Feral DPS Discussion - Page 53

Leafkiller · 03/24/10, 2:10 PM

Originally Posted by Diabetesh

What happened to Feral By Night? Did the creator get busy, stop playing, even die? I love the timers and no other addon just works as well. Just wondering because with 3.3.3 it will not let me log in if I have it in my addon folder.

Yes the author quit playing just before the 3.2 patch came out. There is ongoing work on move predictors being discussed in this thread: Visualising the optimal cat rotation ingame although the general consensus is to create solutions which focus on the moves only and does not include timers. There are several good solutions for timers that you can use in conjunction with a move predictor for a similar in game experience.

Ristaccia · 03/24/10, 2:10 PM

Originally Posted by Leafkiller

Rake is worse than that - often, if you clip it, the DOT will not be reapplied at all and you will need to Rake again. It is easy to test this on a training dummy.

This was fortunately fixed in 3.3.3.

Leafkiller · 03/24/10, 2:14 PM

Originally Posted by Ristaccia

This was fortunately fixed in 3.3.3.

I did not see that in the patch notes, but is is good to hear - I will definitely go test that. That plus the Mangle change will allow keeping the rotation going much easier even with the occasional clip on the last tick of Rake.

Edit: Just did some testing and in all cases regardless of procs and the presence/absence of SR I was able to overwrite the Rake bleed effect. In contrast Rip will still prevent you from overwriting the bleed at times with "A more powerful spell is already active" (depending on procs/buffs). This opens up some new opportunities for modeling as there may be times where Rake, Rip and SR are all about to expire and it will be advantages to Rip, clip Rake and then reapply SR in order to maximize both SR and Rake uptimes. It could also cascade back to the logic on when to refresh SR early as the previous work was done knowing that clipping Rake was disastrous.

Sephon · 03/24/10, 2:38 PM

Originally Posted by Leafkiller

I did not see that in the patch notes, but is is good to hear - I will definitely go test that. That plus the Mangle change will allow keeping the rotation going much easier even with the occasional clip on the last tick of Rake.

Basically what they allowed is for rake to act like any other dot, it can always overwrite itself at your own dps loss if you mess it up.

It still should be allowed to drop before we apply it, so for most of us its not gonna be much of a change, its really only kinda nice if you know you have time off the target and want to reapply as you swap targets, in that case it can be useful, otherwise, its mostly a moot change.

Murna · 03/24/10, 6:45 PM

I can't understand your problem.

I play cat now for basically the whole WotLK expansion (we didn't need to rake in BC), nearly 4 times a week. And I never clipped my rake - maybe one or two times, when I didn't pay attention.

The change, that rake is now clippable, will make bad players even worse, while having absolutely no impact on good players.

But, one point that Sephon mentioned is interesting.
Since mangle now lasts for 60 seconds, it may be better now, to reapply (thus, to clip) rake before leaving a target, than to shred.

gcbirzan · 03/24/10, 7:15 PM

Originally Posted by Murna

Since mangle now lasts for 60 seconds, it may be better now, to reapply (thus, to clip) rake before leaving a target, than to shred.

Looking at my numbers on my gear + 4pt10 from simulationcraft, that's only true if you cannot extend rip by shredding and rake only has one tick left (two rake ticks should provide the same damage from either move). Without 4pt10, shred is always better.

Diabetesh · 03/24/10, 11:58 PM

Originally Posted by Leafkiller

Yes the author quit playing just before the 3.2 patch came out. There is ongoing work on move predictors being discussed in this thread: Visualising the optimal cat rotation ingame although the general consensus is to create solutions which focus on the moves only and does not include timers. There are several good solutions for timers that you can use in conjunction with a move predictor for a similar in game experience.

I don't need the predictor just the timers, it's easy to follow mangle, rip, and rake, but throw clearcasting and savage roar in there and it becomes pretty difficult to juggle.

Nich · 03/25/10, 12:51 AM

Originally Posted by Diabetesh

What happened to Feral By Night? I love the timers and no other addon just works as well. Just wondering because with 3.3.3 it will not let me log in if I have it in my addon folder.

I still only run FBN for the timers (specifically the shred/rip interaction), and I've had no issues logging in with it activated.

RareBeast · 03/25/10, 2:56 AM

Same here - the big (I have scaled it up) OOC proc display & the mangle/rake/rip/SR/TF & Beserk timers all nice and compact in a row sitting above my Ovale suggestion box make my life nice and easy.

RagasLS · 03/25/10, 3:08 AM

To everyone who's using FBN just for timers - I recommend Droodfocus addon (if you like timers on icons as opposed to bars).

histrix · 03/25/10, 6:19 AM

Originally Posted by Diabetesh

I don't need the predictor just the timers, it's easy to follow mangle, rip, and rake, but throw clearcasting and savage roar in there and it becomes pretty difficult to juggle.

Just use CatRotationHelper

Way better then any other addons I tried before anyway.

Flycaz · 03/25/10, 11:55 AM

Badkitty has nice useful and configurable timers as well...

