Thread: 4.05 - Tank DPS comparison

Originally Posted by Quor

Wait, so, does TBN mana cost double at 70? Cause, at least according to what it shows me on my 60 DRK (using mana costs appropriate for the level) TBN and DA cost the same, while SS restores the exact same amount as the cost of both DA and TBN. Or does SS just lose half of it's MP restore at 70?

Sounds like someone spends too much time in Grit.

Syphon only restores a DA's worth in Grit, out of Grit it is half. This entire discussion is about proc'ing extra Bloodspillers with TBN out of Grit. In Grit it is a gain and has always been because of Bloodspiller's Grit potency.

Theorycrafting on DRK in 4.0 has been a depressing affair. There's definitely losses and gains to be mathed out, but they're so tiny as to be insignificant, hence the feeling that the job is "braindead" and doesn't reward optimization.

Originally Posted by Quor

Ah, good to know.

And the rest of my post?

Originally Posted by Quor

Yes, you pay the MP cost towards TBN instead of DA, but it's not a gain of 400 vs 440, because you can choose to delay your BS as long as you're not at 100 blood. This means you still get the 300 potency from the non-DA SE, then on top of that you get a further 400 potency from BS.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the rest of your post is a novel about a job that you have not yet gotten to 70, you're disregarding math in favor of... well basically nonsense. People are telling you that over a given number of GCDs using TBN+BS is a potential loss against not using it over the same number of GCDs, and you're basically saying "well, yeah, over that given number of GCDs, but after that you still get the potency yadda yadda..."

Saying "Well, you can just delay using a GCD for this and then use that afterwards" increases the data set. If you use Bloodspiller instead of Souleater, and then you come in and say "well, we can use Souleater afterwards!" then you've increased the data set. We're talking about 4 GCDs now instead of 3. And it doesn't matter because you still spent 2400 mana and gained *nothing*, because you spent 140 potency (2400 mana) to gain roughly the same amount against your PPGCD, on average, spread across any number of GCDs in an encounter. Spending that 2400 mana on a Dark Arts is a direct potency increase, because it is off the GCD and doesn't delay your resource generation, over your base Souleater combo.

You can't increase the data set for one set of statistics and leave it the same for the other. If the given number is 3, 4, 5, or 100 GCDs, it doesn't matter, it still at best only breaks even.

Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

snippety

Disregarding the facts that I've seen a lot of DRK's who do not have WAR at 70 try and tell me how to play WAR.....
Theory is still just theory. To paraphrase the saying, if you want to know how something "should" work, ask an engineer. If you want to know how something actually works, ask a mechanic.

I'd like to see some real world results. If I had DRK at 70 I'd do it myself, but I've been hitting the WAR tank cheevos pretty hard.

Well, pretty hard for someone who doesn't powergame anyway. Just another 124 to go! Kill me now

Take a fight, like O1 for example. It's a pretty good setup for this, because there's high uptime on the target, not a lot of mechanics that will stop GCD rolling for very long, it's solo tankable so the OT can stay DPS the entire time, and there's lots of errant aoe capable of popping TBN bubbles. Do a few, 3-4 tops, of those fights just focusing on DA+SE, with no TBN's used at all. The only BS usage would be from naturally generated blood. Then do the same for 3-4 fights, only this time, use TBN as much as possible during times when it would pop. O1 has a lot of errant aoe, so there are plenty of opportunities where tossing it on a squishy will ensure something eats the 10%. Hell, you can even go in with friends and tell them to strategically stand in certain aoe's to ensure maximum TBN popness. The point is to try and get as many BS via TBN as possible, in addition to natural BS.

Then compare the two. 3-4 fights should be enough to get an idea of where it all stands, and if there's no significant difference then we have our answer, using real world data instead of theorycrafted on-paper numbers. If there's a difference, one way or the other, that's significant as well. But I haven't seen any direct comparisons in a controlled environment like that (which makes sense, since Omega has only been out for 2 weeks and I doubt anyone thought to try a test like this yet). Obviously any fights that have "derp" moments would be tossed out of the pool and redone, but you get the general idea.

Hard data in a real situation is what would convince me. I enjoy the fun of theorycrafting as much as the next guy, but the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Oh, almost forgot:

You can't increase the data set for one set of statistics and leave it the same for the other. If the given number is 3, 4, 5, or 100 GCDs, it doesn't matter, it still at best only breaks even.

I accounted for that earlier in the thread.

Originally Posted by Quor

SE combo = 700 potency over 3 GCD's.
Bloodspiller = 400 potency for 1 GCD.
TBN, if broken, allows for another BS due to the 50 blood gained. Thus, for this example, I'll assume TBN was used (but not DA, on BS or SE, that'll come later) to allow for a third BS, and that the DRK is at 100 blood gauge going in. Now the SE combo takes place over three GCD's, while BS is a single GCD, so we'll be comparing a point at which the two intersect, which will consist of 12 GCD's. This is 4 SE combos or three SE combos + 3 BS.

4 SE combos over 12 GCD's results in a net gain of 2800 potency.
3 SE combos + 3 BS over 12 GCD's results in a net gain of 3300 potency. Again, this assumes no DA's in either combo, and single use of TBN in the second combo to enable a third BS. But even without that third BS, if we just factor in a Hard Slash as the 12th GCD (instead of a BS) then that's still 3050 potency total over 12 GCD's, which is more than just running the SE combo.

Now let's look at what DA does, compared to TBN (since the argument is that TBN is always a potency loss over DA). For this example, we will use four DA's in the SE combo (all on SE) and 3 DA's + one TBN in the BS combo. That means an equal amount of mana was spent, and again we are starting at 100 blood gauge in the tank for the BS combo.

4 SE + DA combos over 12 GCD's results in a net gain of 3360 potency.
2 non-DA SE combos plus one DA+SE, and 3 DA+BS (including TBN) over 12 GCD's results a net gain of 3860 potency.

Or, for those who would prefer to see an average, you have 280 PPGCD for the pure DA+SE combo vs 321.7 PPGCD for the combo that uses 3 DA+BS and TBN.

Now that of course is an extra TBN in the BS combo's, but you can easily subtract 140 potency to account for one less DA in the BS combo's. That still leaves the BS combo ahead of the pure DA+SE combo 3720 vs 3360.

Originally Posted by Quor

snip

The problem here is that you're asking us to do field testing for something that can easily be verified just by looking at tooltips.

Why would we run any number of O1S's to test this and subject the results to composition, crit RNG, player performance, etc.?

The point is that the difference is extremely small, almost unnoticeable, to the point where even something like the aforementioned crit RNG would mask it completely, which is part of the problem; this is why people are complaining. Naturally gained Bloodspillers cause your PPGCD to actually go up by an appreciable amount, whereas TBN-proc'd Bloodspillers barely change it at all, and are either an extremely small loss, or (more rarely) an extremely small gain, to the point where TBN may as well not even do anything other than provide the shield. Every single time you use TBN to proc Bloodspiller you could have easily used that mana to DA a natural Bloodspiller, a Souleater, or even a Syphon Strike, and your PPGCD would be the same, if not slightly higher... for all intents and purposes it wouldn't change at all. Its a goddamn zero-sum game and that's why people are complaining.

If TBN was simply a 10-20% shield that cost no mana and had no blood gauge generation attached to it, DRK's DPS floor/ceiling would statistically not move at all.