Multiple heroism rotations:

Mearis · 04/08/08, 4:44 AM

As most guilds that are learning Brutallus, I was looking at a few things to maximise total raid DPS. One of the most trivial things that most guilds do is use up one heroism in the caster group sub<20% to stack with molten fury, and rotate the remaining heroisms in the melee group, since that group tipically has the highest DPS.

However - rogues/enh shamans/warriors all scale relatively terribly with heroism.

At the very high end, rogues top out between 60-70% white damage, depending on warglaives/DST. Yellow damage for rogues/warriors scales very poorly with heroism - for rogues it would be a 30% increase in CP procs, and for warriors it would be increased rage gen - but they most likely are already nearly at full rage all the time in most raid situations. This means that being generous, heroism is at most a 20% DPS increase for most people in the group.

Mages and warlocks on the other hand scale a full 30% with heroism, and in the case of Brutallus, mages can use icy veins twice stacked with heroism.

My immediate thought would be to heroism the mage group early on about one minute into the fight, so mages can pop icy veins for the first time + heroism for maximum damage, and heroism again once you hit sub 20% to use it again in conjuction with icy veins.

Assuming you have:

1 melee DPS group
2 caster DPS groups (3 warlocks, 3 mages, 2 shamans)

and 5 heroisms or so the optimal assigment intuitively seems to be to drop 2 heroism per caster groups, and only 1 on the melee group.

Concerns are obviously threat for the casters, I am not sure if casters can possibly maintain below the threat cap getting two heroisms. Has anyone else tried to give casters multiple heroisms?

Poloma · 04/08/08, 4:58 AM

We gave the melee group 2 heroisms one at (85% and one at 20%) and the caster group 2(60% and 20%). The destruction warlocks do need to lookout for threat though.

Optikalusion · 04/08/08, 5:17 AM

Actually it works very differently than you think.

First of all, Rogues and dps warriors have an inherant speed increase of 35/30% thanks to slice and dice and flurry. Rogues also have blade flurry and haste potions. Haste works like this (%*%*%*(Overall Haste Rating) Multiplicative haste effect Multiply with each other, while haste rating effect stack and then are multiplied by total rating %, increasing heroisms overall effect. So, in this rogue example, a standard 30% heroism turns into (30%*35%*20%*(xxx rating from gear + 400 from haste pot + 325 DST proc + etc)). In this example one will reach 306% attack speed not counting passive haste alone. Haste has no DR for melee. This is however only ONE reason why haste is so powerful.

Rogue and warriors ALSO do a ton of proc based dps (Energy regen on hit, Sword spec, WF attack, and trinket procs). These effects ALSO proc off of each other making dps done from haste alone a quadratic increase.

I'd argue that overall damage done to a full melee group (3 rogues warr shaman) outdoes any caster group save mages sub 20%.

It's only a matter of time before somone smarter and with more free time on their hands than I comes along and postes definitive math on the subject proving one of us right, so lets get to arguing before that happens.

Morakk · 04/08/08, 5:21 AM

Depends on your raid makeup I'm sure. Skill of individual players probably matters as well, but honestly I think any guild with a realistic shot at killing Brutallus has 15 dps that can hit shadowbolt/keep up slice and dice/whatever and hit cooldowns efficiently enough.

But I can imagine one guild running around with three rogues with six warglaives between them, while another guild has none. Or having three shaman versus six. Or having only one shadow priest, or two or three (is three overkill enough as to be non-viable on Brutallus?).

[E] Saying that Bloodlust/Heroism stacks multiplicatively with all over haste effects is true; using this fact to argue that it makes it better for classes with more passive haste effects/procs is specious.

alienangel · 04/08/08, 11:13 AM

Don't overlook the BM hunters please

Heroism timed to coincide with Beastial Wrath does delicious things for pet + hunter DPS. Need to pre-time it though, since the hunter will typically want to use BW not later than 30s into the fight, while mages/warlocks/rogues in the group tend to not like heroism that early. And the hunter won't want to have rapid fire up while heroism'd.

manly · 04/08/08, 11:49 AM

Well, for a fire mage ideally I want 2 bloodlust. The obvious sub-20%, then the other one matching my 3 min cooldowns.

Even if I am not at execute range, I do have quite an amount of cooldowns to stack with bloodlust, namely:
bloodlust (+30% haste)
icy veins (+20% haste/20s)
drums of battle (+5% haste)
combustion (3 guaranteed crits)
skull of gul'dan (+11.15% haste/20s)
destruction potion (+120dmg, 2% crit/15s)
flame cap (+80 dmg)
hex shrunken head (+211 dmg/20s)

everything in there is multiplicative except combustion. I can't say how much it boosts rogue dps, but for mages everything is multiplicative pretty much and leads to quite absurd numbers.

Tempestra · 04/08/08, 4:08 PM

Manly - for a mages to stack the 2nd heroism with 3-minute cooldowns, it has to happen in the first 30-40 seconds or so, correct? That is, the 2-minute cooldowns won't roll around for a 3rd time unless we pop them early enough. If this is the case, is there possibly a threat issue with such an early spike in DPS?

