Of /castsequences and haste

So, due to my own mediocrity, I am the user of a /castsequence macro. During most of Wrath, with our 1.5 second global cooldown, there was only so much wiggle room in the rotation - you could do one Chimera, one Aimed, and a combination of one Arcane and two to four Steady Shots, depending on your Armor Penetration, talents, and haste.

In Cataclysm, our GCD has dropped to 1 second. One second, with instant-cast, no cooldown but the global cooldown Arcane Shots. Steady Shot still has a base cast time of 2 seconds. Chimera Shot's cooldown is still 10 seconds (since I don't glyph it).

Our goal is four Steady Shots to every Chimera Shot. Why? Improved Steady Shot. We want these four in bundles of two. With 1 second of the 10 second rotation given to Chimera itself (GCD), a maximum of 8 seconds will go to the four Steady Shots. With no haste, that gives you time for one Arcane Shot, preferably between the bundles. When haste pushes your Steady Shot cast down, however, you're looking at extra time in your rotation, and face it - you're probably carrying extra focus. Add in Rapid Fire and your Imp. Steady Shot haste and you're probably rolling in focus and GCD time.

This was what I noticed - my focus bar was always too full. My Steady Shot cast is down to 1.54 seconds - that's about an extra two seconds in my rotation, which is two extra Arcane Shots. Obsessively watching focus consumption in a heroic (the only of two heroics I have successfully completed) got me killed on Anraphet, so it probably wasn't the best idea. I had been popping an extra Steady Shot onto the end of my rotation when my haste procs were up, waiting for Chimera to cool down, but more focus doesn't do me any good. Arcane is a focus dump for a reason.

So! The /castsequence now looks like:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

With my usual lines for the engineering tinkers, tooltip, error clearing, and such, of course.

I couldn't leave it the way it was and manually add the Arcanes - I really want to be hitting two Steadies before my next Chimera to assure I have the focus for it. The flexibility comes between the Steady bundles. There's still enough room in this for Aimed procs without losing Serpent Sting, although the shorter Serpent Sting duration due to the glyph change does make things a little tighter.

I would say that my DPS did edge up afterwards, but that heroic was really not a good run to judge one's DPS on.

As haste probably continues to edge upwards, additional Arcane Shots will, at some point, be untenable to add - three in a row seems to be about the limit for the focus pool following a pair of Steadies. Further shots added to the rotation will probably be Steadies, depending how the haste goes.

Brief thoughts on the Cataclysm

The leveling guide will continue shortly.

In Cataclysm, hunters are going over to focus. I've heard that in the pre-release versions of WoW, focus was the planned resource system for hunters, but for one reason or another, we got switched to mana. This is probably the biggest change I saw for hunters coming out of the eventual 4.0 release; I'm looking forward to it. It'll take some relearning, but we simply have too many stats to watch right now. Cutting Int out of the equation entirely is good. I have a level 74 rogue, so I'm not unfamiliar with that style of resource.

Haste, on the other hand, will change some things. Haste will make focus regenerate faster, but since it won't affect our attack speed, that also means that our autoshot speed is probably going to be less mutable, and Rapid Fire and Improved Aspect of the Hawk procs will be more important to watch.

Attack Power on gear is going bye-bye. (/cheer) I loathed the switch from 2 AP from Agi to 1 AP from Agi and AP on gear since it happened. (From my enchanter's point of view, things are going to get... weird. All those Spellpower and Attack Power enchants are probably going away - possibly to be replaced with Agi, Int, and Str enchants? We'll find out!)

The change to talents - paring out passive stat/damage boosts for "fun" talents - should prove interesting. I play heavy MM in both my specs, and 5 more points means you should be able to invest enough into a 2nd tree for the first or second mastery bonus.

I like that we'll be coming back to Azeroth. I'm looking forward to underwater mounts. (I'm sitting at 90 pets/90 mounts right now.)

Another macro concept

Adapted from the thread on the guild forums where I've been mulling it over.

Another possibility is:

/castsequence Arcane Shot, Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot
/cast Steady Shot

Logically it would run through the cast sequence first on every click; I'll have to see if it will actually go to the /cast line when those three are unavailable. (The downside of doing all this on lunch at work.)

I think the cast sequence would still choke, though, in terms of the 6 second/10 second optimization; the first two iterations would be fine :

Arcane shot, Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, (1-2 Steady Shots depending on haste), Arcane will be ready so Arcane, Steady, Chimera, Aimed, Steady, Arcane, Steady, Steady, Chimera, (Arcane would go here except the cast sequence goes to Aimed) Aimed...

So the cast sequence will still eat a couple Arcanes. I'm actually not sure purely manual weaving would help, since there may still be times that Arcane is ready at the same time as one of the others.

It might, however, help the macro be more flexible for variable haste with regards to Steady Shot - since the hunter GCD is static at 1.5 seconds, and Steady Shot's cast can't be made faster than that, if you're not stacking haste to keep it constantly at a 1.5 second cast (and my gear isn't good enough to even try doing that yet), it's Rapid Fire and Imp. Hawk occasionally boosting your Steady Shot cast speed (plus Bloodlust, and I'm liking Potions of Speed recently - need to fish more for more pygmies). The current macro doesn't effectively take advantage of that in terms of the occasional extra Steady Shots, but if the /castsequence + /cast macro does, it might be worth switching to.

I'll try it out on the dummies when I get home if I can fish up enough pygmies to make enough potions to test out the haste effects.