Editors Note: Another big hand for Pherra, the guy who is thanklessly coding that stupid hunter DPS addon idea.
Blizzard’s announced design changes give the hunter community a lot to absorb in the months leading up to Cataclysm. The biggest change was the “ranged rogue” change from mana to focus that was announced at Blizzcon. This post looks at the various smaller changes around the haste stat and hastily concludes that haste will be a lot more relevant to Cataclysm hunters. [Edit 2010-04-12: added links below about preventing DoT clipping]
Haste and Focus Regeneration
The first new effect of haste is to improve our focus regeneration rates. How important is focus regeneration? Well, we have 100 focus and it regenerates at 6 focus per second. That means we can completely recover our focus in just under 17 seconds. How fast can we spend our focus? How much do our shots cost?
- Aimed Shot, Multi Shot: 60 focus cost
- Arcane Shot, Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot: 45 focus cost
- Steady Shot, Cobra Shot: 9 focus gain
Suppose we are Survival specced and the GCD is still 1.5s. We might start a fight as follows.
- Start of 1st GCD – cast Explosive Shot, down to 55 focus.
- End of 1st GCD – regenerated, up to 64 focus.
- Start of 2nd GCD – cast Aimed Shot, down to 4 focus.
- End of 2nd GCD – regenerated, up to 13 focus.
- Start of 3rd GCD – cast Steady Shot, up to 22 focus.
- End of 3rd GCD – regenerated, up to 31 focus.
- Start of 4th GCD – cast Steady Shot, up to 40 focus.
- End of 4th GCD – regenerated, up to 49 focus.
- Start of 5th GCD – cast Explosive Shot again…
Now, that example totally ignores Black Arrow and Serpent Sting, both of which are still likely to be early in our rotations, but the take home message is that we will be running out of focus very quickly. In that example, we had no choice but Steady or Cobra Shot after two shots. That’s about 3 seconds, well under the 17 seconds to completely recover. Without significant boosts to our focus regeneration, we’ll be casting Steady or Cobra Shot most of the time. Haste is currently the only known way of improving focus, so it will likely remain important as talents and glyphs are revealed to help our focus management.
Haste and Damage over Time Spells
The second new effect of haste is to increase the tic rate of DoTs such as Serpent Sting or Black Arrow. Hasted DoTs will have the same duration, but the time between damage tics will be decreased and more tics may occur. As Euripides noted [ed: after Pherra told me about it], this benefit from haste will not give a smooth benefit as you add more haste since you only gain tics passing particular tic rates. I’d like to add a few observations here.
- The Glyph of Serpent Sting will decrease the amount of haste needed to squeeze in more tics, since each additional tic is a smaller percentage increase. For example, to increase from the unglyphed 5 tics to 6 tics, 20% haste is necessary. With the Glyph of Serpent Sting, the first gain is from 6 tics to 7 tics, which only requires 17% haste.
- Without the glyph, Black Arrow and Serpent Sting gain tics at the same haste levels. With the glyph, they are staggered so the gains are somewhat more regular.
- Unless your last point of haste added a tic, there will be a dead time at the end of the DoT debuff. You can safely clip the DoT at this point without a DPS loss. Supposing all you did was refresh your DoTs as the last tics hit, then haste would scale their DPS perfectly linearly without a stair step pattern. Practically, you might reapply the DoT a second or two earlier, but you won’t see the smooth linear benefits with your full rotation.
- Warlocks will have it easier since they’ll always extend the duration instead instead of clipping the last tic. [Edit: Here is the warlock preview announcing this change. Also, in a comment below, Jodalpho points out a blue post following the priest preview where Ghostcrawler says they want to prevent DoT clipping in general.]
- Marksman hunters will have it even easier since Chimera Shot will take care of refreshing Serpent Sting. Serpent Sting gains from haste will always be linear for Marksman hunters.
- All these issues are particularly interesting for Explosive Shot and high haste levels. Around 33% haste, the last tic is within the same GCD, so you can’t clip it. This would make the debate over Lock and Load rotations moot. At 50% haste, you would get a 4th damage tic, which would be a 33% boost to Survival’s strongest general use shot.
As a historical aside, this haste change is a followup on a 3.3 experiment by Blizzard. Blizzard wanted to test reducing the time between tics for all damage and healing over time spells using haste. In 3.3, this became optional for Corruption and Rejuvenation by means of Glyph of Quick Decay and Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation. With those glyphs, the time between tics was reduced by haste, but the number of tics stayed the same and the duration decreased. My understanding is that these glyphs were great for warlocks and very situational for druids — some fights were better served by longer lasting HoTs. A similar issue would exist for Survival hunters would be wanting to keep the Serpent Sting uptime high for the Noxious Stings damage bonus. Keeping the duration fixed avoids such pitfalls and improves the damage or healing per cast.
Hasty Conclusions
We really know very little about the new hunter mechanics to be released with Cataclysm. There will certainly be similarities to rogue energy use, but we’ve already seen plenty of hints that our game play will remain quite different from just being ranged rogues. In this post, we’ve looked at a few released details and seen a surprising importance to the haste stat. At this point, we are ready to conclude that hunters should stack as much haste as possible in their Cataclysm builds. Or that just might be hasty.
Note that DoTs will no longer be “clipped” in cataclysm. If your serpent sting debuff has 1s remaining on the mob and you reapply it, its duration will be extended to full and assumedly stats like attack power, crit, haste, etc, recalculated. You won’t lose a tick of damage.
In a nutshell, Blizzard anticipated the issues you’re discussing here.
For locks, yeah. You’re probably right and they probably will extend the same courtesy to hunters.
