Duration, Efficiency, Toggles, And You

[OffaLimb]

Looking around the webs and Reddit and such I found a lot of slightly wrong and/or confusing information about the recent toggle abilities efficiency/duration change.  The basics are increase duration increases the time between when each drain "tick" hits.  Increasing efficiency reduces the cost of each drain "tick".

 

First I'll do an example then I give the maths behind how this works.  Let's take a toggle power that has a base drain of 2 energy per second.

 

If you increase duration only with a maxed Continuity (130% duration) you will loose 2 energy every 1.3 seconds.   Now if you were to change that to only increase efficiency using a maxed Streamline (130% efficiency) you would lose 1.4 energy every 1 second.  Now lets do something crazy and use only a Rank 4 Fleeting Expertise.  That will increase efficiency by 50% and decrease duration by 50%.  Now what happens is something really cool - the drain is 2 energy per second (our starting value).  This is because it actually does 1 energy drain every 1/2 second.

 

However this is a really basic view of things.  It gets really messy when you increase both duration and efficiency.  So without further ado MATHS INCOMING!!!!

 

The way this all works is based on this simple equation:

 

C=(B/D)(1-E+1)

 

C = Final cost per second

C = Base Drain

D = Duration

E = Efficiency

 

Realize the duration and efficiency shown on screen are percentages meaning 150% is actually 1.5.  So this equation is based on what you see on screen - meaning you added a full ranked Streamline E = 1.3 due to your efficiency is now 130%.

 

For example, you have a build where the screen says you have 130% duration and a 130% efficiency.  Or rather you are using a Continuity and a Streamline with no corrupted mods to lower either value.  Here's how the equation will work (I'll use the base drain of 2 from earlier):

 

C=(2/1.3)(1-1.3+1) or a drain of about 1.08 per second.  In play this will actually look a little different.  You won't see a 1.08 drain every second, you would see a 1.4 drain every 1.3 seconds.  Or, let me scale this up a bit to 13 seconds - you didn't take a drain of 1.08 energy 13 times, you took a drain of 1.4 energy 10 times.  This might seem small, I mean .3 seconds isn't that long.  However, if you consider a duration of 200% would cause your drain to hit every other second.  Not sure if it's really helpful, but it's a good to keep in mind anyway.

 

Now the reason this equation is important is to note that negative duration has a very huge impact (even bigger than negative efficiency) on toggle drains.  The reason is that part is a 1/X equation - if you don't know what those look like off hand, google it.  However on the flip side, there hits a point where more duration makes a very minimal effect.  It doesn't scale linearly like efficiency does.  Also due to the nature of things, in the above example, the duration has a bigger impact than the efficiency - this means Blind Rage maybe be a good candidate to put into some toggle builds now where before it was generally a bad idea.

 

 

 

So the tl;dr of this:

 

Know what the generic 1/X graph looks like, and remember the equation:

 

C=(B/D)(1-E+1)

 

C = Final cost

C = Base Drain

D = Duration

E = Efficiency

 

Knowing the equation can help you determine if sacrificing a little duration or efficiency for the greater good (This Transient Fortitude vs Blind Rage).  You can break the equation into 2 parts and see exactly which is contributing the most and how much effecting one will do.  Oh, and duration effects are based on a 1/X style graph, as opposed to efficiency being a straight linear graph - yeah, don't forget that either.....

[Arunafeltz]

AAAAAAH MATH HELP

 

 

 

But thanks.

[VKhaun]

1) I'm pretty sure I read somewhere in there that these still obey the 175% efficiency hard cap. Might want to explore how(if) that works?

 

2) This seems way too complicated for the end user. Someone just sitting down to play would never think of most of this when adding duration. They would just expect a duration mod to make durations longer on abilities that clearly LIST a duration. I'm not looking forward to the future of Players Helping Players and in-game people asking me about why their toggles are wonky, or posting strange assumptions in build threads.

 

If we're committed to this setup, I would advise the devs to at least display the tic rate in the abilities menu so people get that notion that duration probably does something, to start them on the right track.

Edited October 5, 2015 by VKhaun

[Oriviagene]

I know about this already :|

Without the math of course XD

[Bahws]

I find the topic name misleading, it sounds like a guide but really only gives a bare bones explanation of what happens and the equation to use but does not discuss the implications of these things further.

