3.0 Assassin DPS Theorycrafting Results

[Aelanis]

Keep in mind that APM isn't always the best indicator of ability, as it can fluctuate for very normal reasons (outside of lag). A higher DPS parse might have a lower APM than a lower DPS parse because some offensive cooldowns were still on cooldown in the higher DPS parse that could be used late in the lower DPS parse.

 

I've been using high Alacrity on my Shadow for some time now. Compared to my Vanguard, who I went high Alacrity with long ago due to Kwerty's advice, I would say the results haven't been too noticeable. Much like on the PTS, I haven't seen a DPS loss, but I haven't seen much of a gain, either--except perhaps a more consistent, higher average.

 

By the way, Aelanis and Kwerty: Have you two compared notes? I know Kwerty did a brief recommendation some time back for Hatred that had a higher Alacrity recommendation than the one you came up with, Aelanis.

 

Alacrity is a super consistent stat, especially compared to Surge. As long as you can keep up with the speed boost, it's a flat increase with absolutely no RNG. And while I haven't shown the results yet, my math at higher levels of gear suggests even more Alacrity: to the point where it's suggesting full Alacrity augments at certain gear levels (which we may not hit before the next level cap).

[mmerry]

Alacrity is a super consistent stat, especially compared to Surge. As long as you can keep up with the speed boost, it's a flat increase with absolutely no RNG. And while I haven't shown the results yet, my math at higher levels of gear suggests even more Alacrity: to the point where it's suggesting full Alacrity augments at certain gear levels (which we may not hit before the next level cap).

 

Is this consistent across other classes, say, a MM/Virulence sniper?

Edited April 23, 2015 by mmerry

[Aelanis]

Is this consistent across other classes, say, a MM/Virulence sniper?

 

What's a sniper?

[mmerry]

What's a sniper?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyNuriXG3BQ

[Aelanis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyNuriXG3BQ

 

So hey, can you teach me this one-shot skill that dude seemed to have? Seemed pretty cool.

[Damastes]

Alacrity is a super consistent stat, especially compared to Surge. As long as you can keep up with the speed boost, it's a flat increase with absolutely no RNG. And while I haven't shown the results yet, my math at higher levels of gear suggests even more Alacrity: to the point where it's suggesting full Alacrity augments at certain gear levels (which we may not hit before the next level cap).

 

I'm not doubting it I wouldn't have been using it all this time if I felt I was gimping myself. Just responding to an earlier comment from someone about not noticing much of a difference: That was also my experience once I went high Alacrity with my Shadow. It just doesn't seem to be as pronounced an increase as some other specs have seen. In other words, people shouldn't expect miracles.

[TACeMossie]

By the way, Aelanis and Kwerty: Have you two compared notes? I know Kwerty did a brief recommendation some time back for Hatred that had a higher Alacrity recommendation than the one you came up with, Aelanis.

 

We actually worked together on making the model for these numbers to begin with (though Aelanis updated it for 3.1.2). The Higher Alacrity recommendation was back pre-nerf, and the reason mine was higher was cause Aelanis's numbers didn't account for any augment combination, just mostly Willpower or Mostly Power.

 

Ah the primitive days of early 3.0, where Mainstat + Power augments were king.

 

(The higher alacrity post came from a thread where someone asked where to stop when going high alacrity in Serenity/Hatred)

[Aelanis]

We actually worked together on making the model for these numbers to begin with (though Aelanis updated it for 3.1.2). The Higher Alacrity recommendation was back pre-nerf, and the reason mine was higher was cause Aelanis's numbers didn't account for any augment combination, just mostly Willpower or Mostly Power.

 

Ah the primitive days of early 3.0, where Mainstat + Power augments were king.

 

(The higher alacrity post came from a thread where someone asked where to stop when going high alacrity in Serenity/Hatred)

 

Hopefully by the end of next week I'll have a simulator up and going for Deception, or will have gotten in touch with fatheroftheyear to work on his old simulator for Deception, but my programming skills are a smidge rusty to be writing my own working functions. I'm hoping to use this to see how the damage spread works out using the sets of gear that the current code I have written suggests.

