Balog

One of the biggest efforts of theorycrafting is devising an optimal rotation. This then becomes the basis of the "cookie cutter" talent builds, and to a certain extent the choices made for gearing, enchanting, and gemming. Players will often sacrifice utility and survivability talents in an effort to maximize this specific rotation.

However, bosses have a nasty way of interfering with the best laid plans. Phase changes, the need to not stand in the fire, the need to taunt/battle rez/life tap/aggro dump etc etc etc all conspire to screw this rotation up. In some cases (tankadin's 96969 being a great example) it's fairly simple to pick it up where you left off; just taunt/hand of protection or whatever, skip one and start it up again. Some rotations however (moonkin's eclipse proc-watching one for example) are very reliant on being able to spam during a certain peroid.

So, my question to the EJ community. How consistently do you maintain your class/spec's "perfect" rotation? Do you feel it's too dependant on not being interrupted during certain times to be reliable on anything other than tank and spanks? If so, do you think that there are any changes that could be made to the "cookie cutter" build and gearing choices to deal with the reality of boss fights instead of the theoretically perfect but rarely attainable rotation?

 

PsiVen

A tank's actions are rarely going to follow an ideal rotation when handling multiple mobs and whatnot. But I think an essential part of any rotation is what to do if you are actually able to apply it but you are interrupted. How you handle an interruption of some length is part of the consideration necessary to render the ideal theory in non-ideal circumstances.

The most common issue a tank faces to interrupt their rotation is movement. Needing to move the boss around or just hide behind a rock can cause abilities to be out of range for a few seconds. Heigan is a good example as you'll often spend half the fight out of range.

When you face trash mobs, the mentality is different. Perhaps you're maximizing damage in a way that produces less threat, or have to find the GCDs to rebless the raid while you tank six mobs. Or maybe you're worried about that pat on the left and want to save a key aggro ability for picking them up. So I see it boiling down into a couple types of situations:

- The rotation is adapted to the situation, but followed whenever possible.

- The rotation isn't applicable because situational tools are constantly in demand.

 

thorpac

The key is not knowing "what", but "why". If you understand why your rotation is set up a certain way, you can prioritize your next move when you are interrupted.

Not everything i say is stupid.

 

SenorPez

I think that being able to maintain an "optimal" rotation despite interruption is what separates the good and outstanding players from the average players.

The first key of being able to maintain that rotation is understanding the role, importance, and effect of each of the skills that you're using. When I started playing a Shadow Priest, I was tutored during the leveling process that it wasn't so much a "rotation" (as what I was used to with my Hunter "main"), but more of a priority system. Being able to expand that not only to other fights, but to other classes, is where you can shine. Knowing when to cast a new Sting, when to cut off the last tick of SWP, knowing when to reapply Thunderclap, all in a dynamic environment that can shuffle your best-laid plans is great. When I was a noobie Shadow Priest, I was amazed at how much more deadly others were. It was just that I hadn't quite figured out the value of priorities.

The second part of being able to recognize when support skills should be used to best effect. Take, for example, the brave new world of the Hunter's Aspect of the Viper. I'm finding that Feign Death has been used less, because some close inspection of the skill makes it not only a mana battery, but a threat throttle. Feign is now reserved for those moments when DPS can't be spared, such as boss fights. And there are quite a few skills that might only have one or two uses, but are vital. Knowledge of those, even if they aren't a part of your normal "rotation" is key... I remember one instance where a Black Morass wipe was aided by the fact that I completely forgot that I had Tranquilizing Shot. Oops.

 

Ralnar

Rotation is an over simplified way of saying it, I'd lean more towards a "priority" always use what has the most priority when it's available. Marks at 80, my priorities are going to be:

Serpent Sting (if not up)
Chimera Shot
Aimed Shot
Steady Shot


Not really, if I lose my serpent sting it's generally because I was doing something more important such as staying alive.

Not really, it depends a lot on your class and your job on the fight. If you're job is to DPS adds and only DPS adds, you're rotation is going to be wacky since you may not get your full rupture or second chimera shot. If your job is to stand and DPS the boss you'll have full use of your "rotation".

