RDM Scortch

[Archwizard]

What this does to our gameplay is give us an extra, higher target to aim for, and thus more advanced situation evaluation and decision-making, which is the core of RDM gameplay design.

Also I explained about value under buffs and/or when you have limited time.

All your explanation shows is that Verholy and Verflare would exist to highlight how much better it is to balance Mana. To offer three doors with the best prize behind only one.

You still haven't answered the fundamental question: why would I ever want to use Verholy/flare?

Let me put it to you this way. If the devs had implemented your idea for a "balance-oriented" Verfinisher first, then released the "slightly" worse Verholy and Verflare in a later expansion, what would your take on them have been? Eliminate the perspective of it being an "advanced" Verfinisher and just tell me, resource-wise, advancement-wise, gameplay-wise, "why have all three?"

And a few minutes' theorycraft would tell us exactly how many times we can hit Reprise and try again before it becomes a potency loss.

Yes, please do that few minutes' theorycraft and napkin math while you're in the middle of a boss fight trying to figure out when to give up.

We're not talking about mathing out how many Fire IVs you can fire off in AF phase, we're talking about a proc-dependent rotation. What you suggest is non-intuitive, especially when Reprise is higher PPM than most of the melee combo save Finishers.

[Singularity]

Let me put it to you this way. If the devs had implemented your idea for a "balance-oriented" Verfinisher first, then released the "slightly" worse Verholy and Verflare in a later expansion, what would your take on them have been? Eliminate the perspective of it being an "advanced" Verfinisher and just tell me, resource-wise, advancement-wise, gameplay-wise, "why have all three?"

I would see them as a situationally useful tool to make use of our melee combo when either the boss (via mechanics) or the rest of our party (via buffs) or the game itself (via procs) makes it useful or necessary to go for it now, much like the real-world addition of Reprise. Using Reprise is a potency loss too, so in an ideal situation you'd never press that button at all, but if it lets you land your melee combo in a Trick window without wasting mana or keep uptime when the mechanics demand you move continuously for a long time, then it was worth pressing, because the smaller loss led to a bigger gain.

You can work the theorycraft out beforehand. While the rotation is proc-based, there aren't that many possible combinations of procs you can have, and you can know how many retries you can use for each.

[Archwizard]

I would see them as a situationally useful tool to make use of our melee combo when either the boss (via mechanics) or the rest of our party (via buffs) or the game itself (via procs) makes it useful or necessary to go for it now, much like the real-world addition of Reprise. Using Reprise is a potency loss too, so in an ideal situation you'd never press that button at all, but if it lets you land your melee combo in a Trick window without wasting mana or keep uptime when the mechanics demand you move continuously for a long time, then it was worth pressing, because the smaller loss led to a bigger gain.

That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Reprise can be used to prevent from overcapping Mana in a multitude of situations (such as spending Mana during mechanics where entering melee is ill advised, since we can still build Mana at range), and comes at a higher potency-per-Mana than any melee skill in our combo, meaning there are ideal situations where it can intuitively come as a substantial damage gain (i.e. if you're near cap and rolling in Verquick procs that would be overwritten by your set-up Verfinisher meaning lost Mana anyway -- one glance, "I just need to burn this proc", E.Reprise, burn proc, follow with the opposite longcast, now you've instantly made back the cost within a negligible difference and turned what would've been lost Mana into damage, hit your melee combo with a clear conscience), acting as another tool to help us control RNG.
Not to mention that its use as our Scathe/Ruin II attempts to fill an open mechanical niche in our kit that we have nothing else to provide for except stutter-stepping and Swiftcast.

Meanwhile, you've listed no cases for Verflare/Verholy where your "better" Verfinisher wouldn't still outshine them if it was available, nor cases where they are made more "necessary" by encounter mechanics, as they would all attempt to fulfill exactly the same niche in the kit and position in the rotation. You're still relying on players to be able to substantially math out in their head in a split second whether to take the loss or not, which without using Acceleration every time would mean praying for good RNG, which in itself would determine the value of said loss within the situation.
In any realistic scenario it's overly-complicated, impractical, and goes against the "at a glance" intent of our design philosophy, all to satisfy an obsessive need for purely aesthetic "balance".

