Melador

Well, there's always going to be a gap between casts due to latency. The spell queuing stuff definitely helped -- we're not eating a full latency cycle between casts any more -- but there's still a gap which is what the Latency field represents.

For example, if I spam wrath at a target I average 1.45s per cast, but my tooltip lists it at 1.38s, and my in-game listed latency is 200ms. There IS a full latency cycle when I first start casting, but the current "automatic stopcasting" system brings my chaincasting effective latency down to ~70ms. So yeah, I wouldn't just plug in your listed latency, but there's definitely still some time between "last spell is done" and "next spell is casting".

The only reason latency negatively impacts haste is because haste causes you to cast more spells, and every time you cast a spell you eat a latency delay.

 

Saraya

It's not really just an issue of higher latency per say, its also human reaction time. Your cast times turn into <cast time>+<lag>+<reaction time>. Haste only affects cast time unfortunately, and does not make your reaction time or lag any better.

Let's say your starfire is 3 seconds cast. If your reaction time is 0.2 seconds, and lag is 0.2 seconds, the total time is 3.4 seconds. If you had enough haste to get 2.5 seconds per cast, your actual time would be 2.5+.2+.2 = 2.9 seconds instead.

Compare 2.5/3 = 0.8333333, without any lag/human reaction time
and 2.9/3.4 = 0.85294, with lag/human reaction time, and its easy to see that haste loses effectiveness when you add in any external casting delays.

With the old /stopcasting macros, and now the new so called "spell queue" in place, you should be able to reduce the lag to a minimal time. The total of lag+reaction time should be roughly 0.2 seconds if you're doing it right. Any latency or lag field in rawr/spreadsheets is basically just the combination of the two numbers.

The average human reaction time is about 0.2 seconds, in case you were wondering where I'm pulling the number from. If you have a constant ping, you can actually lower this even more with good timing. Keyboard presses in wow activate on negative edge(when you let go of the key), so if you know you will be casting a spell, you hold it down first, then right when you want to cast it, you let it go. Even if you don't do any anticipation, the simple act of not needing to hit the key will save at least another 20-30 miliseconds. Anticipation(which is only applicable with a constant ping) can help you shave off even more time, but the penalty for failure is you not casting the spell at all, so while you're learning the timing of this, I'd do a double tap to ensure a spell going off. (All of this is only really useful on very static fights since it requires a degree of attention to hold down the key in advance and let go of the key on time)

The short version is that yes, the 1392 spell damage:haste equivalency point is not totally applicable to us simple jesters. Haste is still useful, it's just harder to justify gemming for it.

 

Efejel

That sounds a little unrealistic since average human reaction time ( Reaction time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) may be substantially higher, though there isn't a category for a periodic reaction to a single-variable stimuli with at least 1.5 sec of advance notice of the specific variability... If I recall correctly, someone had done pretty thorough analysis of WWS parses and felt that ~50 ms was reasonable reaction time, but a bit on the slow side? I'm afraid I don't recall where I read that, it very well could have been somewhere in this thread.

*D'oh* Apparently responses to this effect spilled onto the next page, and I missed seeing that I was repeating something already mentioned. Lemme see if I can find the WWS parse comment to add some value to this post...

"Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something." - Kurt Vonnegut

 

spi

I'm curious to know why people keep mentioning the human "reaction time" when you now just spam buttons for the queue system. Am I missing something here? Reaction time shouldn't really be considered when you're spamming a button. It would have made sense to me to consider the human reaction time when one uses stop casting macros, but I don't understand where "reaction time" comes into play for the new queue system where you spam one button. You aren't reacting to anything.

 

◊ Lorewanderer

While there may be an element of it, there are certainly things one can do to get around latency.

The most straightforward way of getting around it thaqt I've heard of is to bind your primary nuke to the scroll wheel, and when the previous cast time is coming to an end, begin spinning it.
I use a more complex system with a custom driver where if I hold down a button it hits it once, then spams it 15x a second after a short delay. Given my extremely jittery lag, I will occasionally see it nearly "skip" an entire NG-wrath cast castbar in Quartz. That's something I know I couldn't accommodate with any level of reflex, but actually works quite well with some intelligent driver tweaks.

 

Öwlcapwn

I have a simple question, I hvae been raiding bt / hyjal for 4+ months now as balance, I have 4/5 t5 and 4/5 t6 atm, no Sunwell pieces yet. So I can choose to wear a high damage 4/5 t5 set or a high haste 4/5 t6 set. I was wondering what kind of concensus there was to which option would be best for a fight like brutalis that requires maximizing dps.

in my haste gear (under ideal raid buffs / group which happens 80% of the time) i can roll with 175-200 haste and sit at about 1200~ damage unbuffed.

