USELESS Alacrity on item for Sentinels ???

[Rheemus]

So is the following crafted item ANOTHER bioware bug or who would use alacrity as maruader/sentinel, when everyone seems to agree You need so much of it to get GCD to 1.1 that its waste of stats, and better spent on accurace, surge etc.

 

Item: [Artifact] Microfilament Might D-Device:

 

+163 Strength

+166 Endurance

+79 Power

+74 Alacrity

 

Its a shame really since these crafted artifact level 53 items have really good stats, except it seems for this one :-( ( the COmbat one has much more end than str, and i guess is for tanks and not dps)

[HellionFBI]

They've changed alacrity such that it also reduced GCD and therefore has potential for almost all classes. That being said, as a Sentinel I do not prefer to use it because the GCD difference is unnoticeable without larger amounts, and so I put the stat points in to more important things like Accuracy and Critical, or Power and Surge. As more people get into the higher end gear (including myself), I'm sure tests will be run to determine if the alacrity might be more useful.

[Ardarell_Solo]

Combat sents need it to squeeze in four ticks of damage into precision slash's buff window instead of just three (if Zen is not active).

[atschai]

Combat sents need it to squeeze in four ticks of damage into precision slash's buff window instead of just three (if Zen is not active).

 

Good point. Anyone knows how much alacrity is exactly needed for that?

Precision slash is 4.5 secs and one GCD is 1.5 sec.

I mean with 50 ms ability lag being 3.3% of a 1.5 sec GCD this would be about 200-250 alacrity?

Edited April 29, 2013 by atschai

[Ardarell_Solo]

Yep, it sounds a lot I know, but as combat you get 3% accuracy from ataru form, which substantially decreases the sh*** load of accuracy points watchmen need to spend since 2.0 to get to 100%. So roughly you can say: What combat sents need to spend on alacrity equals what they don't need to spend on accuracy in comparison to watchmen... Edited April 29, 2013 by Ardarell_Solo

[dinchydoo]

we are a class that's set up for speed to do damge and finse we are not a big tank with power and single blow kills

[Ashuranrx]

Yep, it sounds a lot I know, but as combat you get 3% accuracy from ataru form, which substantially decreases the sh*** load of accuracy points watchmen need to spend since 2.0 to get to 100%. So roughly you can say: What combat sents need to spend on alacrity equals what they don't need to spend on accuracy in comparison to watchmen...

 

How did you split your surge, accuracy and alacrity? How much of each do you have? How did you adjust your crit vs power with lower surge?

[gtangtan]

.5 sec is 500 ms. You want your GCD to be below 1.125 sec if you were to squeeze in 4 attacks within 4.5 sec, which is about 25% alacrity down from 1.5 GCD, which is not possible to achieve with a reasonable amount of alacrity.... However, in defense of combat, higher alacrity gives you a better chance of using riposte within the precision slash window and also possibly allow you to drop your second precision slash right before your first precision slash completely wears off.

 

Good point. Anyone knows how much alacrity is exactly needed for that?

Precision slash is 4.5 secs and one GCD is 1.5 sec.

I mean with 50 ms ability lag being 3.3% of a 1.5 sec GCD this would be about 200-250 alacrity?

[seektravota]

.5 sec is 500 ms. You want your GCD to be below 1.125 sec if you were to squeeze in 4 attacks within 4.5 sec, which is about 25% alacrity down from 1.5 GCD, which is not possible to achieve with a reasonable amount of alacrity.... However, in defense of combat, higher alacrity gives you a better chance of using riposte within the precision slash window and also possibly allow you to drop your second precision slash right before your first precision slash completely wears off.

 

There's only one way to find out. Somebody try stack a lot of alacrity instead of surge a (keep accuracy at 100) and do a parse. Let's see the result.

[Ashuranrx]

There's only one way to find out. Somebody try stack a lot of alacrity instead of surge a (keep accuracy at 100) and do a parse. Let's see the result.

 

Parses have been done, the conclusion is that Alacrity is useless for Sent and here is why:

 

Watchman spec: Watchman does most of its damage from Dots and Alacrity does not make DoTs tick faster. The main hitter, Merciless Slash, has a cooldown and Alacrity does not decrease its cooldown. Surge is better than Alacrity for Watchman because of Zen’s auto crit mechanic for DoTs.

 

Combat spec: Precision Slash is off GCD and builds centering, and can reset from proc. This means Combat spec can build 8 centering in 1 GCD (PS + BR) or 16 in 2 GCD sometimes. Combat can also build 30 centering before the fight starts. This means Combat builds centering faster than other specs and can keep Zen up 50% of the time in combat. Zen gives 30% Alacrity and burns focus so fast during Zen’s uptime that some strikes are needed to build focus, having more Alacrity in gear is meaningless during Zen. Therefore, Alacrity is not as good as Surge and Accuracy during Zen, which is about half of the time in battle.

 

Master Strike does not benefit from Alacrity, so you can’t channel MS faster to squeeze more attacks in Precision Strike duration. Blade Storm also can auto crit in Combat which makes surge more valuable. If you use Transcendance in PvP, Surge is still better than Alacrity because PvP is about burst damage and you want your auto crit Blade Storm to hit as hard as possible. So Alacrity is not better than surge and accuracy for Combat.

 

Focus spec: This spec is about landing sweeps as often as possible, to as many targets as possible, and having it crit as hard as possible. So Surge is definitely better than Alacrity here due to auto crit Force Sweeps.

 

Conclusion: Alacrity gives very little return for large amount of point investments and is not as good as accuracy and surge for all three specs. So no alacrity should be in gear for Sentinels. If you are interested in looking at parses, you can dig up some old posts in the Marauder forum. They posted a lot of parsing there.