Anticipation Bug

[Elbrondane]

I am wondering if anyone else has noticed that Anticipation is sometimes not giving the correct charges or any charges. I have been noticing it over the past few weeks, but I thought it was just me. I was just sitting at the training dummy testing out Assassination (I have been playing Subtlety and Combat and noticed it in both those specs, also) and I had 5 CP with a proc Dispatch. I hit Dispatch and it is a normal hit, but I do not gain the Anticipation charge. Not a dodge/parry, a hit. Also, I noticed that Mutilate is sometimes only giving 1 charge even though it is guaranteed a minimum of two. This is only happening when I am at 5 CP. Has anyone else noticed this?

[Deleted]

Sounds like a strange case. Are you using a custom UI or an addon to track your anticipation? Simple, but could be that?

[Elbrondane]

I use WeakAuras to track everything, but I tested it without it to make sure and it is still doing it.

[Hntr]

Never experienced something like that.

[uctar]

the only thing i have been seening lately is that anticipation and ruthlessness sometimes bugg so you wont get the extra ruthlessness cp.
Mainly this happens When you are at 10 cp (5+5a stacks) and finish twice i only get 1 cp instead of 2.

[Enhshamanlol]

the only thing i have been seening lately is that anticipation and ruthlessness sometimes bugg so you wont get the extra ruthlessness cp.
Mainly this happens When you are at 10 cp (5+5a stacks) and finish twice i only get 1 cp instead of 2.

Yep. Need a fix? Play with marked for death. its a small dps gain.

[Senftw]

the only thing i have been seening lately is that anticipation and ruthlessness sometimes bugg so you wont get the extra ruthlessness cp.
Mainly this happens When you are at 10 cp (5+5a stacks) and finish twice i only get 1 cp instead of 2.

I've never had ruthlessnes add stacks to antic at all

[Ryme]

Yep. Need a fix? Play with marked for death. its a small dps gain.

When played perfectly, with mistakes in your cycle (quite easy during AR + lust for example), anticipation pulls ahead.

[Rixis]

I've experienced it, where you consume combo points but not anticipation charges when using abilities, so you have 0 combo points on the targets and 2 stacks of anticipation, slightly annoying, but not that big a deal.

As a none pushing the boundaries rogue, I much prefer to play Assassination, as does the OP, and Anticipation is better for that spec because of Seal Fate and Muti giving 2 (or 3) combo points, so we can often "lose" combo points, and thus have to either use finishers earlier, or suffer combo point loss.

[Avengerx]

Ruthlessness ain't bugged. It just works badly with anticipation. You have to use it with only 4 charges (that is 9 cp) otherwise you will loose the ruthlessness one.

[Deleted]

I've experienced it, where you consume combo points but not anticipation charges when using abilities, so you have 0 combo points on the targets and 2 stacks of anticipation, slightly annoying, but not that big a deal.

Well, what finishers? Sounds normal. Buffs (e.g. SnD & Recup) require CP and do not apply from anticipation charges.

Playing sub or combat with a little more care makes it entirely avoidable, however. And this shouldn't really be an issue as Mut

[fierydemise]

Yep. Need a fix? Play with marked for death. its a small dps gain.

Not necessarily. During 5.2/5.3 MfD was competitive for combat however the addition of Ruthlessness weakens MfD somewhat. I was talking to Shadowboy last night after he had just run some simulations to look at that.

[Carp The Fish]

Not necessarily. During 5.2/5.3 MfD was competitive for combat however the addition of Ruthlessness weakens MfD somewhat. I was talking to Shadowboy last night after he had just run some simulations to look at that.

Public link to those sims? This sounds like some useful information for those that are still progressing on the heroic content.

In my mind, MfD is the way to go because you will NEVER waste the CPs from Ruthlessness; when you're using Anticipation, there's a bug (?) where the Ruthlessness CP won't convert to a stack of Anticipation.
Mind you, this problem can be controlled somewhat, but only if your RNG gives you 4 Anticipation instead of 5 for every finisher.

....actually, now that I think about it, is it more optimal for Combat to hit a finisher at 2-4 stacks of Anticipation instead of 5?

[shadowboy]

Public link to those sims? This sounds like some useful information for those that are still progressing on the heroic content.

