We’re Marks now. We’ve been so for a while and we’re loving it. Once of the great things Marks has to offer is the Readiness ability. Readiness will reset the cooldown on all hunter abilities except for Bestial Wrath. That means abilities like Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Feign Death, Misdirection, and more importantly – Rapid Fire!
The most common use of Readiness is to reset our Rapid Fire ability and allow us to use it multiple times during a boss fight. That’s right we can use our Readiness ability to get anywhere from four to six depending on the length of the encounter.
There are two schools of thought on how best to use Readiness and Rapid Fire in a raid encounter. The first method has us synchronize the cooldowns of these abilities by performing the following sequence.
The second method method focuses more and getting additional Chimera and Aimed shots off sooner, but you’re Readiness and Rapid Fire cooldowns will not be in synch.
Some general thoughts. Don’t just focus on Rapid Fire. If Rapid Fire has fallen off, but Chimera and Aimed are not on cooldown, you’ll want to wait until you can get both those abilities on cooldown before using Readiness.
Also, you want to try and stack Rapid Fire with as many procs and abilities as you can. Using Rapid Fire at the start of a fight ensures that the majority of your procs will be cooking in conjunction with Rapid Fire.
After Readiness and Rapid Fire come off their three minute cooldowns, you’ll want to assess things before repeating the process. Maybe it makes sense to pop Rapid Fire right then and there or maybe you’ve got some things coming off cooldown and it’s worth waiting a few seconds. Whatever the situation, it’s certainly not worth having one fewer Rapid Fires for the sake of stacking buffs.
There is a lot of nuance that comes with the Readiness ability, but we love it and we use it early and often. How about you guys, when and how are you using Readiness?
Most times I do the former of your two models, waiting to double up on Chimera but getting the two RF's in as soon as possible otherwise.
The only exception is when I know a fight won't be long enough for 4 RF's. I'll then wait to line up my RF's with either my t10 set bonus proc, or toward the end so that I can double up on Kill Shot. And a lot of that comes from knowing the fight lengths for my raid group.
But it's really a fight awareness thing a lot of times. For example, I'll wait to see if I'm bit first on Lana'thel before I cast RF. Then once anyone is bit (me or otherwise) I use them. Or using 2 in less than 30 seconds at the beginning of Lady D so that I get 4 in total, but also before I have to switch to adds. It also helps the chances of a t10 proc so that I can renew my SS on her early and keep it up the whole fight.
I have always tried to use readiness after a full rotation to get the extra Chimera and Aimed. What do you do if there is a call for Heroism at the beginning of the fight? Do you stack Rapid Fire WITH Heroism or wait till afterwards and possibly only have RF once or twice max in a shorter fight.
I've heard that we don't necessarily want to use RF during BL/Heroism because both will take us to or near the haste cap for Steady Shot, so we're only benefiting from extra auto-shots in RF instead of both. But I've also heard Kripparian specifically state that he stacks the two for the extra auto-shot damage.
I decided that I would do it whenever possible just so I'd have a decision on it to make it less confusing. And so I do stack them, but I can't honestly say that I know if it's right or not. But I wouldn't mind seeing the decision addressed either.