Elitist Jerks Weekly Recap 1/6/12

Every Friday Tabana brings you the latest discussions straight from the Elitist Jerks forums with a recap of what was discussed and links to the full posts so you can stay on top of the latest in hunter theorycrafting.

Zero Gap DPS 12/31/11

In the Survival thread, Krennick wrote, “If you can get 9 ticks out of ES, ES, AS, ES it is possible that you suck at dps.”

Before spell queueing (4.0.3 I believe) it was common for dpsers to suck by simply not pushing their buttons enough. In a given fight time players spamming the same spells with the same gear might come out at 180, 200 and 220 casts depending on how badly they sucked. [...] To spam-cast very aggressively you could use an AHK script or hardware macro to cast the spell every millisecond and then always have 0 gap between casts. [...]

If lowering your lag tolerance is causing you to introduce gaps in your cycle, that is almost certain to outweigh any advantages you may gain from better proc reaction and preventing ES tick loss under LnL.

Ardeaf replied, “ES ES AS ES depends on your situation. Others report it works flawlessly. I have similar results to yours, though: ES ES AS ES causes me to get 8 ticks of ES. The solution is simple: just throw another AS in there.”

ES ES AS AS ES. Fixes the 8 tick problem without much dps loss at all (if any). This is pretty much always do-able with the new tier set bonus as the new chore for hunters this tier is trying to avoid focus capping.

Neith replied, “This is actually dependent on your latency. If you do play at low latency <50ish you can expect to lose a tick. If you play on higher latency such as 250ish (aka the rest of the world outside US) you can expect to get all your ticks irrelevantly of how tightly you spam your keys.”

[...] As much as people like to believe that the ‘custom lag tolerance’ resolves that issue – I would argue to the fact that it does absolutely nothing. I have tested it with the option turned on and off and the combat log still shows the same delay caused by latency – a 1 second GCD, for example, becomes 1.3 seconds with 300 ping, etc. [...]

Nooska replied, “That’s not how latency works. Your latency is the inherent delay between the client and the server. You lose no ticks due to having low latency as the ticks are calculated serverside, not clientside, and while ability request sent to the server are timestamped, this has no effect on the calculation.”

The 8 or 9 ticks depend on latency fluctuation – either the ones getting 9 ticks have increasing latency so the server has a slightly longer delay between requests than your keypresses (or requests sent) – OR – the ones getting 8 ticks have a decreasing latency, so the server receives the request with a lower interval than you press. [...] Of course, the lower your normal latency, the higher the chance that a slight change will adversely affect you, compared to having a high latency.

As Neith points out at the very last, spell queueing is actually more likely to play havoc with your usage of procs, and thus the spam clicking/pressing is definitely not a gain if you have spell queueing “enabled” – and is a bad habit anyway, much better to train yourself to the rhythm of when you can press a key [...].

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Kill Command During Haste Procs? 1/4/11

In the Survival thread, zakaluka15 wrote, “I am rather curious about the effect of t13 4p on our rotation. Haste procs should scale poorly against our static rotation: ArS is GCD capped at 1.0s already. CoS scales with haste, but it’s also our lowest DPET ability.”

I’m imagining a situation where we might want to dump with KC during haste procs to improve haste scaling, with timers set to monitor the ICD of the 4p bonus. Obv would dump through ArS when under a different haste proc but we’re eligible for a 4p haste proc. Has anyone evaluated it?

Dreambeard replied, “Why would you want to dump with KC? Arcane Shot scales with SV mastery, and can also proc Sic’Em. KC does have 9% higher crit chance, but it also costs twice as much focus. And I’m not sure how KC would improve our haste scaling? I don’t really see how our T13 4-set would change the preferred focus dump.”

Even though the whole haste plateau stuff isn’t really applicable anymore, haste still is a nice stat. Shorter Cobra Shot times means more focus regen and this more room for focus dump with Arcane Shot. Haste also increases our autoshot speed, focus regen (though the impact is small) and pet attack speed. [...]

Zakaluka15 replied, “[...] The premise was that dumping with KC during dynamic haste effects shifts more activity into CoS, which actually benefits from all that haste (while ArS does not). However, as someone pointed out the loss of mastery benefit nullifies that gain.”

The difference in DPS between standard priority, and dumping with KC while under a large dynamic haste effect, was within simcraft’s 99% confidence interval margin of error (on 25k runs). In smaller words, it doesn’t make a noticeable difference.

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Patch 4.3.2 Change to Lock and Load 1/3/12

In the Survival thread, Bikiniwax wrote, “Patch 4.3.2 on Test Realms: * Lock and Load no longer affects Arcane Shots.”

Which means when LnL procs, ES-AS-ES-AS-ES should be the highest DPS rotation if you have the focus.

Lokrick replied, “For many people, the primary win for this change is that we won’t lose LnL procs to AS shots that were in progress at the time.”

