Stacking up poison efficiently

joonabug42

My main uses Infernal Ranged and I've been wondering what the best way to get the initial 5 stacks of poison would be.

*So far the three methods I've tried are, fully charging Infernal Blast 5 times to get all the stacks up before starting my rotation ((Pre-emptive strike) tap blast > full charge defile, repeat).

*Just starting the rotation and letting the stacks build up as they will.

*Starting with a modified rotation of weaving full charges of Infernal Blast and Defile until I get the full five stacks then going back to the normal tap > full charge deal.

Any thoughts on this?

pantagruel01

It probably doesn't matter very much, but you can always fire up a parser and test.

spinnytop

If it's a short fight then poison stacks don't really matter so just do your rotation to blast out as much damage in that short time as possible. On long fights any of the methods you mentioned will largely produce the same results since the portion of the fight you spend building stacks is going to be very tiny compared to the entire fight. Since you're going the Pre-Emptive Strike route it's unlikely your stacks will ever fall off, so you don't really need to worry too much about the stacking method.​​

joonabug42

Thanks for the replies! I guess I'll just go with what feels correct for the fight. ^_^

pantagruel01

So, now I'm a bit curious. The character I am using is incomplete, so your numbers will vary. Assume we have infernal blast r3 and defile r3. My tooltips on this character are:
Infernal Blast: 0.5-2s, 306-1,202 damage, 25-100% chance to poison
Defile: 0.67-2.5s, 673-2387 damage, 13-50% chance to poison.
Deadly Poison: 31 damage per second

Your rotation should work out to 306+(2387*1.1) = 2931 damage/3s or 977 dps, and should apply an average of 0.75 stacks poison, reaching full stacks in 20s. In 20s, total damage should be 19,540 plus an average of 40 poison tics for 1,240, total 20,780.
Spamming charged infernal blast will hit 5 stacks in 10s while doing 6,010 damage; 10s of rotation adds another 9,770 for total direct damage of 15,780. However, we get 70 poison tics for 2,170; final damage 17,950.

Not included in this analysis:

• Critical hits. Crits will generally make your direct damage more valuable relative to poison damage.
• Stack building. Building form stacks will make late damage more valuable than early damage, and the infernal blast method puts its low damage attacks at the start.
• Defense reduction from pestilence, if used. That makes building stacks faster a bit more valuable.
• Energy management. With the gear I had on my test alt, Infernal blast spam is 16 energy per second, the rotation is 30, so it's possible you can handle the infernal blast costs but not the defile.

Assuming energy management is not a problem, using your regular rotation is almost certainly better.

joonabug42

Wow, thanks for all of this Pentagruel! Not focusing on poison stacking will definitely help with reducing my anxiety about dpsing. I'll just go ham right from the start then!

spinnytop

joonabug42 wrote: »

I'll just go ham right from the start then!

This thread ended well. Good job Panta s( u w u )z​​