Please read previous results, as your numbers on haste are completely wrong. Namely, this effect multiplies with all other haste effects, not adds, same as the old NG effect. NG will affect Starfire exactly in the same way as it did previously. It will affect Wrath much less, but will have a much higher uptime.

Thanks for the quick reply, my post was more of a question in a way.

Also. as mentioned previously, the new NG will allow for multiple spell casts to be influenced by it, now on a single NG proc your next 2-3 SFs will get the haste benefit.

Oh very nice, I did not spend enough attention to the new tooltip/patch info to notice that they removed 'from your next spell'.

Reading is the key
to the art of theorycraft;
Leave it to the pros.

Oh god, not again
we just got over haikus,
and you brought them back!

Hmm what would the numbers be on using Starfall during a Wrath eclipse? I can see a stream of 1sec casttime, +30% dmg Wraths doing quite some nice burst. Ofcourse, with enough crit your NG uptime when spamming Wrath will be very high already.

The problem stems from the fact that, with Haste levels they are at the moment, Wrath will begin to be clipped. At the moment on live, with the current NG of 0.5 sec reduction, I'm clipping Wrath. Obviously, NG won't reduce Wraths cast time as much, but I still see SF Eclipse being the main powerhouse DPS increase, prehaps even more with the Starfall and NG changes.

I'm more curious about the standing of IS, as will the damage co-efficient increase be enough to keep us wanting to use it, or will we go back to our two main spells being MF and SF.

Unglyphed IS (with Nature's Spendor): Base damage is more than SF base damage. Scaling per cast is 140%. Costs 1 GCD to cast.

Non-crit SF (with Moonfury and WoC): Scaling per cast is 132%. Costs 2 GCD to cast.

So ignoring latency (or possibly GCD clipping at very high haste), non-glyphed IS is higher DPET than Starfire, even at 100% crit. I think you will want to use it, unless the T8 bonus adds more than 30% to our nukes.

With the change of NG, and the change in our rotation to maximize dps at levels of haste under 400, would it be valuable for us that run higher than 400 to attempt to drop haste? We would add alot of crit in doing so, and I dont know how that would really work out.

Say currently I run 583 Haste , with 19.6% crit out of form, 2063 SP out of form.

Would I gain overall dps by dropping 'excess' haste, and pushing my crit up substaintially due to the change in rotation?

I realize that due to itemization costs, 1 haste > 1 crit, I was just something running through my head, any thoughts would be appreciated.

With my current stats at 606 Haste, 16.77% crit and 1958 spellpower (out of form) I am starting to wonder the same thing. Come to that I already worry that I have favoured haste over crit too much

I don't think it will really effect gearing all that much.

Given that it's possible to get upwards of 3 wrath casts and 2 starfire casts with the new NG, the total uptime for the buff should be close to 100% of the time, assuming ~45% crit raid buffed. NG's uptime was directly proportional to crit, and this increases uptime considerably. So, I think it's a buff, overall, without really changing any gearing strategies.

Plus, this helps with highly hasted wraths, because they're not clipping the GCD as much as before, leading to slightly smoother cast rotations.

For SF heavy rotations you are right - The amount of haste to push SF below 1.5sec casttime is out of reach or getting there would involve a very funky set of gear either way.

For W there is a huge latency penalty for going below 1sec casttime - This provides a cap of around 400 haste, at which point getting more hurts your dps quite alot. Main problem is that dropping 250 haste from gear is not that easy & leads to using items that are quite far from current best in slot (& this only gets worse as we reach higher tier's).


@Fallenangel - Crit = 20% haste for 3 seconds. No mentioning of spell restrictions to the NG-haste anywhere.

Edit: In my original post I was looking for a clear explanation of why we have an added latency penalty when our spell cast time is less than 1 second. I now understand that spells can be queued when you are in the GCD and break when your first cast finishes but you are still in the GCD. I was originally thinking that spells can't be queued at all until you are out of the GCD.

Does anyone have the link for the study on this? I'm not having any luck searching it on these forums. If it's elsewhere any help would be appreciated. I think understanding this better would really help when it comes time to make decisions in some of those questionable situations.

Go play the game, this is easy to observe (I.e. theres no magic hidden theory, its just a basic observation of how the spellqueue system works).

