How to Dragoon per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[JackFross]

Not sure. Gonna run a quick examination. I feel intuitively that it would be a loss, since Disembowel is going to fall off before you re-apply it, by a substantial margin.

When clipping (assuming you didn't also have Arrow), you lose ~1.8-2 (~2 when Fey Wind is a thing) ticks of the hyper-buffed dot and replace it with the not-so-buffed one.

1 dot tick is 35 potency
HT+B4B+IR+BL+TA+Potion
35 => ~75 potency.

Just HT (what you'd get re-upping it combo 3)
35 => ~40 potency.

So you're turning (adjusting for the 1.8-2 ticks) 134-149 potency into 72-80 potency, a gain of 62-69 potency on those two ticks.

Running a quick test myself on a dummy at 604 skill speed, opening with IDC4>TTT4>TTT4>IDC4 causes Chaos Thrust to be inactive for ~7s. That would be ~2.2 extra ticks of the ~40 potency dot, which is a gain of ~88 potency just from not letting Chaos Thrust fall off. We can also factor in the fact that, in my parse, Disembowel falls off at :31, and is re-applied at :37, 6 seconds of time during which I cast Phlebotomize, Impulse Drive, and Disembowel. These are 170+180+220 = 470 total piercing damage that loses this buff:

HT+Dis
470 => ~594 potency

HT
470 => ~540 potency

Which is a further loss of ~54. Altogether (if you carry the decimals that I truncated for easy reading), we lose 142.6 potency from Dis and CT falling off, but gain 62.2-69.1 potency due to the 1.8-2 ticks being buffed. That's a net loss of 73.5-80.4 potency up through the re-application of Chaos Thrust in this modified opener.
That is, we're comparing:
H>IDC4>P>TTT4>H>TTT4>P>IDC
H>IDC4>P>TTT4>H>IDC4>P>TTT

Images of these timers below. First is buff/debuff, second is showing the rotation I used.


You can probably extrapolate this and figure out exactly how much you would have to clip the initial CT before it'd be worth it to NOT clip, but I think this should do enough to explain it and why it's a loss.

Also, if you actually intended H>IDC4>TTT4>TTT4 and not H>IDC4>P>TTT4>H>TTT4, you're going to lose even more potency on the loss of Heavy Thrust on the Full Thrust and 4th (650 potency losing a 15% buff) hits of the second TTT4 rotation, as well as still losing Disembowel for the 220 potency Dis re-application AND still losing a full tick on Chaos Thrust's timer. And none of that factors the loss of a fully-buffed Phlebotomize.

If you meant H>IDC4>P>TTT4>TTT4, skipping HT, you lose the 15% buff on VT>FT>4th (850 potency) AND you lose Disembowel on ID>Dis.

Without running calculations for those alternatives, this one I ran is the one with the least loss, I would assume.