PvE Balance Guide: Cataclysm Draft

Lightflower · 11/22/10, 6:19 PM

Minor typo in the Stat Caps/Breakpoints section:

Hit: Against a level 83 target, with all buffs, we need 1742 hit rating (17%) to cap at 100%. To check your hit rating, just mouse over it on your character sheet--it already includes the bonus hit from Balance of Power. Against an 82, 81, or 80 target, the caps are 615, 512, and 409 rating respectively.

These should be 85-88 respectively, not 80-83.

Quite a few of the item links are broken, particularly gems. Not sure if that's just because Wowhead is in transition at the moment.

The Rebirth section appears to be outdated and is not listing the shared cooldown between Druids and the restriction of 1 per 10 man raid & 3 per 25 man raid per encounter (I'm not 100% sure on the 25 player cap though).

Other than that, great work & extremely informative!

• Hamlet · 11/22/10, 6:21 PM

I'll assume the blue post is accurate about 3 in 25-man. Things were buggy on beta, but we'll see what happens. I don't know of any shared cooldown other than the per-encounter limit.

M� nze · 11/23/10, 6:10 AM

Herbalism now gives a haste cooldown via Lifeblood. At 240 haste for 20s every 2 minutes, it averages out to 40 haste.

Thats actually rank 7 , rank 8 gives you 480 haste for 20s, so its avarages out to 80 haste.

Cdin · 11/23/10, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by Hamlet

Engineering gives the best DPS gain. Synapse Springs - Spell - World of Warcraft give 480 Int, for 12 seconds out of every 60, for 96 Int on average.
You can insert these lines to a macro with any spell to use the gloves automatically without spamming errors:

/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/use 10
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");

(This macro can also work with trinkets. /use 13 for the top trinket slot, and 14 for the bottom slot)

In addition to all of the above, the Nitro Boosts activation is an excellent perk. Flexweave Underlay and Grounded Plasma Shield - Spell - World of Warcraft are further perks.

Your Engineering calculation assumes that you get the full benefit of the 12 second buff. This overstates its value a little.

As you know spell damage is calculated at the end of a spell cast. If you start casting a spell with one second left on the buff then that last second of buff has absolutely no impact on DPS. You're also unlike to activate the buff at exactly 60seconds each time. For example, if it takes you 1 second to activate the buff after it comes off cooldown and one second of the buff is wasted each time then the benefit of the springs is 86.6 Int (480*(11/61)) instead of 96 Int. How much this devalues the buff is debateable, and I'm not saying my 86.6 Int number is correct. In fact, I agree that Engineering is likely the best DPS profession for T11 other then Leatherworking. However, it should be pointed out that 96 Int is the absolute maximum benefit possible and unlikely to be achieved over the long term. Thought, I know some people will change professions either way, and I am considering it as well.

The other question I had, was have you confirmed that Instant cast spells are buffed by the Springs when using that macro? I assume this won't be a problem for Wrath, Starfire, or SS with a cast time, but I wouldn't be surprised if there
Instants had an issue.

Originally Posted by Hamlet

Leatherworking: 130 Int to bracers in place of the usual 65 haste gives a DPS equivalent of around 100 Int.

I realize that this is a 4.0 guide, and what you said here is very likely to be true for the entirety of T11 content. That said, you may want to include a comment that Leatherworkings advantage is likely to decrease in higher tiers of content.

• Hamlet · 11/23/10, 12:29 PM

That's true about temporary buffs, although it can work other way--since if the last spell you cast when it's up is an instant, you gain effective uptime. There's probably still a net downward adjustment, but not so large.

I haven't specifically checked those sorts of macros lately, but they've worked for non-GCD effects pretty much forever. I don't know of any reason it would have changed. My NS macro for Resto worked fine on beta.

Cdin · 11/23/10, 2:39 PM

Originally Posted by Hamlet

That's true about temporary buffs, although it can work other way--since if the last spell you cast when it's up is an instant, you gain effective uptime. There's probably still a net downward adjustment, but not so large.

Yes, it is true of all temporary buffs, but none of the other crafting profession buffs are temporary other then the obviously bad tailoring buff. Therefore you're not comparing them on an equal playing field. As I said before Engineering is likely one of the best two professions in terms of DPS but it's not the equivalent of a static 96 Int buff.

