Part 2: Timing autoattacks and combat arts
For some Melee DPSers, autoattacks form an enormous part of their damage. As a monk, in my current setup (mostly KoS instanced gear, DPS specced, t8 ad3 spells mostly), I sit around 65% of my damage coming directly from autoattacks, with procs taking up a not insignifigant part of the remaining damage on some encounters. to give you one example.
One absolutely critical factor to consider to understand and maximize melee DPS is that of timing CAs. Basically, it goes like this:
When you cast a combat art, it has a casting time and a recovery time. For many combat arts, this is 0.5 seconds for both respectively, landing a combat art's combined time on 1.0 seconds. Some deviate from this, but it seems to be the norm across all melee DPS classes.
If you are casting a combat art, or recovering from having cast one, you cannot land an autoattack. Instead, said autoattack lands only after the recovery time of your combat art has ended.
So, to give an example of a bad setup, if you have a weapon with a 1.2 delay (such as the scepter of destruction, deathtoll, let's assume you've no haste) and your combat arts take 1 second to cast after all modifiers (they rarely will, see below for specifics), and you spam combat arts, your will get in trouble. Point in case:
An autoattack goes off, and immediately after, you hit a combat art. 1 second passes, the combat art is over, you have the next CA in line and begin casting it. 0.2 seconds later, your autoattack should go off... But you're in the middle of casting a combat art, so it can't. Instead it waits for fully another 0.8 seconds before it lands. So instead of over swing every 1.2 seconds, you will get one every 2.0 seconds - That's missing out on a great deal of potential autoattack damage.
In other words, you should time your autoattacks so they are always landing in the spot between your combat arts - this is virtually impossible - or so that they are very, very slightly faster than your autoattacks and thus wait in line for a very short time before going off. Finally, failing this, if your autoattacks cannot be timed otherwise, you should get used to "let the autoattack cycle" - that is to say, cast a combat art, and then wait for the autoattack to go off before casting another combat art. This takes a bit of getting used to.
In order to time this correctly, however, you first need to calculate your haste. Be aware that there are temporary buffs that will increase your haste... But let's ignore those for now, and I'll get back to them later. You should have a good idea what you usually end up in a group with on a raid. The following buffs makes for a signifigant modification on your haste and are always up as long as the one casting them is alive:
Trouby: I forget the name, but groupwide haste buff.
Illusionist: Rapidity, single target.
Monk: Swift Calm, raidwide, 22.
Count in the ones you should be affected by under "normal" raid circumstances in the calculation below.
Now, I have covered how to calculate your weapon's actual delay in the post before this one, but the formula is this:
<real weapon delay> = <listed weapon delay> * <possible Dual wield penalty> / (1 + <haste percentage>).
If you are dual wielding, the penalty, applied separately to each weapon, is a 33% longer delay, so multiply their listed delay by 1.33 - that's the <possible Dual wield penalty>. If you are not DWing, ignore this entry.
The other factors should be fairly self explanatory.
Let's say you're DWing 2.5 delay weapons on 130 haste on a raid. That's 107% real haste: <real delay> = 2.5 * 1.33 / 1 + 1.07 = ~1.6063.
You should now get your combat art time as close to this figure as at all possible.
Your combat art time is <casting time> + <recovery time> - each of these can be buffed individually, so let's treat them as such:
Casting time:
Also received temporary buffs here and there. Again, let's ignore those for now, and I'll get back to them later on. The permanent buffs are:
Bards: Allegro, groupwide, 1% to 8% - most bards I've seen run this on 8%. This is an AA ability - if the bard has Don't Kill the Messenger, he also has allegro. On SF raids, it seems reasonable that you will usually be in the same group as a bard.
Monk: Swift Calm, 13.1% at master 1, t7. The t8 ad3 is worse, and master 1 on t8 is 14.4%. As of right now, no monk in SF has this mastered. This may change, but calculate with t7 masters for now.
Add up the total casting time reduction, and calculate real casting time as follows: <original casting time> / (1 + <casting time reduction percentage> = <real casting time>
- If you inspect the combat art while under the effects of these abilities, it does show you the altered value, with two decimals' accuracy. That will usually be sufficient, but run this calculation to be sure in any case.
Recovery time: Usually 0.5 seconds, this is time not spent casting the combat art, but where you can do nothing else. Recovery increasers exist, but no permanent buffs are in place outside personal buffs. If you run a brawler or a rogue, the agility lines will allow you to modify this. Look up your individual AA abilities for more detail.
Be aware that recovery time is not the same thing as reuse time, a point that confuses some.
The correct formula for calculating recovery time is:
<original recovery time> / (1 + <recovery speed increase percentage>) = <real recovery time>
- If you inspect the combat art while under the effects of these abilities, it does show you the altered value, with two decimals' accuracy. That will usually be sufficient, but run this calculation to be sure in any case.
Now to make things much more complicated:
Using these basic tools, you should be able to time your combat arts and autoattacks to work together under the permanent buffs you will usually run with on a raid. However, it should here be noted that there are temporary buffs that will increase haste, casting speed, recovery speed or any combination of the three. This will mess up the otherwise neatly fitting numbers.
Buffs where this becomes a problem (this will be an expanding list):
Instinct, fury single target buff, procs haste on autoattack.
Death match, Shadowknight groupwide temporary buff, increases casting speed and haste.
Divine Recovery, Cleric groupwide temporary buff, increases recovery speed and casting speed (unsure on this one, cleric input wanted).
Cacophony of blades, bard temporary groupwide buff, increases haste and gives an automatic proc on autoattacks (called blade chime).
Jester's Cap, toubadour single target temporary buff, increases casting speed and recovery speed.
For all of the above, while they are active, be aware that timing autoattacks correctly becomes difficult. Learning to work around it correctly will provide a large bonus spike damage, while playing incorrectly while some of them run may actually decrease damage.
In general on haste buffs: Usually, you will be casting two, three or even four combat arts before your autoattack would fit in. Learn how much these buffs that give haste changes your autoattack speed, how many CAs you can still fit in, and how long you have to then wait for the autoattack to go off. This is difficult, and with classes you usually never get buffs from, it's probably not worth it in the first place - and the fury's instinct buffs does not give you a warning as to when it goes off, making it virtually impossible to keep an eye on it.
However, to some extent this can be practiced. Blade chime, at the very least, should be something every player of a melee class worth his salt can work with casting combat arts through, as long as he or she is not using very fast weapons.
Be aware that no matter how badly you do, temporary buffs that only increase haste will, at least, never actually lower your DPS output - you can however negate the gain from it by not playing properly while it is up.
Casting- and reocvery speed buffs: Again, this is a matter of getting an idea of how many CAs you can now fit into the autoattack cycle, it may be more than before, you may simply have to wait a bit before continuing the cast chain, it depends on the size of the buff and the speed of the weapon you are using. Often, you will get very little out of these buffs; they help casters much more. If nothing else, however, you may not want to spam CAs while they are up; doing so may decrease your damage output as you delay autoattacks.
So far as general guide to autoattack timing. Individual calculations to your class and group setup is for yourself to make - but this is the single point aside from itemization that often seperates a good melee DPS character from a mediocre one. I can only recommend experiementing with it. You can probably do the calculations on correct setup with permanent buffs outside the raids, it's pure math really, nothing much more to it.
As for the temporary buffs, I can only recommend running a parser and keeping an eye out for the results while you experiment with them. Be aware what these buffs do, try to adjust to playing under them, and this should make a difference on the parse.
Basic-level Melee DPS guide, needs feedback
