How is it different for hunters? Pardon my ignorance, but I'm as much reading these forums to learn as teach.
My limited (non-hunter) understanding of the issues: Hunter "white" (autoshot) damage is dominated by the aimed shot cycle, and weapon speed resonances that fit neatly into it. Aimed shot is a 3s cast with a 6s cooldown - while it's being cast, the autoshot timer continues, but doesn't fire until the end of the cast. As a result, the number of autoshots you can get off between aimed shots is relatively fixed for fairly wide ranges of weapon speeds. Therefore, the best hunter weapons are ones with (quiver-hasted) speeds of around 3s, to fit neatly into both the cast and cooldown time of aimed shot (so they cast aimed shot essentially "between" to normal auto-shots, and get three shots off between the end of an aimed shot and the start of the next one). Faster weapons don't actually get any more autoshots off between aimed shots (until they become significantly faster), so since they're getting the same number of shots off, with a lower AP multiplier thanks to the faster speed, they're highly sub-optimal.
The thing is Bibdy, attack power has the same effect on all white damage regardless of weapon swing because you only attack at weapon speed. Attack power on a slow weapon will give you more damage per hit, but the exact same amount of damage on a faster weapon over a set period of time. Thus why its said that AP adds 'DPS' and not just damage.
Instant attacks, since they were able to ignore swing time and just attack whenever you wanted, became entirely dependent on weapon speed because even 0.1 increase in weapon speed meant a greatly increased amount of damage per attack. Thus why the barman shanker and arcanite reaper were staple weapons, they were super slow and thus added tons of damage per instant attack with their AP bonuses. Now its normalized so slow weapons only add more damage because their range can be higher, though in many cases the average damage ends up surprisingly similar regardless of weapon speed.
The thing is Bibdy, attack power has the same effect on all white damage regardless of weapon swing because you only attack at weapon speed. Attack power on a slow weapon will give you more damage per hit, but the exact same amount of damage on a faster weapon over a set period of time. Thus why its said that AP adds 'DPS' and not just damage.
Instant attacks, since they were able to ignore swing time and just attack whenever you wanted, became entirely dependent on weapon speed because even 0.1 increase in weapon speed meant a greatly increased amount of damage per attack. Thus why the barman shanker and arcanite reaper were staple weapons, they were super slow and thus added tons of damage per instant attack with their AP bonuses. Now its normalized so slow weapons only add more damage because their range can be higher, though in many cases the average damage ends up surprisingly similar regardless of weapon speed.
Yeah, that much I'm aware of. It works in an identical manner for casters (at least for 'bolt spam') where you get a bonus of 1 DPS for every 3.5 points of +damage you have. It grinds my gears when I hear people thinking an un-Baned shadowbolt gets more bonus from +damage than Searing Pain simply because it hits harder.
I'm still yet to convince a lot of people that this is the case. My crusade continues.
That's an interesting point about Hunters, though. Makes more sense to me why a lot of our Hunters have shunned some weapons for PvE.
There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.
There definately comes a point when slapping people becomes more attractive than telling them how and why they are wrong about mechanics. I'm too embarrised to admit some things my guildies have said in the past (and some still believe because I gave up on the issue).
The rogue in your guild was most likely confusing AP with damage range when he said that when there's enough DPS on a fast weapon it can become preferable to mainhand. Since speed is technically irrelevant that can be true. Faster weapons just tend to be poor mainhands because they are likely to have lower damage ranges than alternative weapons. The Iblis is not a good example because there's a lot of better alternatives out there. A good example though is Harbinger of Doom which a lot of rogues mainhand despite it being 1.6 speed because its DPS is huge enough that its damage range is pretty decent compared to the options out there depending how your dagger luck has been. Then of course mainhanding it removes the offhand damage penalty so you get a little more of that tasty DPS.
But yeah, he basically read/heard a debate somewhere and got the tainted idea in his head. I've started demanding maths whenever someone makes bogus claims, something that shuts people up if they only brushed against the idea and thought themselves an expert. You should try it next time. :P
Is it me, or does it seem we're re-hashing the basest rogue mechanics in *every* thread?
It's beginning to seem that way. I've spent a lot of time learning 2 rogue, and the resources on this forum were very helpful to me in that regard... The quality of the in-depth numbercrunching discussions here have always been very high.
And Biddy, the reason not to throw the term "normalize" around randomly is due to the fact that "normalize" means a very specific thing in WoW; specifically it's a term applied to the effectiveness of AP on instant strike melee attacks (Backstab, Mortal Strike, Sinister Strike off the top of my head) and certain Hunter shots (Multishot, Aimed Shot).
The fact is as AP goes up, fast weapons scale dramatically in DPS, and slow weapons do not. At a certain point in AP a fast weapon is better than a slow weapon as a mainhand, even at similar DPS.
How does that work mechanic wise? What is this AP point?
I'm firmly of the "teach a person to fish" school of thinking, so maybe it's been too long since I've read the tooltip, but doesn't AP explain itself fairly effectively in the tooltip in such a fashion as to preclude such confusion?
If not, let us look at the basic mechanic of AP.
