[BETA] Cat Discussion

♦ Carebare · 10/14/10, 9:46 PM

This thread is ONLY for BETA discussion. If it's on live, use the appropriate thread.

Yawning · 10/17/10, 11:43 AM

Build #13195

Coefficients/base damage figures for level 85:
* Ravage: Weapon Dmg * 8.5 + 2814
* Mangle: Weapon Dmg * 3.6 + 1137
* Shred: Weapon Dmg * 3.5 + 1158
* Rake (Direct): 304 + AP * 0.023
* Rake (DoT, per tick): 620 + AP * 0.14
* Rip (DoT, per tick): 62 + 162 * nrCPs + AP * 0.023 * nrCPs
* Ferocious Bite: 305 + 518 * nrCPs + AP * 0.11 * nrCPs

Shred/Ravage are exact (in game tooltips match what's observed). Everything else is derived. As a matter of convenience I used the level 1 target dummies in Theramore for Mangle/Ferocious Bite. The Mangle number should be near exact, the Ferocious Bite values appear to be within 10 damage or so.

Oddly enough a freshly copied level 85 premade has a 2.0x crit multiplier which is inconsistent with what is currently on live.

Defyn · 10/18/10, 10:01 AM

I will have logs later tonight (hopefully) for the raids they're testing on 10/18, but off the top of my head my DPS for last night was ~25k with this breakdown:

To put 25k into perspective, moonkins and warlocks were doing ~27k, while we are roughly on par with UH DKs, Ele Shamans, with Ret and other melee a bit under us. Mages are terrible on beta and we had to swap them out to avoid enrage. Given how DPS looks on beta, ferals are competitive (top 5 if you play correctly), but our rotation still feels like it's off.

(sorry for the rough estimates, will be better tonight)
Rip: 30%
Shred/Rake: 20%
Melee: 18%
Fury Swipes: 5.7% (much higher than live)
FB: 2.X% (low, again due to lack of CP generation from low crit)

I'm gemming for full hit/exp cap, and reforging all haste and hit/exp (over cap, due to lack of decent enchants) into mastery. Enchant mastery wherever it's available, Exp/Hit otherwise. Crit is the only thing available to cloak.

Swipe in Cat does horrible, horrible damage compared to Rake so tab Raking is still the way to go unless the number of targets is something absurd.

I was constantly SRing with 1/2 CPs because keeping bleeds up 100% of the time were consuming all my CPs.

FB is glyphed because on the off chance that I would use it, I couldn't afford burning on energy on it.

> If Omnitron is a good indication of what Cata raids are like, there will be a lot of target switching, so switching early and reapplying bleeds (on multiple targets, at times) is the way to go.

> Stampeding Roar's 40% movement buff doesn't do much at all, I'm still getting used to pressing the button but it doesn't seem that useful in execution.

Deathwing · 10/18/10, 12:21 PM

Defyn,

Why are you gearing for hit/exp cap? Is this just a playstyle choice, or does something change between 80 and 85 that makes hit/exp much more valuable to dps?

And did swipe not receive the damage buff that it did in live?

kalbear · 10/18/10, 4:26 PM

While hit/expertise aren't crucial for raw dps against a stationary target over 5 minutes, they smooth out rotations in those cases and make it more likely to be correct. The big gain is when dealing with situations where fights are not stationary and time is more of a cap than damage. When dealing with multiple targets, target swapping, time on target being small, etc - having caps means reliably being able to do damage. This is especially important for bleeds, where a missed bleed means uptime drops or ticks can be lost.

It is difficult to simulate this, but my personal experience on fights like LK has been that misses are significant contributions to lower DPS, especially on valks and raging spirits. In the beta, most heroic fights and omnitron are examples where this applies.

Borazon · 10/19/10, 12:21 PM

Deathwing, I believe cat swipe is still 215% in Beta, rather than 335%. (edit, it's 335).

Build 13202 should be deployed soon. This build implemented a number of scaling improvements to Rip/Rake/FB. It is interesting to see these huge improvements, especially given Defyn's comments on cat providing competitive raid dps in the current build.

•Rip now scales from 18/37/55/74/92% of Attack Power depending on combo points, up from 8/16/24/32/40%.
•Ferocious Bite now scales from 10.9/21.8/32.7/43.6/54.5% of Attack Power depending on combo points, up from 7/14/21/28/35%.
•Rake now causes scales from 2% of Attack Power for bleed damage, up from 1%. Now scales from 42% of AP for additional bleed damage over 9 sec, up from 18% of AP.
•Mangle additional damage has been increased from 726 to 1136.
•Vengeance - Entering Cat Form will cancel this effect.

edit - it appears 13202 is not yet on servers. Removed question about raid testing. Noted swipe damage.

