No need to re-apply sta debuffs during a fight - hmmmmmmm

[culmore17]

<div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div>Question: Does a mystic need to keep the sta debuffs Eidolon and Wail of the Ancients on a mob til it dies to get the beneift of the reduction in hps?EXPERIMENT1) find a bunch of easy grey mobs, I used camens in Sinking Sands, and I work out how much damage I need to do to kill them, without my 2 sta debuffs. Lets call that damge X. I just counted the number of dots and nukes I cast to kill one.2) Fight the same level of mob again and this time initally cast the 2 sta debuffs and kill the mob before the sta debuffs expire, lets call this amount of damage Y.  X was more than Y as you would expect, by a significant amount (a full 2 nukes more.)3) Fight the same level mob again and initially cast the 2 sta debuffs. Take the mob down to about 50% health or less and then wait til the sta debuffs expire. Then finish the mob off. Again calculate the damage. For me the damage was again Y. This experiment show that there is no need to keep the mystic sta debuffs on the mob til it dies.  QUESTIONS1) Does anyone hava  counter proof/ experiment2) Does it hold for epic mobs - i assume yes. I ask this question as folks in game insist that u need to keep the sta debuff on the mob til it is dead or it "heals" when the sta debuff expires. They say the mechanics changed about 1 year ago, but this experiment implies that you do not need to reapply the sta debuff once the mobs health has droped by a significant amount. <div></div><p>Message Edited by culmore170a on <span class="date_text">11-06-2006</span> <span class="time_text">03:34 AM</span></p><p>Message Edited by culmore170a on <span class="date_text">11-06-2006</span> <span class="time_text">03:35 AM</span></p><p>Message Edited by culmore170a on <span class="date_text">11-06-2006</span> <span class="time_text">03:35 AM</span></p><p>Message Edited by culmore170a on <span class=date_text>11-06-2006</span> <span class=time_text>03:37 AM</span>

[Banditman]

The mobs you are playing with are too low level, with too few HP.When you start dealing with mobs who have 2 million HP, the effects of keeping a STA debuff active become a lot more obvious.<div></div>

[culmore17]

<div></div>Banditman<a target="_blank" href="../view_profile?user.id=34715"><span></span></a>1) the results of "my experiment" seem obvious. Where do you see the flaw?2)  Can you supply something more than just an opinon to backup your statement.Why should a mob with 2 million hps behave differently than a mob with a few thousand hps. With a grey con mob I can easily test things I cannot exactly do the same with Taranix.<div></div>

[Xaile]

<DIV>There is a flaw in the expiriment, though.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Our two nukes and our ice-based dot have variable damage, so simply counting the number of spells needed to kill it does not give an accurate example of what it takes to kill the mob.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Another confounding factor, along the same lines, is the fact that the Wail of the Ancients spells also do a decrease to poison/disease/fire/ice mitigations. This will mean your variable damage spells will be hitting even harder, which affects the number of spells you need to cast.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>A more accurate way to determine what it takes to kill it is to use a parser to find out the total damage you dealt that fight (that being the total hp of the mob). Make sure you have no proc-when-hit damage spells, no pet attacking, no meleeing. Try to make sure it's the same level both times, etc, to remove any confounding variables.</DIV>

[thedu]

Actually it's kind of a moot issue right now.  It's something I've always been meaning to get back to, but with the stat changes coming up, it's probably best to wait till after expansion to run your tests.  There was a big running thread on an other forum regarding this, and at the moment I can't find it;<div></div>

[Xaile]

