Retribution DPS Theorycraft - Page 104

orkyben · 02/28/08, 8:28 AM

Such a shame those Achemist Stones don't increase the effect of Haste Potions as well. =(

SomeoneRandom · 02/28/08, 9:09 AM

The tanking / melee dps stones are really underwhelming... I was hoping for something that would EASILY be best in slot like how all the other professions get...?

End game Helm for engies, End game Chests for Tailor / BS / LW...

On the bright side... the healing one definitely seems worth it and it looks like I can get rid of my essence of the martyr finally

• Shalas · 02/28/08, 10:34 AM

Originally Posted by Avitus

Or you're using SoC.

Given two 3.8 speed weapons, where one does 400-600 damage and the other does 450-550, which do you think would do higher dps with SoC? How about between one that does 400-600 and one that does 500-550?

SomeoneRandom · 02/28/08, 11:50 AM

I imagine hes not bad enough to think that higher top end = more damage if the average damage is the same, my guess is since your usually comparing two weapons of equal dps... higher top end = slower = better for SOC... at least thats what I imagine he is thinking.

Avitus · 02/28/08, 11:58 AM

Originally Posted by Shalas

Given two 3.8 speed weapons, where one does 400-600 damage and the other does 450-550, which do you think would do higher dps with SoC? How about between one that does 400-600 and one that does 500-550?

That's irrelevant. The comparison is between Torch and CE where torch has 396-595 damage and CE has 386-580. Don't know how your example applies.

In addition, SoC is not weapon speed normalized = Higher frontload X slower weapon = win.

Shalymar · 02/28/08, 1:02 PM

I saw this change to Shamans

Shamanistic rage now let you regenerate mana equal to 30% of your attack power instead of 15. Duration reduced to 15 seconds. (Was 30 seconds)

I would love a talent or a change to a talent that gave us mana regen like this.

• Shalas · 02/28/08, 1:08 PM

Originally Posted by Avitus

That's irrelevant. The comparison is between Torch and CE where torch has 396-595 damage and CE has 386-580. Don't know how your example applies.

In addition, SoC is not weapon speed normalized = Higher frontload X slower weapon = win.

SoC benefits from slower weapons, and weapons with higher dps. It does not benefit from weapons with a higher top end. If you look very closely at the examples I posted, you should be able to figure out the difference.

tarja · 02/28/08, 2:50 PM

Originally Posted by Shalas

SoC benefits from slower weapons, and weapons with higher dps. It does not benefit from weapons with a higher top end. If you look very closely at the examples I posted, you should be able to figure out the difference.

You are right that it is not top end weapon damage that matters, but your example is wrong. First of all, your example is fairly meaningless because 2H weapons tend to pretty much always have top end damage proportional to the weapon's average base damage. I couldn't find a single example of two TBC epic 2Handers where one weapon has a higher top end damage the other weapon has higher average base damage. Second of all, it is actually not the average base weapon damage that matters for SoC - what matters is the average damage after including attack power.

So for example, Cataclysm's Edge has significantly higher top end damage (580) AND average base damage (483) than a World Breaker (558/464.5), but as long as your AP is over 1500, the World Breaker would still have higher SoC damage since it is slower, and your AP adds more damage per attack. I think this sort of example, with weapons that actually exist, is far better at illustrating why it is wrong to think in terms of "top end damage" when comparing weapons.

Avitus · 02/28/08, 2:59 PM

Originally Posted by Shalas

SoC benefits from slower weapons, and weapons with higher dps. It does not benefit from weapons with a higher top end. If you look very closely at the examples I posted, you should be able to figure out the difference.

Please spare me the tone. Your example is meaningless and simply a derail. You hooked on to some guy saying "top end" when he meant "frontload" and started a crusade to explain how 10-30 is the same as 15-25. Wow.

Frontload matters.

Speed matters.

Top end doesn't, but that's irrelevant since no one even is talking about that and since it's pretty standardized in how weapon ranges are.

Jeez.

Buliwyf · 02/28/08, 4:31 PM

We're at 104 pages now and more an more people are saying they don't want to read all 104 pages to maybe find their answers. Should we compress all we have learned in this thread to a new post #1 in a new thread and keep going from there?

Edit. It appears I missed out "two" capital letters in the above paragraph. I have been reported for this heinous crime and have received a penalty point. I am sorry for offending anyone and will endeavor to ensure it never happens again. Should I miss out the occasional comma or quotation mark, please feel free to PM me that my mistakes irk you and I will fix them and let the forum police focus their attentions on the real trolls.

xellos · 02/28/08, 4:40 PM

Reading all 104 pages is a laborious process which is why they have a search function. While at some point we may want to condense everything and start anew, I don't think that it's necessary at the moment. There's still plenty of good information to be gleaned with a bit of effort.

flyingtoastr · 02/28/08, 4:51 PM

So the second Blizzcast is out (hooray?). Nothing terribly exciting except for a small comment by Tom Chilton at around 38:45. When asked about changing SoC/JoC to take effect of "warrior stats" he responded like so (paraphrased):

"We want all specs to use the same kind of gear so that we don't have to itemize specifically for one spec in the game. We want ret pallys to use Warrior style gear. We've made a few changes to fix the immediate problems in 2.3. Eventually we want to make it so all the seals and Judgements use this kind of stat distribution, but we will not be seeing the full effects of this until the next expansion." (emphasis mine)

Sounds to me like we won't be seeing any changes to SoC to help with the oodles of haste on Sunwell gear. I can't say I'm especially happy with the continuation of the "wait and see" crap the devs keep shoving down our mouths.