In my mind, MfD is the way to go because you will NEVER waste the CPs from Ruthlessness; when you're using Anticipation, there's a bug (?) where the Ruthlessness CP won't convert to a stack of Anticipation.
Mind you, this problem can be controlled somewhat, but only if your RNG gives you 4 Anticipation instead of 5 for every finisher.

....actually, now that I think about it, is it more optimal for Combat to hit a finisher at 2-4 stacks of Anticipation instead of 5?

To my knowledge, that's not a bug. Ruthlessness will never add an anticipation charge for this simple reason: Ruthlessness takes precedence.

The ruthlessness combo point is applied BEFORE anticipation, which means if you have 5cp + 5ap and you finish, then what happens is you consume the 5 combo points, ruthlessness generates a combo point, then anticipation fills in the rest. Anticipation consumes all anticipation points, regardless of how many combo points you have.

The long and short of it is this: Ruthlessness munches anticipation charges so don't build 5 anticipation charges. Run a 3+ anticipation cycle instead of 4+ (2+ during SB instead of 3+).

In regards to anticipation vs MfD, here is my interpretation of what was/is going on.
In 5.2/5.4, MfD was actually generating more combo points than anticipation was preventing you from wasting. MfD generates 5 combo points per minute, but in ToT gear, I had determined from back of the envelope calculations that anticipation was only preventing you from wasting ~2-3 combo points per minute, so MfD was about 2-3 combo points per minute ahead of anticipation. It really came down to MfD's contribution to restless blades (more frequent cooldowns) vs anticipations contribution to BG (higher finisher damage, anticipation basically increased the damage of 1 finisher per BG cycle by 30%).

The primary difference between the two talents is that anticipation scales with gear, MfD does not. The additional combo points from MfD is fixed at 5 per minute, but the combo points you waste from gear scaling goes up with haste. As you gain more haste, the net gain of MfD decreases because anticipation is now preventing more combo points from being wasted. Let's say in SoO you have enough haste that anticipation all of a sudden saves you from wasting 3-4 instead of 2-3 combo points per minute. Now the net gain of MfD has dropped from 2-3 to 1-2 cp per min. Ruthlessness munches one of those so MfD drops to 0-1 extra combo points per minute, which in light of restless blades begins to fall behind from the extra 30% finisher damage of 1 finisher per BG cycle (which there are about 1.4-1.5 BG cycles per minute).

Basically the reason why anticipation is ahead now is due to a combination of gear scaling and ruthlessness.

[fierydemise]

Public link to those sims? This sounds like some useful information for those that are still progressing on the heroic content.

In my mind, MfD is the way to go because you will NEVER waste the CPs from Ruthlessness; when you're using Anticipation, there's a bug (?) where the Ruthlessness CP won't convert to a stack of Anticipation.
Mind you, this problem can be controlled somewhat, but only if your RNG gives you 4 Anticipation instead of 5 for every finisher.

....actually, now that I think about it, is it more optimal for Combat to hit a finisher at 2-4 stacks of Anticipation instead of 5?

Shadowboy just mentioned them to me last night, I haven't actually seen them. I haven't played combat at all this tier but I'm somewhat confused about how MfD prevents wasted CPs, if you finish at 5 pts don't you always get a new cp from Ruthlessness so MfD is only actually generating 4 cps?

Just ran a quick set of simulations myself and I see that if you use the default MfD action list (use MfD at 0 cps) it does tend to fall behind anticipation because you don't use MfD very often (MfD interval just under 2 minutes) whereas if you modify the action list to allow MfD to be used with 1 cp then you'll MfD comes out basically identical to anticipation, difference on the order of 200 dps using my current gear. Hopefully Shadowboy can provide his methodology and results.

[Moritsume]

I use MfD as Combat on Galakras, and I find it works very well there but that's about it. I feel like I'd be wasting too many cp's on any other fight (keeping in mind I'm using 4pc t15 since I haven't gotten 4pc t16 yet so my AR+SB is still super spammy).

[shadowboy]

Shadowboy just mentioned them to me last night, I haven't actually seen them. I haven't played combat at all this tier but I'm somewhat confused about how MfD prevents wasted CPs, if you finish at 5 pts don't you always get a new cp from Ruthlessness so MfD is only actually generating 4 cps?

