Cooldown Timing!
November 16, 2009Here is the long awaited post on cooldown timing!
Basically, there are a few methods that will work, and one method that is hardest to set up and execute, but will return the highest DPS. Here they are:
- Macro everything to a commonly used shot, have all pet cooldowns on auto-cast, and use all available cooldowns as soon as they come up.
- Macro many things to shots, but save some things (like potions and racials) for heroism/bloodlust.
- Macro only Kill Command to shots, and manually cast everything else when you’ll get the most out of it.
We all know the first one- many of the hunter shot macros out there have trinkets, racials, rapid fire, and kill command macroed. That works, and you will get the average performance of all these abilities.
Cooldowns
If you elect to manually time casts, here is the list of cooldowns you can choose the timing of:
- Rapid fire: haste
- Readiness: resets all hunter ability cooldowns (no pet ones, however)
- Call of the Wild: AP (percent based)
- Furious Howl: AP (static)
- Potions: haste or crit (static)
- Racials
You don’t gain any advantage stacking static quantity agility or attack power buffs together compared to just hitting them when they’re available. Also, Using a haste cooldown when you’re already on a haste effect (like heroism/bloodlust) will not gain you as much DPS as not stacking. Stacking a haste with an agility, attack power, or armor pen buff will give you more DPS than casting both separately.
Special cases:
-Furious howl is on a 40 second cooldown, however trinkets are on a 45 second internal cooldown and can take up for 55 seconds between procs. Since it’s a static AP buff, it doesn’t provide you any synergy DPS for firing it with other static AP buffs/procs. It does stack multiplicatively with haste (and I believe armor penetration, but correct me if my logic is off). In my case, I’m going to leave this on auto-cast.
If you elect to manually manage it, casting furious howl is not as easy as it sounds. If you leave it off autocast, your pet will almost never have enough energy to use it when you want to fire it. To get around this, you need to have a macro to turn on auto-cast, and another one to turn it off in a few seconds after the pet uses it. Unfortunately, the command used for this can not be placed in a /castsequence that would let you toggle it.
/petautocaston Furious Howl
/petautocastoff Furious Howl
If you want, you could combine those into one macro with a conditional key (like alt), but I’m not going to write it now.
-Call of the wild does do more DPS when you stack it with AP/agi buffs. It’s a 10% buff, so casting it when you have the highest possible AP will increase it’s DPS. Stacking haste on top of that just adds even more synergy. Whenever possible, you want to make sure that furious howl and a trinket are up when you use this. On a fight that’s less than 5 minutes, you want to save this for heroism/bloodlust and time it so that it coincides with as many of your procs and buffs as you can. If you have to wait for half of heroism for trinket procs, consider ensuring that you have a rapid fire or haste pot available to extend the haste buff.
Procs
How do you take advantage of all this? You need to identify your uncontrollable procs, get an addon that will help you predict them, and make sure you know which cooldowns to stack with them. Your trinkets and heroism/bloodlust are the primary source of procs. In my case, I have the greatness card which gives me a bunch of agility every 45 seconds or so, the grim toll which gives me a bunch of armor pen on the same internal cooldown.
It took me a while to figure out the best addon for tracking internal cooldowns on trinket procs, but I settled on one called SexyCooldown. It’s very flexible, but all you need to do is create a single bar, and under the option where it asks you what to track, only select item cooldowns. Note that ForteXorcist will not show you the internal cooldowns unless you have SexyCooldown installed, but if you do, it will.
Wrapup
- Always ask your raid leader when they’ll be calling for heroism/bloodlust.
- Try to know ahead of time how long the fight will be.
- Always try to cast call of the wild during heroism, rapid fire, or a haste pot with as many AP increases as you can stack.
- Don’t leave a cooldown available for too long unless you’re sure you won’t be costing yourself applications over the fight.
- When you have normal cooldowns available (that you’re not saving for heroism), try to time them to be used with trinket procs.
euripidesoutdps
jurgwena
Faeghleis
lemli
eidotrope
Being MM specced and Engineer I’ve got some nice stuff to macro in each shot:
——————————
#showtooltip (shot name)
/cast (shot name)
/use 10
/cast Silencing Shot
/cast Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
——————————
This way I instantly cast the selected shot (Aimed Shot for example) + Pyro Rocket + Silencing shot + Kill Command. No way to waste a single second.
When Heroism is going to be used, this is my specific button I immediately click:
——————————
#showtooltip Powerup
/cast Call of the Wild
/cast Rapid Fire
/cast Kill Command
——————————
If the fight lasts long enough I generally pop it few seconds after I start attacking: this way I get Mirror of Truth + Darkmoon Card: Greatness procs procs or even more power.
Also to consider if you’re a SV hunter if you have black arrow currently applied or not.
That’s a good point. I wouldn’t delay BA long for a nice combination of buffs and procs, but a couple of seconds might pay off.
