When to Use What Potion!
October 29, 2009As a DPS class, it’s our duty to ensure that our potion is on cooldown at the end of every non-trivial fight. Clearing Archivon for the mount? Feel free to save it, but if you’re on a hard fight, you can really increase your DPS this way. Today I’ll go over our options, and talk about when and how to use them.
First up, the basic mechanics. Using a potion out of combat gives you a 1 minute cooldown, but using it in combat prevents you from being able to use one again until after this combat is over. And no, feigning death does not let you take another. Here are the commonly used potions, what they do, and when to use them.
- Potion of speed is the most commonly used potion because it’s “the DPS potion”. It gives you 500 haste rating for 15 seconds. Alas, as we all know, haste for hunters is one of the lowest DPS per point stats we have. It makes our auto-shot go faster, and if we’re not already casting them faster than our global cooldown, our steady shots go faster. Still, 500 haste, even for 15 seconds, will increase your DPS.
- Potion of wild magic is nowhere near as popular for hunters, but I’m listing it second for a reason. The fact that it gives us 200 spell power can be ignored, but the 200 crit it gives? Well, according to all the DPS calculators I use, that’s actually more DPS than 15 seconds of haste. If you want to find out whether this is true for you, you should import your hunter into www.femaledwarf.com and check yourself.
- Runic mana potion is next up, and it gives you a chunk of mana. If the fight you’re in will force you into viper at some point, this will lower the amount of time you need to spend in viper.
- Runic healing potion is last on my list. You need to have these around in case you need them, but the only way they increase your DPS is by preventing you from being turned into a hunter flavored pool of jelly by some (hopefully unavoidable) damage your healers couldn’t fix. For example- on Iron Council hard mode, you need to have one of these for the last few percent in case you get a super-powered static disruption while the healer is out of range to battle res a tank.
Now as for when to use these: if you’re going with a potion of haste or wild magic, you have to try to use them during a heroism/bloodlust. If you’re going to have to use a mana pot, try to save it until you really need it- the later you pop it, the more likely you are to realize that you won’t need it and be able to pop a DPS potion instead.
Sometimes, you won’t have a heroism- in this case, try to use a crit potion during rapid fire (the more shots you have while the crit buff is active, the more effective the potion). Personally, I don’t like blowing haste pots during rapid fire, but I can’t quite pin down why. If that’s the direction I’m going in, I just always use one some other time.
[edit] One last note- some people like to pop a potion just before combat starts so they can use a second one after a minute. This might work for you, or it might not. At the very least, it costs twice as much as just using the single potion, and whether you can time your first use well enough to make sure you don’t get locked out for the rest of the fight, and still have enough time left on it that’s it was actually worth it depends on the fight.
If you’re an engineer or an alchemist, you have additional options, but I’m not going into them because they all fall into the health and mana regen area. Anyone else have any others they like? Maybe something from BC?
euripidesoutdps
jurgwena
M
lemli
eidotrope
I’ve read that different sources of haste are multiplicative. Is Rapid Fire therefore exactly the time to use the haste potion?
Notice how I tried to avoid that question and skirt the issue? ;)
I am not completely sure what happens when you pop haste pots during RF, but I do remember reading on EJ that it wasn’t the best idea, however no explanation was offered as to why. Once I get better at simulationcraft, I’ll have a better answer for you.
Some fights you can’t pre-pop a potion. BNR is one, simply because combat begins about 5 seconds before the mob becomes aggressive. All the rest are golden.
Hmmm Wild Magic, huh? I’ll have to check that out.
Runic mana potion for the win. Aspect of the Viper is my enemy.
As marksman I tend to pop the speed potion when not under the effects of rapid fire or heroism and with no quickshots the reason is to trigger quickshots the more auto shots I fire the more chance of a quickshots proc
I seem to get quite a few procs when I rapid fire ones it procs it tends too keep proccing others then hit readyness and wait for a quickshots to come off hit rapidfire again and hope for more continuous procs then pop a speed when I hit the quickshot drought again
I don’t think you want to use a haste potion during Rapid Fire or heroism.
The reason is that except for BM, almost no hunters are at the soft haste cap. So by using any one of these three effects, you reach the soft haste cap and your steady shot casts faster (and you get more auto shots). But if you double up on these, you get the faster auto shot, but you’re still at the soft haste cap – so your net gain is less than using them separately.
Best to use each effect separately, getting the full advantage to your steady shot from each effect.
In other words: using heroism, rapid fire, and/or speed potion all at the same time doesn’t give you more damage than using them all separately. The auto shot advantage is the same, but you lose damage from capping your steady shot for longer.
Wild Magic though, definitely during rapid or heroism.
Raid buffed, all my steady shots are under the GCD, so nothing I do changes the number of steady shots per second I can fire while not moving.
Hello there
i totally agree with Frostheim.
But still there is one question im wondering about: wild magic pushing crit to the maximum … useful or not?
full raidbuffed and infight sometimes i have about 75% crit chance (i think thats a normal value for available gear). on the long term of course such high amounts of critchance are a dps boost, but beyond the magical 50% line, its a real tricky thing, for me, to clarify whether more crit rating is a worthy dps boost or not – concerning short durations like wild magic.
70% crit (example) -> 7/10 shots are a crit.
concluding question is: is it possible to fire enough shots to gain a significant DPS boost within these 15secs of wild magic or not?
All else being equal, a point in crit when you are at 50% crit is worth as much DPS as a point in crit when you’re at 99%. The cap is 100, but short of gimmick bosses, that’s unreachable.
thx for response
looking for the math & statistics you’ll see, that in short fights its very luck dependent whether you crit or not (for example 15secs). for long durations, as i said, its of course significant more dmg.
