Does Swift Cast work on any skills?

[Kaurie]

If we're talking trash mobs, 5% is insignificant. You can overstate the effectiveness, but it doesn't change the fact that awareness and foresight, the two absolute weakest tank cd's, mitigate more damage in their respective durations than SF's Slow does in two minutes. Awareness only needs to 'proc' once to completely overshadow any defensive benefits of the Slow, and the chance of being critted increases drastically the more mobs you have pummeling you. SF's slow is more window dressing than it is actual mitigation.

You have a pretty skewed idea on damage mitigation, but that's fine. It's unlikely we are going to play together, so I don't really need to concern myself with it.

For mathematics, let's say you pull a pack of 5 mobs that each do 10 damage per hit every 3 seconds. If 1 crit were to happen in 30 s (time of a shadowflare), you would have:

Damage mitigation from Awareness: 5 damage (prevent 1 crit and take regular damage instead), for a total of 500 damage taken
Damage mitigation from Shadowflare: 10 damage taken every 3.15 seconds, for a total of 9.5 hits (as things don't hit for half amounts, you'll only be hit 9 times). You'll receive 1 crit for 15 damage. Therefore, you receive 10 x 9 x 5 + 5 = 455 damage.

However, if you really want to count the 0.5 as damage taken, as over longer fights it will result in 19 instead of 20 hits, the math works to 480. It's also important to note that I used simplified numbers to make the math easier to understand. If my understanding is correct, mobs hit on the regular GCD of 2.5 seconds, not 3, and the slowed time is 2.625s.

Naturally, awareness can proc more times than that, but it also can not at all. This depends on how often the mobs are hitting critically.

The logical fallacy is that you don't choose between Awareness and Shadowflare. Shadowflare simply couples with your current damage mitigation and the scholars shields and the faeries heals.

[VanilleFang]

snip

I don't really understand how you can say you take x amount of damage every y seconds when the mobs attack every 2.5 seconds, not every second. If you take damage every 2.5 seconds wouldn't the total amount of damage you take every 3 seconds be the same as the total damage you take every 4 seconds (up to a point)? Or am I just not understanding something here?