Grunge

General consensus over at the rogue dps spreadsheet is that bosses have around 7k-8k armor in TBC. (40%~~ or so?)
That might affect the value of the trinket a bit (-2.6k from sunder, 610 from FF, leaving us with 4k'ish~ instead 2k'ish armor.)
Also Icon has excessive hit rating which isn't that desirable by druids?

Fans glory to the Gladiators,
Gods glory to the Heroes.

 

Meddler

Yeah, the +hit isn't brilliant either, wouldn't rule out the Icon automatically though - it's still useful just not compared to a lot of the theoretical alternatives which are often hard to find on trinkets (strength, agility in particular).

Thanks for the heads up on boss armour, hadn't realised it'd still be quite that high fully debuffed. Gives us 25% reduction at 4000 and 22.1% at 3400, so a 3.9% increase (bit of rounding of course) still. Other thing to bear in mind I guess is that there are a few mobs with low/no AC around so it's also obviously a waste on those requiring you to carry an alternative option for such situations even if you feel the Icon's worthwhile.

 

Sheldong

I noticed a similar oddity tonight on our Karathress kill. I've selected the relevant info from the combat log. ( http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&fia=71&fiaa=t )

I think what we may seeing here is mangle stacking. I looked through Immortal's parse from an earlier post, and couldn't find a second mangle, so perhaps this is just coincidence. Does anyone have any other parses that might perhaps shed some light?

 

• Falk

Like I mentioned earlier in the thread, when it happens, it's because Mangle bonus is being awarded twice, yet there's only one Mangle debuff visible on the mob. I'm very sure of this. In other instances, the mangle debuff is on the mob, but Rip DOESN'T get its 30% bonus at all.

It happens more often* when you try to time your mangle to land right as the one on the mob is running out.

*(p.s. by 'more often' I mean still pretty damn rare, but it happens. Or maybe it seems more often because I'm looking out for it? Placebo effect and all)

 

ShadowKntSDS

I created a Monte-carlo style simulator for cat form damage, and verfied my general results with other spread sheets posted on this thread (they helped me get rid of 2-3 major bugs). A few thing were immediately obvious to me after testing a few runs:

* results were not very stable. When the run length was 10,000 seconds, DPS would vary +/-30 DPS between runs. I had to increase run length to 2mil seconds to get stable results. This does seem realistic condier how random the game is.

* small changes in start AP, crit, hit% etc were next to impossible to observe compared to the fluctuations between each run.

* behavioral changes (such as 4pt rip, saving to 81+ energy before rip/mangle) had a much smaller impact that I thought. Near optimal DPS (within 3-4%) could be had just applying mangle when it falls off, ripping at 5cp, and shredding otherwise.

After seeing that it would take 2m+ seconds of a run to get a "stable result", I decided to go for a true monte-carlo simulation where i do 10k runs, but have the run size more acurate with a real fight duration (I chose 10 minutes). I then average rthe results.

My plan now is to use this determine a correlation between crit%/hit% and average cycle length (i.e. #of shred/mangles per rip). That seems to me as the biggest wildcard in other simulators.

 

• Vykromond

It's this. Had this behavior yet again in SSC on Tuesday and the ratio of "unusually high Rip value" to "regular Rip value" was 1.295, consistent with a second application of Mangle on top of the first.

 

HaklePrime

Ok, nice theory, but explain this:

WWS

I'm the only feral in the raid. I had multiple tics of 800+ Rip, capping out at 885. (And I had to run all the way to the door to rez a rogue, but that's a small gripe! )

According to Dukes' AP/Rip chart, I'd need around 8500 AP to achieve that particular total. I clearly don't have that much AP, yet I see these levels of Rip tics every night.

 

• Vykromond

Actually, I didn't say you needed two ferals in the raid to have Mangle bug out and apply twice. In fact there's no particular reason to assume this is true; the "correct" behavior in both cases would be to only have one application of the Mangle debuff, and either or both could be bugging in some situations. Furthermore in cases of two ferals doing DPS I don't think both are frequently Mangling. I know I almost never cast Mangle when the other feral is also on DPS, but I do get "monster" Rips nonetheless.

Your "max" Rip tick over your "average" Rip tick is a coefficient of 1.376, once again suggesting (but not proving, yes) a 30% bump caused by Mangle deciding it was applied twice. I'm pretty sure Lossendil's "average" Rip tick is the mean, rather than the median, so your median value would actually be higher, bringing the coefficient closer to 1.3.

