Not true, it also matters how much of your raid DPS comes from classes which scale poorly/well with haste.

To see why, let's take JoeRogue and BobMage. JoeRogue does 100 DPS, and gets a 20% boost from Heroism. BobMage does 100 DPS, and gets a 30% boost from Heroism. BobMage also does 50% extra damage when the boss is under 50%. Let's look at some example raids.

1) A raid of 25 JoeRogues.
Total raid DPS at the start or end = 25 * 100 = 2500
Total raid DPS at the start or end, with Heroism = 25 * 100 * 1.2 = 3000 (20% increase)
Heroism is a 20% boost when used at the start or the end of the fight, so timing is irrelevant.

2) A raid of 25 BobMages.
Total raid DPS at the start = 25 * 100 = 2500
Total raid DPS at the start, plus Heroism = 25 * 100 * 1.3 = 3250 (30% increase)
Total raid DPS at the end = 25 * 100 * 1.5 = 3750
Total raid DPS at the end, plus Heroism = 25 * 100 * 1.5 * 1.3 = 4875 (30% increase)
Heroism is a 30% boost when used at the start or the end of the fight, so timing is irrelevant.

3) A raid of 24 JoeRogues and 1 BobMage
Total raid DPS at the start = 25 * 100 = 2500
Total raid DPS at the start, plus Heroism = (24 * 100 * 1.2) + (1 * 100 * 1.3) = 3010 (20.4% increase)
Total raid DPS at the end = (24 * 100) + (1 * 100 * 1.5) = 2550
Total raid DPS at the end, plus Heroism = (24 * 100 * 1.2) + (1 * 100 * 1.5 * 1.3) = 3075 (20.6% increase)
Heroism is a very slightly larger percentage boost when used later in the fight.

4) A raid of 15 JoeRogues and 10 BobMages
Total raid DPS at the start, without Heroism = 25 * 100 = 2500
Total raid DPS at the start, with Heroism = (15 * 100 * 1.2) + (10 * 100 * 1.3) = 3100 (24% increase)
Total raid DPS at the end, without Heroism = (15 * 100) + (10 * 100 * 1.5) = 3000
Total raid DPS at the end, with Heroism = (15 * 100 * 1.2) + (10 * 100 * 1.5 * 1.3) = 3750 (25% increase)
Heroism is a slightly larger percentage boost when used later in the fight.

4) A raid of 1 JoeRogue and 24 BobMages
Total raid DPS at the start, without Heroism = 25 * 100 = 2500
Total raid DPS at the start, with Heroism = (1 * 100 * 1.2) + (24 * 100 * 1.3) = 3240 (29.6% increase)
Total raid DPS at the end, without Heroism = (1 * 100) + (24 * 100 * 1.5) = 3700
Total raid DPS at the end, with Heroism = (1 * 100 * 1.2) + (24 * 100 * 1.5 * 1.3) = 4800 (29.7% increase)
Heroism is a very slightly larger percentage boost when used later in the fight.




Obviously it's not a large effect, but it's non-zero. The reason the effect exists is that in a case where you have a mix of rogues and mages, the rogues (who scale badly with haste) do proportionally more of the raid DPS at the start of the fight, while the mages (who scale well with haste) are a higher proportion of raid DPS at the end of the fight.

However, in practice the scaling factors for all classes are almost certainly between 20 and 30% DPS increase from 30% haste, and the execute bonus is not a full 50% (as used in the example above). Thus I would imagine that there is no more than a few percent change in the proportional benefit of Heroism when used early or late. Moreover, there may well be classes that act against the tendency demonstrated above - i.e. a class that has an execute bonus, but that scales poorly from haste. An example of the latter would be a bugged HaT rogue - they have an execute bonus, but get almost no bonus from haste since the majority of their damage is yellow damage and they are capped by the 1 second GCD spamming Eviscerates.

I exaggerated to make it more obvious that the increase is non-zero. Also, your numbers is slightly off. 100 dps * 50% execute bonus * 30% bloodlust bonus means 195 dps, not 180. In the end, this gives us.

No bloodlust: 232.5 seconds.
Early bloodlust: 222.5 seconds.
Late bloodlust: 222.1 seconds.

This is a quite small ~0.4% dps increase overall, given that your numbers are a good estimation.

As interesting as this topic is, I'd also say it's kind of pointless. As the autor assumed, 40sec with 30% more haste shortens the fight by about 10 seconds - let's not discuss whether that's perfectly right, I think it's not that far off.
Assuming a 5 minute fight, 10 seconds are 3.33% of the fight (in a static fight also 3.33% Boss-HP).

