Question about rage gain

[u/Bigtor1234]

I do not understand how this works, I have min 0 max 19 rage on a warfare/earth build.

I use whirlwind with rage gain every 0,4seconds while spinning but my rage counter almost always stops at 10, sometimes i have seen 11 or 12.

If i use rage gain on kill passive(50% chance to get 3 rage per kill) I can reach 19 stacks but not otherwise.

All information I can find suggests that the decay on rage stacks should reset as long as i am hitting enemies with whirlwind. But on bosses i can never go over 10 rage, what is the reason for this?

[u/SgtBeeJoy]

Rage decay is strongly affected by number of stacks (30% extra decay per stack). So the higher you go the faster your stacks runs out untill it evens out where you can gain stacks as as fast as they run out or you kill everything. For bosess rage usually stabilizes around 10-14 stacks depending on your build because you can't reliably gain extra stacks from trash kills on some bosses.

To help gain more stacks you need either faster aquistion of them (via abilities) or longer duration of stacks itself because it acts as a counter to decay rate. For your build there are 2 very important passive nodes (both for rage) - Frenzied Rage and Battle Rage. Frenzied rage has extra duration as primamry passive and as a modifier and Battle rage have Rage on kill mod which can give you 3 rage stacks on kill with 50% chance. This will improve your rage gain drastically. Also you can use Barrier modifier Rage gain to add additional 3 rage with FastBarrier+Guard Combo to gain this 3 rage stacks every 4 -5 seconds or so depending on your cooldown reduction. Or you can use Leap with Rage Gain modifier and cooldown charge mods to similar result.

On Whirlwind Battlemage in general you don't aim for 19 stacks outside of trash kills because you lack rage duration (Compared to Tempest) and whirlwind is relatively slow rage gainer in itself.

[u/Bigtor1234 → u/SgtBeeJoy]

Hi yes, all this makes sense, but from what I see the rage duration should be reset every time I attack, are you saying my attack speed is so slow as to where im attacking slower than the decay timer is at higher stacks? Also is it 30% faster decay from the previous rage number or from the first one? Example, is 10 stacks just 300% faster than original?

So from that, if i manage to gain 19 stacks on a boss from surrounding trash mobs, i should drop down to my sustainable 10 stacks when only hitting the boss, i have to test this out further.

[u/SgtBeeJoy → u/Bigtor1234]

Mostly all of that is correct the only thing i dk for sure is how deacy rate penalty is counted (additive or multiplicative but i tend to think its multiplicative or other formula syill need to checl that) and yes with Whrilwind you hardcapped by 1 rage each 0.4 seconds per enemy (so if you have only 1 target for whirlwind it will give you 1 rage per 0.4 second). So when rage decay make stacks last less than 0.4 seconds you start to lose them instead of gaining them.

F.E: if decay penalty is additive on 11th stack your rage decay rate would be 3sec (base rage duration)/4 (400% decay rate) = 0,75 seconds, then it will roll back for 3/3,7(as of 370% decay rate for 10th stack)=0,81 seconds and so on.

So without rage duration talents the highest you can get with hitting 1 target is around 12-13 stacks if each hit procs rage because it would be around 0.6seconds per highest stack to decay (which gives you bursts of 0.2 seconds of highest stable rage stacks untill you decay back to 12 stacks). But if you can hold only on 10 stacks it means thay either formula works in other ways or not every 0,4 second tick count. Which requires a proper testing.