Not Quite Perfect

What’s the ideal 10-man raid composition?

What classes would be in it? Which buffs would be cast? Which talent specs would be chosen for which roles? How perfect would these runs be? And would you actually want to be a part of it?

I wouldn’t.

As the theory goes – and I think we all know how accurate theories are – a perfect raid composition could tackle any situation perfectly. But of course, you’re assuming that each and every one of those people is perfectly skilled. And I would much rather be in a non-ideal group of skilled people than the ‘perfect raid’ any day.

Seriously, though. I imagine this differs from player to player, but the idea of just blowing through instance after instance with no trouble is, well, pretty boring. What fun is it to breeze through content without a single glitch? What kind of story does that make for?

I have a fair number of friends who don’t play WoW. So if I want to talk to them about the game, I have to make the story interesting enough to cross through the language barrier. Sure, maybe some people find “And then we totally one-shotted Lady Deathwhisper. Everything went perfectly according to plan and we pwned her,” to be fascinating. I guess it’s good for bragging rights, at least.

But I find it much more exciting to relay the tale of how one by one our raid bit the dust by the wandering ghosts, and with Deathwhisper at 1% the lone dps shaman and dps warrior still standing managed to take her down that last percentage point and get us the loot. Or how we four-manned the vampire boss in Ahn’kahet that offed the dps right away, and we watched the tank and healer go back and forth for nearly ten minutes against the guy, and in the end the healer died and the tank solo’d the vampire the rest of the way down.

Those stories are epic. They’re tales of people with skill who defeat the odds. The probability of success is stacked against them and still they pull out ahead. That is what I love seeing in this game.

So people can have their perfect raid compositions if they want. I’m a Beast Mastery hunter – I’m not a part of anybody’s ideal raid. I’ll stick with my rag-tag band of misfits, thank you very much. And oh, what tales I’ll live to tell!

Autocasts, Pet Focus and Respecs, Oh My!

UPDATE – THIS POST IS INACCURATE PLEASE REFER TO THE CORRECTION POST HERE

One of the things that makes our pets easier to handle is the Autocast functionality. As long as that little sparkly edge is glittering on the button, our pets will cast it every time they’re able. Otherwise we’d have so many buttons to push we’d all just reroll rogue.

But as OutDps pointed out earlier this week, apparently our Autocasts aren’t quite as reliable as they should be. In fact, one could even say there is a delay on the cast. Delays that rob us of well-deserved dps. This, put succinctly, is a problem.

Rarely am I one to simply take information at face value, so last evening I plopped myself down by the Heroic dummy in Orgrimmar and took a couple of logged shots to see the difference firsthand.

While I was at it, I went ahead and tested Wolf vs. Devilsaur again. And then respecced. But I’ll get to that.

First of all, to determine the autocast latency, I used my old Pet Focus spreadsheet to see the lag between my pets’ casts, as well as my pet’s focus effiency. I compared the information from the training dummy against the data from IC on Sunday, just for consistency’s sake as well. What I found was, well, sobering.

Mahrou is casting his Furious Howl once every 30 seconds, a stat that remained the same through three different data sets. His cooldown is 28 seconds, which means there’s a two second delay between casts. This, thankfully, isn’t too terrible. Yes, it’d be ideal for him to be casting every 28 seconds, but when you take other abilities into consideration (as well as focus usage), a two second delay isn’t crippling. Over the course of a 7-minute battle, that would would only mean one extra cast.

Bite, however, is hurting badly. Averaging out the three data sets, Mahrou is using Bite once every 2.5 seconds – a full second longer than the cooldown. Since Bite is his focus dump, the only thing he uses focus on other than Furious Howl (once every 30 seconds, remember), that means his Bite damage is effectively two-thirds of what it could be. For every two casts, he could have cast one extra time.

My only solution to this is the one that OutDps proposed – macroing Bite with other oft-used abilities as well as keeping it on Autocast. Hopefully, by throwing it on with Steady Shot and Arcane Shot, I can force it to activate just a bit more often. I won’t be able to reach the uptime that Autocast should theoretically handle on its own, but it will help.

