Items - World of Warcraft

So far every endgame trinket in TBC has an inferior green or blue counterpart obtainable via just leveling to 77. I don't expect we're going to see the same sort of carryover as we did from Vanilla in this respect. Healing trinkets such as [Memento of Tyrande] and [Glimmering Naaru Sliver] are the only ones I haven't seen equivalents for.

Where is my head wrong on this? My admittedly slow mind is telling me that if I have a 30% crit rate, then I have a .3 chance to crit the first time, second time and third time, which means that it should only proc 2.7% of the time. I'm not sure that I can stand to put 3 talent points into that. Unless crit goes up to something like 50%, which then gives a 12.5% chance to proc. If anything, this talent appears to be underpowered unless crit scales appreciably.

Am I loopy?

The Hot Streak crit counts toward the next chain. This is how people are chain-critting when they hit mobs in a multiple of 3. Thus, you only need to crit twice to get it to proc for single-target DPS.

You can artificially boost your crits w/ combustion by taking off your gear, popping combustion, getting it stacked to a decent amount, then putting your gear back on. Ofc, this is not really exploitable because you can't do it in a raid except once, but it might help w/ testing purposes.

The crazy Bernoulli math involved is explained way, way upthread somewhere (search the thread on "bernoulli" and you'll be able to dig it up). What some of us did, though, is whip up some scripts that actually simulated a Fireball/Scorch casting sequence (with Scorch having +4% crit, which is now outdated) and run hundreds of thousands of casts at 1% crit rate increments to determine the increase provided. Obviously these will vary somewhat from the real mathematical averages, but not too far.

I've actually interrupted writing this to update my script to use +6% crit on Scorch, and to limit the Fireball crit rate range to 20%-80% (to shorten the run, mainly, because crit rates outside that range are pretty unlikely). I'll post a link to the script and the output when it's done running.

Not quite true Muphrid since you have to get 3 critcal strikes for the very first hot streak.

Remember, though, that a string of 30 casts does not give you 10 opportunities for 3 in a row, it gives you 28 opportunities. The first two casts obviously can't give three in a row, but every cast after that is the third cast in a sequence of 3.

Hmm, a Fire/Frost spec would have been extremely powerful w/ hot streak if WG had been kept the way it was:

Hot Streak
Shatter
Winter's Grasp (supplied by other frost mage)

Use frostfire bolt/fireblast on the HS crit, WG and WC for building up to the HS.

Unless i'm mistaken, you can't/couldn't get both in 1 spec.

You can however get WC and HS in 1 spec for good raid synergy on top of decent damage. Of course, we're yet to see how fire changes mess it all up.

Doesn't change the fact that getting additional crits from Hot streak is about as effective as popping Combustion and that's for 3 talent points....

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear, this was when WG would be supplied by other mages in the raid.

But I am definitely in favor of getting HS and WC in the same build, then on the HS crit use frostfire instead of fire, because of the crit bonuses.

So it's a talent that really scales and also heavily pushes the crit-loving tendency of fire... and you have a problem with this?

Imo it's a great talent for those reasons... and the returns of it aren't so high scaling that it's too powerful. It's not like at low gear levels it nets only an average of 1% crit and at high gear levels it's 30%, but more like 3-9%, which is as it should be. Talents should become more meaningful the farther you progress, unlike Mind Mastery which is ultra-meaningful at low gear levels and decent but not amazing at high gear levels, or a talent like warlocks' Shadow and Flame which is pretty crappy and unsupportable at low gear levels, but absolutely amazing at high gear levels.


EDIT:

Actually thinking of Hot Streak got me thinking more about FFB builds. Has anyone considered 0/43/28 for FFB? With the talent changes it still picks up imp scorch and WC... but to me 0/43/28 almost seems like it'd be a better build than 0/33/37+1.

And in an attempt to correct the previous work (since it was under the assumption Hot Streak's proc doesn't start a new chain), I post the following, which...is probably wrong, but I feel another set of eyes will likely catch the mistake.

Assume a normal crit chance c. Let the chance of any given cast being a Hot Streak proc be p.

Any Hot Streak proc must be preceded by at least 2 ordinary crits. The "first" crit in the chain can be a Hot Streak crit (chance p) or a non-HS ordinary crit (this is the tricky part--I'm going with this probability as being c(1-p)).

Thus...



Since a Hot Streak proc only gives "extra" benefit if it wouldn't have been a crit anyway, I submit the added crit chance is...



So, with this value of p...



But, I can tell right away that this doesn't mesh with what Lhivera was saying earlier; the crit chance gained is far higher at 40% and 50% than those. It may be that either the simple formula for delta c is wrong, or the probability of having the first crit in the string is wrong.

Murphrid, if I'm understanding your description of your math well enough and, based on what I've read earlier in this post, I think your misstep occurs here:
I am under the impression that when hot streak procs, you can front load a fireball + fireblast to get two starting crits out of it. Therefore, once started, you'd only need one additional crit to proc hot streak. However, I'm still unsure how this is influenced by the fact that those hot streak crits may have been crits without hot streak (Your "tricky part" above).

