Sorry for contributing nothing meaningful to the discussion, but I've been following the thread intently and the mental image of the high priest of a primal god being slowly beaten to death by a walking tree and two men with rusty swords was just hilarious.
On a more relevant note, 40 minutes with a 1.5 weapon on autoattack would yield around... 1600 attacks? Do you have any promising evidence yet or is it too early to be sure?
We're going for over 10 000 swings before saying anything conclusive. Anything less would have a pretty significant margin of error. Runs on Venoxis are lasing about 40-60 minutes depending on how quickly we kill the snakes, so it'll be a while yet.
Well, we got up to 8000-ish swings on both Paladins when we had a weapon break at some point, and we're too f'in tired to find where it was in the combat log tonight. We shall continue tomorrow night after the raid.
From what I could see – and this is very, very preliminary – it's looking like weapon skill from a DPS perspective is at least roughly on par with an equally weighted combination of Hit and Crit Ratings, but it also digs into Dodges that Hit Rating can't touch. Jury's still out on the tanking perspective, since we got some bizarro results with Parry on individual 45-60 minute runs at Venoxis, but we'll see if the combined log helps shed some light on that mystery.
I have my own test, but the numbers show nothing new...
I went and wacked level 60s using auto-attack only with 350 Weapon Skill for a bit. Same result as Punscho, no dodges and no parries. This time I used daggers, so there's no stunning getting in the way either. Targets were various level 60 humanoids in Hellfire Peninsula.
Then to make sure that the level 62 test wasn't just the mobs that was fighting that one time, I went and attacked some level 62 Orcs outside of SH.
Weapon Skill 360, Maces (with mace spec)
218 Attacks
212 Landed
0? Miss (I don't have any written down when I copied the data by hand out of recap. Doesn't really matter anyway.)
6 Parry
0 Dodge
So it wasn't just the mobs I was fighting last time. 350 Skill on 60s is not the same as 360 Skill on 62s.
Here are the raw results from our tests on the PTR. I am Theras's guild member that had to heal his sorry ass.
Therasiv had 3 more agi than Beaglej. This should result in a 0.12% higher crit and 0.12% less hit for Therasiv. Therasiv is at 365 weapon skill and Beaglej is at 350 weapon skill. All other stats identical.
Beaglej's results:
196 crits, 3933 hits, 396 blocks, 2030 glances, 692 misses, 419 dodges, 1016 parries, 8682 total attacks
415263 damage, 47.830339 damage per swing
272925 hit damage, 69.393593 hit damage per swing
105224 glance damage, 51.834483 glance damage per swing
2.258% crits
45.301% hits
4.561% blocks
23.382% glancings
7.971% misses
4.826% dodges
11.702% parries
Therasiv's results:
327 crits, 4845 hits, 442 blocks, 2369 glances, 521 misses, 323 dodges, 1148 parries, 9975 total attacks
533359 damage, 53.469574 damage per swing
347863 hit damage, 71.798349 hit damage per swing
127203 glance damage, 53.694808 glance damage per swing
3.278% crits
48.571% hits
4.431% blocks
23.749% glancings
5.223% misses
3.238% dodges
11.509% parries
Tentatively, it looks like weapon skill has a great effect on crits, hits, and reducing dodges, but had no effect on glancings and parries. And your data seems to fix the new glancing rate at around 18~19% instead of the previously postulated ~24%.
All in all, this is great info. WTB weapon skill :P
Crit Difference is .793%, corrected to .673% to account for agi gap, with a std dev of .188%. Hence, with a high degree of confidence, the true number lies within 1.041 and .305. Assuming the skill difference is 15 as previously asserted, the true crit per skill number lies between .02% and .06%.
Same calculation for hit: hit per skill lies between .106% and .181%.
Same calculation for dodge: dodge reduction per skill lies between .053% and .112%.
Conclusion? Well, the first one is that the data set would need to be about 5 times larger to really pin this down with much accuracy. But .04% crit per skill looks pretty good, .1% hit is now on the outliers, and dodge has the look of some oddity like .08%
Crit Difference is .793%, corrected to .673% to account for agi gap, with a std dev of .188%. Hence, with a high degree of confidence, the true number lies within 1.041 and .305. Assuming the skill difference is 15 as previously asserted, the true crit per skill number lies between .02% and .06%.
Same calculation for hit: hit per skill lies between .106% and .181%.
Same calculation for dodge: dodge reduction per skill lies between .053% and .112%.
Conclusion? Well, the first one is that the data set would need to be about 5 times larger to really pin this down with much accuracy. But .04% crit per skill looks pretty good, .1% hit is now on the outliers, and dodge has the look of some oddity like .08%
On the dodge thing. With parry not moving at all, maybe they decided to combine he dodge/parry change into just dodge for weapon skill. So it is sort of like the anti-defense of 0.04% of parry and dodge, but instead takes that 0.08% totally from dodge. Maybe for pvp reasons? Maybe not everything parries, but they didn't want weapon skill to be diminished just because you happened upon an opponent with only dodge? It would make sense.
