I don't think the counters cap too much in IW and grindfest: my Haste vs no-Haste tests came back today with surprisingly poor performance for Haste at IWBTH. So there must be a lot of counters and it's not capping (or only caps without Haste).
...I guess I can explain it. The greatly increased counters with the largest swarms (~9 in IW, compared to ~4 in most Arenas, and ~5 in denser Arenas where Haste did best) probably hurt Haste. Whereas one of the side benefits of Haste -- longer PA duration to stick while spreading -- probably peaks out in usefulness around 5~7 monsters. And the other side benefit of Haste -- Overwhelming Strikes improvement -- is independent of swarm size.
I've never done a Grindfest, is it mostly ~9 monsters like IW, or only at the very end? Item World revs up to ~9 monsters at a quarter of the way through.
As for evade, I think it's surprisingly unhelpful for 1H players. I tested myself while doing IW practice on that helmet. On PFUDOR if I target and kill enemies one-by-one I can easily clear without using Spirit Shield or anything (I do use Haste, but don't need Shadow Veil it turns out). And this theoretically makes me ~5% slower in Arenas compared to spreading as tested before. On PFUDOR IW if I spread I get beat up fairly bad and have to cure a hundred times...but it was still faster than targeting singly. (Thus in my later Haste tests on panties, I always spreaded no matter how beat up I got).
In other words, it's better for 1H players to not use evade and Shadow Veil past level ~380 no matter how bad they get beat up. The ~12% speed loss with Evade due to loss in counters won't be made up with damage reduction. Actually it will probably be ~24% speed loss since IW is mostly huge swarms of 9. Single targeting reduced my damage infinitely and even that did not make back its ~5% speed loss.
Haste is another story. I know I said the IWBTH results came back worse than expected, but they are still good.
Haste obliterated no-Haste in PFUDOR IW though. I still need to gather more samples on Saturday. I can't anymore because it became unfair void day. I was unable to finish enough PFUDOR runs today because my panties did not cooperate. I wasted 12 Amnesia shards already and counting... (IMG:[
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What's the last thing you've (not) accomplished?, Anything that doesn't fit in other threads
Apr 16 2020, 11:18
