In general, you have skills that do damage, buff you, and debuff the enemy.

Damage skills are either over time (DOT), or instant.

So, of the skills you want to use, pread them across the bars so they make sense, and the rotation is the easiest way to keep all of them active with the fewest gaps.

ms_sophysticated wrote: »

Hello everyone,

I am wanting to start theory crafting. to try and create my own Non-Meta build. I see these builds online that I follow as best as I can, but I am at a loss when I comes down to picking the skills and creating a rotation will them. can anyone school me on what goes into making a rotation?

If starting out I'd suggest going for a fixed rotation (repeating the same steps each time) rather than dynamic.

To begin with you need to work out how long that rotation will last. That used to be more variable but currently most things last 10s so that is a pretty good default starting point.

Once you have a sense of how long the rotation will be you should look at what is most important to use in that time. I'd suggest you look at important buffs / debuffs first (if you use potions you might not need as many), which might either need casting or simply to be on the bar for passives, then prioritise the things that do the most damage per cast (normally DoT skills).

Typically you will either be constrained by rotation duration, number of skill slots or available useful DoTs so will not be able to just cycle 10 DoT skills endlessly, so you might end up, for example, with 2 slots used for passive buffs, 6 slots used for buffs / debuffs / DoTs and 2 slots free. Whatever you end up left with you can use for a spammable, an execute (if your class / setup has access to one) or utility skills.

As you get the basics done you can also start to look at things that might only need casting every other rotation (e.g. barbed trap, netch) and what you do the other rotation (cast another alternating skill or use an additional spammable).

Skills that do highest:
Damage (including DoT) per cast
Damage/cast per resource unit

Most DoTs will be beat spam skill per cast
However some high damage DoT’s sustain cost could reduce total DPS. That you have to test. Mystic Orb often is a culprit.

Also if you slot all DoTs you start to loose passive skills and potentially make rotation too costly. So again once you have a base rotation that sustains add in the next powerful dot and see if it hurts or helps. Likewise cut out the least powerful dot for a passive and check results.

It always good to know what your least important skills are for when you situationally want to add utility.

If developing static or even dynamic it helps if the dot skills have similar timers.

Recommend starting with a liko/asiangod rotation and then going non meta from there. That’ll give you a baseline to start with

Note unless you want to take a big performance hit you always want to include special class skill. Eg spectral bow, scorch, blastbones, shard etc