Hey guys,

I need a little bit of Rawr interpretation help. I'm starting to bump into the GCD when casting with haste buffs (Icy Veins, Heroism, Potion of Speed) and I'm trying to figure out what might best changes to make (rotation or gear/gems/enchants or both). Before I get into that though I just want to make sure some of my basic assumptions and understanding of what Rawr is telling me is in fact correct. So first of all, my base haste right now is 786 which Armory tells me is 23.97 haste. Secondly, with the Imp. Moonkin Form and Wrath of Air totem selected for buffs (3% and 5% +haste) Rawr is reporting my haste as 42.12%. Since 23.97% +3 +5 does not sum to 42.12%, I'm wondering where the rest is coming from? I trust what Rawr is saying because it agrees well with observed casts, just not sure where the numbers come from.

So, once I cross the threshold of 50% haste, my GCD stop decreasing at 1 second (right?). At my current 42.12% haste my cast time for MBAM or AB is 1.76 seconds. If I add on Potion of Speed (+15.25%) and IV (+20%) during Heroism (+30%) I'll be sitting at 117.25% haste and my calculated cast time will be 1.15 seconds. That's only about 30% away from the theoretical haste cap (ie the point at which cast speed = GCD = 1 second). Under these circumstances I no longer look at my cast bar for timing casts, but at the GCD "wheel" on my cast button. It is so close right now I know I'm missing casts, and functionally I already "feel like" I'm at the haste cap.

I'm 10 emblems away from the 2-pc T10 bonus. I'm worried that any more haste I add will be largely wasted. So, what to do? One solution I've considered (and am already kinda doing) will be to change my rotation to start staggering my cooldowns more, so that heroism, and IV in particular are never stacked. Alternately, I'm thinking I could just switch from Potion of Speed to Wild Magic, and to swap gems to de-haste down to some more manageable value (maybe 1.8 second base cast time?). What do you guys think is the best approach?

Hunh? That isn't right. I thought I knew how to calculate percent but no matter what way i do it I can't make a base haste rating of 786 (23.97%) with a 3% and 5% modifier add up to 42.12%. There has to be something else Rawr is factoring of which I am unaware.

Way ahead of ya. if rawr wasn't already telling me to stack my cooldowns as I described earlier, I wouldn't be coming to these forums. That's the issue you see, Rawr is telling me to pile up Pot of speed with hero and IV and thus to just deal with a 1.15 second cast time. As i said, I am working as hard as i can to maintain this cast speed, but it is getting a little unreasonable. As I said, my suspicion is that my dps is actually higher if I don't take Rawr's suggestion to repeatedly try to click a key for a spell cast within a 0.15 second window (and often miss) and instead desync the cooldowns. i suspect that you are right in that I'll have to start dealing with some of the advanced options in the cooldown editor to confirm this.

It's working perfectly well, you're just misunderstanding how haste effects stack together.

Your haste rating contribution: 23.97%
Netherwind presence: 6%
Wrath of Air: 5%
Boomkin: 3%

1.2397*1.06*1.05*1.03 = 1.42117 or an effective haste rating of 42.12%.

You keep multiplying percent based factors as you stack them, i.e. if you bloodlust, you multiply 1.42117*1.3 = 1.848 or 84.8% haste. You will reach a GCD of 1 second when haste crosses 50%. You will start being GCD limited once you reach 150% haste (assuming you are only casting AB or AM).

In your case, some of your dps loss might be the result of you not pushing your arcane blast button fast enough while you're building stacks - you can and should keep queuing spells while non-channeled spells are casting. You can even do it with arcane missiles: I'd recommend using a
for all your arcane missiles - this way, you can spam your arcane missiles button without fear of restarting the channel. As far as I know, the above macro unaffected by latency/client+server communication unless you want to channel back to back arcane missiles.

This might be relevant for you in case you want to modify the latency values to model different behavior as you're nearing the gcd limit. The total time spent on a spell is calculated as normal hasted cast time + latency. This latency is the GCD Latency for instants and spells with base cast time less than 1.5 sec, Cast Latency for normal spells that can be queued and Channel Latency for channeled spells. This value however cannot go lower than minimum global cooldown (= 1.0 sec) + GCD Latency. Knowing this you could increase the GCD Latency to 0.15 for example to model that you can't utilize cast times below 1.15 sec.

Just because you're hitting the GCD when stacking all the cooldowns doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing to do. It's quite likely that the benefit of stacking them outweighs the slight over-capping.

Probably. That or I am still configuring things improperly (or both). Let me see if I can figure out which. By simply switching out Potion of Speed for Potion of Wild Magic I lower my haste to (1.4212*1.3*1.2=2.217) 121.7% and get +200 sp and +200 crit for it instead. Of the 15.25% increase I'd normally get from Potion of Speed I'd only be able to use about 12.5% or about 410 of the 500 haste that Potion of Speed normally gives. So then the question becomes, which is better? +410 haste or +200 sp and crit? I don't have it open right in front of me but as I recall rawr was saying that my scaling ratio of haste to sp is about 1 to 1.15 or so. So I'd need about 230 haste to match 200 sp. I don't recall at all how crit scales relative to haste but even if it were as high as 0.9:1 (I think it may be), 200 crit from a Potion of Wild magic would equal about 180 haste. So using Potion of Wild magic should net me about as much dps as boosting haste by 180+230 = 410 should. If I recall those scaling factors correctly, it implies I'm right on the edge of where Potion of Speed stops being useful to stack in the cooldowns. I'll have to reconstruct the sequence again with some virtual item that boosts my base haste another 5% and see if rawr tells me to use Potion of Wild Magic instead.

Another thing when dealing with edge cases regarding haste is that by default Rawr averages haste procs (things like Black Magic, not on use effects) at spell level. If you want to sacrifice performance for extra accuracy you can enable an option in advanced settings to compute haste procs at cycle level instead.

Beyond the page that you linked the best you can do is search for my posts here in this thread. I can try to explain something if you're having problems, but I'd have to know what you're trying to accomplish.

Has the way the "add custom gemming/equip custom gemming" right click menus's fuctionality changed? I used to be able to use this to quickly change the gem, if for example the optimizer wanted me to put the same gems I already have in different slots. Id use it to equalize what rawr shows, with real life in game. Lately however, it doesnt give me a full listing of gems under that menu, just 4-5 gems, none of which are even part of my gemming template.

Sounds like a filtering problem. The default filters in v2.3.6 had some things turned off by default, which you could just turn back on. Those defaults were turned back on for the newer versions though.

The main functionality you can get from advanced solver is cycle analysis (comparing custom cycles or solving for optimal ones) and cooldown stacking analysis. It's also possible to use it to model more complicated fights involving vulnerabilities or multi-phase fights and its effect on cooldown stacking. It's also needed in most cases to get feasible sequence reconstruction results.