Additionally, the two drivers that maximize LnL DPS are getting ES on cooldown ASAP and not missing any ES ticks. Given the current DoT implementation for ES, there will only be further benefit at very low latency.

  • <50ms latency: ES AS ES AS ES minimizes risk of clipping while continuously dpsing.
  • 50-300ms latency: DoT refresh only requires a single shot, so ES is on CD faster with ES ES AS ES
  • >300ms latency: accumulated latency for instant shots prevents DoT clipping, so ES ES ES is best

Changes to Simc are required to simulate the latency impacts and ES pushbacks more carefully. [...] The key question is: How much additional delay is worth inserting in order to protect from the variability of network latency, as opposed to just inserting the additional AS (which gets some dps and precludes clipping, but pushes the ES out by a fair bit)? Just for a concrete datapoint, I took data from a recent (regular) Ultraxion fight. [...]

For this example, the break even would be right around 0.65 seconds of pushback on the ES; more than that and ES AS ES AS ES is a dps loss vs. ES ES AS ES. So waiting half a second would avoid clipping and be a dps increase. This napkin math has a pretty long average delay in LnL because of the mechanics of the Ultraxion fight. With a tighter ES timing of 6.1 seconds, the breakeven gets tighter [...]. The numbers (300-800dps) are large enough to be interesting though, so I look forward to being able to simulate them.

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Serpent Spread 1/1/12

In the Survival thread, BadCo asked, “Does [Serpent Spread] apply 6 seconds worth of SrS damage spread out across 6 seconds? Or does it instantaneously apply 6 seconds worth of SrS damage?

Aggixx replied, “It means that targets are afflicted by a 6 second long serpent sting (6/21sts of the damage of a normal SrS over 6 seconds). 1/2 points is recommended because you only have to Multi-Shot every 6 seconds to have a 100% DoT uptime, so the 2nd point would hardly do anything.

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Haste Points with Tier 13 Part II 12/31/11

In the Survival thread, Snorkelpoof asked, “Has anyone been working to figuring out what haste level we should be aiming for these days? I can’t help but feel that the old haste plateaus aren’t applicable with the new t13 set bonuses. I saw some discussion about some haste point around 2200 but it never really led anywhere.

Neith replied, “With regards to required haste levels, correct me if I am wrong, but with the 2T13 the haste requirement has become rather obsolete: you no longer have to have cycles with 3 CSs.”

From my experience raiding with SV in current content – as low as 500ish haste is more than sufficient. Of course this has to take in account the amount of latency you have to ensure that you do not lose too much time waiting for ES to come off the CD (when the time left is < 1 GCD) or have to finish after the ES is off the CD.

The goal of haste is to ensure that you are ready to cast ES the very moment it’s off the CD. There is no one single cycle to use, you could / should have cycles where you get 2 AS, or 1 AS or even 3 AS, each of these cycles would have a different amount of CS casts, hence the amount of haste required for each to be tight is going to vary. Additionally, haste only affects 2 things: the amount of auto-shots and CS cast time. The amount of CS casts required to sustain a solid cycle with 2T13 is so small that haste has become a nearly obsolete stat in that sense. With regards to auto-attacks and haste – it’s a very small portion of our DPS, so I really don’t see a point worrying much about it when you can increase all of your elemental damage (80ish% of your total damage) or your crit.

[See previous discussion of this topic here]

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MM vs. SV 1/5/12

In the Hunter DPS Analyzer thread, Buzzerbeater wrote, “In optimal MM Settings the theoretical DPS is higher compared to SV, where I can only reach around 34848.23.
I know reforging would change it by a fair bit, but I dont think it could out dps MM. I hope I havn’t overlooked a lot of details again. Because the general performance of hunter speccs is SV>MM.

Whitefyst replied, “Well, personally I am not sold that SV > MM is terms of potential DPS currently. All the sims that I have looked at still show MM > SV theoretically. The reasons that I believe that SV DPS is coming out on top in logs currently is the following:

- The SV rotation is easier to play. It requires 1 less ability to perform it. Its focus dumps never change. Its rotations do not change much with haste levels beyond doing extra shots of those they are already doing. It has no major buff that it has to keep the uptime up on that affects its shot selection. It has less reliance on haste. Its damage is not frontloaded over the first 10% of boss health. Hence, I believe that it is easier for the SVs to be closer to their slightly lower DPS potential than MMs can be to their slightly larger DPS potential.

- While a well performed MM rotation should perform better on a single target standstill fight where MMs can take full advantage of the CA phase while hasted with RF and can take full advantage of all the haste effects, SV should perform better on fights with a lot of target switching where the CA phases are short and often without haste effects available. [...]

- Player skew. If more of the top players are playing a particular spec, it is going to make that spec seem like it performs better although that may or may not be the case. [...]

