I'm not as cool as Dervy or anywhere near as good at manipulating these numbers as he is. I try my best, though. And honestly, you're only looking at a 3 minute parse. If you get a shit opener (which happens) and are sub 1500, your final dps at the end of hand phase is gonna be absolute garbage (compared to how you could have done), regardless how effective your dps was in that phase.

As a nice example, there was this run I did for P1+2. If you look at just P1, you'll see that I ended that phase at merely 1437. I do Phase 1 exactly the same every single run - exactly the same amount of hits and exactly the same skills used. The variance is *massive* - ranging from 1437 to 1600. Neither of those runs had a Potion used. That swing of 170 dps is a HUGE difference in the final parse, regardless how P2 is handled.