Fire Cataclysm Discussion: OP Updated for Release - Page 14

Dejah-Thoris · 09/28/10, 3:56 PM

Originally Posted by Zaldinar

Which patch did you do this under? and did you happen to /combatlog the test?

I didn't /combatlog the tests. The patch was whatever was on the PTR on Sunday - I didn't look at the number. I'll get those when I play around with it some more.

Zaldinar · 09/29/10, 10:39 AM

Some more Tier 3 Hot Streak numbers from patch 13066:

Procs	Crits	NonCrits
16	19	1591
58	80	1544
111	173	1603

Crit Rate	Procs per Crit
0.011801242	0.842105263
0.049261084	0.725
0.09740991	0.641618497

~45 minutes of scorch spam on a level 80 target dummy per scaling from a nudist mage to a geared up mage, specced fire to Tier 3 HS and Imp Scorch with nothing else. Combat logs are saved if anyone wants to look at them to verify my grep string. I'll see what I can do to drive my crit rate up tomorrow for a higher crit sampling.

I'd love to see a combatlog of the low proc rate observations that have been posted about a few times.

Edit:

Also, oddly, if you hard-cast a Pyroblast it ticks for a given value, but if you recast a pyroblast with a DoT present it ticks for around 2% more (with no mastery), and I can't come up with a reproduction scenario but I've also observed a 4% increase (754, 769, and 784). Can someone else confirm this?

Edit2:

For anyone curious about the precasting mechanic in Cata, I did some data collection using the API to collect timestamps and found that the earliest I could consistently generate a UNIT_SPELLCAST_SENT after the start of a GCD was around 400 msec before the expected end of the GCD. That is, you have 0.4 seconds before the end of your GCD regardless of your haste or the duration of the GCD where you can push the button and get it to cast the follow up spell. It would appear that the rest of the mechanics from the 2.3 change are still in place, where there is a period towards the end of your cast bar that will allow a spell request to be sent and if you request a spell before that the GCD starts ticking, then gets canceled.

This cleans up dealing with 1.5 second base cast spells and instacast spells significantly as far as precasting goes.

Smaiki · 10/01/10, 12:33 PM

But Ignite still does not really stack corretly.
I did some tests today with a dummy and normally should end up with 48% Ignite Damage (40% + 20% DoT-Dmg of Fire Spezialisation) of the overall crit damage.

Here some numbers:

Critical Dmg
------------

Spell     Avg Crit   Crits  Total
Fb        16465      49     806785
Pyro      18601       5     93005
Pyro DoT  1900       33     62700

Total                       962490
48% (expected Ignite)       461995.2

Ignite Dmg done    312446   means 38.7% of Crit Dmg

Don't know if this issue will be fixed ever. Can somebody confirm this everlasting problem on a Beta? Just could test this on PTR, unfortunately.
Also noticed, that Ignite ticks sometimes twice, sometimes 3 times - mostly in connection with larger crit rows.
Is this intended?

Bashram · 10/01/10, 4:48 PM

Zaldinar, you mentioned on the Beta forums that you don't like the way that Frostfire plays currently. Would it be worth suggesting a change to the DoT, such that it no longer stacks, but instantly deals the remaining damage when it is overwritten? Or am I totally off the deep end again?

Tristany · 10/02/10, 6:12 PM

Some further testing after MMO-Champion reported the "new" Pyroblast! spellname.

Current Beta version Pyroblast! is the "evolved" name of Pyroblast when a Hotstreak has proc'd... i.e. the spell Pyroblast on your bar changes to Pyroblast! when you get a Hotstreak. in addition it's DoT is named Pyroblast! as well... however... if you cast a regular cast Pyroblast after a Hotstreak.. you can see the existing Pyroblast! DoT overwritten with a regular Pyroblast DoT.

This may have something to do with why Hotstreak Pyroblast! DoTs do not spread with Impact... and also leads one to wonder if Pyroblast! DoTs are being rolled into Combustion.

