DPS simulations - spreadsheet

Hi all!

So i’ve been working on this spreadsheet for over a year now, and have been pushing back the release of this resource more and more. At the beginning, it was a project mainly designed as a resource for our cabal. Now, it’s been a while since i’m not working on this as i’ve lost interest, more or less, so i’ve figured i might as well share it now with anyone who’d want to play with it.

This spreadsheet is intended to answer a lot of basic yet difficult questions such as “what’s the best head talisman for build X?” or “what are the best agents for build Y?”, with little to no extra modeling required.

Each of the tabs models a DPS build. At this point, i’ve been only working on the meta DPS builds as i personally see no interest at all in creating simulators for non-meta weapons and/or weapons that have specialties which remain harder to model with a non-iterative approach. After all, the simulators have been created with a clear objective: min-maxing your DPS!

The spreadsheet also contains some miscellaneous stuff that i had some fun with, such as the average cooldown reduction comparisons between different combinations of Generic head signet cooldown reductions, specific signet’s reductions and/or Efficiency mk3 weapon affix.

Here is the spreadsheet:

To be able to play with the simulators, you’ll have to log into your existing gmail account, and then go as follows: File -> Create a copy.

At the moment, there are a lot of builds and build variations around hammer, rifle and chaos main weapons, as well as potentially the best OD AoE builds.

Have fun!

PS: credit goes to @DumbOx for the chaos spreadsheets. I’ve copied the whole weapon mechanic modeling from his own maths.

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Ifritian despoiler not pulling ahead of SPES offhand?
Than again I am to lazy to really crunch those numbers…

The Ifritian is ~ 60 DPS above the SPES for the maul/shotgun build. The shotgun can be selected in the dropdown menu. This is without considering SPES stacking between downtimes and between different encounters however.

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I dunno if it keeps up with the metas but one build I like is hammer/nothing with my Red Road, it lets the Shriven crit buffs line up with every enraged demo between CD uses. I don’t think Shriven’s enough of a buff to materially improve time it takes for Red Road to catch up to Maul (since it’s adding onto > 200% crit power) but it’s a nice consistent pattern.

The ‘nothing’ kinda has 1 free cd (so, Opening Shot or whatever) cause Hammer on its own has no 6th useful ability in single target dps.

I’ve compared Maul to Red Road. It turns out for 50% crit chance, Red Road is superior to Maul after 21s of fight for pure hammer builds (hammer / fists or hammer / Inverter), and after 60s for hammer / Voltaic Shunt (or MIRV) build. Basically, Maul is stronger the shorter the fights are, because its free enraged hit is a cooldown, which means it gets an extra proc at the beginning of a fight.

This still means the Red Road is a VERY good hammer. However, you should no matter what, pair it with Inverter and Crystallized Blaze. In the current meta, and since the Signet of Nemain has been introduced, Crystallized Blaze’s damage literally became cosmic (Nemain buffs the damage of Blaze).

I personally still prefer using Pneumatic Maul, because when you’re fully geared and play with other overpowered DPS and tanks, the content tends to get obliterated. The other reason is that the most important fights tend to have downtimes, which also favours Pneumatic Maul. Final reason for my Maul preference: the Maul / Voltaic Shunt is one of the best hammer builds out there, and it’s not that good with the hammer of the Red Road because of how much you actually use the offhand.

Yeah, if I ever get around to it I’ll do a Maul, probably of Alacrity to round out my options (Red Road has Efficiency cause I wanted to try that out IRL instead of just theory… helps me line up to OS while taking into account delay to hit 50 rage but not much else.)

I like MIRV fine as a second hand, only does work on big bosses though which is a silly condition.

Hi all!

I’d like to talk a bit about group buffs.

Opening Shot

As it stands, according to the simulations, for a maxed out KSR/Inverter build, Crystallized Blaze brings around 4k DPS out of 44k total (under exposed, passive tradeoff included). Enabling Opening Shot as a buff for this build brings on average around 1.7k extra DPS, which means that it is worth dropping Crystallized Blaze in favour of a shotgun with Opening Shot (for the best case of 4 DPS in the group being fully maxed KSR/Inverter, we’d have 1700 x 3 + 1200 = 6300 DPS brought by OS, 1200 here being the DPS gain of the person who uses OS - in exchange of a 4k DPS loss).

