Haste Undervalued for Feral Druid Tanks in Classic?

I’m wondering if Mr. Robot is undervaluing Haste (especially the haste to gloves enchant and Libram of Rapidity) for Feral Druid tanks in Classic WoW. It seems to me that a 1% haste has to be a better DPS/TPS increase for feral tanks than 8 STR or AGI, but Mr. Robot continuously puts it at the bottom of my enchant recommendations, regardless of fight length or average gear level. That seems really counterintuitive to me, as so much emphasis is placed on our haste/attack speed with regard to threat in the form of the Manual Crowd Pummeler as such an OP item to the point that Mr. Robot is still recommending it over my Draconic Maul. Here are a couple of relevant threads:

There also seems to be some support for Librams of Rapidity on the Classic Druid Discord. What do you think?

I don’t think that attack speed is under-valued in the optimizer.

The calculations figure out how many auto attacks you can get over the course of the fight you are optimizing for. 1% attack speed will not necessarily give you 1% more DPS/threat - it doesn’t really work like that. For that 1% attack speed enchant to have value, you need to actually get an extra auto attack. There is no such thing as half an auto attack in our optimizer.

You can use the optimizer to actually find the fight length value at which the enchant becomes good. It is literally worth nothing (with pummeler as your weapon) until you get a fight length up around 170 seconds or longer. Without pummeler, you don’t see an extra auto attack from that enchant until 250 seconds or longer. That is assuming you are auto attacking for 100% of the fight, which is what we assume in our calculations.

If you look at BiS in our optimizer for the default guardian druid, set the gearing strategy to all DPS, set the fight length to 170 seconds - you will see the optimizer pick the 1% haste attack speed enchant.

The optimizer is really good at picking the right gear for the specific situation you are optimizing for.

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You’re right. I played with it some more, and I was able to get the optimizer to pick the haste enchants at certain fight lengths and focused on pure DPS/TPS. What was interesting is like you suggested, there are certain cutoffs where it likes haste more because of the extra swings, and if I go too far above or below those cutoffs, then strength becomes better again. I guess my challenge is that fight length is so variable, which I suppose is the problem with haste enchants, lol. What I’m getting is that if you know you’re going to be in mostly longer fights, then haste enchants make sense. If you’re going to be in 2 min or fewer fights, then str or dodge make more sense depending on whether you’re going for more TPS or more avoidance. Does that sound right?

Yeah, that sounds right. Also keep this in perspective… the actual difference in DPS/TPS we are talking about here is so miniscule that you’d never actually be able to “feel” it playing the game. This is theoretical hair-splitting.

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