Tick interval on Death Shroud?

I'm trying to figure out how effective Death Shroud is or isn't, but I don't know a crucial thing: The interval between its attacks. It looks to be about three seconds.

I'm currently trying to figure out whether this is, slotted up a bit, in fact my most efficient attack in damage-per-endurance. Numbers are:

Shadow punch: Average damage 33, endurance 2.94.
Smite: Average damage 60, endurance 5.22
Shadow Maul: Average damage 124, endurance 5.41
Siphon Life: Average damage 84.89, endurance 8.64 (but it's also a heal)

Shadow Maul is clearly the best of those attacks, giving about 22dpe. (It's also the only one six-slotted.)

Right now, death shroud is costing 0.37 end/sec, and average tick is 10.61. If ticks are about 3 seconds, that's only about 10 dpe -- better than smite, not quite as good as shadow punch.

But wait! I have two procs in it. Eradication energy damage and Scirocco's Dervish lethal damage. The energy damage hits about 3.5x as hard as the basic damage ticks, and the lethal damage ticks seem to be more like 4.5x as hard. Specifically, against a given target (below my level), I got 22.95 negative energy damage from death shroud, 89.74 points of bonus lethal damage, and 74.78 points of bonus energy damage.

I am not entirely convinced that the "20%" number is accurate -- it doesn't seem like I get those hitting 20% of the time. But between them, they come pretty close, so on average I'm getting pretty close to double damage over time. That gets us to about 20dpe, which is comparable to shadow maul per target.

... Does any of that make sense? Am I overlooking something?

The damage ticks once every 2 seconds from aura attacks (Death Shroud, Lightning Field, Blazing Aura). A damage proc will check once every 10 seconds with the aura active.

Damage procs offer an average of 14.4 points of damage (20%*72), which equates to an additional 2.88 points of damage per tic (14.4/5) or 1.44 (14.4/10) damage per second.

I don't bother with damage procs in the auras, as almost every build I have can put those sockets to better use.

So, every 10 seconds, it has a 20% chance of doing damage... to who, exactly? It seems to sometimes hit several people, other times only one, so I'm not sure what it's checking.

So, every 10 seconds (every 5 ticks), there is a 20% chance per enemy of taking the proc damage? That fits, and explains why it seemed to be triggering less often than I expected -- about 1/5 as often, in fact.

It also explains why it's bursty -- both procs are firing at the same time, if they fire, so every so often I have, for each target, two 20% chances of about 3x-4x the usual tick damage.

So because it's every-5-ticks, it's about 1/5 as good as I thought it would be, and I would probably be better off replacing them with either slots in other powers or better slotting in this power. (That's a separate consideration from, say, the benefits of any set bonuses.)

Damage auras are often the single most damaging power you have when you look at total damage inflicted. They don't do much to any individual target, but they keep on hitting everything near you for the entire fight so it really adds up. I'd suggest going for ED capped damage, lots of endurance reduction, and enough accuracy to hit reliably. About four slots should do the job if you frankenslot it. Procs really don't add much in auras, though the Armageddon proc is useful if you can afford it (and don't have a real PBAoE to put it in) since it hits harder and more often. The Fury of the Gladiator resist debuff proc might also be worth using if you're rich.

The endurance cost on Death Shroud is a bit high to run it before Stamina, but once you have SOs (and more importantly, SO-strength Multi-Strike and Cleaving Blow or Scirocco's IOs to frankenslot with) it'll probably be pretty endurance efficient if you fight decent size spawns. If you only fight groups of 2-3, it's a little harder to justify until you get your total endurance use down to a manageable level. Once you have your attacks and toggles well slotted for endurance and get a few recovery bonuses (and Dark Consumption) you should be able to run Death Shroud without killing your blue bar, but until then I'd only use it when fighting several enemies. The extra damage on one or two targets isn't worth having to stop to recover endurance, but even if it drains your blue bar the extra damage on five or six enemies at once will be more efficient than taking them down one at a time.

What I mean by "fire at the same time" is that both procs are always checked at the same time. Because they're in the same power; both are checked when it starts up, then every ten seconds, both are checked again. So I don't have one tick where the lethal damage proc is checked, and another tick where the energy damage proc is checked.

As to energy efficiency: I ran with death shroud from level one, originally slotting mostly for end redux. Yes, it's expensive, but it was pretty effective.

And yeah, looks like when I19 comes out, I'm gonna be swapping these out. Next up, determining whether procs work any better in caltrops. The relative damage is higher, but caltrops does not derive its primary value from damage done.

Procs in Caltrops operate the same way: they check each target on the Caltrop patch once every 10 seconds. As such, slotting procs really doesn't add a lot of damage... on the other hand, Caltrop base damage is so low that procs are better than damage enhancemets. It's not that procs in Caltrops are bad, it's just that many builds have better things they can do with those slots.

I have to admit that the Ragnarok Chance for Knockdown proc in Caltrops would be funny, but that's a lot of inf to invest just for humor value...

Well, it'd be expensive, but it'd actually be a pretty significant effect.

Huh. So, basically, it sounds like these procs are pretty much worthless, because they don't really have a 20% chance to do damage, they have about a 4% chance to do damage, in practice. Except presumably on click powers, but most click PBAoE have enough higher damage that the marginal benefit is trivial anyway.