With that out of the way, it was on to pet comparisons. Mahrou still pulls ahead of Mijikai, sadly. The difference, however, is close enough that it’s nearly negligible. So if you really, really hate Wolves, you should be alright with a Devilsaur. But if you want to maximize your dps, stick with the Wolves. They’re awesome anyway.

Lastly, something I noticed from the pet focus spreadsheet is that my pets are wasting a significant amount of focus. On average, they were only using 50% of all focus gained – meaning that the other 50% is lost to the aether. I can only assume this is due to my crit rating (36% unbuffed) causing far more Go for the Throat procs than initially planned. Since I only have one point in GftT, I yanked a point from Bestial Discipline and fretted over where to put it.

That point is now sitting in Aimed Shot.

I feel kinda dirty. But it’s a dps-increasing dirty (200 dps on the training dummy) so I don’t think I can complain too much. Yet.

Focus!

I learned a lot today.

Mainly, I learned a lot about Excel spreadsheets and how fascinatingly useful they are. I also learned about the limitations of said spreadsheets, as well as my own patience.

That said, here’s the fruit of my labors:

Simple Pet Focus Spreadsheet

Simply put, it’s a hacked-together calculator that asks for some information from your WWS/WMO log. Give it the basic info in the ‘START’ tab, then click over to the ‘FINISH’ tab and take a look at your pet’s focus generation and use.

It’s not the be-all, end-all of pet focus analysis, but it’s certainly a start. If your pet is wasting 80% of its focus, after all, something’s going wrong somewhere.

Let me know how it works! It worked when I tested it out, but never underestimate the bugs that can arise after testing.

With a fine-tooth comb

After picking up a nice cloak from Ulduar, I found myself over hit cap and worried that Mijikai was getting more focus than she needed. So I took a look at our Heroic Auriaya kill to get a better idea of what could change.

I initially meant to keep an eye on Mijikai’s focus myself during the fight, to see how she was handling focus, but ended up concentrating too much on the actual fight to do so. Instead, I picked apart the WMO log to try to extrapolate the information I wanted.

First things first: I had to figure out how much focus Mijikai used overall. According to the log, she used Bite (25 focus) 272 times during the fight, which ran 546 seconds (9:06), effectively once every two seconds. She used Monstrous Bite (20 focus) 60 times during the fight, effectively once every nine seconds.  Doing a bit of math gave me the final number: 8000 focus used over the entire fight.

The next part was slightly easier: figuring out how much focus Mijikai had gained. I have two points each in Bestial Discipline and Go for the Throat, netting Mijikai 43 focus every 4 seconds, and 50 focus every time I get a ranged crit. With a total of 94 ranged crits during the fight (Volley doesn’t count), this all added up to Mijikai gaining 10,560 focus during the fight.

Big, impressive numbers overall…until you realize that means Mijikai wasted over 2500 focus.

Now, some extra focus is preferable. I don’t know exact numbers, but you want your pet to have a little bit more than necessary to allow for a fuller focus bar during the fight. Better too much focus than too little. But 2500 extra focus goes beyond that rule of thumb. By a lot.

So I started working out alternate situations. I switched up my talents on paper and did the math to see how much focus Mijikai would have gained with different combinations during that fight:

BD 2/2, GftT 1/2   -   219 wasted focus
BD 1/2, GftT 2/2   -   1716 wasted focus
BD 1/2, GftT 1/2   –   633 focus short
BD 0/2, GftT 2/2  -   24 focus short

The last one seemed worth trying at first – yes, I’d be short focus, so Mijikai would do less damage, but that would give me two talent points to slide around to give me more damage. It could work out – until I realized that I needed both points in BD for my talent distribution to work. I wasn’t willing to take the risk and put the liberated points into talents I didn’t need, so I scrapped that idea.

That leaves the first one as my only current choice – two points in BD to keep my BM build solid, a point in GftT to help keep the focus up, and that will give me an extra point to rearrange. Since I’m over hit cap, I’m going to yank a point from Focused Aim to put somewhere else as well. Now the question is where?

There were three  accessible damage talents that stood out to me as I poured through the talent tree: Cobra Strikes (currently at 1/3), Improved Stings (0/3), and Improved Tracking (0/3). I picked through each one, using the Auriaya log as a base, to figure out which would benefit me the most.