Now, even IF saving Bloodlust for the 35% phase is beneficial it would be in the range of 1% of the fight duration... at max - so about 2-3 seconds.
Sure, if we had encounters like they were in Sunwell these 2-3 seconds might be important but since we don't have such fights the only difference it might make is that you finish a whole Naxx-Run 3*16 = 48 seconds earlier.

And even if we had that hard encounters, using Bloodlust in the right moment (no movement, weaknesses, DDs have CDs ready) probably makes a bigger difference than those 2-3 seconds we would get if the under 35% theory is true.

There is also a less quantifiable but important benefit associated with early bloodlust:

To bloodlust effectively, you need to be able to sync it with (most) cooldowns, but also make sure that you are not reducing the number of cooldowns used by "saving" them for the bloodlust. Now, in an ideal situation all players would know the expected duration of the fight and plan accordingly for a late bloodlust. In reality, however, there are cases in which players defer an early cooldown use in order to ensure that it is up for a late bloodlust, and effectively lose the oppertunity to use a cycle of cooldowns. An early bloodlust ensures that cooldowns are used at (near) the earliest possible oppertunity, maximizing the number of cooldown cycles possible in any given fight.

Aye, in a raid situation it's not really relevant. Where Heroism / BL really does become relevant is in the 5 man content, particularly the DPS race achievements. The individual fights rarely last longer than 180 seconds, some as little as 120 seconds. Shaving 10 seconds off that is somewhere between a 5% and 8.5% boost. To put that into perspective, that's about what you get from upgrading 1/3 to 1/2 your equipment by a full tier. That's substantial.

5-man stuff may be old hat to all of us now, but there's a lot of people out there still doing it and gradually working on the achievements. There are a couple of 5-man achievements (e.g. Less-Rabi) that I would recommend people don't bother trying without a shaman - even if they're in Naxx25 gear! That's silly, especially given that 5-man groups are inherently less likely to have a shaman.

You can't just look at raid DPS like this. I don't think anyone is saying that you don't get higher DPS by using BL below 35%, the catch is that when you do, you spend less time below 35% because you kill it faster. As a result, you get less total benefit from your "Execute" style abilities.

As long as the boss lives through the duration of bloodlust, you'd get more of those execute style attacks in in those 40 seconds than you would otherwise. Do you want 10 extra attacks without the execute bonus, or 10 extra attacks with it?

Right, but when you use BL sub 35%, you kill the boss faster, reducing the total attacks with the execute bonus.

To word it like you did:
Do you want 100 attacks with execute bonus, or do you want 80 attacks with it? If you use BL at 35%, you spend less time there; so even though you're doing more damage, you don't get the benefit of your "Executes" for as long.

Also, if you use BL before 35%, you get there that much sooner, but that's neither here nor there.

Repeat after me:
Your DPs during execute does not matter.

What matters is the total fight length (i.e. how long the boss takes to kill).
When you pop BL during execute you do gain more dps than popping it outside of BL. However, you shorten the execute phase of the fight, and this is true irrespective of whether the 35% lasts 40s, or longer than 40s. You do get 40s of OMGEXECUTEBLDPS, but you lose X second of omgExecuteDPS because the execute phase is shortened.

Please read through some of the (many) examples in the threads before repeating these arguments to the point I am forced to remove my own eyes.

Borrowing from the BenefactorBar:

You appear to have COMPLETELY missed the point of my post.

As previously proven, if Heroism increases your DPS by a set percentage, then it does not matter whether you use it within Execute range or not. A 30% increase of your pre-execute DPS has exactly the same effect on time-till-death as a 30% increase of your execute-range DPS. This was the point of scenarios (1) and (2), to demonstrate that early or late Heroism makes no difference in a range composed entirely of mages or rogues, despite the fact that mages get more benefit from Heroism and have an execute bonus.

However, in a mixed raid, you have an additional factor in the mix. Because the mages have an execute bonus, they contribute a greater proportion of the total raid DPS during the execute phase. This means that using Heroism during the execute phase will have a not just a larger absolute effect, but a larger percentage effect on your raid DPS than using it before the execute phase. This means using Heroism later is slightly better from a time-till-death perspective. It's a small effect, but it's nonzero, as proven by my scenarios (3) through (5).

Here is something I put together earlier. I've bumped the bloodlust/execute bonuses to be higher than in-game behaviour, and double checked the math.

Conclusion: fight time is the same, and the individual dps is the same as well. Sure it's a gross simplification, but if a gross simplification that is using higher gains than we would see in practice is giving equal results, how would lower gains or shorter time frames make any difference?

