[Enhancement]: Critical cap analysis (Tow/HotC)

bestpike · 01/11/10, 10:07 PM

The following post is only a test about if the ToW debuff counts towards the Crit cap or not.

An in-depth Critical Cap analysis can be found HERE

After fellow Rouncer informed me on the new findings of the EJ community regarding the 4.8% "crit depression" or "crit conversion", something was bothering me. Totem of wrath or Heart of the Crusader is applying a debuff on the mob. It makes attacks made to it have 3% chance to crit.

Now, since that doesn't in fact raise your critical chance but rather the chance the mob will get critted, i was searching to find an answer to my question: Does or does not this debuff count towards the crit cap towards a boss? (Which is 71.2%). I asked Rouncer and other people from the forum but noone was totally sure (tested it) and on the EJ forums half people were saying it counts, half that it doesnt.

Testing this is extremely difficult, since one must reach humongous amounts of critical chance. But I've thought of a different way to test this.

I removed all my gear. I removed the Thundering strikes talent. My critical now is 3.77%. After many thousands of melee attacks on the dummy i saw my critical chance. Someone would expect to find a 0% (as a lot of people suggested in these forums), since you are critting a boss with -4.8% than what your tooltip says. The result was 1% crit. It seems there is also a low cap of critical. You can't get lower than 1%.

To make sure that this 1% is indeed from some kind of cap, i added 1% more crit on me. Now having 4.77 (aproximately). The result should still be 1%. And it was.

And now the real test starts. I respeced to elemental to get the Totem of Wrath, so i can test in my own time. As said before, there are 2 choices: Either the Totem of Wrath counts towards the crit cap, or it doesn't.

1. If the Totem of wrath doesnt count towards the crit cap, it means that this 3% debuff should be off the hit table. Something extra that takes chances from other kinds of attacks (probably hits, since they are last on the table).

So with my current 3.77% crit and 3% ToW debuff, i should be critting the boss dummy for at least 3% (or more), since this extra critical chance is off the table and shouldn't be subject to the 4.8% depression as mentioned before.

2. If the Totem of wrath indeed counts towards the crit cap, my expected criticals on bosses should be :

3.77%+3%-4.8%=1.97%

After a few thousands hits the meter says 2% critical. The Totem of Wrath indeed counts towards the crit cap like any other normal buff.

There, I finally proved it. Now i can sleep. Thanks to Rouncer for pointing me to the right direction.

Nevets_69 · 01/12/10, 12:11 AM

I posted this macro in another thread, but this seems like a much better place for it. Also, with these findings, I've added a version for when you have ToW or HotC present.

Without 3% crit boss debuff:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Room below crit cap: "..100-(27-(GetCombatRatingBonus(6)+6))-(24)-GetCritChance())

With 3% crit boss debuff:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Room below crit cap: "..100-(27-(GetCombatRatingBonus(6)+6))-(24)-(GetCritChance()+3))

Vlyxnol · 01/12/10, 2:47 AM

I've been wondering in depth about Crit cap in general and honestly I've come to the following conclusions and I'm wondering if they are correct or incorrect?

My understanding of the hit table is as follows. Each potential hit is first checked against Miss, than Dodge, than Parry, than Crit Depression, than Block, than Glancing, than Crit, than Hit. Assuming a shaman is expertise capped, attacking from behind, and has 13% hit from gear (which i do) and 6% from talents that leaves a 8%miss chance on a lvl 83 boss (27-6-13=8). So to fill in the % on the hit table for myself I'd see, 100%-8%-0%-0%-4.8%-0%-24%= 63.2% crit cap.

Now currently I have 41.56% crit rating from gear and we get 8% melee crit from raid buffs and 9% from elemental devastation which brings me to 58.56% raid buffed, and thus 63.2%-58.56=4.64% more crit before I would need to stack more hit to increase the cap. I cannot honestly think of any other buffs or procs that provide crit besides perhaps wild magic pot which I do not use. Of course some fight mechanics increase crit but we'd rarely gear for 1 fight.

*Edit~~ I forgot Death's Choice as stated below, which gives a proc that affects melee crit..... I have the normal version so its 450 agility with 33% uptime which is 450/83.33=5.4% melee crit which puts me at 58.56+5.4=63.96% crit during Paragon Procs. I've been running EP's in Enhsim and it gives me a crit value of 1.45 EP. 3 Weeks ago my EP value for crit was 1.9ish, but since I've gained alot of crit.... I have my EP set to 64 but since that 64 points would have a value of 0, 33% of the time during paragon is why I believe its dropped so drastically.