[TominatorBriss]

Deleted Edited May 19, 2015 by TominatorBriss

[Sarafain]

Can you control active time on your sim?

 

A dummy parse will have a 100% active time but that's rarely the case in boss fights. I'm curious at what point of downtime Alacrity looses it's increase. Side note - why do no parsers measure time between ability activation to show someone's uptime.

[Aelanis]

Can you control active time on your sim?

 

A dummy parse will have a 100% active time but that's rarely the case in boss fights. I'm curious at what point of downtime Alacrity looses it's increase. Side note - why do no parsers measure time between ability activation to show someone's uptime.

 

First answer: no. My code does a time average, not a simulation. At some point I may write a simulator, or work on one that a guildmate started, but at this point I cannot add periods of downtime, only total overall downtime, and even that would be a lot of work.

 

As for the other part of your question, as a raw, time averaged stat, there is no specific amount of downtime that causes Alacrity to no longer benefit you. You can think of Alacrity as simply having more total time in a fight because you move faster than everyone else. So when there's downtime, as long as you're not creating extra downtime yourself, you will have the same percentage uptime on bosses. And during that same amount of percentage uptime on bosses, you have the "extra time" granted to you by your alacrity. As for cooldowns finishing, yes, you lose a little of the benefit of Alacrity when cooldowns finish and you can't be on the boss, but that is vastly overshadowed by the fact that you already aren't dealing damage to the boss.

 

As for specific instances, there are far too many variables to draw a general conclusion. Is your downtime at specified, regular intervals? What's your rate of downtime starting, and how long are those periods of downtime? Different amounts of alacrity benefit or are harmed by different periods of uptime and downtime, to the point where you can shift your periods by a single second to watch a certain level of alacrity plummet/skyrocket in terms of DPS, and with just a little bit less/more alacrity, see no difference at all. There are just too many variables to draw a conclusion here.

[Sarafain]

As for the other part of your question, as a raw, time averaged stat, there is no specific amount of downtime that causes Alacrity to no longer benefit you. You can think of Alacrity as simply having more total time in a fight because you move faster than everyone else. So when there's downtime, as long as you're not creating extra downtime yourself, you will have the same percentage uptime on bosses. And during that same amount of percentage uptime on bosses, you have the "extra time" granted to you by your alacrity. As for cooldowns finishing, yes, you lose a little of the benefit of Alacrity when cooldowns finish and you can't be on the boss, but that is vastly overshadowed by the fact that you already aren't dealing damage to the boss.

 

This extra hits/time granted from alacrity are offset by the greater damage done from having higher surge. Downtime will mean you have less attacks and they're now doing less damage. More hits vs. harder hits. In your calculation did you include the extra 4% surge damage on the crit's from Recklessness and the 6 piece set? Sorry if this was covered, I skimmed the thread but didn't see mention of it.

 

I find it hard to justify using 1 or more enhancements on bosses where it's tough to get 35 APM. My point is there's a point where, when mechanics don't allow for high DPS uptime, surge becomes better. This is especially true of melee in the current tier.

 

With all the variables in boss fight mechanics and RNG of proc's I think the difference in alacrity over surge is almost unnoticable.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Sarafain

[Aelanis]

This extra hits/time granted from alacrity are offset by the greater damage done from having higher surge. Downtime will mean you have less attacks and they're now doing less damage. More hits vs. harder hits. In your calculation did you include the extra 4% surge damage on the crit's from Recklessness and the 6 piece set? Sorry if this was covered, I skimmed the thread but didn't see mention of it.

 

I find it hard to justify using 1 or more enhancements on bosses where it's tough to get 35 APM. My point is there's a point where, when mechanics don't allow for high DPS uptime, surge becomes better. This is especially true of melee in the current tier.

 

With all the variables in boss fight mechanics and RNG of proc's I think the difference in alacrity over surge is almost unnoticable.

