Also to add to the discussion of people getting Divine Sacrifice and it being useless. Where else could we possibly put the points anyway? No where. I agree that it is a weak talent and could probably use some changes (or a new talent).
Rets really have lackluster talents at the moment.
No, what's being said here is that it's a moderately useful talent for small raids (10 man) and an amazing talent for small groups/Arena.
For 25 mans, yes it's usefulness is extremely situational at best and useless the majority of the time, I quote: It's not a way to "heroically mitigating a massive amount of raid-saving damage!" as some would want to believe.
If you only run 25 man instances and nothing else in wow, then yea for you it's a bad talent. However you can't expect them to scale every talent to every situation, I would be the first to say the ability to provide 40% damage reduction to 24 people without a cap would be hands down overpowered/game breaking.
Further, if they change the cap to say 400%-500% paladin health to make it borderline useful in 25 mans, it would be pushed into overpowered/game breaking range for 10 mans (let alone balancing it for Prot paladin HP pools).
The only other solutions would be to add a cap depending on group size, but this is very unlikely to happen (Blizzard have stated before they dislike adding situational behavior to abilities to avoid overcomplicated the game) or make the cap "per person" (as in, "absorbs up to 20% of paladin HP per person") which would be great for soaking raid damage, but would kill the other use of helping out a tank as well as make it much weaker for small groups/arena.
To conclude: DivSac is a nice tool for small raids/groups and that's fine for the expenditure of 1 talent point. It's not a tool for large raids, nor does it necessarily need to be.
Originally Posted by Endoscient
I have definitely had my Divine Sacrifice end early while bubbled quite a few times. I use DoTimer to mange my buffs/debuffs and it is very easy for me to notice how long it lasts with it.
This definitely sounds more confident than my hazy memory would let me recall In that case, it definitely is the last nail in the coffin of DivSac usefulness in 25 mans.
I think it should be added to the OP that it only absorbs Max Health * 1.5 (~average 38k) regardless of DivShield/HoP immunities to avoid future confusion (unless proven otherwise).
Clearly you only use it on combination with DS, or else you go splat. But, there is a 1.5 sec gap between casting DSac and DShield.
Divine Shield lasts 12 seconds, though, and Divine Sacrifice lasts 10. It's roughly the same principle as bubblehearthing; that extra 2 seconds accounts for the GCD used, so when using Divine Shield you do not suffer any time in Divine Sacrifice where you might be taking damage. On the other hand, Hand of Protection has an equal duration to Divine Sacrifice, and both invoke the GCD, so you will take damage either at the tail end or the very beginning of the effect, depending on which you cast first. Of the mitigation options to soak DSac's damage, only Divine Protection is off the GCD.
I'm going to try and play around with this ability tonight and see if I can't run some quick tests, though it does seem more likely (and more logical) that even if bubbled, damage is somehow accruing towards the 150% total.
This definitely sounds more confident than my hazy memory would let me recall In that case, it definitely is the last nail in the coffin of DivSac usefulness in 25 mans.
I think it should be added to the OP that it only absorbs Max Health * 1.5 (~average 38k) regardless of DivShield/HoP immunities to avoid future confusion (unless proven otherwise).
Last night my guild did Ulduar 25 and our first boss to get down was XT-002 Deconstructor. In the following parses I believe to prove that the amount of damage absorbed by Divine Sacrifice does not get capped at 150% of the paladins health if you have Hand of Protection or Divine Shield up.
This shows the exact timestamp of my use of Divine Sacrifice and who it affected: Wow Web Stats
This shows the exact timestamp of when Tympanic Tantrum was used and from there on, who absorbed any dmg: Wow Web Stats
From the parses you will notice that Divine Sacrifice lasted its full duration of 10 seconds. I calculated the total amount of damage absorbed to be 49673. One of the absorbs on the player Profet was caused by Sacred Shield so I have not included that absorb in any way. This amount of damage absorbed is almost 200% of my raidbuffed health which was about 26k.
Feel free to browse through the parses or ask me for any further info needed.
Thanks.
Last edited by Blazeflack : 04/20/09 at 5:39 AM.
Reason: Had to go through the parses again.
