Does Swift Cast work on any skills?

[Kaurie]

A flat 5% DPS decrease seems like a weird way to look at a slow, especially in a game tied to a 2.5 second global cooldown. Now I may not be super knowledgeable about how all this dps stuff works but if mobs are also tied to a 2.5 second cooldown...

Say you fight a mob that only uses instant abilities every 2.5 seconds, casting a 5% slow would delay its attacks to every 2.625 seconds. Taking these numbers, plus the duration of Shadow Flare(SF) you can sort of calculate dps. For the sake of this equation I'm going to say the mob deals 100 damage per attack.

@30 seconds, and 2.5 GCD, the mob would execute 12 attacks (30/2.5=12), and would inflict 1200 damage (12×100=1200). Which can then be calculated as 40 DPS (1200/30=40).

@30 seconds, and 2.625 GCD, the mob would execute 11 (rounded from 11.42~) attacks, inflicting 1100 damage, or 36.67 DPS.

36.67 is about an 8% decrease from 40. So you actually reduced the target's DPS by more than 5%.

But if the mob died at 29 seconds it would execute 11 attacks regardless if it was inflicted with SF or not. So the dps would not be any different, since in both cases the mob would inflict 1100 damage, or 37.93 DPS.

This is all napkin math and I'm actually work so I may be completely wrong, but slows are not the same as actual damage reduction.

Indeed this is all correct, and something I alluded to above. I appreciate the other take on it to help make it clearer for others.

I should note that the total damage will be the same if they are both 11 attacks, but the speed at which that damage occurs is still slowed. This is quite valuable when DPSing.

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?

I used per second, as generally the unit of measure for damage is DPS or damage per second.

It's drastically overstating the actual effectiveness of the slow, yes. The point I was making is that SF shouldn't be considered mitigation because slow really doesn't have an appreciable effect at 5% over short fights. As I said earlier, trying to sell it as mitigation sends the wrong message, and the uninitiated might try think they can save cd's while SF is up only to be slammed in a split second, because slow doesn't actually lower the damage taken.

There is nothing drastic about giving the precise amount of effectiveness. Shadowflare helps slow the damage to the tank. This is valuable and a form of mitigation. Saying that it does not mitigate 'sends the wrong message'.

If an uninitiated tried to save CD's with Shadowflare after reading our conversation, then they clearly need to re-read our conversation.

That's why I think saying it "reduces DPS by 5%" is really weird. It's not like Disable that literally decreases the damage its target inflicts.

Yeah this is way of topic though. Opps. XD

5% is actually slightly off. You're adding 5% to the lower half of the fraction (damage / second). So instead of (x/y) you have (x/(y*1.05), which works out to a 4.8% reduction in DPS.

[VanilleFang]

snip

Ah. Alright. Thank you for clarifying!

[Rivxkobe]

5% is actually slightly off. You're adding 5% to the lower half of the fraction (damage / second). So instead of (x/y) you have (x/(y*1.05), which works out to a 4.8% reduction in DPS.

Which means its even worse than previously stated.

A 4.8% decreases in DPS is not that big of a deal and not that great at all. And really, the actual damage taken is only noticeable after a certain amount of time has passed, and since it is a 5% slow the amount of time that needs to pass is quite a long time. Shadow Flare is good for the damage, lets not sit here and exaggerate or make something out to be better than it is though. They could remove the slow and no one would notice a difference.