 

f.e.:

Using this equation if one had a theoretical mod with the stats -99% power efficiency and -99% power duration using this mod alone would result in a power drain of 10/1sec becoming 0.1energy/0.01sec

Normalizing 0.1e/0.01s to per second we get: 10e/s

So it changed nothing really

 

But if we add a second mod to this equation that gives our warframe +1% duration it becomes 0.1e/0.02s

Normalizing 0.1e/0.02s to per second we get 5e/s

Suddenly this mod gave us 50% efficiency because when our base is 1% doubling it tends to do that.

 

This means, if you want to maximize the time you can "turn on" a channeled ability (a toggle ability with cost to keep it going), fleeting expertise is a very interesting mod because it even though "alone" it seems to do nothing, together with a second mod it can do a lot.

 

Also the lack of discussion, if power efficiency only goes to 175% or beyond for channeled abilities, is sadly missing.

Short-Answer: it goes beyond 175% (please make note of the date of this posting ...)

long answer:

- equip a warframe with a toggle ability

- equip a max rank fleeting expertise and a streamline rank 3 (or any combination that will get you to exactly 175%)

- check energy drain/sec in ability window with mods applied

- equip max fleeting and max streamline

- check drain again

 

TL;DR for channeled abilities

if using 2 mods:

 

fleeting expertise +

streamline

reduce your channeled power consumption by 75% (use ability 4x as long for same cost)

 

if using 3 mods and you want large range:

fleeting expertise +

streamline +

[primed] continuity

reduce your channeled power consumption by 85.7% [89.5%] (use ability ~7x [~9.5x] as long for same cost)

 

if using 3 mods and you don't care about range (or want it small)

fleeting expertise +

streamline +

narrow minded

reduce your channeled power consumption by 92.8% (use ability ~14x as long for same cost)

 

Interesting fact

With the last setup a Valkyr has an expected energy drain of 0.18e/1s

Meaning one energy orb, worth 25 energy, powers ~2min19sec of invincible rage ball mode

If you can't get an energy orb to drop once every 2 minutes you probably don't need to be invincible due to lack of enemies trying to kill you

 

My Opinion on Valkyrs 4 would be kind of off topic I guess...

 

PS:

using 4 mods and small range:

fleeting expertise +

streamline +

narrow minded +

[primed] continuity 

reduce your channeled power consumption by ~94.1% (use ability ~17x [~19x] as long for same cost)

Valkyr has ~2min49sec [~3min13sec] to find the next energy drop

 

using 5mods and small range:

fleeting + stream + narrow + [primed] cont + constitution

use ability ~20x [~22x] as long

Valkyr has ~3min17sec [~3min42sec] to find next energy drop 

 

edit: I personally haven't seen a primed streamline yet but i am sure most of you that have read this post would understand what it would mean

Edited October 5, 2015 by Bahws

[(PSN)EvilFlowerChild]

My brain is exploding

[Bahws]

What I previously posted appears to no longer be true.

At least on Valkyr and Chroma there appears to be a hard cap of 75% reduction now.

[ViolentSweed]

The easiest way to calculate this, without all the fancy math, is that duration works like efficiency but at half the value. You with me?

 

Let's say you have 200% duration, that is a 100% increased duration value which means that it gives 50% flat efficiency to toggled skills. (which DE has already explained)

 

Now let's say you only have 50% duration, that means that duration will take away 25% (half of the duration value) efficiency to toggled skills.

 

Now if you are running no duration, which caps out at 12% (without the arcane helmet(s)), you have a reduced duration of 88% which means a reduced efficiency of 44%. 

 

With both Streamline and Fleeting Expertise you have 190% (or 90% depending on how you look at it) efficiency. So if you still want to run both of those mods you would need at least 70% duration, which means 30% reduced duration and 15% reduced efficiency leaving you at 175% which is the cap for everything.

 

If you only run Streamline you would need at least 190% duration for the 45% efficiency increase for the cap of 175%.

 

I hope this makes sense, if not too bad I will take your wasted time and store it in my bum.

Edited October 10, 2015 by ViolentSweed

[(PSN)IIIDevoidIII]

Moved to Players Helping Players subforum.