OP, I apologize profusely for any thread derailment that may have occurred by me attempting to explain this same concept half a dozen times. Singularity, please drop it.

[Singularity]

there are ideal situations where it can intuitively come as a substantial damage gain (i.e. if you're near cap and rolling in Verquick procs that would be overwritten by your set-up Verfinisher meaning lost Mana anyway -- one glance, "I just need to burn this proc", E.Reprise, burn proc, follow with the opposite longcast, now you've instantly made back the cost within a negligible difference and turned what would've been lost Mana into damage, hit your melee combo with a clear conscience), acting as another tool to help us control RNG.

The actual ideal situation is that you should have burned the proc as soon as you were in range for that action to get you over 80/80 (or even at any time above 80/80 that doesn't overcap), thus achieving the exact same gain without having had to Reprise at all. If you got to near cap with both procs, you already misplayed.

I've explained multiple times about the advantages that can be gained by taking less time to set up. Yes I am relying on players to be able to do mental arithmetic, that is after all the basis of the RDM rotation. As in the example above, as soon as you were at 71+/71+ you should know that your next spell pair will put you in a position to go into melee and therefore you should burn a proc instead of maintaining them, and if the difference is exactly two, you should know which way round to cast the spells to achieve the imbalance needed to force a proc on the finisher.

If you'd prefer to continue via another thread or some form of direct messaging, you're welcome to do so. I also had no intention of subverting the OP's thread.

[Burningskull]

The actual ideal situation is that you should have burned the proc as soon as you were in range for that action to get you over 80/80 (or even at any time above 80/80 that doesn't overcap), thus achieving the exact same gain without having had to Reprise at all. If you got to near cap with both procs, you already misplayed.

I've explained multiple times about the advantages that can be gained by taking less time to set up. Yes I am relying on players to be able to do mental arithmetic, that is after all the basis of the RDM rotation. As in the example above, as soon as you were at 71+/71+ you should know that your next spell pair will put you in a position to go into melee and therefore you should burn a proc instead of maintaining them, and if the difference is exactly two, you should know which way round to cast the spells to achieve the imbalance needed to force a proc on the finisher.

If you'd prefer to continue via another thread or some form of direct messaging, you're welcome to do so. I also had no intention of subverting the OP's thread.

People have trouble doing the math in Ridorana and you want them to be able to remember how much mana their spells give and do math and figure out which one is better to use at a given time in between fight mechanics and using spells / oGCD abilities, on a job where all you have to do is look at which mana is lower and cast that spell... yea that'll work.

[Archwizard]

The actual ideal situation

... completely ignores that procs are given at a rate determined by RNG? And that reaching 80/80 doesn't eliminate the chance to gain more procs? And that even in the listed scenario, there's nothing keeping you from getting yet another proc, because the only way to guarantee proc prevention would be casting Impact in single-target? And that you don't need both procs to still be in a bad position for a Verfinisher, just the proc for the lower Mana value? That when your choice is losing mana to overcapping, losing it to overwriting an existing proc, or spending it on Reprise, only the latter turns all of the excess into potency? That this is exactly what I mean when I say the value of such a loss would be determined by RNG?

Obviously we're just talking in circles at this point, and it's a wasted effort to continue trying to convince the other. Again, please drop it.

[Singularity]

That when your choice is losing mana to overcapping, losing it to overwriting an existing proc, or spending it on Reprise

Using media tour numbers, the melee combo delivers 2270 potency for 125 mana (including refunded mana) over 4.08 GCDs (at base GCD). Using the distribution from the existing theorycraft (accounting for the buff to Jolt and removal of Impact), we can recalculate the average GCD potency to be 287.6, so the melee combo gains us ~1097 potency, or about 8.8 potency per mana.
Reprise gains ~47 potency (accounting for its 2.2s GCD) at a cost of 20 mana, for a net loss of ~129 potency. A proc is worth 20 potency and 3 mana (26.4 potency equivalent) over the Jolt it would replace, so even if you'd 100% of the time overwrite the proc (instead of 50%), it's always correct to do so vs. using Reprise and trying again, since the cost of doing so outweighs the gain of an extra proc.

