Given the recent math on how unreachable a tight 9s AS focus dump cycle can become due to latency alone I'm beginning to think that glyph of CS might not as optimal as we thought. This is, of course, taking into consideration that current fight mechanics would also easily be pushing the shot cycle past 9s as well.

Looking at my personal logs from hardmodes I'm generally maintaining an actual 10.5+ second cycle hence, I'm basically wasting the benefit of CS glyph.

Now, I also need to get better at "DPSing on the move" but, there is a limit to that both on my personal skill and hardware. If we agree that, say 9.5s, is an acceptable tight cycle in which glyph of CS makes sense, it would mean that I personally need to get 1s faster/smarter/etc than I already am. And, to be honest, I believe I can probably become 0.5s better, but that's it.
TLDR; I'm switching Glyph of CS to Glyph of RF because my latency+skill can't benefit from Glyph of CS.


Edit: This also means I'm changing my reforging pattern. I'm going for hit cap (of course), max crit, and all the haste I can get from reforging out of mastery in pieces where crit is not a reforging option. This is because without CS glyph on standard phase, you can either go with 15.12% haste from gear required for a tight rotation or 0% haste from gear (different rotations)

Definitely, if you already have 10.52% haste from gear, most hunters probably do not have enough stats on gear to make up for the latency, and if you did it would be giving up too much in other stats. My statements were not meant to say you should acquire haste to make up for the latency, only that this was how much was needed.

Concerning the CS glyph, the obvious benefit is being able to vast your CS a second early. Sometimes people take that statement too literally to mean you always have to be casting CS near 9s for the glyph to be beneficial. That is not the full story. If having the CS glyph reduces your CS cycle time by more than 0.5s or so over what it would be without the glyph then it can still be a benefit. The 10.5s I mentioned was not the time for casting CS with the glyph, but without the glyph in my example. With my current haste amount, a 100 ms latency results in a 9.4s CS cycle, which still uses 0.6s of the CD reduction, but the benefit may be more than just the 0.6s if without the glyph for instance my CS cycle would be 10.2s (just to through a number greater than 10s out), then the benefit of having the glyph is really 0.8s. That was the point I was trying to make - that the benefit of the glyph is how much time it reduces your actual CS cycle from the case without the glyph.

My statement concerning the 156ms latency was just to provide a ceiling on the maximum amount of latency that could be compensated for in a CS-ASx2-SSx5 rotation. Remember that in the first case of a CS-ASx2-MMM AI-SSx4 rotation, I stated that the maximum latency that could be compensated for was 125 ms. This was because you had 4 instant cast shots that incurred the latency and 4 cast shots that did not and whose cast time could be reduced by haste to compensate for that latency. At 10.52% haste, each of the cast shots had a 1.25s cast time. Since there was an equal number of latency shots to cast shots, we can look at the what is the maximum latency on one instant shot that could be made up for on haste added to one cast shot. This is basically, the halfway point between 1s and 1.25s, or 1.125s, meaning that at most 125 ms of latency could be reduced in that cycle if you could acquire enough haste to do so. Adding more haste beyond this point cannot cannot make up for more latency in that rotation since every shot must take at least 1.125s, so even if you reduced your SS cast time to below 1.125s, the latency would still result in it taking 1.125s. For instance, if you had 130 ms of latency, every shot takes 1.13s. Thus, having haste to reduce your SS by 130ms to 1.12s to try to make up for the latency would still cost 1.13s to cast due to the latency.

The SS cast time in the CS-ASx2-SSx5 still has the same 1.25s cast time; however, in this case there is only 3 instant cast shots incurring the latency and 5 cast time shots that can be used to make it up. Thus, instead of the 1:1 ratio as previously that cut the 0.25s in half, this rotation has a 3:5 ration. This means that the maximum latency that the cast time shots could make up for if you could acquire sufficient haste to do so is: 0.25s * (5 cast time shots) / 8 shots = 156.25 ms.

Concerning the question about whether there is some point in latency where another glyph will definitely outperform the CS glyph, the answer is yes depending on the glyph and the situation. What that case is for someone with the T11 4-set is not constant from player to player. I believe that it varies with your overall gear ilevel and stat pool. Probably the best way currently to determine this for each player is to mess around in FD. Gear to the 10.52% haste recommendation for no latency and set the latency setting in FD to the normal amount you experience and record the result. Then try different glyphs and haste amounts to see if they improve the situation. For my character and my typical latency, FD showed the 10.52% haste setup with my latency as still being better than all of the options I tried (which was by no means an exhaustive situation), although it was not much better than some of the other options.

Also note that now that we better understand the impact of latency, that is is possible for a given latency amount to design a rotation that optimizes it; however, that is not something I am planning to do since it only applies to one latency amount, which not everyone has.

I think it would be beneficial for the hunter community if we could go into a little more in depth on this. Firstly, does FD calculate the effects of latency accurately enough to give a real representation of what will happen when switching glyphs in your above example? The reason I ask, is that you recommend 3/3 pathing for all of your specs, but I see a dps increase with 2/3 Pathing and 3/3 Frenzy, even with only a 1287 haste rating (CS glyph and 4p T11). Secondly, I am a bit confused as how we should go about determining what is the best glyph setup for our latency, given that we have 4p t11 and 10.52% haste. You said to try different glyphs and haste amounts to see if the situation improves, but my question is why add different haste amounts? Are you saying we should be adding the differing amounts of haste we can acquire with reforging out of other stats? For example, I currently have 1287 haste rating, I can lose 60 crit and gain 60 haste to get to exactly 10.52% haste rather easily. I could also reforge out of 262 crit to gain 262 haste resulting in a haste rating of 1549. My concern with using FD is that it doesn't show the whole picture. If reforging into large amounts of haste will help to offset player latency and real world latency, that type of thing cannot be analysed, but can have a huge affect on ones dps.