Lumb · 01/12/10, 3:13 AM

Originally Posted by Vlyxnol

I've been wondering in depth about Crit cap in general and honestly I've come to the following conclusions and I'm wondering if they are correct or incorrect?

My understanding of the hit table is as follows. Each potential hit is first checked against Miss, than Dodge, than Parry, than Crit Depression, than Block, than Glancing, than Crit, than Hit. Assuming a shaman is expertise capped, attacking from behind, and has 13% hit from gear (which i do) and 6% from talents that leaves a 8%miss chance on a lvl 83 boss (27-6-13=8). So to fill in the % on the hit table for myself I'd see, 100%-8%-0%-0%-4.8%-0%-24%= 63.2% crit cap.

Now currently I have 41.56% crit rating from gear and we get 8% melee crit from raid buffs and 9% from elemental devastation which brings me to 58.56% raid buffed, and thus 63.2%-58.56=4.64% more crit before I would need to stack more hit to increase the cap. I cannot honestly think of any other buffs or procs that provide crit besides perhaps wild magic pot which I do not use. Of course some fight mechanics increase crit but we'd rarely gear for 1 fight.

Don't forget you get 450 agi from your trinket, which I believe is 5.42% so potentially you have almost 1% crit from a proc going to waste. Until recently I haven't really thought much about the crit cap as I didn't see it as an important consideration, but it seems with high end gear and a crit proc trinket this could be an issue.

I think I'm in the same boat. According to the macro posted, I'm 20.8% below the cap. 20.8 - 17% = 3.8% before hitting the cap in raids. When my trinket procs it gives 13.33% crit, so almost 10% crit is going to waste(if elemental devastation is up) when it procs? When I sim it out, Comet's trail is showing as over a 200 dps increase more than dark matter, I don't know whether that's because the trinket is just that good, or otherwise.

bestpike · 01/12/10, 5:37 AM

Originally Posted by Lumb

Don't forget you get 450 agi from your trinket, which I believe is 5.42% so potentially you have almost 1% crit from a proc going to waste. Until recently I haven't really thought much about the crit cap as I didn't see it as an important consideration, but it seems with high end gear and a crit proc trinket this could be an issue.

I think I'm in the same boat. According to the macro posted, I'm 20.8% below the cap. 20.8 - 17% = 3.8% before hitting the cap in raids. When my trinket procs it gives 13.33% crit, so almost 10% crit is going to waste(if elemental devastation is up) when it procs? When I sim it out, Comet's trail is showing as over a 200 dps increase more than dark matter, I don't know whether that's because the trinket is just that good, or otherwise.

Yes this is correct. If you have all the raid buffs and elemental devastation is procced, you are losing 9%+ crit from the trinket.

Lumb · 01/12/10, 6:44 AM

Actually looking at it, [Mark of Supremacy] is even coming out ahead of [Dark Matter]. And this isn't even taking into account that the 3% crit from ToW counts towards the cap. I guess to test this I could just remove the 3% crit debuff from consumables & buffs, and manually give myself 3% melee and spell crit - although then there would be a slight loss of dps from fire elemental and spirit wolves.

Synkronos · 01/12/10, 9:05 AM

Originally Posted by Vlyxnol

...and we get 8% melee crit from raid buffs...

You forget the melee crit gains from Improved Mark of the Wild (57 agi), Improved Strength of Earth Totem (196 agi) and Blessing of King (25.3 agi boost on top of MotW and SoE, and then another 10% of your unbuffed Agi). For my toon, this would put me at a total raid buffed agility increase of 404, which according to wowwiki's (not the most reliable, I understand) value of 83.33 agil/crit for shamans is a further 4.85% melee crit from raid buffing, for a total of 12.85% crit from raid buffs. Also don't forget that any trinket that procs agility will proc an extra 10% with kings.

Following through on the calculations, again for my toon, we have the following:
11.92% hit + 6% talented, giving 9.08% miss chance.
24% glancing chance
4.8% crit depress

Now, regarding the crit depression, this reduces your crit chance by 4.8%, as well as being non-removable from the end of the table for white hits only. For yellows it still reduces the crit chance, but can be removed from the table by adding additional crit - basically giving you extra room before capping your yellow hits on crit, and not affecting white crit cap. It reduces your range, sure, but also reduces your crit chance, effectively nullifying itself, so it can be ignored. It's possible that this has changed since I last read, I'll go make 100% sure in a moment. [e]Yellow attacks overcoming crit depression - altho that doesn't make 100% clear whether it is unaffected entirely, or merely overcomable as I thought. I'll keep looking.[e end]

So, 100 - 9.08 - 24 = 66.92% worth of hits and crits (note ignoring 4.8% depression - it drags the start point and the end point of the crit/hit zone towards zero by the same amount, so doesn't change the size of the zone).

