Ashvane's Razor Coral usage

[thesimpsonsman]

When do i need to use my Ashvane's Razor Coral? I am using it on pull and then using it again once my 2 min CD's are up, is this right?

[Damasscus]

Personally (and assuming you do not have Cyclotronic, and why don't you?!) if you don't have any other on use trinkets. I think you should be using it on the pull to start stacking the coral, and when BW is up again using it again to have the crit buff active during the duration. As soon as it's up again make sure to activate asap to start stacking coral for either the next BW or any burn phases coming up.

[thesimpsonsman]

Personally (and assuming you do not have Cyclotronic, and why don't you?!) if you don't have any other on use trinkets. I think you should be using it on the pull to start stacking the coral, and when BW is up again using it again to have the crit buff active during the duration. As soon as it's up again make sure to activate asap to start stacking coral for either the next BW or any burn phases coming up.

I have the ashara trinket (420) and now the coral for my trinkets.

[Damasscus]

I have the ashara trinket (420) and now the coral for my trinkets.

Obviously Razor Coral isn't a burst trinket, so you'll still be wanting to use Font on pull for the burst.

[Agallion]

I picked up a nice one last night and am struggling a bit with adequately using both the cyclo and this and the heart trait appropriately. I found a WA for the coral but damn.

[Turtel]

With Font and Coral:
Since both Font and AotW share a 2 minute cooldown, you definitely want to be using Font first over the Coral so that you don't mess up its alignment with AotW (if you delay Font by 20 seconds then it won't align with AotW for the rest of the fight unless you also delay AotW as well, which is not ideal).

You can actually have all 3 buffs to be aligned for 10 seconds if you go:
0 seconds: Start Font buff (lasts 30 seconds), Coral is put on a 20 second cooldown
10 seconds: Start AotW buff (lasts 20 seconds), Font has 20 seconds left
20 seconds: Start Coral buff, Font has 10 seconds left, AotW has 10 seconds left
So in that last 10 seconds you have all three buffs up.

With Cyclotronic Blast and Coral:
I think you want to save Cyclotronic Blast until after AotW finishes. If you use Cyclotronic Blast just before using AotW then that will put Coral on a 20 second cooldown right when you are about to use AotW so you won't be able synch the 20s Coral buff with AotW, which is almost certainly a DPS loss.

However what's not clear is after the second AotW where you've gained the crit buff from Coral: do you reapply the coral buff so you can start stacking up the buff again? Or do you use cyclotronic blast first, then wait the 20 seconds before reapplying Coral? My inclination is that you should start stacking the coral buff before using Cyclotronic Blast again since all that does is push back Cyclotronic Blast by 20 seconds and then it will stay there for the rest of the fight (whereas you'll lose a little DPS by losing uptime on stacking Coral every time you delay Coral), although it probably depends on the length of the fight (i.e. if delaying Cyclotronic Blast by 20 seconds causes you to lose one use of it in the fight, then it probably isn't worth the tiny extra crit chance gained by reapplying Coral 20 seconds earlier).

So here's my guess at the ideal rotation:
0 seconds: Apply Coral, Cyclotronic Blast is put on 20 second cooldown
0 seconds: Start AotW buff (lasts 20 seconds)
20 seconds: Use Cyclotronic Blast
2 minutes: Start AotW buff (lasts 20 seconds)
2 minutes: Start Coral buff (lasts 20 seconds)
2 minutes 20 seconds: Reapply Coral, Cyclotronic Blast is put on 20 second cooldown
2 minutes 40 seconds: Use Cyclotronic Blast
4 minutes: Start AotW buff (lasts 20 seconds), Cyclotronic Blast still has 40 seconds of cooldown
4 minutes: Start Coral buff (lasts 20 seconds), Cyclotronic Blast still has 40 seconds of cooldown
4 minutes 20 seconds: Reapply Coral, Cyclotronic Blast still has 20 seconds of cooldown
4 minutes 40 seconds: Use Cyclotronic Blast

[Bluur]

Azortharion recently made a Twitch clip talking about the usage of the trinket.

