Annihilation | Watchman 4.0 Guide

[oofalong]

I started looking into moving Ravage so it benefits from Devious Wounds. My quick math shows it isn't worth it so unless someone points out some flaws I doubt I'll more fully investigate this.

 

Assuming we keep the rest of the rotation the same (meaning we don't delay Force Rend at all), they only way to get Ravage to consistently benefit from Devious Wounds is by moving it to the 3rd & 4th GCD after Annihilate. This means we will have to Rupture by 3s by moving it consistently to the 5th GCD. (Recall, Force Rend will move between the 2nd, 4th & 6th.) Anyway so what impact would this have on damage:

 

 

• We can expect an extra 345 damage due to Devious Wounds buffing the first GCD of Ravage by 5%.
  
• However, we effectively lose 1 tick of Rupture which is 2,100 damage.
  
• We also delay Ravage by more than one cycle, but assuming its just one cycle this is a 5,900 damage loss. I have assumed we'd use Assault & Vicious Slash in its place.
  

 

Thus, we are trading 8,000 damage now for the ability to buff our future Ravage's by 5% for 345 more damage. It takes 24 Ravage uses for this trade off to make sense, which implies a >7m battle of 100% uptime.

 

Conclusion: The benefit of Devious Wounds is not great enough to delay our core abilities.

[Lodinn]

For one I really enjoy having two different sets of CDs to manage. Most things are on a 9s cycle, but two important abilities - DS/OS and Force Rend | Melt - follow 12s cycles. And, when you mesh these together I find it all a lot of fun. It leads to a 36s rotation. On top of this, we now have the opportunity to alternate between Assault | Strike and Vicious Slash | Slash depending on available resource; this trade off yields 60%+ more damage in that GCD.

What displeases me with that fillers thingy is that 3.* (but pre-3.2.1) rotation had 36s cycles with... Let me think. 4 fillers in the whole cycle? 4.0 rotation makes more breathing space for Vicious Slash | Slash decision making, which should (in my opinion) lead to replacing some of the fillers with more spec- or class-specific skill. I mean... Look at Cycle 1 in your guide. There are 3 fillers in a row with DS application on one of them. I know, it'll sound like "I CANT PLAY THE CLASS!!1" now, but I'll say it. I've used to had Massacre on 1 as a spammable ability and Slash and Vicious Slash on Z and Alt+Z respectively, as I barely use them. I feel on my fingertips how things are different now :D:D

 

Well probably it's just me and KBN are the crybabies of this patch I'm not very happy with sin changes but not very unhappy either... Mara changes kill me, however. Gotta get over it. Eventually.

Your work is helping Oof. Thanks for this

[Bugattiboy]

More importantly, his analysis shows that Anni | Watchman is the strongest DPS spec out there (ignoring Engineering | Saboteur).

Why are we ignoring Saboteur? And you said that Watchman is no reminiscent of 2.x, how close would say the resemblance is?

Edited October 28, 2015 by Bugattiboy

[oofalong]

Why are we ignoring Saboteur? And you said that Watchman is no reminiscent of 2.x, how close would say the resemblance is?

 

Mainly so I can say we are the top parsing DPS But seriously, as I understand it Saboteur struggles in raid environments due to movement.

 

4.0 Watchman feels like a less frenetic version of 2.X because now everything is on a 6 GCD cycle instead of 4. I find the constantly moving Force Melt (& Overload Saber to a lesser degree) engaging. Plus we now have to make quick decisions about Strike vs. Slash like 2.X.

[WiththeForc]

Interesting, I'd have to totally change what I'd been doing for 216 :-)

 

In the thread Oofalong mentioned I only saw an example for gearing no finalized stats yet. And I thought it was for 220. Did Bant post something else I missed?

 

And I'm impressed you're doing those calculations as well, the method seems pretty complicated. How do you do it?

 

I've also tried to shift stuff in the rotation to make better use of Devious wounds. For that I analyzed how Rend and Rupture tick. I found out the only chance to have two ticks of Rupture under the buff you'd need to place it right before Annihilate. Which is only possible if you delay both Rend, Rupture Annihilate by one GCD every 4 blocks. I'm seeing a DPS loss doing that. (On a side note you also lose 1 tick of Rend under Devious Wounds that way compared to Oofalongs rotation). If you're interested I can post the exact tick times for both.

