Ledneh

What do you mean by "nothing special"? Doesn't being hit capped still reduce your misses, increasing your DPS or TPS or whatever?

 

Zure

The main benefit of removing all avoidance, beyond the easily quantified direct DPS increase you listed, is that you never have to worry about your cat form dps cycles being disrupted by miss/dodge.

His point was that simply capping hit is no more effective at reducing cycle disruption than is increasing both hit and expertise at the same time, since a "dodge" is simply a "miss" with a different name.

 

Fydor

What he means is that there is nothing special about being hit capped in the sense that your cycle will be perfect. People often think that once hit capped the cycle is 100% but fail to remember that the cycle can still "miss" due to being dodged. So if the goal of being hit capped is a reliable cycle, then the true goal is actually to be hit and exp capped. One without the other is not really anything that special in light of this goal.

 

Allev

That's actually not true. You can prove this simply: turn your crit up to 70%, hit and expertise to 0, take the 2t4 and 2t6 bonuses, and shift every cycle. You'll be bound to not hit one of every 10 or so rips, which takes a GCD to try again-- so one of every cycle is 13 seconds instead of 12. Yet, your average cycle time in Toskk's is still 12s.

There is a similar effect on cycle time if you get a worst-case cycle: if you rip, then miss mangle, then hit mangle, then hit two shreds (but not crit), and get no energy procs, you have 3cp. The time of this isn't averaged, rather the times of all your cycles is averaged so that your best-case cycles which would last 10s balance out the ones that take 14s, and extra shreds are added in. Again, your average cycle time is longer, which means that you use more mangles or shreds and fewer rips in the fight. More hit rating mitigates this to a degree.

A more common situation you may find yourself in, even if you have supposed 12s cycles, is having to wait on energy from time to time.

I've had a discussion with Toskk about this on his forums (sometime in November) but modeling all of these properly would take a massive investment of time. Rather than taking average energy gain, you need to calculate chances of energy droughts. Rather than an average cycle, you need to calculate probabilities of every cycle, with energy procs and without (and account for when you get them). It's messy as hell, and I don't blame him for not modeling this part-- it's orders of magnitude more work for comparatively little return.

Until that work is done, though, the tool will incorrectly report optimal cycle times, which will in turn incorrectly report optimal DPS, since you'll be using a different ratio of mangles, shreds, and rips.

While Toskk's has proven to be a relatively accurate ballparking tool, and possibly the best we'll get, let's be clear: it's not perfect.

 

Malazaar

The benefit of hit/expertise is better modelled by looking at the bad things that missing/dodging do:

1. Missing Autoattacks do no damage.
2. Missing Finishers do no damage and refund no energy.
3. Missing Specials (Mangle, Shred) do no damage but refund ~82% energy.
4. Missing a Mangle after applying Rip will cause your first rip tick to do 30% less damage.
5. Missing a Clearcast-Special does no damage and does not refund energy either.
6. Missing will reduce your 2t4 and Clearcast proc rates accordingly.
7. Having a particularly bad missing streak may cause your energy pool to 'overload' or completely throw you out of your cycle.
8. Missing repeatedly will cause gcd issues.

I believe only 1-3 are covered in the common dps calculators, so the real value of hit is a bit higher than those are telling you. Though the impact of points 4-8 are not that big, they should be considered nonetheless.

Expertise is of slightly more value than hit because you will also have to deal with parry in some encounters (gorefiend for example will turn quite frequently). Expertise has twice the value of hit in scenarios with parry (mainly while tanking).

Keep in mind that expertise is not only more TPS and reliability for a tank, it will also slightly reduce incoming damage due to less parries.

 

Maeltne

I've been concerned by the lack of a Feral tanking weapon, and undertook an exercise to design one (same ilvl as the Stanchion) based what the best known ilvl calculations.

The result is what follows:

Mace of Feral Tankage
Binds when picked up
Two-Hand Mace
136.5 - 305.5 Damage Speed 3.00
(73.7 damage per second)
525 Armor
+112 Stamina
+50 Agility
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases attack power by 1197 in Cat, Bear, Dire Bear, and Moonkin forms only.
Equip: Increases defense rating by 10.
Equip: Improves your expertise rating by 25.