I also wouldn't put to much stock in DoTs increasing the effective uptime of the buff. It will probably be a net positive, but you could go through the 12 seconds without your DoT needing a refresh. There are probably some cames that coudl be played, like clipping a DoT or delaying it for a few seconds to pick up the buff, but just as there will be times were we get all three of our high DPET spells in the buff, there will be times when we only get one or none of them in there as well.

• Hamlet · 11/23/10, 2:51 PM

I know it's not, although it's pretty close. Your lowball estimate was still 86 Int equivalent.

I could estimate in more detail by checking what % of your time you spend casting nukes/instants and averaging out the gain/loss of the partial spell at the end of the buff. That's not especially worth it though, since the adjustment would probably be on the order of <5 Int, and I'm ignoring larger effects just due to the stacking potential of a temporary buff and other factors. It's clear that it's better than other professions except at most one (and I'd probably recommend it even if it was subpar for DPS just due to Nitros), so we have enough information for now.

e: A more interesting question is: is it better to macro Synapse Springs with DoT's only or with all spells? The former ensures you catch a set of DoT refreshes every time you click it, and might also significantly increase the uptime overlap with Nature's Grace.

MatsT · 11/23/10, 4:22 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Engineering additionally give us an extra cloak, helm, belt and boot enchant? Some of them not incredibly powerful on 85 but a lot better than nothing.

EDIT: Didn't realize they removed all of the stat bonuses in 4.0.1. Engineering was pretty ridiculous there for a while (And still best because of the invaluable nitro boosts)

• Hamlet · 11/23/10, 4:29 PM

Originally Posted by MatsT

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Engineering additionally give us an extra cloak, helm, belt and boot enchant? Some of them not incredibly powerful on 85 but a lot better than nothing.

Those are already mentioned. The cloak one doesn't really do anything, belt one is kind of neat (just macro it to Barkskin), but the boots are the really good one and provide a strong incentive to take Engineering regardless of DPS.

crmccar · 11/23/10, 7:09 PM

Have you looked into how much it's worth delaying On Use effects like the engineering gloves and trinkets for Eclipse bonuses? My first thought was to macro the gloves with Starfall (especially if you're not using the Starsurge glyph), but if it doesn't fall during Eclipse, then it's lower DPET than our dots.

Do dots and/or starfall damage change dynamically with your spellpower?

• Hamlet · 11/23/10, 7:27 PM

Not looked into that in any detail yet. Off-the-cuff math: Eclipse amplifies a spellpower buff by X (37% to start). If I delay a buff by Y seconds to get Z more seconds of Eclipse shared uptime, I gain XZ seconds of effective buff uptime. But the Y second delay corresponds to a loss of Y*(mean uptime ratio) seconds. In a simple case where Z=Y (i.e. buff would already have carried partially into Eclipse, but I'm waiting longer so it overlaps more), we need XZ>ZM. M is typically around 1/5 or 1/6 for temporary buffs, and X is always greater than that.

I'll make that more comprehensible at some point, but at first glance, that makes delaying look like it has potential. Will have to be explored more.

DoT's do not, Starfall does.

• Hamlet · 11/23/10, 10:07 PM

Seeing reports of Nitros failing in raid instances now. Something to keep an eye on. Although, as discussed above, will likely still leave Engineering as the best profession.

Kluian · 11/24/10, 1:29 AM

Appears as if there was enough pushback on the WoW forums to return the chaotic style meta's back to their original requirements.

More blue gems than red gems? Ya...no. Change it back.

The current design has been reconsidered, so we're planning to revert gems that now require more blue than red gems back to their original requirements. Such a change can't be accomplished via a hotfix though, so we'll have to wait to revert these in a future patch.

• Hamlet · 11/24/10, 2:10 AM

Heh. I mean, I'm generally happy since it would led to a really irritatingly high amount of regemming with each upgrade. A small part of me is sad because complex gemming is something that rewards good players (or perhaps moreso, lets you identify players who know their class theorycraft well).

a civilian · 11/24/10, 4:47 AM

Regarding the discussion on engineering/synapse springs, note also that if the fight length is not an integer number of minutes, the uptime on the buff will be higher than 12/60 = 20%. The first use is at the start of the fight, so e.g. in a 4.5 minute fight you'd use it 5 times for a 22% uptime.

Generally you'll get an average of about 0.5 extra uses out of the enchantment (slight overestimate since it doesn't account for the nonzero duration), so in a fight of approximate length n minutes you'll have on average about (20%)(n+0.5)/n uptime on the buff.

This also applies to tailoring.