When Corb put up his thread about his Fury Guide and was taking suggestions for topics I offered help with determining how Haste effects Rage generation. I was pretty busy at work for the next week or so and was dragging my feet on getting it done.
I saw a thread on the Tankspot forums that covered this topic before I could finish my testing and do a write up. Here is the thread by Bagelbite:
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/theory-articles/36614-rage-generation-haste.html He was using the same basic methodology that I had been using, but I thought that he was being a little too limited in his testing. Namely in his weapon choice. He only used one type of weapon and with a very narrow damage range. From reading his write up I came away thinking that he also didn't do very many repetitions. He also didn't do any tests to see if rage behaved differently when mulitple Haste effects were stacked.
To modify his methodology a little I decided to use 4 different weapons. I used the MH Hakkari Warblade (1.70), Talon of Azshara (2.70), Halberd of Smiting (3.50) and Stormherald (3.80). I did this to make sure that the Rage equation didn't behave unexpectedly at different values for weapon speed. Just from looking at the equation's graph I believed that it wouldn't, but I wanted to make sure. I have seen equations act a little differently than I expected before in various classes. A little extra work to make sure seemed to be worth it.
To further change his method of testing I did two additional tests. It dealt with my hang up about seeing how the equation behaved when multiple Haste effects are stacked. For this reason I did a test with Flurry and the Abacus of Violent Odds up at the same time. I did another test with Flurry, Abacus and my Troll racial Berserking up at the same time. I did these test with only the Talon and Halberd. Mostly as a quick check for my hypothesis.
This brought me up to five different experiments. I did a control group (no Haste effects) where I did two runs with each weapon. I then did the experiment with the Abacus two times with each weapon. Then came the two runs for each weapon with 5/5 Flurry. I did the stacked Haste experiments as described above.
To record my data I did a little digging to figure out the best way to do that. My first stop was Curse to see if there was an addon that showed how rage gains on a per hit in a visible way. I found one mod that was around a year or more old and decided it wouldn't do the trick since it was so outdated. If I remember correctly it was last updated around the time the Rage Normalization went through.
I started looking through the mods I already had loaded up. Under my SCT menus I found an option to show all power gains. I checked the box and went out to hit a few mobs to see if it would work how I wanted. I took a few swings at a mob in SMV and saw “+13 Rage” and “+7 Rage” scrolling on the left side of my SCT. I asked the author of SCT if there was a way to log this data (because it doesn't show up in any combat log data for some reason).
I never received a reply from him so I resorted to Fraps'ing each test and then using the good ol' pen and paper to record the data for each hit. This made things go pretty slow, but it allowed me to review exactly what was going on as many times as needed. By doing this I was able to take larger samples with each attempt. This allowed me to see if any oddities would occur over due to the rounding process for Rage.
Here is a sample of my data for the Talon of Azshara:
Speed Damage Rage
2.70 471 11
2.70 469 11
2.32 472 12
2.32 474 11
2.16 450 10
2.16 480 12
1.85 541 12
1.85 553 12
1.68 449 11
1.68 486 11
The first set is from the Control, the second set is from the Abacus, third from 5/5 Flurry, fourth from Flurry+Abacus and the last set is from Flurry+Abacus+Berserking. The Rage is the actual in game Rage gain that you can use.
Some of you might have noticed that in one case 450 damage generated 10 rage while in another case 449 damage generated 11 rage. This is because the game always rounds the fractional portion of Rage down and reports it for the Rage gained. Bagelbite saw the same thing while he was doing his test. He hypothesized that the game carries the fractional Rage (but still rounding down for usable rage) until there is enough to add 1 Rage to the swing. From looking over all my data I have to agree with him.
Conclusion:
Just from looking at the Rage generated from the different speeds anyone can tell that in no situation does Hastened weapon speed change how the Rage equation behaves. The only reasonable conclusion is that it always uses the base weapon speed no matter how many Haste effects are in play.
When I sit down and think about how the Rage equation works, I always come to the same conclusion: it has to always use the base speed. This is because there is really no way to efficiently to account for OH Flurry procs instantaneously increasing the MH's attack speed mid swing. The game would have to have some sort of "pro-rating" system in place to weight the length of time for each speed to determine the final rage generation. In the length of time that can happen when using non-matching weapon speeds it would be impossible for the servers to do the calculations with lag factored in. Base weapon speed is the only logical choice to use for the Rage equation.
