Dear Dragoons. Your AoE is actually good.

[Keyln]

Didn't miss any points, just countering with how pointless your numbers are. Talking about tp efficiency to the point where you say a guy can last 5 minutes in a pull is an utterly useless point.

Well, reading from your words, I think you have. My entire point was that there is a point about TP efficiency when talking about AoE, and that melees can spam AoE for so long before they run into TP starvation.

As for the rest, I'm not even sure where to begin. Maybe put it this way simply, if you're at the point you're out of tp with 12 mobs to fight, as a ninja, you have 2 options: wait 2 ticks and do 1200 potency, or do 2 single target moves and do roughly 1/3 of that. It's not even close. At 6 mobs, it's 600 potency over the tp gained from 2 tics vs an average of about 440 potency on 2 single target moves. Those kind of differences add up.

Again, you're using the total amount of potency as opposed to potency per enemy. It's great if you want to stroke your e-peen, but in terms of measuring how long it would take for a group of enemies to die, it doesn't really say a thing.

And to say "pulling 12 mobs isn't the most efficient" is absurd, because at some point you're forgetting there's time saved in doing 1 pull instead of 2 or 3 pulls. Not to mention when you do bigger pulls the melee have more time between pulls to regenerate tp at the faster rate, rather than start fighting again every pack of 3 mobs and not get that benefit.

I'm not sure I'd call the idea absurd. If there's a corridor that takes 25 seconds to run down, it's going to take 25 seconds regardless if it's done all at once, or in 5 second bursts. The true measure of efficiency is how fast can the DPS kill a group of enemies.

As far as TP goes, that depends on how long the tank takes between each pull. Outside of combat, TP regenerates at a rate of 100 TP per 3 seconds, or 30 seconds to go from empty TP to full TP. However, it's rare for a tank to wait between fulls, so the DPS may not necessarily start with a full TP bar. In the examples that I used earlier, I started with the assumption that the DPS starts each battle with a full TP bar. If it's not true that the DPS starts a fight with a full TP bar, then the time it would take the DPS to reach TP starvation is smaller.

And the only drawback to "damage is split between the enemies" is if the tank+ healer can't handle the incoming damage but we're talking about dungeons here, and when that gets to be the case you pull smaller cause you're undergeared, not because it's more efficient to do so.

I didn't forget it, it's just that it's not relevant to the discussion at hand. As long as HPS>DTPS, then the tank can stay up for an infinite amount of time, and thus, the limiting factor is how efficiently (read quickly) can kill the group of enemies. If DT > HPS, then the tank will die in T=DTPS - (HP of tank + HPS). Also factor in that as each enemy dies, then the DTPS goes down with each enemy death.

But that is its own discussion all together, and doesn't really belong here.

tl;dr your math is just really off. idk man. As much as I'd like to say "oh you showed numbers you must be right" if that were true nobody would ever fail a math test.

If my math is off, then show it. Otherwise, you're just spouting meaningless fluff. I responded because I saw this discussion being based on a faulty premise, and I responded their math with math of my own. My sense is that you just simply don't like what I have to say, not because you are trying to find the truth.

[JackFross]

I'm noticing a rather large flaw in the arguments here.

Click through to read my post here:

Okay, getting a bit strained reading these posts. Here's some math for you.

It goes into everything you're saying.

The main point is that when using strictly AoE moves, the time it takes down a group of enemies does not vary with the number of enemies.

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.

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:


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.

[Syzygian]

Hello I am DRK and this is my contribution to this thread:

[StouterTaru]

Again, you're using the total amount of potency as opposed to potency per enemy. It's great if you want to stroke your e-peen, but in terms of measuring how long it would take for a group of enemies to die, it doesn't really say a thing.

Let's say there's 6 enemies with 50k HP each, and your party can either do 2500 dps to one of them at a time, or 1000 dps to all of them at once. Which method would kill them all the fastest?

There's a reason parties with BLM, WHM, BRD, and WAR have always had faster dungeon runs, and it's not because of their superior ST damage.

