DPS With Kissassist vs Isboxer/Regular Playing
This page was created because I would like to show the evidence for why Kissassist does less DPS than you can do by using my Isboxer playstyle. It should be obvious that Kissassist can't perform as well as an actual person can - but for some reason in the MQ2 community it is not obvious. There are many reasons that KA can't perform as good as a real person and the majority of them will be addressed on this page.
Before I dive into all of the evidence let's first look again at my argument for why Kissassist does less DPS than you can do by using isboxer or even EQBC - so long as you manually press attack to attack and manually pop burns.
First let's look at the two *basic* reasons Kissassist does less DPS:
1. It attacks marginally slower than you can by manually pressing the attack button. It's not a human and it sometimes takes longer to engage an enemy or fails to pop all cooldowns
2. It uses Cooldowns significantly slower than an actual player can - this is the largest reason for the lower DPS
In Everquest, the majority of difficult fights begin with you popping your cooldowns and going bonkers doing as much DPS as possible. This game is designed around raiding and on 90% of the raids the second the boss comes out, you pop your Cooldowns and go to town blowing him up. Or, you save your cooldowns for some point during the event that is difficult and you pop your cooldowns during that part to make it much easier. This is how you should be playing as a boxer.
The same goes for group missions, usually you save your cooldowns for the big baddies, pop them all then blow him up. When people measure their Epeens in DPS comparisons, this is how they do it. They pop their cooldowns and see how much they can burn for in 60 seconds or 90 seconds, sometimes they have longer parses too to see how much they can sustain their DPS for after the burn.
This is how all guilds measure DPS while raiding and how all players measure their DPS when compairing it to one another in those guilds. This is also how I am going to compare my DPS by manually pressing attack to Kissassist's.
These characters are in full Conflagrant gear and they only have up to Ring of Scale purchased so they DO NOT have The Burning Land AAs which would minorly increase my DPS.
Proof of Character's Gear + AAs
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(Fell Foliage - Cactiikii) Parses of Me Playing My Characters with Mana Conserve Rotation:
Parse 1 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1 420k and Wiz 2: 410k)
Parse 2 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 429k and Wiz 2: 419k)
Parse 3 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 563k and Wiz 2: 409k)
Parse 4 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 545k and Wiz 2: 543k)
Parse 5 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 448k and Wiz 2: 402k)
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(Fell Foliage - Cactiikii) Parses of Kissassist Playing My Characters with Mana Conserve Rotation:
Parse 1 On Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 327k and Wiz 2: 328k)
Parse 2 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 402k and Wiz 2: 345k)
Parse 3 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 414k and Wiz 2: 337k)
Parse 4 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 398k and Wiz 2: 346k)
Parse 5 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 305k and Wiz 2: 296k)
Parse 6 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 345k and Wiz 2: 301k)
For this parse I changed my INI Files to DPSOn=1 as an experiment.
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(Fell Foliage - Cactiikii) Parses of Me Playing My Characters with Burn Rotation:
Parse 1 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 565k and Wiz 2: 536k)
Parse 2 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 516k and Wiz 2: 488k)
Parse 3 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1: 553k and Wiz 2: 431k)
Parse 4 on Cactiikii - (Wiz 1:
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(Aaryonar) Parses Of Me Playing My Characters with Mana Conserve Rotation:
Parse 1 on Aaryonar - 70s Parse (Wiz 1: 500k DPS and Wiz 2: 358k DPS)
Parse 2 on Aaryonar - 70s Parse (Wiz 1: 373k DPS and Wiz 2: 359k DPS)
I was slow to engage with this parse, you can see that there is a 10sec gap between when I pop burns and start attacking Aaryonar (about the same speed as Kissassist). This accounts for the lower DPS difference.
Parse 3 on Aaryonar - 110s Parse (Wiz 1: 385k DPS and Wiz 2: 371k DPS)
I was slow to engage with this parse, you can see that there is a 10sec gap between when I pop burns and start attacking Aaryonar (about the same speed as Kissassist). This accounts for the lower DPS difference.
Parse 4 on Aaryonar - 80s Parse (Wiz 1: 471k DPS and Wiz 2: 384k DPS)
Parse 5 on Aaryonar - 100s Parse (Wiz 1: 416k DPS and Wiz 2: 376k DPS)
Parse 6 on Aaryonar - 80s Parse (Wiz 1: 400k DPS and Wiz 2: 403k DPS)
I was slow to engage with this parse, you can see that there is a 10sec gap between when I pop burns and start attacking Aaryonar (about the same speed as Kissassist). This accounts for the lower DPS difference.
