Temple of Sethraliss

The in-game timer read 33:49 against a 32:01 par. Of the 108 seconds over, 90 are the death penalty - six deaths at fifteen seconds each, the rate that applies at +12 and above. Strip every death out and the group still finishes eighteen seconds late.

So two things were true at once. The route had no buffer in it: 1,780 seconds of combat, only 75 seconds of walking between packs, and a wipe recovery of 82 seconds on top. And the wipe was decisive - the first Avatar attempt ran 242 seconds and killed nothing, the retry another 247.

Hyporock finished on 195,411 damage per second across the clear against Arcane Mage's 242,069 - a gap of 90.3 million damage over the key. Splitting it by where the group was standing:

  phase                    seconds   his dps   mage dps   share of the gap
  trash                      1,022   253,855    293,327                45%
  Merektha                     128   223,170    404,490                25%
  Avatar (both attempts)       489   117,508    158,530                22%
  Adderis and Aspix            163   101,824    127,910                 5%
  Galvazzt                     146   130,950    148,939                 3%

On trash and on two of the four bosses he is within 12-13% of the mage, which for a melee spec against Arcane is unremarkable. Merektha is the outlier: 128 seconds, 6.5% of the clock, 25% of the whole gap. It is not target selection - both of them spent the fight on the snake adds in nearly identical proportions (Snake 40% and Merektha 38% for him, 48% and 36% for the mage) and his press rate was at its highest of the key there. Arcane simply detonated a snake pile better than Retribution did.

Asked directly, so measured directly. A button costs damage only if it takes a global cooldown, and six of his did not - proven by a rotation press landing inside four tenths of a second after them, which cannot happen if the global cooldown fired. Free this key: Rebuke x26 (which produced 23 of the group's interrupt stops), Divine Protection x15, Divine Steed x29, Avenging Wrath, the trinket and the damage potion.

That leaves 49 presses that did take a global cooldown - Hammer of Justice x10, Cleanse Toxins x9, Blessing of Sacrifice x8, Divine Shield x6, Lay on Hands x5, the Healthstone macro x5, Blessing of Protection x3, and one each of Blinding Light, Hand of Reckoning and the battle resurrection. At his measured global cooldown of 1.19 seconds that is 58 seconds of rotation time, 3.0% of his combat clock. Priced at what an average press of his was worth this key - 210,000 damage, counting the Divine Arbiter and Highlord's Judgment procs the presses drove - it comes to 10.3 million damage, about 5,300 damage per second, 2.7% of his output. Counting only the direct damage of the buttons themselves it is 7.8 million, or 4,000 per second.

Call it a ceiling rather than a loss, because the global cooldowns were there to spend. Inside pulls he had 86 stretches with no press at all, 274 seconds beyond a single global cooldown - 4.7 times what the utility used. And 10.3 million against a 90.3 million gap to the mage is 11% of it. Against Destro Lock, 9,000 damage per second ahead of him, the utility more than covers the difference.

The 274 seconds of no-press time inside pulls is the larger number and the one worth working on. Some of it is unrecoverable - moving, a target dying, a mechanic - but the shape of it is familiar from his last six keys. Blade of Justice, his documented lever, was cast 177 times at a median gap of 9.03 seconds, which is the right cadence, but 19 of those gaps ran over twenty seconds and eight over thirty. That tail is 14.0 seconds per minute of a button that recharges in roughly nine.

The median is the good news: when he plays the button he plays it at the right speed. It is the stretches where it stops being pressed that cost, and this is the highest key that pattern has been measured in.

Corruption Burst is an instant with no cast bar - three seconds of aura, Shadow school, from the Lifeforce adds. It took 1,366,756 off Hyporock in four tenths of a second, and did the same to Arcane Mage, Destro Lock and Disc Priest within the same instant. No defensive was pressed by any of them, and there was no window in which to press one after seeing it.

His own last presses read cleanly - one button every second, unbroken, right up to the moment it landed, and a Rebuke one second before he died. Nothing in his hands was wrong. What was available and unspent was Divine Protection: last used at 23:14, three and a half minutes earlier, and therefore off cooldown. It is a pre-press, not a reaction.