From falk's anecdotal evidence one possible programmatic explanation would be that after the visible Mangle debuff falls off, the "30% additional damage from bleed effects and Shred" bonus remains on the mob for some fractional period of time. If Rip, and a new Mangle, are applied during that time, you get a "monster" Rip.

We would need to see more logs (not just local WWS information) to confirm or deny the theory, I think.

 

HaklePrime

Was gonna blend this into my previous post, but it's kind of veering from the current point of discussion, so here we are.

I'm sure everyone has seen emmerald's item comparison page, and while it is mostly up to date at this point, one thing is still bugging me. While yes, each item is fairly accurately valued, per slot, that's just it; it's exclusively valuing each slot. In that context, it very clearly over-values +hit rating, as if you got each of the top items, or heck, any of the top 2 in each armor slot, you'd end up with well over the hit cap, and be 'wasting' item points.

That being said, does anyone have an ideal setup at this point? I think it's fairly clear that one would want to max out the +hit rating in our non-tier slots, in order to facilitate the amazing T6 4pc bonus, and simply due to the stat-driven high AP values on the T6 pieces. So, what do you shoot for?

The items that spring to mind, to me, as the best contributors in their respective slots, are:

[Nether Shadow Tunic]
[Insidious Bands]
[Belt of Deep Shadow]

Of these 3, only the Tunic occupy a Tier slot, one of them (the Bands) are the accepted 'best' in their slot, and the 3 combined provide nearly half of the 142 (?) hit rating required to cap out, and that's pre-sockets. After seeing these totals, and sighing with relief that the utter lack of hit rating on our Tier 6 isn't the end of the kitty-DPS world, I'm starting to re-think some gear choices, particularly rings and trinkets, for the near future, and it's not in a lamenting neglected mindset either

Just typing out loud . . .

 

• Vykromond

I just had a curious thought. In one of the feral druid threads (EDIT: yeah, uh, I meant this thread, ~10 posts above this one) on this forum we talked about the bug involving the Mangle visible debuff appearing on a mob at range "spontaneously" when you change target after Mangling a previous target.

Presumably the "spontaneously pulled" mob is gaining this debuff: Mangle - Spells - World of Warcraft

Could this issue- which is obviously a timing issue- be behind 'monster Rips,' as well?

 

ShadowKntSDS

I essentially cut and paste his item data into my own spread sheet, in which I have a column where i compare each item's value assuming I was hit capped. Even at my meager levels of AP and crit, Emmerald slightly undervalues AGI, so I also use my own stat values for crit/hit/AGI.

 

ShadowKntSDS

Here are my results, using varying crit rates, while hit capped. 25% != 3 shreds per rip due to dodge. I ignored AP values as it has nothing to do with your cycles. I have not yet modeled OOC or T4x2 procs. These were collected over 10xruns of 100k seconds.

crit% shred per rip
15 3.41
20 3.25
25 3.11
30 2.96
35 2.85
40 2.72
45 2.6
50 2.51

This seems fairly linear, at least close enough to extrapolate for inbetween crit rates. I'll try seeing what OOC and T4 procs do.

 

Valerian

After doing some math with my current gear (around 3k AP and 35% crit unbuffed) and a couple of the dps spreadsheets out there, it appears that keeping the Malorne 2 Set bonus is pretty much the best for DPS out of all the gear that is currently out there. Even taking 4 set T6 bonus into account, I get more DPS keeping the Malorne Shoulders/Chest than I do if I switch in the T6 pieces in those two slots.

The only flaw I can think of here is the calculation I did for malorne. It gives essentially 1 extra energy per second, which should increase your yellow dps by 10% since we normally generate 10 energy every second. I multiplied my current yellow dps by 10% to determine how much the malorne set added and then inputted values in the spreadsheet until I determined how much AP it required to match that 10% bonus which ended up being 336 AP. Even with the difference in stats between T6 Chest/Shoulders AND the 15% bonus to Rip, it only resulted in a 265 AP equivalent. Thats still a hefty difference, and Im wondering if I made any other errors so any confirmation here would be appreciated.

 

tunah

Malorne bonus does look very good. It's a little more complicated than 10% yellow damage since it can proc off yellow attacks and it affects your cycle.

Plugging your current gear into my sheet i get 965DPS unbuffed.
Switching the malorne helm/shoulders for Thunderheart (same gems/enchants, but awarding socket bonuses for the same pieces as not 100% sure how you'd adjust your gems) gives 927 before considering socket bonuses.

