Maximum scoundrel dps analysed

For scoundrel I feel like I will fall in alot of repeat of my video. So I will link the video first and then will follow up with a short version of everything. I will also discuss new insights not showing in the video like the used tilesets. Here is the vid:

So what was the scoundrel dps chart looking like again? Like this:

Talents
Lvl 5: Slow Burn
Lvl 10: Quick Draw
Lvl 15: On the Line,
Lvl 20: Break Shot
Lvl 30: True Gambler

Ring affixes
Same as all classes +35 crit chance both rings and Empowered affix + Elite Hunter affix.

Armour affixes
Just like the Mage it uses projectile damage and crit damage. For scoundrel crit damage is even more important then projectile damage. This is because the scoundrel with True Gambler talent will have an insane crit chance of 81.3%. 81.3% of your damage will make use of increased crit damage :scream:. Crit chance has no chance and is thus not the choice you want to go for.

Weapon affixes
Because the scoundrel uses the poison card alot in the rotation it will steal the Charged Strikes affix alot. Also because Scoundrel crits so much Charged Strikes is also rendered almost useless by default.

Bleed on the other hand is the friend of Scoundrel. This is because of the high crit chance individual bleed DoT ticks do even more damage. Bleed is 100% the number 1 affix for scoundrel. (yes bleed DoT’s also get influenced by the crit chance of the class)

I would choose as second best affix Iceheart for Scoundrel for the sweat 5% boost. But I found that this is too optimistic because the Scoundrel has no control over something being frosted (except for the rare rare frost card). So adding human reality to it I removed about -2% from the 5% boost in the calculation. Although completely guessed, it seems fair to not act like 5% is expected every fight. Maybe it is way worse than -2%. :man_shrugging:

The rotation
The rotation is as in the video + added the super:
image
On the first row you see again:

  • X = start boosts of class
  • f = first charged shot taking no time (also being a rank V curve but not getting the rank V boost itself)
  • B = a fast bullet. 0.22 seconds between fast bullet shots
  • C = Charged shot 1.71 seconds.
  • The Double ‘C’ is used to indicate that the first charged shot is a rank V Curve. And the second is just a normal rank V. So rank V is up the whole fight.
  • Until we reach the super which will be ‘S’ as charged shot and ‘s’ as fast bullet. But then with the 1.145x dps boost of Scoundrel super.

The second line of the rotation is a parallel line doing its own actions. This action is grabbing a card with ‘D’ every 4.55 seconds. (added human thinking time of 0.3 seconds from 4.25 to 4.55). The card is being used on the charged shot itself, coupling the first line of actions with the second line of grabbing cards.

This rotation keeps:

  • Chamber in middle to always regen bullets
  • shoots on shortest cooldown
  • adds possibility for creating tilesets from the timings
  • Makes sure card actions are always done right on the moment of the charged shot, so the flow of the rotation stays up.

Tilesets
So for tilesets you might notice:

This is the best I could come up with with this rotation. I tried different things of manipulating time with the rotation to get better tilesets. But this ended up in getting a so much more horrible rotation that the tilesets were not worth it.

The tiles used are:

  • A = Poison hit enemy
  • 2 = 2 hits per second
  • 3 = 3 hits per second
  • 6 = between 1 and 1.99 seconds delay between hits
  • F = burning a card

The combinations of tilesets are based on another program I used to puzzle for me what were the best tilesets and filled them in into this program until I had the highest possible dps boost from the tilesets. Sadly it is still only a weak 10.2% total dps boost.

Opinion
So again if the only thing that is changing is the numbers than my initial recommendation was something like a 21% dps boost. BUT thinking more about it the current community does not have the skill to justify only a 21% boost. Something more drastic like a 35% boost is needed to make up for the difficulty of the class. One thing that scoundrel has as downside in the theoretical dps calculation is that every bullet is expected to be 0.22 seconds in time and 1.71 for charges. But in practice no matter how hard you try, sometimes a bullet jumps with a timeframe of 0.4 or a charged shot also gets delayed shot (trigger pul gets locked). Losing time and thus dps. Shaman and ranger have the same problem to an extend. Don’t forget that scoundrel has problems keeping up good dps in multi target fights (yes even with poison spreading, because of the re-curve)

Which brings me to changes I would have loved to see for scoundrel that aren’t direct number balancing. If the rotation is done right, then only one thing is missing which is a big factor of the dps. Which is feedback from shooting the charged shot in time. I would recommend to add a vibration on the millisecond the gun is done charging just like the ranger to give feedback on the player shooting their arrow barely in the 0.8 second time. This would help focus on the dps. Also the glow is always too late for the exact 1.7 second charged shot. Don’t forget that humans processing time on vision is longer than touch and hearing. “The average reaction time for humans is 0.25 seconds to a visual stimulus, 0.17 for an audio stimulus, and 0.15 seconds for a touch stimulus.” This might be the most important addition for class skill fixing. At least in my opinion. It is still something I personally struggle with nailing down. To be honest the only problem left for me fully mastering the class.

Another really small help would be: grabbing a new card should start regenerate when the next card is already in the hand. This would be more of a quality of class flow improvement than a dps increase.

And lastly of-course the tilesets of the scoundrel are just frustrating to no end. I heard somewhere throwing 500k dram to the community and keeping a dev dragon hostage is not enough to solve this problem :upside_down_face:. I would love to see some more options of triggering tilesets for Scoundrel. Things like grabbing a card triggering a tile already instead on only burning it would go a long way in helping out the class tileset problem. What exactly need to be done to fix the tilesets would require a bit of research and fiddling with parameters though. And not knowing if any suggestion would ever get implemented I don’t see the need to prove what would fix it until I know it would be considered at all.

Link to main post: Max dps of all 4 classes

10 Likes

I actually wonder if allowing 2 of the same tiles in one set would not fix a hell lot of problems (not only scoundrel, also of other classe’s rotations which proc same tiles in a row often).

That would not only make tilesets easier, it would make them too easy. It would bring a new meaning to Fireball mage. So I don’t see this as a good plan. I rather want to see just a small tweak and addition to the scoundrel and ranger tile options. I think that would solve most of the problem already.

4 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 20 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.