<BR> <BLOCKQUOTE> <HR> thedump wrote:<BR>Actually it's kind of a moot issue right now.  It's something I've always been meaning to get back to, but with the stat changes coming up, it's probably best to wait till after expansion to run your tests.  There was a big running thread on an other forum regarding this, and at the moment I can't find it;<BR> <BR> <HR> </BLOCKQUOTE> <P><BR>That is a really good point about the topic being a moot point. Words of wisdom...if only I read them before I performed an incredibly short expiriment.</P> <P>However, as an example of a slightly more accurate experiment, as well as for posterity, if nothing else, I'm going to post my results.</P> <P>These fights were done with casting nothing but Wrath of the Grey and Eidolon, and an occasional healing spell. At my spell qualities, intelligence, and level, Wrath of the Grey deals 268-328 cold damage, and Eidolon reduces 75 points of both Stamina and Strength.</P> <P>I performed nine fights total. Three fights were with Eidolon on during the entire fight, three of them were with Eidolon on until it was at 60%, and the last three were without any Eidolon.</P> <P>These fights were all against the Scaleborn Warriors outside of Sanctum of Scaleborn. These are solo mobs, with one arrow up, and I killed only ones that were level 58.</P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr> <P>With Eidolon-----------Eidolon to 60%----------Without Eidolon</P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P>1)       9936 damage             10526 damage            10694 damage</P> <P>2)       10061 damage           10515 damage            10892 damage</P> <P>3)       9991 damage             10623 damage            10728 damage</P> <P>Draw from that what conclusions you want, but to me, the evidence suggests that Eidolon for the entire duration makes a significant difference over Eidolon for part of the duration.</P> <P>Of course, that said, there is always room for error, and there are a lot of confounding factors in my experiment. A few are as follows:</P> <P>a) The mobs have varying HP, so even with an otherwise identical fight, I'll get different HP results.</P> <P>b) Wrath of the Grey has varying damage. I do not know what happens with the parser results if it has 5 hit points left and I nuke it for 300 points of damage.</P> <P>c) It's hard to get the mob to exactly 60% health, and because I was only hitting in chunks of 250-350, sometimes I had to settle for 59-61%.</P> <P>d) Like Banditman said, results on a small scale are hard to see. Both in HP amount and number of trials, I have really small data to work with. But since I'm not capable of soloing things with millions of HP, nor do I have the patience (read: I'm too lazy) to kill more things, this is what I'm working with.</P> <P>Of course there are other variables, but I hope this information is useful to have up, at least as an example of a slightly more accurate expiriment. =)</P> <P>(Edited because I'm nit-picky about my typing.)</P><p>Message Edited by Xaile on <span class=date_text>11-06-2006</span> <span class=time_text>10:48 AM</span>

[Terq]

<DIV>Like others said, the benefit of recasting your stamina buffs become more pronounced when you start dealing with mobs that have lots more HPs.  In a typical group scenario, things will likely die before you finish casting the debuff.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>The other thing to remember, is that both our Stamina debuffs also debuff other things.  That elemental debuff is great for helping with caster DPS, and that Str debuff is nice to take a little edge off some of the incoming damage.  </DIV>

[wushupork]

<P>The way I understand it, a mob just like a player has a standard HP pool which is augmented with Stamina, at a certain conversaion. Upon using a stamina debuff it will drop their max HP and will adjust their current HP to be reflective of the same percentage. Upon termination of the debuff, the reverse will happen, effectively "healing" the mob in a total HP remaining standpoint, however their HP% will be the same.</P> <P>Lemme pull out some purely hypothetical numbers just for illustration:</P> <P>Mob base HP= 1000, Mob Stamina= 20, Stamina to HP converstion (x5)= 100, Total Mob MAX HP pool=1100</P> <P>Stamina debuffed 5, dropping acutal/max hp to 1075 on pull.</P> <P>Mob hit for 50, dropping hp to 1025(95%).</P> <P>Debuff wears off raising max hp to 1100 again, acutal hp remains at 95%, so mob has 1045 HP left.</P> <P>Effectively making the hit for 50 actually do 55 damage.</P> <P>If the mob is never debuffed again, it effectively did 5hp of dmg to the mob out of 1100.</P> <P>If the mob is debuffed entire duration then it effectively did 0hp of dmg to the mob out of 1075.</P> <P> </P> <P>So either do it for the whole deal or don't bother at all (raid vs group). And as Banditman said on a raid mob everything is scaled to alot higher proportions.. that stamina x 5 would be more like x 100 or whatever.</P> <P>Am I totally out in left field? <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></P>

[Terq]

