What are the relevant changes of patch 7.4's miniature rework?

Gnashing Fang no longer has charges, which increases flexibility of the rotation significantly due to the ability to shift the position of where it used, provided the charges are not completely full. This Gnashing Fang charge system can be used to optimize No Mercy by attempting to place both (or as much as possible of both) Gnashing Fang usages within No Mercy.

Bloodfest also no longer overcaps the powder gauge, allowing you to hold up to 6 cartridges within the powder gauge and granting an additional 3 cartridges to the powder gauge at level 100 upon each use.

Bloodfest’s cooldown was changed to 60 seconds as well, which results in the usage of Reign of Beasts within every No Mercy.

Should I ever use a different opener than the one listed?

Yes, absolutely. The reasoning behind general-purpose openers is to put yourself in the most flexible position so that you can adjust to the fight as needed without losing damage, and without leaving party buffs. They do not account for fight-specific characteristics such as multi-target scenarios, forced downtime, or special fight-specific damage buffs.

As some general advice:

• Look at when your group casts their raid buffs and try to match theirs.
• Open earlier than your group’s raid buffs if you’re losing cooldown usages due to downtime phases.
• Do not drift No Mercy over the fight (without planning it) to continue matching party buff timing.

What GCD should I play?

It is recommended to play on 2.50 due to little to no ping requirements, highest average DPS empirically in the majority of encounters, and ease of access with gearing.

You can choose to explore with skill speed at various ranges if you are looking to experiment, but there is little reason as of Patch 7.4 other than adding additional tolerance/lenience to optimizing the use of the filler Gnashing Fang charge within No Mercy, because faster GCD speeds will have time to carry an active Solid Barrel combo through the extra Gnashing Fang charge and burst phase without falling off.

How does cooldown reduction from SKS impact our job?

You will notice that when playing below 2.50 GCD, the cooldown of Double Down will begin decreasing by 0.1% of its base cooldown per SKS tier (separate from the GCD tier, there are four SKS tiers per GCD tier.)

This effect will cause it to come off cooldown before No Mercy, resulting in the cooldown falling outside of No Mercy unless held. The correct solution at almost every speed played is to hold Double Down back into No Mercy, and it does not become better to use off cooldown until reaching speeds close to 2.10.

What should I do if my GCD isn't exactly one of the listed speeds in the BIS list?

You can either meld SKS to reach one of them, or you can just leave it as-is and accept some innate drift to No Mercy. The degree of innate drift is machine dependent and will not exactly match these figures (reliant on ping and framerate), but in general:

• 2.45 - 2.47 play the same, and No Mercy drift going slower than 2.45 increases from 0 by ~0.27s per tier.
• 2.40 - 2.44 play the same, and No Mercy drift going slower than 2.40 increases from 0 by ~0.25s per tier.

The drift to No Mercy may pull you out of raid buffs over time, but speeds close to 2.40 or 2.45 are typically safe for use in the majority of encounters without risk of loss, and can even be more optimal than the base speed (e.g. 2.40) due to fight alignment.

How ping reliant is Gunbreaker? Does it require double weaving?

Gunbreaker normally double-weaves and occasionally needs specific usage timing of No Mercy to ensure that you get 9 GCDs within the buff period of No Mercy.

• Most GCD speeds do not have any real ping requirement, but 2.45 needs you to be below ~50ms because No Mercy will be a “perfect” late weave every other usage.
• Double weaving is generally expected to occur, but single-weaving is possible without damage loss (as long as the full burst window is completed).

How do I recover my rotation if I make mistakes?

The recovery depends on the nature of the mistake.

If uptime was lost, then prioritize in order:\

• Double Down.
• Reign of Beasts.
• Sonic Break.
• Gnashing Fang.

If Bloodfest has drifted, then the powder gauge must be managed to ensure that enough cartridges are held to use whichever cooldowns Bloodfest has drifted beyond within No Mercy.

Other mistakes are harder to evaluate directly, such as accidentally drifting Double Down out of No Mercy. The answer here would depend on the remaining time within the fight, because every usage of Double Down used outside of No Mercy would result in “0.20x” of one usage being wasted from not being buffed.