Knowing that, and knowing that each fight has different requirements, you could make super optimal gear sets for each and every encounter and swap between the exact right hit for each target. However, the effort to reward would be quite minimal.

 

• mutagen

Blizzard has moved most classes off a rotation system to a priority queue and in many cases the player is already reacting to random events (the example of Eclipse).

Good players are the ones finding ways to minimize the impact of interruptions or movement. In most cases the ramping up time of the cookie cutter spec and priorities is so small that there is little benefit to be had deviating from it. The rest of the cases get chalked up to RNG the same way the good crit streaks do.

Bad players advocating for bad specs often pull up these kinds of corner cases to push their cause.

Sure, there are situational uses for gear. The most obvious DPS case would be capped hit gear for bosses vs capped hit for trash. As a healer I'm always swapping gear around for different situations. When Blizzard gets around to dual specs there will be people switching back and forth to optimize for trash vs boss or different bosses instead of PVE vs PVP.

Is it 'fun' when some your optimum spec can top meters in some fights but feels handicapped in others?

 

tedv

One of the key discoveries in Shadow Priest theorycrafting was that there was no rotation. Because of the interactions of different cooldowns that didn't divide nicely, a theoretically perfect "rotation" would repeat once every 5 minutes or so. And of course, the 1% resist rate virtually guaranteed that this was impossible. Instead, we have a priority queue, where you use the highest ability on the list that can be cast.

More and more classes are moving towards this structure. However, it's worth noting that there are different priorities for different situation. In the case of shadow priests, it's a question of how much mana you want to spend. It's important to realize when you need to shift to a lower mana priority queue, and what the new priority queue is.

As far as how faithfully I follow the optimal queue, I think I average one mistake every 3 to 5 minutes. (For example, casting a Vampiric Touch when I should cast Mind Blast, or casting Mind Flay when I should refresh Vampiric Embrace.)

 

Shatter Combo w/ Fries

The more and more you play, the larger the perceived time window seems to become in those 1.5 seconds, allowing you to have other choices.

I don't really know if shadowpriests had the 'hardest' rotation in 2.0... actually, slam warriors probably had to pay even more attention. But playing both I'll simply tell you that after a while it gets to the point where it's all just second nature, and you worry less about specific spells to cast and more about thinking ahead a few spells and things like if you are going to clip the end of your dot when you re-apply it in 3 spells, or if you should mind flay and re-apply the dot afterwards, stuff like that.

An example of what the OP is actually getting at, I think, is the run speed to boots enchant. Most (all?) classes have a better option for DPS or whatever on a boot enchant, but you'll see a good number of raiders using run speed for obvious reasons.

 

Lgs

Scorch, FFB, FFB, FFB, omg proc pyro!!, FFB, FFB...

I would love to have a real rotation. So going with something so simple, it doesn't take much skill to watch the rotation. However, for mages, we have distilled out rotation and so you can see how another factor in DPS skill, maintaining high DPS time, is important. In this case, the keys are being aware of your surrounding and using procs and spells to be mobile when you have to.

So since this is a mostly theoretical discussion, I would propose three factors in skill for damage classes:

1. Rotation/Priority knowledge and execution
2. Maintaining DPS uptime
3. Optimal gear/spec knowledge and implementation.

Are there any others?

Gnomes are creatures of destruction.

 

solbergb

^^^ Absolutely. WOLK has introduced a lot of random procs and adjusting to those is similar to adjusting to "don't stand in fire". You have your basic rotation, and you have your rhythm but you have to be situationally aware and make the right decision when something changes, without distrupting your smooth use of abilities, or minimizing that disruption.

Right now my mage is using a rotation that amounts to roughly half 1.5s spells and half "instant" spells with 1.5s global cooldowns. I try to use the gcd's to move a little, without messing up the start time of the slower spells. This can cause brain lock because some of the 1.5s spells are random procs and knowing if it is useful to move varies a lot from fight to fight.