 

I'm very impressed by what you're doing on actual boss fights (I've always been :-) ) . I don't suppose you'd share some secrets how you adapt your rotation situationally or filler placement?

 

Either way it's a lot of fun playing and maximizing WM/Anni again. Very thankful about that. I really had a hardtime doing Cora and Revan HM on the old rotational chaos we had...

 

Like oof said, I actually messaged him as well as one of my buds on what their thoughts on what would make a BiS 224 Mara. I had a pretty good idea of how to gear and narrowed it down to two options (one of which is that .07 higher dps build) Oof told me how to use his model and I figured it out.

 

As for actual boss fights, thank ya bud. It's nice when others pay attention to the hard work I'm puttin in . I would definitely agree that oofs opener and rotation ii ideal as it allows the rotation to just flow. Ultimately though, ya have to keep in mind that in the majority of raid encounters, this ideal rotation will not be obtainable due to down time and mechanics. So in actual fights I consider the rotation as more of a priority system (this I believe is supposed to be mentioned in the dulfy guide for anni my friend is writing). To parse well on fights, it's pretty much all about uptime, and using mechanics to your advantage to maximize uptime. Even little tweaks can improve results. For instance, take tfb dread guards. During original nim tfb pre pre nerf where we needed to squeeze out as much damage as humanely possible, I noticed that 9 times out of 10 ciphas jumps on the right side of heirad to shield him. Therefore I always angle myself to be knocked back onto ciphas rather than using a gcd to leap to him.

 

Finding little tweaks to improve dps on all the fights is why I love dps, and why I love Mara in general. We now have two very good specs to run again in ops to provide top-tier dps, and I'm loving it.

Edited October 28, 2015 by WiththeForc

[WiththeForc]

Overall I've really liked how they've handled Maras in 4.0 (wish we had new content to test it out on though), and I'm hoping to see the class come back alive with new and retired Mara's alike (Yolo, play Mara again plox) Edited October 28, 2015 by WiththeForc

[LedZeppelinFan]

I'm confused as to how we can use Ravage/Blade Dance twice in a row. Is it a set bonus? Because as I've been leveling I haven't been able to pull that off. Help a lowbie out?

[WiththeForc]

I'm confused as to how we can use Ravage/Blade Dance twice in a row. Is it a set bonus? Because as I've been leveling I haven't been able to pull that off. Help a lowbie out?

 

He's just referring to the gcd window in the rotation. It's just one ravage being shown over 2 gcds, ie ravage 1 = 1st gcd, ravage 2 = 2nd gcd

[LedZeppelinFan]

He's just referring to the gcd window in the rotation. It's just one ravage being shown over 2 gcds, ie ravage 1 = 1st gcd, ravage 2 = 2nd gcd

 

Thank you kindly. I was very confused.

[TACeMossie]

Mainly so I can say we are the top parsing DPS But seriously, as I understand it Saboteur struggles in raid environments due to movement.

 

By that argument AP is the best spec in the game, because of stupid high mobility + Burst, excellent sustained, and being buffed by getting AoEd

[WiththeForc]

By that argument AP is the best spec in the game, because of stupid high mobility + Burst, excellent sustained, and being buffed by getting AoEd

 

Shhhhhhhh, let's not bring logic into this

[oofalong]

By that argument AP is the best spec in the game, because of stupid high mobility + Burst, excellent sustained, and being buffed by getting AoEd

 

You can't even let me have a week of thinking Anni is the best thing ever? You're no fun, Kwerty.

[FlyinSpaghetti]

Like oof said, I actually messaged him as well as one of my buds on what their thoughts on what would make a BiS 224 Mara. I had a pretty good idea of how to gear and narrowed it down to two options (one of which is that .07 higher dps build) Oof told me how to use his model and I figured it out.

