01-30-2007, 10:27 PM
Quote:I'm not in a mathy mood. I'm fairly over this. As I go, I'll leave you a couple of tweaks to think about.
Arbitrarily cutting it off at 5 minutes is not the way to go. To figure out the cycles best, do DPS for one whole cycle (full mana -> full mana). From what I can tell of your chicken scratch, it looks like your mages start at full, cast to empty, fill up, then start casting again when the mob dies. However your talented mage gets off two extra fireballs during the second casting phase. This means he ends the fight with significantly less mana then the untalented mage. At some point around 6min, he is going to run out of mana, while the untalented mage gets off two more casts. If the mob dies during that time, the untalented mage will have roughly triple the gap in damage you are giving him credit for. Of course thats a big if... so DPS over a full cycle is the only fair way to calculate it.
And this also assumes that 5 min is a "long" fight. I'd call it average. KT, Saph, 4H, C'thun, Twin Emps, Nef, and Ony are all way longer then that (at least the first time you kill them).
There's also this: I've got a fire mage, and I'm going to take the shorter casting talent for soloing/grinding/5-manning, just *for* the shorter cast time. Now, if you're *strictly* raid-focused and *nothing else*, you might want to do all the math above.
--Mav