The Thrill of the Spreadsheet: Rabid and Bestial Wrath Stacking

This is part of a series in which we take a technical, more in depth look at huntering and hunter abilities.  If numbers aren't your thing,  you'll likely want to skip this one. 

Throughout Mist of Pandaria, Beat Mastery has essentially been a cool down class.  That is to say, BM's primary mode of increasing DPS is with the proper use of CDs, and when appropriate, the stacking of CDs.

In Episode 4 of the Cloak and Quiver, Solar talks about 2 BM CDs that I imagine most hunters already macro together, and I wanted to talk about why it is better to macro them together than use each of them precisely on cool down (in the comments of the video on youtube, you can see where he briefly got into this topic).

Measuring the Benefit:
Disregarding Frenzy for a moment while we look at Rabid, my pet normally does 1 melee every 1.4 seconds.   While Rabid is up, it can get off 25 melee attacks, which is 1 every .8 seconds (1.4/1.7=.8 and a little change).   Let's say my pet's melee ability averages 20k for hits (which is pretty close to what it does unbuffed against a raid dummy) and 40k for crits..   

If you use Rabid while not in Bestial Wrath, where normally melee would do 420k damage over 20 seconds (or about 210k over 10 seconds),  it will now do 760k damage over the same 20 seconds (assuming about 50% crits). 

Normally bestial wrath would simply increase the melee damage for those ten seconds by 20%, from 210k to 264k, which is 54k extra damage.   If instead Rabid is up while you use BW,  that 20% commutatively stacks, bringing you up to 456k damage from melee over those same 10 seconds.  Which is a 192k increase over 10 seconds of BW without Rabid,  or a 76k increase over those same 10 seconds with just rabid.  Simply put,  you're getting around 80% more +20%s.

And this isn't even taking into accounts the other benefits of increased pet focus, etc., while in BW.   

Lining it up
I currently only have the regular Heroic AoC, not the Warforged,  so at 574 ilvl it reduces applicable CDs by 47.63%.  If your curious,  the formula to find how long the CD of any given ability will be, is:

New Cooldown = (Normal Cooldown)/1.4763

It is not, as some people had thought,  (normal cooldown)*(1-.4763).  

Anyhow, back to stacking CDs.  For Beastial Wrath I have a 40.64 second CD, and it lasts for 10 seconds.  Rabid on the other hand has a 90 second CD, and lasts for 20 seconds.  Let's imagine a 360 second (6 min) fight. Now let's make a little chart:

Seconds	BW	Rabid
+0	use	use
+10	buff ends
+20		buff ends
+41	use
+51	buff ends
+82	use
+90		off CD
+92	buff ends
+123		use
+133	use
+143	buff ends	buff ends
+174	use
+184	buff ends
+213		off cd
+215		use
+225	use
+235	buff ends	buff ends
+266	use
+276	buff ends
+305		off cd
+305	use	use
+315	buff ends
+325		buff ends
+346	use
+356	buff ends
+360	Fight Ends

You see we've delayed using Rabid a couple times.   But we were able to stack rabid with bestial wrath 3 times.  With everything else being equal, that's over a half million extra damage just from our pet's melee ability.   And we still get the exact same number of Rabid buffs as if we'd used it precisely on CD.