Some posts about divine charges got me thinking about how time-efficient invention actually is. If we assume that bosses can be done with or without augmented gear, and that augmented gear is just going to increase our DPM and our kills per hour, how efficient is it really when you consider the time spent collecting charges?
Depending on your perks invention is somewhere in the range of 10-20% DPM increase as far as I'm aware. If I'm as generous as possible and assume 20%, that means every 5 hours spent killing a boss with augmented gear gives you the equivalent kill count of 6 hours without. In theory this means you need to be able to gather at least 5 pvm hours worth of energy in a single hour of divination to make your augmented gear time-efficient.
My gear (t90 weapon with t80 armour) burns 3.93 charges/second at 120 invention. Over the course of an hour, with a little downtime and banking factored in, this works out to around 4.5 divine charges. A divine charge takes me rougly 3 minutes to fill with a vacuum at radiant springs and 87 divination. That works out to 20 divine charges per hour or about 4.4 hours of PvM. Just below the breakeven point.
So even with the most generous assumption that invention is responsible for 20% of my DPM: Filling divine charges does not seem to be worth my time. The activity provides no practical amount of experience and no benefits outside of providing charges and the time I save using augmented gear does not make up for the time I spend gathering energy. So would it not be technically better for someone in my position to unaugment my gear and stop using invention? I think the answer really is whether or not you value the AFK time of charge gathering more than the enjoyment you get from PvM. A player who enjoys PvM more than divination should, at my stage of progress, theoretically use unaugmented gear.
This of course doesn't account for the idea that some bosses may require augmented gear to get consistent kills or hit certain skips, DPM doesn't necessarily equate to KPH in this way. It also doesn't consider that higher KPH conserves supplies like overloads which have their own time-efficiency equations. There's too many variables to say anything for certain but I am toying with the idea of running unaugmented gear in most of my PvM encounters, at least until I bother levelling divination.
