WoW analyzer

[Jatuu 1]

How accurate is this website relative to the icy veins guide? I ask because I keep getting results from it that seem contradictory.  For example, the IV guide says use crows on CD unless BW is less than 30 seconds away. But when I use it on CD, it says I am doing it wrong. I don't see how to do both--use and not use it on CD.  Also. I often have the situation where Crows doesn't come off CD until BW is almost over. Both Analyzer and Guide say don't use crows if you got less than 7 seconds. But if I am supposed to cast it on CD, wouldn't I be getting crows with zero BW anyway? So I don't understand the significance. 

[Luthixx 138]

Realistically you just want to time crows with BW, regardless of what wowanalyzer says - the only difference might be if you're saving it for 20-30 seconds each time and you get 1 or 2 less uses over the course of a fight, that would end up being worth more than one crows CD empowered by BW.

wowanalyzer just does the calculations based on your maximum number of uses, not the realistic. Same as kill command, even with a 100% parse you could have still mathematically fit in quite a few more abilities but you still got the top parse.

[Khallid 110]

Wowanalyzer is very decent in my opinion. It helps by telling you additional information that is hard to notice by just reading the logs.

14 hours ago, Jatuu said:

For example, the IV guide says use crows on CD unless BW is less than 30 seconds away. But when I use it on CD, it says I am doing it wrong

Well, if you think about it, Bestial Wrath will always be up in less than 30 seconds. Here's a random log from me set to uptime of Bestial Wrath on Mythic Felhounds. The longest gap between Bestial Wraths I had was 17 seconds. Unless you're not using One With the Pack (the top talent in that row) and/or your critical hit chance is non-existent, your downtime on Bestial Wrath should be between 15 to 20 seconds at most.

I haven't read the guide lately since I do all the sims and math myself, but I'm pretty sure that you are NOT supposed to cast Crows on cooldown. Let me explain. Let's assume that the average uptime of Bestial Wrath is 50%, which is fairly realistic. Logs say my uptime is around 55%. At 50% uptime the average downtime is 15 seconds. 15 seconds is 25% of the cooldown of Murder of Crows (and Titan's Thunder as well), so in the worst case scenario, you lose 25% of its damage by waiting, but on average you probably only lose about half of that. However, Bestial Wrath increases the damage by around 33% (25% base + artifact traits). So it's mathematically proven that it's better to wait.

While it may or may not happen that you get an extra Crows by not waiting, every cast of Crows will be around 33% weaker if you use it out of Bestial Wrath, so getting an extra cast every 4th cast amounts to nothing.

To be fair though, Crows is a very small percentage of your dps, so there's a negligible increase in dps by overlapping the cooldowns correctly. Don't get overly frustrated by the little details that don't matter.

Edited January 23, 2018 by Khallid

[Jatuu 1]

Thanks for the response. It has been a bit frustration, as I am trying to figure out how to improve my dps. I have been looking at your logs and trying to see what you do, but I am kinda lost.  WoW analyzer will tell me "no major issues, good  job" yet I am clearly 200k or so behind your parses at the same ilevel, even with my best.   Been trying to pop your parses into wow analyzer and see what you've done.  The big things wow analyze says (when it says there are problems) is titan's thunder and crows usage, but I don't see how it has such a huge impact. 

 

My worst fights seem to be fel dogs and garothi warbringer.  On the former, I hover around 1.63-1.72m.  WW monk by comparison in our group is over 2m most of the time. 

Edited January 26, 2018 by Jatuu

[Khallid 110]

It might just be a gear difference if you're comparing to other people. I'm 969 ilvl at the moment with well optimized stats so of course I parse very high. If you're hitting close to your simdps that is fine. I've been doing a lot of sims and I simply don't see why everyone isn't wearing Qa'pla. It's always the top legendary in all of my sims and switching builds just lowers the dps more.

I sometimes pop crows and titan's thunder at the wrong time as well. It makes such a small difference it barely even matters.

RNG also moves your dps significantly. Your higher and lower dps parses can range by 200k just from RNG.

