Your rotation in the guide says you start the fight with Prepot and jump right into Meta.
But if you have the Chaotic Transformation Trait, wouldn’t it be best to Fury Build > Eyebeam > Death Sweepx2 then use Meta to reset Eye Beam and Death Sweep? Along with giving you the other trait Furious Gaze for 24 seconds at the start of the fight instead of just 12 seconds?
My opener is typically Throw Glaive as the Tank goes in > Felblade into boss > Eyebeam > Death Sweep and then I wait for another Death Sweep before I jump into Meta. This gives me about 2 sec left on Furious Gaze, so I can Eyebeam again for another 12 seconds of the Trait.
I do prefer to use Felblade/Demon Blades/Demonic on my Talents. Dinum-Zul’jin is my character and I typically score in the 90%+ on warcraftlogs, a few 98/99/100 as well for my iLvl. So, I’m just curious if I’m opening wrong or if this was just overlooked on the Guide?
I would appreciate that. I know how much extra work you guys put into it. I see all other DH do the Meta opening, while I do my own way. Just wondering if I could improve because my way is less overall or what.
I also checked in the rotation/logs for DH Havoc and indeed the Chaotic Transformation trait is not used at all.
To make it simple :
Eye Beam > Death Sweep > Meta > Death Sweep > Eye Beam
If you’re playing Blind Fury, you want to cast some Annihilation before Meta in order to avoid a waste of fury.
Well, whether it’s used or not might be a simple thing as user preference. My Guild is filled with DH (5-6 of us at any point in time) and I’ve been the lowest ilvl, by about 20 iLvls. I’m not saying they are bad, but I’ve always been beating them on the DPS for each fight. Which, realistically shouldn’t be happening. The only differences are me using Fel Blade/Demon Blades and using a different opener.
Also, that opener you listed isn’t long enough to take advantage of Furious Gaze, which is 12 sec and you would re resetting it around 6 seconds, making it only 6 + 14 instead of 10 + 14. Hence, why I wait for a 2nd Death Sweep before hitting Meta on my rotation.
I’m hoping Swol can come up with actual % increase/decrease based on rotation change with the Traits being picked, because AMR does recommend me always having 1 of Chaotic somewhere in my gear. I figure it would be a good idea to actually take advantage of it in the opener if I’m going to do that.
What I’m saying is the whole point about gearing Chaotic Transformation trait is not only about the damages of one extra EB+DS, but also to get +10sec (trough Demonic) of Meta, which is taking your full Meta duration to 1mn. It is not a matter of play-style, it is skipping the mechanic of a trait, and for sure there should be an overall DPS gain if it was included.
Here is an example of sim logs with my char and Chaotic transformation trait (AMR Default rotation):
As you can see, because Metamorphosis is cast before Eye Beam, the sim completely skip the reset.
Also Death Sweep/Blade Dance should be higher priority than Annihilation/Chaos Strike. You only want to hold your Blade Dance cooldown when you have Demonic talent and you gonna cast and Eye Beam remaining cooldown is less than ~4sec, so you can do 2*Death Sweep during Meta.
I also noticed that Galecaller’s Boon is cast as soon as it is ready, to be more efficient it will be better to cast it after Eye Beam because EB doesn’t care about haste and you will loose 2sec of buff (during EB channeling).
I really need to learn how to create those Rotations, may be I can help with some classes.
And again, thanks for all the hard work ! I really enjoy your tools !
I will post some havoc stuff soon - been messing around with it to get some good data.
Eye Beam “cares” about haste at least somewhat - the channel time is reduced by haste, so I don’t think you would see any measurable change in DPS by delaying galecaller’s boon until after the eye beam.
Plumee, one of the things i brought up in my original post you forgot about for opening rotation. The Furious Gaze trait when combined with Chaotic Tranaformation. It can give you up to 24 seconds of haste buff instead of 12, but you cant use the second eye beams as quickly as you mentioned, or you lose time.
