Do you guys find alacrity helpful?

[seektravota]

It seems combat spec can benefit from alacrity. But not sure. Has anyone tried it out?

[Ashuranrx]

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.

[seektravota]

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.

 

Thank you so much for the info. Very helpful.

I just found alacrity in many sentinel 69/72 gears. I've been wondering what is dev's reasoning for putting alacrity mods in there since in my first impression it'll be useless.