Posted a bug report in the forums... though not sure if this intended or not.

Maje · 10/02/10, 6:49 PM

Hmm, one reason I can think of that they chose to do it was to solve the issue with HS Pyroblast consuming Clearcasting.

Zaldinar · 10/03/10, 7:29 AM

Originally Posted by Smaiki

But Ignite still does not really stack corretly.
I did some tests today with a dummy and normally should end up with 48% Ignite Damage (40% + 20% DoT-Dmg of Fire Spezialisation) of the overall crit damage.

Here some numbers:

...

Individual instances of the bugs tell us more than a mass of data collection like that. Can you isolate down individual crits that are not behaving as you are expecting them to? If you can build a model for how it should behave, then generate conditions where it doesn't behave within that model, then those can be reported as bugs.

Originally Posted by Bashram

Zaldinar, you mentioned on the Beta forums that you don't like the way that Frostfire plays currently. Would it be worth suggesting a change to the DoT, such that it no longer stacks, but instantly deals the remaining damage when it is overwritten? Or am I totally off the deep end again?

I don't like it because of how much it rewards spreading your spells around. Ideally for a FrostFire glyphed Fire mage you would build up a three stack of the DoT, impact spread it to up to four targets, then cycle FFBs between those four to keep the stacks up.

I like the idea of using Impact / LB / Hs Pyro to keep DoTs up on multiple targets to take advantage of Pyromaniac, I don't like adding the baseline nuke into that behavior as well. It seems like it will create a belief that "Oh, the FFB Glyph is only for when you have three to four targets that will live for an extended period of time" instead of simply allowing Fire to have another incidental DoT available.

Your suggestion would essentially fix the problem, which is that after three stacks are present you have little motivation to cast another FFB on that target until its time to refresh the stack, but it sort of defeats the purpose of the DoT being there at all if when spamming it all you're going to get is a little extra pow on your next spell.

Maje · 10/03/10, 9:26 AM

One thing that might be interesting to check is to have both glyphs (Fireball and FFB) and one other, and basically mashing FFB to refresh the stack and Fireball during off-times. I know it wasn't their intention but it might be worth it, the main contenders being Pyroblast, Living Bomb and Molten Armor glyphs.

Zaldinar · 10/03/10, 9:47 AM

You make a good point. The Pyro glyph probably isn't actually all that valuable, and the LB one may not be valuable enough to compete with the ability to three stack FFB then swap to Fireballs. Worth mathing out when things stabilize numerically.

Edit:

Actually, doing some simple simulation on this would seem to support that if we can drop a glyph for the Fireball one, it is very much so worth it to change the priority list to be:

1) Critical mass maintenance (Via Scorch if required)
2) HS Pyro
3) LB Maintenance
4) FFB DoT stacking to 3 and refreshing if casting a Fireball would cause it to drop off
5) Fireball

Using this method my simulator is showing you can consistently net over twice as many FFB DoT ticks as you would expect from the spells themselves (So what was a 3% damage benefit becomes a 6% benefit). Couple that with the Fireballs themselves being worth casting and we can have a single target priority list that is a step move involving. This also includes random periods every 25 seconds or so where you might have to do something other than cast for five seconds (to simulate movement, thus causing some drop offs of the DoT and requiring restacking).

Whether or not this is desirable is worth questioning. And whether or not the relative value level of the glyphs would allow us to do this is also worth questioning. Until HS proc rates stop changing drastically patch to patch and are isolated down I doubt this will be doable atleast for the Pyro glyph. LB might be able to be done with a more sophisticated sim though.

Smaiki · 10/03/10, 10:59 AM

Originally Posted by Zaldinar

Individual instances of the bugs tell us more than a mass of data collection like that. Can you isolate down individual crits that are not behaving as you are expecting them to? If you can build a model for how it should behave, then generate conditions where it doesn't behave within that model, then those can be reported as bugs.

