I don’t usually top 2 myself, don’t really have the time for it, and even sometimes when I go for it, others can do the end of sub grind either faster, more efficiently, or just more thoroughly than I can. Sometimes you budget 3 hours to grind everything to 1, but end up leaving a few hundred points on the board, and those are the points that you’re losing to the guys that did it all in 3 hours, or gave themselves 3.5 and did a bit more. As for the math, there’s no tricky stuff you can do to get more points than clearing everything right when your timers reset every 8 hours, and then clearing everything to 1 at the end.
That said there might be a more optimum strategy FOR YOU. Maybe you know you can’t devote 3+ hours at the end of the sub, let’s say only 2 hours, so you can only pack in 3-4 clears instead of the full 6. Or like you allude to, your roster can’t handle the full grind and you run out of health packs, which is frankly a similar issue, since it also leaves you short on clears. If you’re sticking to normal clears (one of everything), then this can be easy on the math. However, no one realistically does this, since it’s probably not optimal to do so. Maybe you have time for 4 full clears, but instead you end up doing 5 of all the hardest nodes + essentials, and only 3 of the easier nodes.
Let’s look at the simpler math solution: If you give yourself time to do 4 clears at the end of a sub, and let’s say that takes 2 hours (probably optimistic, but we’re making math easier here), then when you start your grind your nodes will be at 23/24 X (one stack off is -1/6, but 6/8 of that 1/6 has regen’d, so it’s -1/6+3/24 = -1/24). each subsequent time you hit it, will be 1/6 less. So, your 4 clears will net you roughly (again, it will likely be more, cause some nodes will regen in the time it has taken you to hit others, while some of that is built into your normal clear schedule, not all of it is) (23+19+15+11)/24 X. This comes out to 68/24 or 2.83 X (compared to before, which was 3.125 iirc)
Now, how does this compare to maybe doing an earlier clear between the 3rd full one and your last grind? If you do a second clear right after the previous one, that will net you 5/6 the total points. I’m going to neglect the actual time taken to do this clear, just for my sanity’s sake. If you wait those same 6 hours you waited before to start your grind, you will be starting with nodes at a level of 19/24 instead. So now you will get (19+15+11+7)/24 X for your grind. This comes out to only 52/24, but adding in the additional 5/6 gets you to 72/24, which is 3X.
This is where the tricky part comes in and how much time you have left really matters. As you can see above doing that extra clear actually helps you when you only have time for 4 clears at the end. But, if we magically tack on an extra clear that you somehow managed to do in the same amount of time, we get to add 7/24 to the top method and only 3/24 to the bottom method, which actually puts them equal to each other. Give time for the full 6 and saving them all for the end is obviously better.
The trickiest thing to determine is the tradeoff between time and points. I posted about this somewhere before, but every hour you wait on your final grind nets you an additional 1/56 X points for every time you hit the node. So if you do the full stack, 6 hits, that’s 1/8th of the base points of the node you either lose by going earlier or gain by waiting longer. For an essential node worth 1k+ that’s a decent chunk, for the trivial goon nodes, it’s not even 20 points. However, waiting and missing out on hitting nodes completely will clearly hurt you. That last hit of a node is worth 1/6th of the base value, which hopefully you don’t need math to see is larger than the 5/56th (less than 1/8th) you would get by waiting an hour and only hitting it 5 times.
So, in the end I’d say the clearly best method is going to be perfect clears right when your timers reset followed by grinding everything down to 1 in the last 3-4 hours. Lacking the time it takes to do this final grind, you’d be best off either doing a second full clear 8 hours from the end and then doing as much as you can in the last few hours you can devote to it, OR you can use your free time in the last 8 hours of the sub to hit some of the lower point nodes periodically since this will hurt your final score the least, and then grind down the higher point nodes as close to the end as you can. The problem with this last strategy is that scaling could potentially hurt you. Hitting all those easy nodes first could make the harder nodes even harder, to the point where you can’t grind them all efficiently. Same can be said even in a “normal” grind. People will tell you to get the most points you should grind nodes down to 1 starting with the lowest points and moving to the highest. This is certainly effective, but it saves all the hardest nodes for last, meaning your scaling will be at it’s highest for the toughest nodes, and you run the risk of running out of health packs or taking too long on those overscaled nodes and running out of time. So it may be best to do some of the harder nodes first, then letting your A-team take a rest while your B-team takes care of the easy nodes, and finally returning to the hardest nodes, even though this method is not technically the way to score the most points.
Finally, a lot will come down to your bracket luck. More often than not you will find at least 2 people willing to grind for 3+ hours at the end of each sub and the only way to compete is to do the same. Sometimes you can get lucky and maybe only 4-5 clears at the end will be enough to distance you from 3rd place instead of the full grind to 1.
Wow, that was a lot. Feel free to ask more questions, or shoot me a PM.