Connecting the DoTs: A Summoner Guide

[T0rin]

Do the two 10% Festers even make up the 100 potency loss by using Painflare over Fester?

Nope, which is why that opener is a DPS loss, unless it causes the dot timers to line up better with phase jumps.

[Dervy]

Dont think I'm entirely disagreeing with you. When testing for coefficients and even potency per second,its instrumental to make a vacuum with static circumstances. However, what I'm saying is that gives you the general direction, that does not mean other lanes don't exist that can possibly be better outside of the vacuum which torin eluded to.

But that's what I mean. You can eliminate Human Error over time through pure consistency and muscle reflexes, but you're still going to be subjected to RNG from your hit ranges and Crit, also when you clip DoTs due to the global ticks.

Though, you're absolutely correct about the NA/JP DET stuff. The issue is majority of the people who were working on the damage formula quit once EMX made his first draft. Afterwards, it was just.. Set in stone and no one questioned it.

It wasn't until Sunny noticed inconsistencies in 2.4ish about DET, that I started investigating the true nature of Determination. And even then, it turns the old Critical Hit Formula we used in 2.0 was incorrect. I'm gonna be honest and I agree with the JPs, 2.0 NA Theorycrafting was horrible.

But, this is the reason why I'm very confident about my work. Both myself and JPs have ended up with very similar coefficients for WD and DET. The only outlier is the function of AP.

Anyway, there's only a few things which you can't test in a vacuum. Example, you need to change your potion placement to get 3 GKs before Phase 2 in A3S. Sometimes, you may say that SS is weighted poorly, but in a certain fight, SS will be valuable (A1S, T13 earthshaker dancing etc). Obviously I'm no summoner so I cannot give examples where SS will be better due to mechanics.

[T0rin]

Obviously I'm no summoner so I cannot give examples where SS will be better due to mechanics.

With ~715 SS, I've noticed that I can fit an extra GCD comfortably inside DWT, where I could not back when I had 5xx SS. For the same MP, that's an extra 40 potency in every DWT.

Fairly minor thing, but SS makes a lot of fairly minor improvements possible. And isn't that what optimization is all about?

Edit: One thing I've seen a lot of, is people mentioning that "SS doesn't reduce GCD enough to get an extra cast", which in some cases will be true. It ignores the fact of things like Raging Strikes, Potions and DWT where you get buffed damage within a finite window of time, and if you can get 6 GCDs inside of a buff instead of 5, you don't need to get the benefit of a full extra GCD to see a potency improvement.

[Havenchild]

The simple reality is that if the game doesn't back up the numbers, then you need to look at the numbers. The odds of there being human error involved are just as likely in a mathematical analysis as there are in executing a rotation in the game. That doesn't take away from the merit of either, it just means that you need to be very diligent about both. If the analysis is done right, then nothing in the game short of player error should counteract the data. Going back to your pre-3.0 example.. if the analysis is saying one thing and the reality is showing another, that points to a potential flaw in the analysis, but does not discount the idea that the analysis should definitively be able to prove out what is analytically better than something else.

This was a better statement I can get behind. You ideally want to see the theoretical yield of stats in action. It's what ultimately determines how high you will parse with Build A vs Build B.

And this is comparing dummy parse sims vs real fights, of course there will be differences in the impact of different stats. What if you wrote a sim that actually simulated real fights with normalized RNG on mechanics?

Forgive me if I'm mistaken but this would be an example of how spellspeed loses weight.

We can understand Spellspeeds weight in testing based off a few different things we look into.

1) How much damage Spellspeed changes our DoT ticks.
2) How much damage does Spellspeed influence Pet DPS, in the form of more attacks.
3) How many extra casts does additional Spellspeed give us.

The first two can be accurately portrayed on a dummy because there aren't too many factors that can heavily increase or decrease Spellspeed even during a fight after factoring player abilities. Not to mention, it also doesn't heavily affect the DoT damage. The last one however, will likely pull the weight down in an actual fight for two reasons. The first would be because of unavoidable downtime. Downtime is not adjusted regardless of how much Spellspeed a player may have. This means that the strength of Spellspeed in a fight, when referring to additional casts is balanced against the fact of gaining additional casts / or skill completions, before the inevitable downtime. Now on a striking dummy, or a simulator, odds are you will see something that will tell you, it's possible.

Now as for "what if you wrote something that simulated real fights with normalized RNG on mechanics?" This largely assumes one big thing, that your rotation is stagnantly proceeding regardless of the mechanic, however what if my actual rotation of skills is adjusted beforehand based off what I've seen from the mechanic which previously targeted someone else or presently targeting me? The maximum rotation would now flip in an instant for that encounter. If we can assume RNG as a constant factor in fights in terms of mechanics choosing players, than in the same breath we should assume that the maximum rotation of skills changes mid encounter and thus we change how many casts we have gained by not staying striking dummy like in execution and when weighed against what I said before of amount of casts you can get before inevitable downtime, this concludes the second reason of how the Spellspeed weights variate. So I'm not sure it's entirely possible to simulate a rotation entirely based off those and other factors, for example, how fast something is dying, which can also change depending on buffs, or gear acquisition among players etcetc.

