[TC] Banking procs for high IF stacks

[Chev]

Hi All,

The last few days there have been a few questions in IRC with people asking if there are any threads showing if it is worth banking / sitting on Fingers of Frost, Brain Freeze or Ice Nova until you are at 4+ stacks of Incanter's Flow. I only remember seeing the pros and cons of this discussed in IRC so in an effort to give people something to look at I have put this post together.

TL:DR - Don't hold on to procs to wait for higher IF stacks. Just pray to the RNG gods that your procs happen during a high stack period.

Below are 3 sets of results.

All sims where run using 450 fight length (+/- 20%), light movement, Highmaul only Mythic gear (so no set bonus), Elite skill level, single target and to reduce the margin of error as much as possible, with 50K iterations. All sims use Ice Nova and Incanter's Flow talent's but I change the lvl 100 talent.

Also, there are 3 actors for each sim. The default Frost profile, "Bank_ST" which will only bank procs during the single target procs and when it will not be a clear DPS loss to bank the different spell procs and the extreme banker "BankProcs" who is also banking during Frost Orb, when the Crystal is up and will hold on to 2 stack of Ice Nova until IF is high as well as banking during normal procs.







As you can see, it is better to use the procs as and when you can so that you do not lose procs while waiting for IF stacks to get higher.

[Rinoa]

Thank you so much for putting this into a post, now we've got something to link doubters. \o/

[Songette]

That is pretty interesting. But wouldn't be interesting to hold just the second charge of IN for high IF stacks?

[TLTeo]

The second IN charge alone is an extremely tiny dps increase, so while you can hold on to it, you won't see a noticable dps increase.

[Frosted]

Post HTML files and profiles in the SimC thread?

(Or just the relevant changes to the APL).

And ability breakdowns?

[Komma]

Post HTML files and profiles in the SimC thread?

(Or just the relevant changes to the APL).

And ability breakdowns?

This.

The problem with countering any "banking" argument is the often quoted "you're not doing it correctly". For example, I'm assuming that you changed the APL to only use FoF/BF stack at say, 3+ stacks of IF. This doesn't represent how many players consider "banking" though - they only do so at specific times when they're not overloaded with procs, and think they can bank without losing any.

[Trustbucket]

There are certain situations that I cannot think of a reason why banking would be a loss, obviously most times you can't bank procs or you risk delaying water jet or overwriting procs but for example if you are gaining stacks at say 2 currently and you have 1 FoF or BF proc you would not risk overwriting a proc by casting another frostbolt to let the IF stacks increase unless you had frozen orb or water jet up, would it not? Also small delays like this I would think would be an increase because you have a chance to have a trinket/ enchant/ ring proc before you use the BF/ FoF as well, assuming you don't lose the trinket/ enchant/ ring before casting the BF/ FoF.

[Frosted]

There are certain situations that I cannot think of a reason why banking would be a loss, obviously most times you can't bank procs or you risk delaying water jet or overwriting procs but for example if you are gaining stacks at say 2 currently and you have 1 FoF or BF proc you would not risk overwriting a proc by casting another frostbolt to let the IF stacks increase unless you had frozen orb or water jet up, would it not? Also small delays like this I would think would be an increase because you have a chance to have a trinket/ enchant/ ring proc before you use the BF/ FoF as well, assuming you don't lose the trinket/ enchant/ ring before casting the BF/ FoF.

So, in looking at banking of FoF/BF, you actually don't want to cast them during enchant procs. You want to be casting frostbolts. Casting FoF/BF procs during MotFW results in less BF procs on average, which is a DPS loss.

The number of times something like "I already have 1x FoF, no CDs are coming up, FO is not up, and IF is at 2stack and rising" occur per encounter I think are extremely low. Maybe one or two times?

People really over-sell the value of banked procs. Having like 8% more spellpower (using that FoF at 5 and not 2 stacks) on what, a few FoF-ILs? It's entirely trivial, less a 1% gain. You would need an absolutely gigantic proc to use these banked procs under to have any sort of noticeable gain in DPS - especially if you want to it be out of the margin of error that encounters bring.

I suppose though, we COULD implement extremely strict banking principals like you're suggesting - where it's only done in the very safe conditions of basically nothing else possibly screwing it up. But I think the amount of complexity that would add to the APL (and the time it would take to figure it out), for what I'm 100% certain are entirely trivial gains, is not worth it.

[Wilderness]

for example if you are gaining stacks at say 2 currently and you have 1 FoF or BF proc you would not risk overwriting a proc by casting another frostbolt to let the IF stacks increase

Frosted has a good point about how often this would occur - for some reason, I was under the impression that your frostbolt's multistrikes can also proc FoF and maybe BF too, which if correct would lead to munching in that situation.

[Frosted]

for example if you are gaining stacks at say 2 currently and you have 1 FoF or BF proc you would not risk overwriting a proc by casting another frostbolt to let the IF stacks increase

Frosted has a good point about how often this would occur - for some reason, I was under the impression that your frostbolt's multistrikes can also proc FoF and maybe BF too, which if correct would lead to munching in that situation.

The MS events do not have separate triggers for FoF and BF.

[Dunceton]

The MS events do not have separate triggers for FoF and BF.

Wait..so when I get a frostbolt MS my chance for a FoF proc isn't doubled? Sorry I'm not big on numbers or %s, just kind of assumed 2 frostbolts going out would mean 2 chances to proc FoF.

[Komma]

Wait..so when I get a frostbolt MS my chance for a FoF proc isn't doubled? Sorry I'm not big on numbers or %s, just kind of assumed 2 frostbolts going out would mean 2 chances to proc FoF.

That is correct. Multistrike events are unable to proc FoF or BF. The "increased chance to proc Brain Freeze due to multistrikes" means "when your Frostbolt multistrikes, the main Frostbolt has an increased chance to proc Brain Freeze", and the multistrike events still have a 0% chance of proccing anything.

[Trustbucket]

Yeah Frosted you probably are right about wanting to fb during the MS proc, I just assumed the ice lance MS chance would be more valuable than the increased proc chance on the frostbolt under a MS effect. Have you checked if its still an increase on two targets though? The ms chance on a splitting ice, ice lance damage seems like it might be better than the increased proc chance on a frostbolt multi-target. Not sure if you've simmed either, doesn't really matter either way because the chance this situation arises in a fight would be rare and the damage delta would be very small.