The Withering Presence Paradox: Fast Forward vs. Persistence Support (Optimal usage)

I’ve been crunching numbers on Withering Presence and discovered a bit of a paradox. Here’s the simple breakdown:

Default Withering Presence:
– Lasts 6 seconds by default, ticking from 1.8 - 1.42 seconds (depending on gem level).
- Because it auto-recasts on expiration, the real “useful” trigger happens when an extra tick can be squeezed in.
– You might expect around 4-5 ticks per cycle (starting giving 5 ticks at lvl 17).
- From gem level 17+ you get 500 ticks per 10 minutes.

Fast Forward Support:
– This support reduces the skill’s duration by 30%, cutting a 6-second cycle down to about 4.2 seconds.
– On its own, that might drop you from 4 ticks to 3 ticks per cycle (since 4.2 ÷ 1.42 barely misses fitting a fourth tick).
– However, adding +0.1 sec from quality bumps the cycle to 4.3 seconds. Now ticks occur at 0, 1.42, 2.84, and 4.26 seconds—four ticks per cycle.

The Paradox:
Over 10 minutes, a 4.3‑second cycle gives you ~139 cycles, which means roughly 558 ticks total. That extra 0.1 second per cycle (thanks to quality) is what makes the recast “hit the sweet spot.”
In contrast, using Persistence support (which adds 40% duration) would lengthen the cycle further. More duration doesn’t help here—it simply means fewer recasts and no extra tick, because the tick count per cycle is determined by the discrete tick interval and the cycle length. In this setup, more duration actually works against you by reducing the recast frequency and overall tick count if your build benefits from the refresh.

In short:
Most optimal setup is +0.1 duration from quality upgrade and Fast Forward. It will sit at roughly 418.6 ticks per 10 minutes up until lvl 19 and at lvl 20 it will jump to 558.1 ticks.
Never use Persistence, it drops your overall ticks per 10 minutes in every combination possible (even with Fast Forward). Just don't touch it.

Best route:
Use Fast Forward on an 0 quality version of Withering Presence up until you hit lvl 17 (because 428.6 ticks is better than just 400) of that gem and then remove Fast Forward from it to jump to 500 ticks per 10 minutes. When you hit lvl 20 with that gem, apply Fast forward again, but only if you upgraded the gem to 2% quality and you will have the most optimal setup.
UPDATE:
However if you want to Vaal it for +1 lvl to get gem 21, then apply just 1% of upgrade and then Vaal it. You will get 564.7 ticks per 10 minutes.

goat

you forgot about calculating stacking. The goal isn't ticks / 10 minutes. It's Max stacks of wither. I'm too lazy to do the math, but more duration means more stacks of wither.

I think this calculation assumes that reapplying wither resets the duration of all present stacks which it does not.

I am not sure if they changed it in 0.2 because they did change this for critical weakness.

Your understanding of how Wither works is incorrect. Nobody listen to this man.