Explanation:
Swapped 350 Armor Penetration for 525 Armor (350*.15/.1 = 525)
Swapped Agility for Stamina (no effect on ilvl, stamina goes to 112, Agility to 33)
Swapped 47 Strength for 10 Defence, 25 Expertise, and 17 Agility

If this is of interest to you, perhaps you'd contribute on my PTR [Feedback] thread: WoW Forums -> [Feedback] Feral itemization: Tank Weapon

 

ramenchef

Hmm, I get shadowmoon destroyer's cape as being better than the kael cloak in mine. What buffs are you using? All the other slots are the same, though.

 

david0925

all standard melee group buff (imp GoA, imp SoE, imp BS, UR) with scrolls.

Shadowmoon and Thalassian are REALLY close for me though

 

Promethius

One minor issue that I've found, and excuse me if this was accounted for in this list by the fact that not everyone is a JC, is that RAWR does not have the correct stats on Hard Khorium Choker, namely that it's missing the gem slot. Using a relatively optimal melee group and most standard raid armor debuffs shows the choker gemmed with glinting pyrestone ahead of Clutch of Demise. Also, depending on if and how Shoulders of Vehemence are changed, the fact that the choker satisfies a yellow requirement for meta could allow for higher DPS without the use of T4. The alt Shoulders of Vehemence Astrylian put in combined with Duplicitous Guise have significant enough stats to overcome the T4 set bonus, and puts overall "missed" attacks much closer to 0%. Regardless though, in terms of raid distribution of gear, the minor DPS increase (if any) of these two sunwell pieces probably doesn't outweigh the fact of already having T4.

 

david0925

Plugging in the items you mentioned gave me 8 dps less (2133 vs 2125, less than 1% difference), however at the benefit of more consistent cycles. It's a toss up.

 

Toskk

Yes, Allev is noting a few of the difficulties involved with a combat model rather than a combat simulator. The basic problem comes down to averages rather than reality. For example, in the model if the average cycle time is greater than 12.00s, on average you won't be throwing in an extra Shred to compensate for extra energy. But *some* cycles would still be below 12.00s, requiring an extra Shred, even if the *average* cycle is greater than 12.00s. This unfortunately cannot be modeled effectively, as it would require computation of the probability of every possible attack cycle..I did actually create two combat simulators as well as the current combat model, and unfortunately neither of them are workable because of the amount of recursion involved.

In order for a combat simulator to *begin* to give reasonable averages, it takes well over 500 simulated cycles (I'd personally use no fewer than 1000 cycles). That amount of recursion in Javascript almost immediately causes web browsers to grow suspicious of the script and start throwing errors, not to mention takes like 60 seconds to actually finish.

I do have eventual plans to move to a new calculator format (probably using Java), one that would not hate me for attempting to force it to compute thousands of sustained DPS cycles for every variable I want to manipulate. Until that time, however, the comparisons between the current combat model and the combat simulators I created were very close anyway, with most stats typically differing from the model values by no more than 0.2 Kitty Points.

 

Benita

Im guessing any class can max out their char with self designed items. If you put this to an extreme you would just earn raid tokens and then assign your stats and specc in the login screen. Not a game i would continue to play.

Id rather think that having one weapon acting as both cat and bear items would solve this problem best. That would mean though that you cant have stats on the item that only boosts one of the 2 forms, otherwise you create a problem with it not being an upgrade to the last tier for the other form or the next tier wont be one.

So fixed sta, agi, feral ap and hit/expertise scaling and no other stats on the item ever. No def, armor, str, armor penetration or crit rating. I think feral ap already scales only with ilvl, there are no "out of line" items for that stat.

Then less people would whine about the wrong kind of feral staff being implemented in this or that instance.

Not the most ingenious solution, but having only one choice is maybe better than skipping tiers and then having 50% of the cat/bear people to whine about not receiving an upgrade this time.

 

tedv

Or they could just include one bear and one cat staff in each tier. I mean, there are 3 epic melee daggers in sunwell, and only the minority spec of one class uses daggers. There are multiple healer, caster, and tank weapons. Is it really so hard to include one staff for bears and another for cats? Hell, you could even make one of the weapons one of the sunmote trade-ins.

