Empowered shadows

[nattalie405]

So i know the first time you get this buff you need to refresh your buffs, lets say you cant refresh it because of a bad rng you still have the dots on however from the first empowered shadow and you mind blast get the buff again do you need to refresh the dots again

[MoanaLisa]

So i know the first time you get this buff you need to refresh your buffs, lets say you cant refresh it because of a bad rng you still have the dots on however from the first empowered shadow and you mind blast get the buff again do you need to refresh the dots again

Generally, it seems to be OK to wait until you have to refresh dots if you have ES up. The only time that you might want to think about that is if the run time on the dot is longer than ES. You gain a little bit by refreshing them early, true. At the same time you lose regular DPS while starting up VT/DP again. You don't need to restart SW:P as MF does that. In a long fight, it probably doesn't make a great deal of difference.

[Bullettime]

Believe there isn't a real true answer and if there is, yet to find it. Arguments for both saying to recast the dot as soon as you get the buff but others saying to just flay and go on as usual since you would spend 2 GCDS (3 secs) just recasting the dots which could have been another flay (which gets the buff as well) when you would recast the dots soon enough anyways. If any of the pros know one way or the other then bout damn time. Been researching it for a bit myself and just seems to be 2 sides arguing over it with no clear answer.

[Aica]

With your specific example, no you do not.

In general, as long as your current dots are empowered, you should be able to let them run their full duration before refreshing them. There are other cases where it may be beneficial to refresh early, but it gets complicated, and there isn't a straight answer to many of them.

[MoanaLisa]

It may be that there is no really clear answer.

As an example, DP has 20 seconds to run when ES comes up. It's going to need to be refreshed before ES falls off.

Now the same thing with 10 seconds to run...do it when you would normally.

On top of all that is balancing everything else we need to, keeping 3 balls in the air at once (figuratively speaking) and moving. So it's hard to know. We have a lot of stuff like that now which drives the theorycrafters a little crazy. RNG, situational abilities, etc. I think it makes for an interesting play style but I can understand those who think we're already complicated enough without all of that.

[G l o w y r m]

It's my understanding that if you cast a DoT while ES has 1 second left, the DoT will benefit from the ES buff for the entire duration of the DoT, even though ES has fallen off just a second after it landed.

If that's the case, waiting until ES is about to go away (enough time for 2 DoTs so at least ~3 seconds left, probably less with Haste) sounds perfectly fine to me. You'll be able to use the bulk of the ES time to boost Mind Flay and you'll still get your DoTs benefiting from ES for their full duration. So if you refresh them early or late, they will get the same boost for the same amount of time either way.

I think the question is, if you refresh right away and then refresh once again as ES is going away, would that yield more damage than just 1 full DoT duration buffed + Mind Flaying. With the first way you get the DoT to run for a bit during ES and then once again when ES is about to fall off but you'll be clipping it when you refresh it at the end of ES. So it's almost like having 1.62 DP's benefit from the ES buff instead of just 1 + more Mind Flays.

I hope that last bit made sense to some people . I do NOT play Shadow much but I like to stay on top of the mechanics. Going to do some dummy testing later should be able to at least see some sort of trend with different timings and stuff.