Cooldown Stacking

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

 

 Here’s the Theory

First of all, this assumes that you have a trinket that procs. Since Darkmoon Card: Greatness is so amazingly awesome, probably every hunter has it unless they have Death’s Verdict. This proc is the key.
The theory is that since it’s an agility proc instead of ap, the various hunter cooldowns are not strictly additive, but are multiplicative.
For example: Furious Howl adds 320 ap. Greatness card adds 300 agility on a proc. In addition to increasing your AP, that agility also increases your crit chance. So by combining them you’re not only getting the 320 ap bonus from Furious Howl, but that 320 also has a greater chance to crit and do yet more damage.
Everything about this is perfectly logical and got me excited to take Furious Howl off of auto cast!

Kinds of Cooldowns

We hunters basically have 4 kinds of cooldowns to work with:

• Attack Power Cooldowns (Furious Howl, on-use trinkets)
• Haste Cooldowns (rapid fire)
• Agility Cooldowns (greatness or death’s verdict – procs every 46 sec or so)
• Multiplicitive Cooldowns (Call of the Wild)

The secret is to stack these in a way that gives you a multiplicative advantage. Combining two attack power cooldowns is purely additive — its the same dps gain overall as using them separately. But if you combine an attack power cooldown with one in any other category, it becomes multiplicative (with haste you have more shots getting that AP buff, with agil the shots with the buff crit more, etc).
Now agility and multiplicative cooldown categories are automatically multiplicative even with themselves and whatever else you add to them. So the secret is to make sure you combine your AP cooldowns (mainly furious howl) with cooldowns from other categories.