As it is on live servers, Ignite doesn't stack correctly when 2 casts critically hit at the same time.
You just have to deal dmg on a dummy for 1min, watch the ignite dmg and you will note that ignite did not 48% of the total critical dmg.

Gundles · 10/03/10, 12:58 PM

I can confirm that ignite is not stacking correctly. Here are some test results with 19,13 Mastery.

Living Bomb:

Crit: 3 AvgCrit: 3817
DotCrit: 10 AvgDotCrit: 5730
IgniteDmg: 40652
Expected IngiteDmg: (3*3817+10*5730)*0,4*(1+19,13*0,025)=40652
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pyroblast:

Crit: 3 AvgCrit: 17069
DotCrit: 15 AvgDotCrit: 2282
IgniteDmg: 50521
Expected igniteDmg: (3*17069+15*2282)*0,4*(1+19,13*0,025)=50519
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you can see, using these spells individually, everything works perfectly. Now lets see what happens, when we use them together, combined with fireball.

Fireball:

Crit: 41 AvgCrit: 14707

Living Bomb:

Crit: 5 AvgCrit: 3974
DotCrit: 30 AvgDotCrit: 5672

Pyroblast!:

Crit 10 AvgCrit 16603
DotCrit: 44 AvgDotCrit: 2138

Total IgniteDmg: 351310
Expected IgniteDmg: (41*14707+5*3974+30*5672+10*16603+44*2138)*0,4*(1+19,13*0,025)= 622710
Ignite Loss: 43,58%

Multiple crits at the same time still not working correctly. I think it is not a serious problem on live, but now, when pyroblast and living bomb crits leaving ignites, it has become a serious issue. I hope there will be some kind of a solution for this, it looks like it wiould be better, if dots wont leave ingite at all.

Maje · 10/03/10, 3:58 PM

Like Zaldinar said it's not very helpful saying it should be X and instead it's Y. It might be true but you can't really submit a bug this way, a much better way is to paste log snips where the specific loss happens. Just make sure the beginning of the log is Ignite fading or being applied.

Smaiki · 10/03/10, 6:11 PM

As you can see, it's not working as intended... so what should else be? I'm not really an expert in things like logs and so on, but it seems to be obvious that ignite is not dealing dmg as expected.

Zaldinar · 10/04/10, 1:53 AM

Originally Posted by Smaiki

As you can see, it's not working as intended... so what should else be? I'm not really an expert in things like logs and so on, but it seems to be obvious that ignite is not dealing dmg as expected.

If all you're talking about is the simult-crit bug, that's hardly news ( World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> So I talked to a GM about Ignite... ), but if you want to submit a bug report you need to isolate specific instances of it happening and show why it's not good.

You don't need to be an expert at anything. Cast a few spells, get a crit, do the math for what you're expecting to see and see if it matches up. If it doesn't, try to explain the result. Screenshots of your combatlog or typing /combatlog in your chat box and then posting the file from ~\World of Warcraft\Logs\WoWCombatLog.txt suffices.

Smaiki · 10/04/10, 4:19 AM

Originally Posted by Zaldinar

If all you're talking about is the simult-crit bug, that's hardly news ( World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> So I talked to a GM about Ignite... ), but if you want to submit a bug report you need to isolate specific instances of it happening and show why it's not good.

Of course, this issue is already known, so when I began with this discussion about the Ignite stacking, I deliberately used the word "still". I merely wanted to "refresh" this topic and get some current information or maybe try to find out why it's so hard to fix over 3 years (concerning to your great link)!
Perhaps that's the inappropriate thread or forum for my intentions, so when I did wrong: I'm sorry.

Edit:

Originally Posted by Smaiki

Also noticed, that Ignite ticks sometimes twice, sometimes 3 times - mostly in connection with larger crit rows.
Is this intended?

see below!