I wonder why 50 posts after there is still discussion over the amount of absorption of Divine Sacrifice.
Under Divine Shield, the buff Divine Sacrifice (gained by raid members) causes 0 (ZERO) damage transferred to the paladin, hence the amount of absorption will be uncapped for the duration of the Sacrifice, assuming the paladin is smart and casts Divine Shield first and Divine Sacrifice in 0.5 seconds after then end of the DSheild GCD.
This shows the exact timestamp of my use of Divine Sacrifice and who it affected: Wow Web Stats
This shows the exact timestamp of when Tympanic Tantrum was used and from there on, who absorbed any dmg: Wow Web Stats
From the parses you will notice that Divine Sacrifice lasted its full duration of 10 seconds. I calculated the total amount of damage absorbed to be 49673. One of the absorbs on the player Profet was caused by Sacred Shield so I have not included that absorb in any way. This amount of damage absorbed is almost 200% of my raidbuffed health which was about 26k.
Feel free to browse through the parses or ask me for any further info needed.
Thanks.
Sorry, but that log is not conclusive. At 26k HP, DivSac should account for ~39k of those absorbs, I can easily see the remaining 10k (out of 49673 you stated, I'm not recounting) being absorbed by Power Word: Shields, Sacred Shields, Mage shields and other such shields, especially since you expect people to be using such abilities to mitigate the incoming damage.
While it did last 10 seconds, unfortunately the "absorbed" logs do not show what the sources of the absorbs are (as far as I know wow logs do not distinguish absorbs by source), the only way to be certain is to hunt down every shield effect and reverse engineer from there (unless there's some method I don't know about).
Also notice that Tantrum lasted only ~4-5 seconds of your DivSac.
One useful thing from that log seems to be: Div Sac appears to affect pets too, making it even less useful at keeping players up against mass AoE.
I think the only way to prove this would be to have DivSac up during very heavy boss hits on the tank + heavy AoE that would show a significantly large absorb along with all those absorbs for something that is not accountable for by other absorb effects.
Originally Posted by KanonGemini
I wonder why 50 posts after there is still discussion over the amount of absorption of Divine Sacrifice.
Under Divine Shield, the buff Divine Sacrifice (gained by raid members) causes 0 (ZERO) damage transferred to the paladin, hence the amount of absorption will be uncapped for the duration of the Sacrifice, assuming the paladin is smart and casts Divine Shield first and Divine Sacrifice in 0.5 seconds after then end of the DSheild GCD.
It would be amazingly useful if you could explain where exactly you're pulling this out of. Source? Proof? What is this based on?
The thing is, if DS simply mitigated 30% of all damage done when you use it along with Divine Shield, it would mitigate redicilous amounts - far more than anything I've seen reports on (during Tantrum it would mitigate 200.000-250.000 damage).
Honestly, I also have a feeling something isn't right, because the effect I see on the raid is indeed far bigger than expected. If that is the case, it's bound to get corrected in a hot fix. However, I'm not willing to let "my gut feeling" be part of a discussion that should be based on facts.
Currently, I think the best use of DS is to prevent hard hitting AoEs from killing players - i.e it can prevent people getting killed by chain lightning on Thorim or seeds on Freya. Example: If only 5 people get hit by X damage, you'll mitigate 8k damage per person, which is enough to survive most attacks that would otherwise instantly kill someone.
Sorry, but that log is not conclusive. At 26k HP, DivSac should account for ~39k of those absorbs, I can easily see the remaining 10k (out of 49673 you stated, I'm not recounting) being absorbed by Power Word: Shields, Sacred Shields, Mage shields and other such shields, especially since you expect people to be using such abilities to mitigate the incoming damage.
I wrote down the absorb amounts and calculated how much of the initial damage was absorbed. All absorbs in my calculations absorbed exactly 40% of the inital damage done. I can post the result in a table, I just need to figure out how it works.
I wrote down the absorb amounts and calculated how much of the initial damage was absorbed. All absorbs in my calculations absorbed exactly 40% of the inital damage done. I can post the result in a table, I just need to figure out how it works.
I see, that sounds a lot better, you could just host the table file somewhere.