 

A couple things here: You're assuming that someone with Alacrity has more downtime than someone without it under identical circumstances. Which is wrong.

 

So let's take 2 otherwise identical characters, except for that one has 4 Surge Enhancements (A) and the other a 2/2 Surge/Alacrity split (B). In a 30 second uptime window, character A gets 20 hits, while character B gets 20.617 hits, which equates to 21. That's 5% more hits at the cost of 7.45% Surge, or a 5% increase in number of hits to a 10.3% weaker crits (but 7.3% less on high Surge moves), so you'd need a total critical rate of 48.48% (or 68.61%) in order to make it an even trade. Any lower tips the scale in favor of Alacrity, and higher in favor of Surge. The really cool thing about a character with only instant abilities, as opposed to casts or channels, is that as long as you go just a little beyond the next global, you've still gotten an extra hit in, which actually amplifies the effect of Alacrity. Of course, that works against it at certain intervals, but most periods of uptime are set for even second intervals, and even then, it's usually a pretty high number of seconds (60+) and periods of downtime are usually pretty small (<10 seconds).

 

And yes, I accounted for higher crit rates on certain moves based on set bonus and Recklessness. It's actually in the OP, if you feel like reading through C++ code.

[Sarafain]

Your example is skewed. If you are rounding up the attacks you need to round up the time needed to complete the attack ( another ~ .5-6 seconds). Roughly 48-49 seconds *of uptime is the time it takes for alacrity to gained a full GCD. This lowers the amount of Crit Rating needed for the Surge build. Also, if the downtime happens during this 48-49 window the extra hit from alacrity is lost as you can't have half an attack. This won't happen on a dummy parse, but it will happen during boss fights.

 

I'm using napkin math so my numbers won't be completely accurate.

 

Edit*

Edited May 26, 2015 by Sarafain

[Aelanis]

Your example is skewed. If you are rounding up the attacks you need to round up the time needed to complete the attack ( another ~ .5-6 seconds). Roughly 48-49 seconds is the time it takes for alacrity to gained a full GCD. This lowers the amount of Crit Rating needed for the Surge build. Also, if the downtime happens during this 48-49 window the extra hit from alacrity is lost as you can't have half an attack. This won't happen on a dummy parse, but it will happen during boss fights.

 

I'm using napkin math so my numbers won't be completely accurate.

 

Except that that's not how instant attacks work. Most Assassin attacks hit nearly immediately after ability activation. If you were looking at 3, maybe 4 globals of uptime, yes, I'd say they don't get the extra attack, but that's unrealistic. We're not playing a ranged class where the abilities have a travel time, except for Ball Lightning, since Discharge hits instantly and is the only other move in the regular rotation with range. That extra hit isn't lost just because you haven't had your full global. In fact, I can't count the number of times I've fit an extra move in on Blaster because I had just enough Alacrity to get it to work, before his shield comes up at Master's arrival.

 

While boss abilities usually have discreet numbers for their cooldowns, our attacks very much don't follow that same standard. Open up any parser, and engage in combat with an enemy with ~4000 health. Hit them with Saber Strike, and then hit them with any move that would kill them. Your combat doesn't last 3 seconds: it lasts a little over 1.5 seconds, because that's when your ability actually hits. Because of that, discreet timers on uptime phases on bosses, especially in multiples of 3, actually heavily favor Alacrity as a DPS stat, so long as you're using instant abilities.

[Rowdieranger]

My problem with alacrity is it doesn't lower the CD of blackout and force cloak which messes with your force regen. In the 40 or so parses I did with full alac augs and two revanite alac enhancements I parsed on average 200 lower than with mainstat.

[Aelanis]

My problem with alacrity is it doesn't lower the CD of blackout and force cloak which messes with your force regen. In the 40 or so parses I did with full alac augs and two revanite alac enhancements I parsed on average 200 lower than with mainstat.

 

So here's the thing. Alacrity takes a LONG time to affect you like that. Let's look at Force Regen for Deception.

