One of the keys to playing an MMO effectively as a raider or mythic dungeon runner has always been getting your rotation right. Making sure that you fire off key skills at the right time, don’t waste cool downs, and combo your best abilities correctly. After every major patch there is always a new rotation to learn and action bars to configure to ensure optimum key pressery.

BfA is no different, so I’ve set about researching the new best-in-class rotations for my Hunter. I’ve never professed to be anything beyond a ‘Normal’ level player, but I still like to try and make sure I’m not doing anything obviously stupid, and preferably doing most things right. There are a lot of great guides out there, from Icy Veins to Wowhead to individual class masters like Bendak at Eyes of the Beast.

I usually try and cobble together talents and rotations that combine passive skills along with the more fun active talents, and then hotkey them in some semblance of the correct order. This time however I stumbled across a really interesting post on the AskMrRobot blog, which examines Simple vs Complex rotations, and the effect on DPS as the rotation gets increasingly involved.

Using a Marksmanship Hunter as an example, they discovered that the difference between a simple rotation and a very complex one can be as little as 1-3%. Even the difference between the simplest possible rotation and the most complex was only ~10%. I found that amazing to read, and somewhat liberating as a casual player.

Obviously if you’re a progression raider that 10% difference is immense, but for the Normal and even Heroic players, if you can pare it down to a 3% difference then it seems very safe to choose. As AMR points out, the major benefit of simpler rotations is that you can focus better on the boss mechanics, and you’re more likely to be able to maintain your rotation in the face of the chaos of a boss fight:

Simpler rotations aren’t just easier to do, they are also more robust. They can stand up to the interruptions from a real boss fight, like movement, knockbacks, and switching to adds that need to be nuked down. A lot of complex rules lose all of their benefit when these types of interruptions happen and either offer zero DPS gain, or in some cases, cause a DPS loss.

Again, great news for the casual player who still wants to be effective!

Which makes me happy to turn to Icy Vein’s ‘Easy Mode’ guide (despite the slight but ridiculous shame that comes with associating with ‘ezy’ play), or Wowhead’s Levelling Build when designing my BfA setup.

Looks like another case where the old saying might be true: the simple things in life…