For hammer however, notably for a Maul / Inverter build, we’re also loosing around 4k DPS by abandoning Blaze in favour of shotgun + OS, so OS would be worth considering. In addition to that, on average, for any hammer build, OS brings at least 2.2k DPS, which could go really higher because of the fact that hammer has a stronger burst potential than a KSR build.

Finally, for Warped Visage DPS builds, dropping Blaze represents only around a 2.2k DPS loss due to not only 1 extra passive being freed (in this case, Butterfly Effect), but also 1 extra global every ~21s being done by chaos contributing a lot more than other weapons for the chaos DPS due to how the chaos specialty works. Warped Visage DPS builds are, therefore, the builds of choice to roll Opening Shot with.

Obviously, other factors exist:

  • OS should be carried by any non maxed out DPS.
  • OS should be carried by anyone who does not have a Signet of Nemain maxed out, since this is the biggest factor of the damage provided by Crystallized Blaze.
  • OS should be carried by anyone who isn’t experienced with proper Blaze placement.
  • OS should carried by anyone not playing the meta DPS builds (hammer or rifle).

I keep seeing Blazes being missplaced very often in any group content, resulting in a huge DPS loss. In this scenario, OS should be considered instead. The Blaze placement mistakes often come from a mix of lack of knowledge of given fight mechanics, lack of proactive gameplay and/or the simple ground targeting option being checked, which removes the ability to control precisely the Blaze placement.

A great example of Blaze placement would be Machine Tyrant. Depending on your group DPS, the fight goes as follows: at the beginning, 1 or 2 Crystallized Blazes on the boss which should be immobile for their duration, then 1 Blaze on the middle BEFORE the boss reaches the middle. After that, it’s a rotation of 1 Blaze on the boss, and 1 Blaze in the middle.
The boss should be moved to new Anima Wells between Blaze timings, and Blazes should be placed as soon as the boss is immobile and won’t be moved because of circles in the next ~10s.

If your group is unable to capitalize on Blaze timings on Machine Tyrant, then consider bringing OS instead, and even different offhands than Inverter or Shunt.

Glaciate

According to simulations, regardless of the build used, with a maxed out gear, Glaciate provides around 380 DPS per person (under exposed). For a typical KSR/Inverter build using Blizzard, we’d get a DPS loss of ~1800 DPS by slotting Ice Beam + Glaciate instead of Blizzard + Secondary Explosion (the rest of the passives are: Stability, Slow Burn, Heavy Payload, Crystallized Blaze). Ice Beam becomes worth slotting with at least 5 DPS fully taking advantage of the debuff for its entire 5s duration, so only in the context of a raid like a regional farming session.

I won’t consider Ice Beam viable for NY raid since the uptime on Glaciate and the cooldown usage of Ice Beam is likely not optimal at all and Ice Beam is a downgrade from the CC department, where Blizzard or High Explosive Grenade would be a smarter choice for Colossi / pods (for the latter, HEG is obviously the go-to elite).

Potency Enigma & The Redeemer

Quick summary: with a generous 10% uptime (it’s usually lower, even with the Long Term Chaos passive), for a maxed out gear and a regular chaos focus, the enigma brings on average 500 DPS, and around 700 with the Enigmatic Apparatus. The DPS brought by the enigma is worth it for a Warped Visage / Inverter chaos DPS build. Crystallized Blaze can be swapped for OS for a loss of ~2.2k DPS (one more passive and one more global every 21s used on chaos = more paradoxes generated).

The Redeemer brings around 900 DPS with the assumption of a reload every 7s of either Uranium Depleted shells or the Armor-Piercing shells (depending on the abilities and passives used, this is a more or less a realistic consideration). In the context of bufftanking, it is then better to roll Redeemer / Sanity’s Aphelion instead of going chaos primary.

Beatdown

Beatdown is the strongest debuff in the game for hammer and rifle main builds where the energy value is the highest - it is essentially a raid-wide cobra ring debuff for 6s, which grants on average an extra 4.5 energy.

I’d advise to use Blindside interrupt with Beatdown passive for the following dungeon bosses (at least): Pol1, Pol6, HE6, HR4, HR5, DW1. It is obviously possible to use it on even more bosses, but the listed ones are those where i see tanks going for Evulsion or an interrupt gadget the most often. The idea is the following: as a tank, as soon as you take Evulsion for a given encounter, ask yourself if you can’t instead go for Blindside + Beatdown.

