Feral Megathread - Page 97

coredumperror · 01/18/08, 10:20 PM

This idea just popped into my head today, and I had to come here and ask you guys who are actually good at this stuff:
Would [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] be a reasonably good tanking piece for a feral druid?

It's about 620 less bear armor than [Waistguard of the Great Beast], but 25 expertise is a great threat AND mitigation stat. There's equal agi on 100 deaths, with an 8agi and 4agi/6stam gem (for the socket bonus), and it'd be slightly better stam compared to a Great Beast with double 8-agi.

Basically, I'm sure it's better if I'm armor capped without Great Beast (which I'm not quite at, since I've yet to see Hyjal/BT. We just downed Kael for the first time yesterday). But I'm not sure how effective the 25 expertise would be compared to the 620 armor. I'd be around 32.5k with One-Hundred Deaths on instead of Great Beast.

Tasonir · 01/18/08, 10:49 PM

Originally Posted by Liar

Ah right, now that makes the post above look stupid. <_<

Ah well, point still stands. There was a Warrior in the raid who didn't sunder? And the fact that you took more overall damage is as you said because the fight took longer but one thing that I found surprising is the fact that your max hit taken is slightly higher than that of the Warrior (6282 vs 6142) even though you'd expect it to be the other way around.

Yeah, sorry about the indirect links. I'd have posted better ones but the load was 25 minutes so I couldn't really reach them.

I suspect the difference on max hits comes down to gear. A warrior who takes a crushing blow on an odd chance should take significantly more than a druid taking one, but things like ironshield potions or 25% armor buffs from priests/shamans could easily cancel that out. Honestly, I don't think druids will have a fair shot until we can get the full benefit from ironshields and other armor buffs, but there's no real room for that in the current system. I'd be in favor of removing the armor cap, but that won't happen.

As for the dps warrior not sundering, I assume he just never thought of it. We generally use warrior tanks, and if not, a prot warrior is probably still sundering. Naj is pretty hard on melee, so the prot warriors sat out for that fight. Only the dps warrior was there, and I don't think he's used to maintaining sunder while dpsing.

Pokkai · 01/19/08, 3:09 PM

For gem cutting I noticed there is no 12 hit gem, but there is a 24 attack power gem.

david0925 · 01/19/08, 5:03 PM

Originally Posted by coredumperror

This idea just popped into my head today, and I had to come here and ask you guys who are actually good at this stuff:
Would [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] be a reasonably good tanking piece for a feral druid?

It's about 620 less bear armor than [Waistguard of the Great Beast], but 25 expertise is a great threat AND mitigation stat. There's equal agi on 100 deaths, with an 8agi and 4agi/6stam gem (for the socket bonus), and it'd be slightly better stam compared to a Great Beast with double 8-agi.

Basically, I'm sure it's better if I'm armor capped without Great Beast (which I'm not quite at, since I've yet to see Hyjal/BT. We just downed Kael for the first time yesterday). But I'm not sure how effective the 25 expertise would be compared to the 620 armor. I'd be around 32.5k with One-Hundred Deaths on instead of Great Beast.

Yes, one hundred deaths works out as the best DPS belt, and one of the best tanking belts. The expertise reduction of possible burst damage outweights the armor loss, in my opinion.

monstor · 01/20/08, 1:08 AM

Hey guys, any suggestions for this tanking set?
bluenote - Character - World of Warcraft - WoWDigger

It's a high HP build with decent amount of dodge and 412 def + 17 resil, which makes the setup crit immune.

Bullie · 01/20/08, 3:31 AM

A rather interesting topic appeared on the EU druid forums a few days ago, which had me wondering for a while as well.

Basicly it's about the difference in the crit chance on your character chart, and the actual crit chance reported by recount/wws etc. The actual value tends to be lower and I am wondering if this could be a bug, or a mechanic I am unfamiliar with.

First of all we were looking at yellow hits, to avoid any difficulty with glancings (although they should not matter). Also, to work around the effect of a 2-roll system, misses/dodges etc are disregarded. So, we're only looking at the actual hit vs crit %.

Now I can think of one thing that could cause a lower crit chance, and that would be the increased defense of a raidboss vs a player.

My question is the following: Has anybody got any large data samples of fight with the same amount of crit chance (iow, no gearchanges/buff changes/setup changes that would alter your crit chance)

With a large enoug sample size, we can filter out the effects of luck, and perhaps figure out what is causing this consistent lower crit chance.

