Steelbadger

Was having a discussion about our EoF AA spec with a guildmate assassin, and we started talking about Excessive Bleeding.

Personally I think it provides much more "effective" DPS than Repeated Stabbing (Frontload I have yet to look into) even if it doesn't show up on the parse.

Erkekjetter, however, raised the issue that it only says "max hitpoints" in the description. So, we (he) decided to take a look into it.

From both duals and fighting identical mobs it would seem that Excessive Bleeding works as follows:

Reduces Max HP of target by 1%
Reduces current HP of target by 1% of current HP

In duals Erkekjetter melee'd me down to about 50% hp, and then stopped and used Mark on me, I compared my HP before mark and after mark.

I have 5800 ish hp.

My max hp went down by approx 300 (5% of max) (I'm considered a weak target )
My current hp went down by approx 150 (5% of current, 2.5% of max)
When the skill was canceled I regained both the hp and the max hitpoints.

We need to test whether the hp you regain is equal to 5% of your new hp (when damage dealt from other sources is considered) or simply regains an absolute amount of health equal to that which it lost on application of the bleeding skill.

Another issue raised was that in the past hp debuffs had a very detrimental effect when they wore off, a mob would actually gain considerable amounts of hit points, over and above what it lost when the debuff was applied. If someone could confirm or deny this I would be grateful

It is probably the case that for lesser geared, run of the mill, assassins Excessive Bleeding is the best choice, while if you sport a lot in the way of recast time reducing gear and buffs it would be best to go with Repeated Stabbing to allow for faster spamming. However I just thought we should clear up the whole excessive bleeding question.

It does work.
It does reduce current hp.
It does cause mobs to regain hp when it wears off, however the %age health the mob has will always remain the same, on application and removal.

Against the EoF mobs (lots of single target very high hp mobs) this skill really shines, with a 2% constant decrease on a mob with 4-5-6 million hp you are doing anywhere from 40k "effective" damage with each maintainable dot to 60k "effective" damage with each maintainable dot.

Ok, fine, it is not real damage per say, but 2 dots can be kept up ad infinitum, and those two dots effectively do a manaburn on the first time they are applied. You may not see it, you may not get a pat on the back for it, but it has reduced the mobs hp by that much.

Satinah

Its not so much the hp that the mob loses because they gain it back when it expires but the damage done under the effect will be a bigger portion of the mobs life. So another way to look at it is a tiny (2-4%) boost on raid dps. Its more effective when soloing or grouping when you can kill the mobs in a few sec before they expire, in that case you also take take the full hp % out.

Thats how i understand it works, someone correct me if i am wrong.

Amythyst

I've used excessive bleeding for a while and have never seen this happen on a mob before. Because from what I am reading if you got an epic x4 down to 3% you could hit all of your bleed skills and it would die instantly?

Satinah

Wording is confusing on the CA. Its a ratio so if on max hp its 1000 at 50% itll be 500 and on 3% will be like what. . 30?

Mystify

You're reading what he said wrong. It lowers current health by a different % than max. However, what he's saying is if you can maintain deadly wound and scraping blow (which you should be able to maintain indefinitely baring misses), a mob with 5,000,000 health would have 100,000 less hit points when you kill it because you've kept 2% of its health off for the duration. So you've essentually done 100,000 more damage than your parser shows you at. On top of that, you can maintain a third bleeding ability for most of the time, so any damage done while you have the third one up counts as more. What is happening is you reduced the mobs health by 1% more (max) and Y% (which is a function of current health) and then lowered the health by around 720,000 (provided your raid is parsing 30k DPS), changing the current health and thus changing the amount of health modified when Y% is reapplied. I don't have the exact math but I did test this in duels.

Basically with hypothetical numbers....

You remove 1% of 1,000,000 (10,000)
Your raid DPS takes down 500,000
Your effect wears off and restores 1% of 500,000 (5,000)

So you would have taken off an extra 5,000 health by doing nothing. Again, these numbers are hypothetical but from my testing in duels, that's how it works.

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Satinah

Yea, that sounds right.

Amythyst

Ah ok that makes more sense... I wish they would have it set up to where you could see the actual effect on a parse. Or the effect as a debuff on the mob. Or even better show us the mobs full hp so we can see the effect.

dshadow

Biggest thing about Bleed line is time it takes too kill a mob so 5 bleed attacks =5 % of max heath off the mob if it takes 10 mins too take a mob down at 2,000,000 hit points you will shorten the time on the mob alot but this must be done at the top of the max hp. mob has too get the most out of his hp. if a mob takes 1 min less too take down better for the hole raid force does it effect your dps no but it helps in the hole

Vaanir

If it takes 10 minutes to kill a mob with 2 kk HP then i'd rather die
Seriously though, only Cloaked Assault in the bleeding line is good, for encounters with lots of spawned adds, makes a slight difference though...
Exacting, Deadly Focus, Hemotoxin, Honed Reflexes and RS can't be missed for making a mob die 2-5 secs faster

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Ardain

Dunno, I just kinda fell in love with repeated stabbing. I used to have bleeding line as well, but as Vaanir stated I only think the cloaked assault thingy is worth it.

There aren't any really long fights in the game anyway (except for Wuoshi maybe and for Avatars and Contested Mayong I don't know, to much lag on my server atm so no-one actually kills them anymore) as far as I know (might not be true, we don't do contested mobs so I can only speak for instanced ones).
But as you can read all over the boards guilds kill even avatars really quickly, and I doupt this is because of excessive bleeding .

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