 

As for actual boss fights, thank ya bud. It's nice when others pay attention to the hard work I'm puttin in . I would definitely agree that oofs opener and rotation ii ideal as it allows the rotation to just flow. Ultimately though, ya have to keep in mind that in the majority of raid encounters, this ideal rotation will not be obtainable due to down time and mechanics. So in actual fights I consider the rotation as more of a priority system (this I believe is supposed to be mentioned in the dulfy guide for anni my friend is writing). To parse well on fights, it's pretty much all about uptime, and using mechanics to your advantage to maximize uptime. Even little tweaks can improve results. For instance, take tfb dread guards. During original nim tfb pre pre nerf where we needed to squeeze out as much damage as humanely possible, I noticed that 9 times out of 10 ciphas jumps on the right side of heirad to shield him. Therefore I always angle myself to be knocked back onto ciphas rather than using a gcd to leap to him.

 

Finding little tweaks to improve dps on all the fights is why I love dps, and why I love Mara in general. We now have two very good specs to run again in ops to provide top-tier dps, and I'm loving it.

 

Yeah I agree with this, this rotation is awesome on a tank and spank target but some boss mechanics can throw you off it. However messing up the rotation is not as penalizing as in 3.0 as that was a bit too tight and long winded for a melee spec IMO.

 

The only changes I don't like though are first the no sub 10m force leap which forces us to take the ardor utility for 30 sec transcendence, and the lack of procs on the new accelerating victory proc which make building AV kind of pointless. I feel giving us a 100% proc on merciless slash would make a lot more sense, also if we are destined to use force leap from a 10 meter+ range then give us a lower cooldown on blade blitz to increase our maneuverability as it's cooldown at the moment is far too long to even remember it's there.

[WiththeForc]

Yeah I agree with this, this rotation is awesome on a tank and spank target but some boss mechanics can throw you off it. However messing up the rotation is not as penalizing as in 3.0 as that was a bit too tight and long winded for a melee spec IMO.

 

The only changes I don't like though are first the no sub 10m force leap which forces us to take the ardor utility for 30 sec transcendence, and the lack of procs on the new accelerating victory proc which make building AV kind of pointless. I feel giving us a 100% proc on merciless slash would make a lot more sense, also if we are destined to use force leap from a 10 meter+ range then give us a lower cooldown on blade blitz to increase our maneuverability as it's cooldown at the moment is far too long to even remember it's there.

 

I've discussed this with some guys in Provectus, and we're fairly sure that 4.0 changes were meant to kind of nerf classes on HM Revan (though you can still cheese each pull in via a well angled mad dash every other pull and a well timed camo on the pulls in between). Only thing is that HM Revan as far as I know has been nerfed pretty heavily to make nim more progression worthy.

[EthanA]

"I have highlighted the talents that will generally be the most worthwhile for PvE . . ."

 

*looks at Utility Talents chart*

What?

*squints eyes*

Really?

*moves closer to screen*

Are you sure?

*smears face into screen*

Oh! There it is.

[Ardarell_Solo]

Good to finally see a Sent/Mara thread that's not 90% whining

 

Alert: Nevertheless some whining incoming.

 

 

...I still do miss that elegant "Merciless *hopeful* - Cauterize - 3 - 4" - playstyle. Just a little bit.

 

 

On a more serious note: I do think in priorities in raid encounters. It's obviously very important (even for specs with "fixed" rotations) to know what your priorities are. That's why I calculate dps/activation for all DPS specs I play in each tier of content so I can be sure what to prioritize, whenever things get steamy. So I'm probably having an uptime problem here. (I'm also still using my old 198 set bonus, since I haven't gotten hold of enough tokens to completely exchange them since those stupid 4.0. armorings won't stack with the old set bonus, even though they're doing the ecact same thing )

Edited October 29, 2015 by Ardarell_Solo

[oofalong]

Could we get a sideways picture of the Rotation? I can't exactly fit a vertical Opener and Rotation all on my second monitor to follow for parsing and training... Something like the Dulfy pictures would work well.

 

Check this out.

[Tearsscream]

Check this out.

 

Thank you for posting all of this so quickly and for this side view especially since I am not the best on my sentinel and I'm wanting to improve. It will be most useful

 

 

Thanks again for all the hard work!

[oofalong]

Thank you for posting all of this so quickly and for this side view especially since I am not the best on my sentinel and I'm wanting to improve. It will be most useful

 

 

Thanks again for all the hard work!

 

Thanks, I will post a sentinel version of it this weekend sometime.

[Darththirdeye]

Check this out.

 

This is prefect!! Thank you so much.