Deathwing · 10/19/10, 12:45 PM

IDK, this says otherwise:

Swipe - Spell - World of Warcraft

Between the beta 13202 patch, the hotfixes on live, and the lack of 100% documentation, I'm a bit confused as to the exact state of abilities in beta. I too wonder the point of these latest beta improvements IF beta got the hotfixes that live did.

Borazon · 10/19/10, 1:04 PM

You are correct. I was able to log on and confirm, it appears to be 335% from some quality naked time with the training dummy. Thanks for correcting.

It's weird. I agree, its definitely unclear to me whether all of the live changes are present on Beta, or if it is just a subset. I guess we will know more once 13202 is in.

Yawning · 10/19/10, 1:54 PM

All of the changes posted on MMO regarding feral coefficients have been on live since the hot fix.
All of them have been present on beta since #13195.

I'm assuming this is mmochampion's method of deriving such things finally catching up to the hotfixes.

Defyn · 10/19/10, 2:59 PM

I'm not at hit cap anymore on beta, it's not been much of an issue. I prefer to be capped when learning new fights, but nothing's been that challenging so I've moved away from that a bit.

More accurate percentages than from what I had before. This is from Theralion and Valiona, which requires a ton of movement, and as such DPS is much lower. Shredding is a huge issue given the mechanics too.

There are no AoE mechanics in any of the raids so far, it seems they want to move away from that. Swipe is still critting for less than 10k with my current gear, which is about a tick of Rake. It's much more efficient in terms of energy to just rake multiple targets, even on trash (energy is at a premium atm).

Shred requiring us to be behind the target is antiquated. There have been multiple times on that fight and the Conclave where I had to stop DPSing completely and wait for better positioning to allow me to do anything. Mangle has been buffed, yes, but bad positioning makes Glyph of Shred useless.

Deathwing · 10/19/10, 5:47 PM

Rake vs Swipe, that's with mangle up, right?

I'm wondering if a mangle-only build is still relevant. I've yet to get my hands on a 4.0 sim(I think Mew has one, just haven't had time to learn the code), but I built a mangle-only build for 3.5 that was with 3-4% dps of shred. It wasn't exactly mangle only, because of the cost of shred to mangle, you still had to shred on ooc procs. Might be able to get away with spending OOC on anything now.

tangedyn · 10/20/10, 12:06 AM

Originally Posted by Deathwing

Rake vs Swipe, that's with mangle up, right?

I'm wondering if a mangle-only build is still relevant. I've yet to get my hands on a 4.0 sim(I think Mew has one, just haven't had time to learn the code), but I built a mangle-only build for 3.5 that was with 3-4% dps of shred. It wasn't exactly mangle only, because of the cost of shred to mangle, you still had to shred on ooc procs. Might be able to get away with spending OOC on anything now.

Mew has a scriptable strategy, you do not have to modify the code at all. You can copy the default strategy script and modify it to replace the shred fillers with mangles. The script API documentation can be found here: Wiki Pages - mew-wow-druid-model - Project Hosting on Google Code and you can view the default (best dps found so far) script here: CatModelSimulator.script - mew-wow-druid-model - Project Hosting on Google Code

Just a quick note - the value of hit/exp should be slightly higher now in 4.01 / Beta due to the removal of Primal Precision (which refunded 40% of the energy cost of failed finishers). No idea if it's worth reforging or even gemming for, however.

Primal Precision has is now baked into all our finishers.

Deathwing · 10/20/10, 8:46 AM

Yeah, I got ahold of the script and played around with it for a few hours. Didn't get anything satisfactory. Previously, I could play around with OOC shred, roar/rip desyncing timers, when to mangle for combo points, etc. Seems like the 'wiggle room' for that is pretty much gone. Best I got was a shred based build being 4.8% higher than a completely mangle based build.

Oh well, I wish they would remove the positional requirement on shred. Maybe after they see how many rogues don't touch backstab after fixing the dps competitiveness of it, they might fix shred too.

tangedyn · 10/20/10, 9:05 AM

Did you manage to get higher than the default script with your best shred script?

Deathwing · 10/20/10, 10:13 AM

Nah, I couldn't really find a way to improve that. MAYBE upping the ripsync timer to >=4 instead of 3, but that was a very marginal dps improvement.