◊ Rob

OK, I figure this is where people who know about the hit table are reading, so I'll ask this here.

If I have expertise and it removes some Dodge chance, is that converted into Hit chance or something else entirely? For example, do those Dodges become misses and my effective hit cap is raised? Or does the size of the hit table shrink (say, from being 100% to 99% with X expertise, so now everything else is more likely to happen).

Or do we just have no idea at this point?

 

Nite_Moogle

Removal of dodge and parry will work just like removal of miss -- more hit.

 

reydien

At this point, everything is pure speculation based on the short description made in the PTR patch notes. This should change shortly after the test realms come up later tonight.

 

◊ Rob

Something I hadn't considered in my initial reaction was applying this to yellow attacks in addition to white attacks. If weapon skill rating is converted to expertise rating at a 1:1 ratio and the number of expertise rating to achieve one "point" of expertise is identical to WS rating:points, AND expertise reduces the dodge/parry chance of yellow attacks, then I will actually laud this change. Something tells me that not all of these things will pan out to be true, though. We'll see.

Hmm, thinking about it some more... can a mob dodge and/or parry from behind? I've heard that these are converted into "Miss"es and I've also heard that they can't occur, but I don't recall if I ever learned which of the three scenarios was true. My assumption up to now has been that mobs cannot parry attacks from behind, but they can dodge attacks from behind (and no conversion of parries->misses occurs).

 

Scritty

Mobs can dodge from behind.

 

Swiftwind

Expertise: We have added a new stat and associated rating called expertise and expertise rating. Expertise rating converts to expertise at the same rate that weapon skill rating formerly converted at. Each point of expertise reduces the chance for your attacks to be dodged or parried by 0.25%.

Weapon Skill: All items and abilities that granted weapon skill have been changed. In most cases, they were converted to expertise or expertise rating. Ranged attacks do not benefit from expertise, so ranged weapon skill has generally been replaced by critical strike bonuses or hit bonuses. In a few cases, talents have been changed to other effects to avoid granting players excessive amounts of expertise.



conversion to hit supposing to hit from behind (ignoring parry)
3.9 Weapon skill rating = 1 weapon skill = -0.25% dodged
15,6 weapon skill rating = -1% dodge
15,8 hit rating = +1% hit
Capped to -5.75% dodge = 23 skill = 89,7 rating (50,7 if weapon expertise keeps giving 10 pts)



Why it's insane
autoattack - til 5.75% it's same as +hit
finishers - if you have 41 combat is useless
specials - til 5.75% is gold.. only way to increase "hit chance"
basically til you have 5.75% -1 dodge gives approx the same as +2 (two) hit
so 1 weapon skill rating gives (til it's capped) the same dmg as almost 2 hit rating
IF you aren't standing behind (solo farming, bosses with adds, .. ) overall effect is just sick


"Rogue" items giving weapon skill rating and conversion to -dodge after patch:
[Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] 25 all = -1,60 dodge
[Shoulderpads of the Stranger] 10 dagger = -0,64 dodge
[Gloves of the Searing Grip] 18 all = -1,15 dodge
[Shapeshifter's Signet] 20 dagger = -1,28 dodge
[Grips of Deftness] 15 sword/mace/dagger = -0,96 dodge
[Fang of Vashj] 21 dagger = -1,34 dodge


additional consideration
considering it reduces parry as well, once you get it capped you can finally get out of shadows and stick hugging the tank in front


EDIT: humans/orcs racial modified, now gives 1% crit

 

acx

Most bosses have >10% chance to parry. You'll still want to attack from behind.

 

Ihmes

This propably means that all my loot distribution plans are destroyed. =)

I thought tanks should get the +5 skill from either brutalizer OR gauntlets of enforcement, but now it seems +skill no longer diminishes after the +5 skill... So basically those two items reduce dodge+parry for 10 (or does it round up to 11 from ratings?) 2*0,25*10= 5 % "hit", which also affects specials even after the hit cap. This also means that my +hit doesn't cap if the axe drops, if base miss chance against lvl73 still stays at 9% while wielding 1h+shield.

