Everything important that needed to be said was said by page 3-4. The last 20-25 pages has mostly just been DSM trying to tell everyone else that they are all wrong and he is right.
It has been established that:
-Str will result in more DPS.
-Str will result in shorter fights.
-Str will improve carrying capacity.
-most knight alts won’t statistically make it to 60
-Very few players will ever be seeing BiS gear unless they are already one of those extreme raiders working on their next twink toy alt
-Iksars SKs have terrible starting str for a melee
-Iksars won’t ever cap their str without buffs unless in BiS gear
-Iksars SKs at 60 with reasonable gear for level 60 (best EC, group gear, velious quest armor, and a few raid pieces) will likely still not hit str cap without some fairly massive shaman buffs
-All melees will always want more strength all the time right up to that 255 cap
These are all known variables.
What is also known:
-mana recovery (med, buffs, FT) for ROUTINE situations is the ONLY important factor in mana actions per minute.
-emergency mana recovery (twitch, mod rods) for extraordinary situations is the next in the conga line
-a bigger mana pool DOES NOT give you more mana actions per time, it just allows you to get an extra spell off in extraordinary circumstances where you otherwise would have run out. It may also let you go just a tad longer between med breaks, but your med breaks will be longer.
Seriously, anyone who has played a knight knows that you’ll spend 99.9% of your active play/fighting time somewhere between 10-95% mana and 85% of that time between maybe 25-85 mana. Mana pool becomes more import for clerics in a cheal chain, spot healers starting from full on raids, wizards expecting to start the raid burn at 100m and maybe enchanters doing some baller hard content solo.
For knights (especially shadow knights) you have to do some SERIOUS theorycrafting with worst case scenarios or hat trick solo artist crap with already stellar gear before you can come up with a scenario where the shadow knight having 200 more mana was literally the reason for success where failure was otherwise gonna happen. 200 mana at 60 is basically maybe 1 extra Drain Soul for a 338 heal.
For those “never gonna actually happen” scenarios - simply having a 10 dose wort pot available provides a much more significant safety net. If you needed that extra 200 mana to land a FD - serious errors in judgement and poor play are the culprit, not a lack of a slightly larger mana pool.
If we knew that this person was taking his iksar sk to level 60 with BiS gear and they only cared about final endgame stats, yes intelligence is the answer. If a troll or ogre, 100% intelligence all the way.
As much as I would love to see some parses from DSM on something other than a level 5 turtle (cough cough) - even his lil Mr Turtle parses showed a 4.3% increase in dps with a 20 strength difference. Confident though I am a bigger difference would be against a level-appropriate target, 4.3% is actually significant enough to settle the issue.
If you as a tank thing you could do to make you take 4.3% less damage … oh lord we as tanks would be all over it.
The primary jobs of any tank (in order)
1) hold aggro (easy for knights)
2) not die and don’t take too much damage (easy with level/content-appropriate gear)
3) help it die faster. Faster kills is more xp. Faster kills is shorter fights and less damage taken
3*) if you’re a knight - the smattering of other cool things your spells let you do. Situationally this may take precedence over 3 - even mid-fight.
At least for paladins an extra 200 mana might allow you to toss a HoT on self/other for an emergency 700-825 heal. Even then, as a paladin haven’t had a single case where a 200 deeper max mana pool would have made the difference.
Everything important has already been said. Knowing how these threads predictably play out when DSM is on a roll trying to napkin math why he is right and everyone else is wrong …. we’re headed for another 50-page’r.
Tally ho!
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