Should every spec get their gcd reduced by haste?

Community General Discussion
1

I was thinking about this in the last few days since i made a post about secondary stats some time ago.

Why isn’t it that haste does not decrease gcd for energy specs? Afterall it meets the same criteria as the non energy classes.

What does haste do basically?

It reduces certain cds, applies to both energy and non energy
It increases resource generation, both energy and non energy
It reduces gcd. Does not apply to energy specs

What i personally think they should do is this.

Reduce base gcd to about 1 sec or so, and haste can decrease it up to 0.5 seconds, why?

A couple of reasons. 1.5 seconds is dreadful as base gcd, making the start of the expansion really bad from a rotational standpoint, 0.75 is nice, while 1 sec to 0.5 is from decent to good, mind you, it’s 0.5 sec at gcd cap which is not that easy to get usually, you have to get to 100 % haste, easier said that done.

0.5 sec gcd is i think the perfect point where the rotation is really really fast but still possible to follow.

They could also increase baseline energy regen to cut down on downtime.

At the moment haste isn’t really simming well for most energy specs so, this could be nice. And i just see it as a pointless difference.

Also keep in mind that this isn’t really talking about cds being on the gcd, that’s a completely different discussion, but i agree, having 5 sec setups before doing damage just does not feel good.

2

I think the main reason haste is so poor for most energy specs is they have mechanics that counter the primary reason for haste - resource generation.

For non casters the primary benefit of haste is this, as their pace is determined by how much abilities they can use, not the time it takes to use them. Even with phenomenal haste levels you never reach a point where the GCD is the thing limiting your pace, it’s always your resource.

This said the temptation to stack haste is reduced for many because as said they have mechanics that manage their energy regen in most cases sufficiently well enough that you simply get more benefit from boosting other stats than boosting your regen because if you play around the mechanics, you get very few dry energy spots.

Brewmasters get free haste with their final BIS talent, and their standard rotation is such that you rarely are “out of energy” if you use your free abilities at the right moments. Light brewing makes haste even weaker as it gives you a ton of the benefit haste would anyway. SL may change this.

WW mastery requires precise resource management, and because you generate Chi quicker than you spend it most of the time, it’s rare you’re sitting on surplus. Your mastery encourages occasional pooling to avoid breaking the combo as well.

Assa rogues have toxic wounds, which although it scales with haste, it does the job well enough without needing to stack it endlessly, and crit applies better energy use by lending more CP for more finishers which generally are more favourable on energy than your builder.

Outlaw gets a crapton of free haste and energy regen, although haste boosts it further, it’s the same as above, the benefit you get from more is reduced because your kit provides a lot.

Sub is the only spec that likes haste because their only energy regen mechanic is tied directly to it via AAs and it’s random, which means it’s unreliable, so passive regen is desired. However in BFA the bis az trait provides you with a ton of haste whenever SD is up.

3

There are some reasons yes, but this has been the case for a long time, even in legion most energy classes did not scale well with haste.

And still, this is more of a gameplay thing then a solve haste scaling for energy.

I personally would really like a 1 sec gcd baseline reduced to 0.5 at 100 % haste.

It would most certainly help with energy haste scaling though, that’s fore sure. Although if you were to have downtime you wouldn’t get the full benefit out if it, for example, i am not seeing assassination using a skill every 0.5 sec no matter the haste, even if they were to do this.

4

I think Fury is the current exception. Thanks to Cold Blood Hot Steel or whatever it was called, you really want to cast as many bloodthirsts as possible, and cooldown reduction helps here a lot. Ever since one of my guildmates told me “always cast bloodthirst when it is off cd, prioritize it over everything” my DPS jumped by like 25%.

5

With enhancement at this point i am where gcd is my limiting factor, i get to 0.75 regularly thanks to corruptions, and passives, and i think that 0.5 would be really good, i do not have any trouble at all following the rotation, instead i actually think it’s a tiny bit slow.

Anyway the general points he brought are correct i think. But I do not think the resource being the limiting factor is mostly true, and ill make an example.

Of all the melee specs where the gcd is reduced from haste, there is only 1 spec i can think of where the spec is limited more by resources compared to the actual gcd, and that’s arms warrior, and maybe dk, but even then the amount of time you have to wait for your resources to come back is much smaller than the time you are actually smashing the keyboard.

