Hit point vs. Mana point gearing on a Manna Robe Magician

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Balimon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thank you for all this! What an incredible amount of work you've done, so I finally had a chance to dig into your posts and play around with the graphs. It seems to me, after plugging in different numbers that 1 mana is at least twice as effective as hit points in delaying zero mana. Do you think that spam clicking the robe would change the results at all? Are those the results you're seeing as well?

I'm glad you appreciate the posts. Hopefully it's helpful in giving you a better understanding of the mana/health gearing tradeoffs.

Two things initially come to mind: first, without someone else checking carefully checking my calculations there's a good chance I made a mistake somewhere. If you read to the end of the thread that prompted you to reach out to me, you'll see an example of my fallibility. Second is the difference between the map and the territory. I made a bunch of assumptions, some more and less realistic. For example, canni-dancing for ten minutes while also doing everything else you need to do is clearly unrealistic. So it's always better to trust your real-life experiences over the predictions of a model. A model can only inform your estimates, not replace reality as it confronts you.

In terms of thinking about whether spam clicking would change the results, I would approach that through looking at that graph I posted. There's two sections, first where you have excess health and you're clicking the robe frequently, and then afterwards where you're just clicking to burn off regenerated health. You can think about the two sections as each having two attributes. First, there's the vertical distance traveled by the segment. Second, there's the slope of the line for that segment.

Increasing the vertical distance increases the length of the segment. Flattening the slope (lowering the number) increases the length of the segment. Each depends on the other: if you increase the vertical distance a constant value, it will extend the segment further if the slope is less. You can think about it like base jumping off a cliff: if you sink like a stone, it doesn't really matter how high the cliff you jump off, while if you can glide like a glider, your distance before you land is strongly influence by how high the cliff is.

In the first segment, the horizontal length kind of represents how much excess health you have. The slope is how much mana you're burning/regenerating. So if you're hitting the robe as fast as you can the first section will have a shallower slope, since you'll be regenerating more mana and therefore having a lower burn rate. However, the horizontal (time) length will be shorter, because you'll burn through your health faster.

So in each section, horizontal or vertical stretching depends on either gearing/buffing choices or behavior choices. In the first section, the health buffer depends on the gearing/hp-buffing, the slope depends on the behavior/regen-buffing. Once you know the slope, the health buffer will tell you the length of the segment.

In the second segment you're constrained by hp regeneration for how often you can click the robe, so there's not as many options where behavior can change the graph.

I know that didn't directly answer the question but did it help? Keep asking questions!

Originally Posted by Ripqozko [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

good luck to yall with all that, if you want to move a whole raid fast you stack more necros. all i care about is the few fights where its competitive to coth quickly, rest doesnt matter if its .2 sec slower waiting on a necro to pump me. the competitive ones only your pool matters, after the first 5-8 coths you either won or didnt.

This is a much more thoughtful post than your initial response. Why you gotta be so mean at first? For what it's worth, I agree with you. Initial burst used well with good communication being more important than sustained mana generation is a reasonable position. But good communication can't be improved with better gear, and once your pool is sufficient it seems reasonable to optimize for longer scenarios. Finally, and somewhat defensively, I'll point out that I didn't type that all out just for the hell of it. Balimon specifically asked me for my thoughts.

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Mage trying to mage-ana-dance while answering tells from 40 different players in the raid

Good objection and clear weakness in the assumptions. However, I also did not include any mana regeneration from medding. How about standing the entire time and clicking the robe 6 times a minute? You can also change the assumption to be only 3 times a minute, in which case both segments will have the same slope and the math is much simplified. More detail can improve the model.

Originally Posted by Salaryman [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

all these nerdy graphs and charts just steal a manastone and play on RED99

Maybe if you had more intelligence than a gnoll or more charisma than a troll your server would have more players than I have fingers and toes.