There was apparently a bug that caused over-proc of seals when using Divine Storm. This was apparently identified and resolved (server restarts) within the last 12 hrs or so.

From what I understand (I had no cause to use DS last evening, so was unaware of the issue until I read about it), DS would proc at least SoC many dozens or thousands of times on every use. Some were exploiting this to generate literally hundreds of thousands to over a million DPS.

Again, it was a bug. Our mechanics should not have changed. Again, it has been fixed. Our mechanics are back to functioning appropriately.

Back to: nothing to see here, patch should not impact us.

One can only suspect that Blizzard had tried to sneak in some kind of an as-of-unknown change to our Seal mechanic and horribly screwed up while doing so last night.

Anyone noticed anything different since last night's emergency restart?

Gurthalak does not have an internal cooldown. Every eligible attack (which is not all our abilities) has a 2% chance to produce a tentacle, even if the last attack just produced one.

There is no window during which a weapon with better raw stats would 'pull ahead' while waiting for Gurthalak to regenerate, as there is no cooldown through which to sit. Even if Gurthalak did have an ICD (which, again, it does NOT), swapping weapons would not gain benefit. For at least the last few years (when Blizz seemed to create a standard for trinkets and procs) anything which has an ICD has that ICD reset when the item is equipped, specifically to prevent these multi-swap scenarios. Click-use items have a forced CD on equip to semi-mimic this situation.

Example:
Item A has an ICD of 50 seconds. It procs. You swap to Item B for 50 seconds. You swap back to Item A - and its ICD resets - it will not proc for the next 50 seconds. The entire time you used Item B did not count towards resetting Item A.

The tools available will permit you to compare Gurthalak with an average proc (i.e. exactly 2%) to another weapon and determine which is better for your gear and raid setup. In actual use you will generally have better RNG sometimes and Gur will beat a weapon that, on paper, it should not, or worse RNG and it falls behind a weapon that, on paper, it should surpass.

Again - swapping gains no benefit. Stick with one weapon or the other.

I tried to come up with a Simulationcraft profile that would model just a single cooldown cycle, so that ESS and Gurth could be compared side-by-side under the optimal conditions for ESS. Not being an expert with Simulationcraft, I used the initial default ability queue with a 25 second fight length (max_time=25 on the Override tab; that should allow for all sim runs to build 3 HP and get the full 20 seconds of cooldowns). This means that GoAK was up too which won't be true every CD cycle, but I thought that was acceptable to get a best-case ESS figure. I imported Saboya with his H-Gurth and ran checks with and without Bloodlust, then did the same with a Heroic ESS and otherwise the same gearset. H-Gurth was about 800 dps better under bloodlust, and 1100 dps better without bloodlust. Do of course note that this is not overall fight dps; an 800 dps increase under CDs is maybe 130 dps for the overall fight. But either, way, at least when it comes to Heroic weapons Gurth is better even only looking at cooldown phases than ESS (these sims likely ignore any Mind Flay ticks from existing tentacles that would tick on past the set encounter length, so Gurth is likely a little better than advertised here).