Here's my current rotations and how I'm doing with them. Many of these will change on the road to 80, and my use will get a lot more polished at 80 when I'm in a lot more situations where a routine rotation is the way to go. I'm using just the default UI for now. I'm waiting on add-ons until Wrath comes out, trying to see where I really need them before blindly installing a huge package of them.


Fire mage:

scorch/living bombscorch/fire blast-(hotstreak/pyroblast on proc)-scorch (fireblast every 6 sec, living bomb recast after each explosion). I'm recognizing and using the hot streaks but I'm not riding the global cooldown well enough, smoothly starting the next spell precisely 1.5/haste rating after casting instants. This will be easier with a fireball or frostfirebolt rotation, but I'm doing plenty good single target DPS for everything I'm encountering at 70, even with my lack of perfect casting. Living bomb uptime is also spotty, I have trouble remembering to use it except in really long fights.

Dragon breath-firestarter flamestrike-blast wave-firestearter flamestrike-cone of cold, kite with arcane explosion until dead.

I've got this one down pretty well, the main problem is when working in a team situation I need to sometimes move during the dragon breath disorient to ensure the blast wave blows the opponents in a direction that won't hurt the team. Also most things die so fast that I really have not had enough practice with the cone of cold/arcane explosion kiting.

Pyroblast/Living bomb-scorch/fireblast-dragon breath-scorch/cone cold-fireblast

This is the "pull and have it die before it can hurt me" rotations. When I have frostfirebolt it'll replace pyroblast. Sometimes when living bomb procs on a kill, I'll just launch the instant pyroblast to start another pull. This one I can do pretty darn reliably, except I need a better keybinding for my cone of cold or maybe to practice on more durable monsters as I'm having trouble getting the current one into muscle memory.

On my protadin I'm theoretically using 96969 type rotations but it's not smooth yet. The vast majority of the time this character has been soloing, so the "boss rotation" where getting all the gcd's exactly right hasn't happened enough to really make it routine. I'm also still fussing with keybindings trying to make sure I can fit in hand spells, lay on hands, bubbles etc and find them when I need them under stress.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I think some players overlook how useful abilities and talents you can use while moving are. It's easy to look at a spreadsheet assuming you're fighting patchwerk and make all of your decisions from that.

For moonkin in particular, many people skip typhoon and starfall when these are significant damage boosts since you can use them while moving.

 

erragal

This can't be said enough for all players. One of the key aspects to maximum effectiveness on boss encounters is to leverage every source of total damage that you can. With moonkin not only are there these two options that would not be the best uses of a GCD during a normal fight, you also have to know whether mana requirements will allow you to utilize them as they are very inefficient spells. That type of mid-fight calculation and pre-fight planning is where the average player misses the boat.

Balance druids, Frost mages, and Enhancement Shaman also need to learn placement and timing of their temporary pets in order to maximuze dps. For the melee pets this is especially important in order to extend their uptime in many encounters.

An important part of DPS is non-standard encounters is being intimately familiar with the damage per execution time of all your usable abilities. If you copy a spec and a rotation without understanding the numbers behind it you're only really learning how to play one type of fight, instead of learning how to play the spec/role.

 

Balog

Moonkin were actually what prompted my post. In their thread I saw a lot of people skipping AoE or regen talents to try to work in Eclipse based on how much of a DPS boost it would be while up. I've also seen a lot of reports from people actually raiding that the actual benefits are not as great as the theoretical due to proc time being lost to other things. I was wandering if other classes/specs with proc watching rotations/priority systems had the same experience; and if so, would that devalue the proc talents, or at least make regen/survivability/utility talents more wortwhile in comparison?

 

erragal

I believe this is where knowing the numbers comes in handy. With moonkin you can look at a talent like owlkin frenzy and compare it directly to eclipse. There are many fights where owlkin frenzy is worth significantly more DPS than eclipse. Fire mages have fiery payback as a talent with potential benefits in very specific encounters as well. Considering how RNG dependent many procs are, your actual results are going to vary from experience to experience.

