Viator

Yeah, I can see that argument. Plus there's no guarantee SS is going to be up with rogues and my Poison Vial eating charges. I just wrapped up a Karazhan clear and actually led with flamestrike; my numbers were about the same.

Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork

 

Myul

Don't just check out the maxdamage, there is also a mindamage you should have a look at. Some sources claims, gladiator weapons could reach 97.5 dps - if it's true you can add another 10 maxdamage to it (and it's still superior, because it has a bunch of stamina and a nice +hit giveaway).

I would only take a look at blacksmithing with another upgrade, possible from hyal reagents, putting 'em around 105 dps (yes, Hyal/BT weapons need a little upgrade!)

Oh, just respecc to 40/0/21 or 0/0/61 for pvp 5on5 and enjoy spending 70g per week, as protwarriors and some other classes have to do so, to. Gold shouldn't matter anymore with those daily quests. Skettis, 15 minutes for over 20g and 2-3 pots, worthy another 10-15g... and so on.

 

• Disquette

Yeah, especially when you get gems like this in actual testing:

http://elitistjerks.com/attachment.p...3&d=1181615495

I challenge anyone to come up with a consistent explanation for how flurry is working there. There's no spreadsheet, simulator, or theory that can give you correct answers when we *know* that we can't explain how the game actually works.

I'm considering dropping my dps simulator altogether because of how bugged out flurry is.

 

• Juice

What's wrong with determine an average % of weapon cooldowns that are impacted by Flury and going from there? That average is tied to crit rate, so as crit rate goes up the average % of cooldowns impacted by flury go up.

 

• Disquette

In part it's because we, especially as shaman, are impacted a lot by converting actuals to averages. I've thought about saying in the dps calc, "flurry gives 4 charges", but a lot of times that will be wrong, and that will have the snowball/butterfly effect.

The other part, and this is much more pertinent to my involvment personally in this matter, is that the game isn't working like it should. I don't like modeling things that don't work without rules. It is pretty hard for me to say "well, that model looks right, but I'll never be able to test it because I'm fudging numbers".

Just in the 3 recent attachments so far, here are the crit and number of flurried attacks they produce:

http://www.discofiend.com/wow/Shaman...finitive_3.jpg
(1 crit, 5 flurried attacks = 5 count scenario)

http://www.discofiend.com/wow/Shaman...definitive.jpg
(3 crit, 11 flurried attacks = 3.67 count scenario)

http://www.discofiend.com/wow/Shaman...finitive_2.jpg
(4 crit, 13 flurried attacks = 3.25 count scenario)

You get a better sense of why you don't want to approximate when people start making gear choices based on your formulas. You don't want to be responsible for inadvertently screwing with people's time and effort for something that "maybe looks kinda ok", which is how I'd describe it at the moment.

 

• Juice

I guess I have a different outlook on it. I see your approach as the more exact scientific, and my approach as the 80/20 engineering approach. If you have to get a +/- 10% number, I think my approach will work well enough. However, you're the one putting time into it, so you certainly have to do it your way.

I think I would not worry about the number of charges Flurry is supposed to have, or actually has. Rather, I'd take 10,000 swings and dump the combat log into excel. I'd calculate the swing delay and then sort the data accordingly and count the number of flurried swings as a % of the overall swings. I'd do this at 15% crit, 20% crit, 25% crit, and perhaps 30% crit if you have the gear to hit it. From those data points I'd look for a relationship between the two, and the would be that. Crit and Flury would be related. Then, just modify dps on any given weapon by the anticipated flurry impact (increase dps appropriate to the % of cooldowns impacted by flurry for a given crit rate).

Is it perfect? No, but it's probably pretty reasonable. But I don't blame you if you don't want to mess with it.

 

• Disquette

The main thing I dislike about your suggestion is "it's still wrong"

The main thing I like about your suggestion is "it's a lot better than what I have now".

 

• Juice

Lots of things in life aren't perfectly understood, but are understood well enough to work well. I was surprised to learn that aircraft wings and the corresponding turbulent flow of air over them cannot be accurately calculated. Rather, they build the wings (based on years of experience building wings) and then test them for their actual performance.

 

Pater

Disquette, would it be helpful to have a mod that added a line in the combat log whenever the flurry count changed? I think I could whip one up pretty easily. That way you could have time stamps and such for testing.

My guess is that the issue is granularity. The game has some flurrycount update frequency, and if you get 2 or more swings in that window, then you don't lose charges.

 

panny

Terrifying.

 

Nite_Moogle

Sounds a lot like winging your itemization based on theories involving minimizing the total number of windfury cooldowns and parsing your damage after the fact.

