beating heart of mountain usage

[HappyLuckBox]

say we have a hypothetical blackhand fight which lasts exactly 7 minutes for your guild.
phase 3 always starts at the 5minute marker.

we have two options for bhom usage.
option 1 we use bhom at:
0:00
2:00
4:00
6:00
for a total of 4x uses

option 2 we use bhom at:
0:00
2:00
delay bhom 3 until 5:00 in order to stack with lust.
for a total of 3 uses.


which is better?

obv if its a 7:20+ fight, we'd be better off with option 2, because we get a fourth use at 7:00, but if the fight ends before we can get a fourth use, are we better off saving the last usage on lust?

[Deleted]

3>2
/10 chars

[Deleted]

There's a few considerations.

Bloodlust in general isn't that big of a deal for survival hunters. It buffs our autoshot rate, focus regen rate and reduces focusing shot/cobra shot cast time. It doesn't affect the damage or tick rate of your serpent sting, black arrow, explosive shot or crows, which is the majority of your damage output. We also have no inherent cooldowns to pop together with it to benefit from buff stacking.

If I toggle off bloodlust completely in a standard 7.5 minute (20% vary length) sim, I lose 400 dps out of ~40k, which is 1%.
On the other hand, if I do the same for my warlock friend he loses 1400 (out of 43k) and mage 1500 (out of 45k)

So if all you care about is the damage meter at the end of a fight and nothing else, you will get more overall damage by using the trinket 4 times in your scenario. This is probably the answer you want, and the strategy you will want to employ for the majority of fights, most of the time. More usages = more damage. Losing 1 use of a major CD or trinket is generally always a loss, no matter what you stack the others with (there are exceptions of course)

With that said, if you are desperately lacking Phase3 DPS, and can get through phase 2 smoothly, then your best strategy may be to simply hold onto that third use and stack it with potion and lust. Killing the boss is always more important than how good you look at the meter in the end. If there is no kill, there is no glory regardless of how well you personally did on skada. This is a call you have to make. If that boss simply sits at 1-2% HP when you wipe, everyone in the raid need to figure out how they can optimize their damage for that phase, and holding onto cooldowns to achieve that is one of the strategies you can use.

On Kromog mythic for example, we achieved our first killl by having the majority of the raid NOT use cooldowns on pull. Because 1m30s into the fight, 3 huge pillars will spawn that has a very tight DPS check to kill them in time. It is one of the hardest parts of this encounter, and having all DPS cooldowns ready to burst these down was essential in making our kill. Of course holding onto cds for that long generally will tank your overall damage, but is more benefical to the raid strategy.

So it's a judgement call. Sometimes the bottom line matters less than smart planning, and its up to you and your raid to figure out how best to beat the boss.