Purpose of preheat in TC?

[DFGL-ion]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum or should I say I've been a silent observer for awhile as I usuaaly feel I have nothing whatsoever to contribute.
However I have a question I would like to ask and hopefully I could also get some feedback from the developers. I completely understand the idea behind preheat, but just can't seem to find it's purpose in TC.
Isn't TC in itself already a type of "pre-heat"? What I mean is, let's assume I have a 0.5 SS316L build setup in TC (I'm using SS for the sake of argument but it could just as well be Ti or any TC wire you like) and I have my watts all the way to max (let's say on my DNA75, so I'm at 75W) now when I hit the fire button the mod will run as many watts possible/needed/pre determined through the coil until it hits that temperature and then the mod (hopefully) cuts back on power to maintain that temperature in effect automatically creating a preheat like effect, right? So what would be the point of setting a pre-heat function to such a coil, if the mod is already running that much power and will cut back to maintain the temperature? Assuming I do have a preheat setup in order let's say to decrease ramp up time, why would I then want to limit the mod from running more power through the coil after the preheat time limit is reached if it is already limiting power anyway? Basically what I'm asking is: how is preheat doing anything for me that just setting the mod to a sufficient wattage for said build isn't already doing? Now I've tried a bunch of different preheat settings as well as not having any preheat at all and all I can say is, I can't feel any difference. Yes I've seen the graphs on PBusardo for the punch settings etc. and even he says he can't really feel any difference (although he was referring specifically to punch settings in preheat). So, what am I missing out on? Now, preheat for a non TC coil, that actually makes a ton of sense to me, but maybe I'm just an Idiot?

[VapingBad]

That view relies on the assumption you set watts much higher than you need with temp protection and while that works fine with Evolv boards it gives a far poorer vape with the boards that use pulse time modulation to average the temperature.  It is also generally bad practice IMO because if you fit a coil with a lower TCR and forget to change your settings or there is a connection fault you can run far more power that you would wish through your coil, I have anti lock breaks on my car, but I still avoid breaking hard if the front wheels are not straight.  Evolv designed the DNA 40, 200, 75, 250 & 60 to protect you from exceeding a set temperature expecting most vapers to set the watts to the watts they want to vape at so spending most of the time below this limit, just hitting it if airflow or wicking decreased.  But lots of us ended up setting things so we vape at that limit, but even them preheat still allows you to safely reduce the preheat time especially with bigger coils that need a lot of power to heat and far less to stay at temp.  I always have far higher watts set in preheat than in the main power setting, this can be as different as 200 and 50 W and without preheat it would take longer for the coils to come to temp.  You could also set preheat to heat your coil more slowly if you wanted.  

It started that way to give the best experience coming from how people vaped before temp protection and this is as valid now as it was then, and for people who just blindly max the watts it still give more flexibility for fine tuning.

Punch is how close it gets to temp before switching from preheat to temp protection with (IIRC) 0 meaning within 165 F and 11 within 10 F, but it you have the watts and preheat watts set the same or less than the watts or the watts far higher than you vape at you have effectively undermined the preheat punch setting so are unlikely to notice a difference.