Parse 7 on Aaryonar - 80s Parse (Wiz 1: 409k DPS and Wiz 2: 359k DPS)
Note: I was not using Frostbound Alliance during this time because I forgot to bind that keybind.
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(Aaryonar) Parses of Kissassist Playing My Characters with Mana Conserve Rotation:
Parse 1 on Aaryonar - 110s Parse (Wiz 1: 286k DPS and Wiz 2: 270k DPS)
Mage did not pop all of his Cooldowns and one Wizard (Foovi) did not pop all of their cooldowns either. Foovi INI File
Parse 2 on Aaryonar - 100s Parse (Wiz 1: 385k DPS and Wiz 2: 338k DPS)
This is a pretty good parse and it's in line with the parses of me actually playing when I was slow to engage.
Parse 3 on Aaryonar - 100s Parse (Wiz 1: 312k DPS and Wiz 2: 247k DPS)
One Wizard (Foovi) did not pop all of their cooldowns for this fight again. Foovi INI File
Parse 4 on Aaryonar - 50s Parse (Wiz 1: 395k DPS and Wiz 2: 395k DPS)
Both Wizards failed to pop Frenzied Devastation at the start of the fight so I did it manually for them both.
Parse 5 on Aaryonar - 60s Parse (Wiz 1: 413k DPS and Wiz 2: 270k DPS)
Parse 6 on Aaryonar - 70s Parse (Wiz 1: 454k DPS and Wiz 2: 272k DPS)
Mayoi did not pop Frenzied Devastation or Focus of Arcanum for this fight, as is typical with many KA fights.
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Example 1 - Kissassist Failing To Pop All Cooldowns (Aaryonar)
DPS Of Fight: Wiz 1: 164k and Wiz 2: 143k
In this example I let Kissassist do everything except for a few times in the beginning of the fight when I manually press the attack button in an effort to drop Aaryonar's HP to 95% so some of my characters engage him faster. As you'll notice in this video one Wizard and my Mage do not pop all of their cooldowns; this is the reason I decided to keep this video... It's evidence that Kissassist does not always work 100% which is one of the main reasons I hold my view that you can do better by manually controlling your box team instead.
This is a common thing that I bring up about KA and it adds to the problem of lower DPS but everyone on Redguides tells me it doesn't happen or it's my fault that it does this. Highly doubtful as I have multiple friends who report the same and I also have 5 computers at my house, all of which have EQ installed that I see this happening on. It's much more likely that the people on Redguides that say this doesn't happen either don't pay attention or are too arrogant to admit their macro is flawed.
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Example 2 - Cactiikii Isboxer Fight W/ Mana Conserve Rotation
This is just an average fight on Cactiikii during which I play my characters using my Wizard's Mana Conservation Rotation. The reason that I created Example 2 as well as Example 3 is to make a video demonstrating how I am doing the parses because I know that Redguides has some serious skeptics.
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Example 3 - Cactiikii Kissassist Fight W/ Mana Conserve Rotation (No Conditions)
This is a fight where I let Kissassist play all of my characters except for my tank (of course). It demonstrates what I did when making my Kissassist parses of this fight, if you have any questions about how I did my parsing - hopefully this video answers them.
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Example 4 - Cactiikii Fight W/ Wizard Burn Rotation (Isboxer)
In summary, this page isn't meant to disuade you from using Kissassist, in fact I encourage more of my friends to use Kissassist and MQ2 than I do Isboxer simply because it provides utility to your box team in more ways than Isboxer ever could.
The whole purpose of this page is to educate and demonstrate the difference between Kissassist and manually inputing commands on your characters yourself. You can still use Kissassist 100% of the time that you play - if you simply just create 3 buttons, one for manually attacking and two for manually popping your burns - you'll do more DPS. It's as simple as that.
Many people over on Redguides find this topic to be a contentious one because they can't separate their emotions from the facts. This isn't unique to Redguides, there are many different aspects of life where people cling to their beliefs even when confronted with evidence proving them wrong. At the end of the day, I can't reason someone out of a position that they were not reasoned into.