Originally Posted by
Ladislaio
If NHB is 66 no matter the style for you, then you are shooting 22 shots/20s on the single. Pretty sure you are missing quite a few attack speed buffs, such as max BAB and possibly alac 20% instead of 15%. If you are missing these things enough then Dual Shooting is better because it doesn't scale as well with them, and conversely isn't hurt as much when you don't have the buffs. Honestly I think that the attack rate of Dual Shooting is capped and NHB exceeds that cap somewhere in low epics, or possibly high heroics. I was able to get about 66 bolts per NHB on single shooting with a BAB of 19 and no alac item. Tenser up, drink a haste pot, then do the test again.
Doing your test with single shooting (NHB + 40s no boost) I shot 145 bolts. Not going to test with dual shooting cuz I'm outta plat for resetting and this is close to the number predicted from other tests. This isn't a practical dps check tho, as anything you would be shooting for that long you should have started a NHB again - or - everything is so close to dead when NHB comes off of CD that you aren't intending to do dps. It is even less practical for a alchemist based build such as mine as even if I were out of NHB I should/would be using another boost when it came off CD.
Even with your test, at 95 doubleshot, you would have an effective 238 attacks single shooting and 245 dual shooting, meaning the DPS is almost the same between the two, even with the sub-optimal rotation. Closing the rotation up for rot on 40 not 60(so that you sync with reaper's strike; this is actually worse dps than just using NHB on cd, but it is a higher burst amount), you would have 88 bolts single and 116 double per 40s, which is 171 attacks per 40s at 95 doubleshot for both styles. In this case I would favor double shooting, but again, I think you are missing quite a bit of attack speed with your build which needs to be addressed to make single shooting a better option.
The doubleshot difference is there. Eyeballing the "largest number" in a quest isn't a very rigorous method of testing if it rolls over to triple shot or not, which you shouldn't because your doubleshot is less than 100. A better, but still not great, way of testing if doubleshot is lower on DS than SS is looking for the _lowest_ number when your DS is over 100. This is because on a DS you should get single shots about half the time, but you should never get a single shot on a SS xbow.
A big part of the reason why DS is mentioned but that "damage is +x" usually isn't is that "damage is +x" doesn't usually change in a significant amount between fully geared builds endgame that are running the same enhancement trees. Some things like "Are you running alchemical acid proc" result in a larger dps differences than "damage is +x" vs "damage is +x+15".
NHB options are Dual shooting (heavy, light); Single shooting (heavy, light); Great xbow(rog t5); repeater (heavy, light)(rog t5); repeater (heavy, light)(12 arti). What testing I have conducted suggest that, for a capped BAB and attack speed character, Repeaters > Single shooting (heavy, light) >= Great xbow > Dual shooting(heavy, light), in number of bolts fired durring NHB/EF. When you normalize for 100 doubleshot, it goes Single shooting (heavy, light) >= Great xbow > Repeaters > dual shooting (heavy, light)
repeater(heavy, light)(12 arti rog t5) and Great xbow (no alac enhancment) are also options, but I have no test data on them whatsoever.