So I'm sure by now many of you have seen the Glancing Blows calculator thread, here:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...hreadID=1051138

Certainly it needs more testing, and I'll be doing quite a bit of my own in coming days; for now, though, I am curious whether Aged Core Leather gloves are worth digging back up and wearing over NS / Bloodfang.

The difference in stats is massive, but some of the reported reductions from Glancing Blows are preposterously high. Is 15 AP and a little bit of crit (assuming hit ~ .75% crit) better than +5 daggers, considering how vital white damage is to combat builds?

In that vein, is the Mugger's Belt worth wearing as well? Distracting Dagger is definitely out; it is far too massive a downgrade in weapon DPS and stats. Mugger's Belt has significantly worse stats as well.

I know the partial resist thread is already sidetracked on this, but they have a solid initial topic so I thought I'd post this so they can get back on track.

Certainly in interesting development in rogue math. I'll be trying Aged Core Leather for a while I think, and depending on what I observe from that I might even re-farm the Mugger's Belt.

Makes me glad I picked up a Maladath, and sad I didn't roll human.

I'm doing some data collection as well, give a bit more ammo to the argument, try to help provide a more exact estimate for the value of +skill.

Haha, I logged on to ET to rant to you about how ridiculously better humans are, but you weren't online - clearly you are awake though!

I figured you would already be rolling on the data for this.

I think Undead should get +dagger skill instead of Underwater Breathing to keep things balanced!

More like trolls, bitch. +5 daggers would have been >>> +5 bows.

Here's Ouro/C'thun attempts tonight - note the skew down from 70 caused by DPSing Claw/Eye tentacles.

Any time where I'm just dpsing a 63 mob I've seen nothing but a 70% on the dot glancing rate. Makes me chuckle whenever I see human rogues posting about how good combat swords is on their raids.

Heh... chuckle. We both know you mean cry.

Haven't had a raid night yet, but I've got the mod set up. I almost wish that enterprising CS student hadn't ever had this idea. Ignorance was bliss.

Every day I think about why I didn't roll a human. Then I go huddle in a corner and cry.

There's no discernible difference between bosses and trash in this regard.

Against a 63 mob, 2/3 of your attacks will Glance. More +skill makes the damage of a Glancing Blow approach the damage of a non-glancing blow, and apparently 310 means a Glancing Blow will hit for 100% damage.

I'm out of town and off WoW for the weekend (Passover holiday, I wanted to see my... what're they called... god... can't remember... oh, yes, family!).

But I was bored, so I hit the forums.

At any rate, this week I plan to collect some data, try to figure out what's going on.

My assumption is that glancing blows occupy a similar counterpart to crushing blows on the combat results table; based on a players +hit, crit rate, dodged and parried attacks, and the measured glancing rate, it should be possible to back-calculate the "standard" rate of glancing blows, and the effect of +skill on it.

Goddamnit. Why didn't I roll a human!

Gotcha. A couple of the posts in the official rogue forum thread about this suggested differences, at least between bosses, and possibly between bosses and trash... but those forums are hardly a paragon of reliable mechanics information.

If nothing else, your explanation is far more parsimonious, and that seems to be a theme in the way Blizzard codes their game mechanics. Well, laziness anyways.

Kalman - roll a human rogue and catch up to mine! We can twink our way to 60 and then hate ourselves when there's no analogous sword to Death's Sting for a whole tier of content!

Running this mod for a bwl/mc clearing night showed a estimated loss of 8%. So i found myself wondering if some crappy + axes gear would be an upgrade over otherwise better items. Since items with +skill are few and far between I dont know if they are worth the trouble. Anyone better at math than me care to guestimate on that idea?

http://thottbot.com/?i=12416
http://thottbot.com/?i=12420
http://thottbot.com/?i=51697


^ Is every + axes item in the game.

Shooting from the hip here, none of those really seem worth it. The ZG sword set might be for +swords, but +axe items all involve massive downgrades from epic pieces in their slot. Keep in mind you need +10 to the skill to get a gain of 8%. The Goldminer's Helmet might be worth wearing and comparing.

Orc warriors look a lot better now, though!

Funny you should mention ACLs - I snagged a pair in Molten Core today(rescued them from shards), and I've got the (abominably fugly) Circle of Restless Dreams. So I'm going to bust out the +skill set on some progression attempts and see how it does relative to my normal gear.

I will also laugh very, very hard if it somehow turns out my dagger hat is better than Deathdealer.

Obviously Maladath would be better, heh.

I'm getting convinced the ACL gloves are worth it. Even a 5% boost to white damage is quite significant (10DPS or so at least), and I think that's a conservative figure.

Hahahaha. Sadly, I can see that being very, very possible. At the very least they might be comparable, and considering Deathdealer + ZG Enchant that would be very telling for other such "epic vs +skill" item questions.

I kept my Aged Core Leather because I am a resist whore and they have better resists than Nightslayer, but I imagine a lot of rogues will be disgruntled when they turn out to be better than their current gloves and suddenly there's a huge demand for them.

I put on my robe and wizard hat(actually Circlet of Restless Dreams and Aged Core Leather Gloves), busted out my Perditions, and did ZG with +11 dagger skill.

This is just weird.

Holy shit, does that mean what I think it means? To wit: am I a complete retard for passing on Ancient Core Hound Gloves and trashing a Mugger's Belt? I knew +daggers was good but that's insane...

The same thing consistently happens to me with +10 skill. I'm not sure why, but it probably has something to do with the parsing. There are a lot of events being ignored, and perhaps even some that are being miscategorized. (For example, the mod would probably register a block as a normal hit, and count the reduced damage toward the average.)

Damn, the hole in the mechanics explanation would have been much cooler :P

Billmaan wrote the mod and deserves the majority of the credit for the various cool things we're finding out. :)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the information you can get out of the combat log is just plain not specific enough to do meaningful parsing. For one, any crit that is mitigated in any way shows as a hit. That has to put a serious hole in any set of calculations.

First explanation was cooler :(

Logic, begone!

So, are we concluding that any data from this mod is bunk? Or only > +10 skill?

Haha robe and wizard hat.

Wait, what? I tought the whole point was that there's no such thing as a "mitigated crit."

I've forgotten now, not playing a melee class--when you get blocked, does the combat log show how much of your hit got blocked (allowing you to calculate your unblocked damage)?