4.05 - Tank DPS comparison

[DWolfwood]

No offense taken, I'm just having a hard time reconciling the "math" that says the 400 potency attack is somehow worse than the 300 potency attack (or the 540 is worse than the 440)....

Well, we're not comparing Souleater vs Bloodspiller. Bloodspiller is always a DPS increase over Souleater because it's a higher potency. What we're comparing is, does 2400MP result in higher DPS if you spend it on TBN to get *another* Bloodspiller, or does it give more DPS if you spent it on a Dark Arts. The answer is that spending it on a Dark Arts results in about 7.77 more potency.


Keep in mind that the 140 potency on Dark Arts is applied on top of a GCD, you're not changing anything in your rotation to get it. If Dark Arts were its own GCD, it would be a horrible loss. If you spend that MP on TBN to get a Bloodspiller however, you're essentially squeezing in that Bloodspiller into your rotation, thus pushing something out.

Here's an example:

Let's say you started out with 2400MP and 30 Bloodgauge to speed up what I'm trying to illustrate without having to go through 5+ combos.

Here's your rotation without using TBN:

1. Hard Slash (150 pot)
2. Syphon Strike (+1200MP) (250 pot)
3. Souleater (+10 Bloodgauge) (300 pot)
4. Hard Slash (150 pot)
5. Syphon Strike (+1200MP) (250 pot)
6. Dark Arts + Souleater (+10 Bloodgauge) (440 pot)
7. Dark Arts + Bloodspiller (540 pot)

Remaining MP: 0
Remaining Bloodgauge: 0
Total Potency: 2080

We're now at 0MP and 0 Bloodgauge because we use it all. Note, that we did this in 7 GCDs because that's important and fundamentally how we get "DPS" to begin with.

Now lets look at if we use that 2400MP on TBN:

1. Hard Slash (150 pot)
2. TBN (-2400MP + 50 Bloodgauge) + Syphon Strike (+1200MP) (250 pot)
3. Souleater (+10 Bloodgauge) (300 pot)
4. Hard Slash (150 pot)
5. Syphon Strike (+1200MP) (250 pot)
6. Dark Arts + Bloodspiller (475 pot)
7. Bloodspiller (400 pot)

Remaining MP: 0
Remaining Bloodgauge: 40
Total Potency: 1975

See the difference? Now you might be thinking, "what if we just continued after that?", well the thing is, this is going to keep repeating. The reason why we lost a great deal here is because the GCD we lost was Souleater in this case. However, we have 3 moves in our combo, so there are 3 different cases. In the first case, we only lose Hard Slash. In the second case, we lose Syphon Strike, and in the third case we lose Souleater.

Over time and throughout every fight though, these will be more or less evenly distributed. The only thing that changes is for each time there's DPS downtime, you will end on a different part of your combo. What the math is showing is, when we look at the average of these 3 cases, we end up with a result of 7.77 potency difference.

... If it does interrupt, then that's a problem, and it should be changed to function like Fell Cleave/Inner Beast.

I think you're talking about literally it breaking your combo the way certain abilities like Unmend (iirc), old Sword/Shield Oath, etc., which is something else entirely.

That said, it's actually the same thing for Fell Cleave. Every time a Warrior uses Fell Cleave, they're losing out on Beast Gauge accumulation. Furthermore, we can apply the same math and actually find that the real potency increase of Fell Cleave is around half (approx. 250ish, this isn't the thread for that though). When you know this, Onslaught is actually a great skill in that it's roughly the same potency per Beast Gauge meter as Fell Cleave since Onslaught is not a GCD.