Does 4 set t5 bonus outweight t6 until I get more haste or can wear both 4/5 t5 and 4/5 t6 sunwell?

I've ran some of the numbers thru the spreadsheet but I'm having trouble finding real noticable results. The spreadsheet doesnt seem to be updated completely with 2.4 mechanics.

EDIT: I would also wonder about Treants added to the rotation. They seem to do a tremendous amount of damage done to my boss fights, and some fights require them to be thrown out at well timed moments. Are they a dependable source of DPS? meaning should I always try and use them or not. I've had our main tank question the overal effectiveness as the chance that the boss parries my treant and cause more spike damage to the tank.

 

Melador

Lorewanderer/spi: yeah, I don't think reaction time plays much of a role when you're chaincasting, I'm typically spamming my button pretty good when it's getting close to my current cast being done. It doesn't get around latency entirely (see my above example with wrath spam), but it helps.

Owlcapwn: From what I can see, 4pc t5 is a ~100 dps bonus. If you're not getting that with your additional t6/sunwell gear, I'd stick with the t5.

 

◊ Lorewanderer

Treant safety would depend a good deal on how your tank transitions happen, and how you work around them. If Brut is being spun at all by taunts, the parry chances go up quite a bit. If there isn't much movement going on, dropping them in an intelligent spot behind the boss won't really risk additional parries.

As for t5 v. t6, are you being asked to keep IS up (if no, and if tank death is a serious concern, why not)? Since you'll have the dots going regardless, I'd stick with t5 to take advantage of that. If tank death is less of a concern, and debuff slots are an issue, I'd go t6 to avoid making that issue worse and ease up the timing issues--keeping a tight rotation on moonfire without clipping/letting it drop off can be difficult.

 

Öwlcapwn

I appreciate the feedback so far. I just noticed today that the spreadsheet has been updated for 2.4 content.

With my current t6 set up it says I should pull more DPS then my t5 set up. I'll crunch some more numbers thru the day and hope I can clarify it for myself a little more.


and the max dps rotation it suggests is MF x 2 SF x 13, i can only assume they mean MF, SF x 6-7, MF SF 6-7.

 

Celdhyrean

Treants and other pets will now automatically try to go behind the boss. Between the spot where you cast them and this new behavior, there shouldn't be any parry risk unless the mob spins around at times (to cast whatever on a raid member for example), and even then that risk wouldn't be higher than that created by other melee dps.
You can use combat logs to verify whether there's any pary on their melee swings.

They are really usefull if they can do their full 30s of dps and still OK even if they only last 50% (same +dmg, they did 3k for 15s against Kazrogal, for a GCD). If lower uptime, then don't bother.

 

• Adoriele

Yep, that's exactly what the spreadsheet means. When I update mine to deal with cast rotations, it won't actually stick to a fixed number of SFs for this very reason, and instead will determine the number of SFs on its own based on a statistical distribution of procs, and generate an average that way. I.E. if you have enough haste and crit that you routinely switch between 5 and 6 SFs depending on NG procs, it will determine statistically your chances of 5 or 6, as well as the actual cast time for each, and combine the two to generate an average DPS. It'll have the option to pick whether you prefer to clip the ends of your dots off, or let them fall for the end of the last SF (or W, if that's your preference) cast.

 

Khalanis

From numbers I've run I would have to say that 4pc t6 is better than 4pc t5, but not by a whole lot.(something like 50dps on starfire), add in the fact that you have a 2pc that actually does something for you, it's a good bet that it'll be a bit better 'till 2 4pcs. Not to mention it gives you a lot more freedom when DPSing since you won't have to worry about religiously keeping up your dots.
Treants are often worth throwing, even if you can't guarantee their safety for the whole duration. My avg SF hits for ~4100(counting crits), so, for the cast time treants would need to do 2050 dmg before they died to make it worth throwing for me. they usually do anywhere from 7-11k for full duration so it doesn't take long to reach that 2k mark. And, I'm not sure on this, maybe someone can help me out, but I think if you throw them just before heroism pops they'll get it too?

 

Zene

Now that latency and haste is being talked about, some of you may find this post from the Elemental Shaman thread of use/interest.

http://elitistjerks.com/739686-post1800.html

 

thedopefishlives

This is how Rawr works, except it always forces you to allow the dots to expire; you can never clip your dots. One interesting result of that is if you have .000012047 seconds left on your dot, it will try to cast another Starfire/Wrath, which is an obvious loss of DPS. I'll try to insert pseudo-clipping into b14.1, where if the dot clip is less than a certain small amount (say, your character's latency), it will clip the dot rather than casting another spell.

