How to Dragoon Per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[pandabearcat]

Hm, its actually really difficult to have a priority system do a straight rotation.

I am thinking of adding macros to allow users to track their own "states" in case they want to do more rigid rotations rather than priority. This wasn't really an issue in WoW because everything is proc based over there - here it is kinda lame that almost every class (aside from ranged) is completely static. At least it meant spreadsheets gave fairly accurate models.

Anyway the syntax would look something like this:

Conditional:

(p1.macro.test == 1)

Action:

{macro.test, macro.test.inc, macro.test.10, macro.test.dec}

macro.<id> : initialize
macro.<id>.inc : increment by 1
macro.<id>.dec : decrement by 1
macro.<id>.<#> : set macro to #

All macros would be integers. They are initialized to 0. You can create and set as many macros as you like (I suggest you do this in precast).

so for example (in the future) this rotation would be something like:

[p1.PRECAST]
(){macro.state_var}

[p1.GCD]
# still want to use 4th combo when we can
(p1.aura.enhanced_wheeling_thrust){wheeling_thrust}
(p1.aura.sharper_fang_and_claw){fang_and_claw}

# if state is 0, do first half first line
(p1.macro.state_var == 0){heavy_thrust, impulse_drive, disembowel, chaos_thrust, macro.state_var.inc}
# if state is 1, do second half first line
(p1.macro.state_var == 1){phlebotomize, true_thrust, vorpal_thrust, full_thrust, macro.state_var.inc}
# etc. etc, to reset after last line, it would look like
(p1.macro.state_var == 5){phlebotomize, true_thrust, vorpal_thrust, full_thrust, macro.state_var.0}

[SunnyHirose]

SKS is out of control! Either the sks formula provided is wrong or something is very different.

Probably something is very different. If you're doing what I think you're doing... unless you change something about the cutoff to scale with skillspeed, it's either going to have no effect when it doesn't squeeze in extra skills, or a huge effect when it does.

[pandabearcat]

Shrug! I don't know what the sim does.

I just punch in the numbers.

The sim ends when the last event occurs after the duration cutoff - the "true duration" is then recorded and the dps calculated. There is less of a hard cutoff of all or nothing.

[Hustensaft]

Shrug! I don't know what the sim does.

Maybe the sim is right and the modelled rotation is wrong?

I don't even get why DoT clipping is so incredible bad - yes, skillspeed causes you to loose DoT ticks, but for the most part it also counters every lost DoT tick via the damage increase (we're looking at -2-3% damage lost for each dot application for each tick). If you go for simplicity as the Tick loss is pretty much neglectable - you're comparing a GCD gain to a potency gain.

If you take the rotation in the OP: 2884.2 potency across 10 GCDs (25 sec) or 288 per GCD.
You now take your GCD down to 2.2727 (== 11 GCDs in 25 sec), you add 288 damage for ~610 SS.

Converting that in DET: 610/7290 = 0.083 = 8.3% increase. (should be less - 610 SS would convert to less DET due to itembudget)

So a 10% DPS increase from SS translates to a DPS increase of less than 8% with DET. Does seem right to me that the sim has SS that strong.

[pandabearcat]

Well I am still thinking there is something at work here.

Reasons why SKS should be valued lower:

1. DoT clipping. While this no longer decreases the value of DoTs (because of DoT SKS scaling) it means that if you end up clipping a dot, further SKS won't actually increase the damage of the DoT, lowering its dpct (relative).
2. CD usage. If a lot of DRG's high damage abilities are CDs rather than rotational abilities, then higher SKS simply means more usage of "bad" abilities, rather than increasing dps more efficiently. This doesn't make SKS bad, just lowers its effectiveness.
3. TP usage. The sim currently does not care about TP, but obviously in real scenarios you will. I am unsure about how "tight" DRG's TP consumption is, but it may be a concern.

Reasons why SKS would be valued higher than normal:

1. Fitting another GCD into a dps cd. For obvious reasons, since DRG are very cooldown focused, this means higher dps increase.
2. Higher Geirskogul usage, because of higher usages of 4th combo. This may very well be the reason that it can be better to have SKS. Also a reason why there may be more SKS plateaus.

So really I don't know. I certainly think SKS should be valued at higher than "nothing" past plateaus. I just don't know why.

This is one of the reasons why I made the sim - a lot of us have preconceptions on how stats or openers or whatever should behave. By distancing myself from this and making an impartial sim we might come to surprising conclusions.

Furthermore, to paraphrase the simcraft creators, I -want- people to be upset at the sim. I want them to say "you're stupid, there is no way SKS is this good" because it means people will scrutinize the output and either find an error, or learn something. And that makes a better sim, better stat weights and better rotations.

[Dervy]

But it won't be 288 potency per. Once you go beyond 2.4GCD, your chance of clipping Phlebotomize comes into play and Chaos Thrusts is even greater. The overall average potency per GCD decreases when your Skillspeed increases.

I can't pull out any math to back my argument unfortunately, but Skillspeed increasing DoT damage doesn't mitigate the DoT clipping once bit.

Also, when I threw together a growth curve for Skillspeed on our PPS, it wasn't linear at all.

[pandabearcat]

Well, just run the sim with varying degrees of SS and see what happens!

I trust in the priority rotation, though the breakpoints of "when should I IDC" may need tweaking.

[Dervy]

Panda/Sunny/Hustensaft if you PM me on Reddit or YouTube I'll give you a download link to my model so you can double check a few things if you'd like and see if there's any suggestions you could make.

And I just read your other post Panda. I agree that everything should be scrutinized. That's why I regularly ask people to check over my work cause I know I'm prone to make a mistake somewhere and learn from it. (Ty Husten)

We're only human after all! And if it does indeed shown that Skillspeed is better... then, well well well.

[enil]

SKS is out of control! Either the sks formula provided is wrong or something is very different.

SkS is not a very linear stat - is it more likely that at whatever gear level your sim is currently being run at that there is some sort of SkS breakpoint after adding x SkS (however your sim determines weightings)? i.e. the 2.4~ HT/PHEB breakpoint.
As you said running some more tests at seperate gear levels may identify the issue.

edit: the sim with the default rotation does not clip CT, i.e. skill usage of FT combo was about 2x as much as CT combo. changing the logic doing CT combo <12 seconds of CT buff instead of <4 seems to fix this resulting in a dps gain of 50~. The new rotation the SkS weighting becomes 0.0042 (approx 4x less than crit) the main issue was CT was not being clipped at all, leaving a large amount of downtime for CT and Disembowel (hence why SkS was so good, increasing uptime for both skills).

edit2: there's still something wrong with sim logic, total 13 F&C+WT vs 17 CT/FT. Optimal rotation should always have a 4th per combo. Will need to take a look.

[SunnyHirose]

The sim ends when the last event occurs after the duration cutoff - the "true duration" is then recorded and the dps calculated. There is less of a hard cutoff of all or nothing.

That's better than nothing, but it's still a discrete cutoff with more than one bias (the random DoT tick timing and whenever the last skill is used) that you're trying to model a continuous concept with, and a very sensitive one at that. Without some sort of proration or a sampling of skill speed values (some of them fractional), I'm afraid it's just gonna be screwy.

As for a realistic assessment of skill speed... I'm gonna make a judgment call and say it's not super different from how it was when I was raiding on MNK (for my alt). Just because it has the appearance of the worst dummy stat doesn't mean it's bad to have a lot. In certain pinches, it can make your life easier by the simple virtue of reaching your combo sooner (but the scaling this time ughhh). Actually, if I had to say, BotD maintenance is tougher on the whole than GL3 maintenance was in 2.x.