• Aldriana

So, from the moment I first saw Dragonspine Trophy start dropping for people, I've been sort of curious about it - it's clearly good, but the mathematician in me has always been curious about just *how* good. Well, the other day I saw someone post a combat log for half an hour in the blasted lands, so decided to run some analysis on it. If you want to see the source material, it's linked from the wowhead comments on the item - url is http://putstuff.putfile.com/57121/1853616

Now, there were a couple of interesting revelations here.

First off, lets look at the duration of the procs. There were 51 periods of haste all told:

9.86
9.89
9.906
9.922
9.937
9.953
9.953
9.968
9.968
9.969
9.969
9.984
10.0
10.015
10.016
10.016
10.016
10.031
10.031
10.031
10.046
10.047
10.047
10.062
10.062
10.062
10.063
10.063
10.063
10.141
10.156
10.156
10.157
10.157
10.157
10.172
10.172
10.828
12.453
14.266
14.39
14.453
14.968
15.594
16.188
17.5
17.562
19.203
20.812
20.859
23.344

Now, 37 of those are 10.2 seconds or under - presumably the 10 seconds that it's supposed to run. But 14 of them are longer than the usual duration - 3 of them by more than a factor of 2. Hence, these must reflect it proccing and refreshing itself while already up.

Observation 1: Dragonspine Trophy has no hidden cooldown like Hourglass of the Unraveler does.

Counting in the (at least) 17 refreshing procs, there were actually 68 procs all told. Hence the proc rate, massaging some numbers around, is about 1.7 PPM in this test. Unfortunately, there's not enough information here to determine if it's a fixed percent chance or a proc per minute chance.

So, that's all pretty basic stuff, and I'm sure someone has already figured it out. The interesting (and in fact, concerning) part of it is what happens when the actual effect of the haste is measured.

So, the methodology of this is as follows: I wrote a python script that went through and stripped out the time between each two offhand swings (I chose offhand swings rather than MH so as to remove the effects of sword specialization). I then compiled two lists of swing spacings, one for swings that occurred when haste was not active, and one it was. I through out any swing that spanned the start or end of haste. That is: haste starts (and stops) between two swings. Since that attack is "partially hasted" I chose not to count it towards either list. The only swing timers included are those that lie entirely inside or outside a hasted interval.

Now, there were a few high outliers in this data. Some of these were due to gouge/bandages with intervals of order 20 sec. However, there were also a handful of shorter ones, still well above the usual swing interval. My interpretation of these were that they were indicative of times when an attack missed or was dodged, since there are no misses or dodges listed in the log. Hence, I removed these from the data as well.

These corrections made, we're left with 961 unhasted swings (ranging from 1.125 to 1.953 seconds) and 452 hasted swings (ranging from .859 to 1.469 seconds). Computing the average swing duration in each case, we find that the regular swings averaged 1.422 seconds between attacks, while hasted swings averagesd 1.169 seconds between attacks. This means, that in a given interval of time, with the haste effect active, one will land roughly 21.64% more swings than one would unhasted.

But wait! 325 haste rating was, at level 60, 32.5% haste rating. This was reduced by the standard factor of 1.577 to 20.61%, and then buffed by 50% in patch 2.0.7, so it *should* be giving 30.91% more attacks - why, then, is it only giving 21.6% more attacks? I see only once possible explanation:

Observation 2: Dragonspine Trophy is not benefitting from the 50% buff to haste that theoretically occurred in patch 2.0.7. Note that is *says* it gives the right amount - see http://hem.bredband.net/perwin84/AFGM/dragonspine.gif (linked from Thottbot entry for the item) for instance - but the actual attack rate is not consistant with this display

It is undetermined as of now whether this is true of all items that give haste rating, or just of dragonspine trophy. It would be interesting to test with another item that gives haste rating (Abacus of Violent Odds, for instance) and see if it exhibits the same behavior.

Ald

 

• Arawethion

Neat. It seems like it would have been noticed already if the haste buff were universally absent (although I could probably test simply by logging in and popping MQG), but it doesn't all seem outlandish for them to have missed one item.

Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.

 

Andrise

A factor you're not considering that throws off such data from solo farming mobs is the reduced swing timer after you parry a mob's attack. I suspect this is a large portion of the wrinkle in your data.

 

• Aldriana

I'm not actually familiar with such an effect... how is it supposed to work?

Regardless, throwing out the attacks that span a parry, we still have 433 hasted attacks and 912 regular attacks, the means are 1.422 and 1.168, and the speed increase is 21.77%. On the whole: this does not appear to be a significant effect.

Ald

 

• Khlysti

According to the combat mechanics testers parrying an attack resets your melee swing timer to 0 (or some very low figure) ie if you are half way between two swings, and parry an attack you now get to attack right away, instead of having to wait for the remaining half of your timer.

Ald

 

• Dinian

Looks like they put Improved Aspect of the Hawk (in some form) on a trinket.

 

suicuique

IIRC the posted data on these threads, a parry does not reset your swingtimer but reduces it significantly by a given percentage.
But my common sense says this would only apply to your mainhand swings. So parsing OH swings only should be not affected by "parry haste".

Just unequip any haste items, and test your parser. Should give an accurate measurement of your OH weapon delay.

 

• koaschten

yeah and get some flowers for the offhand or a fish

 

• Aldriana

Well, I don't actually have the trinket myself, so can't take additional data - this was based on data taken by someone on wowhead. However, if someone who *does* have the trinket would like to post their combat log (preferably with no OH weapon, and with misses/dodged/etc. displayed) I can certainly run it through the same analysis. In a totally ideal world it would also be done with a weapon of a different speed so as to be able to infer something about the proc rate.

 

Kody

So are you thinking that they have an entry they have to manually edit for every single haste rating effect in the game? It seems like the change to the amount of haste granted by haste rating would have been a mechanics-level change rather than a per-effect change. I find it rather silly if they actually have to change a multitude of abilities by hand, rather than just making a code change.

Interesting data though, hopefully more people can share their data if they have the trinket.

 

Kalince

It doesn't necessarily have to be giving the actual 325 rating, it could be a discrepancy between tooltip and function.

 

alienangel

I don't think you should be discarding all the swings that were "partially hasted". Last we saw in the hunter math threads, there's no such thing as partially hasted swings. The swing timer works by using your current haste to determine time until your next swing. If you have a haste effect up when swing1 is fired, that haste will be used to calculate when swing2 lands, even if the haste expires before that time. However if the haste does expire before swing2 lands, then the time between swing2 and swing3 will not be reduced by haste.

Would it be helpful to post a combat log from a hunter? We can guarantee no misses/dodges/parries, no sword spec or off-hand/mainhand filtering, and probably no bandaging/gouging either - I assume your scripts could be run on other combat logs without much trouble?

I could only provide data from abacus and kots though, no dragonspine trophy for me (yet...). Anyone else want to chip in with the data?

edit: this is probably better placed in the Combat Mechanics forum btw

 

• Aldriana

Interesting - I'll take a look at that and see if I can confirm/deny it. I wouldn't expect it to make a large difference though.


Sure, I can run numbers on other data sets. However, see below for an interesting update on the nature of this bug.

I made some additional modifications today to run on main hand attacks. I threw out all the stuff that I threw out before, but I additionally dropped any attack where the swing time was interrupted by a parry or sword spec. This resulted in 193 hasted MH attacks and 407 unhasted OH attacks, with the following result:

The regular swings averaged 2.76 seconds. The unhasted swings averaged 2.06 seconds - an increase of 34%, much closer to the predicted 31%.

Observation 2, revised: It appears that 2.0.7 haste buff was applied only to MH attacks, and not OH attacks.

I didn't see a combat mechanics forum - that forum is called "class mechanics", which this technically isn't. But if the powers that be feel it deserves to be elsewhere, they're free to move it. I don't see a way of doing so myself.