Everyone has to look at all the encounters you'll be doing in a given raid and weigh the benefit there. If you have just one stand and nuke fight and four raid-wide damage fights you're probably going to choose owlkin frenzy over eclipse (Assuming you don't just respec every fight). Throw in a multi-target fight where your best DPS output is to keep high DPET dots/E&M on multiple enemies where you may need a custom spec just to cover the huge mana outlay.

I don't know if every DPS spec has these sort of decisions to make. That was one thing they did really well with balance specifically through the beta permutations: there are situational talents that cater to specific circumstances for a wide variety of good builds.

 

vassleer

Affliction Warlocks are likely the ones with the "hardest" rotation now. Their destruction brethren are likely one of the primary reasons that the game has moved away from set rotations to "priority" based rotations as shadowbolt spam - even in fights with movement - was easy to maintain in comparison to other rotations.

With affliction the entire idea of set rotations has gone beyond what I think even Blizzard expected. When I last played affliction in T4 level raids a set rotation was possible, and even required, in order to squeeze the last drops of dps from the spec. Even with the rotation it was still possible to pay attention to the raid and the environment around you. Switching to destruction made it even easier as it was simple to even lead raids, watch raid health/mana, etc, even as I spammed shadowbolts.

Now affliction has caused the "tunnel-vision" effect that I often see in healers who watch their healbot without realizing that they are standing in fire/charred earth/posion. I find myself staring at my DoTimer addon, ready to refresh one of the 7 or 8 debuffs I keep up at all times, ignorant for the most part of what is happening around me.

While I think that the emphasis on "priority" rotations is a nice addition to raiding, I think that in some cases (as with affliction locks) the changes have evolved to the point where "optimal" consistent dps is extraordinarily difficult.

 

Morwen

Affliction is 'hard' in a sense, but it is not hurt much by movement/pauses.

As an affliction warlock it is possible to be within a few percentage points of optimal dps even if you consistently mess up the timing, because every ability is on a relatively long timer. When your concentration slips and you keep losing 2 seconds of uptime on a DoT that lasts 15 seconds and accounts for 10% of your overall dps, it is no big deal.

By comparison, if you are, say, a ret paladin, then your main abilities have short timers between 6-10 seconds, so you are going to be hurt more if you keep losing 2 seconds.

 

vassleer

While I agree that the dps loss of a single instance of a Ret paladin clipping the last few seconds off of one of their effects will surpass that of a warlock clipping the last few seconds off of UA or SL (perhaps even CoA), I think it much more likely that the this would occur more often to the warlock juggling 6-7 spells/effects then the Ret. I also strongly disagree about the affliction lock not being hurt much by movement or pauses.

Much of Afflicition's dps is made up of the synergy between Haunt, Shadow Embrace and the remainder of their dots. Allowing either Haunt or SE to fall off their target results in a significant dps loss to the lock, and will take them some considerable time to replace - resulting in a dominoe effect of additional dots "falling" off while they attempt to fix it. The Ret pally may have all their effects fall off, but they can more easily (and quickly) reapply their effects and return to their optimal dps rotation. (Ignoring for a moment the differences in movement in various fights between melee and ranged dps).

The analogy I like to use when I describe to my friends the difficulty in playing a quality affliction lock vs. other dps classes is that of a juggler. Imagine juggling 3 balls and getting the timing down to be able to keep all 3 balls going and not let any hit the ground. Now throw in 3-4 additional balls and you have the affliction lock. Due to the differences in dot duration, cast time, and especially priority (as Haunt + shadowbolt to keep the Haunt and SEx2 debuff is of primary importance) you have to work just to keep all the dots running - forget about worrying over hurting your dps by clipping a few seconds off of UA, SL, Immolate (if you use it) or god forbid CoA. A few seconds of movement makes it even worse as the lock has to scramble to recover while the dots falling off are causing a dominoe effect that can require the lock to simply start their rotation from scratch in order to quickly get them all back up.