Having said all that, what we would in theory also need to analyze is what part of spellspeed is the strongest portion of it. For example, in say 500 Spellspeed, how much of the weight concluded is represented by additional casts or increased DoT strength?
If it was in fact a strong modifier to DoT damage (would imagine 80-90% of the coefficient is how it affects DoT strength) than it's stat weight wouldn't change much even in an actual battle. However if its the former, of additional casts it will.

Considering however we know that, it's not too strong as a modifier of DoTs, even though it does modify them, we can safely conclude I think, that it's not somewhere in the 80-90% bracket, which means we have to fall back on additional Attacks or Casts from SMN or PET, correct me if I'm wrong here.

Don't discredit the hard work being done to gain an understanding of "just how much" a stat is really affecting us. Or not.

I 100% agree with this. For one, I personally appreciate all the efforts, you guys are showing to help fellow SMNs improve on the class. Let's try to keep the discussion as civil as possible regardless if we have differing opinions.

[Kona_Nightwind]

Well that's only really doable with the 2P1F opener as opposed to the 1P2F as Fester will be cooldown when you Trance, unless you Painflare last but by then your DOT's would start falling off before you can Tri-Diaster in Trance.

The opener aside I'm not sure about using Painflare in one Aetherflow cycle just so that you can Fester twice during Trance with 10% Magic increase.
Do the two 10% Festers even make up the 100 potency loss by using Painflare over Fester?

The only time you painflare (in a perfect single target situation) is during your opener. I use Sleighs opener, the reason her opener is so effective is it maximizes the use of your potion and litany/trick attack. After the opener, you use two fester and Tri-Disaster, during DWT. Then after around 20 secs you use fester again. So every time you use DWT you have 3 aether stacks for the two Festers and Tri-Disaster.

[Havenchild]

Well that's only really doable with the 2P1F opener as opposed to the 1P2F as Fester will be cooldown when you Trance, unless you Painflare last but by then your DOT's would start falling off before you can Tri-Diaster in Trance.

The opener aside I'm not sure about using Painflare in one Aetherflow cycle just so that you can Fester twice during Trance with 10% Magic increase.
Do the two 10% Festers even make up the 100 potency loss by using Painflare over Fester?

I think you might be misunderstanding what Kona first stated.

If you are using Sleigh or my Opening, the first DreadWyrm Trance, you will only be able to Fester once inside it.
However, the DreadWyrm Trance in the rest of the encounter you want to line up with Aetherflow usage. So essentially what will happen is you will wait to use your last AF stack still the Aetherflow CD is less then 30 seconds (preferably closer to 20 second remaining) and then you use your last stack. This then leaves you with three Aetherail Stacks and zero Aetherflow stacks. However the timer of Aetherail stacks will be 30 seconds, but the CD to get Aetherflow Stacks back will be less than 30 seconds.

So when Aetherflow finally comes off CD, you will wind up doing something like:

Some skill / Ruin II -> Aetherflow -> (Some skill/ Ruin II/ No skill) DWT -> Fester -> Ruin III Spam, Tri-Disaster + Contagion somewhere in between -> Ruin II -> Fester -> Deathflare.

This is true regardless of what opener you use.

[Judge_Xero]

A couple interesting Data Points.

Over 1680s (28 Minutes) - Ifrit Testing

354 Spell Speed
607 Crit (11% Chance)
552 Auto Attacks
528 Burning Strikes

751 Spell Speed
479 Crit (7% Chance)
552 Auto Attacks
541 Burning Strikes

354 Spell Speed
483 Crit (7% Chance)
552 Auto Attacks
523 Burning Strike

I should have done a full base Crit/SS as something to compare these results to, but to give an example.

4% Crit Chance was almost a 1% increase in Pet damage through Enhanced Pet
397 SPD was close to 3.5% increase in Pet damage.

I'd be interested in a combination of really high Crit/SPD to see how it would compare.

I wish I could record a proc chance, to determine how much the SMN would benefit from additional SPD.

[Charybdis]

A couple interesting Data Points.

So the AAs seem set (which makes sense since they said SS wouldn't affect AAs) but with +397 SS there's a ROUGH increase of 13-18 Burning Strikes. The increase in Crit on your first set could account for more Enhanced Pet procs which increase the number of Strikes a bit. This is all rough speculation of course using this.

But +397 SS would be a rough increase of 3.44% of ability uses which would mean 114.406 SS per 1% increase in Stikes/ability.

My math could be wrong (I'm the data collector, not the math-er) and that's likely not enough data to make a data point but it's some napkin math for discussion.

EDIT: Were you letting Enhanced Pet Actions proc and pet attack through them? I'd assume so, just asking for clarification.
EDIT 2: You answered like everything I just said with your edits, damn you!

[Minorinz]

There's two things kinda wrong with your statement. The first is...

Omg i love you, and I totally get what you are saying. I think about it this way too.

[Minorinz]

I can't quote everyone, but I will say that I don't mind the ss test but just to be clear, do not start spreading misinformation about ss being better than crit or even det without going through ingame scenarios (instances) because people will blindly trust you on it and start stacking and adjusting their gear. Most of the people who post on this thread are creditable smns. If you wanna do some researching on it then sure, i'm happy to see smns who care to help and reach out to others. However it wouldn't be a good thing when new smns coming to learn/lurk jump to the conclusion that ss is somewhat better. Other than what I just noted, I feel it should be about capturing data and analyzing it, not having a conclusion/assumption ready then working in reverse trying to prove it.