DPS Excel calculator for Sorcerer / Sage

[Kaedis]

Quote:In the Rotation sheet it appears that Lightning Barrage'd Force Lightnings are being cast every 10 seconds whenever Lightning Barrage is taken and Affliction is up, which I believe is unreasonable. My understanding of the skill was that it had a 10 second cool down then needed an Affliction tick to crit to get the buff. Is that understanding incorrect? I remember reading a post from Kor where he roughed out some math around that phenomenon but now I can't find it.

That's correct. Average time between procs = 9 + 3 / CritChance. Example, at 30% crit chance, average time between procs is 9 + 3/.3 = 19 seconds.

Reasoning behind the equation: the equation for average time between procs is TimeBetweenAttacks/ProcChance. An ICD simply adds a period of time in which that's not possible, so the equation for average time between ICD effects is ICD + TimeBetweenAttacks/ProcChance. Even though ICD is 10, it effectively is 9 (the 9 second tick is the last ineligible tick). At 100% crit, this would give 9 + 3/1 = 12 second, which is exactly how often it would proc at 100% proc chance per tick outside of the ICD.

Incidentally, this means that the dps benefit of Lightning Barrage, assuming you use every proc, is equal to (ForceLightingDamage*0.5)/(9 + 3 / CritChance), or ForceLightingDamage/(9 + 3 / CritChance) if you use the double-barrage bug every time. This is because a Barrage FL deals the full damage of FL in half the time, effectively dealing half of the damage of the channel "extra" during that time. If you double-barrage, you've cast two FLs in the span of 1, gaining an every FL's worth of damage per proc.

To put it another way, since a Barrage'd FL takes the place of a normal FL, you basically get the difference in DPCT for the duration. For a single Barrage, that's double the DPCT for half the time, minus the DPCT of FL, meaning you gain the DPCT of FL times half it's normal duration, or half the damage of a full FL. Double-barrages gain twice this value.