/p Blood Price used, WHMs do not use Holy for 15 seconds <se.1>

[Syzygian]

@Rahal
:O, I'm happy to admit I'm one of the idiots that didn't know BP works that way (Somebody else mentioned keeping BP for heavy damage phases, so I assumed it is determined by damage taken ).

Any idea what is the hard limit you can get hit per second?

I mean, 5% per mob hit seems to be a hell lotta MP recovered IMHO, wondering even if DRK and WHM locked horns (Holy and BP activated together), is the 8 seconds remaining on BP after the 7 second stun wore off not enough to recover the MP you used?

and there is a hard limit on the amount of hits you can take per second. Note that this is the same MP return as a single Syphon Strike.

I've never heard or observed anything about a hard limit, as 884 (Syphon Strike) does not divide evenly into 353 (Blood Price) and I've seen over half a dozen hits regening 353MP a piece trigger in under a second, so I'd say Rahal's numbers are not correct here. You can prove this simply by putting BP up before the 4-hit cleave on the first boss of Fractal. When it goes off it triggers 4 returns of 353MP in under a second for a total of 1412 MP. You can also test it by doing an extremely large pull and spamming Abyssal Drain. Repeated Abyssal Drain usage even combined with Darkside's drain (-972MP per GCD + -127MP per server tick) is not enough to cause you to suffer a net MP loss on its own if you are tanking enough trash with Blood Price up.

Maximizing DPS and hate during BP's duration on a large pull is close to 1000 MP every GCD (Abyssal Drain spam), more if you factor in drain from Darkside, so over the course of BPs duration a DRK will burn through over 7K MP at least, which is in excess of their total MP pool. BP returns exactly 353 MP per hit you take even if that hit does zero damage, so if you're tanking 8 mobs and they're each hitting you once every GCD, just as a hypothetical, that's almost 17K MP restored over 15s.

Over the course of a large pull a DRK will use Unmend, Unleash, and Abyssal Drain all at least once, before getting everything into position. Unmend to start, Unleash if you get a free proc or if you need to tag a large group without targeting it as you run through, and Abyssal Drain to tag small groups from a distance that are bunched up.

When you factor in Darkside's drain, its not uncommon for a DRK to be halfway to their mana floor by the time they settle into position, before they even start AoEing. This is a big part of why BP returns are so crucial. The AoEing and the pull commonly costs roughly 9-10K MP, and a DRK at 60 has only 6926 MP. A full duration of BP in a pull of around 8 mobs can generate between 15-20K MP depending on how often they hit you, so with all that extra MP we can Dark Arts AD. People slam this a lot, but AD hits each mob for about 600-700 in Grit in my mix of slaying and melds that has about 940 or so STR. Using the 8 mob example, this is a 4800-5600 self heal every other GCD (DA is a 5s recast).

So taking into account that a big pull+BP gives you near infinite MP for 15 seconds of sustained AoE DPS and enmity and powerful self heals, not to mention all the oGCDs DRK has, BP is like 15 seconds of fucking god-mode.

This is all taking into account my playstyle which is big pulls, because I'm a DRK and for DRK big pulls = more MP = more DPS = more hate = more self-heals = awesome speed run bruh = commendations.

Now in dungeons, the idea for me at least, is to stop AoEing about 1 GCD before BP ends, and this leaves me with near full MP. DRK has a lot of evasion boosting stuff and BPs downtime is the ideal time to use this because literally the only things that can potentially deal damage to you that won't give you MP under BP other than DoTs are things that you dodge. Weaving a DA DP and DA DD in between a couple of Syphon Strikes blinds the mobs and boosts my evasion which is a massive amount of mitigation without even touching any raw mitigation CDs like Shadowskin/Wall.

In theory, 8 seconds of BP is enough for a DRK to get the MP they need back albeit very conservatively and with not much room for error/self heals/additional MP usage at the end of the duration without a lot of slow single-target Syphon combos, but if you told a DRK they had to sacrifice 7 seconds of BP they would almost assuredly choose the last 7 seconds and not the first 7 because in a big pull those first few seconds is when shit often hits the fan, by the time the first 7 seconds has passed its usually too late if something has gone wrong. You drop low and need a quick self heal, a zealous DPS has yanked aggro on a straggler, or a regen/eye for an eye/Eos has managed to pull something off you. Every piece of ranged or AoE enmity DRK has costs MP, and as stated before, its not uncommon for a DRK to be sitting on half their MP by the time they arrive at the pull's destination.

For the record, these worst case scenarios rarely happen to me, but I pull big, tag everything, and use Plunge on distant mobs to gain ground on the rest of the party so usually by the time a WHM is Holy bombing BP only has 3-4 seconds left. Either that or they're being considerate. Either way they usually get my comm. That being said, a healer is in the perfect position to see all the information they need to gauge what their holy spam is doing; they can see when the DRK pops BP and how much time is remaining and are also able to watch the DRK's actual MP as it jumps up and down. I wouldn't encourage another WHM, if I was one, to wholly disregard this information and just Holy spam steam-roll over it. However, a very experienced DRK can find ways to work around this, but DRK MP is a very unstable thing and things can go pear-shaped easily if a WHM disregards what they are doing in certain scenarios.

A good DRK will get well ahead of you and have been AoEing and self-healing for close to 15 seconds by the time you get to where he is and do your Holy-prep, but a DF DRK may not. Keeping in mind that we're not all savage raiders/speed runners I'd advise anyone to be conscious of what their team mates are doing and in general try and facilitate their maximum performance as much as yours.

Also, 15s flies by.