Quota

This isn't exactly the most conclusive data in the world but going over my WWS for Shade of Akama last night I definitely noticed the change in regards to the WF totem nerf. Granted this fight isn't extrapolated over a very long period of time, but it still shows the result of the nerf pretty clearly in my opinion.

Over 46 seconds of fighting Shade myself, combat dagger rogue, and MS warrior all had "1 extra attack through Windfury Attack" happen twice for each one of us. Compare this to last weeks kill in 42 seconds where all three of us had between 8-9 "1 extra attack through Windfury Attack".

Take it for what its worth, but if this is indeed correct a 75% reduction in procs is more than just a small nerf.

 

Duranthor

Okay, I think how hard this nerf will hit individual warriors will depend on thier move order. If your dps break down is 56% or more white damage, then WF should still do wonders for you. If you are having specials and instant attacks doing close to 50% of your damage, well then you might have some issues.

I haven't had a chance to test this yet, so it's purely theoretical at this point.

 

Urraca

That's not the best data either for terms of pure DPS, since you're using rupture on the new log and eviscerate on the old one. It does show the WF difference, but it doesn't make for a good DPS comparison.

 

Crtlaltdel

I don't think the person who asked for WWS wanted a DPS comparison, but the change in WF procs. :/ That's the closest data I could find.

 

• Snowy

Yeah... 45 second sample size is going to be real illustrative. I compared Void Reaver parses from last night and last week and even then that's nowhere even close to enough data. You need thousands and thousands of attacks to be able to draw a conclusion. We *know* it got nerfed, the question is how much and claiming Shade of Akama shows the result pretty clearly is a pretty silly statement. You could have gotten unlucky this week, and lucky last week.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Legedi

On nights where I don't have a shaman my white damage DPS is around 35-36% of my over all damage. On nights with a shaman my white DPS is 41-42%. Thing is the extra rage from WF attacks helps fuel special attacks.

 

Medicine Man

As much as I hate to see any nerfs hitting my class, much less reductions to a class defining skill, I don't think we can call this change an ambush. Blizzard tried to make this exact change to the windfury mechanic in the months before the launch of The Burning Crusade. They eventually retracted the change when it became clear that it was going to worsen the (already imperfect) balance between the two factions. They also didn't have the time to fix the problem with negative windfury returns for the "on next attack"-style specials. Retracted or not though, the first time this change was put on test we were effectively "on notice". I suspect any communication we may have had about this change now would merely be a rehash of the furor that arose the first time Blizzard contemplated bringing windfury down a notch.

Looking at the ripple effect any change to windfury has, I'm hard pressed to insist that the buff didn't need fixing. I'm mostly worried about threat generation now though. I'm told that WF-procs off sunders and devastate are significant threat sources for a protection warrior.

 

Dominus

One of the major problems I see is guilds who are on the cusp of enrage timer content. With my guild, we've killed VR twice, with 17 and 21 seconds to go on enrage respectively. Shaving off 6% of the rogues (myself and Klixx) translates into roughly 55k damage that needs to be made up (just based on our last VR run). We also have a 33/28 warrior who will be losing 15ish% of his DPS, which means we need to make up even more raid wide.

It's just a frustrating change that may have been necessary for top end guilds in BT. However, I'd assume all of the encounters in SSC/TK with enrage timers were tuned down from their original difficulty to be based around old WF mechanics, not Blizzard making them pushed farther down to be in line with this change, months down the road. All this really does is put a slight damper on BT farmers while they adjust, make it harder for current BT guilds to break into later BT, and make it harder for newer/more casual guilds to break into enrage timer content.

I realize it was a PvP fix mainly (at least that's what it seems like), but the PvE changes seem pretty drastic overall. Who knows, maybe we'll walk in and wipe the floor with VR again, or maybe we'll subject ourselves to wipe after wipe because our top 2 DPS lost a 6% edge on their damage. I'll withhold true judgment until I see it in action on non farm content, but I can't see it not being significant.

 

Gokey

We hardly ever have a shaman in the MT group, and we don't have a problem. The change will hurt, ya; people will just have to work harder now.

The biggest problem is that Arms DPS is now dead basically. We raid with ~5 warriors, and 3 of them usually DPS as Arms. Nothing too spectacular, but they were able to hold a little over 1000 DPS on some fights with windfury. Without it, it's not even worth bringing them anymore. Sub in real DPS classes I guess? =\

 

Quota

You are absolutely right 45 seconds is no where near enough time to make an accurate prediction and maybe I shouldn't have state it shows the result pretty clearly, but as of now we don't have too much data collected to make an accurate assessment so we need to start some where. I was merely pointing out my experience with the nerf as of last night. Until we get hundreds of logs we won't realistically know the extent of the nerf.

As for your second point, I could have gotten unlucky and so could have the two other people in the group as well. I don't know the odds of three people getting unlucky with wf procs, but I imagine over a 45 second window it could be relatively common. However, going over every single log we have from Shade from previous weeks and looking over some other guilds WWS for roughly the same time frame, the average number of WF procs does seem to be about 8 +/- 1-2. So using 8 procs on Shade for a 45 second fight is a pretty good benchmark in order to compare.

 

◊ castille

Make 'em get out of their PVP spec and go fury

23:40:55> [Illidan Stormrage's] [Shear] was blocked by [Castille].
^ Yes, this actually happened. Yes, Castille is a shaman.

 

Kiranat

Blood Frenzy is not a PVP spec.

 

viji

I completly agree about that. PvPing Second Wind & Imp. Intercept is key talents in a good pvp build. Personally I'm 33/28 cause I find the extra threat from DW 17/44 quite annoying, might be because our tanks TPS isn't as great as others, can't really say. But I feel alot more safe threatwiese when I'm playing as 2H fury, and at least before the WF nerf the damage was quite alright.

 

Lambach

How exactly does 17/44 do more threat? You mean just cuase you're actually doing more dmg?

 

david0925

You're doing Heroic Strike more frequently due to faster swings, resulting in more threat

 

nfw

This, on top of the defense-against-daze nerf, might just piss me off enough to quit the game.

 

Lambach

Ewww...heroic strike.

 

• Snowy

For any particular melee group, the odds aren't that great, but when you expand that to every Shade kill that week, the odds are basically 100% that some melee group got a bad roll of the dice on WF procs. It reminds me of Quigon's tale of basically being gibbed at Archimonde due to parry, or at Shahraz -- it never happened to us, it never happened to a lot of other people, but the odds of it happening to *one* tank out of all of them is quite high.

Anyhow I'll just throw these numbers out here from Void Reaver for both rogues there each week.

Last week:

Wodin had 55 Windfury procs in 368 seconds. (8.97 ppm)
Cryingrogue had 57 Windfury procs in 374 seconds. (9.14 ppm)

This week:

Wodin had 32 Windfury procs in 308 seconds. (6.23 ppm)
Cryingrogue had 40 Windfury procs in 294 seconds. (8.16 ppm)

So you can see it's down, but need a lot more data. Was CR lucky this week, was Wodin unlucky? Then the question is, how much of an effective DPS loss is it, if say, you end up losing 1 ppm?


edit: Also looking at Morogrim, CR got 42 procs in 368 seconds. (6.85 ppm) He was the only rogue who didn't get Graved.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Kiranat

In my case: Assuming a crit (so ~3000 damage) it's a 50DPS loss. Assuming non-crit (~1200 damage) it's a 20DPS loss.

For warriors you'll be seeing a much larger drop in PPM.

Currently, assuming no wasted instants, 33% of my attack rotation can proc it which works out to an effective 6.6% proc rate.

For a "perfect" swing time of 2.5s with a perfect slam rotation (assuming no haste procs/heroism) we're looking at 60 attacks per minute, or 12 PPM.

If we assume the same swing time with the current WF nerf we're looking at 4PPM.

In white damage alone this is a 160 DPS downgrade assuming a ZERO PERCENT CRIT RATE on the WF attacks. I'm honestly terrible at math, so I'm not even going to try to work out how much of a rage generation loss it is and how that would affect DPS over a timespan.

One person who won't be pumping out huge DPS anymore is Serida, who has been brought up several times in the Future of a DPS Warrior thread. A significant amount of their attacks (based on WWS) were Hamstring, obviously for WF procs, and they were hitting 1800+ DPS. As reference, using almost exclusively a slam rotation I average 1150-1250 DPS. I'll post more numbers once we raid again, I didn't have WF in last night's raid anyway.

 

Legedi

Real quick and dirty math for my DPS (going to assume no gaps in specials from lack of rage):

Weapon Speed = 3.8, 3.04 with flurry
Single slam cycle time with 0.5 second slam, and 0.5 second lag/human delay = 4.04 seconds
Every fourth cycle has a gap in BT and WW cooldown, so I get 1.75 special attacks per cycle.
1.75/4.04 = 0.43317 specials per second.
20% chance of a special proccing WF = 0.086634 WF procs per second from special.
Each WF proc ~ 1400 damage
Special attack WF damage = 0.086634*1400= 121 DPS.

121 DPS, just from WF procs from specials I won't get anymore. And I'll probably be rage starved, reducing specials even more.

I'm not that far into SSC/TK. When I don't have a shaman in my group I do around 700 DPS. When I do have a shaman I do closer to 900 DPS. Now with a shaman I'd guess I'll do more like 780 DPS.

Like everyone else, I'll be watching my WWS logs for the next week or so to see how it goes in the game.

 

Emeraude

I don't see why people keep on bringing up PvP and Blizzcon, if you remember before in WoW Classic they tried to nerf Windfury but reverted it because it was unfair to Horde raiding, now both factions have Paladins/Shaman, so it's not exactly a shocker to see them bring it full circle.

 

Lithose

It's the manner the change was done in, not really the change itself.

If this change had been in 2.2 , or 2.3, I think there would still be complaints, but it wouldn't be as "shady" as it is now.

When was the last time a massive mechanic change was hot fixed (and this is massive, stretching across four classes and affecting raid DPS in a noticable, big way)

They spend weeks testing the smallest tweaks on test servers, and this huge change was just "hot fixed" in a few days after blizz con, with *no* player testing?

It's not within blizz's standard MO..Of course people will think its blizzcon, its the only *rational* explanation, apart from a dev over there going crazy.

 

Cos-

I haven't tried mutilate since I was using quest rewards but t4+s1 arena weapons (effectively t4) I was pulling like 150% of ranged dps on fights like gruul.

edit: Needed an '.

 

Emeraude

I found the manner it was delivered in amusing on one hand and obviously disappointing on another.

Neth literally was like "Good news everyone!(Flaskbacks to Futurama and Professor Farnsworth) Windfury totem is finally fixed!" Which was actually turned out to be a pretty horrible thing. I have to wonder, if she even knew the level of horrible news she was dropping on the playerbase when she delivered it, considering where/when/how she dropped it. Heh.

 

◊ Oggie

Eh? I read what Dysnc posted, but it didn't include any lines (that I saw) about a new incoming change to the mechanics. I certainly can't get dazed on live (on my tankadin, in 490 defense), nor can I seem to be on Test, so I'm not sure of what you speak.