The first version of this article, written on 2024/08/14 was a manually-calculated table looking into exactly how much damage each ability did with their current bonuses as of the launch of The War Within, the current version is an automated chart that is easy to keep up to date when balance changes happen. Consider this when drawing your conclusions from the numbers here and please report to me anything you think its wrong.
Changelog
- 2024/09/17: Updated for the 10% disint damage buff.
Summary:
- Even when it is a DPS gain, using disint involves grabbing the talents for it which is a healing loss of some kind. Preservation does not need the mana from eloop so you are intentionally dropping some healing in order to grab the package that enables disint in any situation.
- For a majority of players disint will not be a gain big enough to be worth the talent swap, essence cost and mental focus required to get the value out of it regardless of the numbers below. Spamming chronof when possible and fb on cooldown is enough to be a good damage contribution on your part.
- If you are not talented into both eloop and natcon you should not be pressing disint at all ever.
- A combination of scarlet and chronof would need both to be at 62.6% of their caps to do more than a fully talented disint.
It is a pretty common question for new evokers to not know when you should use disint. At first glance it seems like an essence dump to gain dps that you could use during downtime, but in reality the amount of different talents that interact both with disint itself and lf make it hard to parse out what is actually the better choice. Here we will compare the two to let you know exactly if and when you should be pressing disint.
1) Listing all the bonuses the base spells always benefit from without hero talents:
lf
| lf | lfm | enkindled | Total | SpellPower / Cast Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 232 | 160 | * 1.06 | 415.52 | 415.52 / 2 = 207.76 SP/s |
disint
| disint | eloop | Total | natcon | SpellPower / Cast Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 634.04 | * 1.35 | 855.954 | Cast * 0.8 | 855.954 / 2.4 = 356.6475 SP/s |
To note, the damage listed in the disint tooltip isn't correct because that is the total damage done over 3 ticks but disint also does a hidden tick right on cast
that isn't counted there, so to get the actual damage done we need to take the amount listed in the tooltip and / 3 * 4 it.
2) Chronowarden Dynamic bonuses:
chronof and scarlet add a varying amount of spellpower% to a lf cast. This amount is added at the end and after any bonuses. titansgift adds a bonus multiplier to disint.
3) Flameshaper Dynamic bonusses:
Similar to the chart above, but removing chronof and adding enkindle
Even in the best possible scenarios, Preservation is still a healer and the single target damage the spec does isn't gonna see a noticeable increase or decrease from you replacing some chronofs with disint or viceversa, this is a very min-maxy thing with very very small differences and for the vast majority of people it won't be worth it at all. It is more likely that you will increase your dps more by improving your gameplay and optimizing your healing more so you get more free global cooldowns to cast dps spells as opposed to integrating disint into your rotation while also losing healing talents like ton for it.
Considering that in real scenarios there is always some healing to do and so scarlet to fill, there is a chance you are losing dps by using disint even when fully talented if you aren't keeping close track of both your scarlet and chronof caps. In my opinion this isn't worth it to track at all and you should just not use disint
In the case of grabbing eloop and using disint to regen mana in M+, that is a different argument to be made and a much more approachable discussion to be had as opposed to wanting to increase your dps.