• Narcosleepy · 03/25/10, 1:06 PM

Mod Note There are a lot of mods that have timers. Can we please stop listing every single one out there?

Helistar · 03/31/10, 11:52 AM

Some more information on mangle-spam. I've decided to give it a try to see how hard the DPS will suffer from the switch. The approach is simple: replace Glyph of Shred with Glyph of Mangle and forget about Shred completely. Of course, real-world comparison is always nontrivial, but at least I have some data to show.

Going back to the beginning: I performed simulations using my current stuff (no armory link since I happen to tank at times, so it would be often wrong), the raid-buffed stats are:

AP: 12448
Atk Speed: 0.71
Hit rating: 234
ArPen: 1326
Crit: 61.79%
Expertise: 23

Procs: Mongoose, ilvl 264 Idol, Trinkets: Herkml War Token, ilvl 264 Deathbringer's
The low Crit comes from the fact that I'm using Cryptmaker.
Talents: the standard single-target Cat build (with 3/3 Imp.Mangle).

Using the current default simulationcraft rotation (and optimal_raid=1):

DPS with shred: 11574
DPS with mangle: 10924

As indicated in an older message, a 5.6% loss, which is not negligible.

Real-world data from Festergut 25N: 11086.9 DPS (NOTE: with +5% ICC buff!!!)
WoL: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
(apologies for the "anonymized" log, guild policy)
I was lucky, I never had to move around, so it was continuous mangle-spamming.

How it feels (I kept testing for some more time):
- the shorter duration of Rip makes it very hard to FB, the end result is that it's better to never FB and just use a 5 CP rip followed by a 3 CP SR refresh, rinse and repeat. Keep up rake, of course....
- the reduced energy usage can make it hard to reach 0 energy during a berserk, expecially if you hit a streak of OOC procs.
- the DPS "cycle" becomes a whole lot easier: no need to take care of shreds extending rip, no need to care about positioning, you can keep happily spamming even when moving around to position yourself correctly.
- looking at some other fights I've done since, I'd say that the DPS loss can be noticeable, expecially when dealing with adds which die fast: mangle/shred-spam eats energy faster but gives more short-time damage than mangle-spam (note: glyphing shred is irrelevant in this scenario, so you can still do it, I just chose not to for testing).

Another detail which may be interesting: on Festergut mangle accounted for 23.1% of my damage output. This means that even if I had gone full mangle-spam WITHOUT the glyph, the impact would be small, only an additional 2.1% DPS loss. Result: assuming you have improved mangle, if you're ready to sacrifice around 8% of your DPS you can go mangle-spam without touching your glyphs.
Now, 8% is a lot, but this assumes that you are able to execute the shred-based cycle as well as mangle-spam. For me this is not the case (I don't use any move-suggestion addon, just timers), as a result the easier mangle-spam approach results in less mistakes in the cycle, so the difference is definitely smaller. For comparison, in the Festergut example above, I'm less than 5% close to the theoretical simulation, even without correctly respecting all the complex rules used in the simulationcraft profile, but just going Rip@5 SR@3. After checking, this is one of the times where I'm closest to the theoretical simulation values.... when using shred-spam I tend do to worse (even if the overall DPS may be higher).

In conclusion, I'd say that:
- if you're in a DPS race scenario, then mangle-spam is out of the question, but then this is assuming you master the shred cycle, otherwise the difference may turn out to be smaller than predicted by the simulation.
- for combats where positioning requirements are messy, mangle-spam will be on par with shred.
- for combats where there's a lot of distractions and survival is a priority, unless you really master the shred cycle (= you don't need to look at timers), then going mangle-spam is probably a win simply for the fact that it requires a lot less concentration.
- if you're ready to have 3 points in Imp.Mangle and can afford a 2% loss, you can just go mangle-spam even without the glyph. This is obviously a bad idea, except in fights where there's a single short phase where you need to focus on outside events: you can then mangle-spam in the critical phase and then revert to the normal shred cycle during the rest of the fight, the DPS loss will be minimal and you get the benefit of having a simpler cycle.

After the testing, I've decided I'll go back to the Shred glyph and the shred cycle, but in the process I have learned that mangle-spam may have its uses in specific scenarios. If you are curious on the effect on your personal DPS, next time you're on a farm-mode boss just test it (even without the glyph, you'll still get an idea). The simplest approach is to replace the shred button with a 2nd copy of mangle, then you don't even have to change your keypressing habits

Slimbones · 04/02/10, 3:30 PM

One situation I run into is when I have 5 combo points on the boss, and rip and SR both expire simultaneously. If I use the combo points to reapply rip, then quickly get another combo point and get SR back up, does the rip that was applied without SR up stay "unbuffed" by the SR? Or does SR apply to everything once its up, regardless of whether it was up when they were applied? I've been doing it this way because it is so much more downtime on rip to use the 5 CP on SR, then have to get a full 5 more CP to get rip up. But in the back of my head I wonder if those rips are getting the SR bonus. It doesn't happen that often in my rotation, I'm usually pretty good at keeping them desynchronized, but it does happen on occasion. Any thoughts?