Quote Originally Posted by JackFross View Post
This is true when you look at it in a vacuum, but it's not an accurate or telling way to examine an aoe pull. There's many enemies and killing all of them with a steady rate is (in general) better than killing them with a staggered rate, assuming there's no priority targets (like one shooting petrification or such). You can look at it as HP-per-mob or Total-HP-of-mobs, and you'll end up getting the same answer, which is the one you've gotten and the conclusion we all came to pages ago.
This is true if and only if all of the enemies in a group have the same HP, which in actuality, is not always the case.

Think of it like this. Let's say that there's a group of 6 enemies, with 4 of them having 1000 HP and 2 of them having 2000 HP, for a group total of 8000 HP. Attacking with an AoE attack of 100 potency, and assuming no TP starvation, how long would it take to kill that group of enemies?

I argue that thinking of this as potency per enemy is a better way of making this argument because:

A) It's how the tooltips for the attacks describe them, making it easier to verify
B) It's easier to do the math as to how much damage each enemy will take
C) Thus, it's easier to calculate when a group of enemies will die using such an attack.

It's absolutely a priority system, and everyone in the thread has been saying that. I understand not being arsed to read all of the posts, but uh, we've been discussing this for a few days and I've been trying to convince people that that's the case in all of this time. The OP has agreed with me, since that's what they were saying in the first place.

I wouldn't have responded if you hadn't taken a quote from me out of context and implied that it was my argument. c:
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you here, just that the premise of the argument that both people are making is a bit flawed, and thus making for a flawed argument.

It's also worth noting: on the topic of waiting for a TP tick or not, that looking at strict DPS or treating 60 TP over 3 s as 20TP/s is drastically off-base and doesn't do anything to give you a realistic view of what's happening there. You can't look at the TP/s expenditure of your single-target rotation and use its DPS combined with a 20TP/s regeneration to reason out how much damage you do, because TP doesn't come back in a continuum - it's back in discrete chunks every 3 seconds. It's worth noting that 120 TP is 2 ticks. 70 TP is *also* 2 ticks from 0. It becomes fewer after that, but these sorts of things can't be glossed over when trying to make a serious argument on the merits of one rotation over another. I used arguments like that to make broad comparisons between rotations, and then I broke it down to a second-by-second account of the fight when trying to showcase an actual rotation and how it'd last neatly through one minute.
The reason why I put in a per second basis is that the use of TP and the regeneration of TP do not follow the same time scale. The amount of TP used depends on the skills used, and the global cooldown, which is varied with the amount of skill speed that a player has. TP regeneration, on the other hand, is a steady amount over time, and the only time it varies is if the player is in combat or not.

Thus, to make the two comparable, it would be better to think of them on a per second basis when trying to figure out how long could a DPS last using xyz move with a TP cost of T over a given amount of time.