[Kinegos]

Azortharion recently made a Twitch clip talking about the usage of the trinket.

link? can't find any video or clip that refers to the trinket

[Lighthorse]

https://youtu.be/r8Jm1Ccem0U

It’s in his YouTube channel

[Khallid]

Logically speaking, you would want to use it together with cooldowns. Overall that makes the most sense.

However, I've noticed that my sims use it every 20 seconds, which is basically spamming it on cooldown. I think reason for this is that when you activate the Coral for the first time you get 1 stack, but the rest of the stacks happen randomly. By activating the trinket on cooldown you will get an extra guaranteed stack every 40 seconds, compared to waiting for stacks to accumulate normally. So even if you don't line it up perfectly, you still get more stacks overall. I believe that's the reason why sims use it on cooldown. So I've just been doing that. Although my second tinket is not "on-use" so that may change things.

[Turtel]

Logically speaking, you would want to use it together with cooldowns. Overall that makes the most sense.

However, I've noticed that my sims use it every 20 seconds, which is basically spamming it on cooldown. I think reason for this is that when you activate the Coral for the first time you get 1 stack, but the rest of the stacks happen randomly. By activating the trinket on cooldown you will get an extra guaranteed stack every 40 seconds, compared to waiting for stacks to accumulate normally. So even if you don't line it up perfectly, you still get more stacks overall. I believe that's the reason why sims use it on cooldown. So I've just been doing that. Although my second tinket is not "on-use" so that may change things.

That's just the default behaviour of Simulationcraft (using trinkets as soon as they come off cooldown), it isn't necessarily the usage that offers the highest DPS. SimulationCraft doesn't actually have that functionality, it just sims DPS based on the instructions it's been given (the APL), it doesn't alter the APL, least of all altering it to find the optimum APL to maximise DPS. That's something that's done manually, effectively by trial and error (using some common sense and educated guessing of course).

However, I checked my sims for BM hunter and it's consuming the Coral stacks every 2 minutes rather than using the trinket on cooldown, which is what's generally been recommended since that's when the buff will align with Aspect of the Wild.

Regarding your explanation, I think it's flawed in a few ways:

1. Using Coral on cooldown actually results in less overall stacks being gained throughout the fight, despite that one guaranteed stack when you first apply the trinket after consuming the stacks. This is because you don't gain any stacks for the 20 second duration which you have the crit buff for (after consuming the stacks). According to the Wowhead page, the proc rate of Coral is 6 RPPM (an average of 1 proc every 10 seconds, modified by haste), which means that in those 20 seconds you are unable to gain stacks for, you would have lost at least 2 procs on average. So the 1 guaranteed stack for applying Coral again doesn't make up for the stacks lost.

2. Even if using Coral on cooldown did result in more stacks throughout the fight, it could still be an inferior strategy since you'd be consuming most of the stacks when you don't have any of your DPS cooldowns up. Each stack is probably worth close to twice as much if you use them when they'll align with all your DPS cooldowns, so you'd still want to hold them for your cooldowns even if it means you'd only get ~half as many stacks throughout the fight (although that isn't the case as I pointed out in #1, you actually get more stacks if you hold off on using Coral).

3. This is a bit more situational, but if your other trinket is an On Use trinket (which is likely given that the next two best trinkets in the game are likely Font and Cyclotronic Blast), then you'll never be able to use it if you're using Coral every 20 seconds, since using Coral puts your other trinket on a 20 second cooldown, meaning it will always be on cooldown.

[Mixxy]

I don't play a Hunter, but I've been giving a lot of thought to the Razor Coral recently.

I'm of the opinion that it's best used by applying it at the very start of a fight, and only pulling it out once, during your last burst window of a fight.

Every time you pull it, that results in 20 seconds where it's not dealing damage or generating crit stacks. So if you pull it four or five times throughout the course of an encounter, that's like two full minutes where it's doing nothing.

I'm looking at my own logs on Azshvane herself, for example. On that fight I pop it in at the start, and then leave it in all the way up until the final burn phase. (Then put it back in again after the crit buff wears off for just a bit more damage procs).
It was a 5-minute fight, my (heroic) Coral procced 35 times throughout. So that's averaging like, a proc every 8 seconds.
So every time I pull it out, that's two 10,000 damage procs I'm losing. And 224 crit worth of stacks. If I pulled it out every two minutes, then I've missed out on five of those 35 procs.