EDIT: Found the full Transcript

Bornakk: So, we have a couple of questions for you today. The first is, regarding Retribution Paladins, we've made some recent changes to the class that were very nice and they're wondering if we're going to update the Seal or the Judgement of Command with the new model that we were following.

Tom Chilton: Absolutely. What we're trying to do, a big push that we have in the expansion, is to get different specs and different classes to use similar types of gear. What we don't want to have to do is drop different kinds of gear for every single different kind of spec in the game. Unfortunately, that has the side effect of making people feel as though a lot of loot that isn't for them drops. It's great when the item that is for your class, for your spec drops but you've got to figure that there's a whole lot of other classes and specs out there just thinking ‘another item that's not for me?'

So, what we're trying to do is make sure that the items are shared more among the different classes and specs. So, we're really looking towards moving Retribution Paladins farther towards using the same kind of itemization that warriors use and we've made a couple of changes recently in patch 2.3 that kind of go part of the way there. And really, that was just to shore up some of the immediate problems that we were having with it.

Really, we want to go further with that and make sure that across the board, all the different Seals, Judgements, and all the different paladin abilities in general kind of follow that same scheme. But that's something we'll likely be seeing the full effect of in the expansion. (emphasis mine)

I personally really don't feel like waiting another 8-10 months to actually have a working combat system that scales with stats correctly, especially when my comrades across the border have it already. With all the Haste on SWP gear and all the 2-handed weapons being fast as hell its looking like things are going to be very depressing for alliance for a while.

Fiola · 02/28/08, 5:14 PM

"Really, we want to go further with that and make sure that across the board, all the different Seals, Judgements, and all the different paladin abilities in general kind of follow that same scheme."

That sounds promising.

IMO, if Ret paladins are going "Warrior style gear", the entire class needs to follow suit, or ease of itemization is not going to improve much on Blizzard's end. (Warrior/pal DPS gear, warrior tank gear, prot paladin tank gear, holy paladin heal gear ...)

I'd like to see what they mean that "full effect" though. How much effect are they going to give us in the interim? (Well, the end of 2.4 will tell us that)

I will be greatly amused if I can someday look at a pure Str/Sta item and think, "oooh, that looks good for healing".

• Chicken · 02/28/08, 5:24 PM

I'm also curious how it'll work through to Protection Paladins. I wouldn't say no to a re-thinking/re-itemization which makes Block Value fill in the task that Spell Damage currently does.

That would possibly be too powerful though; converting all the spell damage on my tier sets to Block Value would see me an extremely large gain in how much I block for, and it's already responsible for a pretty large amount of damage reduction as is.

Merple · 02/28/08, 5:30 PM

Originally Posted by Chicken

I'm also curious how it'll work through to Protection Paladins. I wouldn't say no to a re-thinking/re-itemization which makes Block Value fill in the task that Spell Damage currently does.

That would possibly be too powerful though; converting all the spell damage on my tier sets to Block Value would see me an extremely large gain in how much I block for, and it's already responsible for a pretty large amount of damage reduction as is.

Also, flip that. Imagine a warrior's threat with that much block value.

Rasputin · 02/28/08, 5:50 PM

Originally Posted by Chicken

I'm also curious how it'll work through to Protection Paladins. I wouldn't say no to a re-thinking/re-itemization which makes Block Value fill in the task that Spell Damage currently does.

That would possibly be too powerful though; converting all the spell damage on my tier sets to Block Value would see me an extremely large gain in how much I block for, and it's already responsible for a pretty large amount of damage reduction as is.

"Spell damage increased by X% of your block value"

They don't seem to want to change the end playstyle of the classes, or else we'd be using physical damage seals that we activate when we choose as Ret. They could allow cross-utilization of gear by dropping in a few deep talents. For prot, mana regen on damage done to help with "rage" generation(as protadins are really the only class that can be run dry, especially in an offtanking position) and something to get spell damage from warrior tank stats(block value mostly). Ret is closer already. Fix SoComm so it's the definitive ret seal by scaling it with AP exclusively, then add in mana regeneration from some DPS stat or activity and we can ignore int and mp5 and completely share warrior DPS gear. This seems reasonable to do across all classes, and could easily narrow the drops down to DPS plate, tanking plate, DPS mail, healing mail, DPS leather, etc so that restrictions are by role and armor type instead of role, armor type, class, and spec.

