The post and data here is mainly aimed at people gearing for raids, where single target damage is by far the most important aspect to be invested in. I agree though, that if people want to do M+ as their main form of progression they would be better suited to run a different suite of simulations, using transient adds more liberally and increasing the fight length, to model their situation better.I think a more in-dept discussion/theorycrafting about optimal 5-man play would be nice. Basically you can see a dungeon as a very long (20-30 minutes) boss fight with some aoe phases and single target phases. Too many players seem to think trash pulls arn't important in dungeons and save cooldowns for bosses when in reality in an optimal play situation trash pulls are more important (and harder) by far. Some dungeons are literally 1 huge trash pull untill boss>aoe everything down (quite hard, burst dps is very important so use cooldowns)>kill boss in chill mode without cooldowns, maiby 1 set of cooldowns towards the end of the fight when they come back up>1 huge trash pull untill next boss when played optimally.
At the moment 99% of the mages still seems to be gearing based on a 5 minute 'single target' sim situation, when in reality 99% of the content you do the coming weeks is going to be a big aoe fest with small 1.5 minute single target phases. Some theorycrafting and talent discussion on dungeons would be great!
Also, does anyone have an idea about the BIS trinkets for 5-mans (aka 'AoE situations'). Been running many dungeons, and expect to run a lot more, so optimising for single target seems like a bad idea atm. Was personally thinking the Alchemist Stone+Stormsinger Fulmination Charge would be a good choice in non-demon situations.
Honestly though I'm still pretty confused as to why people want to run Kindling for trash. Cinderstorm is significantly stronger in an AoE setting when Ignite does not have time>>>>ignite_duration to tick (which is where all the AoE power from Kindling comes from). Once you add transient adds into the sim, even getting 4 or 5 cinder impacts (not cinders per mob, but total cinder impacts) is stronger than kindling
I sort of thought along the lines you were here. I said that if we take an 8 min fight and add short duration adds a few times into it, we're sort of modeling the up and down nature of handling trash packs. Doing this results in CiS>>>>>>Kindling, with it being what I said above with only needing 1 cinder impact per mob to be a gain over kindling. I didn't really put a lot of effort into the sim though, so I could probably do something like bank combustion for the add phases and stuff to improve kindling - but it's really an issue of how long they live. If adds are dying fast, ignite doesn't tick full value and so kindling isn't really worth much.