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Configuring FemaleDwarf for MM 1/5/12

In the Hunter DPS Analyzer thread, Buzzerbeater wrote, “I joined a new guild when DS started, [...] and talked with the other hunter already in the group about spec, rotation etc. He is MM in around 390 gear. He told me he isn’t using Arcane Shot or Aimed Shot [...], only the instant proc of Aimed. [...] I tried it in femaledwarf and the tool is showing me a 3000 DPS increase with his play style over the normal focus dump AS rotation. He is 90% of the time Focus capped and his 2p T13 is 100% worthless. Any explanation for this?

Pichuca replied, “That´s beacause you are not running FD with the propper settings. Share a setting link and you´ll see how what your friend is doing is wrong.”

Buzzerbeater replied, “I made 3 Profiles [...] Search the publicprofiles for “Drego,” there should be three.

Pichuca replied, “The default setting is not configured at all.

-Switch glyph of CS to glyph of AS
-Check “disable AS during CA”
-Select “steady shot in pairs if ISS is <4 sec”
-Select “manual cast and Instant” for AiS behaviour
-Set maximum speed for AiS hardcast to 1.8/1.9 and “except during careful aim”
-Disable sting and CS during CA phase.

Whitefyst added, “If you are doing an AS focus dump rotation, having the AS glyph and the 12% bonus damage is critical. Replacing the CS glyph with it is a +500 DPS change.

It is important to disable AS during the CA phase since not only is it less DPS than AIs that are guaranteed to crit, it is less DPS than SS that are guaranteed to crit plus the additional MMM AI and Flaming Arrow procs. [...]

Having the proper SS setting is important as well. [...]

In your setup, it was actually better to perform SrS and CS during the CA phase.

I reduced the wait time for CS from 0.5s to 0.3s. [...]

I turned off waiting for KS. [...]

Even with an AS focus dump case, you still want to use AI during the CA phase when it is basically guaranteed to crit. Setting Aimed Shot behavior to Manual Cast during CA and instant is +971 DPS.

Also your cast casts BL right at the beginning where it overlaps with RF, which is generally a bad idea. The best place for it is during the KS phase. [...]

The next thing for this case is that if you are using AS primarily as the focus dump, then you do not need so much haste. You actually want mastery instead of haste due to all of the extra shots you are taking.  [...]

The thing is that I would never recommend anyone to perform this case though. The big adjustment that should be made is to cast AI when under sufficient dynamic haste effects [...]

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Kiroptyric Sigil, Proc List Page, Custom Ranged Weapon Support 12/30/11

In the Hunter DPS Analyzer thread, Rivkah announced, “I added a few new things to the site today.”

First I fixed the cooldown on Kiroptyric Sigil which was out of date and set to 60 sec, it’s now 90 (I assume that was some old PTR value or a guess).

I also added a proc list page so you can view the values I’m using for calculating procs and use items. Since I often don’t have accurate data on how procs work when the items first come out (and usually don’t find out the correct values until someone reports them), having this page should allow for folks to more easily correct me on proc rates, cooldowns, etc. as the items become available for testing. Note a few items like Kiril are implemented strangely (I recalculated it to work like a standard agil proc), and some are not in the list because they required specialized code, but most more standard item procs should be in there.

I also added custom ranged weapon support, which I’ve been meaning to do for quite awhile. This should allow for experiementation with different dps and speeds (you can still use custom stats to simulate any stats on the item).

Whitefyst replied, “This is not to say right or wrong but only to report the impact. The change to the Sigil modeling in FD is a huge difference. It reduces the average agility benefit by about -191 and results in a loss of 805 DPS for my character.”

I really do not understand Blizzard itemization here since the Sigil is essentially worth on average 382 agi and 458 haste. This makes it worth less from an average point of view than Heroic The Hungerer with 433 agi and 433 haste. That is a 6 lower ilevel trinket with +52 agi and -25 haste on average. Of course, being able to stack the full agi amount of the Sigil during the CA phase is a nice boost not modeled by FD.

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Vial of Shadows, Chardev Profile Import, Termination, Dark Intent 1/1/12

In the Hunter DPS Analyzer thread, Rivkah announced, “Made a few more updates to the site. The biggest one is changing the attack power scaling on Vial of Shadows to use melee AP instead of ranged AP.”

Although the tooltip makes it look like it scales with ranged AP, based on test data provided by WarBringerPT on the MMO Champion forums it looks pretty clear that it’s actually scaling off melee AP. Modifying this caused the value of the heroic version of the trinket to decrease by 363 dps in my gear setup. I’ve posted about the bug on the Blizzard forums but I think it’s likely it won’t be changed.

I also added in support for Chardev profile import. Although I expect this won’t be used a ton, it might be handy in cases in which you want to use Simulationcraft and my site both to test certain gear setups- now you can use the same source for the gear/talent list.