Actually, they specifically said that it applies to every DoT and HoT in the entire game. They won’t clip, will gain ticks with haste, and every DoT not procced by a crit (like ignite and deep wounds) will crit.
Do you have a reference for this? I only saw it mentioned on the Warlock preview.
Preventing dot clipping is something we want to do in general. It obviously benefits Shadow priests just as much as warlocks.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/24038432151/cataclysm-class-preview-priest/
Most hots and dots, including druid ones, will benefit from haste and crit. The exceptions are things like Deep Wounds and Ignite, which are already tied to crit.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/24262387043/cataclysm-class-preview-druid/
Gotta read ‘em all!
I did read the original posts for both threads and all of the Druid posts yesterday. I caught up again just now and there is still no mention in those threads that anyone but warlocks gets clip avoidance for free. It would be great to have it, but I have yet to see a blue post confirming it.
I posted the blue replies that say so.
“Preventing dot clipping is something we want to do in general. It obviously benefits Shadow priests just as much as warlocks.”
in particular. I don’t see any ambiguity. Nobody will clip DoTs. Unless they change their minds, I guess.
This was from blue replies in the forums, not in the actual class reviews themselves.
Um, yeah. That’s still pretty vague. The intent is clear, but the mechanics are not. From everything I’ve read, only warlocks have been told how they’ll deal with DoT clipping, and the rest of us have been told they want to deal with it generally.
They say they don’t want them to clip. Not sure what else you want. Shrug.
For me, the preview actually brought about more questions than it answered. Questions like the following have me tossing and turning in my sleep (not really – I just trinket out of it), so I’m actually still very excitedly waiting on all the hunter changes that haven’t been announced yet.
- What are some of the “interesting” talents that will replace our current plethora of “boring” ones? (At least will they let us keep the sexy-sounding 7/57/7 talent point breakdown?)
- How are we going to regenerate sufficient focus in PvP? (Will our PvP gear be stacked with haste?) D:
- Why are they suggesting that Aimed Shot will cost more than Explosive/Chimera Shot? (Surely its cost will be reduced or its power increased, or both… Yay, more talent questions.)
- How can Cobra Shot be the signature BM shot and one of the focus regen shots at the same time? (Uh oh… I smell Cobra Shot spam.)
- Is Herkuml War Token the best-in-slot trinket now? (Just kidding.) :P
Oh, duh… of course we won’t keep 7/57/7… once we get to level 85 we’ll have 5 more talent points.
9/58/9? 13/55/8? Hmm… 7/57/12 has a nice sound to it. :D
(Hey, I realize the numbers themselves are pointless, but if we’re really going to have the last “10 or 15 points to put wherever we want” then it won’t matter right?)
I’m not sure if Explosive Shot has ever been a DoT as such (the spell descriptions on WowHead and in the MMO-C DB are quite vague), so I wouldn’t bet on it being (automatically) affected by haste when Cata comes.
That’s easy to check in the combat log. I’ll take a look after work.
You’re right – it is not a DoT. I found an example log with Google showing it using the SPELL_DAMAGE event. DoTs use SPELL_PERIODIC_DAMAGE.
Honestly, I’m kinda anxious to see the changes, and how haste will work. I don’t think that I’ll really mind the changes, so long as there is still a gap between the average hunters that don’t do a lot of research, and the hunters that do tons of research, and are min-max like crazy.
Haste currently lowers cast times and lowers the GCD. Imagine for a moment that haste didn’t increase focus regen. It would provide no benefit, as you’d be focus starved, and would have to wait for focus to regen.
If haste provides a big, big increase in focus regen, it will have lots of “break points” as it both lowers the GCD and generates more focus. We’d see our rotation change as our focus comes in faster than our GCD does, and there will be “magic numbers” where we can put in an additional shot.
I think, by far, that the most likely scenario is that focus regen will scale exactly with the more rapid GCD that haste provides. If so, our rotation ends up being exactly the same, it just goes faster in a gradual and predictable way as our haste rating improves. Faster GCD = faster haste regen = faster rotation, not a different rotation.
Simple, scales well, no brakepoints, and haste can be exactly as useful for each class. Seems like a likely design.
hey Haerich, while I do agree with what you said, haste actually does not lower the GCD, mainly because the only cast shot we really have is steady shot, and if haste reduced the GCD it would get pretty crazy.
Haste does reduce the GCD in the game now for all classes. My wife runs a Holy Paladin who is an absolute haste fiend, and can spam Flash of Light at her reduced GCD of 1.03 seconds.
If you stack haste (this isn’t a good option for us, obviously, but bear with me) you would find that your Steady Shot would shrink down in cast time, and your GCD would as well.
My point is that if haste continues to work in Cataclysm as it currently does in Wrath (i.e. reduces both cast time and GCD time) then having it increase focus generation to keep pace is the logical choice. This exactly fits what Ghostcrawler has said (that haste will increase focus regen) and what he has said about secondary stats in general — that they should work more intuitively.
Note that current mechanics prevent reducing the GCD via haste to below 1 second, and that takes absurd amounts of haste gear to do it. It’s do-able, but it means sacrificing everything to do it.
If it was a recent change, then I may be wrong, but I believe that it does reduce the GCD for other classes, but not for hunters.
Our GCD cannot be reduced by haste. Only spell casts can have their GCD shortened by haste, and Steady Shot is not considered a spell in this regard.
The hasted DoT of Serpent looks to make the 2P-T9 bonus even more valuable.
…which makes it even cooler that they’re adding that bonus into Serpent Sting innately.
haste reduces all things with cast times and steady shot has a cast time.