Black Arrow and Lock and Load: A Second Look

It’s been two weeks since we last looked at the combination of Black Arrow and Lock and Load procs. In that time the tooltips have been adjusted and I’ve taken part in some raids to get some actual data on the proc rate of Lock and Load. Overall I still find Lock and Load to be an interesting and rather beneficial talent/proc for hunters, even if it only happens a few times per raid. Let’s go through the data and take a look.

On average it seems that Lock and Load will proc for about 2-4% of a four hour raid. That’s the “applied” time of the buff, meaning if you get it as you exit combat it’s going to fluff up the timer with up to 30 seconds of “applied” time, whereas if you’re using it in combat it won’t last nearly as long. I also tend to get up to 60 procs in a 4 hour raid which shows how often I get the buff. However, even if you get Lock and Load significantly fewer times than I do, I still recommend speccing into Black Arrow as well as Resourcefulness, which decreases the Black Arrow cooldown.

Check Your Spec

On my old post, I had some math going and I’ll redo it here. I use a mod known as Dr. Damage and I’m sure most of you are familiar with it. The damage I mention is based on the readings I get from Dr. Damage even if it is usually just a little bit off. Islandwind, who commented on my previous post, brought up the idea that they spec fully into Hunting Party for a 3% agility boost. If you really look at it, 3% isn’t all that much. 3% is 30 agility for every 1000 you have and assuming that you can get to 2000 agility, it’s only 60 extra. That’s just under 1% crit according to the numbers on WoWWiki. Instead I choose to spec into Resourcefulness which is more helpful than 1% crit overall.

Do The Damage

Dr. Damage is clocking my Black Arrow at 3k-4k damage on average, depending on buffs and WWS shows an average of 4500 damage when raid buffed. We’ll work with the average of 4500 damage which isn’t bad considering you can proc Lock and Load, and when you do, you get two free Explosive Shots. If you get it at the end of the fight, you can easily go Explosive -> Kill Shot -> Explosive -> Steady Shot -> Explosive and deal out a hefty amount of damage.

With only 1 point in Hunting Party, I can still get Replenishment up almost 100% of the time, and honestly Replenishment isn’t good enough to put all 3 points into Hunting Party. If I’m not in a 25man raid with multiple mana regen buffs, then I go out of mana all the time. Resourcefulness, on the other hand, lowers the cooldown on Black Arrow, which could also be part of the reason why I have so many procs. With a lower cooldown on Black Arrow, I can keep it up more. If Black Arrow is up more, I have more chances to proc Lock and Load. Let’s do some math with the shorter cooldown.

Black Arrow normally has a 30 second cooldown. This means you can shoot it off twice a minute. Let’s assume a fight lasts 5 minutes.
5 minutes, twice a minute, you get 10 shots of Black Arrow. Assuming all of the damage gets to the target before the end of the fight, you would hit for 45k damage.

Now, assume you have 3 points in Resourcefulness. This means you can shoot off Black Arrow almost 3 times a minute. We won’t assume that for the math, but we will still assume a 5 minute fight. Now, in the first 4 minutes (240 seconds), you’ve already shot Black Arrow the 10 times that the previous example had. On top of that, you still have a minute left, and that means we get TWO more shots off (the third would require slightly more time). So you get 12 shots off in 5 minutes. 54k damage. Sure it’s only a net gain of 9k, but that’s assuming a 5 minute fight. The longer the fight, the more you get to use Black Arrow (and vice versa).

Keep Up Your Debuffs

With more uptime, you also have more chances to proc Lock and Load. Let’s do some math there as well.

In a 30 second CD of Black Arrow, you have an uptime of 15 seconds. That means you only have 50% of the time to actually have a chance to proc Lock and Load.

In a 24 second CD of Black Arrow, you also have the uptime of 15 seconds. This means you have 62.5% of the entire Black Arrow Time (including CD) to proc Lock and Load. 12.5% increase in uptime essentially.

Now taking the increase in time AND the already increased damage, you have the potential to proc Lock and Load more often which would increase damage on its own as well. With that increased damage and the damage from more Black Arrows, there’s no reason to NOT decrease cooldown time. Essentially you could be bringing an extra 5k+ for each Lock and Load proc on top of the 9k Black Arrow damage increase. If we assume that you do bring 5k extra and you proc Lock and Load twice, thats 10k extra per fight, for a total of 19k extra in a 5min fight. It doesn’t seem like much, but in a fight where almost everyone is dead at 1% (or even 0% before the boss dies), that 19k could make all the difference.