Likewise we can calculate the cost of overcapping vs. using Reprise - that 129 potency loss is the equivalent of 14.7 mana, so if you're overcapping by 14 or less mana, that's also correct vs. using Reprise.

The upshot of this is that Reprise only has value in non-ideal situations. Since it costs more to use it than you gain from a proc (whether the proc is gained from avoiding an overwrite or from setting up your finisher to generate one), and more even than you lose to overcapping up to 14 mana, it's only a gain when you're losing GCDs to movement, or if you can use it to delay your melee combo such that the combo lands within buffs that more than compensate for the cost.

[Rongway]

Using media tour numbers, the melee combo delivers 2270 potency for 125 mana (including refunded mana) over 4.08 GCDs (at base GCD). Using the distribution from the existing theorycraft (accounting for the buff to Jolt and removal of Impact), we can recalculate the average GCD potency to be 287.6, so the melee combo gains us ~1097 potency, or about 8.8 potency per mana.
Reprise gains ~47 potency (accounting for its 2.2s GCD) at a cost of 20 mana, for a net loss of ~129 potency. A proc is worth 20 potency and 3 mana (26.4 potency equivalent) over the Jolt it would replace, so even if you'd 100% of the time overwrite the proc (instead of 50%), it's always correct to do so vs. using Reprise and trying again, since the cost of doing so outweighs the gain of an extra proc.

Likewise we can calculate the cost of overcapping vs. using Reprise - that 129 potency loss is the equivalent of 14.7 mana, so if you're overcapping by 14 or less mana, that's also correct vs. using Reprise.

The upshot of this is that Reprise only has value in non-ideal situations. Since it costs more to use it than you gain from a proc (whether the proc is gained from avoiding an overwrite or from setting up your finisher to generate one), and more even than you lose to overcapping up to 14 mana, it's only a gain when you're losing GCDs to movement, or if you can use it to delay your melee combo such that the combo lands within buffs that more than compensate for the cost.

We should include missed mana gains in the calculations. We've so far accounted for the potency of the spells we would have cast instead of performing a melee combo, but we haven't accounted for the mana those spells would have generated. When we account for this, the melee combo actually costs 163.21 mana, and E.Reprise actually costs 28.34 mana or 22.70 mana, depending.


If you start with 160 mana, you can perform a melee combo in the course of 10.08s, doing 2270 potency, and ending with 35 mana.

In a mana generation / spell casting phase, you can do 250(6) + 320(12.5) every 4.88s. This accounts for a Verslowspell's 50% chance to increase the potency of the next hard cast by 20(3). Then the expected potency and mana generation over 10.08s is 1177.38 potency and 38.21 mana.

So whereas starting with 160 mana and performing a melee combo would leave you at 35 mana, starting with 160 mana and casting spells for the same amount of time would leave you with 198.21 mana. The melee combo does 1092.62 potency over spellcasting, at the cost of 163.21 mana, yielding an effective 6.695 potency per mana.


Likewise, if you started with 20 mana and used E.Reprise, in 2.2s you would do 300 potency and end with 0 mana. In those same 2.2s, spellcasting would do on average 256.97 potency and leave you at 28.34 mana. Therefore, Reprise does 43.03 potency at the cost of 28.34 mana, or dealing 1.518 potency per mana. We could adjust these numbers slightly if we considered that Reprise should only ever take the place of a Jolt, in which case the spellcasting potency is 225.41 and the mana generation would have been 2.70, which would be a gain of 74.59 potency at the cost of 22.70 mana, or 3.286 potency per mana.

But for now let's go with the less optimistic calculation of 43.03 potency at the cost of 28.34 mana. At the melee combo rate of potency per mana, we expect an expenditure of 28.34 mana to deal 189.736 potency, which makes E.Reprise a loss of 146.71 potency.

If we convert this 146.71 potency back to mana, it's about 21.9. Therefore, going 21 mana over cap would still be preferable to using E.Reprise.

[Archwizard]

-snip-

This was just linked to me in another RDM thread, which I find very helpful for this particular discussion. Feel free to read it over and debate the math with its original author.