In any regard, 49k still doesn't sound too conclusive to me. While it can prove that there might be a bug allowing for more absorption than it should, it does not conclusively prove "unlimited absorption" under Divine Shield. We'd need a much bigger discrepancy for that lasting the full DivSac duration.
Last night my guild did Ulduar 25 and our first boss to get down was XT-002 Deconstructor. In the following parses I believe to prove that the amount of damage absorbed by Divine Sacrifice does not get capped at 150% of the paladins health if you have Hand of Protection or Divine Shield up.
This shows the exact timestamp of my use of Divine Sacrifice and who it affected: Wow Web Stats
This shows the exact timestamp of when Tympanic Tantrum was used and from there on, who absorbed any dmg: Wow Web Stats
From the parses you will notice that Divine Sacrifice lasted its full duration of 10 seconds. I calculated the total amount of damage absorbed to be 49673. One of the absorbs on the player Profet was caused by Sacred Shield so I have not included that absorb in any way. This amount of damage absorbed is almost 200% of my raidbuffed health which was about 26k.
Feel free to browse through the parses or ask me for any further info needed.
Thanks.
This is what I was planning to do myself, but it looks as if you've beat me to it. In any case, this was what I had been noticing when I started trying to track down the damage absorbed by Divine Sacrifice. I suspect that, since I see the entries in the combat log to be "Raidmember Divine Sacrifice causes 0 damage to Paladin" instead of an Absorb or Immune message, it's somehow applying a 100% damage reduction modifier when incoming Divine Sacrifice damage is negated by Divine Shield. This might be preventing the game from correctly calculating when to stop absorbing damage.
I added up the absorbs myself and came up with 51218 total damage absorbed (the difference is 1545, which seems about right for a stray Sacred Shield proc I might have missed). The only thing I thought of, as a complete guess, that might skew your results, is if somehow latency might have played an issue and caused an 'extra' round of absorption before the server could communicate that you'd lose the buff, since all the damage occurs at the same time, but the threshold would have been roughly 39k health based on the number you gave for your health, and total damage absorbed after the fifth 'wave' of damage was 42793 (or 41248, if the counting was my mistake) by my count, which would have been enough to break the cap.
So, for now, I can't see anything that makes me question the results just based on math, though I did notice that all of the ranged were too far out to receive the damage absorb. If all 24 members of the raid were getting damage reduction, the total amount absorbed could have skyrocketed and we'd get to see if there really is no cap.
I don't think this is what Blizzard has in mind for the talent, however.
In any regard, 49k still doesn't sound too conclusive to me. While it can prove that there might be a bug allowing for more absorption than it should, it does not conclusively prove "unlimited absorption" under Divine Shield. We'd need a much bigger discrepancy for that lasting the full DivSac duration.
It had struck me too that the amount absorbed was quite close to the limit, which is what made me think that perhaps latency had allowed an entire wave of hits to land at once before the buff was removed by the server, but even considering that, it would have been removed after the fifth wave of damage.
Knowing the exact health amount for the cutoff would be nice, though. And in any event it's still shaving a very fine line between where the theoretical cutoff would be and how much ends up being absorbed. I'd be much happier if we could see a WWS with a 20k discrepancy or something like that.
Last edited by Jellex : 04/20/09 at 7:52 AM.
Reason: Clarification
It would be amazingly useful if you could explain where exactly you're pulling this out of. Source? Proof? What is this based on?
Unfortunately the proof is in a WWS report that I don't have available anymore as I left the guild (it was in the internal guild forum).
When you cast DSacrifice, all eligible aprty members get the buff DIVINE SACRIFICE and then it acts exactly as I described in my post #254 if I remember correctly.
A quick check would be going for Emalon and activate the sacrifice/shield with all players in range and let the add explode.
*I believe this is how a mixed absorb would look like.
All the absorbs listed in that table was during the Divine Sacrifice. They are all a 40% absorb and consistent to each other.
Originally Posted by Jellex
So, for now, I can't see anything that makes me question the results just based on math, though I did notice that all of the ranged were too far out to receive the damage absorb. If all 24 members of the raid were getting damage reduction, the total amount absorbed could have skyrocketed and we'd get to see if there really is no cap.
Unless someone beats me to it I plan on getting in range of as many people as possible next week and see what results I get.