 

• Astrylian

That's been the obvious solution since the day they released the sunmote trade-in system.

 

Maeltne

I'm my mind it is inexcusable for any feral item to have dodge or crit ratings. Why? Agility is designed to give more to Feral Druids than these stats do. Sure if we use an item designed for another class we may have to make do, but for items specifically designed for us there is no point. Similarly with regards to Int on items that will be used to Tank (a little Int is ok on hybrid/dps items), or Strength on tanking items, so on and so forth.

If this makes druids too powerful, then change the ratios so that we get less from these stats. Making the game harder, or gimping a specific class, through poor itemization, is just plain insulting. We know what is good for our classes, and it is becoming painfully obvious that we know much better than Blizzard .

Personally I would *LOVE* a game that allowed us to allocate the stat points on our items. I know what I want to, I know how to do what I want to do. Let me do it.

 

TimWischmeier

I would like to offer you some assistance with that. If you provide (well, you already do, basically ) the numbers, formulas and models, I can rather easily code you a nice Java Application (and Applet). I have a good amount of experience in programming in Java, and although the next university semestre will start in a few days, I think I have the time to do this. So if you are going to port your simulator to Java, don't hesitate to ask me.

 

Malazaar

I already have a dps calculator written in java which is almost identical to toskks, write me a pm if you want the source code.

 

Promethius

The notion that crit on items is bad isn't necessarily true so long as it's paired with agi on the item and has been pointed out before, simply because of how item stat distribution works. The broader the number of stats an item has, the more each stat can be increased. As an example, an item with only 100 agi could also be converted to 90 agi and 27 crit rating while at the same ilvl and quality. I would assume the latter would be more appealing to most any feral druid out there. Due to this item stat distribution, it's actually quite a benefit to us if we had as many stats per item as we could get for total net benefit. Having our main pieces with armor, str, agi, stam, int, crit, hit, expertise, armor pen, haste, *insert whatever new mechanic they add here* on each piece would give more total stats than if each stat were isolated across different gear. Ideal is a term we can argue over all we want, but for myself at least, having items like that, modified by having weapon, jewelry and cloak pieces determine our role as tank or dps, would be pretty ideal.

 

Vidandric

this weapons ilvl is WAY too high. Even w/ 0 expertise your sitting around ilvl 165 which is still higher but close

heres my best try at a tanking weapon

ZOMG a Druid Tanking Mace
Binds when picked up
Two-Hand Mace
136.5 - 305.5 Damage Speed 3.00
(73.7 damage per second)
500 Armor
+60 Agility
+80 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases attack power by 1100 in Cat, Bear, Dire Bear, and Moonkin forms only.
Equip: Increases defense rating by 24.
Equip: Improves your expertise rating by 24.

 

oldmandennis

Really, does making up pretend items have anything to do with being an actual feral druid? We all know that feral weapon itemization sucks, but other then the observation that the sunmote turn in system would have been the ideal place to put the other feral staff, is this gibberish advancing the discussion in any way?

 

Morthis

That was, perhaps, a poor abbreviation on my part, the AP there was Armor Pen, not attack power.

Now as for the bracer enchant, even with both the my helm and shoulders enchanted for defense, and jewelry with defense on it, along with a shadowmoon insignia, I'm still not defense capped unless I put defense on my bracers or gem for defense (and defense to bracers is far better in terms of budget then).

Honestly, I see no point of removing a superior piece of gear to gain the 4T6 set bonus, unless you are tanking several mobs at once and swipe threat actually matters.

If lacerate outperforms swipe without 4T6, and swipe barely outperforms lacerate with 4T6, at the cost of a worse piece of gear, why bother? Even when you reach the point where swipe puts out more than the base threat of lacerate (which is 285 or 290 I believe), there's still the bleed damage. Despite the massive threat reduction on the bleed damage, it is still a decent amount of threat, and I don't think swipe currently reaches the point where it is more efficient to simply spam swipe entirely and ignore at least keeping lacerate up (all theoretical of course). Now we're talking about really minor differences in tps here anyway. So looking at it like that, unless you're actually using swipe to tank multiple mobs, or the extra tiny bit of damage matters that much, I can't see a reason to swap out a piece to get 4T6