 

From Tenebras' top Deception parse (from a while ago), converted to using the 6 piece bonus (trade 1 VS for a SS, 1 more VS for a Discharge), and we come to a total spending rate of 10.58881 Force Per Second (FPS), pre Alacrity. With no Alacrity, he recovers 8 ever second baseline, plus another 45 every 102 seconds from Blackout's immediate refund, and another 50% of his base recovery for 24 of those 102 seconds, worth 96 Force. He will also recover an extra 9 Force every 12 seconds thanks to Saber Conduit, which defaults to every other Ball Lightning's cooldown, due to its 6 second cooldown, for 76.5 extra Force every 102 seconds. All told, that's 217.5 Force in 102 seconds, or another 2.13235 FPS, for a total of 10.13235 FPS recovered. Since his rotation is Force negative, he, overall, spends 0.45645 FPS, which means he can be in a fight for 219.08 seconds before he runs out of Force. For those playing at home and looking at this parse, it lasted 206.756 seconds, which means he pushed his Force about as hard as he could.

 

Now, the vast majority of his Force recovery per second does benefit from Alacrity. Sure, Dark Embrace doesn't benefit fully from it, due to the lack of cooldown reduction on Cloak/Blackout, and Blackout's initial restoration doesn't benefit at all, but Saber Conduit does. Factoring all of this in, at 2 pieces of Revanite level Alacrity, he would have run out of Force on his very last hit. Now, to show you how relatively small an effect that is, I swapped one more Voltaic Slash in instead of a Saber Strike, and had he done that parse, even at 0 Alacrity, he would have run out of Force 32 seconds prior to killing the target. That's about 4 times the result of adding 2 pieces of Revanite level Alacrity. The effect that Alacrity truly has on Deception's Force Regeneration is not quite as large as people seem to think it is.

[Sarafain]

Except that that's not how instant attacks work. Most Assassin attacks hit nearly immediately after ability activation. If you were looking at 3, maybe 4 globals of uptime, yes, I'd say they don't get the extra attack, but that's unrealistic. We're not playing a ranged class where the abilities have a travel time, except for Ball Lightning, since Discharge hits instantly and is the only other move in the regular rotation with range. That extra hit isn't lost just because you haven't had your full global. In fact, I can't count the number of times I've fit an extra move in on Blaster because I had just enough Alacrity to get it to work, before his shield comes up at Master's arrival.

 

The same arguement can be made against Alacrity if you use 30.5 seconds; the Surge build will complete it's 21 hits while Alacrity is still on it's GCD from it's 21. The Alacrity hit and Surge hit will leap frog each other until enough time has passed that Alacrity has gained a full GCD. Until that time has passed all alacrity does is get off the attack sooner.

 

You also need the full amount of time it takes for alacrity to get to that point on the target. It's a crap shoot on getting the extra attack, the more time on target the more likely the extra hit, the less time the lower the chance.

[Aelanis]

The same arguement can be made against Alacrity if you use 30.5 seconds; the Surge build will complete it's 21 hits while Alacrity is still on it's GCD from it's 21. The Alacrity hit and Surge hit will leap frog each other until enough time has passed that Alacrity has gained a full GCD. Until that time has passed all alacrity does is get off the attack sooner.

 

You also need the full amount of time it takes for alacrity to get to that point on the target. It's a crap shoot on getting the extra attack, the more time on target the more likely the extra hit, the less time the lower the chance.

 

How many bosses have cooldowns that aren't integers, though? That's what I'm getting at. Current content design is such that every boss ability is on an integer cooldown. On top of this, there's limited downtime in these operations, Underlurker, Master/Blaster, and Ruugar being the only real culprits. On Ruugar, we're talking sub-6-second downtime periods, which barely count, and you're talking 10 of every 45 seconds on the lurker. Except for pushing Master into the burn phase, there are no instances where you have less than 10 seconds of uptime, and so you're going to see Alacrity taking effect. In short, I'm going to paraphrase myself with a small catch: there's no situation where Alacrity loses it's benefit in any relevant tier of content.