Every other spec, like fury, enhancement, havoc, and the hunter specs, all are limited by gcd. If anything the point would be more correct for energy classes as they are more limited by resources than gcd, and that would apply even if haste were to reduce the gcd of energy specs.

6

I perhaps misunderstood. I thought we were talking about Energy Specs? Rage, Maelstrom and Focus have different regeneration principles to Energy which makes them different. For starts Energy accumulates at a reliable rate of 10/sec unlike Rage or Maelstrom where generation is less reliable and more spikey. With Fury I’d say the issue is offset because Fury can dump almost their entire resource on a high DPS ability which should be prioed (outside of BT with Az trait) whenever possible to keep enrage going. For most energy classes their biggest energy spender is not their higher DPS ability, it’s usually amongst their weakest.

Enh is a totally different ballgame because enh can be sitting upon too much resources due to stuff like WF procs, Stormbringer procs, hot hand procs which prevent you from dumping and should be prioed over trying to dump your maelstrom (fact is you can’t dump when they’re active anyway because they either remove or reduce Maelstrom costs). So I agree about Enh, but I don’t consider it an Energy class.

The issues with energy are why the covenant abilities for monks look pretty stale outside of the Venthyr one arm. Kyrian boosts mastery whilst also making it more difficult to spend chi outside of spamming BOK/SPK Which completely defies the point of boosting your mastery. You either reap the benefits of the mastery boost and sit on surplus chi/energy or you don’t, and negate the point of the mastery buff, spectacularly bad design.
Faeline Stomp also generates Chi and Energy spheres. Again for a class that struggles to spend their resources to avoid cap whilst maintaining mastery this is really bizarre design, WW doesn’t want free chi being thrown at them because it means you’ll not need to use TP, so your energy will overcap. Wierd design but it looks cool I guess.

My bad if I misunderstood what was meant by energy classes, I just assumed literal Energy.

7

No, i was definitely not talking about energy classes in this case, only in a few phrases i did.

What i was discussing was this point in particular “For non casters the primary benefit of haste is this, as their pace is determined by how much abilities they can use, not the time it takes to use them. Even with phenomenal haste levels you never reach a point where the GCD is the thing limiting your pace, it’s always your resource.”

While i agree with your general point, i think the one highlighted here is mostly false for most specs where the gcd scales with haste. The specs where this might hold some truth are specs like arms warrior, and maybe ret and dk. But usually you can cast on gcd, there isn’t a lot of downtime even for arms.

Mine was more of a gameplay point rather than balance, if it helps with secondary stats balance especially on energy classes where haste is pretty bad good, but the point i made is more about fun.

I think 0.5 sec gcd is perfect at 100 % haste. Really really fast, but not too fast where it’s not possible to follow. And 1 sec gcd instead of 1.5 base is very noticeable, while 1.5 is unbearably slow, 1 sec is decent. So the argument summarized was, make all specs gcd 1 sec base, all types of resources benefit from haste gcd reduction, not everyone aside from energy, last point was, possibly increase baseline energy regen in case downtime gets too high.

8

i’m happy about my 1s static gcd. i enjoy rogue being resource limited and having predictable rotations that you can plan around. i know exactly how to do my damage rotation while juggling stuns without gaps because my global doesnt change and i don’t have random procs that alter my rotation.

rogue also has tons of abilities off global. all in all it adds up to my character feeling like i’m in control. i do what i want when i want, and my character will follow my lead, compared to the style of winging it as you go because it’s unpredictable. that can be fun on other classes, but that’s not what rogue is all about imo.

sub does not have any random energy regen. you get energy when you use finishers, and it gives you the same amount every time. the only random thing sub has other than if you crit or not is shadow techniques, which i assume is what you mean, and even that is psuedo-random and can be tracked because the chance increases the more hits you do. though in SL they’re putting energy on it, just like it had in legion. but it’s not particularly random.

9

The point is not about unpredictability. Just because my haste changes doesn’t mean my rotation suddenly does. I just adjust to the speed, i find it quite easy personally.

Also a completely predictable spec is quite boring, that what i would consider ret pally to be, it’s the standard 123 type of rotation. Rogue usually isn’t really like that.

