Quote Originally Posted by Achelon View Post
I know that I have to use Shadow Flare every time it's up, but for the stacks, when should I use them on Bane and when on Painflare?
So here's a bit of napkin math:

Painflare is 200 potency to everything it hits. So the idea is that you want to Bane when you do more than 200 potency x the number of enemies hit by Painflare.

On your original target, it takes 3 global ticks to do more than that 200, since each tick is 80 potency with both dots. So if the pack is going to die in under 3 ticks, Painflare. Most packs won't, so Bane. That's the easy and obvious example.

Less obvious is when you're on a pack of, say, 3 enemies. The third enemy takes 40% reduced damage from your Bane, so 48 per tick. This means that you need 5 ticks on the 3rd enemy to do more damage than Painflare would've done. At 4 ticks, you do 192 potency, so it's still generally worth using Bane over Painflare if a pack of three is gonna live for at least 12 seconds - usually a bit less since the first tick generally happens in under 3 seconds.

On 4 enemies, the 4th takes 60% reduced damage, so 32 potency. Now you need 7 ticks for the 4th enemy to take more damage than they would've from Painflare.
On 5 enemies, the 5th takes 80% reduced damage, so 16 potency. At this point, Painflare will always do more damage to the 5th target and beyond.

Now, recall that Bane on the 2nd and 3rd target will do a lot more damage than Painflare over a reasonable amount of time. I would recommend Bane and Painflare x2, because Deathflare + Shadowflare + your pet's AoE will generally make up for the very low Bane damage. However, if the enemies are so healthy that they're gonna live for a long time (45 seconds+) AND you just used Aetherflow, I would Bane, Painflare, and then set up a second Bane once the first one is almost out. This lets you enter Dreadwyrm, and Aetherflow should be coming back up very close to the end of it.

tl;dr Bane + Painflare x2 in the vast majority of situations