On the usefullness of sadism support for bleeding

Hi, so i'm aware about what most people interested have watch, read and understood about Sadism support.

And it's not good.
Basically, there is usually not enough link available for the gem to become competitive with other options.

Now, the gem is a heavy modification on an obscure mecanism and i think it's necessary to kind of do the maths to understand why it's usually not good and why it could be an option for a 6th link.

The following is both a mixture of experimentation and heavy theorycrafting, just to empty my notepad on the internet

The first thing to evacuate is the resulting duration of a bleed instance.

And it's about 1 second.

You may have seen 0.56s on the wiki, and it's accurate (obviously) assuming no other modifications.
But with the 60% increased duration on the bleed mastery and starting from there, taking a bit of duration and a bit of faster damaging ailments here and there it end up around 1second+-0.2s.

The second thing is the dps increase that the gem bring. And it's between 20-32%, like most support gems. With some conditions.

Now for last, there is some conditions to analyse.
So, the gem modify the duration of a bleed from 5s to about 1s and bring on some moderate dps increase assuming i can reapply such bleed constantly.
Which is half of it.

Each hit that inflict bleeding add an instance of bleed on the enemy, and only the strongest one deals damage.
So for Sadism support to be interesting i must not only be able to apply bleeding at least every second, but this instance must be the strongest one possible.
Which mean that Ryslatha and volatility support are working against sadism, because it's less likely to apply enough bleeding instance to average up the dps of every instance dealing damage at a given time.

So the TLDR of it is sadism can be an option if :

- I want to have a short bleed duration

- I dont have crimson dance and the enemy is moving (unless going toward 45/50 hit/s)

- I can either :
1/ Apply a tons of bleed instance per second (so the average bleed instance is comparable to the one that would be ticking with another support)
or
2/ Apply a strong bleed instance every second (consistently strong)

- My hit applying bleed have a low variance


The 1/ is mostly skill dependent, strong candidate will be perforate, rain of arrow, vaal double strike, vaal flicker strike... Shield crush and lacerate seems a bit too low in hit numbers for this
I would sadly not put bladestorm in this either, since most of the hit would come from the half damage storm

The 2/ imply either a semi-slow hit providing a strong bleed once per second, like earthquake or an exerted slam on some apple eating maniac or using critical strike affliction / perfect agony with enough crit chance to land at least one every second.

The last point is weapon dependent. The only use case currently applied is with oro's sacrifice flicker strike on an ignite version, but i'm sure there's other possibility
Bloodseeker and soul taker have the lowest variance i've found on physical weapons. I imply that the variance is not modified through ryslatha or volatility support

After all that it still wont be a top dps support, but it might become a 6th link option at least.

It is still unlikely that pob will propose it unless you force it in your link, look at your bleed duration, count how many hit you can reasonably land within this duration, force this number into the bleed stack override, take enemy is moving and uncheck crimson dance.
And then undo this for every other gem you want to compare it to.

So unless specifically build for it, it's use case is mostly for fun if you have enough dps even without it

The last point i think worthy of mention is that another skill can inflict a long bleed while a shorter sadism one's is ticking. The longest bleed would then start dealing damage between the application of the shorter one (if this one is stronger)

I dont mention totem or most bow skills because i'm dont know much about those

I think the only potentially viable build for Sadism isn't for bleed but rather for poison. Specifically a build that uses Alchemist's Mark, stacks the modifier 300% increased poison dealt to non-poisoned enemies (because the duration is so short, you will constantly hit the enemy as non-poisoned), and basically treats it as an alternate hit build with high damage.

Yes, in theory if you have a slightly slower attack speed than the resulting poison duration it is a huge dps increase

Now the resulting poison duration is at 0.22, wich would place the attack speed target at 4aps, wich is kind off slow (2aps for viper strike)

Increasing poison duration being way more accessible on gear than applying faster one, it could lead to a "strong poison" applied playstyle.
The base damage of every instance seems a bit low for that (compared to bleed), and low tolerance stack additively with other increased damage source so it may become less effective at higher gear. Didnt POB it tho

Now there could be something to do with apep's rage and blade vortex if you could have 200% faster poison (including 50% from apep's rage and 79% from sadism), no increased poison duration and 10 blade.
Or just matching the number of blade with the resulting poison duration of whatever gear is equipped (7blades max with a perfect apep's, sadism and no increased duration, 6 with a low roll apep)
Or maybe just with swift affliction on the links, havent done the math

I tried doing a melee punture deadeye(for rupture nodes) with crimson dance and having summon reaper with sadism to hopefully get in a big fast bleed while I applied rupture stacks. It kinda worked but in the end was not worth it in my opinion, I do not know if the support gem is bugged but it deffinetly felt like a decrease in dps than just about any other relevant link.

while having rupture stacks, the reaper bleed should have a duration of 0.14s, since it doesnt use the player increased bleeding duration nor the puncture base duration

I dont know the attack speed of the reaper but i somehow doubt its in the ballpark of 7.2 wich would mean that the target spend a long time not bleeding from it, resulting in a huge loss of dps. And that's assuming the resulting reaper bleed would be the strongest one

yeah I did not account for such a low duration, which would explain my experience with it. there are things I could do to both extend the duration and increase the reaper attack speed, but that is a lot of investment.