Now, to be fair, I main Havoc, so that's the expected way for me to use it in the first place. Apply it on pull, then yank it out during my second burst window (since Havoc's Meta is on such a long cooldown you only get to use it twice on most fights), but owing to the Coral's cooldown between stabs and pulls, it grants less total stacks the more frequently you use it, right?

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since using Coral puts your other trinket on a 20 second cooldown, meaning it will always be on cooldown.

Is that the case? I was literally just thinking "Hey the Coral would be fun to line up with a Cyclotronic Blast", but if it can't...

[Turtel]

I'm of the opinion that it's best used by applying it at the very start of a fight, and only pulling it out once, during your last burst window of a fight.

Yeah that sounds correct as far as I can see/understand. For BM hunters at least, Kill Command deals 50% more damage when the boss is below 35% health, so I'd imagine that that would make every stack gained throughout the fight all the more effective if they were saved for that final phase of the fight (during the execute phase) rather than spent earlier in the fight.

I'm sure this would have been considered by the Simcraft APL authors though, and if it resulted in the highest sims then it should have been implemented into the default APL, as far as I understand that process. For BM hunters this wasn't implemented, instead favoring consuming the stacks for each Aspect of the Wild (2 min cooldown).

One possible reason might be the issue of crit capping: once you reach 100% crit chance, any additional crit is wasted, since you can't crit more than 100% of the time. This is perhaps most relevant with BM hunters because crit is by far their best stat: they're stacking every possible source of crit they can find, and particularly a lot of procs that give crit. This is compounded by the fact that their major DPS cooldown Aspect of the Wild provides a +10% crit chance.

Here is a list of all the sources of crit that I have currently have (excluding Razor Coral):
- Blightbourne Infusion: 1414 crit for 14 seconds
- Unstable Flames: 850 crit rating for 5 seconds (when it reaches the max of 5 stacks)
- Crows Nest Scope: 650 crit for 12 seconds
- Gear + Food: 2232 crit rating

During the perfect storm where all three of these procs are up, that is a total crit rating of 5146 which is +71.47% crit chance. From what I can tell Hunters have a baseline 11% chance to crit, which becomes 21% with Aspect of the Wild active. This adds up to a total of 91.47% crit chance and then it only takes another 615 crit rating to reach 100% crit chance, which is a mere 6 stacks of Coral (which will be reached within the first minute of the fight if you're Lusting on pull). Of course, it's quite rare that all three of the crit procs will occur simultaneously and they won't last the whole 20 seconds, so you're likely to benefit from more stacks above 6 .

Is that the case? I was literally just thinking "Hey the Coral would be fun to line up with a Cyclotronic Blast", but if it can't...

Yep, you won't be able to use Cyclotronic Blast when you have the crit buff from Coral up.

[Azortharion]

Saving for execute is what the guide recommends. The APL was updated around last week.

https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/beast-...owns-abilities

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Logically speaking, you would want to use it together with cooldowns. Overall that makes the most sense.

However, I've noticed that my sims use it every 20 seconds, which is basically spamming it on cooldown. I think reason for this is that when you activate the Coral for the first time you get 1 stack, but the rest of the stacks happen randomly. By activating the trinket on cooldown you will get an extra guaranteed stack every 40 seconds, compared to waiting for stacks to accumulate normally. So even if you don't line it up perfectly, you still get more stacks overall. I believe that's the reason why sims use it on cooldown. So I've just been doing that. Although my second tinket is not "on-use" so that may change things.

You must be using an ANCIENT sim for it to be used on cooldown like you describe. Like a local SimCraft download from ages ago, Coral usage has been optimized ages ago.

[Mixxy]

Yep, you won't be able to use Cyclotronic Blast when you have the crit buff from Coral up.

Man that's sad. Would've been hilarious to line them up.

[Khallid]

You must be using an ANCIENT sim for it to be used on cooldown like you describe. Like a local SimCraft download from ages ago, Coral usage has been optimized ages ago.

I'm unsure of which version it was, I simply used raidbots. I looked into it when I got the coral, so about two or three weeks ago. Current sim looks correct now though. Thanks.