Oh, and I suggested to Theras that we should have been trying for a 100k swing set, but 10k would be a good start. The fact that we kept getting Venoxis to phase 2 kinda sucked.
Might also have to do with melee DPS attacking from behind, meaning mobs aren't parrying but can still dodge. This would imply different intended effectiveness for tanks versus DPS though.
Well, dodge is a guarantee, universally. Parry is not. So it means they wanted weapon skill to be universally at full potency in all situations by making it double affect dodge and not touch parry. Both of you give good examples of that effect for both mobs and players.
It would also probably explain why blocks are not affected, even though defense does change blocks. My question is, where is the extra 0.1% crit they were supposedly adding when they removed +weapon skill's effect on glancings?
Conclusion? Well, the first one is that the data set would need to be about 5 times larger to really pin this down with much accuracy. But .04% crit per skill looks pretty good, .1% hit is now on the outliers, and dodge has the look of some oddity like .08%
I'm not exactly the math guy here, that's Dolphin (I'm just the monkey with 2 computers and a dream), but I'll take a stab at these results. Let's assume this is correct for a moment and examine the ramifications of weapon skill.
1 weapon skill rating would then yield approximately +0.01% crit, +0.026% hit, and -0.021% dodge. So that's about +0.047 "hit" (hit + dodge) and 0.01 crit.
1 crit rating gives you 0.045% to crit.
1 hit rating gives you 0.063% to hit.
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So let's say you had a choice of 100 skill rating, or 50 hit rating and crit rating.
Option 1 would give you 4.7% more to hit and 1% to crit.
Option 2 would give you 3.15% to hit and 2.25% to crit.
Balancing it as 78/22 hit/crit would be 4.91% to hit and 0.99% to crit.
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If those numbers are correct, would it be safe to say that weapon skill is only useful if you're near the hit rating cap and can only gain from the reduction in dodges?
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Edit: Dolphin has informed me that I suck dicks at math. Fuck me.
Last edited by Theras : 05/21/07 at 1:54 AM.
Reason: Dick suckin'
The wiki, for what it's worth, claims that the hit penalty for each point of target defense beyond your own skill + 10 is doubled. SO supposedly the first 5 points of skill vs. 73s is worth a lot more.
Does anybody know where the theory on the wiki comes from?
I think they turned it into hit.
If you assume they added 0.1 % chance to hit per skill v bosses and moved the effect of anti parry to anti dodge, the total effect of one point of weaponskill versus a skull mob would be
0.04 crit
0.14 Hit
0.08 antidodge
Which would fit the data very neatly.
Re: relative utility.
The values per rating point are very close and weapon skill is the only way to reduce dodges.. I'd stack weapon skill as high as drops allow (without hanging onto gear which is tiers old..) and fill to the hit cap with gems.
If those numbers are correct, would it be safe to say that weapon skill is only useful if you're near the hit rating cap and can only gain from the reduction in dodges?
Well, I generally resist making blanket statements of that sort. I mean, it's a matter of tradeoffs; even if weapon skill is point for point worse than some other mod, the itemization is such that sometimes it's worth getting anyway. Example: whether you're near the hit cap or not, Belt of One Hundred Deaths is *way* better than any other belt accessible. So the real question is: how does it convert to EAP or AEP or whatever your favorite theorycraft conversion factor is? Well, tweaking paramaters in the Rogue Gear Spreadsheet a bit, I find that the EAP (that's Effective Attack Power, for the record) value of sword skill rating, in the gear I'll be wearing after 2.1, is 1 skill rating = 2.39 AP (assuming .04 crit .1 hit .08 dodge). Compare to, for instance, 2.71 for hit and 1.63 for crit rating. So, point for point, hit is better (until the hit cap) and crit is worse.
Tentatively, it looks like weapon skill has a great effect on crits, hits, and reducing dodges, but had no effect on glancings and parries. And your data seems to fix the new glancing rate at around 18~19% instead of the previously postulated ~24%.
All in all, this is great info. WTB weapon skill :P
I know what this thread is about, but..... glancing at 18-19% instead of 40%!!!!!! Woot is all I can say!
The wiki, for what it's worth, claims that the hit penalty for each point of target defense beyond your own skill + 10 is doubled. SO supposedly the first 5 points of skill vs. 73s is worth a lot more.
Does anybody know where the theory on the wiki comes from?
If you look at the wiki's history, that theory is from before 2.0. It was definitely wrong then, there's no reason to give it any credence now. Consider the EJ forums to be more up to date than wow wiki. =)
6.2% misses against a boss type mob with 350 skill., that's 0.6 more than expected.
Seems the old values don't apply here anymore as well and could shed some light on the now assumed 25.5 miss rate instead of 24.6 with dual winding.
I took a grab at that 18mb log file (clicky) this morning ... wrote a quick batch parser to get through the hassle. %1 is the file to be parsed, %2 "boss name". example call: parser.bat WoWCombatLog.txt "Lady Vashj"
Glancing blows is white damage and therefore a fraction of ALL swings, meaning hit, crit, glancing, parry, dodge, miss.
Thus your result of 20.81% is correct.