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That made me incredible sad…like OS was already a situational thing that just became more situtational for me (do to needing groupcontent and needing noone else to run it).
-.-

I’m not sure why you’re saying that. As a shotgun main, if you hold OS for rifle or hammer DDs in your group, you’re providing more value than what you’re giving up. My comparison was made strictly for a group of 5 fully geared and minmaxed players playing meta builds like KSR/Inverter or Maul/Inverter.

The problem is less one of numbers than one of coordination…for some reason people find it hilarious to slot it desppite both me getting it ready and saying so without saying it themself throwing away either my cast or their cast.
It left me with the theoretical dream of that if one enters the minmaxer group at least they would have some use for it but this number crunching leaves me with the feeling that even best case I am just a weight on the groups dps table no matter what I do.
Maybe it’S the frustration speaking…last shambala really gave my selfconfidence a jab I am still cooking over.

I feel like even if I put the time I have now into shotgun another time I still am more useless to someone coming in with a precooked build that had the decision to buy meta weapons and roll their face over the keyboard. I mean half my weapon is considered useless thanks to substaintanking, I don’T feel that much better than healers apart that I can theoretically do at least some dps that is doing something for the fight.

P.S.:Also OS is a pain to smoothly integrate into a mainhand rotation

Hum i just noticed that my build comparisons were off - dropping Blaze in favour of OS for both KSR and Maul builds is a personal DPS loss of 4-4.2k DPS, which is pretty far of 5.4k and 8k i’ve stated previously. This was because of the fact i did not intergrate the extra passive gained in the process for the considered builds, and the fact that for the KSR build, Blizzard was also accidentally dropped. One will obviously have to play with High Explosive Grenade in order to be able to bring OS. I’ve corrected my previous post according to these changes.

TLDR: it is worth slotting OS even for KSR mainhand builds.

Added a mention about the Beatdown debuff.

I mostly agree but I couldn’t make it work on Pol 6, too high frequency of him casting Cosmic Gaze outside melee range of the wall (he’ll do Cleaves up to like, 7-8m away from the tank without closing the gap, and casts Cosmic Gaze at any range without moving). Gadgets have a fast enough instant to stop him doing any knockbacks, Beatdown’s GCD based so even with zero reaction time it’s maybe 30% chance you cancel it that soon.

I’m not sure how the Cosmic Gaze can be “too frequent” - we get 2 (or even 1 cast) per fight there. If you’re playing with DDs that are so low that they parse lower damage than you as a tank, then yes, i guess you’d probably have different things to worry about to begin with.

About Cosmic Gaze pushing you back, you simply have to stand against the wall where you pull the Ur’Draug first, and after that, against a rock - easy peasy.

I think I get 3 per fight typically, one in initial burn, one after blue phase, one generally the first cast after Tsunami. It’s the second one that’s frequently in an awkward spot.

Ok so you did not mean that Beatdown is still on cooldown for the 2nd one after the blue phase, because that would not make any sense, right? I guess you mean it is awkward because of the new boss placement. You can always position yourself near a rock for that matter.

Yeah it’s just placement, not cooldowns.

Regarding buffs when would it make sense for a player to bring expose? If its not all ready being brought by Eruption from a hammer user of course. Say in the case of having 4 AR/ele DPS would it make any sense for the dps providing OS to also bring bombardment?

Exposed is the strongest debuff in the game, this is why i didn’t even bother talking about it. Bombardment can be brought by the same DD who brings OS indeed, you’ll need the Combat Reload passive for it though because Bombardment needs 6 shells. Going Ifritian Desploiler is a small bonus and should be considered, the shell type can be guaranteed to be Dragon’s Breath by reslotting the shotgun between fights. The “problem” is that in order to minimize the DPS loss of slotting Bombardment over other elites is that you’d need to have the shotgun elite signet. Bombardment’s passive, however, Cluster Bombs, is able to deal some insane damage to bosses with big hitboxes such as Ur’Draug - up to an extra 6.5 CP per elite usage, which is equal to ~0.3 CP/s - insane value for a passive.

An alternative and lazier solution is to slot Kill Blind on the offhand slot, but no OS possible this time around.

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As shotgun main I slot Bombardment only if noone else has it while it works on static big targets, it utterly fails on stuff that moves a lot like Machine tyrant. I didn’t have time to train u the Howling dog shotgun but that is an option that gives superior expose in that case as you can pump out enough blue shells to keep it up that way, which does cost you 0.2 CP/s if numbers are to believed from optimal rotation but opens up 1 passiv from mainhand full salvo builds and another active and passiv for bombardment builds which in itself have a hard to quantify value.