Reservoirdog

Maybe i am missing something in your post, and if so i appologize, but this thread is talking about BLUE caster gems. Neither spell crit or spell dmg fill a blue slot, so i dont understand your post. also the statment of spell crit being inferior to spell dmg is false. This is not a linear function, and thusly the % of dps increase of 5 spell damage is not a constant. The more spell dmg you have the less % of dps increase u get from 1 additional spell dmg. Although +dmg gives dimishing returns, crit will produce a constant % of dps increase. If you need more info on this check my post on the thread "[shaman} relentless earthstone for ele".

 

galzohar

While it isn't a linear fuction, it is incredibly close to being one at almost any level of gear - the smaller the gear level gap the closer it is to being linear. In practical terms, damage VS crit is very very close to linear I would never really bother checking if their ratio changed until I upgrade to full T6 or something... Upping my spell damage from no pots to flask+food+wizard oil (all add flat spell damage) the crit->damage conversion value only changes by ~0.02 (or less? I forgot). This is nothing and the different of sclaing of crit vs damage at different gear levels can be almost safely ignored.
So yes, you can say 4 crit is inferior to 5 spell damage and if you are correct for him (which I bet it is for shamans too), it will be correct for probably 99.9% of the raiding shamans, and the 0.1% remaining shamans probably suck anyway due to having some kind of extreme gear setup which would only be possible with crappy gear...

 

Reservoirdog

As i agree with you for the most part, and unless i am mistaken, the poster i was responding to was comparing 9 spell dmg gems to 4 crit 5 dmg gems. I would have to do the math, and you may be right that it would take an impossible amount of +dmg to make the 4 crit add more dps than 5 dmg(especially since 4 crit is about .2 crit%), but nevertheless, dmg does give dimishing returns and crit does not. Thusly, if it is possible to get high enough +dmg to make 4 crit give more dps than 5 dmg, then adding 9 dmg gems is just a waste.
I guess i just dont like people who post absolutes. Also, crit is very very very important to ele shammy for mana conservation, so even if the crit doesnt do more dps, it can add sustainability, which in turn adds dps in raids.

P.S. did u check out my post on the other forum, i would like to know if my math is fairly accurate when comparing crit to dmg. thanks

 

galzohar

Crit does have diminishing returns. Going from 150% to 151% crit isn't the same relative upgrade as going from 120% crit to 121%. Just like going from 1000 spell damage to 1200 is not the same as going from 500 to 600. The difference, however, is not big especially when you're talking end games numbers of +damage and crit chance.

The DPS fuction (neglecting hit for a sec here) is (a*dmg+b)*(c*crit+d) as you can see both are linear functions, however the change in DPS per damage point hardly changes if you change crit by a bit and the change in DPS per crit rating point hardly changes when you change your spell damage by a bit.

Adding 1% to DPS for example (which requires at least 1 item upgrade if not 2+) from pure spell damage increases the value of your crit by 1%. That means if you needed 25 crit rating for 1% damage increase, you will now need 25*100/101=24.7524 crit rating per 1% DPS increase. Notice that it's also very close to 25*.99=25.74 as when you're close to 100%, going from 101% to 100% is almost the same as going from 100% to 99%. Using these sort of things make a lot of calculations much easier and faster. So basically if an item adds 1% dmg through crit and 1% damage through dmg it would add 1.01*1.01=1.0201 or 2.01% dmg increase. An item that only gives 2% dmg increase through spell damage would give 2% dmg increase. I afford myself to safely ignore the 0.01% dmg there becuase it's completely meaningless and only look at the linear form of the dps equasion after putting in my current stats. And as you can see the values of crit vs dmg would remain similar the closer you are in damage/crit to the one who calculated, and you will see you need to be very very far off of the person whose values were used to get significantly different values.

You can do similar for much bigger increases - even as much as 10% dmg from crit and 10% dmg from dmg which is completely impractical upgrade as it requires insane amount of gear chahge, and if you treat it as linear your error is still going to only be evaluating your DPS increase by 1% too low if you ignore the non-linear factor. With 2.5% and 2.5% with 5% total which is again multiple major upgrades your error is as low as 0.0625%

 

Totemologist

The conversation is straying a bit off topic, I think the original question is (as best it can be) answered. As for the choice of me selecting crit over damage? I don't have an issue with my short term output, I took up LW and stack some additional crit for longevity (via clearcasting) while raiding. Now that my guild has completed kara/gruuls and is moving into Mag/SSC I can adjust my +Dam up as needed. For right now Crit works for me, I don't fall behind on output and more importantly I don't run oom.

I originally posted to see if I had made a PvE error in selecting spell penetration as an aspect of my socketing, it seems that I indeed had. I can easily resocket the items with the dam/stam gems and keep the bonuses that I like.


Thanks again for the insight, and if anyone has more info or experience with Spell Penetration in regards to PvE please share.

 

cladnin

Didn't read this whole thread, but searched the first 6ish pages for another penetration thread and found none, so I'm posting here.

Penetration of any use on Supremus? Our mages clocked around 16% partial resist on him tonight, all of course fire. No that he is hard even with 4 fire mages, but negating some resists would be quite useful, and there is no way you would respec for him. The dps loss was quite hefty. We kept COE up and such, but still mad resists. Any real testing/data on PVE mobs and penetration?

 

◊ Oggie

This is sort of the whole point here. While of course at some point 1 crit rating will outshine 1 more +damage that's not reasonably something that's going to happen for pure sustained dps so don't worry about it.

However, 1 crit rating being better than 1 +damage because of sustainability issues and overall providing more dps, now that might be a number worth calculating (or an equation worth talking about). In the meantime fit to your own stuff.

Indeed, but it's been corrected and looks like you know what's what.

