Need a math geek. (MNK)

[Carstien]

Okay, I'll keep this short. Firstly, I suck at maths. I would likely get this wrong if I did it myself.

Anyway, I just hit 814 SkSp with my MNK, which is an outrageous amount of SkSp and reduced my GCD to 2.32 raw, 2.21 at GL1, 2.09 at GL2 and 1.97 in GL3.

Now I'm curious as to how much SkSp it would take before tornado kick > snap (PB) > snap > snap mid rotation becomes a dps increase and not a loss.

Obviously we need to take into account not only the lost potency of the snap punches, but the increasing potency and decreasing GCD per hit. When does the 330 potency under GL3 become worth it? We can assume that instead of this we would have been doing snap > bootshine > true strike instead of the 3 snaps.

[JackFross]

Quick and dirty, using a base gcd of 2.5s.

And with your current sks:


Turns out I didn't even need to account for skill speed, since it's always a gain to do that.

It's an 18% increase in potency over that span either way. I of course assumed TwS and DK were both active for every hit since they should be. The biggest reason why this would be a dps loss is not because of this particular moment, but because of a later moment, when you lose greased lightning. If you - at any point - drop GL3 due to mechanics, and you burned your PB on this, you're stuck spending a far greater time ramping up than if you GL off the bat. (That is - 7 gcds at not-gl3 as opposed to 3)


I also forgot Fists of Fire, but adding a buff to every hit on either side won't change the relationship.

[Powercow]

It's an 18% increase in potency over that span either way. I of course assumed TwS and DK were both active for every hit since they should be. The biggest reason why this would be a dps loss is not because of this particular moment, but because of a later moment, when you lose greased lightning. If you - at any point - drop GL3 due to mechanics, and you burned your PB on this, you're stuck spending a far greater time ramping up than if you GL off the bat. (That is - 7 gcds at not-gl3 as opposed to 3)

You forgot autoattacks. They're no small portion of a monk's DPS, and losing out on the 30% damage and 15% attack speed on them even for a couple of seconds can be impactful.

[JackFross]

You forgot autoattacks. They're no small portion of a monk's DPS, and losing out on the 30% damage and 15% attack speed on them even for a couple of seconds can be impactful.

True! A monk's autos have a 2.56 delay, so it should be easy to calculate them in here~ I'll just compare the two of them and add them to the previous numbers, since I didn't save that sheet.

Running the numbers at base skill speed, the gap turns from ~27 pps to more like ~10 pps. It's still better to do it than not, but by a much slimmer margin. I believe that margin increases proportional to skill speed, because of the nature of how these numbers play together (skill speed doesn't affect AA frequency, and faster skill spins will get you better AA potency due to hitting more gcds between AA hits).

That was a really good catch! @__@

[Powercow]

Running the numbers at base skill speed, the gap turns from ~27 pps to more like ~10 pps. It's still better to do it than not, but by a much slimmer margin. I believe that margin increases proportional to skill speed, because of the nature of how these numbers play together (skill speed doesn't affect AA frequency, and faster skill spins will get you better AA potency due to hitting more gcds between AA hits).

I did the math back when 3.0 was datamined and came to pretty much the same conclusion -- if utilized *perfectly* it's a single digit DPS gain. To use it perfectly the following must all be true:
1 - The combo you'd replace was a bootshine/true/snap combo. No buff/debuff/demolish refreshes.
2 - No Touch of Death, Howling Fist, Shoulder Tackle or Elixir Field uses in that time.
3 - There must not be a point in the next 3 minutes of the fight where PB is useful.
4 - There must not be a point in the next minute where Tornado Kick would be useful.
5 - Any applicable buffs/debuffs (Balance, Trick Attack, Blood for Blood, etc.) must be used with Tornado Kick but *immediately* wear off before they'd affect the next skill or autoattack.
6 - At no point can your rotation be interrupted for fight mechanics or the presence of adds that last more than a few seconds.

Failing any of these the incredibly tiny DPS gain is lost and you'll start to lose DPS, and the more of these you get wrong the more your DPS would be lower than if you just did the normal combo. Yeah the relative gain does increase if you stack Skillspeed but, well, if you're intentionally stacking skillspeed then I don't think you should look to Tornado Kicking to squeeze out that last theoretical 0.01% DPS when a switch to crit/det would net you a far, FAR larger gain.

tl;dr: Not worth it.

According to some of the people who got to play an early version of HW at a convention the potency used to be higher (like 500), but was reduced before launch. Given the incredibly close nature of the potential gain I think 330 is the highest it could possibly be without being worth it in a normal rotation. Either someone at SE got really lucky with a random guess or, maybe, somebody there did the math and figured it out too. My guess is the latter.

[Ossom]

Would it then be a DPS gain to do

Form Shift : Snap > PB > Snap > Demo > Tornado Kick > Snap > Snap > Snap

[Carstien]

@JackFross - Thank you for the maths and the very handy chart! That does help though, not only does the relation between them seem larger at higher SkSp, but in certain instances we know we won't lose GL3 to mechanics.

@Ossom - In my opener I also put up twin and DK after hitting GL3. Without it I imagine it is a direct loss to blow the stacks since once PB drops you lose your stance and have to cycle before you can put DK up.