♦ Tecton · 01/20/08, 4:29 AM

Well, the character sheet shows for level 70, whereas bosses are level 73. I'm not saying for certain that's why we can observe a lower crit rate than shown, but I'd imagine that'd be a good guess. Feel free to correct this if I'm wrong.

Bullie · 01/20/08, 4:38 AM

Originally Posted by Tecton

Well, the character sheet shows for level 70, whereas bosses are level 73. I'm not saying for certain that's why we can observe a lower crit rate than shown, but I'd imagine that'd be a good guess. Feel free to correct this if I'm wrong.

possible indeed. How big of an influence would this have though? And, we could test on a lower level mob (Blasted Lands) and see if this also results in a lower crit chance then expected. I am secretely hoping somebody has already invested the time in testing this, since I don't look forward to standing in front of these mobs mangling for multiple hours :-P

tenten · 01/20/08, 5:51 AM

Originally Posted by Bullie

possible indeed. How big of an influence would this have though? And, we could test on a lower level mob (Blasted Lands) and see if this also results in a lower crit chance then expected. I am secretely hoping somebody has already invested the time in testing this, since I don't look forward to standing in front of these mobs mangling for multiple hours :-P

you have a huge crit chance on lower level mobs b/c of their defense levels

onkl · 01/20/08, 8:34 AM

Miss, parry and dodge reduce your yellow criticals further.

seminarca · 01/20/08, 5:46 PM

From my current understanding of combat mechanics, for single roll attacks (white hits) the weapon skill to defense disparity between a player and boss mob should only result in -0.6% crit [0.04 (anticrit per defense) * 5 (defense per level) * 3 (level difference)].

For two roll attacks (yellow damage) as onkl said, miss/dodge will reduce observed crit value.

So if your chance to crit is 40%, and you have 5% chance to miss and the boss has 5.6% chance to dodge, your actual crit rate on yellow attacks will be:

89.4% of specials will land
of those, 40% will crit
So your observed crit chance should be: 35.76% across all attacks

If you were hit capped with no Expertise:
94.4% of specials will land
Observed crit chance: 37.76%

If you were hit capped with 5 Expertise:
95.65% of specials will land
Observed crit chance: 38.26%

Bullie, can you link that thread please?

Deliverance · 01/20/08, 8:19 PM

This is the thread, Seminarca: WoW-Europe.com Forums -> [Bug?/Theorycrafting] Feral crit chance

There are some WWS data samples in post 10 (way too limited a sample for general purposes), a couple of posts with anecdotal evidence, a few posts from the clueless, and a short discussion of confidence intervals. This subject appears, on the face of it, to warrant further investigation, as there's just enough "me toos" to suggest that something might be going on without enough data to either prove or disprove a general pattern.

Daboran · 01/21/08, 4:36 AM

Originally Posted by monstor

Hey guys, any suggestions for this tanking set?
bluenote - Character - World of Warcraft - WoWDigger

It's a high HP build with decent amount of dodge and 412 def + 17 resil, which makes the setup crit immune.

Not going into specifics, but you'll find that if you wear more resilience-based armor you can get a lot higher on stamina for relatively little cost in armor or dodge lost due to using less +def items. The season 3 items generally have equivalent stamina/sockets to T6 with only slightly less armor.

Monique · 01/21/08, 6:11 AM

I've got an Excel of 2100+ shreds and mangles from our WWS reports. I'm somewhat safe bet as a test subject as I'm not benefitting from agility totems at any point on our raids, I'm mostly in MT group and was using the mark flasks on raids.

I got a gear upgrade and at the same time bought a good stack of agi pots, with the good intention of using those to test how a notable, 5% increase affects the results.

My crit rate at 41,2% yielded an actual crit rate of 35,9% (delta 5,3%) with a sample size of 1715 mangles and shreds.
My crit rate at 46,5% yielded an actual crit rate of 41,9% (delta 4,6%) with a sample size of 420 mangles and shreds (one week, I'll continue tracking this in raids to come).

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spoke · 01/21/08, 8:40 AM

There is a suggestion in the thread that the problem might come from LotP. Personally, I think this is unlikely.

There would be an easy way to test this if we could click LotP off. If I recall correctly, that's not possible (I'm not at home to test right now). Maybe another class, grouped with a Feral, would be able to do so though? Of course, any kind of bug might only materialise when LotP is applied to ourselves.

From my experience, my yellow critical rate isn't generally any lower than I would expect from a two roll system. Is it possible this could be an issue with the European copy of the game only, or are the builds the same?