Put some attempts on rag today and i saw a drastic increase in my dps when i used, 0:00 1hp inq > 0:01 GoAK > 0:10 AW > 0:30 Zeal/Apparatus. As Prolifik said, It definitely gives ample time to build trinket stacks.

I find it's more the other way around Mamoru, if you want to fully use the mastery proc of Apparatus you need to maximize the amount of CS/TV you use while it's up. By using apparatus towards the end of your wings it lets you pretty much do CS > TV cycles instead of CS > HoW > TV.

I believe your priority would shift with the trinket up to Inq->CS->TV->HoW->Exo->J->HW->Cons even with wings active.

Learning a new boss (an "attempt") tends to be significantly shorter than boss kills. When working with timeframes of 2-3 minutes, popping CD early so you use them twice is going to appear hugely superior to popping them late and losing a CD cycle entirely. If the fight length isn't consistent, then you cannot perform an accurate comparison. Not that testing is terribly accurate this X-pac, see my next comment.

Babathong - Apparatus proccing Crit is not bad, simply not quite as good as Mastery for us. As for DPS not dropping and appearing to increase, with RNG that could be perfectly true that evening... or week... or month. Ret have a huge amount of DPS tied into RNG (hello HoL and AoW). During a fight I have passed another Ret's current total damage via chain HoL and Exo procs (with some lucky crits) while they just used an AW+Zeal cycle, then when I use my own CD wave goodbye, and vice versa seen them pull ahead during my own CD phase. Trying to tell anything realistic about our spec via testing is nigh impossible. All our great tools help us rapidly tell the average for decision making, but we're far more often at either end of the bell curve in practice.

Since we seem to be leaving the hotfix timewindow and trinkets don't appear to be changing, I'll probably release an update of my spreadsheet this week. It'll have the updated values of Apparatus procs and a few 365 items I missed (I hadn't previously realized their prevalence).

I suppose i should have clarified that they were solid end of phase 2 transition to phase 3 attempts 5-7 minutes. We did 20 of them, and i was trying both ways of poppin cd's, and Pro's method always seemed to edge it out. Like you said, its proccy and not very reliable, but as Prolifik said its just his experience, and im just backing it up sayin it worked for me as well.

Anyone been lucky enough to get some firestones or know someone who might have and tested the heroic Apparatus rating stat per stack gain or is it safe to assume the 433/383 : x/508 ratio will be in place?

And as response to the posts above the only reason it does edge out is HoR:H (+ prepotting), which in BIS setup will be highly irrelevant.

Is it worth breaking bonuses (namely four-piece) before you get 2pT12 if you’re swapping out 359s for 378s? I haven’t been able to find a solid consensus on this yet.

My thinking is that the raw Strength (and secondary stat) gains, combined with the buff to Inquiry of Faith, would ease the transition and result in an overall net gain to DPS.

I've found myself with a dilemma. Keeping H HoR leaves me with a massive surplus of Expertise, while dropping H HoR for Vessel+Apparatus allows me to reforge to be right on cap. I've taken a big hit to mastery in doing so, but gained a massive amount of passive strength. The hit to mastery still allows for apparatus to proc mastery.

In theory, it seems to be a dps increase, but in practice it is very hard to see it. I'm trying to adopt the staggering of CDs, but i'm weary. I suppose the question is what exactly is the use order for trinkets given Apparatus pre-4pc t12?

Goak->5 seconds->AW->?? stack Apparatus-> Zeal?

Is it more wise to wait for the trinket to stack, or to try and overlap the damage increase of AW+GoAK with zeal?

There was a discussion on the previous page about this. I've done some testing and seen a minor gain. Though minor it's still noticeable. For the time being it seems best in mine and a few others' experience to gotak->10sec aw->30 sec zeal/apparatus

While I have seen an increase in dps when using my CDs staggered like that in the beginning, I haven't had much of a chance to pay attention to second set usage. On the second go around it would be best to delay AW to stack it with Zeal/Aparatus, would it not? And then the third possibly delay them to stack with GoAK. Or perhaps possible continuing to serparate them for more HoW usage and less TV pushback? Any thoughts on that? It all seems very situational, being length of the fight, % of boss health, etc.

Mamoru, what are you using to find your BIS list? I plugged it into the newest version of Exemplar's spreadsheet and it came out almost 1000 DPS less than what you did.

Every time I've played with it I end up with helm for offset instead of chest. Additionally, helm is likely to be easier to obtain depending on how difficult heroic rag will be. I also can't seem to make a set where apparatus is better than either version of the rep trinket without going to tank pieces and losing overall DPS from the loss in strength.

EDIT:

I don't have the updated value for apparatus, but I highly doubt that change would swing the DPS by that much.