I also modified the Termination bonus to receive the doubling from 2pc T13 based on Neruse’s testing and finally remembered to change the default value for Dark Intent to reflect the changes to the ability that were made quite awhile ago. If you have Dark Intent enabled and you’re using an old saved setting, you may want to make sure you’ve updated the value as my change only impacts the default.

Rivkah later added, “Based on reports I’ve received, it looks like Vial of Shadows is fixed now so I switched it back to RAP scaling. Adding support for the new LnL will be a larger task, but I’ll see if I can make time for it tonight.”

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Soloing Forum 12/30/11

In the Soloing Old Instances for Fun and Profit thread, Goldschakal wrote, “My comment to the overall soloing thing: I’d love it to have a forum where we can post world first kills/kills overall with videos and discuss things.”

Sure, this thread is nice and Durendil’s Blog isn’t bad too but you have actually no overview and you gain bans very fast (that is no criticism, your forum, your rules!)

Krelle replied, “A topic in the hunter forums on Battle.net could be used for this if it’s being kept updated. Of course that would mean that either the US or EU people couldn’t get to post in it (different forums), unless a topic was made on both the US and EU forums.”

Exminator replied, “I [...] made a minor website for the purpose. [...] Hunter Soloing Society

This is a quick first make of the site, and it does not have a dedicated forum as of now [...]. But you can discuss on each and every single boss page, as well as claim kills etc. [...]

Durendil replied, “what we would need is like: I click on Anub’rekhan and there is, like in your forum, the world first. But there is also space under it to discuss. A bit like the comments on Wowhead [...] We would also need a page for strategies in general [...]; a page for bugs [...]

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Vezax Hard Mode in Ulduar and Loatheb 25 in Naxxramus 1/3/11

In the Soloing Old Instances for Fun and Profit thread, Durendil wrote, “Just a little link to my last soloings: Durendil : Hunter soloing: Vezax Hard Mode and Loatheb 25 down!

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XT-002 Deconstuctor, Hard Mode 12/29/11

In the Soloing Old Instances for Fun and Profit thread, Onin asked, “How much gear would one need to activate XT-002′s Hard Mode? The encounter itself doesn’t seem difficult at all, only the activation and the following DPS requirement seem to be a barrier.”

Goldschakal replied, “Yes, XT Hardmode seems possible. I almost killed him. The damage done is not the problem, it’s more the damage taken.”

You also need luck with Searing Light. Sometimes you start the bandage and one second later you get the debuff which results in zero healing. Now you still can try to bandage only when you get Gravity Bomb but you get way more Searing Light debuffs. Dont stack stamina. More stamina results in more damage from Tantrum but your bandage heal stays the same. Check my Log here. One healcrit more and he would be dead.

Onin replied, “I’ve had a lot of success using Purified Shard of the Flame on healing-intensive fights to keep me up (especially on Eredar Twins where it forms a great buffer for the horrible randomness on that fight). You should see how much it helps you on XT Hard Mode.”

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Yogg-Saron (10 player) in Ulduar Part II 12/30/11

In the Soloing Old Instances for Fun and Profit thread, Szalor wrote, “First time trying Yogg-Saron, I have a problem with tentacles when arriving in p2: I FD, but they don’t despawn. I’m pretty sure I do it wrong: too late or too early, but I already tried many times. Could someone confirm that it hasn’t been fixed in one of previous patches, please?”

Sometimes, after I FDed, tentacles attacked my pet, and once, one tentacle just neither attack nor despawn. Strange mechanics, I hope the 4.3 patch didn’t fix the FD trick, otherwise bye bye Yogg Saron soloings!

Durendil replied, “Tried Yogg-Saron today. He received the following changes: Sara will attack you in Phase 2 no matter what.”

  • Corruptor tentacles don’t despawn. However, if they spawn far away from you and you FD after they spawn, they won’t attack you. (unless they aggro your pet, happens sometimes).
  • Adds in Phase 3 won’t despawn. So it seems possible with 4 or 3 keepers, but even harder than before.

Edit: After having a bit of fun with Noth 25 and Anub’rekhan 25, I discovered the deal. Add aggroing has changed. Before, adds spawning didn’t aggro your pet if they were too far away. Now they do if you FD before they aggro something.

Examples:

  • Noth
    • When skeletons spawn, you FD. Before, they would just stand there. Now, they go after your pet.
    • When skeletons spawn, they aggro you after 5-6 seconds. You FD. They despawn.
  • Anub’rekhan.
    • Pet at the far side of the room. A crypt guard spawns. You FD. Before, he would stand there. Now, he attacks your pet.
    • A crypt guard spawns. He aggros you. You FD. He despawns.

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A full index of all Elitist Jerks posts recapped at the Wow Hunter’s Hall is maintained in the Index of Elitist Jerks Hunter Forum Posts.

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