All of this seems to lead to that "tunnel vision" effect on locks that I mentioned previously. Their focus on keeping their dots and maintaining their optimal dps has made it much more difficult to pay attention to their environment - causing them to violate one of the primary tenets of raiding. That being don't stand in the pool of stuff that is killing you.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Tunnel Vision is a problem, but one would expect the typical hardcore raider to quickly learn the flow of your rotation or priority queue. It's a lot like learning to drive, at first trying to drive the speed limit without staring at the speedometer seems impossible, but eventually judging your speed becomes so second nature that you only peek at the speedometer as an occasional reference point. Granted, this happens faster and to greater effect on a class with a simpler rotation.

It's my experience that the people with major tunnel vision problems will suffer from them regardless of what class or spec they're playing. There are plenty of people whose blinders are just as big when they play Destruction as when they play Affliction. The latter spec certainly doesn't help, but it isn't the root cause so much as a factor that exacerbates the situation.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Shadewalk

Another point about rotations is how badly some, very notably pre 3.0 hunters suffered from lag. As little as going from 100 to 200 to 300ms could cause very significant decreases in dps as the old rotations simply fell apart. This is also important when hammering a rotation to match the GCD, quite sure the old warrior rotation would have to varry a little depending on the latency by dropping a devistate if you lost enough time every rotation, but in some ways this just caused a painful adaptation of the rotation to fix as possible.

As said though the game seems to have moved on a bit from simple rotations even if only by making the theroretical rotations longer than the stationary burst dps times on fights. The introduction of powerful procs can ensure that a rotation cannot be held even for a short while, as I'm sure many warriors have found out now with all the free shield slams even in a stationary tank and spank.

Another point has got to be used CDs like Inner focus. Theoretically I want to use this just after a clearcast proc to ensure that I can escape the 5 second rule for a moment and futher if lucky get another proc given the extra crit to help. In practice though I tend to be dropping renews and PoMs after my flash/greater heals and cannot really adjust much at all to make good use of what should be a few extra seconds of mana.

 

Nethris

If the affliction rotation is enough harder that there are a non-negligible number of people that do develop tunnel vision, or it takes much longer on average to get comfortable enough with affliction to escape tunnel vision, then since giving affliction higher dps to reward pulling said rotation off would violate the balancing they've been working on of having most classes and specs more or less equal, that's a strong argument that either affliction needs more X refreshes the duration of Y talents, or making some of the debuffs involved exclusionary and buffing individual damage if necessary to keep damage throughput about the same. Variety is fine, but it sounds as though affliction is becoming rather extreme in how much extra complexity it has, to the point of being a detriment to the spec - I believe Blue posts have indicated Blizzard is looking at that and seeing how it plays out though.

One interesting tangent of this discussion of course is how the disruption of PvP, from opponent actions, the need to use crowd control, etc, affect different rotations - if 2 classes/specs do similar raid damage with their optimal rotation, the one less disrupted by PvP is going to do more damage in PvP, especially if the definition of disruption is extended to "necessary" talent changes. Since Blizzard wants most/all of the dps specs to be viable in raids and most of them to be reasonably viable in PvP, and class/spec variety leads to some specs being more disrupted by PvP than others, this leads to some of the problems with PvP vs PvE balance that occurred in the past - to some extent, Blizzard may be shooting for all specs to be so totally disrupted by high level PvP that it's almost entirely a separate balance, though that seems unlikely to exactly occur.

 

Lucinde

I just want to emphasize this a bit more, because as said before, in practice rotations or even spell priority systems get disrupted by a boss' abilities.

For example, on A'lar I used to skip refreshing SW:P and hitting SW:D close to it moving to the next platform, so I could use the time I spent moving casting instants. Similarly, on Illidan when he was being kited away from the blue flame circles (forgot the name), I used to "safe" SW:D so I could its GCD to move back in MF range.

Also, on bosses that have adds, it's usually better to refresh your DoT's instead of casting high prio spells right before the adds come up. Or there's Lurker where close to it submerging it was kinda pointless to refresh DoT's and more useful to get in another MF or MB instead.