 

• Adoriele

I would love to see how you've implemented this, just to check it against my own work. It would also be... possible (I'll leave the qualifiers out for now) to implement a double-check to see whether clipping or not-clipping would provide the best DPS on a given instance of the rotation and account for it, but I can't honestly believe that, without an addon to help out in-game, people would be able to make the correct choice all the time, as you'd have to know exactly how much time was left on the DoT. So I'm likely to just set what the preferred method is, and base calculations around it.

So is the IS, MF, SFx4 listing for DPS really IS, MF, SFxN?

 

Saraya

Not very compatible with idol swap macros, but probably worth the trade off if laginfo is clocking in 100+ ms of delay. Thanks for the link.

 

thedopefishlives

In a word, yes. I didn't make the labels dynamic (although I could try, in theory), so any time you see a number listed, it would in actuality be "however many of that cast you can fit in during the DoT".

 

spi

Wow Web Stats
Teron tonight. No 4/5 4/8, just sunwell stuff. The simulator was just about dead on. Perhaps I was wrong about it overweighing haste on Dr. boom (the simulator posted above).

 

Melador

Awesome -- I've never really raided moonkin except for things like Kara and ZG, so I'm flying a bit blind. Great to have some confirmation that it's pretty accurate.

And, wow, 2.2k dps, nice. I wish you hadn't logged out in your resto gear.

 

Anduryondon

wws got deleted
2,2k dps with normal raid conditions (no multiple bloodlust/heroism)?

 

spi

Wow Web Stats

We just merged some more data for it. It wasn't normal raid condition. No imp FF for teron, and two heroisms for me, one mana pot and one destro pot. Push backs are sort of a pain for teron though. However, that's only with one piece of off-set sunwell gear. I feel like if I had sunfire gloves/chest, sunwell shoulders and T6 helm, it would make up for 4/5 T5. I should be in my moonkin gear now... I need some improvements on my weapon mostly so i can put sunfire on it! +
I would love to test out my new gear on brutallus but our feral druid just quit so i'm having to tank it in my gimpy feral gear /cry. I'd like to compare the wws of 4/5 T5 posted above when i get a chance as an ongoing comparison though(although if dr. boom simulator is right, it should make up more than enough). I will be using imp FF next time I do brut so it'll be a good side-by-side comparison.

 

Kaug

Haste is not affected by lag AT ALL. Some would say that haste gives you an extra cast every X casts and that extra cast has lag on it so that diminishes the effect. But every cast has lag on it, SO if you add lag to every casts and then compare that to hasted casts you see flat increase, 'relatively' unaffected by lag. The key is to compare Apples to Apples!


Two examples with SF spam.

no haste
SF - (time saved from haste) + (lag+reaction time)
3.0s -0.0s + 0.2s =3.2s

.2 sec saved from haste
SF - (time saved from haste) + (lag+reaction time)
3.0s -0.2s + 0.2s =3.0s

IOW .2s in haste savings equal .2s in total casting time saved regardless of how little\much lag you have and regardless of how fast\slow your reaction time is

 

Efejel

So, after reading about this, I decided to give it a try last night. Afterwards, I immediately went to my guild forums and posted the following (since some of the other casters in my guild are not as tech savvy as the average EJ reader, it is a bit dumbed-down).


http://www.autohotkey.net/

I tried this out, it's great (assuming you're not threat limited already). I saw about a 15% or more DPS jump tonight in ZA. That's equivalent to a LOT of free haste.

What to do:

1) Go to website & download the version at the top. It's open source, it's neither a keylogger nor a virus.
2) Install it. I just used the default settings, it worked fine for me.
3) Run it. It will ask if you want to create an example & save it in your "My Documents"... you do!
4) Add the following lines:
only replace 3 & 4 (everywhere they occur) with whatever keys you bind to the spells you may wish to spam. There's no reason you're limited, you can create spam-binds for 1-9,-,= even.
5) Save the file, then restart the program to load the modified script. Instead of tapping your cast buttons, hold them down & the program will simulate a tap every 1ms.

Viola, ~10-20% more DPS for casters (hopefully).

"Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something." - Kurt Vonnegut

 

nakedduck

Def. going to check this out when I get home. Just 2 questions Efejel.

1. If I bind it to a number, lets say 1, and i try to type in gchat, will the 1 get spammed?
2. Seems like the program isn't botting per say, but seems like it may be in the grey are in terms of ToS, you know if it's legit?

 

Soultrigger

The only thing about AHK is that you may get banned because of the EULA and TOS for playing WoW, and we all know how Blizzard is with third party programs, and that they ban all your accounts too.

I pretty much prefer to suck at dps, than get banned.