How do you express damage? DPS. 60.7, for example. 600.1, as another. Alternatively, you can go to a time before calculus, and just state the raw function range, 60-100, ignoring the time element. Either way, what do we notice here? Specific ranges for values or statements of values. (These numbers are from thin air and not related, please do not math them)
How is attack power stated?
Is it +5 weapon damage on swing?
No, you get a number like (and this is completely random here) 950. How does 950 figure into a statement like "My dagger of awesome has 60.7 DPS plus 950 attack power."? Is that a raw addition of DPS? Does my dagger now do 1010.7 DPS? Surely not. Does it add it on to the range? 60-100 + 500-950? No, that can't be right becuase it wasn't stated that way.
So there must be some transformation from where AP goes from being a number, like, say, 950, to being a part of D P S. Not to give away the ending, but the "Per Second" part of that may be a hint that the solution is that fast or slow, that's going to be a factor in how we get there.
Anyway, while this doesn't contribute directly to the problem statement, hopefully it was an insightful look into critical thinking that would've solved the issue without recourse.
It's similar to spellpower for spells, if every spell gained 1000 fire damage regardless of cast time, the 1.5 cast spell would (presuming they were fairly balanced at 0 spell power) always trump the 3.5 second cast time spell.
There are, of course, wrinkles in applying this too far, but that clearly wasn't a part of the original problem.
Also, if your guild is Hordeside, on a PVE server, I'd like to state incidentally that I'm on free agent status.
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
I would garner to guess then isnt Normalization just a quick fix to a broken mechanic that blizzard didnt intend to work that way? To me at least it seems to complicate the entire thing way too much. Anyone else sense that maybe they will rework mechanics in TBC or will they just stay the way that they are? I mean and upgrade should be just that for all classes damage wise, an upgrade. I would take it hunters are more broken than rogues when it comes to normalization?
I would take it hunters are more broken than rogues when it comes to normalization?
Well the "normalization" that affected hunters was very similar to the one that affected rogues and warriors. All hunter special attacks receive damage contribution from AP as if their weapon was a certain speed (2.7? 2.8?). The normalization had a bigger impact on the special damage output from slower weapons (e.g. the 3.4 speed BWL xbow). That wouldn't be that big of a deal, pick up a higher DPS weapon with a better damage range and a speed close to the normalization value, right? Wrong.
The biggest thing that bones hunters is that hunter specials (Aimed and Multi shots), unlike rogue specials (SS, BS, Hemo, etc.), interrupt the casting of their white damage (autoshot). Imagine if backstab was a 3 second cast, and during that cast you stopped performing autoattack, but as soon as backstab hit you would get *one* autoattack that would have happened during those 3 seconds.
Under those conditions, backstab would essentially be melee aimed shot, and you can see how you would lose a lot of white damage if the mechanic worked that way, especially with fast daggers and haste where you would have swung twice with each hand during those 3 seconds. That is what hunters are dealing with. They try to get around it by using a slow weapon that has just the right speed after haste that aimed shot doesn't bone them out of autoshots, and they minimize the time spent casting autoshots that they'll never fire.
Good lord, why does this thread still live? Rogue mechanics not that hard nor particularly mysterious.
Main Hand - High damage range (usually slower speed) for maximizing Sinister Strikes/Backstab.
Off Hand - High DPS, Fast speed for poison application (and more Sword Spec procs).
That's it, end of discussion. Can we move onto something more interesting please?
I would take it hunters are more broken than rogues when it comes to normalization?
Well the "normalization" that affected hunters was very similar to the one that affected rogues and warriors. All hunter special attacks receive damage contribution from AP as if their weapon was a certain speed (2.7? 2.8?). The normalization had a bigger impact on the special damage output from slower weapons (e.g. the 3.4 speed BWL xbow). That wouldn't be that big of a deal, pick up a higher DPS weapon with a better damage range and a speed close to the normalization value, right? Wrong.
The biggest thing that bones hunters is that hunter specials (Aimed and Multi shots), unlike rogue specials (SS, BS, Hemo, etc.), interrupt the casting of their white damage (autoshot). Imagine if backstab was a 3 second cast, and during that cast you stopped performing autoattack, but as soon as backstab hit you would get *one* autoattack that would have happened during those 3 seconds.
Under those conditions, backstab would essentially be melee aimed shot, and you can see how you would lose a lot of white damage if the mechanic worked that way, especially with fast daggers and haste where you would have swung twice with each hand during those 3 seconds. That is what hunters are dealing with. They try to get around it by using a slow weapon that has just the right speed after haste that aimed shot doesn't bone them out of autoshots, and they minimize the time spent casting autoshots that they'll never fire.
Thanks that explains it very well. Not all of us play rogues and it helps to understand why certain loot choices are made by other members of the guild.
He probably just got confused, because slower weapons scale better with Crit (given that Lethality will affect the crits on the sinister strikes, etc, by a higher amount due to a higher range), and took that to mean that faster weapons scale better with AP.
As far as a "high damage range", the term is very misleading. I prefer the term "High Average Damage", a la Harbinger of Doom, because, while the average damage is higher than Blessed Qiraji Pugio, the damage's range spreads across an area that it 19 points lower. The only "gear difference" as far as faster weapons go is the poison bonus from the 3pc Bloodfang Bonus, which causes poisons to do about 25% more damage than they had done previously.
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
09/06/06, 7:45 PM
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