I've been playing General's Cry berserker this league, starting with Blade Flurry and transitioning into Shield Crush for extra defenses. I've noticed something funny about the PoB numbers - they all seem insane. Here's my current PoB, it says that I have about 15.8m Sirus dps when 2 waves from the Shield Crush overlap (which is likely), with a reasonable setup and no flasks. This build is in no way super-optimised or ready for The Feared, but it's in a solid state.

https://pastebin.com/QJmUH5ik

Now, I have played builds with a shit ton of dps before and the General's Cry build doesn't feel like a 16m dps skill if I'm honest... it's good but not that good. It's a comfortable mapper and bosser but doesn't delete any content if I'm honest.

So I realised the pob numbers are misleading, and here's why. They factor in attack speed but do not factor in the cooldown. The issue with that is that the mirage warriors attack once and once only, so attack speed is largely irrelevant. However the consistency of your damage is directly related to your cooldown, which is not factored into the dps numbers in any way right now.

So my current stats are:

• 15.8m sirus DPS
• 1.52s cooldown
• 2.66 attack speed

The real numbers are more like:
Normalise the DPS to a single attack 15.8/2.66 = 5.93m

Factor in the cooldown. This is a point I haven't seen discussed often, the current top builds on PoE Ninja try to lower their cooldown but don't seem to make a point of it. In fact for a while I have experimented with a hunter influenced axe with a warcry cooldown mod which brought my cd to about 1.39 at the cost of malediction. I found that cooldown to give me very consistent damage, if less defensive.

1s/1.52s = 0.65

5.93 * 0.65 = 3.9m

So the real DPS is far closer to 3.9m than 15.8m. Thats a HUGE difference in how the skill feels and PoB needs to factor this in. A lot of build guides mis-advertise the damage.

Similar story with Blade Flurry - the top GC Blade Flurry build on PoE Ninja right now has about 28m Sirus dps. However this is channeled at 6 stages, with no cooldown factored in. With the mirages channeling for 0.6 seconds only, this is very attack speed dependant. A lot of builds will simply not reach the 6 stages and therefore their dps will be lower. Optimistically if they channel to 5 stages (0.91 multiplier) and you factor the cooldown in (1.52s), that 28m turns into 16m just from correcting the numbers alone.

I think I've done the math right and welcome any discussion. Just wanted to put this out there so people don't get lost in the pob numbers too much.