Last edited by Blazeflack : 04/20/09 at 8:25 AM.
Reason: Added wws parse links to the post
It was in 25 man Ulduar. The tactic we use is to have all ranged spread out in a half circle in front of boss and the melee stacking behind the boss. This results in only melee and the occasional healer being in range. However, I will try to increase the amount of people being affected next week.
A quick check would be going for Emalon and activate the sacrifice/shield with all players in range and let the add explode.
I did that earlier for the purpose of testing and contrary to the normal raidwipe we only lost three people. It most definitely absorbs during Divine Shield.
I have a working theory of what might be the cause for the higher than expected Divine Sacrifice absorbs.
From the amount absorbed (51440 over 6 hits, assuming 1546 of that mixed absorb on "Profet" on hit 3 is from DivSac like all other hits), it seems very likely that the added 10% absorption gained from Divine Guardian is not being taken into account in the 150% paladin health cap.
Assuming 26k health, 150% would be 39k absorbed. If 10% more absorbed is "free", you can increase that number by a multiplier of 1.33 (0.4/0.3) giving you a total of 52k absorbed.
This is just wild guessing at how the spell might be (miss)behaving, assuming the answer isn't something lame like server/client latency (damage calculations are all server side iirc?).
Emalon test sounds like a very good idea to see if this assumption is correct or if it does indeed provide unlimited absorption under Divine Shield (which would go against what Endoscient and I seem to recall).
Originally Posted by Selenia
I did that earlier for the purpose of testing and contrary to the normal raidwipe we only lost three people. It most definitely absorbs during Divine Shield.
We know it absorbs under Divine Shield, the question is "how much?".
I have a working theory of what might be the cause for the higher than expected Divine Sacrifice absorbs.
From the amount absorbed, it seems very likely that the added 10% absorption gained from Divine Guardian is not being taken into account in the 150% paladin health cap.
Assuming 26k health, 150% would be 39k absorbed. If 10% more absorbed is "free", you can increase that number by a multiplier of 1.33 (0.4/0.3) giving you a total of 52k absorbed.
This is just wild guessing at how the spell might be (miss)behaving, assuming the answer isn't something lame like server/client latency (damage calculations are all server side iirc?).
Emalon test sounds like a very good idea to see if this assumption is correct or if it does indeed provide unlimited absorption under Divine Shield (which would go against what Endoscient and I seem to recall).
We know it absorbs under Divine Shield, the question is "how much?".
Avitus,
Me and Selenia are trying to tell you that it works like I described in post #254:
The 150% HP cap is never reached if the combo is used properly and so 40% of all the dmg caused to Divine Sacrifice buffed members is absorbed.
Me and Selenia are trying to tell you that it works like I described in post #254:
The 150% HP cap is never reached if the combo is used properly and so 40% of all the dmg caused to Divine Sacrifice buffed members is absorbed.
Unless you have solid proof where DS took more than 150%*1.33 of your max hp, his theory is as valid as yours.
edit: best way to test it imo is on some enraging boss, pop it when you hit the enrage timer (and people get hit for 70k+ attacks) and see if the effect stays up for the full duration. The ~52k threshold (150%*1.33) should be reached quickly.
Also, it's important to note that in the end, this is how it will work:
40% (incl. DG) absorbed on all raid members within 30 yards up to 150% of the Paladins health.
I just don't see any other possibility, considering the tooltips (of DS and DG). It doesn't specifically mention how it relates to immunities (HoP, Divine Shield), but we can safely assume it's not meant to absorb 200.000 damage (or more, if you position yourself ideally during Tantrum).
If we do find a bug that either gives us 10% damage absorbed for free, or a flat 40% damage absorbed for 10 sec during Divine Shield, it is definetly something that will be changed, so it's not something to rely on or create tactics around.
We can all keep saying things to our hearts content (well, until moderation kicks in), but they are worthless if you have no proof.
I'm assuming you mean your post #253, there is no proof, just napkin math as is all over this forum (including mine so far).
Once more: Without proof this is worthless.
I told you what I read in the WWS report (that I don't have avialale anymore as I said above) and what you can see from your combat log.