 

Kelestre

To the best of my knowledge Blizzard never rounds anything. They truncate.

For Weapon Skill that meant you would get 10 Weapon Skill, total, from those two items.

Expertise could work that same, but it could also take advantage of the decimal values meaning you'd gain 10.77 Expertise or 2.69% dodge/parry reduction (5.38% "hit" if you want to think of it that way).

If Expertise is truncated like Weapon Skill was, then it would be a flat 5% as you stated.

 

Exigent

WoW Forums -> Sigh, human racials are crit now

It seems that the human racial is now providing crit instead of expertise.

 

seminarca

I guess it's safe to assume Orcs will also get crit with Axes instead of Expertise.

 

Exigent

That is correct. I just verified on the PTR.

 

Dontmindme

Purely speculation, but I'm guessing one of the reasons they are moving to Expertise is that Weapon Skill was hard coded as an integer when the game was created and they had to inelegantly convert all weapon skill ratings to integers when they introduced the rating concept in the first expansion. Converting this existing variable to a floating point would have been a lot of extra work and would have caused a significant change to their data structure. Since they have decided to add a new stat, I see no reason why they wouldn't make this stat a floating point (i.e. allow decimal places).

The character screen does round stats, but I don't believe that the game itself uses the rounded numbers but rather utilizes the full floating point numbers as evidenced by the values returned on various UI function calls for haste rating and the like.

 

Oki

Can you tell me how +skill alters your chance to get an attacked blocked? Can crits be blocked? Blocked amount? (vs 73lvl)

 

• Cluey

I wouldn't worry about it now, the changes coming up will invalidate all of this brilliant testing.

Well done for sorting this out guys, I have a feeling the results of this testing is what prompted expertise rating.
That last point of weapon skill rating making suck a huge difference never felt right, I guess the combat guys at Blizzard never nutted this out like you guys did.

 

• squiffy

That, or they did state not so long ago they wanted to revise the "raid boss parry insta-gib" thing and maybe this goes a way to addressing that.

I like yours better though Cluey

 

Mideci

Um, they do something else. As a human on my other toon, I find I get alternating rep amounts when I should get 82.5 for instance I get some 82s and some 83s... (75 rep for non-humans.).

So at least in one mechanic, they are doing a bit more than a straight truncate.

 

Icharis

Hi Guys,
So I have been looking through this forum as everyone else has to see how this change impacts our dps as melee players and a little light bulb went off in my head when I saw
there are two formulas to calculate miss rate.

I know this is against some forums rules but this is some speculation.
When it takes two formulas to explain a response (miss rate, parry rate, etc) this is usually a sign that there is some level of interaction between causes and it looks like this might be occurring. Has anyone done any type of analysis to see if hit rating and expertise rating are independent? I would highly suspect that there is some interaction between these two things.
I am including a link in wikipedia explaining what an interaction is

Interaction (statistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


If someone has a good reference data set that I can be pointed to that has varying combinations of hit rating and expertise rating on the same mob maybe I can do some analysis and see if this is true.


I am hoping we have some stats gurus wandering these forums that can correct any of my mistakes.

Thanks for not kicking me out of the forums….
Icharis

 

sp00n

1) What two formulae do you mean?
2) I don't believe that there is some sort of interaction between hit rating/miss and expertise/dodge/parry. White melee hits are on a one-roll system, so each stat is independent of each other (you could have 100% hit through hit rating and would still see dodges), and yellow special attacks are on a two-roll system, where first it is determined if the attack lands at all, and then if it is a crit or a hit. Again, dodge and miss are independent on the first roll.

What kind of interaction would you expect, resp. what caused you to think about it? More misses = more dodges? More misses = less dodges?