Typically the only danger period is in the first 20-30 seconds or so, when a chain of crits might pull aggro (at least in my experience). Have you been able to blow heroism that early with all our synergistic cooldowns and still not have a problem?

manly · 04/08/08, 4:12 PM

Nothing that prevents you from doing invisibility.

Anedris · 04/08/08, 4:14 PM

3-minute cooldowns can be used only twice in a 6 minute fight so they would be used at around the 2 minute mark and the 5 minute mark (the latter being molten fury range, obviously).

Tempestra · 04/08/08, 4:24 PM

Originally Posted by Anedris

3-minute cooldowns can be used only twice in a 6 minute fight so they would be used at around the 2 minute mark and the 5 minute mark (the latter being molten fury range, obviously).

Right but in a 6 minute fight, your 2-minute cooldowns are ideally stacked with your 3-minute cooldowns, so timing is constrained by the 2-minute cooldowns - not the 3.

Invis it is I guess =)

♦ Birdemani · 04/08/08, 4:34 PM

double post, stupid lag

♦ Birdemani · 04/08/08, 4:36 PM

Originally Posted by Optikalusion

I'd argue that overall damage done to a full melee group (3 rogues warr shaman) outdoes any caster group save mages sub 20%.

Again, I think that depends on makeup. If you have more than one dps war, only one will be arms. It's possible that the one or more other fury wars will have Imp Execute. Along with the procs you mentioned above, and adding in mongoose/dragonstrike, I'm not sure there is anything in the game that will do as much dps as that fury war sub 20% with heroism. However, even with stats breaking 5000AP and 40%crit and all that haste, it is most likely wise to give it to the multiple mage group over the one fury warrior.

Vulcana · 04/08/08, 4:41 PM

Originally Posted by Tempestra

Right but in a 6 minute fight, your 2-minute cooldowns are ideally stacked with your 3-minute cooldowns, so timing is constrained by the 2-minute cooldowns - not the 3.

Invis it is I guess =)

Not necessarily. If you pop the 2m cooldowns on the pull, you can still stack them with your first and second set of 3m cooldowns, however it still partially defeats the purpose of waiting until that 2m mark to pop the cooldowns.

Either way, you'll probably end up eating 2-3 ticks of invis.

galzohar · 04/08/08, 4:43 PM

Keep a few things in mind:

1. Making someone who is not threat capped to be threat capped by stacking too many heroisms limits DPS. For a mage using invisibility, if it just changes when he uses invis and not wether he actually uses it or not then it doesn't matter, but if it changes him from using invis to not using it then it actuall has a cost of 5 seconds. At the end most classes seem to be able to at least do their normal DPS and generate less threat than the tank, but I'm not sure how much you can increase that DPS while still keeping them under the threat cap, especially when used early.

2. While melee has a lot of haste buffs, it does not matter. What matters is that their WHITE dps increases by 30% and their specials are increased by whatever rage/energy is generated by that 30% extra attack speed. Overall not hard to calculate, but just the fact they have a lot of attack speed multipliers don't mean anything.

3. Hasted casters actually don't increase by straight up 30% due to mana. Depending on the class and the mana situation he's running into on the given fight, it could be between full 30% to much lower than that. For a warlock it's a rather fixed *almost* 30% personal DPS, possibly more due to some increased ISB uptime for the raid (since some of his mana is actually regenerated but most is lifetapped which is boosted by haste, so his lifetap ratio will go slightly higher but nothing significant) - but then again warlocks are the first to get threat capped, and threat capping with heroism means it's quite wasted. For mages on mights up to 6 minutes, if they have a shadow priest, they will have to maybe use 1 mana pot instead of their 2min mark destro pot or squeeze a mana gem between the flame caps, and even that is avoidable with good JoW uptime if available. Gettinga 2nd BL will possibly cost with some other cooldown (lose 1 flame cap for a mana gem or a destro pot for a mana pot). A mage without a shadow priest on a 6 min fight will gain far lower than 30% since he has to use quite inefficient methods of gaining mana. At the end it's always a significant DPS increase regardless of mana, but we're looking at how significant it is, and mana limitations do affect how much you actually get from bloodlust as a caster.

Again I'm not sure it's actually less than 30% in all of these cases due to possible stacking options (which don't only apply to mages, while other classes have less cooldowns they also add DPS), but you get the idea.

So as you can see, on top of what's already mentioned that you need to calculate how much DPS is actually increased for each class doing its rotation, there is more to it that depends on the fight's nature (fight duration, tank threat, dps uptime, burst phases) and the raid/party composition (shadow priests avilability, warglavie rogues...).

Vulcana · 04/08/08, 4:53 PM

Just something to note off of what Galz just mentioned with using inefficient mana regeneration methods:

On a 6m fight like brutallus, if you pop a flamecap on the pull, you can squeeze in a mana emerald as soon as it comes off cooldown and then you'll have exactly 1 minute of flamecap uptime (at the 5m mark). While this is not exactly the best way to do it, as you end up wasting flame cap uptime on scorches, missing molten fury uptime (20% before 5m), or conversely wasting flame cap uptime after the boss is dead.

Hopefully, it's not needed. If WoW Jesus loves you, maybe your RNG won't blow ass in terms of proccing your MoE/JoW.

[E] We're starting to drift off topic, I think. Or at least I'm starting to.