Mokhtar

I am trying to decide whether to discontinue support for ShadowGreenLight at 3.1.

Reminder : before 3.1 crit added damage to dots exactly as if %crit was an added flat dmg modifier. Except that, contrary to how spellpower changes are handled, crit% changes are not applied on the fly to the dot tick values, instead we had to wait for the DoT to actually be hard refreshed. Coupled with the fact that SW:P is almost never hard refreshed this led to a situation where you could lose as much as 25% DPS on SW:P with typical raid buffs/debuffs (a net DPS loss of around 3-4%).

3.1 rolls in : dots can now crit. While I initially thought that meant that I could discontinue ShadowGreenLight I realized later that it depended on the actual implementation : what crit% value is used on the dice roll ? I see three main possibilities :
- when first casted (hard refresh) ?
- at dice roll time ?
- when refreshed by mind flay (soft refresh) ?

I'm not that good at statistics but I tried to find ways to reverse engineer that :
- I imagine that specifically testing for that in a controlled environment (ie for example with a balance druid turning 5%crit aura on and off) would require an insane sample size.
- Testing for that by pure datamining seems impossible to me.
- Last thing I could imagine was to have a small addon recording for each SWP tick if it was a crit, the crit% at tick time, the crit% when last hard refreshed, the crit% when soft refreshed... Then compare actual crit% with mean of each recorded flavour of crit%. What would be the sample size I would need to have a correct approximation ?

Is there something I overlooked ? A test that would be simpler to execute ?

 

Infyrne

All that you care about is the percentage of crits you are getting, the actual values don't matter. Strip off all your gear, remove all talents, try to get your crit as low as possible. Cast SW:P on a target dummy 10-20 times, and you should get a good picture of your actual naked crit rating. Add in a high crit% weapon (since you can swap weapons on the fly), do the same. Now do it a third time, but swap in your weapon halfway through the test. Do the same, but refresh SW:P with mind flay. Count the crits. You don't need that high a sample size as long as the delta between your initial crit, and your crit with weapon (and i guess offhand) is large enough.

 

Sharajat

I'm thinking it will be a soft refresh, otherwise everyone and their pet monkey will be popping Inner Focus>Shadow Word: Pain for a 25% boosted crit chance for the entire fight (That's a lot of extra DPS).

 

syndori

I do believe that you can cast a Shadow Word: Pain on a training dummy, and exit combat while the DOT is still ticking. This means you can strip naked, cast it, exit combat, put your gear back (use outfitter or something similar to do it quickly), and refresh it with a Mind Flay before it goes away.

By adding a full 20+% crit through gear, you should be able to more easily test if crit changes mid-fight affect your DOT.

Inner focus does not effect the damage of Shadow Word: Pain currently, and I doubt it would in the new patch either (unless it were bugged).

 

Infyrne

(edit: nevermind, not a useful test)

 

Carelesslol

As far is i know IF doesnt effect the damage of DP either.
So i doubt, it would do so with VT....

 

Telemont

It currently doesn't effect the damage because it doesn't increase your crit chance, it "increases the critical effect chance of your next spell by 25% if it is capable of a critical effect," by the wording. If you tap it, it doesn't increase the critical effect on your paper doll, so it wouldn't effect your dots periodic damage.

 

Sharajat

It does not currently because dots can't currently crit (instead your crit gets added to baseline, like extra spellpower).

It should, under the new patch, since it increases critical strike chance.

 

syndori

Since shadow word: pain is not refreshed by recasting, the options would be (I might be forgetting something here):

1. Inner focus does not affect it
2. Inner focus affects it, but the crit is recalculated on mind flay refresh
3. Inner focus affects it, and the crit stays the entire time.

#1 is the case right now. #3 would be overpowered! I would most certainly abuse it. Wishful thinking, and feels unintended. As for #2... though possible, it means that there would be very little benefit if any to using inner focus with shadow word: pain, because a mind flay will be following it up in a few seconds anyway.

I suppose they could have the crit recalculate itself over some specific interval, but it does seem a little weird.

 

Althor

Well it's easy enough to see at least that:
1) Shadow Weaving etc, still is only taken into account on initial cast.
2) Casting a DoT while not in Shadowform and then shifting into Shadowform means none of the DoTs will crit (and vice versa).

If they haven't updated those things then they probably haven't updated it with recalculating crit on the fly.

And as mentioned previously, get naked (well, your character, not yourself), cast SW:P on the dummy, leave combat, equip a heavy crit set, refresh SW:P with Mind Flay. Keep refreshing for a good period of time. Track crits with Recount or something.

If you saw barely any crits then it doesn't auto-adjust. If you saw a lot more crits, then it does.

Either way, given that it's not only crit rating that ShadowGreenLight helped with, then I'd still suggest you continue the mod. ;P

 

jdgaynor

Last I checked, Recount could not track DoT crits.

I was testing earlier to make sure that the Moonkin Aura and the 5% Crit Debuff worked with DoT Crits (They do).

What I ended up doing is combatlogging, and then exporting the log to excel and filtering out/deleting all of the log entries I was not interested in. One of the lines in the combat log returns a 1 if the event was a Crit, otherwise it returns nil.

