WMs and MP regen

[oblivious]

This came up in another thread in the context of whether WMs were stronger than other pet masters. I decided to take it to another thread rather than go off on a long tangent. I should warn you that this post does kind of go off on tangents (but well-titled tangents!)

WMs (defilers, really) have better MP regen per AP spent compared to LSes and Liches (shepherd and sorcerers really, but not necessarily all their exits). However WMs are limited by the MP available for them to steal. The motivating question of this thread is how significant this addition limitation is and whether it makes WMs stronger than other petmasters in context (context might include that LS pets are stronger and Lich pets are cheaper). I don't expect we'll come up with a good answer, but I think the discussion might be interesting. The OP is not intended to try to definitively answer the motivating question of the thread.

common circumstances to summon things in
There are five pet summoning circumstances I commonly find myself in with my WM. (probably only four are relevant to the discussion and two of those are largely redundant, but I'll list them all anyway):
1) building up a defensive pet hoard from scratch
2) maintaining a defensive pet hoard
3) building up a large mobile pet hoard to raid with
4) reinforcing a pet horde on site of a raid
5) summoning/maintaining pets to hunt with (for me this is just leaving tentacles all over the map)

(1) and (3) seem redundant, but it's notable that (1) needs to be sustainable while (3) does not.

when is MP availability a significant constraint?
(1) is hugely limited because you don't have a full SH to work with. You generally have a small group of factionmates who don't have much MP each.
(2) and (3) are the interesting cases that warrant further analysis and will probably dominate this thread.
(4) faces no significant constraint.
(5) will almost always have some MP available to do the job (if there's someone to kill, there's someone to steal MP from), but unlike other petmasters you can't summon pets in random locations in one big burst. So there are ups and downs.

How constrained will "sustainable defensive" (case 2) and "unsustainable raid-prep" (case 3) hoards be?
My WM is the only MP-thief in the game's third largest faction. I personally face no serious MP constraint here under typical circumstances. Thus my one WM is probably stronger than one LS in a similar Good faction. The real question is how many WMs you would need to add before MP availability became the bottleneck.

Let's stress-test this by considering the "raid prep" case where every WM spends an entire day building up a hoard to raid with. To be clear, I will outline the assumed behavior of the WMs:

* raid is announced for 5 pm thursday
* WMs spend AP wed morning however they wish (which probably includes rejuving their existing pet hoard to higher-than-usual levels of AP), then save up AP until night.
* around 9 PM wed the WMs start spending their AP in a burst to build up pets (in addition to their normally sustained hoard)
* The WMs continue this until they need to start saving AP for the raid (how much AP they feel the need to save will vary and will likely depend on their pet composition).

Tek says that under this circumstance each WM would need 7 dudes who spend no MP (or more who spend some of but not all their MP). This is in addition to any other defilers/exits who might be stealing MP. Based on this, I might guesstimate that a faction can support 1 active WM raider for every 12-15 members it has before MP availability becomes a major constraint. This ignores Tattoo of Soul, Arcane Well, etc.

arcane well
Intuition probably tells you that Arcane Well is more beneficial to WMs than other petmasters since WMs can steal the MP regen from others. This may be true, but it isn't obvious to me. Arcane Well raises the MP availability constraint from WMs thus allowing WMs to have better MP regen per AP, but Liches will have more pets per MP and LSes will have stronger pets per MP. If MP availability is not constraining the WM, then the WM actually benefits least of all the petmasters.

Intuition probably tells you that Arcane Well doubles the MP available to WMs in a faction (assuming WMs can log on often enough to take advantage of the MP), but this is wrong. Some characters will have use for all their naturally occurring MP, but not the additional MP from Arcane Well (ie MP regen is normally a constraint for them, but AP and max MP become bottlenecks when MP regen goes up). So Arcane Well actually more than doubles the MP available to Dark Heart.

[Ongewitter]

[oblivious]

Although Liches can get external healing (and probably will) and LSes can be energized (though that's less likely). Do you assume the LS to have Devout Supplication, or consider greater results?

I assume 7 MP comes from (10 MP * 70% to-hit). Dark Heart actually seems to be bugged so that instead of stealing 11 MP and costing 1 it actually steals 10 MP and costs 1, so it should be more like (9 MP * 70% to-hit).

[Ongewitter]

Wow, that was a lazy calculation then. A WM only gets 4 good hits on someone. So it's more like 40MP per target for 5.71 hits (and as much MP).
So, how about 34.29MP per target and 12.43 targets.

I'll edit it.

Oh and only Lesser Results. Devout Supplication and Prayer is Tek's area of expertise. I'll just quote him: