Have the feeling Blizzard is starting to completely ignore the PvE side of things and is determined to actually make Arms a pure PvP spec again.
Maybe it is also to tone down the DPS of non-feral druids?
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Maybe it is also to tone down the DPS of non-feral druids?
What does WF totem have to do with the DPS of non-feral druids unless they are meleeing with staves or something? Unless you mean 'Melee DPS that aren't feral druids'.
Back on topic:
My guild usually runs a pretty melee-heavy setup, with an inordinate number of DPS warriors. After the hotfix, assuming your melee DPS group already has a warrior and enh. shaman, would you fill the remaining spots with rogues or warriors assuming you had to decide between them? We won't be raiding until Monday, so I can't check our own WWSes till then to see the difference it makes now, however as far as I can remember the consensus was more or less that rogues 'lose less' by being outside a WF group as compared to a DPS warrior before this change. The other semi-melee group options would probably consist of hunters (both TSA and BM specced), and possibly a feral druid (usually in tank group).
It remains to be seen exactly how much warrior DPS is hurt by this change, so I wouldn't jump to any conclusions before we have solid data. If the results look like we anticipate then yes, replace with rogues.
Comparing tonights raid against previous raids, I used to get about 16% of my total damage as Windfury procs, tonight this was down to about 4%. Rage generation was very poor compared to old.
Edit: Total Windfury damage tonight was about equal to Sword Spec proc damage.
Overall damage loss was about 20%.
I am a 33/28 spec and would rarely use hamstring in hopes of proccing Windfury.
This hit two handed warrior dps in raids extremely hard and I hope this change was not supposed to be so dramatic of a nerf as what it seems so far.
It seems obvious that this hurts SS builds more than backstab builds, given the average 'greater number of white hits MH" for Daggers, and "fewer number of special hits MH" for Daggers. This isn't counting sword spec, combat potency, dragonspine, etc, which means that this undersestimates the extent of the nerf.
2.7 Speed MH (Blacksmithing) Mace
2.07 Speed MH with Slice and Dice up.
This comes out to 29 white hits each minute.
Of these, 20% will proc windfury, or 5.8 (round to 6).
Special attacks per minute as swords is 15.
3 special attack windfury's per minute.
So you will now have 6 WF procs per minute instead of 9, or a solid 33% loss.
Daggers: 1.8 speed MH (Most daggers).
1.38 speed with SnD
This comes out to 43.5 white attacks per minute.
9 windfury procs per minute from white damage.
10 special attacks per minute, or 2 procs from special attacks.
9/11 of teh original procs, or a 22% proc-loss, or 2/3 of the loss of the original.
Now, let's assume 2355 raid-buffed AP and 30% crit rate (for ease of math, comes out to 2800AP on a windfury attack).
Blacksmithing mace: Average windfury attack (including both hit and crit possibilities) is 1044.55.
Losing 3 windfury attacks per minute comes out to 3132 damage total, divided by 60, or a solid 52.2DPS loss.
For Fang of Vashj (35% crit from dagger spec):
698.75 average windfury attack (counting both crit and hit possibilities.
725.6 average damage.
Loss of 2 of those per minute, or 1451 damage lost per minute. 24 DPS lost.
Obviously, the extent of the swords nerf is even greater, given the greater loss of things like dragonspine trophy procs with swords and its effect on combat potency, the greater number of in-effect special hits from both builds given combat potency, et cetera.
But it shows the general point. It's somewhat sad, though, that builds like maces and fist weapons have to suffer the same amount as swords with the whole "OH attack procs MH Sword Spec, procs OH Combat Potency" ordeal of which I was recently apprised.
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Don't ever ask your kick of me.
Not figuring for specials, and given a 2.6 mainhand, assuming 100% uptime for SnD (and no further haste) and SS using ALL energy - (which means this is 'worst case scenario' - i.e. highest realistic ratio of SS procs to white hit procs)
1.82 MH speed = ~33 hits per minute = 6.59 procs/min from MH
SS every 4 sec = 15 SS hits per minute = 3 procs/min from SS
Instead of 9.59 windfury attacks/min, you have 6.59, a loss of 31% of rogues windfury damage, IN THE WORST CASE. It's still very reasonably a 25% dmg nerf to rogues, and quite possibly more than that for warriors given that WF Totem is a larger BUFF to them than it is to rogues.
Doh, yeah - forgot to add combat potency energy into the mix. So it's not the worst case - it's actually going to be worse than this. Suck.
(Adding in 1.5 speed offhand, hasted 30% gives 1.05 speed, or 57.14 atks/min, 11.428 of which will proc 15 energy for 171.42 energy/min, which is 4.28 additional SS, or .86 additional procs/min.
6.59 proc/min from MH
3.86 from SS
10.45 procs/min total, down to 6.59 = 37% loss of WF damage - I *will* claim (without doing the math) that haste effects will actually lessen the blow, since it's far easier for haste to give you 5 more attacks (on average, 1 more proc) than it is for haste to give you 200 more energy via Combat Potency (5 SS = 1 more proc), so haste will scale you towards less of your WF dmg being removed.
So, if WF damage currently only accounts for 12% of a Rogue's total damage (assuming 20% of total damage from main hand)... I think it works out to be only 8% more total damage from WF as opposed to 12% (37% decrease). (This is very, very rough, but should be close.)
If this is the case, then perhaps GoA would be a better totem especially considering Druids get the benefit of AP and Crit. 6% increase for Rogues, Warriors, and Druids, and not just 8% more DPS for Rogues and Warriors...
The original change was that it would be on white damage only attacks, which was quickly reversed.
This change means that while instant specials won't work, those regularly spammed on-next-attack abilities will still work, which is where the outcry arose.
I guess it's a nerf to the extra DPS done by warriors/rogues with a WF totem, but having a minimal effect on tank rage generation/dps/tps.
Sunder/Devastate and Revenge proc it now, and won't after the change. I'd also like to see some high end 2h specs that are actually doing good DPS without Windfury. A few people claim they pull off 1100-1300 with a 2h without it, but they've yet to post any WWS. This change just seems to take a lot of steam away from the whole "BF" argument with how much potential damage is lost for 2h now.
It helps fix a few issues such as :
- Reduce (maybe nullify) the gap between combat swords and combat dagger
- Reduce the arms warrior dps way below the fury one (seriously, who wanted to spec fury while arms was almost as good for PvE dps, provided 2 valuables buffs/debuffs for the raid and was far superior for PvP)
- Reduce the gap between rogues/warriors and melee shamans/druids, or between rogues/warriors and ranged, which I could only see increasing with ZA/T7 stuff
On the other hand it hurts a little for prot warrior threat generation, but it is really not required and I find it usually better to give the shaman to another dps group, and it hurts a lot for retribution paladins, but who cares?
Does anyone know when the change went live and even if it went live (on European Servers) already?
I'm playing on a German server and have been raiding from 18:00 to ~22:00 without noticing my DPS being less than before. On Magtheridon I think I even had my best result ever however that could be because we recently got an Enhancement Shaman and didn't have one before.
and it hurts a lot for retribution paladins, but who cares?
Retribution paladins do, obviously. What a dumb question.
Really I don't think a change like this was unforeseeable- some sort of rogue DPS reduction was definitely coming when reports started showing people regularly climbing into the 1600-1800 range and leaving the rest of the raid in the dust. That said, the change is kind of... strange. For one it casts the net too wide: it really is a major nerf to Arms, which was a nice raid spec though not superior to Fury (and choice is nice). Also the method of announcing and implementing the change was queer... though it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a CM badly misjudged the importance of a piece of information and mishandled the communication as a result.
Why this needed to be hotfixed is a mystery as well.
Even with paws proccing windfury ferals would still struggle to be able to compete with the rogues and fury warriors. We're about the only other ones that rely on yellow damage as much as arms warriors. Oddly enough I kind of assumed that it didn't work with specials anyway, so I can kind of understand why they might see that as "buggy" behaviour.
This is definitely live at least on the US servers.
On our Teron kill tonight I had 7 Windfury procs for the entire fight. I didn't get deathed or anything, so I had 100% face time. Compare this to last week where I had 33 windfury procs.
The fights were roughly the same length of time so I can rule that out as a possible culprit. Has anyone else noticed that big a decrease in the amount of procs from WF today?
I'm hoping there is some logical explanation for this such as my shaman being forgetful about dropping wf totem for part of the fight or I was just extremely unlucky with the proc rate. If not, I am extremely disappointed.
Edit: Looking over my WWS for Shade I had 16 WF procs, so I have no clue what happened during Teron. Have to wait till Sunday to look at the Gurtogg log.
WF totem has always been a ridiculous buff since it's almost 100% scalable. The AP bonus part is nice but you would barely notice a difference between wf totem 1 and wf totem 5 since it's all about the extra attack.
Ball park 25% more damage done from an arms warrior pre nerf. Post nerf maybe "only" 15%. From a _single_ buff.
Not to mention pvp... Of course it needs to get nerfed. I should have been nerfed a long time ago.
Edit: Looking over my WWS for Shade I had 16 WF procs, so I have no clue what happened during Teron. Have to wait till Sunday to look at the Gurtogg log.
Maybe windfury was not up all the time on Teron.
He is known for destroying that particular totem.
Windfury totem is a mainhand only buff and Combat Potency procs on offhand hits, unless I'm missing some subtle interaction.
Oh, right. Shows what I know about rogue talents.
Edited the original post to remove the reference to Combat Potency.
Originally Posted by Vykromond
Why this needed to be hotfixed is a mystery as well.
That struck me as strange too, considering Blizzard is currently sitting on a number of changes that are slated for the 2.2 patch. I can't imagine why this change would go straight to live while (say) the orc shoulder bug isn't getting hotfixed. Nethaera's post didn't provide much information. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get some data - to determine if this change is actually on live right now, or if the hotfix was a hotfix to the PTR build.
I asked my group tonight to let me know if they procced WF off of any yellow attacks, and none of them mentioned it, but it's hard to prove a negative.
Will this change group setups? For example, could it now be worth putting a feral druid in a melee DPS group, removing a rogue from windfury (but not other buffs?).
Will this change group setups? For example, could it now be worth putting a feral druid in a melee DPS group, removing a rogue from windfury (but not other buffs?).
No.
edit: oops, meant to edit this reply into my post above.
The change to tank threat output IS very significant, especially in fights where rage is hard to come by like in content you have outgeared.
This dramatic nerf will lower threat output significantly for protection warriors, and I would like to see some data on it if possible, but my estimate is 200+ tps lost to insufficient rage and proc damage.
08/09/07, 10:22 PM
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