With the 2pT13 you will be doing less "standard" cycles ES-3xCoS-ES, the majority of your cycles will have at least 2 instant shots. Also the 2265 haste plateau someone stated works only for 4pct11. There is no way to achieve 4xCoS between ESs with the current gear. Also with all the haste available on gear this tier, you will be always over the 757 plateau so when needed you can perform the 3coS-ES cycle correctly.

At 390~ ilvl Simcraft shows haste and mastery being almost equal with no 2pct13, being haste generally a bit better. When switching to 2pct13 mastery overtakes haste but again by a minor margin, at least on the few profiles I ran (not even near BiS)

Hm? It's quite easy to get 4xCoS in current gear, the question is whether it's worth wearing that gear since it costs you crit rating to wear (not because of reforging away from crit, just because the pieces happen to not have very much crit on them). 2265 haste rating and 3/3 pathing gives you 1.5s Cobra Shots (yes even without 4pcT11, not sure why you claim that). This is sufficient to put out 4 cobras between each ES without delaying ES - but of course you don't want to do that especially with 2pcT13 due to all the focus, so instead you do 2xCS+2xInstants, for a total casting time of 5s, leaving a lot of dead time to account for latency between the 3 instants per cycle (in the 4xCS cycle you wouldn't worry about latency since the server side queuing negates it as you have no contiguous instants. This dead time is what means you don't really care about getting 1.5s cobras; attempted math below.


To you and Kushana - I think you're right in this, since on cycles where you manage to cast 2xCS and 2xInstants (generally AS), you need far less haste to fit between ES cooldowns, even with latency. A 1.5s CS cast takes 3s for 2xCS, 2s+latency x2 for 2xinstant (usually AS). So at my 100ms latency, since the queueing won't help with latency on the 3 contiguous instants you end up firing, you have a casting time of 5.2s (5.3 if you incur the full latency after ES). So if you were willing to extend your CS casts to eat up that extra 0.7s per ES cooldown, you'd have 3.7s for 2xCS, so only need ~1.85s CS casts, which you have at just Hunting Party + Pathing with 0 haste from gear.

However whenever you proc LnL, haste helps you all the way up to around 8000 haste if you're interleaving CS between ES since until about that much haste your CS cast is above our 1s GCD and the 1s time which we still (I think) need to wait to avoid clipping ES ticks.

For the 3xCS 1xInstant cycles you still have to do (less often with 2pc), you are back at wanting the 700-1000 haste as before, depending on latency.

edit: The biggest argument in favour of high haste over high mastery I can think of is that in sustained AoE situations, if faster CSs lead to gaining a few extra multishots per set of adds, I think that would outweight the gain from higher SrS and ExT damage, because the extra Multishot and ISrS procs will generally do more damage than the stronger ticking DoTs and stronger but less frequent ISrS procs. The question is what duration of aoe gains you enough multishots for this to be true.

4x Cobra Shots at 1.5 seconds is equal to 6 seconds, which is the cooldown of Explosive Shot, but the first second of that window is taken by the GCD from casting Explosive Shot, leaving you a 5 second span for fitting in other shots.

0.00-0.00 Explosive Shot (on GCD until 6.00)
0.00-1.00 Still on Global Cooldown
1.00-2.25 Cobra Shot (1.00-2.00 GCD)
2.25-3.50 Cobra Shot (2.25-3.25 GCD)
3.50-4.75 Cobra Shot (3.50-4.50 GCD)
4.75-6.00 Cobra Shot (4.75-5.75 GCD)
6.00-6.00 Explosive Shot

So really fitting 4 Cobra Shots would require a 1.25 Cobra Shot cast time, as at 1.5 you would be delaying Explosive Shot by 1 second.

Which is might add is pretty useless since you would be wasting all that focus.

What is the benefict of CA over Sic'Em in add fights? I just don´t see it. At best you will get 2 o 3 CoS on any add before it goes under 90% health. Even if it means a raw dps gain, you are throttling your performance for a very marginal personal DPS gain. Bosses like MoD are all about burst, especially in phase 2, where Sic'Em will provide you far more DPS than CA, which provides 0 dps

my view on it is cobra during that first 10%, then go completely out of focus by shooting tentacles, and when you start on a new add you cobra to regain focus, then use all your focus for the remaining 90%, over and over. basically you get more burst.

because you never really try to go completely out of focus, meaning there is some burst damage left unspent right? this means you can use cobra without it being less dps than other attacks due to the higher crit rate, and managing to avoid having to use it on the remaining 90% when you would prefer explosive shot and arcane shot.

now if you do the normal rotation then you probably won't see the benefits as much. I normally have explosive shot on cd, and am out of focus from previous adds, so cobra at the start works perfect.

your point about the burst, a pet will hit 5k bites, 10k bite crits. if 1 cobra shot can crit rather than be a normal hit you see over a 10k difference, and you can probably get 3 in a row before it drops below 90%, and if you start while out of focus you will be sitting closer to 80 focus afterwards, and then you can continue your normal rotation, by then explosive should be off CD.

and killing those tentacles at the end faster, doesn't that mean you get to dps deathwing more? so its a slight drop in dps on him, more dps on the adds, however it means the entire raid gets to dps on him sooner with the raid not having to take as much damage from adds.

this is all just theory, but feel free to disagree. im still experimenting, it shows good results, but its really hard to run it in simulations with different rotation methods during different parts of fights.


sidenote: this is a double post and i was just an idiot not thinking to edit my previous post.

I'm not sure what adds you're referring to on MoD, but I don't see how this gives any DPS increase at all. What adds do you have 0 focus on when attacking? If you mean Blistering tentacles, then you're more likely to get ZERO CoS's off on them above 90%. If you mean the big tentacles, and wing/arm tentacles, then you're more likely to start attacking them while having any amount of focus between 0-100 (more often than not above 0, due to Kill Shot being prio'ed over Arcane Shot).

As for the Tentacles in phase2, it's still the same issue. The loss in dps on Deathwing himself (from Sic'em procs) is bigger than the gain on the tentacles.

Over the entire MoD fight, you will end up getting more damage-done out of Sic'Em rather than CA.

Something that i came across with regards to LnL procs:
It's been a long time recommendation i believe to use LnL procs for ES-CS-ES-AS-ES interleaving shots to maximize the use of the ES ticks. However, when i try to turn on and off interleave option in the FD, without use of interleave i get an approximate 80ish DPS gain?

I suppose this goes down to scaling with agil / mastery of the dmg of AS / CS / ES / ES ticks, and if ES scaling is higher then should we not be switching to a simple ES spam during the LnL as the gear iLVLs grow?

With change to dot clipping you can now safely fire off two explosive shots in a row without the risk of clipping them. For the last shot, you need slighly more than a global in between or a global and a longer travel time in order not to clip one tick.

I know about the changes but I still get 5 ticks sometimes when I fire two esplosives in a row.

I think it depends on the individual. I did get dot clipping when I fired two ES immediately after one another immediately after an LnL proc. Also contrary to what others have reported but in line with your results, I do not get any clips when I do EX-very brief pause-EX-AS-EX, where "very brief pause" means that I look at the dot timer for the first ES and start trying to fire the 2nd ES just as 0.5 seconds have ticked off it.

This is with very low (40 ms) latency. The sample size was a lot smaller than yours.