Optimal rotation; theory vs reality
 

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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?

^^^ 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.