Dark Knight MP gain percentages for each skill

[The_Last_Dragoon]

MP COST

Grit: 18.99%
Dark Arts: 25.32%
Dark Passenger: 25.32%
The Blackest Night: 25.32%
Unleash: 11.39%
Abyssal Drain: 13.92%
Unmend: 5.06%

MP GAIN

Syphon Strike: 25.32% in Grit or 12.66% outside of Grit
Carve and Spit: 12.66%
Blood Price: 1.27% per hit
Quietus: 5.06% per hit
Delirium: 25.32%
Blood Weapon: 5.06% per hit
Sole Survivor: 20%
MP outside of Combat: 5.99% per tick
MP Inside of Combat (No Darkside): 1.99% per tick

Just thought I'd post this since I was doing a bit of testing. It definitely feels like, with the way how MP gain is designed, you're encouraged to do high potency combos more often. It also feels like SE wants you to switch back to Grit for the 25 seconds that you don't have Blood Weapon in order to gain back MP (though with the current Shirk tactics you really shouldn't have to go back into Grit).

[MauvaisOeil]

I think thoses depends of the base piety of your race, as the MP costs are flat but the MP pool can slightly vary.

Thus, the exact % of cost will slightly vary, and raw values might be more or less usefull depending of state.

Are you sure of your calculation between siphon out and inside of grit, plus dark arts/carve and spit cost and gains ? They are meant to be the double of each other, but 12.56 doubled is 25.12 and not 25.32.

[Lyth]

Piety is no longer a racial stat. Please refer to Patch Notes 4.0: "The starting attributes of all races have been changed." You can find the current list here. Your base MP is determined by your job and character level, with healers exclusively having the ability to slot additional MP with their secondary stat choices. Every DRK at level 70 will have 9480 MP.

Rather than looking at MP gains and costs, it's better to conceptualise things as a common currency, or potency. The net value of 1 DA is 140 potency in Grit and 168 potency out of it. The net value of a Bloodspiller is 185 potency in Grit (on average) and 165 potency out of it.

Looking at combo potencies, we have:

HS [150] + SyS [250 + 0.5 DA/1 DA] + SE [300 + 10 blood]

If you just look at the potencies themselves, you have 233 potency/GCD in Grit, and 282 potency/GCD out of Grit. If you include the value of the resources themselves, you have:

HS [1.2(150)] + SyS [1.2(250) + (168)/2] + SE [1.2(300) + (165)/5] out of Grit, which works out to be 326 effective potency/GCD.
HS [150] + SyS [250 + 140] + SE [300 + (185)/5] in Grit, which works out to be 292 effective potency/GCD.

So when you account for extra resource gains from Syphon Strike in Grit, the effective potency difference is narrower, but you still lose about 34 potency on average for each GCD combo action that you use in Grit. In addition, it costs you 1 GCD and 0.75 DA to swap into Grit, which is worth 452 potency. Stance dancing on DRK is a fairly expensive ordeal.

[The_Last_Dragoon]

Are you sure of your calculation between siphon out and inside of grit, plus dark arts/carve and spit cost and gains ? They are meant to be the double of each other, but 12.56 doubled is 25.12 and not 25.32.

I actually did a double-take on this too and yeah I fudged the math slightly. I tested it at the natural 292 Piety and got 1200 MP gain for C&S as well as Siphon Strike out of Grit while I got 2400 MP gain while in Grit. with my max MP being 9480 that works out to be 12.66%, not 12.56% so I'm pretty sure I just swapped two numbers accidentally.

snip

The problem with those calculations is that it's not taking into account the extra Blood Gauge gains you would get from being able to do Blackest Night (doing so outside of Grit would cost 6 GCD of no DA where as in Grit it would only cost you 3) as well as what you get from being able to activate Blood Price when you are in Grit. This leads to more Blood Spillers which has a 648 potency outside of Grit and a 650 potency while in Grit, as well as more Deliriums (though I'm not sure if using Delirium is more advantageous than a Bloodspiller during a boss fight, the 25.32% MP boost outside of Grit as well as a an extra 8 seconds of Blood Weapon can't be all that bad).

[Lyth]

Switching into Grit is extremely expensive. Blood Price's ticks (which give you 20 blood over 15 seconds, outside of being hit) don't come even close to reimbursing you for the cost of this. Blood is generally a weaker resource than MP at the moment. Delirium is a better use of blood than Bloodspiller.

You can toggle Grit on and off for fun just to pick up both Blood Weapon and Price if you'd like, but it's going to be a net dps loss. Test it out the next time you're doing your weekly clears and see.

[SyzzleSpark]

though I'm not sure if using Delirium is more advantageous than a Bloodspiller during a boss fight, the 25.32% MP boost outside of Grit as well as a an extra 8 seconds of Blood Weapon can't be all that bad).

Delirium's gains aren't that hard to math out actually. 8 extra seconds of BW is going to be about 3 gcds and 3 AAs on average. That's 18 Blood and 2880 mana. So for a net loss of 32 Blood gauge you're gaining about 5280 mana, plus an additional 8 seconds of haste. That blows Bloodspiller out of the water (over 300 potency in mana alone, which is more than double the PPGCD gain of even natural Bloodspillers). This doesn't change in Grit (leaving aside for a moment the fact that you're "wasting" Delirium on BP) as you're still seeing a net loss of only 30 Blood for 2400 mana plus whatever you get from BP procs (about 640 mana per target hitting you assuming they AA every 3s, over 16s).

Interestingly I just realized that this essentially means that BP is balanced around tanking 4-5 mobs with 3s AA intervals (2880/640=4.5).

Basically Delirium-BW gives you 2 extra DAs and some change, and +8s of haste. Given that spending even just one DA of mana for a Bloodspiller (TBN) is dubious at best, Delirium is hands-down the best use of Blood Gauge and probably up there with DA-C&S and Salted Earth as one of the most powerful abilities in our kit, DPS-wise.