[Keyln]

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.

[FunkyBunch]

I'm noticing a rather large flaw in the arguments here.

SNIP

Again you're looking at things from a single perspective. Every mob you kill singly, is a DPS loss for me as a BLM.
So your single target DPS not only has to be better than your AoE, it also has to be better than your AoE PLUS my AoE.

Example, You do 100 potency per attack on a group of enemies (6 enemies). Or you do 700 potency on one enemy but you have to keep attacking that enemy.
I do 250 potency per enemy in a group of enemies (6 Enemies). You using the 700 potency is an increase in YOUR potency. But it is a decrease in GROUP potency. And the more enemies that die early, the faster my potency goes down.Once 3 enemies are down, I've now lost more potency than your attack is even worth. So in essence, I'd rather you sit there out of TP and wait to do DPS damage than single target damage the whole time.

The only way single target damage saves time is if you are always attacked the mob with the highest health or the most annoying mob.

[JackFross]

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.

I see what you're saying, now, but in the vast majority of circumstances in this game (like, for every 1 where this is false, there exist at least 8 where it is true), large groups of mobs either have similar enough health that (all things equal) they'll die on the same hit or they're spawned by a boss and thus obviously have less health than the boss mob, but similar health to each other.

Looking at damage per mob totally does work, but when trying to compare two different methods on their efficiency in killing a large group of enemies, it's much more beneficial and telling to compare the total amount of damage each rotation can dish out in a given period of time to the mob group. Unless you're running outdated content, there's no area in the game where a full spam of Doom Spike alongside a BLM using optimal AoE rotation will kill the mob before the dragoon hits zero TP, unless the BLM wastes his Raging Strikes on a triple flare, rather than saving it for the burst opener on the boss (or you're with a WAR/DRK who's doing high dps AS WELL AS YOU TWO and a healer doing the same). And, in the situation where your AoE is NOT killing mobs, looking at the damage it's dealing on a per-enemy basis doesn't tell you as much as looking at the total damage you did in those 10 gcds.

The reason I disagree on the "damage-per-mob" approach is just that it skews heavily toward single-target dps, unless you divide that by the amount of mobs present, in which case it becomes literally the exact same thing as just comparing total damage dealt, just multiplying AoE rather than dividing the single-target.

Basically, you can't at all compare HT>IDC4>IDC4 with 4 gsk/min to HT>RoT>DSx8 in a "per-mob" or "total-damage" potency examination unless you modify *both* of them to examine the situation more thoroughly. Saying DS is 160 potency per mob per gcd while the base rotation (H>IDC4>P>TTT4) is (not including buffs) ~280 potency per mob per gcd completely ignores the fact that, if there are two enemies, your 280 per mob is only doing 280 per gcd whereas my 160 per mob is doing 320 per gcd.

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.

Yeah, same reason I did it in my calculations earlier in the thread. Just as long as you are aware that the rotations don't last exactly that long, since discrete numbers don't operate nearly the same way as continuous ones. It's only really useful to give ratios of TP consumption and regeneration between different methods. It's very important to note that, while you regen 20 TP per second, you do NOT regen 70 TP in 3.5 seconds, you regen it in 6. I would actually think it'd be interesting to examine a 0 TP scenario and compare waiting for 2 ticks to pop a 120 TP skill (Death Blossom) vs using the TP as it comes back for your base rotation. Which would *actually* be stronger? Comparing pps here doesn't tell nearly the whole story.



And what FunkyBunch says is completely true.

If you're gonna fall into the H>IDC4>IDC4 rotation (which you should after a time to conserve your TP), you should always be cycling to whatever has the most health remaining OR doing a H>IDC4>TTT4 to chunk out a large amount of health from a priority target, like something that does annoying status ailment aoes.

[Alistaire]

Let's say there's 6 enemies with 50k HP each, and your party can either do 2500 dps to one of them at a time, or 1000 dps to all of them at once. Which method would kill them all the fastest?

