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Physical damage is a one-roll system. Hit doesn't do anything to crit until your crit is so high that it pushes hit off the attack table.

Edit: Spells are a two-roll system, where first there's the check to see if the spell hits or is partially or fully resisted, then another for a crit.

A crit is +100% damage. 5/5 Mortal Shots makes a crit do +130% damage. Relentless Earthstorm Diamond is another 3%, and so.. umm.. +133.9%, actually.

Edited, Oct 4th 2008 4:42pm by Ehcks

Has anyone tried to toss Steady Shot out the window, go for max haste and crit with a high speed weapon?

If you can get your autos in under a second (guessing max will be down around .75-ish, but just a WAG there) wouldn't firing two autos with their crit chance be better than a steady plus an auto? Plus that gives your chance of speed increase in BM to go up?

A mana dump of instants could be kept up in 3 cycle GCD on 2 cycle Autos. Basically, no room for steady.

Just a thought to toss in there, trying to think out of the box here. Or at least out of my mind... ^_^

I can kind of see your reasoning, and that technically works now, but won't in the patch. I'm not saying that it's a good idea to try to do this. It's just something to keep in mind when your shaman hits Heroism while you're doing Rapid Fire and Quick Shots happens to proc.

but in the patch, Auto Shot is no longer linked with Steady Shot, there is no point to drop it. You can still fire auto shots every .75 seconds while casting steady shot. The reason that everyone is against haste is that after you get your Steady Shot cast faster than the GCD, it only effects about 45% of your DPS. It wouldn't be so bad, but haste already effects DPS less than any other stat- even before you hit the casting time threshold.

Okay, I think I get it. So, since the unlink we are really concerned about the 'specials' rotation, using steady as a 'special' in this context.

I guess I truely won't be able to wrap my brain around it until I work with it myself. I was thinking haste had a role, but apparenly not. My thoughts for mini-maxing priorities were:

1. Hit%
2. Crit%
3. Agil/AP (whichever ends up more critical)

So haste become irrelevant and has no place in there. That just feels odd to me...

Kill Command is still there... kinda.

It's a 30 second cooldown and increases the damage of your pets next 3 special attacks by 60%/40%/20%

I haven't tried to put it into a macro yet, but I'm not sure if the same line that we currently use would work. It'll come up with a "ability is not ready yet" error until the cooldown is up.

But there is marginal use for the 3:2 macro in its current form. If you're in a fight where you have to move a lot, having the macro

/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot

might help you squeeze out a tiny bit more damage, since if you start casting steady shot from nothing, the first auto shot won't fire until after the steady shot is done. With that macro, it'll start Autoshot and Steady shot at the same time, potentially getting in 1-2 extra autos.

However, if you're bad at keeping up a sting 100% of the time, a cast sequence macro could help with that:

/castsequence Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

(adjusting the amount of steadies for your haste and duration of the sting)

I just tried it out on the PTR. I don't have enough time to figure out how many steadies are perfect for me, but it was keeping my sting up 99% of the time without having to worry about it. I think if I just took 2 off, it would be up 100% of the time.

Okay. Well, maybe there is something that I am really missing...

But I accepted that we only had to spam steady shot, and did hours and hours worth of testing with just spamming the skill alone- no macro. I was averaging about 780 personal (~1280 w/ pet) DPS. As soon as I used the /Cast Auto Shot /cast Steady Shot macro, that shot up to around 900 (1400 w/ pet) DPS. I was also seeing much less time in Viper, and my Steady/Auto percentages went from 65%/30% to 50%/42%.

There was even a visible difference between how many shots I was firing.

Edited, Oct 10th 2008 7:38pm by ProjectMidnight

Simply hitting steady shot I had 100 steady's and 73 auto's which is actually above the theoretical number of auto's (68) based on a steady shot every 1.5 seconds and a 2.2 shot timer for auto. This is due to lag and makes sense.

When I used the macro I got 100 steady's and 71 auto's, which is the exact same result with very small deviation due to lag.

So I have no idea what you were doing differently, what kinds of tests were you doing? My tests were simply standing and spamming the macro or steady. I sat in viper so that I wouldn't have to deal with hawk, which is important btw. a lucky streak in hawk procs will significantly increase the number of auto's compared to the number of steady's. What is your weapon speed? What is the expected percentage?

I've been using quartz and recount to track all this and to be honest the values are really really close to the theoretical values. Theoretically the macro should do nothing whatsoever, and as far as I can tell that is the case. It could be that there is a bug and that the ptr is behind the beta. We do get a ton of patches, perhaps that's the difference here.

Lag isn't exactly an issue to me. I consistently get about a 10ms latency. Perhaps that's my issue. I can rarely actually use the 3:2 macro on the live server because I end up stringing Steady Shot.

I took a combat log from my test, but I have no idea what to do with it, since WWS doesn't like it.

Here are some screen shots that I took of my 5-minute tests with Viper on, and no pet. The sting got there because I had it bound to mousewheel up, and I must have accidentally hit it while I was resetting my finger.