If it gave you 2pc thunderheart then that gives you 941dps.
If it gave you 4pc instead then i make that 955dps.

So yes, probably everyone should be wearing 2pc malorne. I'll have to pick up a second helm.

 

Jini

Just from a few minutes playing with WoWhead and my spreadsheet I came up with:
[Razor-Scale Battlecloak]
[Nether Shadow Tunic]
[Edgewalker Longboots]
[Band of Eternity] - Don't know how to link the right one, should be the DPS one.
[Ancestral Ring of Conquest]
[Thunderheart Gauntlets]
[Thunderheart Cover]
[Thunderheart Leggings]
[Telonicus's Pendant of Mayhem]
[Thunderheart Pauldrons]
[Ashtongue Talisman of Equilibrium]
[Madness of the Betrayer]
[Pillar of Ferocity]
[Don Alejandro's Money Belt]
[Insidious Bands]


My DPS numbers from gear/gems/enchants show as:
+3100 AP, +24% crit (+11 from skills), +8.54% hit, no feral weapon skill


I did the calculation using the revered Hyjal DPS ring 43 stamina, 29 agility, and 60 AP. I would obviously sub in the exalted one if I had it as it will be better, I hope.

This completely ignores the 2 pieces Malorne bonus. I would keep the Malorne shoulders and hat if I were to keep a 2 piece bonus.

I heavily favor any item with agility with my current rankings. I have to imagine there are better boots than Edgewalkers for cat DPS that I've missed somewhere.

I'm not too sure as to the Trinkets here, I went with Madness mainly due to the hit rating and Ashtongue because I needed to put something in the list. Crystalforged Trinket would be next on my list but I have great difficulty evaluating trinkets.

 

dukes

Surely for boots either the Feral crafted ones (if you need +hit) or the Treads of the Den Mother are better?

Bloodlust brooch > Ashtongue talisman btw. I think Tsunami talisman is better than either though (my choice would be Bloodlust + Madness though, I'm an AP whore).

I'm also pretty much certain that the Merciless Gladiator feral mace is better than the Pillar, as although it's 50 FAP short it's got 18 hit and 42 crit.

The 4t6 bonus outweighs the 2t4 imo. It's basically ~50-60 dps extra while Malorne is only ~25 iirc (and the extra stats are obviously a massive boost too). It also makes cycles more predictable.

My current DPS gear stats, unbuffed, are ~3050 AP, ~35% crit and ~7.1% hit, so I'm getting close. I need to replace [Primalstrike Belt] (still not seen either belt plan from SSC/TK yet although I have 10 vortexes ready for when either does, and the crafters on our server are charging ~2k just for vortexes so it's not worth getting) and get the Consortium exalted neck ([Haramad's Bargain] - 9k rep, my project for this weekend)) as all our healers have crap necks so they're getting priority on the Sphere (currently using [Choker of Serrated Blades] which isn't bad really). I could also do with a replacement for t4 chest, but it's not like the t4 chest is "bad". I might end up resocketing my T6 helm/shoulders eventually, as they currently have stam gems/tank enchants, but it's a bit of a waste atm (especially with 15 stam gems) when I'm primarily a tank.

Quite funny with bracers - replaced my Primalstrike with the Solarian ones yesterday as no-one wanted them, and then today the insidious dropped and no-one wanted them either so i ended up with a double upgrade. Rather good!

 

Glidi

I've hit a bit of a dilemma. Right now I'm sitting at about 2850 AP, 33.21% Crit, and 117 (7.48%) hit.

Recently I've acquired Skulker's Greaves and currently have them socketed with two +4hit, +4agi gems and a +8 str gem.
Would it be worth giving up some of the +8 str gems on my gear for +8 hit gems?

Also would Shapeshifter's Signet replacing
Overseer's Signet on boss fights make it so replacing gems wouldn't matter?

Lastly I have four trinkets right now. Bloodlust Brooch, Living Root of the Wildheart, Crystal Forged Trinket, and lastly Alchemist's Stone.

Which one would give the best dps result and would it depends on how much STR and AGI you had?

 

Boevis

No, Never. Personal Opinion on how annoying it is to miss specials not withstanding, +Hit Gems are worthless. If given the option, always take +8 Agi in every socket, even replacing the Agi/Hit ones, track down [Shifting Tanzanite][Enscribed Fire Opal][Etched Fire Opal][Glinting Fire Opal] if you absolutely need to socket for +hit (or any yellow/blue) I suppose a +4 str/agi socket bonus would be well worth putting a +4agi/- in for your blue/yellow as well.