 

Kalince

To add a little to the discussion some anecdotal data. The rogue who ended up taking the trinket reported general dissatisfaction with it. I was informed the trinket seems to have a fairly low proc rate even going so long as 10 minutes without a single proc in Karazhan and has since been relegated to collecting dust within the bank.

 

Cel

Maybe he missed seeing it go off? 30mins with 37 procs seems to be rather solid data that you shouldn't go tooo long without seeing a proc. He may just have had an unlucky streak however.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

alienangel

Would this not be simple to test? Pop abacus/kots or proc assasination/blackout, and see how much the character sheet reports your off-hand and mainhand speeds. Then install one of the attack timer mods and see if the character-sheet speed is being used or not.

 

◊ Penguin

A quote from someone in a position to know for sure:

 

Sh@ft

One of our hunters who has the trinket says quite the contrary. He notices it going off all the time. Are you sure your rogue is watching it?

 

Devlin

i have to agree with this statement. the trinket is going of very often, and im not surprised if its not procs per minute, but rather %-based. that would also sort out the issue of not having it proc for several minutes, due to unlucky streaks. that is, unless ppm works similairly to %-based.

ive been getting the general feeling that it procs more often the more attackspeed-increasing skills i have active, hence the more attacks and through that bigger chance of proc (if it is indeed %-based). i have not tested this however, merely a feeling i have

 

Demi9OD

Hunters have the most frequent non white attacks of any class (excluding spamstring warriors which I am pretty sure is no longer useful). If the dragonspine is PPM, the proc % is applied based on the non hasted weapon speed. Because of ranged weapons being relatively slow, and the number of extra attacks a Hunter uses (approximately 4 steadies, 2 arcanes, and 1 multi in 10 seconds), they have a better chance to proc dragonspine than other classes.

Edit: Quick PPM lesson.

Assume Dragonspine is 1ppm. Assume 3.0 speed bow. Game converts 1ppm to 1 attack out of 20 (60/3), or 5% proc chance. Now apply quiver haste, so 23 shots per minute. Assume steady every 2.6s (hasted bow speed), arcane every 6s, and multi every 10.5s. Add those together and we now have 61.7 shots per minute. We have trippled our number of total attacks, yet each attack still has the same 5% proc chance, yielding a fairly high uptime. I have ignored imp AoTH but it would also grant a few more shots per minute.

Doing the same thing for a Rogue with a 2.7 speed MH. Game converts 1ppm to 1 attack out of 22.2(60/2.7), or 4.5% proc chance. Apply SnD haste, so 28.9 swings per minute, assume Sinister Strike every 4s, evisc every 30s. Add those together and we now have 45.9 swings per minute. Windfury and sword spec can potentially give us an extra 25% swings, yielding a total of 57.4 swings per minute, all at a 4.5% proc chance. To be fair I've ignored additional rogue haste benefits such as blade flurry, assas bonus and blacksmithing mace (which would negate sword spec of course)


Of course all of this depends on dragonspine proccing on steadies, arcanes, multis, sinister strikes, windfury attacks and sword specs. But if it works anything like crusader did, and I suspect it does, there is no reason to think it wouldn't.

 

• Arawethion

"PPM" just means "a % proc rate which varies inversely with listed weapon speed." This always seems to confuse people.

Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.

 

Exewut

Yes, but that doesn't mean his point is wrong. Slow weapon speed means instant attacks will have a higher % of proccing the effect, than if you would use a faster weapon, which could very well mean that hunters (slow weapon speed, a lot of instants) have more uptime on the proc than rogues (faast weapon speed, not that much instants)

[e] Reworded

 

• koaschten

i wonder though why a hunter would want the trinket.
fucking up their rotations with auto-shot?

 

Elendril

Err - haste effects are awesome for hunters because they reduce the cast time of steady shot, which is our primary damaging attack, along with increasing our white damage.

 

• Aldriana

Of course, we don't know yet whether it is PPM or flat%... I'd need another combat log or two before I could say either way with any certainty.