Cobra Strikes: Maxing this out would give my Arcane, Steady and Kill shot crits a 60% of having Mijikai’s next two special attacks hit. Since Mijikai uses Bite 450% more often than Monstrous Bite, I used that for my calculations to be on the safe side.

I had 32 qualifying crits for Cobra Strikes during the fight. At a 60% rate, 19 of them would proc Cobra Strikes, and theoretically 8 of them already did (from my one point in the talent). That leaves 11 potential additional procs, equalling 22 Bite crits.

Bite did average damage of 727 per hit, and 1548 per crit. Doing the math (which I won’t bore you with here) indicated that the two extra points in Cobra Strikes would have resulted in 18,062 extra damage, an overall increase of 0.8%.

Improved Stings: Two points in this talent would increase my Serpent Sting damage by 20%. This calculation was easy – Serpent Sting did 58,719 damage, so the 20% results in a 11,743 damage increase. That would make it an increase of 0.6% overall.

Improved Tracking: Putting two points in this talent would increase all of my ranged damage against the tracked creature types (Beast, Demon, Dragonkin, Elemental, Giant, Humanoid, Undead) by a straight 2%. In the Auriaya fight, my ranged attacks did 1,146,721 damage to the targets, which were a Giant and her Beasts. Two points in Improved Tracking would have increased that by 22,934 – an overall increase of 1.1%.

At first glance, it looks like Improved Tracking would give me the highest damage output. The problem is, it wouldn’t be consistent. While there are mods out there to help me keep the correct tracking up (I normally track mining nodes), there are still a good number of mobs out there that aren’t an affected type. The Deconstructor and even Yogg-Saron himself are two good examples of that. So my damage would go up on many mobs, but not all.

In the end, it looks like a toss-up between Improved Tracking and Cobra Strikes. Due to my lazy and ultimately stubborn nature, I’m going to max out Cobra Strikes and hope that Mijikai doesn’t end up focus starved after all. It just seems like a better bet to increase my damage consistently than only in certain situations.

Dazed and Twittered

It started with a twitter.

pikestaff: This may sound crazy but with Steady Shot getting a bonus from dazed targets I wonder if Imp. Concussive would be worth it o__o

Then I had a couple replies. Because I tend to use twitter more as a chat platform than microblogging. I’m a rebel like that.

tchann: @pikestaff Since Steady Shot is no longer our top shot (easily out done by Auto Shot alone) it’s probably not worth the points.

tchann: @pikestaff A random thought along the same lines – do the bonuses to Steady Shot from Serpent Sting and Conc. Shot stack?

And, eventually,

tchann: @pikestaff Y’know, I should be doing work, not theorycrafting Steady Shot. :: dives back into the spreadsheet ::

Certain things needed to be taken into consideration: one, cooldowns. Two, damage. Three, effects and how long they lasted. Other things needed to be made steady for the purposes of calculation: one, a standard duration of time. Two, a set attack power. Three, my sanity. I let the last one go.

What I ended up with is a spreadsheet that lets me plug in my AP, weapon damage and ammo damage, then spits out a dps estimate based on special shots alone (no auto-shot). There are two shot rotations, each going to or close to 100% base mana usage over the course of the rotation, without regeneration.

The first shot rotation uses Improved Concussive Shot, and keeps Concussive Shot up as often as possible to get the Steady Shot bonus. The second shot rotation is the standard Arcane/Steady spamming we’ve come to know and love. If you’re really curious to look at the sheet (published at 3500 AP for the hell of it), you can see it here.

So in the end? My gut reaction was right – Imp Conc Shot isn’t worth it for the damage boost. The ability costs more mana to cast than Steady/Arcane, and the effect is only up for 6 seconds max, with a cooldown of 12 seconds. That’s only a 50% possible uptime for the buff, not to mention, when was the last time we saw a boss that could be dazed with Concussive Shot in the first place?

I didn’t find out if the bonuses actually stack or not – I just assumed they would, and assumed in favor of the Imp Conc Shot rotation. It still lagged behind the regular rotation by 60dps – not a whole ton, but as we all know, every last point counts when it comes to those damage meters.