Just ran a quick set of simulations myself and I see that if you use the default MfD action list (use MfD at 0 cps) it does tend to fall behind anticipation because you don't use MfD very often (MfD interval just under 2 minutes) whereas if you modify the action list to allow MfD to be used with 1 cp then you'll MfD comes out basically identical to anticipation, difference on the order of 200 dps using my current gear. Hopefully Shadowboy can provide his methodology and results.

Good catch. I actually didn't change the default action list, forgetting that it was for 5.2/5.3. I just looked at the dps sum and didn't look further (into frequency of use). It was quick and dirty out of curiosity.

If I had to revise the lengthy interpretation I mentioned above in light of this as to why they are even again I'd say this: While MfD is generating fewer effective combo points per minute, the increased cost of SS is reducing the number of extra damage finishers (from anticipation) due to the slower BG ramp. Probably SoO haste levels with 50e SS more or less mimics ToT haste levels with 40e SS.

Note: reasoning on why I say that anticipation basically increases the damage of 1 finisher per BG cycle by 30%. Without anticipation you'd shift the last finisher of each insight into the next insight level. So while that last no-insight moves up to shallow, that last shallow moves up to moderate, and last moderate moves up to deep. The finishers you perform in shallow and moderate insight is the same as without anticipation, so you effectively shifted that last no-insight finisher into the first deep-insight finisher, hence why it effectively increases the damage of 1 finisher per BG cycle by 30%, specifically 1 no-insight finisher by 30%.

[Warstar]

I've experienced it, where you consume combo points but not anticipation charges when using abilities, so you have 0 combo points on the targets and 2 stacks of anticipation, slightly annoying, but not that big a deal.

As a none pushing the boundaries rogue, I much prefer to play Assassination, as does the OP, and Anticipation is better for that spec because of Seal Fate and Muti giving 2 (or 3) combo points, so we can often "lose" combo points, and thus have to either use finishers earlier, or suffer combo point loss.

I've been having this happen to me a lot ever since ToT. I don't know if it's a lag issue where the anticipation buff doesn't work fast enough but ya I've had it where you spend your cp and the anticipation charges just sit up there and don't transition down. Was a frequent but not noticeable bug with assassination where I eventually got to use those anticipation charges with no biggie. But, with combat it seems to cause some cp/ruthlessness charges to disappear.

Really as combat during adrenaline rush especially during adrenaline rush and heroism I feel like anticipation get's bugged as hell. I don't know if it's a lag issue or just a coding issue or what but I've never experienced anything like this with monks or paladins. I wonder if anticipation was an actual just "you can have 10 combo points" instead of the stupid buff if it would solve these issues. Paladins just get the 5 holy power at a certain level and monks can spec into ascension which adds an extra combo point to their bar and with the points being directly tied to their resource system rather than a buff they don't seem to have any of these problems at all. It seems like bouncing back and forth between the combo bar and the buff with ruthlessness being added in there it's just causing all sorts of bugs.

[Kael]

I don't know if it's a lag issue where the anticipation buff doesn't work fast enough but ya I've had it where you spend your cp and the anticipation charges just sit up there and don't transition down. Was a frequent but not noticeable bug with assassination where I eventually got to use those anticipation charges with no biggie. But, with combat it seems to cause some cp/ruthlessness charges to disappear.

Really as combat during adrenaline rush especially during adrenaline rush and heroism I feel like anticipation get's bugged as hell. I don't know if it's a lag issue or just a coding issue or what but I've never experienced anything like this with monks or paladins.

Can you get a log of these issues? We should be able to see the problem (or lack thereof) through the expression editor in WoLogs... as it is, you could be misreading it, misusing it, or it could be a UI bug rather than a mechanical bug (please don't read any offense - I just can't replicate your problem).

Ruthlessness is addressed above - all anticipation points are consumed after ruthlessness procs - avoid having more anticipation than open CP slots, and you should be fine.

[Warstar]

Can you get a log of these issues? We should be able to see the problem (or lack thereof) through the expression editor in WoLogs... as it is, you could be misreading it, misusing it, or it could be a UI bug rather than a mechanical bug (please don't read any offense - I just can't replicate your problem).

Ruthlessness is addressed above - all anticipation points are consumed after ruthlessness procs - avoid having more anticipation than open CP slots, and you should be fine.

Not sure how to get a log but what has happened has been that after using a finisher typically evis/envenom I'll be left with 0/1 (ruthlessness) CP and then 1-2 anticipation charges.

Then I'm able to build up cp like normal and still use the anticipation charges/build on them.