Holding the usage until the next No Mercy would completely waste one usage, but buff the remaining usages by 20% for the remainder of the fight, meaning it would require 5 usages within No Mercy until you would break even on the potency loss from wasting the entire usage.

In simple terms, without knowing whether or not the unheld usage outside of No Mercy will be lost at the end of the fight because of how far it has drifted, it is better to use Double Down off cooldown wherever it has drifted to unless the fight has longer than 5 minutes or longer remaining (4 minutes or longer if your party has several raid buffs), in which case it becomes better to hold back into No Mercy.

How do I optimize Gnashing Fang's filler charge?

The spare charge of Gnashing Fang that generates while No Mercy is on cooldown can be held and used just prior to No Mercy at level 100, which will buff a portion of its combo.

Ideally, Gnashing Fang should be used so that Wicked Talon is used just prior to No Mercy on 2.50 so that Eye Gouge is buffed by No Mercy, or within No Mercy on speeds that can fit 9 GCDs into No Mercy.

However, any portion of the Gnashing Fang combo being placed into No Mercy is a gain over Burst Strike. This means that Gnashing Fang or Savage Claw, or their Continuation counterparts Jugular Rip or Abdomen Tear are still better / more ideal to use over Burst Strike.

Doing this on 2.50 requires no active Solid Barrel combo, otherwise the combo will break at the end of the burst phase. In order to facilitate this, there is a heuristic that can be used during uptime:

1. Take the number of cartridges within the powder gauge once No Mercy ends.
2. Double that number to find the number of Burst Strikes to spend before the next No Mercy.

• If the number of cartridges was zero, then Burst Strike once.
• If a GCD other than the basic combo has bled into the filler phase outside of No Mercy, remove one Burst Strike per extra GCD.

These Burst Strike casts for 2.50 will ensure that your combo is not running when it is time to cast Gnashing Fang prior to No Mercy. If downtime occurs where you disengage from melee range, this technique will become harder to manage and you may end up having a combo active when it is time to ideally begin Gnashing Fang to buff an additional Eye Gouge, but this is not a problem.

If downtime occurs, simply begin Gnashing Fang as soon as the current combo within 7 seconds prior to No Mercy ends. Remember, ANY Continuation from Gnashing Fang is better than Burst Strike’s Hypervelocity.

Can you die while casting Superbolide?

Superbolide (along with other tank invulnerability actions) were updated to apply immediately upon the server receiving your request to use the action.

This means that the actual activation delay between pressing the button and becoming impervious is roughly half of your ping, because that’s the time it took to send that action request to the server. Some time is needed for the server to actually process that request and have it become active on its end, but there’s no way of knowing what that time is (you can assume it is negligible.)

With that in mind, it should be impossible in effect to die after you’ve cast the action, but it is possible to die from damage that strikes you during the very short period waiting for the buff to activate, and is also possible for the HP halving effect to result in your death from damage that deals more than 50% of your HP striking you from when it was prepared prior to the casting of Superbolide.

What does Tenacity do and why does it randomly appear as singular melds on posted gearsets sometimes?

Tenacity has two effects that scale at different rates, with the first effect being a damage bonus that increases your damage by 0.1% per tier (similar to Determination), and the second effect being a mitigation bonus that decreases your damage taken by 0.1%.

• The damage reduction scales relatively quickly, which can be valuable in situations where damage isn’t required (which usually isn’t the case, so we don’t prioritize this since our mitigation can and will cover the fight with or without Tenacity).
• The damage boost scales somewhat slowly, at a rate equal to 80% of the tiering rate of Determination. This means that you get less damage boost per stat point invested, albeit not by a great difference.

Since every encounter can be covered by tank and healer mitigation tools without any Tenacity, there’s no reason to sacrifice DPS due to lower stat scaling efficiency for mitigation on best-in-slot sets (or progression sets) and potentially risk missing a DPS check that you could have made by having better stats on your gear (which is unlikely, but possible).

Please keep in mind that this is not a recommendation to avoid Tenacity altogether. Gear that contains Tenacity is still very viable in the event that no equivalent item level gear piece exists that contains both CRIT and DET.