Not really. Currently, You have to make a conscious decision to change to the new spell once Eclipse is off ICD. With your proposed change, you'd change spells when Eclipse procs: reactive, versus proactive.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how people are saying spell queueing for casts under the GCD works. What I'm understanding seems to be common knowledge here is that if you cast a wrath that is under 1s cast time, there is no spell queueing, you have to wait until the 1s GCD is finished for your client to send the cast command, making the effective cast time 1s + time for the cast command to get to the server + key spamming time. While a 1s wrath cast would still allow spell queueing, making the cast time 1s + key spamming time, meaning there's a penalty for dropping the wrath cast barely under 1s, rather than just no gain.

I'm fairly laggy, 200-300 ms usually, so from a theorycraft point of view that extra .1-.15 seconds on my wrath seems significant when I'm deciding between starfires and clipped wraths. If I'm understanding this totally wrong please just let me know.

As for observing it, even with my laggy connection that would mean picking up the difference between a 1s cast and a 1.1 second cast from straight up perception, no visible numbers. That doesn't seem so easy already, skirting the edge of impossible with any better connection.

Edit: I realized it was the 3.1 thread where wrath clipping was being discussed rather than this one. I suspect I'm just misunderstanding what people mean by clipping though so this is as good a thread as any to be set straight.

You cannot cast spells faster than 1s. This has nothing to do with queuing, and everything to do with the GCD. Even if you could queue a spell during the GCD, 95% of Wraths will be unaffected by haste past 400 rating. You just simply cannot cast it any faster. Before that point, it's debatable whether you're able to queue a spell so that there is no latency between one wrath finishing and the next starting. Currently, I'm of the opinion that you won't be able to, but I have no hard proof backing me up on that yet.

I've been raiding as a Moonkin during the entirety of WotLK so far but at Patchwerk, I'm still sitting at a measly 4800 DPS. Studying the WWS thread for 3 seconds already explained why, I'm not using IS at all. I had no idea that it would be beneficial to cast, even though I run the Glyphed version.

So my question is, how do I weave it into my rotation, do I keep it up during Eclipse, Heroism? Should I clip it or let it run out and refresh during a more convenient time?

Also, when is the best time to use a haste pot?

If you cast Insect Swarm directly after Eclipse ends and refresh it 15 seconds later, you'll have a fair uptime without getting in the way of Eclipse. If you get unlucky and it runs out while spamming Wrath to proc the next Eclipse, it should be okay to refresh Insect Swarm. Do not cast it during Eclipse. Potion of Speed should be used during an Eclipse and combined with a clicky trinket if you have one.

I don't believe that we in the Druid theorycraft community have done nearly enough to nail down the interaction between haste, latency and the GCD. I tried to find this kind of discussion in other places (affliction lock, shadow priest), but searches for GCD were unrewarding.

The general modeling for the time associated with a cast is

raw_cast_time = haste_function(tooltip_cast_time, haste_effects)
if(raw_cast_time >= GCD)
actual_time = raw_cast_time + latency1
else
actual_time = GCD + latency2

There is very good agreement on "haste_function()". Values for latency1 and latency2 seem to be personnal guesses, with the "guess" for latency1 ranging from 0.0 to 0.2s, even for a good connection. Various simulators use latency2 numbers ranging from zero, to 2*latency1.

It is not too surprising that if one theorycrafter says that Wrath takes 1.0s to cast, and another says it takes 1.4s to cast, that we won't reach a consensus on when we should cast the spell.

Better numbers should not be hard to get.

- Find a target dummy. Make sure you don't have any on-proc haste effects.
- Turn on your combat log
- Cast SF thirty one times as fast as you can.
- Take a drink
- Cast Wrath thirty one times as fast as you can.
- Take a drink
- Cast IS thirty one times as fast as you can.

Record your haste rating, and tooltip cast times for SF and Wrath. Go into your combat log and record the time you started casting the first, and thirty-first cast of each type. For SF and Wrath, figure out how many of the casts were under the effect of NG. Record how you were casting (single keypress eyeball'd with Blizz's castbar? continuous casting via a mousewheel scroll?). If you have a mod that reports latency (recommendations?) record its reading. Tell us your results.

Answers to questions like "When should I refresh MF during Eclipse?" are just guesses if we don't know the ratio between MF cast time and SF cast time.