Now, there’s one final piece to the puzzle here. Not only does Black Arrow hit for about 4500 damage total, but you’re getting 6% increased damage for the rest of your skills. On average I pull a good 3500 DPS overall for a four hour raid. In a 5 minute fight (300 seconds), I can keep Black Arrow up for roughly 180 seconds, or 3 minutes with Resourcefulness. You have a 6% increase on the 3500 damage per second, increasing it to 3710 DPS for 180 seconds. That works out to 667,800 damage. The other 120 seconds I’m pulling 3500 DPS for a total of 420,000 damage. Together that’s a total of 1,087,800 damage, or 3626 DPS for the fight, or an increase in DPS of 126 on your other attacks alone.

Taking a look at the same fight without Resourcefulness, you can keep Black Arrow up for 150 of the 300 seconds. Taking the 3710 DPS (3500 with a 6% increase), you deal about 556,500 damage for half the fight while the other 150 seconds brings about 525,000 damage. The total damage would be 1,08,1500 damage, or 3605 DPS. It’s a 105 DPS increase instead of the 126 DPS increase. It may not be much less, but that’s an average number for one five minute fight and it adds up as you have longer fights and fight more bosses as well. Not to mention, that’s only additional DPS from the damage increase and doesn’t include the damage from the extra uptime of Black Arrow at all.

A Quick Look At The Latest Patch

As I said in my last post about Lock and Load, Blizzard was going to correct the tooltip for the proc chances, and I also brought up the idea that maybe Blizzard was hiding the fact that they hadn’t changed something that they had intended to. My speculation may have been right. Looking at my WWS reports for 25 man Ulduar the last few weeks, the buff time and the number of times that Lock and Load was applied has seemed to drop. There’s several variables here that I mentioned earlier such as when the buff was applied, but the uptime for individual fights has gone down. Here is some pre-3.1.2 data (some is myself, some is other hunters in my guild):
Hodir

• Fight: 06:30
• Lock and Load: 01:03 (16%)

Thorim

• Fight: 09:00
• Lock and Load: 00:35 (7%)

Freya (Kanu — Hunter from guild)

• Fight: 07:38
• Lock and Load: 00:50 (11%)

The above data shows an 11% uptime. The 3.1.2 data looks like this:
Hodir

• Fight: 05:49
• Lock and Load: 00:31 (9%)

Freya

• Fight: 07:07
• Lock and Load: 00:22 (5%)

Thorim

• Fight: 09:13
• Lock and Load: 00:22 (4%)

The above data shows a 6% uptime.

Drawing Conclusions

Taking a look back at some of Lassirra’s old combat log data  (pre-3.1) from the forums, we get this data:
Sarthation (12-09-08):

• Fight: 03:19
• Lock and Load: 00:24 (12%)

Maexxna (12-09-08):

• Fight: 02:51
• Lock and Load: 00:12 (7%)

Noth (12-09-08):

• Fight: 06:14
• Lock and Load: 00:12 (3%)

Loatheb (12-09-08):

• Fight: 06:06
• Lock and Load: 00:35 (10%)

Razuvious (12-09-08):

• Fight: 04:54
• Lock and Load: 00:36 (12%)

Lassirra’s data shows an average of 9% uptime throughout the five fights. My data (I’m only looking at my own buff uptime) looks like this:
Hodir

• Fight: 05:49
• Lock and Load: 00:31 (9%)

Freya

• Fight: 07:07
• Lock and Load: 00:22 (5%)

Thorim

• Fight: 09:13
• Lock and Load: 00:22 (4%)

Iron Council (Steelbreaker)

• Fight: 02:00
• Lock and Load: 00:29 (25%)

Hodir

• Fight: 06:30
• Lock and Load: 01:03 (16%)

My data shows an average of 12% uptime for Lock and Load. My data is post patch 3.1, and more specifically it’s from the latest patch, 3.1.2.

I still hold to my idea that Lock and Load procs a lot more now  than it did pre-3.1 because of the data above. On top of that, I recently saw Tallel, a guildie, have 5 procs in a row and I tend 2-3 procs in a single fight all the time. I will agree that the removal of the internal cooldown has had a large effect on the proc rates and maybe that is why I see such an increase. Of course, we all know it’s the Random Number Generator that decides, and it will continue to do so through future patches.

If any of you have any data that you would like to contribute, I urge you to visit our forums and add your data to this thread.