I think that is where your last comment comes into play.

Is it possible for the average player to determine a rotation to fit their latency?

First, the recommendations in this guide are just that, recommendations. They are not one size fits all. That is why I provide a lot of information, pros and cons, on talents and glyphs, etc, including the ones I do not use, so that individual hunters can take my recommendations and then make adjustments to them to suit their situation and preferrences. If 2/3 Pathing and 3/3 Frenzy seems to work best for you, then by all means do it.

FD applies latency correctly. Is FD perfect? No. But it is pretty darn good.

When I stated try different amounts of haste, I not only meant trying more haste, I also meant trying less haste. remember if you do not have the CS glyph but have the T11 4-set, there are two choices theoretically, a high haste case or a low haste case. Furthermore, even with the glyph, to account for latency and option is instead of keeping your rotation and adding haste to make it tighter with latency is to remove a shot and use less haste to get the tight rotation with your latency.

If you want to try to find rotations and haste amounts for tight rotations with your latency, then do simailr simple shot analyses as I did in section 6.5 with modifying it to account for your latency. If your latency is y ms, then instead of accounting for 1s for each GCD shot, use 1.ys. For your cast time shots, instead of accounting for haste to bring it down to a minimum cast time of the GCD, change the minimum cast time to the 1.ys. It is not that hard, and next week when I have the time, I plan to do it for my own benefit for about 125ms case. I will create a post for it when its done in case people are interested.

We have known for a while that the 10% raid buff did not affect focus regen with it correctly not being accounted for in the analysis; however, it has been a recent development that ISS did not affect it. Myself and others had thought previously that it did. We do not know whether this was a change, and if so intentional or not.

The numbers in the rotation section do assume focus regen from ISS, and with it not affecting focus regen, it has a negative impact on the results. I intend to rework them sometime soon. For the most part though, the impact is neglible since many of the rotations were not focus tight and where this does impact the focus balancing doing an extra SS while using AI as a focus dump or replacing an AS with an SS periodically should can correct the deficit.

Thank you!

My friend just gave a macro which can get focus regen easily:
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Focus: " .. UnitPower("player") .. " at " .. GetTime())
It can tell you your current focus and current time

Besides, he guess that spells with descriptions of "ranged attack speed" (such as 10% raid buff and ISS) cannot affect focus regain, while spells with descriptions of "ranged haste"(such as BL, Path and Focus Fire) can affect focus regain.
Howerver, RF is a exception with the description of "ranged attack speed"

Hello

Yesterday we killed nefarian heroic, and as many know the whole point of the encounter(DPS wise) is to stack up the Stolen Power buff. Even though we killed him and we became happy and such, I was somewhat dissapointed with my dps(as I didn't get ANY MCs throughout the fight, at all) and was wondering, what would be the best way in an encounter like this -

A) Go the Arcane Shot + Chimera glyph and stack haste or
B) Go the Aimed Shot rotation + Glyph way and let Piercing Shots do the job.

And I was also thinking, wouldn't Survival be somewhat superior in this fight due to the 10% increased damage on creatures afflicted with Serpent Sting.

Would be happy with some answers.

Hey,
I've been following this thread closely, but one statement in the OP has been bugging me. I am wondering where the value of 1Agi = 2AP + crit came from. I understand that Agi is worth more than AP on the basis of the + crit rating and that it is by far our most valuable stat, but when I check my character sheet in game, the AP boost attributed to Agi is always Agi-10. I realize this won't change how we play the spec much nor how we attribute stat priority. I am just asking so I better understand the class. Thanks

You are mixing two items together. The first is how overall AP is calculated for a hunter, which is from agi-10, which basically is applied to your base agility/AP even when naked. The second is the benefit of each additional point of agility. Not including any buffs (like the 5% agility mail bonus, the 5% stat buff, or the 10% AP buff - their impacts are detailed in the OP), 1 agi is 2 AP and equivalent 0.552 crit rating (0.0031% crit). These numbers come from the WoW equations for stat conversions where 1 agi provides 2 AP and 1/324.85 crit %.

I am interested in what starting rotations people are using currently. As we wall know the start of every fight is generally our highest DPS due to CA and starting RF, and is often also lower movement than later phases. In general I start with:

Potion of the Potion of the Tol'vir (if I am not saving for a burn phase)
RF
Readiness
AI / SS alternating till RF ends
RF
AI / SS alternating till RF ends
SrS
CS
Enter "standard rotation" for either AI or AS depending on the fight and my anticipated need to move often

I have also tried adding SSx2 proceeding each RF for some extra haste but it doesnt seem to be worth it. Curious what everyone else uses as their opening? Is it worth it to try to keep SrS up or ISS up during RF?

A lot top end hunters like Cev from Vodka, and Cabelim from Blood Legacy are dropping out of as much haste as possible and stacking crit/mastery. To compensate for the lost haste, they don't use the Chimera Shot glyph. Based on the readings in the MM guide and the information in this thread, this wouldn't seem optimal, but these hunters are ranking in the top 10 in the world on many heroic encounters, so they must have some idea of what they're doing.