Herbalism+managing cooldowns

[Lucrece 0]

I just returned from cataclysm as a warlock main and balance druid player, so enhancement is a new experience for me.

 

One of my doubts is about managing cooldowns. My professions are Alchemy/Herbalism. I was wondering if anyone staggers their cooldowns to always have herbalism up for Ascendance.

 

Basically, I have ghost wolf at 2 min cd, which I have tied Herbalism to in a macro. I have FET at 2.5 min (I always use it glyphed), and then Ascendance at 3 min.

 

To get the highest average benefit from the herbalism cd, I would have to use it every 2 minutes. That means however that I would not have it up always for FET and Ascendance. So, should I stagger using spirit wolves+Lifeblood until I can use it together with Ascendance and FET? Should I always be lining up ALL of my cd's together with lifeblood, or is the sustained loss compared to the burst gain too steep?

 

How does stormlash interact with my cd's? Shoul I always want to line it up with Life Blood as well even if it means staggering its usage by 1 minute?

[Stoove 347]

I'd like to preface this by saying that Enhancement is my offspec, so someone else might have more experience of this first hand. This is just what I think;

 

It would be a DPS loss to save Wolves for Ascendance apart from when Heroism is coming up. So I think it would be better to use Wolves on cooldown and benefit from the regular Haste, and only stagger them when you have to hit everything for Heroism (so only when Heroism is not on the pull).

 

Stormlash does scale with Haste, but the main utility is in the DPS from the whole raid, not from just yourself. With that in mind, the relative increase you'd see from having Lifeblood up with Stormlash is minor. Don't save your Lifeblood for Stormlash, use it with Wolves.

 

Does that make sense?

[Krakir 28]

Yeah, Lifeblood is a very minor dps boost. Giving you 228 haste. With AMR stat weights of 3.3 for haste that's ~750 dps increase for 20 sec every 2 min. So around 125 dps increase.

You want to use it on every cooldown to get as much out of it as you can over the course of the fight. This is a cooldown you don't want to be saving or managing too heavily. FET and Ascendance are on the other hand really strong cooldowns that you wan't to manage properly to get as much uptime or use for designated phases.

My suggestion would be to macro Lifeblood with wolves and have a 100% uptime on it. Spam it on cooldown. You don't want to wait for it and align it with your other cooldowsn. Then use FET and Asc properly according to the fight mechancis. Note that with AoC Heroic Warforged Ascendance becomes a 2 min ability and then you should tie it with that.

Also on the Glyphed FE. I use the glyphed version also for most fights but on a fight were the number of times you can summon FE is the same glyphed as it is unglyphed then it is a loss to have it glyphed.

Does that make sense? E.g. If I can only summon FET 2x during the fight, glyphed or unglyphed. Then you don't want to glyph it since it lowers the uptime.

[Stoove 347]

Genuine question Krakir: Better to save Wolves for a few seconds for Heroism, or just drop them on cooldown?

 

Edit:

 

Note that with AoC Heroic Warforged Ascendance becomes a 2 min ability and then you should tie it with that.

 

I still have trouble getting my head around how rare those things are. Like diamond dust, but somewhat more useful.

[Krakir 28]

 

Genuine question Krakir: Better to save Wolves for a few seconds for Heroism, or just drop them on cooldown?

 

Honestly I'm not sure. That might be dps gain. On the other hand guardians scale dynamically so if they're up while you pop BL they're gonna get boosted. Unlike before when stats were copied as a static image on summoning them. So yeah....have no answer. Have to check that one out.

 

I still have trouble getting my head around how rare those things are. Like diamond dust, but somewhat more useful.

Random is what random does

On Sha of Pride Heroic, the AoC Heroic Warforged has dropped around 5 times for us (yes the warforeged), then 1 or 2 times just heroic version. I got the trinket first....the only agi dpser. Then our druid tank who never plays his offspec. Then the balance druid who has resto offspec. For the fourth time we had no other possible uses for the trinket so we disenchanted it and our our healer (who has never seen prismatic trinket) was cursing Blizzard to the ground. For the 5th time the warforged version dropped our paladin tank was joining in on the cursing.

[Krakir 28]

Allright so a quick test:

Spirit wolves on dummy with no trinkets or weapons so that procs won't mess things up. I did 5 pulls.

 

Without Bloodlust

Spirit Wolf: Spirit Bite =160 K

Spirit Wolf: Attack = 150 K
Total = 303.000 damage over 30 sec => 10100 dps

 

With Bloodlust
Spirit Wolv: Spirit Bite = 150 K
Spirit Wolves: Attack = 220 K
Total = 370 damage over 30 sec => 12333 dps.

So what we see is what was to be expected. Auto hits from the wolves increase but Spirit Bite doesn't increase since its an ability on a fixed cooldown.

I guess the answer "should I save my wolves to align them with BL" comes down to the same as FET and the glyph. It is better to wait and use them with bloodlust if the number of times you can summon them doesn't change. If you can summon them more often by not aligning them with bloodlust, then you gain dps.

Scenario 1:
I pop wolves at the pull and then every 2 minutes in a 15 min fight. I don't align them with bloodlust. So that's 7 uses and 1 min that's get left off. 

Scenario 2:
I pop wolves at the pull and then every 2 minutes in 15 min fight. I see that they are off cooldown but we're entering our bloodlust phase within a minute. I wait and align them with Bloodlust. I still only get 7 uses out of them but they hit harder here.

If the fight in these scenarios would be longer so that I would get my 8th use in scenario 1, then waiting that minute for bloodlust is a dps loss in scenario 2 since I only get 7 uses.

[Stoove 347]

Fantastic answer there mate. Thanks! :)