Quote Originally Posted by Coramac View Post
This relates to Fracture because, in a sense, it is frontloading your damage and is more efficient.
You've gotten most of my point with the exception of this.

Fracture is *not* more efficient. The entire point of this discussion is that Fracture is *not* efficient and ends up being inefficient because of its 80 TP cost. Using Fracture increases your damage by a whopping ~2.3% (and, yes, I'm including auto-attack in this because we're looking at total damage without looking at total damage irrespective of TP cost) and TP cost by ~8.3%. That's not an efficient tradeoff. An efficient tradeoff would be if the increased TP cost were equal to or less than the increased damage. Since Fracture increases your TP burn by more 3 times the amount that it increases your total damage, it's not an efficient tradeoff. The only "advantage" it provides is in the frontloading of damage, as you have stated.

The problem with this is that the frontloading advantage isn't really an advantage over the long term. Every time you use Fracture it ends up costing you 75% of your total damage per GCD 2.5 minutes of straight combat later *and pretty much all endgame fights end up with the tank doing this*. The only time it would benefit you to use Fracture is when you run out of your TP reserve and are only able to spend what you're generating because that's when straight TP cost is all that matters (since you're only able to spend what you're generating rather than what you've got saved so base TP cost is actually what you're measuring against).

Here's some math:

I'm going to ignore auto-attacking for the purposes of this, which means I'm using the rotational advantage rather than total comparative advantage numbers since it simplifies the math a bit (all adding auto-attacks would do is reduce the differences between the two because we'd be multiplying the numbers by .8 to account for the fact that auto-attacks make up ~25% of total damage). Non-Fracture provides you with 100% damage for 72 GCDs and 77.5% DPS for all GCDs after (net loss is 14.44, which means that you'll need to have 22.4% of your GCDs empty to keep using it; 50 / (50 + 14.44)). Fracture provides 103.3% damage for 60 GCDs and 78.7% DPS for all GCDs after (net loss is 15.64, which means that ~23.8% of your GCDs will have to be empty to use it; 50 / (50 + 15.64); 1.033 * (1-.238) = .787).

At 60 GCDs, Fracture provides 3.3% more damage than Non-Fracture. At 70 GCDs, Non-Fracture overtakes Fracture on total damage dealt (60 * 103.3 + 78.7x = 6000 + 100x; x = ~9.3). At 120 GCDs, Fracture once again overtakes Non-Fracture (60 * 103.3 + 78.7 * (12 + x) = 72 * 100 + 77.5x; x = 48.08) and provides a further 1.55% more damage (for each additional GCD, not total DPS; the total DPS contributions would be so heavily diluted by all damage done before before that it wouldn't register until you tracked to the ten-thousandths) from attack skills than Non-Fracture.

So Fracture maintains a slight advantage until shortly before 3 minutes, Non-Fracture maintains a slight advantage up until 6 minutes have passed, and then Fracture maintains a slight advantage from then on out. To put it into context, after the first 3 minutes, you'd have to track to the ten-thousandths place to notice *any* kind of difference in total damage dealt, and, all of those advantages are actually ~33% higher than they actually are for total DPS because ~25% of total DPS is contributed by the auto-attack, which those numbers ignore. The 1.55% advantage in damage per GCD for GCDs after the 120th is actually a ~1.16% increase.

All-in-all, we're talking a *lot* about something that makes an absolutely *tiny* difference, which is what most of my point was. *Yes*, if you ignore TP cost, Fracture is a net increase to your damage, but the increase is miniscule. Factor in TP cost, and Fracture ends up being a very small net loss over time up until you get very far down the line. If you look at damage dealt within discrete windows, Fracture is slightly stronger at the start of the fight, becomes slightly weaker towards the middle, and becomes ever so slightly stronger once again when the fight is finishing (it takes several minutes of being without TP for Fracture to actually close the gap).

Fracture does not add real value to your rotation. It's, for all intents and purposes, a break even that becomes *slightly* on incredibly short boss fights (fights have to be *obscenely* long for Fracture to actually overtake Non-Fracture again; you'd have to fight for twice as long as it took you to run out of TP for Fracture to overtake Non-Fracture and, most of the time, I run out of TP about 90% of the way through a fight with Non-Fracture). Its presence on your bar isn't going to make one whit of a difference upon your actual damage dealt. It would be like having an attack that dealt the average damage of the BB combo while also costing the average amount: it doesn't really *add* anything but doesn't really take away anything either (and, yes, I've revised my position on this after redoing my math to account for Coramac's point about bottomed out TP causing baseline TP cost to become the fundamental factor). It amounts to being just a button you press for the sake of pressing something different (though a strong case could be made for it reducing your average Wrath stack generation per GCD, both by consuming TP that could be devoted to Wrath stack generation when bottomed out as well as the GCD consumption itself, which ends up costing you *something*).