There are some little things that you might not be aware of. For example: Let's say you hit Dire Beast exactly 12 seconds before Bestial Wrath comess off cooldown, so it will be ready to use instantly. If you hit Bestial Wrath fast enough, because the animation of Dire Beast takes about a half a second before Stomp hits, you can activate Bestial Wrath after casting Dire Beast and Stomp will hit with Bestial Wrath's bonus. This also means that hitting Dire Beast at 13 or 14 seconds cooldown of Bestial Wrath makes you lose the dps of empowering that Stomp, and it's not obvious how bad that 1 second is, so it's better to wait until it hits exactly 12 seconds. None of the guides say anything about that as far as I know, so it's just gampeplay details that you learn with experience.

Focus management also matters. I'm actually not perfect at it. I tend to keep my focus very low most of the time, so wowanalyzer always tells me to pool more focus into Bestial Wrath. Except that I'm using the zoo build with Aspec of the Beast, not Killer Cobra, so if I get good Dire Beast procs then focus doesn't matter anymore since I get tons of it. And I'm also using Qa'pla so the Dire Beast reset Kill Command gives you the extra focus to never miss one. Worst case scenario I lose the bonus dps of 1 empowered Cobra Shot, so I don't really fret about it. I prefer to focus starve a bit than to focus cap. The spec is not punishing for small mistakes like those, and I find that being focus starved is a good thing at the moment when you activate Aspect of the Wild. It's such a waste to activate AotW if you're already over 90 focus or so. As soon as you hit Dire Beast you focus cap.

[Putro 1]

On 1/26/2018 at 10:09 AM, Jatuu said:

Thanks for the response. It has been a bit frustration, as I am trying to figure out how to improve my dps. I have been looking at your logs and trying to see what you do, but I am kinda lost.  WoW analyzer will tell me "no major issues, good  job" yet I am clearly 200k or so behind your parses at the same ilevel, even with my best.   Been trying to pop your parses into wow analyzer and see what you've done.  The big things wow analyze says (when it says there are problems) is titan's thunder and crows usage, but I don't see how it has such a huge impact. 

My worst fights seem to be fel dogs and garothi warbringer.  On the former, I hover around 1.63-1.72m.  WW monk by comparison in our group is over 2m most of the time. 

Hey, I maintain the Hunter modules, so I wanted to clear up a few things. 

• First of all - don't compare yourself to other classes/specs, that can only lead to frustration. 
• Secondly, gear isn't everything in the game anymore - ilvl and the actual power of the player can swing wildly, so be mindful of that.
• While I can check and codify a lot of things on WoWAnalyzer there are some core rotational issues that I can't always do (especially the way Direbeast resets work in the combatlog (they're untrackable)). So you'd still want to look into similiar geared players, or simply just better parsing players (take a 95th percentile for example - to somewhat escape crazy RNG) and see what order they are casting things in and compare to yourself. Do this by going to Warcraftlogs -> casts -> timeline (or use 2 tabs of WoWAnalyzer and scroll down to the timeline).

Almost nothing has a huge effect on Beast Mastery DPS, I think last I looked even with removing almost all conditionals and merely have a very simply priority on SimC, you'd lose about 5% DPS or something along those lines. But if you had any linkable logs, we could always delve into them and there might pop up some more issues that WoWAnalyzer didn't catch (to which I should look into if they could be implemented) or we could catch some rotational problems that WoWAnalyzer necessarily can't identify.

On 1/26/2018 at 5:48 PM, Khallid said:

Focus management also matters. I'm actually not perfect at it. I tend to keep my focus very low most of the time, so wowanalyzer always tells me to pool more focus into Bestial Wrath. Except that I'm using the zoo build with Aspec of the Beast, not Killer Cobra, so if I get good Dire Beast procs then focus doesn't matter anymore since I get tons of it. 

You'd ideally still want to have a good amount of focus going into Bestial Wrath, even if you are using Aspect of the Beast - the focus thresholds for triggering a suggestion is different depending on using Killer Cobra or Aspect of the Beast, so those have been accounted for, but I might slightly adjust those thresholds again - especially with t214p becoming a bit more prevalent. 

On the whole A Murder of Crows topic -- The APL doesn't include a lot of requirements for it, outside of requiring Bestial Wrath to be up, so the information I used on it currently is mixed with things from the BM Experts on the discord , things from the guide and the APL on SimC in general. The same goes for generally everything else in the module. 

In general - We're always open for feedback, and I'm really interested in more suggestions so feel free to contact us on WoWAnalyzer Discord otherwise feel free to bring them here, PM me either on Icy-Veins or on Discord (Putro#6093) or just tag me on the hunter discord.

Edited January 29, 2018 by Putro
some more murder of crows information