 

Malan

On a total side note, can everyone update their profile with their armory link so that we don't have to go searching through it to look at someone's gear? (Especially for the Euro guys)

Ninja Edit - for those that asked/responded to the FS/ES rotation I mentioned on the page before: As Moogle said, if CoE is up, Flameshock will be doing surprisingly good DPS. I use FS before ES because if you open with ES that's 6 seconds of waiting initially that ES could have been ticking. Its also a bit safer than risking getting a 1300 ES crit in the first 2-3 seconds of being on a mob.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

• Juice

Emperical testing at it's finest

 

Pater

I whipped up a mod that prints a message in the combat frame when the flurry state changes. Only problem is that the message is not recorded in the WowCombatLog.txt file. I'm using the command ChatFrame2:AddMessage("...") to do it right now, but clearly that won't work. Anyone know if it's possible to do what I'm trying here?

 

Stigmata

I'm sure the warlocks/shadow priests are delighted with curses getting knocked off by flame shock amongst other things.

 

• Disquette

the alternative would be to push all combat events into the chat log, use /chatlog (I'm guessing, I've never used it, but i know they added it), and send a tell to yourself every time it changes. Those should get recorded. I've done mods where the tells are sent based on events, but never written anything to the combat log. I was curious how you were going to work that

 

Nite_Moogle

Not any more so than they are by stormstrike knocking them off.

 

Pater

/chatlog doesn't work, just tried that. Sending all combat log events to myself via whispers might do it, though. There would be double lines, so it might be easier to whisper another account, or /say it, unless there's some kind of spam-blocker that prevents such things.

I also considered sending everything to a custom frame that can be highlighted and copied to clipboard, but not sure how to do that.


edit: it's working with /say. This method is going to be much more susceptible to latency and server lag problems, but might help out for testing.

 

Pater

Here's the mod, if Disquette or anyone else wants to use it to test flurry.
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...FlurryLog.html


Here's a sample of the output:

 

Ardonomus

What I'm seeing is that Wicked Edge of the Planes got 5 less min damage then the current Gladiator's cleaver, but it's got a massive 58 more max damage, and it's 0.10 sec slower which, as I understand it, is good for us. I guess if the new Gladiator weapons will have ~10 more min damage and 20 more maxdmg then the current one, it's worth it over the massive grind for blacksmithing.

Can't wait to see

 

• Disquette

Very cool Pater - thanks

edit - Hm, actually, i need to wait for it to be approved before DL'ing it apparently. Soon enough, soon enough.

 

Pater

I looked back to try to figure out how you were getting flurry count before, and can't find it. Your spreadsheets are showing flurry counts, but I can't see how you got them.

I find this stretch really interesting:
Now, I may be throwing stuff off because I have same-speed weapons. But it looks like the game does not update flurry count very frequently. It also seems to give the benefit to the player a hit and a crit come at the same time--no matter which is reported first, it's letting you out of the pair with 3 flurries up.

But as we see at the very end, 2 simultaneous hits only consumed 1 flurry charge... Perhaps same-speed weapons give six, rather than four, flurries?

 

panny

Pretty simple really:

Earth Shock: 675
Earth Shock with Stormstrike Debuff: 810
Flame Shock: 797

Even with SS debuff, ES barely beats out FS. With CoE and/or Imp. Scorch, it's a no brainer. I try use ES right after SS to avoid an ES without SS debuff (consumed by Romulo's Poison Vial, Lightning Shield, Instant Poison, or whatever).

 

◊ Rob

See, I see it as Flame Shock: 377 + completely random amount... because there's no way that debuff isn't getting knocked off on a 25 man. (On a 10 man, you're probably right that you can expect the full damage, but then you may not have the scorch debuff and/or curse of elements). To each his own, I suppose

 

• Disquette

I got flurry count by frapsing all the tests, and going line by line in the combatlog and frame by frame on the fraps, merging them in excel. Needless to say, your method is much nicer, assuming the lag isn't too bad for the next server message back and forth with the time stamp.

I agree that it seems to group results, but not quite like you said it. Check out this log:
http://www.discofiend.com/wow/Shaman...definitive.jpg

It grants the flurry from the crit at the top, but later does send the message "oh, wait, you need to lower the flurry count as well" before any further hits happen. This is what's so infuriating - I can't come up with a pattern that's consistent with all combat logs on how to group them.

For a while i was trying "any hits within 0.5 seconds of each other group as a single for the purposes of flurry reduction, but that fell apart too, under scrutiny.

Also, you *can* have a scenario where you go from a 0 flury count straight to a 2 flurry count - it never hits the 3 flurry upper limit, because the reduce and "give him three" happen simultaneous. I don't think i posted that log, but it happened. Well, maybe it didn't happen if my OnUpdate() function in the game screen received two messages spaced apart from the server, but got rolled into the same frame of video output.