Anarkii · 02/29/08, 3:29 AM

For those who know of Rawr, I've started working on Rawr.Retribution.For those who don't -

Originally Posted by Astrylian

In the most concise terms, Rawr is a program for rating gear, enchants, buffs, etc. It will help you build sets of gear for whatever your purpose is, and most of all, it's accurate. Rawr takes everything possible into account when building ratings, in order to provide the most reliable ratings of gear. First, let me give a brief overview of how Rawr rates gear. In short, it doesn't. Rawr never looks at an item, and gives it a value based on what stats it has. In order to be as accurate as possible, Rawr only looks at the whole picture, the entire character, counting race, gear, enchants, buffs, info about your target, and any other calculation options. Based on the entire character, it will do all the calculations necessary to build one or more Ratings for the character (such as Survival and Mitigation for bears). So how do we get ratings for gear? The ratings for a piece of gear are defined as the difference between <The entire character with that item equipped> and <The entire character with that slot empty>. When Rawr says that one item is better than another by X points, that means that your entire character will be X points better with that item equipped, than the other. The same is done for buffs and enchants. This method is accurate because it takes all gear scaling into account, including the piece being equipped, and not the item you already have equipped.

You can find more info on the current version of Rawr, which was created initially for druids here :
The Druid Wiki � Rawr

I'm creating a module to incorporate the Paladin DPS Model into Rawr which will enable people to choose their gear sets, compare the DPS difference between items graphically, measure the total dps and the dps breakdown ; and do all this while choosing buffs/debuffs/fight options.

The two main objectives are ease of use and accuracy. Astrylian, the original author of Rawr(the base and module for feral druids) has done a nice job of making it easy to use. Regarding the accuracy, I'm referencing the calculations from Bellator's spreadsheet since it has been commonly used for a long time. There are some fundamental temporary buff changes I'm making like the uptime of Bloodlust and Avenging Wrath being used towards their multipliers, depending on fight duration instead of averaging them out on their cooldowns.

I also plan to eventually model the comparison between different stats based on their itemization points. If anyone has any suggestions on what they want to see in this module, I'd be happy to hear.

Some previews of the state after a few hours of effort are attached.

Prinsesa · 02/29/08, 3:49 AM

If Wowhead is to be believed, the Scryer proc is 100 crit rating for 10 seconds. Except it isn't.

The Scryer proc was just theorized from the comments, whereas the Aldor proc was listed right below the tooltip. In any case, it's already been established that the Scryer proc is an Arcane Bolt.

I'm also curious how it'll work through to Protection Paladins.

An idea I had would be to give tiered pieces assloads of loving spell damage, like 2.4's Shattrath Protectorate's Breastplate.

Between that and our weapon, our necklace/cloak/bracers/belt/boots/rings/trinkets could probably be standardized Protection gear (no STR, no INT, no spell damage) without a lot of problems.

Even the bracers/belt/boots could be a wash depending on how much more Blizzard will extend their 8-piece sets into WOTLK.

Liania · 02/29/08, 5:23 AM

Just downloaded the spreadsheet and trying to compare my current items with upgrades i hit the "Analyse Items" button... But nothing happens, no errors no nothing :s

Or wait i do get an error:

Same thing happens when i press the socket gems buttons.

Anyone know why?

Morax · 02/29/08, 6:14 AM

Click Debug and Search in every File vor "Names" - delete every match - try again
i think some changes in excel 2007

Liania · 02/29/08, 6:36 AM

As much as it felt like i was deleting 25% of the spreadsheet it actually worked.

/bow

Buliwyf · 02/29/08, 10:09 AM

Looking at your system tray, it "appears" you're running both Norton Security and AVG anti virus. I'd suggest picking one or the other and not using both. Norton, in particular, doesn't like sharing with other anti virus programs

Liania · 02/29/08, 10:10 AM

Trust me i tried getting rid of norton several times... I just dont know how :x

Buliwyf · 02/29/08, 12:26 PM

START > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs. Find and click on anything by Norton and Symantec and "remove".

If you have done this already and/or it sounds patronizing, apologies. Hope it helps.

Anyway, enough off topic for me now or I get spanked methinks

Nhul · 02/29/08, 1:02 PM

Originally Posted by Fiola

"Really, we want to go further with that and make sure that across the board, all the different Seals, Judgements, and all the different paladin abilities in general kind of follow that same scheme."

That sounds promising.

IMO, if Ret paladins are going "Warrior style gear", the entire class needs to follow suit, or ease of itemization is not going to improve much on Blizzard's end. (Warrior/pal DPS gear, warrior tank gear, prot paladin tank gear, holy paladin heal gear ...)

Ret - Warrior
Prot - Warrior (with some consideration for paladin specific items through badges or a focus on different stats)
Holy - Shaman (many shaman items have crit, haste, and mp5, all the stuff we use as holy as well)

I dont think its that far off, especially from a BE point of view.

It is disappointing that command isnt getting fixed until 2.4.