<P>That is my understanding of things as well.  </P> <P>Now scale that up by a factor of 1000, and you see that the more HP a mob has, the bigger benfit you get from recasting your Sta debuffs.  </P>

[Eepop]

If you don't like math, skip this post: Theres a bunch of crazy scaling rules for when a stamina  debuff hits and when it wears off, but the effect of a stamina debuff is basicly this: Non-Debuffed Max HP __________________      X   ( Damage done while debuffed) = Effective Damage done Debuffed Max HP If you don't debuff at all, you need to do ( Non-Debuffed Max HP) of damage.  If you keep the debuff(s) up the whole time, you only need to do ( Debuffed Max HP ) of damage.  If you keep the debuff(s) up some of the time, you need to do somewhere in between the two. In english, stamina debuffs effectively scale up the amount of damage done to the target from behind the scenes.  This damage increase will not come out on parses because of when the scaling is done and the fact that no indication of the scaling is sent to logs. <div></div>

[culmore17]

Eepop you are the man!!!! I was doing some more tests with more of those camens in sinking sands and a parser (as someone here suggested) and  was coming round to something like the conclusion you mention. So thanks very much you have saved me a whole lot of work tomorrow!!!! But one more questions on a grey Camen the 2 mystic sta debuffs  make a considerable % difference to the mobs health say 25%. How much sta does an uber boss mob have? And what kind of percentage difference do our debuff make on it. A boss can have I dunno  1 or 2 or more million hit points but how much sta does it have?<div></div>

[Eepop]

I don't really know, as theres alot of other variables in the "max hp" calculation of the parser that become alot more pronounced on epic fights. Mob Regen and the completely unpredictable effect that the timing of debuffs/attacks can make really prevent accurate measures of mob max hp except on a very very large sample size. Having a properly timed dispatch(brigand) then decapitate(assassin) can  do a good bit to skew the result.  Now consider how many different synergistic reactions like that are going on with 24  people in a raid. Finding the results of just one debuff (sta) is very hard, as you'd have to get the rest somewhat constant, which is impossible except by not using any of them...and go ahead and win some raid encounters not using  any of that stuff...probably not going to happen. <div></div>

[culmore17]

Thanks again Eepop for your answer, great to get advice from someone who does not jump to conclusions. Lets say the mob has 1million hps if its sta is 100,000 then sta debuffing will make little difference, if on the other hand its sta is 1,000 then Mystic sta debuffing would make a considerable difference. Is there any evidence the as to whether or not it is worthwhile? <div></div>

[Thatdumbg]

Considering things before the change, between my two debuffs (A total of 200 stamina or so), I could manipulate an epic bosses health by anywhere from 1 to 3 or even 4 percent. Considering the mobs' health shouldn't have changed when they change stamina debuffs, that should be indicitave.On Vox in tier 6, ripping only about 150ish stamina and letting it come back up, I could sometimes manipulate it up to as much as 5 percent.Obviously the only way to get definitive numbers would be to not use stamina debuffs at all one week, and to just use yours the next week... but I'm entirely too lazy to do it (I've thought about it many times now, and always said "why bother"... i know its effecting them).<div></div>

[Banditman]

Right after the last change to STA debuffs, I did some testing in raid situations.  I don't have those numbers handy, but the general result of the whole thing was that I could effectively do more "damage" to the mob with STA debuffs than another player was doing with raw, measureable "DPS".<div></div>

[Eepop]

The thing you are missing Cul, is that even if the stamina debuff only lowered the max hp of the mob by 0.5%, that would be a 12ish % increase in the raid's effective DPS during the time its up.  Even if you conclude that the majority of the DPS is coming from half the raid, its still better than a 5% increase. I can't speak for anyone else, but I will take a 5% raid DPS increase every day of the week. As for the general rule of thumb I use, Ward/Heal till stable ( I am not there to cap off the tank, I am there to keep him stable) then DPS/slow debuffs > Stamina debuffs >>>>>> Nukes That ignores some of the intracacies of combat (like knowing when you need to use the Ancients debuff first so the DPS/slows will stick.) but its generally the rules I follow. <div></div>