Opening a thread to discuss these.
This is the second time in 3 tiers that our 4 piece bonus has affected one of our weakest abilities.
I did some analysis on what Feral Spirit is doing for me currently by looking at a recent Blade Lord 25H kill.
The kill lasted approximately 8 minutes. In that time, I cast Feral Spirit 4 times, although the last one occurred only seconds before the end of the encounter and didn't run full duration, so I am considering 3 full duration casts in these numbers.
My wolves did 1,305,515 total damage, or approximately 435,171 per cast. I routinely crit for over 200,000 with Lava Lash every 10 seconds, so this is a small number.
Our 4 piece set bonus reduced the cooldown of Feral Spirit by 8 seconds each time Windfury procs. World of Logs records 99 Windfury hits (combined crit/hit). This means Windfury Weapon triggered 33 times, which knocks 240 seconds off of the cooldown.
This doesn't work out to exactly 2 extra casts for two reasons. First, the effective cooldown of Feral Spirit is 90 seconds, not 2 minutes, because it lasts 30 seconds and even if you could, it would be dumb to clip the ability. Second, because Windfury Weapon has a 3 second internal cooldown, the bonus's effective reduction is 11 seconds per trigger; this is because even if you triggered Windfury with every single mainhand swing, you'd still only trigger one at most every 3 seconds, so 3 seconds elapses between each trigger.
33 Windfury procs will result in more than (33*8)/120 extra casts of Feral Spirit.
If we assume an even distribution of Windfury procs over the course of a 500 second fight, we get one Windfury proc every 15 seconds, or 8 between every 2 minute period. After casting Spirits, 5 procs (75 seconds elapsed) later, the bonus will have reduced the cooldown by an additional 40 seconds which puts the CD at 5 seconds.
By that math it means that we can cast FS every 80 seconds instead of every 120. In my Blade Lord encounter, I'd be able to cast Feral Spirit 6 times instead of only 3. In reality, that would probably be only 5 since a lot of time is wasted during the P1 to P2 transition.
If we ignore that detail of the encounter and assume FS does pretty much the same damage per cast, then with the bonus, I would have done an additional 1.3m damage, which amounts to a approximately 2600 DPS.
I haven't done the math on the T14 4 piece, but I'd be shocked if 15% extra crit on all of my nature spells contributed less than 2600 extra DPS.
What do you guys think?