I don't know if any math has been done on this, but would it even be worthwhile to throw a fireblast into our rotation as one of the main spells? As in, which is better? A guaranteed fireball crit followed by 2 regular fireballs (potentially chaining crits into another hot streak), or a guaranteed fireball/fireblast followed by a regular fireball? I suppose that would heavily depend on our mana regeneration, as fireblast would increase the dps at a cost of dpm.

**EDIT** Eh, see Qbert's math, above. He's got the right idea.

This assumes that Fireblast will be ready to cast again after
Chance based crit
Guaranteed Fireball of FFB crit

However because of spell haste, even a talented Fireblast will not be up again after only 2 Fireballs.

Why not toss in an Ice Lance, if Fire Blast is on cooldown, to gain the second HS crit?

Standing at max fireblast range with about 150 ms latency and 275 passive haste, i have no problems getting a fireball - scorch - fireblast combo to triple crit on the last charge of a combustion buff.

Would it be possible to sustain a 100% crit fireball - scorch - fireblast with a 6 second fireblast in wotlk?

Right right, but this is not what I was attempting to model. My concern was that a 7.1% crit increase at 50% crit was far larger than the value Lhivera indicated from brute-force simulation.

OK, here's the results of my updated Hot Streak script. I'm not accounting for energetic working of the buff by tossing in Fire Blasts or anything like that, this is the effect on a standard, lazy, 9x Fireball, 1x Scorch rotation. This should demonstrate that Hot Streak becomes pretty valuable at higher crit rates which should be fairly easily achieved.

The script simply runs through 1,000,000 rotations at each base crit level and takes the average of the results. The base crit is used for Fireball; Scorch uses that number +6%. Combustion is used on every cooldown.

Expected crit before Combustion and Hot Streak is: (Scorch Crit Rate + 9 * Fireball Crit Rate) / 10

Expected crit increase from Combustion is calculated based on Zaldinar's formula. Any remaining crit over the expected is attributed to Hot Streak.

I'm listing the results in 5% increments here. This is not the format the script spits out, this is just an easy-to-read summary. "Total" is the total increase provided by both Combustion and Hot Streak; "Total/Talent" is that increase divided by the four points necessary to get both talents. The full 1% increment verbose output, and the script itself, can be downloaded here.

One major change from the previous version of the script: I no longer force a Fireball cast on the guaranteed crit, since by the time the proc comes up, you're pretty much done casting your Scorch if that was your next spell.

Note: Zaldinar's formula results in Combustion starting to increase in value again at about 66% base crit. That probably shouldn't be happening. Not sure why it is. But for base crit values over 65%, consider the division between Combustion and Hot Streak to be highly suspect. The total increase, however, should be reasonably accurate.


Hot Streak exceeds 1% crit per talent point at 41% base crit.
Hot Streak exceeds the value per point of Combustion at 53% base crit.
The combined value of both talents peaks at about 54% base crit.

Remember, these "Base Crit" numbers do not account for Winter's Chill, Moonkin Aura, Totems, or any other buffs/debuffs/effects.

So, for any base crit value between about 45% and 65%, Hot Streak provides more than 1% crit per talent points. For any base crit value between about 25% and 70%, the per talent point value of Combustion and Hot Streak combined hangs between 1% and 1.2%.

This is where it starts to seem exploitive, but the game mechanics prevent it from becoming exploitable;

You certainly can fireball/scorch/fireblast on the same crit bonus... but if you want to repeat that you have to wait on the fireblast cooldown since I don't think an Ice Lance can fit into the time window. So you can keep the crits rolling at the cost of stopping for ~1.5-2 seconds every rotation. You can however do this on every other proc if you get lucky and have the chance-based casts crit in between. This definitely seems to fall into the 'creative use of game mechanics' category, adding a significant player-based element to DPS by having the Mage trying to keep his/her own Hot Streak refreshing.

I sure hope the design was intentional because if it was it was brilliant, but even if it was an accident it looks like an excellent 'replacement' to the single-player rolling ignite playstyle of trying to manufacture crits & timing to effect your own DPS.

My only concern remaining is just how random this effect can be since you can literally go 20-30 casts without it ever proccing, or you can crit your first 3 spells then keep it rolling for the first 6-10 casts. The entire benefit is dependent on that first proc, then how well you take advantage of it from there.

You're positive that your fire blast has always been getting the combustion effect? I know that you can fire blast as soon as scorch hits but without a missile travel time I'm not sure that a back-to-back hit without a GCD is fast enough. It's two instant hitting spells that should hit extremely close together, so I guess it should.

I don't know if it's possible either, but it would be super easy to test by shooting anything caught in a nova with scorch and then ice lance. You don't have to be a frost mage; if the ice lance hits for triple damage at all then it works. It might be a range issue though if you're deep fire and you try to use ice lance without arctic reach, since it will draw you in 6 yards closer than you normally would be, which would probably cause the fireball/scorch/FB to stop working in the first place.

edit: Maybe it's something that can be overcome by haste? That sounds like some blegh math.