How does Arcanic pulsar stack?

Classes Druid
1

Trying to understand just how the arcanic pulsar traits stacks (or doesn’t). I understand that no matter how many pieces I have it always takes 9 starsurges to trigger and only lasts 6 seconds. However, I’m wondering how the +dmg to starsurge portion works?

If I have three pieces that grant 1400, 1500 and 1600 does that mean my Starsurge damage is increased by 4500 all the time? Or does it only increase by the largest amount so it’s 1600 dmg more all the time?

ps: I assume from the tooltip the SS bonus damage is constant not just during the free 6 second celestial alignment proc. If that’s incorrect please let me know.

edit: Should have posted from my boomie not my hunter :wink:

2

For almost all Azerite traits, flat bonuses stack but procs, proc chance, or pretty much everything else does not. So the flat damage to Starsurge will add up, but nothing else, making more than 1 Pulsar pretty much a waste just like more than one PotM.

3

I’d love to trade one of the two pieces I currently have with Arcanic Pulsar on it but they’re the highest simming pieces (assuming raidbots sims are right). The two 390 pieces sim higher than the 400 pieces I have to replace them.

Tidemothers Cover (390) -v- Crown of A’akul’s Dark Reign (400)
Gorak Tul’s Mantle (390) -v- … I can’t remember the name doh

I was trying to work out why they simmed so high, and I guess with the extra SS damage it’s enough to push it ahead of the mediocre traits on the other two pieces.

4

Do you have streaking stars on any of those pieces? Streaking stars sims rather high and is one of our best traits. I’d look to replace one of those Arcanic Pulsars with a streaking stars ASAP.

Luckily for us boomchickens the first 3 bosses in BoD drop BiS azerite gear for us.

5

Yeah, as far as I can tell the only good balance specific traits are pulsar, lively, and streaking.

However, are you sure that you are enabling the traits on those other pieces? You have to actually click them so they light up in the best gear page for comparison. I screwed that up the first few times I used it.

The crown is the worst helm in there, I think. The good shoulders come from Jadefire.

I would have thought that the Blightborne on the Mantle would outperform a second Pulsar, but with chickenDB no longer updated it’s hard to weigh things directly.

6

you dont spell dawning sun, streaking stars

7

According to my sims for the single target NB/Starlord/Stellar/Shooting build, simming Goggles/Mestrah/Mekkatorque gear, Streaking Stars outsims Dawning Sun by a whopping 1.9%.

Taking double Pulsar is 2.1% behind, and Balance doesn’t really have any stat breakpoints to make one person’s performance vastly worse than another’s, so yes I’m pretty sure Streaking is going to be better than Dawning for most everybody. If you stand close to the boss, that is. Changing it from on cast to on impact was really, really irritating with how slow Wrath’s projectile is.

8

Streaking stars is on a different circle to Arcanic pulsar so I have both.

Posting from my main instead of my hunter now.

Based on Bloodmallet’s info it looks like treacherous covenant is higher than streaking stars or dawning sun. And that SS and DS are almost identical. Something backed up by simming I’ve done*. I see about 20 dps difference in the sims, something like 20,240 to 20,220. At which point it’s pretty much within the margin of error.

In the case of switching the Tidemothers cover with Crown of Aakul, I see something like a 500 DPS loss on the sims. Which is noticeable. It’s a bit hard to test in real life since the game is so variable, but according to sims it’s a huge difference.

  • that’s not to say that sims are actually right.
9

I can verify this also. I bought a charity 400 headpiece that had DS and a second arcanic pulsar and thought because it was 30 iLVL upgrade that it would cover the difference from losing my stack of SS and no… not at all… I lost about 600 dps because of that. Luckily for myself I got lucky on some pet drops and made quick cash… power leveled engineering for the sweet goggles haha

10

am i misreading / misunderstanding bloodmallet ratings for traits/gear?
stacking pulsar has been working for me quite well, for what it’s worth.
but, i am new to lazer chickenz :confused: so i’m confused from this thread more than i thought.

11

Blood mallet can be inaccurate sometimes. What I find to be the best is to go to warcraftlogs and see what’s working for everybody else. If you look at the top boom chickens in BoD they’re all generally rocking 2-3 stacks of streaking stars with very very few of them having more than one stack of arcanic pulsar.

Judging by the top 1000 or so boomkins it seems generally favorable to have 2/3 stacks of SS, 1/2 lively spirits and 1 arcanic pulsar.

12

My sim is fairly useful for this question because my Azerite items give me the choice of SS x 2, Treacherous, Pulsar, or SS, Treacherous, Pulsar x 2, or SS Treacherous, Pulsar, Dawning. Or a PotM, but that’s just about worthless in ST.

The double SS stack is 1.9% ahead of taking Dawning, which is in turn .2% ahead of double Pulsar.

What I’m not sure of is how many SS damage counts Raidbots expects. If you can’t stand in melee getting SS damage on every possible spell is fairly difficult thanks to the extremely slow speed on Wrath. As I understand it, casting Wrath at more than 10 yards or so will cause it to hit after a following Strike or Starsurge.

I don’t see much point in Bloodmallet when Raidbots is so easy to use. Back before when you had to set up Simcraft yourself, sites like that made sense.

As a side note, the Droptimizer will overvalue multiple pulsar pieces (I think). It rates the Stormwall helm over the Champion helm, and if I used the Stormwall piece i’d have to take one of either a second Pulsar, Dawning, or PotM. Meanwhile the Champion helm would give me Streaking & Treacherous. The Stormwall helm does have Overwhelming Power, though, which is the strongest inner ring dps trait for us, so maybe that is the difference.

13

thanks folks, appreciate the feedback. ill do more checks on raidbots.

14

I use Bloodmallet as my quick guide but sim using raidbots. Bloodmallet says the helm I’m using is a big upgrade and simming on raidbots backs me up on it. Which is a big part of the reason why I made this thread. Maybe you’re right though and Overwhelming power is… OP. And that’s enough to push it ahead of the 400 ilvl Crown.

edit: And maybe seductive power is rated poorly because of travel time? I’m not sure how they model that.

15

Things like lively spirit are assumed to have an ‘average stack’ count as part of the class setup. For lively I think it was 7 or 8 (I forget). I’d guess that seductive is the same, but I have no idea what the average stack that it uses is. The Druid discord would probably know, that’s where I got the lively spirit stack count.

16

When in doubt Raidbots.com.

For me I find 1 x Arcanic Pulsar, then as much Treacherous Covenant/Streaking Stars as possible works well.

Definitely track your stacks of Arcanic Pulsar, so you can pool AP before going into the miniburn with 9th SS cast.

Edit: I’m sure Lively Spirit can also be very strong, but personally… I hate dealing with it’s interaction, so I refuse to.

17

Almost all the top dps parses are streaking/treach with 1 arcanic right now, and almost nobody uses starlord.

18

Starlord seems to be simming higher for myself. I see everybody else is using incarn but after raiding last night with starlord I did notice a dps increase myself… I don’t particularly enjoy having to pull astral power but starlord was very noticeable on heroic rastakhan.