You are modelling BL as a 30% gain whenever it is used, this is not strictly true, but it is "true enough".
Which is the basic point discussed over the last 2 pages: some people may scale marginally better with haste below 35% (manifesting as a better %age scalar) but the differences are too minor to matter.

The crux of the issue is that with various classes mixed together the scaling is not symmetric. In my modeling I assumed a static multiplier above 30% and below 30% with much higher dps below 30%. eg. 10k dps above 30% with a 1.3x lust effect for 40s and then 18k dps with a 1.3x lust effect for 40s below 30%. With this setup there is no difference when lust is used.


With a mixed raid and different classes scaling differently with haste some with execute type abilities and some not its as if we have a different raid makeup below 30% making the lust effect not symmetric.
We have 2 variables so we have 4 different types of scaling that go on here.
A. scales well with haste, has execute abilities
B. scales poorly with haste, has execute abilities
C. scales well with haste, has no execute abilities
D. scales poorly with haste, has no execute abilities


if a raid is homogeneous with any one of these then when lust is used will not matter (this is a simple example of course there is a spectrum of how classes scale with haste)

In the above example we have a mix of A and D. When above 30% lets say that A does 50% of the dmg and B does 50% of the dmg. When lust is blown 50% of the raid dmg benefits greatly from lust and 50% does not. When below 30% it shifts. Since A has execute type abilities A is doing 55% of the raid dmg and D is doing 45% of the dmg so now lust is greatly benefiting 55% of the raid instead of 50%. This is why there is asymmetry. Now we can also construct other combinations of the above classes to make it not matter at all or even make it better to lust above 30%.

Raid comp:
A + B = lust % doesn't matter
A + C = lust % doesn't matter
A + D = lust % below 30% is better
B + C = lust above 30% is better
B + D = lust % doesn't matter
C + D = lust % doesn't matter


(someone double check my logic on this. I agree with it not mattering in practice but now I'm curious about the logic)

So from Rorwyn's post it appears DK's, warlocks and Warriors have a positive feedback loop when Execute and Hero are stacked. The value of this effect is positive, and unknown (although likely to be small). No one else receives any overall benefit from stacking. Hunters and paladins receive a negative effect from stacking (this value is unknown and also likely to be small).

Thus overall effect of changing to early hero is unknown, however the difference (positive or negative) is likely to be so small that it is insignificant.

At the very least we have learned that if a particular fight makes an execute range hero impractical or difficult to arrange, an early hero is a great alternative.

It's the reverse. Unless there are enrage/burn requirements at the end of a fight, it makes no difference when you burn bloodlust, assuming both situations have max cooldown syncing. Obviously early use makes the cooldown syncing easier, so the "rule of thumb" is Early, unless needed otherwise

Post #24: http://elitistjerks.com/1139658-post24.html

You're assuming bloodlust and execute bonus are additive rather than multiplicative, hence your weird results.

Post #26:

This post is actually spot on. What I should've thought of when making the original post is that if classes scale differently with haste, even if it has nothing to do with their execute abilities, then it can matter, as can be seen in the mages/rogues raid example. In the end if the average scaling with haste of executing classes is better than that of non-executing classes, than it'll give an edge for a late bloodlust/heroism. If the opposite is true, however, it'll give an edge for early bloodlust/heroism.

Post #41:
Feedback loops are not necessary to make sub-35% bloodlust/heroism beneficial. Having executing classes scale with haste better than non-executing classes can be enough (and can very well not be enough when you consider the cooldown stacking lost).


Regarding boss abilities/phases/etc, like I said in the original post - if the ability/phase that hampers your raid DPS is duration-based, don't use bloodlust/heroism during that phase. If it is HP % based, though, it doesn't matter when you use it. The example with moving between one horseman to the next is one for a time-based phase, as it'll end after you reach the next horseman rather than on a certain mob death/HP%, and therefore it (obviously) shouldn't be used on that phase. The only HP-based example I can think of is malygos P1 VS P2 (it doesn't matter on which phase bloodlust/heroism is used, as long as it's not wasted between the phases) - you may not be able to do as much DPS on P2 but you will shorten the fight by the same duration regardless of which phase you use it on (in fact, since P3 lets you deal more DPS the longer it lasts, it's actually better to use it on P2). Other situations such as this may show up in the future, though.


