Temporal Manipulation - How important is Time Wall and the Delayed effect?

[EdgeOfDreams]

Now that we can skip T1 powers in secondaries, I'm wondering whether or not it makes sense for a Temporal Manipulation Blaster to skip Time Wall.

On the one hand, Time Wall applies the Delayed effect, which makes all the other damage and control powers in your secondary better (more damage, stronger controls).

On the other hand, the difference in damage and control effectiveness isn't that big, and Time Wall isn't a very high DPA power itself.

Has anyone crunched some numbers to see if skipping Time Wall is a major DPS loss?

[tidge]

After page 5: I kept Time Wall, but still only single-slotted it (Endoplasm Acc/Mezz). The only Melee attacks on this character are Future Pain and End of Time, so as a practical matter I see it as a wash to try to do any math if I could slot Aging Touch to make up from the effect and utility of Time Wall. Put another way: I'm typically casting ranged attacks anyway, and when I transition to a melee I'd rather have the effects of Time Wall plus whichever melee attack than just some more melee Psi Damage.

 

If against single hard targets, I definitely would rather have the -Regeneration (and slow) from Time Wall than trying to leverage a single-target (Psi) melee attack.

[Uun]

The Delayed bonuses are OK but not great, but I like having the attacks that can be used when mezzed. I do have it slotted for damage but it's not part of my normal attack chain.

[EdgeOfDreams]

Ok, trying to do a little math here on a level 50 Blaster with no enhancements.

 

Aging Touch: 1s activation, 73.41 damage without Delayed, 90.09 damage with Delayed
Time Wall: 1.6s activation, 55.61 damage
Time Wall + Aging Touch = 2.6s total activation, 145.7 total damage, for an overall DPA of 56.038. That's noticeably worse than the DPA of Aging Touch by itself (73.41).

Time Stop, Future Pain, and Time Shift don't get any bonus damage for Delayed. End of Time does, but getting a tiny bit of extra damage on a single target when you use an AoE doesn't seem worth considering.

So, I'm thinking Time Wall is probably not worth using as part of your main rotation for damage.

[Zect]

The delayed mechanic is usually not critical, because it does not add bonus damage to the strongest attack (future pain). You are correct that while it does buff the pbaoe (end of time), that is only one target out of many and you still have to kill the rest.

 

However, time wall is still valuable to stop AV's from running - if you've seen the infamous romulus hide and seek phenomenon, you know what I mean - and it even has a little -regen to help out in such situations. If given the choice between time wall and the level 1 melee attack, in most cases I would pick time wall because for an actual melee attack I would use future pain instead. However, you may have an immob from elsewhere in your powers or simply deem it not a concern.

Edited March 11 by Zect