… [censored] it ^^
both, yours and mine, point of views make sense to me ;)
maybe i just got some mistakes in my thinking concerning the statistics and the breakdown on one shot …
i would really appreciate an example of calculation. no expectation of your side, but just a hint where i can find a simple calculation to clarify. thanks in advance ;)
Everything boils down to the RNG- all we can do is control the chances of good things happening. For example- if 10 crit is worth 10 DPS and 10 haste is worth 5 DPS (on average), just because that extra crit for 15 seconds might be actually 5 or 15 DPS doesn’t make haste more valuable.
In short, the randomness of certain buffs do not negate their value, or else we’d all only stack AP and haste.
Popping a Wild Magic when you get a LnL is pretty nice. You’ll pack quite a bit of shots into the 15 second window. I am an alchemist and I love the crazy alchemist potion for mana/health/haste though. More often than not, it procs a potion of speed. So, with mixology, it usually gives me a full half bar of mana and health and a speed boost. What’s even better, is it so cheap to make, two goldclover and an imbued vial.
I’m an engineer as well… if you make mana injectors, you get mixology boost AND the extra mana from the injector.
Too bad there isn’t an AP version of Wild Magic. I always discounted it because of the spellpower.
I use the Speed pot. I also do not use it during heroism or rapid fire. The reason isn’t about haste caps or CDs. It’s because most fights have some movement. If I put all my eggs in one haste window and it gets screwed by some movement then it’s a loss. So I hedge it by doing rapid after heroism and speed after rapid.
It also doesn’t hurt that speed pots are only about 3.5g.
For long fights that I know ill be going into viper in I use my speed pot while im in Viper and use my RF during Heroism. Seems to work great, though i will say I havent done too much research on the issue.
do rapid fire and heroi–&#$% I MEAN BLOODLUST stack?
Im a Troll MM hunter.
I do as Strutt pointed out. If I know im going into viper at some point I save the Speed pot for when im in viper. I also have not done official research but In the time of the speed buff while in viper I can regen about 80% of my mana back.
I never thought of the wild magic pot…I might start playing with those on non viper fights.
In longer encounters I always use mana pots, I dont understand why you would use speed + AotV for mana when you can mana pot, get a good chunk on mana back and go to work again. Its rare that I run out of mana after the mana pot and generally i end a fight pretty close to being oom.
I think wild magic would be interesting to use with rapid fire on but as ZobbL said you get a stupidly high crit rate with raid buffs its probably not worth it.
Do not Haste pot during Viper. Whatever DPS increase you’d get from using the pot is effectively halved. Maybe you’ll regen slightly faster but if it is regen you’re after then just use the Mana pot.
The reason for poping a Haste pot during Viper is only to get out of Viper quicker, which in turns makes your DPS higher. In my experiances, poping a Mana pot somes times makes you go OOM during the last 10-15% of a boss fight… Not a good thing. Of course for short fights I will pop a mana pot if i know that i only need the little extra 4-5k mana from the pot.
First I will prove that if you need to regen then a mana-pot is FAR superior to hasted viper. Viper reduces DPS by a LOT with damage reduced by 50%. We will say a 6k dps hunter goes to 3k DPS during Viper (no dragonhawk also reduces pet dps and worse rotation).
Haste is one of the worst scaling stats for hunters, most hunters get just 0.6dps per haste point. The pot is worth 0.6*500= 300dps for 15s… or just 150dps in Viper.
By Shandara’s spreadsheet, Viper would regen 780 mps unhasted, 813mps when manually adding 500 haste to my gear.
It would take 5.29s of hasted Viper to equal a runic mana pot.
(5.29s * 3150dps + 9.71s * 6300dps) / 15 = 5189dps
-vs-
using a mana pot and staying at 6000dps. It is not even close.
Second, I will prove that if you don’t have a mana pot, you’re still better off using the haste pot after you regen UNHASTED in Viper.
You estimate that you’ll need exactly 1 mana pot until the boss is dead but forgot to hit up the AH before the raid.
Unhasted viper time to regen @ 780mps = 4300/780 = 5.51s
Hasted viper time to regen @ 813mps = 4300/813 = 5.29s (thx Shandara)
You save .22 seconds of Viper time by using the haste. You essentially lose 150dps for 5.29s of hasted Hawk to gain just 0.22s of +3000 dps. Using the haste pot after regen is better by only a total of 122 dmg (with these dps assumptions) but the principle holds.
This point is a corollary to fundamental max dps principles – stack dps buffs together, avoid using buffs to offset debuffs or periods of low dps.
To conclude – don’t be a huntard, never use haste pots in Viper!
Cool, Thanks for doing the math and detailed break down of it for us, much aprreciated.
I Agree about your thoughts on Runic Healing potions however for some fights it can be required, for example, when my guild ever does Anub it is required to have on Runic Healing potion and one fel healthstonem we do this to ensure that no one diesm seeing as we try to keep most people at around 50% and the tanks topped off, i remember that almost every attempt on that fight would have led to a wipe if ti wernt for that potion.
That’s a perfectly valid way of doing things, however in my group, we find that the added DPS brought by the DPS potions outweighs the added survivability from the health pots. If you think of it this way- every health pot you chug gives the boss health, whereas the DPS ones make you take him down faster.
Also, at least on regular, a paladin’s judgment of light should be enough to counter the leeching swarm, so all your healers need to worry about is the debuff and the tanks.
Actually you should drink Mighty Frost Protection Potion (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40215) on Anub, not Health Pot. Simply because used Health Potion will be eaten by Leeching Swarm (giving the boss health) before Hungering Cold DOT even ticks.
But then again, if you are 100% sure about healers, use dps pots.
And i don’t see a reason using (wasting) Haste Pot on BL/heroism, better wait for trinket proc outside of BL time, because stacking Haste+Haste is less dps than Haste*Damage.