I love the Shapeshifters Signet, in my eyes it's the best OT ring available. Better than Overseer's for DPS? no.

Crystalforged and Bloodlust are my trinkets of choice, I lack the Living Root so I've never tested it's procs but iirc from earlier in the thread it's kinda pathetic for strait DPS.

 

Glidi

Thanks for the help Boevis.

One last thing, with my stats right now would it be better to use Nordrassil Gloves or Windslayer Wraps?

 

Valerian

This fits quite well with what I suspected from Lolaan's spreadsheet. Also seems that the Helm/Shoulders are the best bet to keep. Kinda makes me mad I made the Engineering helm now since alone it is superior than the T4 one but all other things considered, Malorne Helm/Shoulders are the best tradeoff to keep the set bonus...

For pure DPS Edgewalkers are better than both Den Mother's and Natural Grace by about 6-10 AP equivalent.

Agreed

As posted above, my spreadsheet and tunah's seem to disagree. Malorne should be a much more significant increase in dps than 25 since it is a flat 10% increase in energy generation and our dps is energy limited.
Check out the new feral dps chest from the violet eye rep rewards. It needs to be crafted by a LW but its superior, dps wise, than the T5 chest.

The gloves off Attumen (Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation) are better dps wise than T5 or the Windslayer Wraps

 

Maratai

Valerian:

IMO, you are wrong. Den Mother are better in every way, incl. raw dps. Also, they have stats vs. AP, in a raid environment, you'll get even more out of them. Only possible way Edgewater compares would be with BT gems, if then.

Link to pic from PTR in another thread re: Violet eye patterns Valerian mentioned:

2.2 PTR Patch notes available

 

osirisunnefer

Pattern: Shadowprowler's Chestguard
Requires 365 LWing
Requires Revered with The Violet Eye

333 AC
32 Str
40 Agi
12 Sta
Red
Blue
Yellow
Socket Bonus: +4 Agi
Equip: +8 Hit Rating

Whats the point of a primalstrike vest (if you put in +8 str, +12 sta, +4 agi/+4 hit gems for the socket bonus) that scales with BoK and without tiered bonuses? It's not like we're desperate for more crit on our dps gear and with such low AC/Stam its useless as an OT avoidance chest piece.

 

Valerian

I had neglected Kings in my calculations. Using this I believe you are correct that Den Mother's are superior:

Den Mother:

38 Str
32 Agi

[top] 180.84 AP equiv (2.46 AP per Str, 2.73 AP per Agi, per the spreadsheet Im using)

Edgewalker:

29 Agi
2 sockets (16 Agi)
13 Hit
44 AP

184.4 AP equiv (1.35 AP per hit, same agi as above)

This is without kings. Edgewalkers are very slightly better with no kings and will be very slightly worse with kings (196.6 vs 198.9). With BT gems Edgewalkers are probably very slightly better even if you include Kings. That said, Den Mother's do have superior armor and Stam as well as some int so overall they are probably the better choice, I will concede that. Edgewalkers are better than the SSC pattern boots though (even with kings)

*shrugs* for DPS its a pretty sweet chest that available extremely early and on par with the T5 chest (I believe slightly better). I do agree its a strictly DPS piece but for the times where you are in a strictly DPS role it works quite well (and allows you to socket/enchant your set chest for tanking).

 

Quirm

I'm not sure about my calculations, but should not be 1agi = 1ap in cat form ?

Edgewalker:
+29 Agility
+16 Agility (from sockets)
+13 hit rating
+44 ap
_____________
+89 ap = 29agi + 16agi + 44ap
+13 hit
+1.8% crit = 45agi / 25

Den Mother:
+38 Strength
+32 Agility
_____________
+125 ap = 38str*2.47 + 32agi
+1.28% cirt = 32agi / 25

Correct me pls if i'm wrong.

 

Liar

You are correct that one AGI gives you only 1 AP. However when people talk about AP equivalents (admittedly, they sometimes leave the latter part out so it might be confusing) they are talking about how much 1 AGI is worth in AP.
This also includes the benefit of increased crit and higher chance to proc Primal Fury/reduced Rip cycle times so 1 AGI alot more worth than just the 1 AP it gives in your character panel.

Basically, going by your calculations above you would leave out the crit part in favor of higher AP equivalents. You can do it like you did of course, but having a base (being AP equivalents) makes comparing items ALOT easier - provided the equivalents are of course calculated correctly.