Save 100% of the Aggravation for 10% of the DPS

Taking a page form a comment made by Jaeger over on a post at the hunters hall.  I decided to play around with some numbers myself and he is indeed right.

At level 90 with the starter level 90 gear, hit and expertise capped of course, I checked the rotation a lot of different ways for survival.  With dire beasts, crows and stampede, without one, without two and without all three.

The numbers were actually surprising when looking at them and I need to wonder about the accuracy of it.  I look forward to seeing if it hold true later on.

With none of those my DPS dropped 10%.  DB was roughly 5%, crows 4% and stampede 1%.

So, if you drop all the new stuff completely, with the exception of readiness, you would only lose 10% DPS.  Over all that is not a great deal of DPS when you notice that the average players can not even reach cap for possible damage done.

Lets say, for arguments sake you can pull 50K with all that stuff executing perfectly.  If you lose dire beast, stampede and crows you can only pull 45K.  However, and here is the huge part, the rotation for 45K will be a lot easier to maintain in a raid setting for most players, myself included.

So lets say you are capable of doing the easier rotation near perfect, lets call it 90%, but the harder rotation at only 80% capability, which would still be quite exceptional as less than 5% of the player base can even surpass 70%.  That would mean the easy rotation of 45K you would do 40,500 DPS working at 90% with the easier rotation and the 50K harder rotation you would be doing 40K being you are not as good with it and only doing 80% of your capability due to its difficulty.

So the question is, would you be willing to sacrifice 10% theoretical DPS, for 100% less stress?

And even possibly more DPS doing the easier rotation because you can do it better?

If you wanted to, you could even slowly work your way up to the harder rotation.  Add stampede back, it is a long cooldown.  Maybe add the others as you get ready for them one at a time.  Add them when you are comfortable, not three or four new abilities at once, but one new one at a time until you are ready for the next one.  Word to the wise when adding thing back, dire beast is the biggest reward for the smallest cost.

Jaeger did some fine work getting those numbers, thank you for doing that.  I had to check them myself of course and you are dead on accurate.  The new abilities are not all that, even more so if you are losing DPS trying to keep that harder rotation tight.

So remember, you are better off doing it old school at 90% of your ability than you are doing it new school at 80% of your ability.  If you really care about you DPS you have only 2 choices, play better and do the hard version better, or do the easier version, as it could net you more DPS in the end than mutilating the harder rotation would.

The next part is lifted from jaeger's post there, hope he does not mind, if you want it removed just let me know.  Just putting it here so people can read it.

GC sounds like a politician with that response. He talks a lot but he doesn’t say anything. The only meaningful thing is the last statement. It’s something that I was planning to investigate anyway. What happens if I don’t use Ability X in my rotation?

I tested using femaledwarf, BM lvl 90 with 496 gear (hit and exp capped) no buff/debuffs, and removed one ability from the rotation at a time. The results were interesting to say the least.

Ability – DPS – DPS loss (%)
All abilities – 61602.76 – 0.00%
Cobra Shot – FD crashed…
Arcane Shot – 56989.95 – 7.49%
Kill Command – 57749.84 – 6.25%
Dire Beast – 58003.17 – 5.84%
Lynx Rush – 58796.08 – 4.56%
Bestial Wrath – 59284.06 – 3.76%
Readiness – 59976.68 – 2.64%
Glaive Toss – 60093.76 – 2.45%
Focus Fire – 60113.03 – 2.42%
Serpent Sting – 60215.59 – 2.25%
Rapid Fire – 60412.26 – 1.93%
Stampede – 60734.85 – 1.41%
Kill Shot – 60767.13 – 1.36%

Kill Shot and Stampede are pretty pathetic. Rapid Fire, Serpent Sting, and Focus Fire while standard abilities that we used before aren’t very powerful. Glaive Toss is rather lame for a lvl 90 talent. Readiness, while a cool addition to our toolset, does not have a huge impact on our dps. Dire Beast and Lynx Rush are worth more than Bestial Wrath, which just seems wrong. Cobra Shot, Arcane Shot, and Kill Command are at least still our top priorities.
So let’s see if we can figure out what our 90% priority list might look like.

Let’s start by dropping all the new abilities: Dire Beast, Lynx Rush, Readiness, Glaive Toss, and Stampede. The Back-to-basics rotation.
54793.08 11.05%

Pretty close to 90%. Let’s add Stampede back since it’s cool and it’s not hard to deal with since it’s such a long CD.
55740.32 9.52%

So there we go. The Back-To-Basics + Stampede 90% rotation. Don’t use any of the new Talents or Readiness.

Or how about the MoP rotation. Keep the new abilities but throw out the old poor performers: Kill Shot, Rapid Fire, Serpent Sting, Focus Fire.
56000.89 9.09%

Actually a little high. Dropping Stampede takes us a little too low though.
55034.76 10.66%

There are of course several other ways to get to 90% by swapping out different abilities.
It would be very interesting to test this out in practice. If a human can do 85% of the max simulated DPS in a stand still tank & spank, they’re doing really good and it’s even harder in real raiding scenarios. A human may actually do better dps by simplifying their rotation instead of trying to pack in everything and get closer to the theoretical max for that rotation. Doing 90% of the 90% is the same as doing 81% of the 100%.

So if you’re having difficulty with the new game of whack-a-mole (I know I am), consider leaving something out and seeing if the simpler rotation gives you the same or better performance. You might be surprised at the results. And if you really get that nailed down, you can try adding things back in.

P.S. I played with a couple other things just for fun.

The Cobra Shot rotation: 30077.18 51.18%
The CS+AS rotation: 39597.64 35.72%
The CS+AS+KC rotation: 42690.93 30.70%

P.P.S. HUGE THANKS to Zeherah for all her hard work in creating femaledwarf.com and making all this possible.

Additional information for SV:

Dire Beast: 5.25%
Crows: 3.68%
Stampede: 0.8% (yes, you read that right)
Glaive Toss: 2.53%

Additional information for MM:

Dire Beast: 4.18%
Crows: 4.45%
Stampede: 1.6%
Glaive Toss: 3.62%