Unread postby Densor
Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:30 am
Arcanosaur and Mythlos got into a little bit of a discussion about AM usage during AP on the battle.net forums and I managed to come up with a way to look at it that might make sense. I'm reposting this from my post on those forums. I'll post the table here as an image attachment.
Edited to remove mention of a pointless mastery number and to take sustain rotation mana cost into account when comparing mana expenditure.
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First off, I can tell you that if you prefer to bank AM for after AP finishes, you want to have at least 14% haste. It's probably ideal to have 18% haste, but 14% haste covers most situations, while there are a few situations where up to 20% haste may be helpful. If you prefer to spend AM within AP, you can get by with just 10% haste. Most likely, we're going to be running around 20% haste, just to spend our mana fast enough.
I'm going to work under the assumption that even with Overpowered and inside AP, it is still a DPS loss to munch an AM proc. Based on that, if you are casting an AB and have 2 charges of AM available, you will be casting an AM as your next spell. The caveat to this is when using PoM to cast the AB, in which case you can decide based on whether you got to 3 charges or not during the GCD invoked by the instant AB.
I'm also assuming that you will never cast Barrage to end AP, since you will be trying to bank some AM's for use after AP ends. Similarly, I'm assuming you enter AP with 0 AM charges, since you would use them earlier if you had them, rather than risk munching AM procs. However, MoA may proc AM, so you could enter with 1 AM charge. If you instead prefer to use AM procs inside AP, I'm assuming you enter with 2 charges and may proc another from MoA. I'm also assuming you may cast Barrage at the end of AP, if you wouldn't have any banked AM procs. I'm also assuming a 20% AM proc chance.
Finally, I am working under the assumption that once you cast PoM, you can no longer hardcast AB, and to fully utilize AP, you want to end with an instant cast, which would have to be a PoM'ed AB, since you don't want to cast Barrage.
With all that said, I built a list of every situation (it's really ugly to post, but I can if you really want) that can occur once you start the AP burn for both preferring to bank AM and preferring to use AM. I am assuming 14% haste. Having more haste will change the results, as there are additional breakpoints for certain situations within AP at 16, 18, and 20% haste. I'm also assuming a 13 second long AP. Additional AP duration relics will change the results, obviously. I guess there was more to say. So, the results:
Preferring to bank AM procs, on average, you will cast 6.5 AB's during AP. Additionally, due to the effects of RoP (@ 40% like the PTR), you will effectively do 8.54 AB's worth of damage with those 6.5 AB's, not counting the bonus from AP (either 1.3x or 1.7x depending on your talents). You will also cast an average of 1.2 AM's during that time for a total of 1.4 AM's worth of damage, again not counting the bonus from AP. Additionally, you will exit with an average of 1.46 AM procs. You can also have an additional 2 AM procs from prior to AP that can be counted in.
If you instead prefer to use AM procs, on average, you will cast 4.4 AB's during AP, for a total of 5.69 AB's worth of damage, still not counting AP's damage bonus. You will also cast 3.3 AM's for a total of 4.2 AM's worth of damage, without AP's damage bonus. Additionally, since we aren't really trying to bank AM procs, you will cast 0.4 Barrages during AP as well. This was done in the cases where PoM AB's were already used and I still needed an instant for the end of AP. You will then end AP with an average of 0.9 AM procs.
Now, let's look at the differences between the two. Assuming you prefer to bank AM's you will do approximately 2.85 AB's worth of extra damage from AB. You will be down about 2.76 AM's worth of damage. You will be down 0.4 worth of Barrage damage. You will have 2.53 additional casts of AM to use.
Now, let's normalize the damage out to AB's worth of damage. As I mentioned before, AM does 1.38 AB's worth of damage. Barrage does 0.67 AB's worth of damage. In total, by banking AM's you will do 1.21 AB's worth of damage less than if you were to prefer to spend AM's. However, you still have 2.53 additional AM casts worth of damage outside of AP to use. You also have cast 2.15 more AB's, so you've spent more mana.
Now, let's add in AP bonuses. If you are running Overpowered, you will have done 2.06 AB's less damage and have spent 11.61% extra base mana to do it. In return, you have 2.53 additional AM's to spend, and mana they save, to make up for it. Keep in mind that it will take you 4.44 additional seconds of time to spend it. I'm not exactly sure how you plan to use your other RoP, but if you don't use it here (keep in mind, 2 of your additional AM's happen before AP and the other are afterwards), your additional AM's will translate to 3.49 AB's of extra damage. That means you are now comparing 1.43 AB's worth of damage to 4.44 seconds of non-burst DPS.
Although, at high enough mastery, maybe we need to drop the Barrage casts and just assume you are non-stop casting AB, which nets you another 0.46 AB's worth of damage from the Barrages we didn't cast. Now we are comparing 1.89 AB's worth of damage to 4.44 seconds of time. Unfortunately, in 4.44 seconds, you can cast 2.25 AB's, so you lost there.
If we assume you can't cast AB non-stop and are actually entering a sustain rotation, then you still have 1.43 AB's of damage to make up in 4.44 seconds. I can throw some numbers at that. At 40000 int, 28% crit, 30% mastery, and 14% haste, AB4 does 484k damage. The sustain rotation averages 200k DPS. Your extra AB's end up falling 196k DPS short of matching it. The sustain rotation takes at those numbers takes about 1% of base mana per second. You regen 1.95% of base mana per second. As a result, after 4.44 seconds, you will regen 13.1% of base mana relative to the sustain rotation, which means you will actually have saved about 1.5% of base mana, but still have done less DPS.
If you aren't running Overpowered, you've done 1.57 AB's less damage and have spent 27.09% extra base mana to do it. You also have 2.53 additional AM's to cast over 4.44 seconds with which to make up the lost damage. The mana saved by casting AM won't make up for how much extra you have spent, unfortunately. I doubt you will make up the extra damage, though you have less to make up.
If we add in Amplification, the balance shifts even more towards spending AM during AP, but I would have to actually look at the mastery damage multiplier for each spell, so I don't want to do that.
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For the table, there are two data sets. The first 7 lines are preferring to use AM during AP. Then there is a line break and the following lines are preferring to bank AM procs. Each row is a potential cast sequence based on what the state of your AM procs is at. The last column is the percentage chance that this sequence is used. The 3rd to last row is the amount of cast time spent up to that point. That's used for determining the haste requirement to fit another instant cast at the end of AP. The 5th and 6th rows are where RoP will start falling off. With the 14% haste I assumed in my post, instant casts in the 6th row will most likely occur while RoP is active. The (proc) stuff just tells me whether an AB cast procced AM or how many of the previous AB/MoA casts procced AM.
Due to the nature of RoP ending within AP, I think it will be relatively standard to cast PoM AB, AM, PoM AB to get the first AB in under RoP and AP, and the last AB in as AP ends. We have to have an AM for the middle since we can't hardcast an AB between the two PoM casts. I suppose you could use Arcane Orb or Barrage + Charged Up for one of the instant casts instead, assuming you've taken those talents.
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Last edited by
Densor on Tue Dec 20, 2016 8:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
