Gaming, MMO

On DPET

Now that I’m getting more into WildStar, I started seeking more information about it, and I’ve found an annoyance with some of the class guides I’m seeing. I found a few that completely dismiss a number of skills that “don’t do enough damage”. Specifically DoT skills, like Annihilation, Devastator Probes and Ignite. These spells get ignored in favor of spells that cause big numbers, like Gamma Rays and Charged Shot. There are some problems with this approach, and I’ll be specifically focusing on Medic here. Spellslinger math gets weird because of their innate.

When I was playing an Affliction Warlock in World of Warcraft (this is back when Soul shards were items in your bag, and Siphon life was a spell that you could actually cast), I was introduced to the concept of Damage Per Execute Time (DPET), a metric used to determine if an ability is worth casting, or in what order to prioritize things in cases where multiple abilities come up at once. The basic idea is that you want to spend the most time casting the things that do the most damage, so you can use this metric to make that decision.

When looking at raw numbers, the Medic’s best skills in terms of DPET are Devastator Probes, Annihilation, Gamma Rays, Nullifier, and Quantum Cascade, in that order. Gamma Rays and Quantum Cascade have the additional consideration of their actuator cost, forcing you to (usually) use the very low DPET skill Discharge in order to continue to cast them, so this must be taken into consideration.

It’s not completely cut and dry, since AMPs and ability points can change this significantly. Also, because you have to decide which abilities you want to take, the total amount of damage an ability can do over a fight is also worth considering. I don’t have any great advice on how to set up a level 50 bar (except that it probably needs Paralytic Surge on it), but I’m just trying to fix the perception that the DoT skills are a “waste of a GCD”, when most of them do more damage than the medic’s premier single-target ability.

Fiesta Time


I managed to finish my playthrough of FF5 for the draft group (I was second to finish, behind Tam), but I’ve been a bit lazy about uploading the videos for it. This is just in time for the actual Fiesta, where my party is Knight/Berserker/White Mage/Berserker. Hopefully this goes smoothly; I think I have enough experience in the game to carry even this physical-heavy party through the whole thing.