Without Macro
With Macro

and on seperate tests that stopped when I got to 100 steadies, I saw 100 steadies/53 Autos without the macro, and 78 Autos with the macro.

Edit: Ieatrocks, you're probably right. When I did the same 100-steadies test without a macro, but firing an Autoshot first I came up with 100/68 that way. It's better, but the macro is still what works best for me.


Edited, Oct 11th 2008 1:52am by ProjectMidnight

I have also been doing extensive testing and i still am at least 150 dps higher when i use a shot macro.

Guys. We're testing timing on shots. Here is what you need to get.

1) What was the total time
2) how many steady's
3) how many auto's
4) what is your shot speed after haste.

Do them all in viper.

Combat logs are also helpful.

Ieatrocks, you can just post your combat log here directly if you want, link to a file or something.

I actually saw a pretty significant DPS drop with the macro despite gaining a significant number of autos. It was running a pure 1:1 ratio the whole time, and the only reason it's showing 99 autos is because I had already queued FD up before the steady finished.

How are you getting a 1:1 ratio ever? That pretty much guarantees you're ******** something up, unless your auto-shot speed is exactly 1.5 the /cast !auto shot macro should not be giving you this cycle. What a 1:1 means is that you are delaying your steady shots and slowing them down to the same rate as your auto shots, which will result in lower dps.

Stranger still is DPS was noticeably higher in the test without the macro despite the fact it had ~30 fewer auto shots

Dps has nothing to do with the number of shots. You weren't delaying your steady's and so you did damage a lot faster. I should reiterate, even if something is broken and the /cast !auto seems to help (although not on the beta) a cast sequence macro is not useful anymore.

Edited, Oct 11th 2008 11:17am by Xsarus

All we're testing is shot timing. As such, the damage of the shots don't matter.

Under normal circumstances your steady shot will be below the GCD so you can predict very accurately the number of steady's and auto's. Hawk messes this up by adding haste to the mixture. It will throw off your ratio, as well as throwing off the measurement of whether auto is going off properly due to the RNG involved in hawk. Yes we want to avoid the proc from imp hawk. This also lets us do longer tests without losing GCD's to hawk or viper switching.

Edited, Oct 11th 2008 2:24pm by Xsarus

Okay. I did 3 sets of tests- 5 tests each. With the Macro, Without the macro (casting Steady First), and Without the macro (Auto First) since Ieatrocks mentioned that EJ is saying that that could make a difference.

I used the same gear as in my armory with this build. My shot speed is 2.00, and my latency is 10ms. My tests were done on the PTR.

Steady/Auto - Time - DPS

With Macro:
100/79 - 2:47 - 510
100/77 - 2:45 - 490
100/79 - 2:46 - 523
100/77 - 2:41 - 525
100/77 - 2:43 - 502

The exact Macro I used is
/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot

No Macro, Steady Shot first
100/52 - 2:43 - 437
100/53 - 2:46 - 453
100/52 - 2:45 - 455
100/54 - 2:42 - 475
100/52 - 2:43 - 436

No Macro, Auto shot first
100/55 - 2:42 - 455
100/54 - 2:45 - 470
100/58 - 2:46 - 459
100/55 - 2:43 - 460
100/60 - 2:41 - 454


I'm starting to believe that these numbers have to do with my latency. 10ms is extremely low, and I rarely run into anyone else with that kind of latency. Maybe I'll go in and undo the latency hack to see if I can push myself back up to 80ms.

Edited, Oct 11th 2008 6:29pm by ProjectMidnight

I've got the chicken xbow 2.03 weapon speed. Serpent's Swiftness and Quiver the only forms of haste. This build, no pet. I realized what was up with the earlier test with the macro and the what was wonky should have been immediately apparent to everybody. :P I had copied a castsequence macro from the sticky. That'll teach me to do something like this when I first wake up. Anyway, got a real 3:2 macro and hit the dummies in SW.

Test 1: Hit steady, and just kept mashing it.
100 seconds.
60 Steadies
38 Autos

Test 2: Used the following macro:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto shot
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill command
/cast Steady shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

99 Seconds
60 Steadies
46 Autos

Test 3: Took the Macro, flipped auto and steady

99 Seconds
59 Steadies
44 Autos

Test 4: Fired Auto first manually, and then began spamming steady.

101 Seconds
61 Steadies
38 Autos

Test 5: By request, Auto shot firing in a vacuum.

97 Seconds
47 Autos


Not conclusive, but it certainly seems to support the notion that there is something strange going on on the PTR.



I R newb. How you do this?

Edit:
Regarding the bug I mentioned from EJ. That has been some time ago and I didn't pay it much attention at the time. If there wasn't at least some small evidence (namely both Midnight's tests and my own seemed to favor firing auto first) I would dismiss it entirely. Since there does seem to be some evidence of it still being around I'll see if I can dig it up on EJ sometime later today.

Edited, Oct 12th 2008 1:51am by Ieatrocks