@Telekinesis: okay, let’s do the math.
Gotta start with some assumptions. We can examine these later if necessary:
1. You can manage to pop all four shatters with full illusions in a close enough amount of time to count them as a single action. This favors the shatter build.
2. Enemies on average take 2 actions every 6 seconds, when left to their own devices. I don’t know how accurate this is, but it feels right, and I’ve seen it floated around the forums in a few places. Based on SW, I think husks take less than that, wolves take more, and teragriffs take more or less depending, and thrashers definitely take less.
3. Weapon skills besides basic attacks are a wash. My bleed build can use scepter2/3 just as well as the shatter build can, and the shatter build can use chaos storm just as well, etc. Optimal skill rotations can mess with this assumption.
4. The bleed build only stacks up to 25. I know many can get more than that, but this is a nice number I can generally guarantee, as I can frankly keep this up with staff clones alone. Adding iDuelists will eventually change the math.
5. Assume 1900 condition damage.
At first, we’ll ignore durations, and just calculate based off max stacks for our propositions.
For yours, 8 stacks of confusion and 4 stacks of torment on CoF, then 4 and 4 for each of the others, that’s 20 stacks of confusion and 16 stacks of torment.
With the exception of Mind wrack, none of the shatters have a low enough cooldown to add any stacks over time, and with a bare 2 seconds to spare, Mind Wrack adds only 1/6 stack of torment per stack applied, which is at most 2/3 of a stack consistently.
So we’re up to 20 stacks of confusion and 16.67 stacks of torment.
For mine, as mentioned in assumptions, let’s just assume for a moment that I get 25 stacks of bleeds and no more, and no burning or anything else.
Bleeds are easy, it’s 136 damage per tick, for 3400 damage per tick total.
Confusion flat damage is 76.5 damage per tick. Torment untriggered is 101.4, Torment triggered is 202.8.
Confusion adds 168.25 per trigger.
So baseline damage per tick with no triggers = 20(76.5)+16.67(101.4) = 3220
With torment triggered but not confusion = 4910
With confusion triggered but not torment = 4342
With both confusion and torment triggered = 6032
So without triggers, flat 25 bleeds outperforms.
With triggers, shatters outperform.
Now let’s consider uptime, because that’s what sustained dps is all about.
The bleeds are 100% uptime, so it remains at 3400.
50% uptime for both confusion and torment triggered is 3015.
At what uptime does confusion/torment match bleed?
For untriggered, even 100% doesn’t match up.
For torment but not confusion, 69.25%
For confusion but not torment, 78.32%
For torment and confusion, 56.37%
So on a constantly moving enemy that makes at least 2 attacks every 6 seconds, you need to have a 56.37% uptime on your full condition load to match the sustained damage of 25 bleed stacks.
It’s not easy to keep an enemy moving all the time, and it’s well-known that confusion is weaker in PVE specifically because pve enemies don’t attack very fast at all, in general.
On many bosses, you’ll be lucky to get a single attack out of them within 6 seconds.
Any failure to get triggers on your torment and confusion shifts the required uptime down the scale toward the no triggers numbers. Fortunately, it’s unlikely that you’ll not get any triggers at all in most pve. Bosses like the Mangler and Troll in Vinewrath and Breach won’t trigger torment much at all, but they’ll get you some confusion triggers from time to time. I’m not sure if the Mangler spinning counts as one trigger or several, though. I’d guess just one, assuming it behaves like Daggerstorm.
So then we have to examine what kind of uptime you can keep on these shatters.
but also do not want to waste resources on something sub-par…. another intriguing on condition build is full set of ascended jewelery I have got as side product of LS….
…. so at time I choose war as main