Are Surgeon flasks as good as everyone says?

I honestly don't see the power of Surgeon's flasks in the state they're in right now. For builds that don't spam unbuffed spells/attacks CoC-style, Perpetual seems outright better to me. I tested it with this abomination of a bow and a diamond flask to bring my crit chance up to 84% with these flasks:



In Dried Lake, it was a complete blowout. The Perpetual flask, even at only 26%, was consistently recharging much faster than the two Surgeon's flasks. This makes sense, since most mobs were dying in a single crit, thus 26% increased charge recovery being better than 20% for a charge. But even with that bow in a t8 map, simulating running harder maps with a better bow, the Perpetual flask was still recharging a good bit quicker than the other two. So I'd assume that, unless it takes multiple crits to kill a single enemy, i.e. bosses and the such or CoC builds, Surgeon's flasks don't have much of an effect.

And on a side note, the reason why I bothered testing this is because of the Surgeon node coming up in the Pathfinder tree. It looks like max ele resistances round down, since a +8% flask effect node coupled with the +10% max res flasks brought max resistances up by 10% instead of 10.8%. With that said, most Pathfinders are going to have +15% flask effect, making the new +6% max res flasks go to only +6.9% max res, so it won't have an effect on that. I'm honestly thinking of foregoing the Surgeon node to get another flask effect node for that +1% max res and added benefit to ToH/Atziri's and whatever new flasks may come out.

Outside of coc spam and boss fights that last over 10 seconds is not that crucial to have legacy surgeon flasks.

An ample flask with node investment will actually do more vs bosses and have as good or better upkeep vs trash mobs.
I found this to be far superior a surgeon equivalent:


The only surgeon flask I use currently is :

And it would make no difference it was perpetual or ample.

I really like Surgeon's Flasks on philosophical grounds more than anything else (and I'm spoiled in having quite a few legacy versions sitting around with 100% chance on crit - can't teach an old dog new tricks oi). I'm not much of a power-player and it will probably be a long time before I can "efficiently clear top content." That said, my preferred playstyle (which I hear doesn't match POE meta right now) is very prolonged one-on-one fights. I like to humiliate bosses. Surgeon's is the only mod that can sustain flask charges when there are no adds (side monsters) in a boss fight.

That said, add-less bosses are few and far between, so the "optimal choice" is probably something other than Surgeon's nowadays. But I'd probably still personally use Surgeon's flasks at least for a while on any of my high-crit builds, just because I like having the peace of mind that if I run out of flask charges but don't have small fry to kill, I can get the flasking I need by actually fighting the big main (unique, rare, boss monsters).

Not sure if I would eventually switch flasks when forced to use non-legacy Surgeon's. I probably would if it made a noticeable difference, wouldn't if the difference were not noticeable. Sorry I can't provide more insight on that.