10

when you alter my gcd, you make a fundamental change to how rogue plays. i have a 4s cheap shot, and i need to re-stun exactly at 0s because if i leave a gap, the opponent has a chance to counter me. this is very core. if my global is now 1.1s because i don’t have enough haste, this doesn’t work. if my global is 0.9s, my timing is thrown off and i have to afk for a bit while i want to re-stun.

rogue is about making the most of short windows of opportunity with a planned approach.

you not liking predictability doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. there are many other classes that you can play. as for ret, it has a lot of procs, on top of wings procs. all of that highly alters what your next global will be. i actually like ret a lot as well, but it is for totally different reasons to why i like rogue.

granted, the specs are quite different. i focused a bit too much on sub perhaps. sub has basically no rng and a big focus on predictability and doing exactly the right thing within a window.

assa is a bit more loose but still has quite a low amount of rng, but it is so resource limited for the most part that you’re hardly ever saturating your globals anyway (on single-target). it sees a big increase in rotation speed with haste due to sped up dot ticks.

outlaw is quite free flowing and would probably play fine with a haste variable gcd.

11

Yeah I’m well aware it’s pseudo random, but nonetheless it’s harder to track than stuff like venomous wounds which increases the value of reliable energy regen through haste. The only way to make ST trackable is either manually counting your AAs or having an add-on track your AAs so you know whether it procced on your fourth or fifth attack. Nonetheless harder to track than “each time my dot ticks” for example.

As to my knowledge and experience, ST does award energy in BFA. SL simply changes that rogues get it earlier in 2 ranks, separations of the energy component and CP component across ranks.

12

i guess. you can also just kinda feel it, it’s pretty consistent.

huh, you’re actually right. my bad.

1 Like
13

Your thread title is “should energy classes get…” It’s not exactly an illogical leap to assume you’d be talking about Energy classes, given there’s a specific resource called Energy. If you intend you discuss all non mana classes you should probably make the title a bit clearer, because I have never widely heard of warriors, shaman and hunters etc being referred to as energy classes, hence the confusion.

As mentioned in my earlier post I believe they’re subject to differences due to their resource differences so what works for rogues (an energy class) and what works for hunters (a focus class) is not the same. As the other poster has said, generally energy classes “like” predictable play with certainty in their actions due to how their resource works so changing their action windows can be jarring if it doesn’t change other parts of their rotation as well (like durations of effects)

14

I think you are exaggerating it a bit to be honest, but to each his or her own i guess.

Personally i would like it if haste reduced the gcd for every spec regardless of resource. Let’s say that you are using sub, you have a 5 sec window to do damage, if your gcd was 0.5 sec instead of 1, and you had 100 % haste, theoretically the only thing that would change is how many abilities you can fit into shadowdance, but the timing should be similar, just faster. That’s my point, you would just have to readjust to the reduced gcd, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that your stun wouldn’t line up perfectly, that’s on you to make it happen.

And pax, the reason why i made that post was because i was responding specifically to the point i listed above.

But i think i will change the title a bit.

15

The reason is that energy specs usually generate resources slower than they can consume them.

Because haste increases your energy regenration it therefore wouldn’t do a whole lot if it also added global cooldown reduction.

How it works now essentially means that gaining more resources results in more damage, paricularly in the case of gloom blade rogues.

16

eh, i don’t think so. if i have a 1.1s global, i have 1 less global during my cheap shot, and a good amount of waiting time. it would be useless in the other direction until you get to the breakpoint where you can do 1 more ability, so the shorter global is just spent waiting. it also raises the issue of if i’m borderline between being able to do the extra ability or not, and then rely on a haste proc or something that i have to pay attention to to decide whether i can do the extra global or not.

it’s not something i want, i think it’d be harmful to sub’s gameplay. for assa i don’t think it matters a whole lot either way to be honest, but i don’t think it’s something that’s needed either. for outlaw i think it’d be fine.

17

Yea i know that, energy classes usually are in the slower side. I think it could be improved.

I would put a 1 sec gcd base, and it gets reduced by haste for every spec as i said above down to 0.5 sec at 100 % haste.

18

You realize that 100% haste can not be achieved, right?

19

It can, at least for now and quite easily.

And it doesn’t matter anyway. Because that’s not strictly the point.

But if we were to talk about it, i think that at the end of the expansion, characters that have high ilvl, should have their main secondary stat no less than about 65% or so.

20

Maybe through corruptions + lust, but corruptions are gone after a month or 2.