On a side note, with everyone having equal scaling, mages will not do any more DPS on the meters with late bloodlust/heroism compared to early bloodlust/heroism, for the exact same reasons that made me make the first post. If mages scale with haste better than other classes, though, and everyone sync their cooldowns for bloodlust/heroism, then not only the mages will do more dps on the meters, but the boss will also die faster. Remember it is impossible to increase total raid DPS (which can be a result of increasing one person's dps without reducing the dps of others) without killing the boss faster, it would make no sense if you could!

On another side note, using exaggerated values is a very good way to verify whether your theory holds true for all possible values or not.


At the end, what really matters for making a practical descision is whether or not the extra scaling with haste of executing classes can make up for the people that failed syncing their cooldowns with bloodlust/heroism. While the difference in haste scaling obviously isn't big, proper syncing may make the loss not big either - depending on your raid's coordination and the specific cooldowns used (sometimes syncing will be bad regardless since it's possible that no matter when you use it some will have to choose between an extra cooldown use to syncing). With the current knoledge I have about the different classes and from the discussions of this thread, this is probably a good rule of thumb unless proven otherwise:

How can you agree with us, and then not agree on point 2, 4? Points 5, 6 and 7 all boil down to the same issue, and who doesn't misdirect/tricks threat to the tank early on? (nevermind the fact that TPS is also increased when using heroism). It's also worth pointing out that unless your DPS classes are so overpowered that even with propper threat management they out-threat your tank, you won't be in this situation (either your tank needs to threat more, or your DPS need to actually pay attention to that threat thing).

Also: when we say "early" bloodlust, we don't mean "at time = 0". Generally, I've waited for 15-20 seconds before using it, specifically for that early threat, ramp up time, etc.

How exactly, Bink, do DPS classes "pay attention to that threat thing" other than dialing back their DPS which directly flies in the face of your statements that it's always better to lust earlier? Assuming 2-3 of each class that's 4-6 of your 14-16 DPS'ers facing threat issues that you just want to stop DPS to "pay attention to that threat thing."

This isn't an untested situation either: it's called lust at 85% of Tenebron's life, which is familiar to many casters here.


You know that I respect the work you've done here, Bink. But you also know I get frustrated that you gloss over the issues of two classes having only 10% threat reduction.

Just to get some comparison, looking at a 4 minute fight where you have access to a bloodlust(40 second 30% damage increase) and a trinket(two 20 second 5% damage increases). Not stacking your cooldowns, the fight will take 226 seconds. Stacking your cooldowns, the fight will take 225.7 seconds. Not exactly a huge deal either.

If that's what's required, so be it. Generally we wait for the first wave to pass, which is roughly that 15-20 second mark, and never seem to have a problem (mind you, we usually have our high-threat tank on the drakes, and generally take longer than you to down them). It's not like I'm saying you absolutely have to use bloodlust in the first 5 seconds, and if you are having un-manageable threat issues then common sense would dictate you wait longer on using it.

I just find it hard to believe that unless you're in a raiding guild like Fusion (which, to be fair, most people reading these forums are not), there is absolutely no way that you can improve threat output as a tank, or manage it better as a dps class (eg: rather than using trinkets/cooldowns at the heroism cast, use it 10 seconds later for a bit more of a threat buffer). I guess I just don't spell things out enough sometimes, nor do I know everything (I didn't know that two classes, nfi which, only have 10% threat reduction).

I'd like to throw in one point that does appear to have been overlooked. BL/Hero is not just a DPS boost, it is a healing/survivability boost too. I appreciate that this thread has been directed towards maximising DPS (and when considering current content, that is understandable), but many bosses also have an 'execute range' or an enrage/frenzy based upon health. When content starts to get a little harder we will also need to consider using it to increase our survivability.

I guess the best example of this currently in game is Maexxna. In this fight, BL/Hero late on is certainly of greatest benefit, not because using it then reduces the overall fight length, but because you want to reduce as far as possible the time during which the Boss's damage is increased and to match the Boss's increased DPS which your own increased HPS.

Bearing this in mind, I believe it is not a simple case of running some generalised numbers to determine whether you can reduce the fight length by a few seconds by blowing it early or late. Rather, understanding that the impact on the overall fight length is minimal, it is best to time it to the boss's abilities, not the raids.

Hence Binks "Early, unless needed otherwise"

I also wanted to state that unless this has been posted somewhere in between the posts I've read and missed it getting an early BL off gives a higher probability of all 25 people in the raid getting the benefit as opposed to any deaths that may occur during the course of the fight. In this i refer to more random deaths or mishaps rather than fight mechanics that force people to not participate in the full length of the fight since it is obvious then that the early BL is the way to go.