Well more like it might be one of the things you track with trinket procs etc for timing when to pop your CDs, rather then worry about delaying black arrows
“•Always ask your raid leader when they’ll be calling for heroism/bloodlust.”
Thank you for saying this :D I’ve annoyed many a raid leader because I ask this (or worse: yell out in the middle of a raid “Heroism…?”), but I don’t care. To get the most out of our cooldowns, we need know when Hero/BL will be cast.
“•Don’t leave a cooldown available for too long unless you’re sure you won’t be costing yourself applications over the fight.”
Or if you know there are times to burn and times to hold off. Jaraxxus, for example: there’s a reason why the nether portals spawn every 2 minutes exactly. Nobody cares what your dps is if you can’t kill the boss.
Though BM hunters are the lowest DPS spec currently, I would assume that Beastial Wrath would be best used in combination with trinket procs as well as bloodlust/heroism. I haven’t played that spec since 3.0. In all great post as usual.
-Hawlk
That’s right- BW is just another controllable cooldown to stack with procs. In fact, timing BW is one of the most important skills for BM DPS.
Some good points.
2 things I’d like to ask/pointout are:
Rapid Fire during a Heroism – I don’t think these stack too well together as we aren’t going to be getting out any additional steady shots, so maybe it’s best not to overlap them?
Serpent Sting – Does the application of serpent sting take into acount trinket procs? I.e – would be be worth applying a new sting when you get a greatness proc and just refresh it from then? Probably not a massive difference but still…
Rapid fire indeed should not be used during a heroism. Save it to magnify other cooldowns if you can. As for serpent sting, it remembers the AP you had when it is applied, but a refresh or re-application will reset the AP value. The one trick here is that +%damage spells (like tricks of the trade or the iron council rune) will stay as long as you keep the sting up.
The other thing which you forgot was improved aspect of the hawk which whenever procs will take you SS down to less than 1.5 or pretty close if your lacking gear. Do you ignore this proc pretty much or try to rapid fire when its not on which is quite rare.
Nice article though.
The uptime on that is pretty constant, and over the course of any rapid fire it will be up and down for the same amount of time.
Quick comment:
“You don’t gain any advantage stacking static quantity agility or attack power buffs together compared to just hitting them when they’re available.”
Two ap buffs combine additively. But an AP buff and an Agility buff combine multiplicatively. When you combine your Furious Howl with your trinket proc, you’re not just stacking AP, but your Furious Howl *also* gets the increased crit chance from the trinket.
In general your cooldowns are AP, Haste, Agil, or multipliers (like Call of the Wild). If you combine any two categories you’ll get a multiplicative advantage.
AP and Agility do not provide as much of a bonus when stacked only with eachother. There is a small amount of synergy from that crit, but overall it’s about the same as you get separately, and this is nothing compared to the synergy from stacking a multiplier or haste with an AP/AGI buff.
Well, it all depends on the amount of agility and the amount of haste. The upgrade of 7/10% crit is very significant. I’ll bet you that the agility proc gives you more effective dps from Furious Howl than Rapid Fire does.
I’d take that bet, but how could we test it? And what would we bet?
Best way is just to theorycraft it, since the formulae for all the shots is known.
Keep in mind that you can stack FH and DV proc 3 times for every one rapid fire (assuming MM). Thus you have to theorycraft for a 3 min period :)
So, who won the bet?
Nobody yet- I’ll keep you in the loop :)
I am trying to get furious howl to line up with my dmc:g and dv/dc trinket procs. Both of the trinkets seem to always proc together. When should i hit my autocast macro for furious howl. For example 3-5 secs before my trinket comes out of cd or just when the trinkets proc?
I think that 2 seconds before would be optimal. Trinket procs will drift apart over time though.
Yeah. After the second proc there seems to be 1 sec behind one another. Thanks alot euripidesoutdps.
So… I get using
/cast Furious Howl
/cast Rabid
and I’ve been able to work that in. I still need practice, but thats the way of the Gun.
Would it make sense to have my Call of the Wild and Rapid Fire there as well, or save those as a separate button, for when Bloodlust hits?
Don’t use rapid fire during bloodlust- stack haste with damage. If you’re timing furious howl hit when you have a trinket proc up, try to use a rapid fire when you have those two up. Use call of the wild too, if you think the fight will last long enough for you to use it again during heroism (or under 20% when you will have kill shots padding your DPS).
i would reccomend watching kripparrian off of youtube on the video: cooldown timing. I am positive thats where this creator of this forum got the idea from. He gives you macros how to do them properly and it is efficient.
If you use potion of speed during heroism (or rapid fire), do you get extra haste, since they are % modifiers? I know it isn’t really a big deal for hunters, but I was curious how the mechanics work.
Heroism and other speed effects add haste, but they are not %damage buffs, so only really affect your auto-shot (unless your steady shots are more than the global cooldown)