 

Icharis

The two equations I was referring to were the one you made back in post 500.
Aldriana I think was on the right track about the lack of linearity in the results we are seeing but that the formula was more complicated and may not be worth the time and effort for such a similar end result.

I am a bit of a perfectionist and power gamer and would love to find out the ideal numbers to carry in hit and expertise. So this really might be at a point that we are splitting hairs.

I do not really have access to a raid group on the PTR to test these theories but if someone has a data set I can play with I would love to give it a shot.
I would need both hit and expertise levels for each attack.

 

Nalisol

This thread was about the effects of weapon skill on a character. I'm reasonable certain that we solved the correct formula(s) for miss rates with regards to weapon skill and hit rating. That's done, there's nothing left to be said. It's also moot since Blizzard is effectively removing weapon skill from the game.

Expertise is a completely new stat that explains itself pretty well. It does not interact at all with hit rating. Hit rating reduces your chance to miss. Expertise reduces your chance to get dodged or parried.

 

Legorol

First of all, I have read through the entire thread to the best of my ability, and it's a very nice read. I am very impressed by the quality and attitude of testing that went into this.

I have looked over the whole forum and didn't find my answer, and it looks like this may be the best thread to ask: what is the currently accepted ball-park figure for the dodge/parry/block rate of a level 73 mob? I realise that testing out the actual numbers is very difficult, so I am just looking for rough values.

So far here are the (contradictory) answers I found:
- Wowwiki still claims 5.6% on dodge/parry/block, but I'm assuming this is still based on the old theory of 0.04 per skill. Since that was not the case for miss, I assume it's not the case for dodge/parry/block either.
- Several posts in this thread where testing was done against 73s had parry figures significantly higher than that.
- Several posters just made blanket statements that boss parry rates are > 10%.

So I ask, what are the current best-known/best-guess values for dodge/parry/block rates?

(I am hoping this is not entirely off-topic, since expertise will be taking off from those values, it's nice to know how much there is to take off from in the first place.)

 

Dontmindme

My best guess is 6.5% dodge and 13.0% parry for bosses. (I haven't really looked at block)
This is based on looking at WWS reports for bosses with few channeling effects showing about 6% dodge and 12% parry. Since dodge seems to go 0.1% per weapon skill or 0.5% per level, continuing the trend gives 6.5%. Assuming the small amount of channeling has a proportional effect on parry (and given the rate seems double the dodge), I put parry at 13%.

I believe the dodge number can get pinned down to the nearest 0.25% with Expertise testing. I suspect serious testing will begin when the changes are finalized and go live.

Although, to be honest, these numbers are just educated guesswork.

 

Punscho

I collected a couple of thousand hits (about 3000) versus bosses and that data suggests about 6/6/12% dodge/block/parry. I stopped raiding before I could get better numbers though.

 

Dontmindme

Did you take into account the reduction for channeled casts? I.e. that a boss cannot dodge, block or parry during those, or were the combat logs parsed for those?

I'm asking this because we may be talking differences in semantics. Here's what I mean...

The observed dodge/block/parry is about 6%/6%/12% against bosses that have few casts (like Gruul), I agree with these numbers, but this is based on what I believe to be a 6.5%/6.5%/13% rate where about 10% of the time a typical boss, like Gruul, cannot block, dodge or parry due to channeling various effects (in Gruul's case Shatter). The distinction is important because Expertise will reduce the 6.5%/13% not the 6%. In essence, you will not see a total 0.25% drop per skill (more like 0.22 or 0.23%) against bosses that channel very little.

This theory can explain why Netherspite, for example, has much lower than expected dodge, block and parry rates. This is because he's constantly casting, either opening the portals or breathing at the party. Theoretically, you would see less observed reduction in dodges and parries with Expertise vs. Netherspite than you would vs. Gruul since half the time, he cannot dodge/parry/block. In fact, Netherspite might be a good test for the casting theory. Stack close to the required Expertise and see if Netherspite truly acts like a 72 or if in fact he's a 73 that casts a lot.