There was a point in BfA where putting Barbed Shot on the same target would give you a second buff, but it had the same Spell ID and didn’t stack. If you put Barbed Shot on different targets, the buffs had different Spell IDs and would stack
I just popped on and tested on a dummy and you are correct. The buff now stacks, with different Spell IDs for each cast on a single target. I don’t know when they changed that, but I’ve been playing with that in mind since BfA. Learn something new every day.
Isn’t the point of multi-dotting to just have more dots rolling at the same time rather than avoiding dot clipping (which I agree would be an almost pointless optimization for us)? Probably still a relatively small increase either way, especially as pull sizes increase.
Anyway, even if the buffs stack that doesn’t solve everything as you may end up with too much regen for a short period of time and then nothing after. I generally try and space out BS casts, because I absolutely can run out of focus in AoE situations. It’s a delicate balance though as we need BS for War Orders procs which are obviously huge for AoE.
The more I think about it the more I dislike BS as an ability, tbh. It has too much baked into it:
ST damage
AoE damage
Focus regen
Frenzy
CD reduction on KC via War Orders
Plus its own proc to manage via Wild Call
It’s a lot. Not fundamentally a bad thing, but when some of those are in opposition to each other (in particular War Orders which makes us want to spam the ability, while Frenzy and focus regen are more about not dumping charges immediately) it becomes harder to balance it.
Iirc, they had some issues with the separate buffs for Focus regen in early BfA, mostly late alpha and then in beta. I don’t recall whether those issues were still present upon release or not.
As they reworked the concept of the Dire Beast/Dire Frenzy abilities in Legion, into what we got in BfA with Barbed Shot where they essentially merged the two together to become a ranged weapon-attack.
Damage-wise, there is essentially no difference between maximum efficiency dot on a single target vs maximum efficiency dot on multiple targets, that is because we only have the one and it has a cd to limit it. If you’re not sitting at two charges, the only concern is clipping. Dotting everything just to dot everything is something we’d do if serpent sting was meta (no CD).
I also dislike how much is baked into bs. I personally liked it more when frenzy was it’s own talent that replaced it (i think at the time it wasn’t even barbed shot, but rather just dire beast). Then you had the ez mode for some hunters but if you felt brave you could spec frenzy.
It looks like most of the Barbed Shot Spell IDs were added in 8.2, which makes sense. I remember a fair amount of complaints from the Hunter community about how the Focus regen didn’t stack from a single target.