Divine Sacrifice comes as a buff to party members. Each time they get dmg, 40% (or 30% without DGuardian) of this is trasnferred to the paladin and the amount trasnferred (which is 0 under DShield) is deducted from 150% of paladin HP until this reaches 0.
I'll do the test described above as soon as I can and I'll post a table.
I think this discussion is very important and after a successful XT attempt last night before downing him it came as no surprise that our success was consequent with most the raid surviving. Therefore discussion of the details of our ability to significantly mitigate raid AoE damage is certainly worthwhile even if it is only usable once every five minutes.
I wanted to make a point on a hit capping as a human or dwarf paladin. In the past I have aimed for 7% to hit as I always have a Draenei in the group. However, given the frequency and unpredictability of raid damage in Uludar it is by no means a given that I can rely on this buff throughout an encounter as this raid member might die. Therefore going for the 8% cap might be wise. I would not consider gemming to reach this, but if it came 'naturally' from strong gear pieces it might be a good idea. This occurred to me after seeing a higher than expected miss rate on a recent WWS parse. I realize that no stat is 'free' given infinite choices of gear, but if I find anywhere to 'err' in stat allocation, this seems like the place to do it.
Also, it's important to note that in the end, this is how it will work:
40% (incl. DG) absorbed on all raid members within 30 yards up to 150% of the Paladins health.
I just don't see any other possibility, considering the tooltips (of DS and DG). It doesn't specifically mention how it relates to immunities (HoP, Divine Shield), but we can safely assume it's not meant to absorb 200.000 damage (or more, if you position yourself ideally during Tantrum).
If we do find a bug that either gives us 10% damage absorbed for free, or a flat 40% damage absorbed for 10 sec during Divine Shield, it is definetly something that will be changed, so it's not something to rely on or create tactics around.
I agree, complete cap ignore under immunity will definitely not stay (if that's the case).
I also think it's extremely naive to assume that the devs didn't expect/predict paladins to use immunities along with Divine Sacrifice and that this is some sort of creative "magic trick" people came up with. I would go as far as to say they very well intended the use of Divine Shield along with DivSac when they designed the spell.
However, I can see them leaving the "10% free" bonus if that turns out to be true, as that's not game breaking and does require 2 talent points after all. It could even be intended (it's equivalent to raising the cap from 150% to 200%), but yet to receive a tooltip update. It's not the first time something like this happens, or isn't documented well enough.
Originally Posted by KanonGemini
I told you what I read in the WWS report (that I don't have avialale anymore as I said above)
The concept of "proof" eludes you. Please just let it rest until you can get back with something that can support your claim. It doesn't matter how many times you "tell me" your assumption, re-stating your point here 10 times without said proof does not make it any more valid.
Originally Posted by Lindsfarne
I wanted to make a point on a hit capping as a human or dwarf paladin. In the past I have aimed for 7% to hit as I always have a Draenei in the group. However, given the frequency and unpredictability of raid damage in Uludar it is by no means a given that I can rely on this buff throughout an encounter as this raid member might die. Therefore going for the 8% cap might be wise. I would not consider gemming to reach this, but if it came 'naturally' from strong gear pieces it might be a good idea. This occurred to me after seeing a higher than expected miss rate on a recent WWS parse. I realize that no stat is 'free' given infinite choices of gear, but if I find anywhere to 'err' in stat allocation, this seems like the place to do it.
I'm not sure. Remember, while missing an attack can be annoying, it's not the end of the world. 1% miss rate is equivalent to 1% less DPS.
-Gearing 1% over the hit cap means you're always wasting ~33 stats whenever your Goat (Draenei) is alive. 33 str for example is quite a bit of damage lost (slightly less than 1% hit, but roughly equivalent).
-Gearing for the hit cap (7% + Goat) and then losing your hit aura means, past that point you are doing roughly 1% less dps.
I know dancing around 7% hit and trying to equip BiS is getting tricky, but if you want to optimize (and you should), I'd rather take an occasional disadvantage than a constant one considering they're roughly of the same magnitude. Also if your Draenei keeps dying like that then there's a bigger problem here.
04/20/09, 3:56 AM
In that case, it definitely is the last nail in the coffin of DivSac usefulness in 25 mans.
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