[Bonzenaattori]

currently my personal best on dummy is 6.4k dps with 50.0 apm

i still need relics and offhand 216... but it is what it is...

 

I'm personally conflicted with your rotation, but its decent i suppose... hardly worth arguing because being at 4 stack merciless will eventually catch up with you and force you into the right motion...

 

im sick of watchman now... changes too often for things that have laughable value, its just annoying

im not one of those people that cry about "missing 2.10" bandwagon or whatever, but for christ sake leave the thing alone!

I'm pretty sure I've said this somewhere... it's almost like i pictured this very moment somewhere in the past... sigh

[Ardarell_Solo]

I can agree that our spec has changed a little too often, but then again that's because it never really worked after 3.0. So I rather have them fixed it than left broken. Either way I can say for sure that sticking to this spec ever since they started fiddling with it has been a pain! Cora and Revan HM was no fun compared to doing Dread Masters and Brontes NiM in 2.X. Then it was just easier to focus on mechanics of the fights instead of managing conflicting cooldowns and Dot durations like we had to in 3.X..

 

Now with 4.0. we're starting over completely - again. And we're still paying way more attention to our rotation than we did in 2.X.

 

However, I'd be ok with that if the reasoning was that the old rotation was just to easy and trivial (which it wasn't, because micromanaging the rotation could make a huge difference, but that was more quick reactions to procs and resource than managing cooldowns which it is now). But they've basically given "our" Watchman rotation to Tactics Vanguards who do equal (if not more) DPS while also being able to stay midrange. No wonder people like Nerevar went where that beautiful rotation has gone... ;-)

Edited October 30, 2015 by Ardarell_Solo

[WiththeForc]

I can agree that our spec has changed a little too often, but then again that's because it never really worked after 3.0. So I rather have them fixed it than left broken. Either way I can say for sure that sticking to this spec ever since they started fiddling with it has been a pain! Cora and Revan HM was no fun compared to doing Dread Masters and Brontes NiM in 2.X. Then it was just easier to focus on mechanics of the fights instead of managing conflicting cooldowns and Dot durations like we had to in 3.X..

 

Now with 4.0. we're starting over completely - again. And we're still paying way more attention to our rotation than we did in 2.X.

 

However, I'd be ok with that if the reasoning was that the old rotation was just to easy and trivial (which it wasn't, because micromanaging the rotation could make a huge difference, but that was more quick reactions to procs and resource than managing cooldowns which it is now). But they've basically given "our" Watchman rotation to Tactics Vanguards who do equal (if not more) DPS while also being able to stay midrange. No wonder people like Nerevar went where that beautiful rotation has gone... ;-)

 

Eh, personally I really enjoy that the spec changes so much. Keeps giving me new ways to play it. Cora I agree with, but Revan I had sooooooooooooooooo much fun with. I always tried to challenge myself on both core and overall dps on that fight. I tried to break 4.5k core dps before 4.0 dropped, but sadly only managed a 4462

[Lodinn]

Spec changes that often are really annoying. I spend like 80% of game time tanking, and I have at least 5 toons I bring to near-progression content. They changed Anni a lot, now what? I'm out of serious raiding on it for a couple of weeks unless i find time to re-learn. Still, until it's fit into raiding, I'd do in Carnage better. Patches be like, "Reroll already". Unlike some of you, I can't always just bring mara into raid as it's (at least was) my best and fairly decent dps class. I had to kill Revan on a sniper having over 500 dps more on mara overall the fight but we were dying twice as often to invisible blades when we didn't have that extra knockback.

Sorry for whining again.

 

@ Ardarell - Nerevar is strong. I play mara worse than him, but not THAT drastically worse. The only fight where i felt really welcome on my mara was Colossal. I've seen a lot of bad maras over the course of farming mainhands.

And then there's lurker, where progression was impossible with the dps we had and without a mara. However, I ended up with healers whining in all pugs I was in later we have too many mdps which are not PTs. Damn you, Kwerty.

Seriously, people were like "ok ok you can solo the add and you have less dtps than almost the whole raid but why can't you bring a PT? We don't need predation that much anyway. Or bring ranged, at least. In the worst case, operative". With Lurker being the most "parsing" boss for the majority of 3.0 and PTs being way superior to any other dps class, people simply refused to agree mara is a good class and kept asking me to bring other class.

