Haste effect on Combustion

[Arbores]

Mod Edit: Moved to Q&A
Hey all,

My first time posting on these forums, so go easy on me. I have recently started playing mage and an experienced mage in my guild went through some of the openers for fire with me. Now he is a troll mage, which comes with the lovely racial of Berserking (15% haste, 10 sec duration). When he went through the rotation with me. I had the idea that after the crystal placement, you hardly physically cast (non-instant casts). Which leads me to believe that more haste during the crystal uptime hardly does anything for you.

This combined with the belief (I hope others can verify this further) that Combustion scales with haste as it does with crit and multistrike, leads me to the question:

Is it worth using Berserking the moment you cast Combustion, rather than the moment you use the crystal. This allows the Combustion to scale with the current haste you have, doing more damage in the process.

From some logs, my guild mate and I came to the conclusion that a combustion with lust does 5 ticks more than a combustion without.

With some simple math one could figure out that, if combustion scales multiplicatively with haste, the following would be true:

BL haste 30 % - 5 ticks
Berserking haste 15% 2.5 ticks

When doing this math I considered the following haste:

11% base
16% buffed
46% buffed + BL

http://wow.gamepedia.com/Haste" target="_blank
This tells us that the GCD can not be lower than 1 sec, with a haste of 50%.

46% haste (BL + buff) == 0.46 sec
4 % haste (the effect of Berserking on GCD) == 0.04 sec

The berserking would only give the last 0.04 sec of GCD reduction in this example on the many instant casts you use during the crystal. Add to that, that 0.04 sec is way too low a time for an average human to actually benefit from (try clicking the button exactly every 1 sec)

2.5 ticks per unit more on combustion seems like a lot more damage to me.

Working this all out, the question remains. Why would you not use berserking to buff your combustion, instead of the at most 2 fireballs in the opener during crystal and the 0.04 sec GCD lowering?

Any comments on this are appreciated, as well as any flaws you might see in my math. Like I said, new to mage, new to this forum

[Searix]

Interesting. Went out and tried it myself.

Settings: Cast inferno blast with 1406/15.62% haste, then cast combustion
Unbuffed (15.62% haste): 24 ticks
5% haste raid buff (21.40% haste): 25 ticks
Bloodlust unbuffed (50.31% haste): 31 ticks
Bloodlust+ 5% haste buff (57.82% haste): 32 ticks
Bloodlust + Darmac's (98.05% haste): 34-36 ticks
Bloodlust + Troll Zerk + Darmacs (127.75% haste): 38-41 ticks

This actually explains so much. Why there's times my combustion varies by ~15%... my troll zerking is off at times when i'm combusting

[Arbores]

Is this question dumb or is there another reason nobody is responding?

[Komma]

There isn't a simple answer to this question. It depends on whether the extra haste can increase your ignite sizes by 7.5%, by skipping an Ignite tick or two before Combustion is used. That will depend a lot on your haste, strategy, luck and a lot of factors that aren't easy to compute.

[skiz]

Worth to mention:
Combustion snapshots crit on cast. (Crit trinket gone before casting combustion? RIP)
Combustion snapshots damage % modifier on cast and on every spread. (You just got that funny debuff on council and combustion is out? DON'T spread.)
Combustion scales dynamic with haste. So if berserking drops during combustion, it ticks slower.

But basically, it is what komma said. If you get a better ignite use berserking for it. If not, use it during combustion. My guess is that its worth more to use berserking after combustion was cast during BL - atleast after GCD cap. But I honestly don't care about troll racial.

Edit:
Furthermore haste is not additive.

11% base
buffed = 1,11 * 1,05 ~16%
Buffed + BL = 1,11 *1,05 * 1,30 ~ 51% which is to much.