As discussed on page 2 of this 3 page thread, yes, it does look like he parses up to a fairly significant amount of fire resist. According to Roywyn his calculations put Supremus at around 97 FR after CoE, so you might actually want to put on a penetration piece or two for him (or better yet, consumables, Hi Empowerment) as Darkchani did and get a signifcant bump.

While the thread is derailed, I could swear I've read somewhere (and referenced numerous other places) that binary-based spell -resist can somehow overcome level based resists. I want to say this is completely insane and never worked, but for some reason I honestly recall hearing it from a somewhat-reputable source. To be fair at the time I thought wowwiki was reputable though, so let's not get crazy here.

Anyone able to step in and say 'yeah, I read that too, got disproved'? It's not overly relivant except as a potential stat for affliction locks (or, alternatively SPs) and I suspect it would come out to be significantly less advantagious than simply socketing another +dam gem, but figured it might be worth asking.

 

Pheroz

Check out some WWS parses. Non-biinary spells have around 4% mitigation (give or take given a small statistical sample). Frostbolt always has 0% mitigation. ALWAYS.
Now, obviously, a frostbolt affected by the small level basd resistance would have to be a full resist and show up as a "miss", but I, and others, haven't noticed Frost mages experiencing a higher then expected miss rate.

It would take a lot of logs and a lot of statistic combining to get definitive, but it appears as tho binary spells are exempt from the level based resists.

 

◊ Oggie

The first part is obviously a result of binary resists simply not being partially resistable (I know that's redundant), so isn't relivant to this at all.

Where that gets interesting is that you're implying that instead of a breakdown of 1% full resist + 4% in partial resists for a 5% total vs a 5% total for binary spells (assuming full hitcap of course) that frost spells are performing at 1% full resist while hitcapped?

Or am I reading what you're saying wrong? This is really not the way I'm remembering this working.

 

Ramielle

Someone made reference to vulnerability earlier, but didn't explicitly state it.

Prior to patch 1.9, there used to something called vulnerability bonuses on spells. These were essentially the opposite of partial resists. This caused a number of problems.

Firstly and probably most importantly, vulnerabitly could cause up to 4x damage and had the ability to stack with criticals. So, at the time when shadowbolts were hitting for 8-900, you could literally be seeing hits for over 9000 counting full vulnerability and berzerking buff. Note: the Drakonoids in BWL would buff themselves with an ability that slightly raised their resistance to all schools of magic and reduced their resistance to one school by 400~ish.

Secondly, the stat scaled absurdly very well. Not being a warlock, I can only recall being quoted that this was roughly 17% nerf to Curse of Elements/Shadows (hopefully someone can verify) even counting the +10% damage change to CoE/S. Assuming this is correct, it means that using today's socketing, spell penetration would be roughly 10 times more effective per item point that spell critical strike rating. Without the nerf, it would have been *the* stat to stack, no question.



Basically, post 1.9 patch resistance went from a PvE and PvP spell to a purely PvP spell. It allowed them to slot it into gear more freely (if you look, 1.9 brought in AQ gear, which was much more liberal on spell penetration) to counteract resistance gear that was being used in BGs (remember, all tier1 and 2 and many blues had resistances on them).

 

tha_bishop

Nice, gives me a way better view of it

 

Snidelyw

The ghosts just inside the side entrance to Kara have a lot of shadow resist, and doesn't Shade of Aran have high resistances to everything as well?

 

Moshne

The ghosts just inside Kara have a buff on them that gives them 200 to all resistances. It is dispellable by all normal means.

If they have additional resist beyond this to shadow, our SPriest doesn't complain much about it. Getting your mages in the habit of keeping Detect Magic on mobs, especially the first time you encounter them, is not a bad idea.

If you were aware of the buff and still feel they have resists, then I apologize, but anecdotally, I've not heard any support for it.

 

Faradin

Back when the stat first came out, there were a couple really good threads on the subject if you looked long enough. At the time of AQ40 and Nax, the conclusion they came to was that all mobs in there had up to ~100 resistance, ~25 of that was level-based and could not be removed while ~75 could be taken off by spell penetration. Since the removable amount was only 75, the same amount CoS/CoE took off, Spell Penetration was deemed useless for PvE. If there is a chance for the stat to be useful for any class, it would be an elemental shaman. And yet, someone would first need to provide proof that blizzard kept resistances on raid mobs before we can say how useful it would be.

 

Steiny

Just putting in an observation,

I was up farming mana motes where I first noted it, but sometimes when my elemental shammy crits or just hits some mobs the hit/crit is considerably less then it should have been considering a "standard" hit/crit. Now I say this from previous hits/crits that I've seen before and don't have any video or log txt to prove it.

Usually my shammy hits LB for somewhere bettween 1300-1700, and then sometimes I've seen him hit the same mobs for 300-900. I've also seen a LB crit (with the same gear) for 1.4K.

Could this have something to do with partial resist?

 

Moshne

You need to be careful to not equate mob actual resists with the mobs level based resistances (which Spell Penetration offers no help for.) You will have mobs, all raid mobs, that will partially resist your Lightning Bolts. LB is not a binary spell, so you don't get the "all or nothing" that a binary spell like a Frost Bolt would. If you want to try and see the difference in your own spells, you can test it against Frost Shock, which also has binary resistances.

If these specific mobs are "critting" for less than normal, and you are not getting a partial resist message in your combat log, it is likely they have a buff on giving them X% spell mitigation, which many mobs that drop motes of mana tend to do.

 

Tweeti

The Spell Shades in Kara are incredibly difficult to keep in a Freezing Trap. They resist the initial trap regularly and come out of traps early the majority of the time.

I have no proof but my strong suspicion is that they have higher than normal Frost Resistance. Would CoE help me in trapping them?

If I'm right I'd like some Cheesecake