My standard opener is this: (provided a rogue uses cloak for melee)
Prepot
Felblade
Use the new CoS trinket
Eye Beam
Death Sweep
Annihilate
Then Annihilate/throw Glaive/felblade based on fury generation until I can Death Sweep again
Then I use Meta to reset timers on Eye Beam and Death Sweep
Death Sweep again
(Typically 10 seconds have passed at this point so the haste buff is close to ending, but not quite off)
Eye Beam again
Then proceed with standard prioritization of abilities.
The important part is having the haste buff around 2 seconds left and casting eye beam to benefit from the haste and to gain the extra 12 seconds from Furious Gaze. Any sooner and you lose uptime on the buff, any later and Eye Beam won’t benefit from the buff itself.
I have two traits of Furious Gaze in my gear and it gives me around 1.7k haste. I can’t really see a reason i wouldn’t want that for 24 seconds instead of just 12 seconds.
Just been waiting patiently while Swol builds the simulator to adjust for the change in opener to see if/how much of a dps increase it would provide. I try to do the best at whatever class i am playing, so making sure im doing the best opener i can is one of the important things.
I also like that delay in Meta because of fights like Conclave. Gonk likes to cast his Hex right around 8 seconds into the fight, so that’s about how long the Meta is delayed by. If he hits me with Hex, i didn’t lose any time on my Meta and if he doesn’t hit me, I’m jumping right into Meta knowing I can get the vast majority of the time in DPS.
jmc, you will not loose any time on your Furious Gaze buff, it’s just gonna extend the buff by 12 more seconds the second EB will be also buffed by haste buff.
You can see Avade logs (our blueprint for havocs) :
Nah, that’s not how normal buffs work. Meta with Demonic has a special interaction. All other buffs only take up to 20% (or its 10%) of the original duration. So, a 12 sec buff will only gain up to 2.4 seconds on the original 12 for up to 14.4 seconds.
This is easy to see with something like Rejuvenation. I think its a 15 second HoT and even if you cast it back to back on somebody, they won’t have a 45 second Rejuvenation on them, it would be a max of 18 seconds. This also applies to DoTs on targets easily tested with a Lock or S Priest.
Demonic Talent and Meta simply have a special interaction in terms of buff timers. Demonic has the limited interaction, like a few other talents do as well (the ones that grant classes their CD buff on chance), that if you don’t have the Meta buff you gain it for 8 seconds; if you do have the buff, you gain 8 additional seconds.
There are very few buffs that use the “30% rule” like a HoT/DoT. Usually it only applies to buffs meant to have a 100% uptime like Inquisition for ret paladins.
Most buffs in the game just get reset to max duration when you refresh it. So if it’s a 20 second buff and you reapply at 10 seconds, it gets set to 20 seconds. There are a few buffs that will append the new duration to the old duration - Demonic does this with Metamorphosis more or less (there is a little weirdness around that particular interaction because of the channel time on eye beam).
Good thing we had this discussion - I don’t think I have Furious Gaze appending in the simulator so I will update that. With that information, we now know that there is no reason to wait until the end of the Furious Gaze buff to use Eye Beam - that makes the rotation simpler. Modifying the opener to get the reset from Chaotic Transformation will likely be a noticeable DPS increase - I should be able to finish my tests today and post them later on.
Yeah, after i had the time to look into logs i can see it appends instead of using the “Pandemic” rule. I just assume all things are Pandemic ruling unless proven otherwise. Also, the addon i was using to monitor it ingame appears to have gotten it wrong because my judgement was based on that as well.
But that helps me clean up my opener, which is what i wanted from the start. I can’t wait to see the simulator after the update you got planned Swol.
I tested Chaotic Transformation specifically, and I also did a test of a bunch of other rotation tweaks as well. I did a big analysis of Havoc in Legion too - and a lot of my findings seem to still hold true. Havoc is a spec where adding complexity to the rotation has a very small benefit - close to being unnoticeable in most cases.
There are a few things that are easy to do and are worth doing, though. Getting an Eye Beam out before Meta with Chaotic Transformation is one of them - it feels better and will always net a slight DPS increase.
Looking forward to see those new data 
the second EB will be also buffed by haste buff.