 

brotherhobbes

r1020 of Recount added tracking for DoT crits for the 3.1 PTR.

 

Bowchikabow

I ended up doing the same thing as Jdgaynor with regard to combatlog tracking. One of the things I noticed, and if someone has seen different then by all means let me know, is that at NO point did I have multiple DoT's critting simultaneously. This is something that really needs to be looked into, this is not limited to patchwerk style fights either. Think about high mobility fights..lets use Heigan as our sample.

during the dance phase I play the GCD game in between slime ruptures. it goes a little bit like this: while running I cast DP, by the time I stop moving GCD clears and I can cast VT, start running while casting SW:P. This allows my DoT's to tick at or about the same time for all three. If they are incapable of critting at the same time, I will be doing LESS equivalent DPS then pre-3.1 because now my DoT's not only are not able to benefit from my ability to crit, but also I no longer have the overall damage increase from crit chance I had with with pre-patch shadowform.


As for the question of DoT crit calculation: we could reasonably assume that our DoT's will calculate critical hit on a per tick basis. If it calculates our chance to crit for the duration of the spell on initial cast, it would likely do less damage over the duration. However. If the calculation for our crit chance over the duration of a DoT IS calculated at initial cast, I would see no reason for IF to not work for them. But honestly, this is more guess work than anything else.

 

ryugen

Checked everything now. [Inner Focus] does not stay with SW:P when the dot gets refreshed(wonder if it works at all). To get the values, I refreshed the effect but did not let Mind Flay dmg.

[Glyph of Shadow]: The effect will not be trigger by DoT crits. Simply DoT a target and check it. This wouldn't seem like a big problem, but read on and you'll see that it indeed is.

All your spells share a globally Critchance. That means if your DoT just critted, your [Mind Blast] or [SW:D] will likely not crit. Since DoT's and [Mind Flay] hit multiple times in the time you can cast [Mind Blast] and [SW:D], the chance to crit with them is way lower than before the patch.
This will not only effect the [Glyph of Shadow] in it's current state, but also [Improved Spirit Tap] in a very bad way.
Both seem pretty useless to me at this time.

 

Kagemane

I must have misunderstood.
Are you saying that if I get "tails" 1231231203712037120371230173013 times in a row with a coin, my next flip will get more than exactly 50% probability to be "heads"?
If that is what you are saying, I am quite certain that you are wrong.

DoT's criting will never ever modify the crit chance of an incoming Mind Blast.

If that is not what you meant, I am sorry, english is not my first language.

 

vilemike

IIRC, crits are rolled on a per cast basis, so no matter how often you crit, you always have the same chance of scoring a crit with your next cast.

 

Bowchikabow

per cast, yes. Each time you cast a spell that individual spell rolls on chance to critical.

Ryugen: DoT's already on targets have their own critical rolls, your ability to crit with MB is NOT affected by whether or not SW:P, DP, or VT is going to crit in that time.

My original question was how ever whether it is either a bug, bad luck, or working as intended that I have so far not seen any combination of DoT's on target simultaneously critical. during testing I found that so long as there is atleast a 1sec difference between ticks that multiple crits can happen ( during my testing I had VT, SW:P then VT again crit back to back).. if this is working as intended then this may have a serious affect on how we time our spells.

 

Tifi

I just tested it on the PTR, build 9733 from March, 24. Normal crit w/ equip is 19.81%+6%, naked crit is 2.29%+6%. I stripped naked, applied SW:P on two dummies, put the equip back on, and kept refreshing the DoTs. My crit rate according to Recount was 5.6% in 198 ticks. So it's highly unlikely that refreshing w/ MF applied the current crit value.

 

ryugen

So Critchance will not get renewed, but refreshed. That'd actually mean Inner Focus still doesnt work with SW:P. at a ~17% crit chance out of 200 ticks ~16,8% critted. A 25% increase should definetly been noticeable.

 

Mokhtar

Thanks for testing this Tifi, it confirms my own conclusions. ShadowGreenLight is here to stay...

 

Mearis

Ugh, this means we are forced to use destruction potions when casting SW: P if we want to maximise our damage, since the crit portion rolls over.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Elimbras

I can see SP rolling for highest crit possible (set of) weapon, and swapping just for the cast of SW:P.

Guess Blizzard will correct it one time or another, as they did for spellpower.

 

tedv

Except that only works against target dummies. If you cast a spell against a boss, you are locked in combat. I think the refresh behavior on shadow word: pain is an artifact of how they coded the spell to not lose DoT ticks. At any rate, the point is that we still need to watch for crit buffs before casting pain, as well as the shadow weaving stack. Kind of annoying but not the worst thing in the world.

I suppose if we reported this as a PTR bug of the exploit variety, Blizzard might be more likely to fix it. Is there any way to get an abnormally high crit rating due to the magic of procs?

 

• Vykromond

He said "weapon." You can switch weapons in combat.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

 

windcape

Is this also truth for today?

I've seen a lot of opinions about it, but no solid proof. And since DPS in the 4800+ class varies a lot with raid buffs, I've not been able to test it seriously in a raid environment.

And if it is working that way, would it still be a higher benefit then if we compared to say, using it during Bloodlust with the extra Mind Flays benefiting from the effect of it?