There's a reason parties with BLM, WHM, BRD, and WAR have always had faster dungeon runs, and it's not because of their superior ST damage.

At this point the only thing that makes their math make any sense at all is they think aoe damage is split between enemies, as in "100 potency death blossom to 5 enemies means 20 potency each". That's the only way I can even remotely come close to their conclusion that death blossom vs 6 mobs is "a 60% dps loss". smh

[JackFross]

At this point the only thing that makes their math make any sense at all is they think aoe damage is split between enemies, as in "100 potency death blossom to 5 enemies means 20 potency each". That's the only way I can even remotely come close to their conclusion that death blossom vs 6 mobs is "a 60% dps loss". smh

I like to take quotes out of context, too!

You're referring to:

Not really. TP regenerates at a 60 TP per 3 seconds, or 20 TP per second. Death Blossom, NIN's AoE move, is 120 TP per use. Thus, that translates to 16 DPS, which is a dramatic drop of 60% in DPS before TP starvation. In my opinion, that's not very efficient.

Which calls back to:

Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that translates to 100 damage per use, or 40 damage per second (assuming a 2.5 second recast time).

A drop from 40 dps to 16 dps (per mob) is a loss of 60% of your damage output from hitting the 0 TP wall, is what Keyln is saying. Like. If you really wanna compare this, we'd have to look at NIN average combo potency when you rock an aoe ST rotation (which, unless I'm way off-base) would be Shadow Fang > Shadow Fang > Shadow Fang > etc, since it's your strongest attack overall and doesn't have a super long duration. If we assume each shot of SF runs to completion after applying it, the total potency of a Shadow Fang combo is 590. Over 5s (because for some reason we're assuming Huton is not a thing now) this averages out to ~120 "dps" as defined in the calculations that gave us 40 and 16. Now, we can pretty clearly see that we'd need at least 3 mobs (4, I'd argue) before we wanna hit Death Blossom.

In a group of 6, your 0 TP, wait 2 ticks, hit Death Blossom 16 dps would be 16x6 or 96 dps, counting every hit of it. That's still less than if you just decided to swap to single target rotation instead of hitting 0 TP. It'd be more complicated to figure out the breakpoint where you'd wanna stop Death Blossom and start Shadow Fang spreading, and I really don't care about Ninja enough to look at it.


Like, some of the things they're saying are a little off, in my opinion (and I'm waiting on a response, because it's an interesting discussion), but the vast majority of the stuff is totally on-point. I think the two of us agree on this topic completely, too, actually. Just some miscommunication.

[FunkyBunch]

SNIP

In a group of 6, your 0 TP, wait 2 ticks, hit Death Blossom 16 dps would be 16x6 or 96 dps, counting every hit of it. That's still less than if you just decided to swap to single target rotation instead of hitting 0 TP. It'd be more complicated to figure out the breakpoint where you'd wanna stop Death Blossom and start Shadow Fang spreading, and I really don't care about Ninja enough to look at it.
SNIP

Like, some of the things they're saying are a little off, in my opinion (and I'm waiting on a response, because it's an interesting discussion), but the vast majority of the stuff is totally on-point. I think the two of us agree on this topic completely, too, actually. Just some miscommunication.

You're ignoring the important part again. The GROUP potency. Yes, your personal potency goes down. But once you switch to single target DPS, unless you're hitting ONLY the mob with the most HP, you're not actually helping in the time it takes to kill all the mobs. You're just mashing buttons.
Because those doing AoE are going to lose their potency per mob. Flare is every third spell. That's over 250 potency per enemy AFTER the 50% reduction.

Unless your single target potency is more than 250Xnumber of mobs remaining+Your AoE potency, do your AoE or switch targets to the guy with the highest HP remaining(because their health doesn't get removed at the same rate due to roll offs and crits). Those are the only ways you help in 99% of instances in multi-mob encounters.
If you insist on single-targeting, make sure you're swapping targets to the highest health mob at all times.