There are countless other examples where you would choose to cast a spell of a lower priority than the highest one available because of what will happen in the next 20 seconds. In fact, you probably spend more time "managing your optimal rotation" than actually performing it. I think anticipating to that kind of situations is what seperates the good players from the bad.

Everyone can learn and execute a rotation within 95% of perfect on Patchwerk. Maintaining ~85% of the DPS of that optimal rotation during a real fight where targets change, non-rotations casts are neccesary (think dispelling, combat res, interacting with fight-related mechanics) or you need to move at semi-predictable intervals cannot be done by everyone. Those that can are the ones on top of the charts and those that get assigned to do the non-standard stuff (ie, handle core dumping on Vasjh). Those are good players.

 

Glodd

As a 3.0.3 Marksmanship hunter, the only proc watch I have is Improved Steady Shot, which gives extra damage on the next Aimed Shot or Chimera Shot. I don't really have to think about it, because at least Chimera is always part of my rotation.

Also, with regard to DPS while moving, that is why I took Aimed Shot in 3.0.2, and it is why I am using it still in 3.0.3. That extra instant shot really helps a lot.

 

PSGarak

Warlock rotations were harder to maintain in TBC, but they were also much more resiliant to movement than most rotations. Lifetap basically means a warlock has two filler spells instead of one. We have some ratio between the two we have to maintain, but there's an amount of flexibility that's basically unseen elsewhere in the game in brick-wall min-max DPS scenarios. Pretty early on, warlocks learned that what separated the good warlocks from the ok ones was timing lifetaps to coincide with movement. However, we probably suffered the worst from interruptions that stop casting altogether, like stuns, fears, silences, or phase transitions. As far as I can tell, in TBC we had the third-highest ramp-up time after mages stacking scorch/WC and shadow priests stacking shadow weaving (which we also had to wait for), but our debuffs took less time to drop off. In WLK we have the overall highest ramp-up time.


It's interesting to look at the graph of DPS vs difficulty. Affliction warlocks and shadow priests were widely cited as being the hardest classes to play in TBC, but I think that's slightly inaccurate. At the high-end of min-maxing, mages and rogues took just as much precision, control, and awareness to reach their top DPS. The difference is the dropoff; an affliction warlock that was merely ok could easily lose a third of their DPS or more, while a combat rogue that just hit SSx5+S&D could hit something like 93% of the theoretical maximum (maybe a little more with cooldown stacking), and the differentiation in mage skill was mostly in cooldown-stacking.

I think the fallout from this is that the classes that get labeled as "easy" are not the ones where you can hit your max DPS with a paperweight (destro locks) since that paradigm is basically dead. The beginner classes will be judged by how close you can come to your max DPS with minimal effort. Frost mages, combat rogues, and destro locks I think still fall into this category, although none of those are the highest-DPS spec of their respective class so it's not a huge issue, and the gap is generally a bit wider now than before. For mid-level guilds, there may be actual tangible benefits in going these unoptimal specs because it frees up some attention for the encounter, depending on the encounter and the actual DPS loss.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

kemikalkadet

This is exactly right, and it's the difference between those that simply read basic theory to get an optimal rotation and those that really read into the subject and question why each move is done and why its done then etc. Someone that really knows and understands their moves will, when things get out of whack, know they should skip X move/spell and jump back into their rotation at Y.

I think the best way to go about it is to prioritise all your moves, so in a 6 move rotation there are 2 that you absolutely must do whenever they're up, 2 that are important but if you can only fire off one move in a particular period you'll skip for the top moves, and 2 that will always be the first to be left out. A very basic hypothetical scenario of course but that's a simplified view of how i look at move prioritisation.

 

Shaewyn

I think that (perhaps obviously), getting closer to an optimal rotation also depends on a proper button/bar setup.

Using Bartender (or another addon) and setting up your Keyboard shortcuts so that you can use the ability you want to without having to hunt for it is very important... If I'm doing a high-mobility fight (eg: Keristrasza in the Nexus), I want to be able to go "fireblast" or "Living Bomb", not "uh... press 3". Hunting for the right button or having to do some strange finger contortions to find the attack you want can cost you a LOT of DPS.