 

It totally feels like until maras will parse ~200 dps more than any other class they'll keep getting refused here. Anti-mara mentality is really strong in the TRE raiding community, and I have no idea about other servers. When you squeeze as much as you can from raid utility, it's not appreciated as people could do essentially the same without it, and PTs were still outparsing maras, can't really fight them on that ground.

"I don't really want to bring more than 1 melee to that fight, and if I have to, let it be PT. So it's him logging melee and playing PT, and you are staying out and bringing some ranged". I've heard that way too much from many raidleads, and spending two weeks relearning the class just to have to fight over your right to ever bring it to raid doesn't sound very healthy to me.

 

It's oppressive, really. Sorry again for getting started on all this, but... I honestly think giving people some more confidence with a spec could actually improve the way other raiders perceive it. There's barely 10% of high-end raiders who can actually work with mara in their team. A habit of changing main raiding spec of a certain class sometimes leaving people clueless about how to behave in raids is not really helping in building confidence.

 

The irony is you will still have to micro-manage rotation a lot, so it's only quote-and-quote fixed. If to think of changes strictly positively, i.e. considering we got a better rotation and better movement, does it really help, say, some random pug raid with mara more efficiently than before? Not really, you'll still think about nearly the same amount of things, PT will still outparse you in raiding environment, which comes from (not the least) reason of them having basically the same rotation for much longer periods of time and people having much vaster experience with the class. Thing is, they buffed deception, even if it can potentially outperform EVERY single other class in PvE, it'll take a lot of time for the community to realize it and put to use just because spec was so unpopular before. Same for maras except they keep changing it.

 

Normal way of balancing classes: spec 1 shows 13% worse performance in average than spec 2 in average for most important raiding encounters, let's just increase numbers by ~10% and see if people would roll it more.

BW's way of balancing classes: Well, people must be really hating something about that class/spec, let's completely rework it. Oh, and people debate skill %skillname% a lot on our forums, it requires our special attendance.

GG.

[TACeMossie]

Damn you, Kwerty.

 

I DIDNT MEAN IT D:

 

In all seriousness though, people hating on sents is dumb. Hell, i'm pretty sure that a sentinel is the second best MDPS for underlurker because of Rebuke - which should be up for every add wave, for the entire add wave. PTs don't get 100% uptime on Electro shield, and with enough DPS (see: any group I was in) the adds die too quickly for it to be up more than every other add wave. Whats more is until 4.0 dropped, VGs didn't have storm to bypass that damn slow during the adds in HM, whereas a sent not only had access to predation to give the whole team an easier time getting to the rocks, but could also jump straight to an add every wave.

 

Plus inspiration is awesome. In a raid doing ~30k dps for a burst window (not hard at all), popping inspiration is worth an extra 30k damage - or 100dps in the long run. The watchman changes should also be good for uptime in a raid, because for one you don't have to pray to RNGsus to have enough resources to even do the rotation, and you don't have to clip Blade Dance (RIP Master Strike).

 

Plus it was discovered that Bant was accidentally providing way too little armor for his calculations. He's running off the assumption of 35% DR without sundered (which equates to ~30% DR with sundered), when in reality its closer to 40% without/35% with. Napkin maths on Tactics vs Watchman nerfs Watchman to 6907 dps, but nerfs Tactics to 6774 dps - putting it ~125 dps lower than watchman (and yes, I did account for the reduced armor vs Rail Shot).

 

Watchman has the lead it needs. The issue is the perception problem of Pug groups, who all suck, still sore over the incident of 3.0 on the watchman rotation. Sentinels in Watchman spec are actually providing a ~225dps lead over Tactics, and have better AoE.

 

Now this isn't me being a sore loser about this - hell, if Im a sore loser over anything this raid tier its that we moved imp side and I lost my sweet Trooper Kel Dragon gear - but Personally i'd love it if our other PT went to his Marauder instead. He even planned on it, but like you, he's got the issue of needing to put time in to learn the new rotation. And I dont blame him.

 

TL;DR Watchman/Annihilation is definitely worth putting the time in to learn it, because you'll be better than everyone else.

Edited October 31, 2015 by TACeMossie