44.22% paper doll crit according to Armory (again not 100% reliable, but good enough for demonstration)
9% Elemental Devastation
12.55% raid buff crit gains

66.92 - 44.22 - 9 - 12.85 = 0.85%

Even were I over the crit 'cap', remember that 4.8% of that 'lost' crit still applies to yellow hits due to the crit depression being removable (still seeking clarity on this), and all of it still applies to spell attacks. Spell attacks being a very sizeable portion of our damage output, and proccing all sorts of things by critting. Also, Elemental Devastation is ~75% uptime according to my last Deathbringer Saurfang 25 kill, making me uncapped a quarter of the time, and hence decreasing the loss further.

Really, my final point in all of this is that it is a soft cap at worst, and is actually closer to a gradient change in our crit value graph.

[e]Calculation edits thanks to me forgeting the hit talent, and bestpike being so kind as to point it out. Thanks[e end]
[e2]Bah, calculation errors ftl =P Still, the principles remain[e2 end]

bestpike · 01/12/10, 9:24 AM

Originally Posted by Synkronos

You forget the melee crit gains from Improved Mark of the Wild (57 agi), Improved Strength of Earth Totem (196 agi) and Blessing of King (253 agi boost on top of MotW and SoE, and then another 10% of your unbuffed Agi). For my toon, this would put me at a total raid buffed agility increase of 379, which according to wowwiki's (not the most reliable, I understand) value of 83.33 agil/crit for shamans is a further 4.55% melee crit from raid buffing, for a total of 12.55% crit from raid buffs. Also don't forget that any trinket that procs agility will proc an extra 10% with kings.

Following through on the calculations, again for my toon, we have the following:
11.92% hit, giving 15.08% miss chance.
24% glancing chance
4.8% crit depress

Now, regarding the crit depression, unless it was changed since I last read, this reduces your crit chance by 4.8%, as well as being non-removable from the end of the table for white hits only. For yellows it still reduces the crit chance, but can be removed from the table by adding additional crit - basically giving you extra room before capping your yellow hits on crit, and not affecting white crit cap. It reduces your range, sure, but also reduces your crit chance, effectively nullifying itself, so it can be ignored. It's possible that this has changed since I last read, I'll go make 100% sure in a moment.

So, 100 - 15.08 - 24 = 60.92% worth of hits and crits (note ignoring 4.8% depression - it drags the start point and the end point of the crit/hit zone towards zero by the same amount, so doesn't change the size of the zone).

44.22% paper doll crit according to Armory (again not 100% reliable, but good enough for demonstration)
9% Elemental Devastation
12.55% raid buff crit gains

60.92 - 44.22 - 9 - 12.55 = -4.85%
So I'm already over the crit cap by almost 5% when full raid buffed, with no crit proccing trinkets.

Remember that 4.8% of that 'lost' 4.85% still applies to yellow hits due to the crit depression being removable, and all of it still applies to spell attacks. Spell attacks being a very sizeable portion of our damage output, and proccing all sorts of things by critting. [e] Also, Elemental Devastation is ~75% uptime according to my last Deathbringer Saurfang 25 kill, making me uncapped a quarter of the time, and hence decreasing the loss further [e end]

Really, my final point in all of this is that it is a soft cap at worst, and is actually closer to a gradient change in our crit value graph.

You forgot the 6% hit through talents. That makes you not crit capped at the moment.

Rouncer · 01/12/10, 10:46 AM

Don't worry about the yellow cap anyway because yellow attacks can't glance, so that's an additional 24% of room before you would even start to impinge on that cap.

Easiest way to deal with this is to use Rawr. It shows you your melee crit rate including all raid buffs and it shows you your melee hit rate as well. So all you have to deal with is Elemental Devastation and trinket procs.

Nevets_69 · 01/12/10, 10:58 AM

Originally Posted by Synkronos

Really, my final point in all of this is that it is a soft cap at worst, and is actually closer to a gradient change in our crit value graph.

I don't think anyone is claiming that the crit cap is anything but a soft cap. And you're right, even once you're capped, you still get benefit from crit rating for out spell crit rate.

However, because a whopping 35% of our total damage is white hits (by far our biggest source of damage), the crit cap, including the 4.8% crit depression which is unavoidable for white hits, plays a big factor into our damage. Also, as a result of the crit cap, not only does it reduce the value of crit, but it will increase the value of hit. Additional hit once crit capped allows the "wasted" crit to be effective on our white swings again.

I'm going to quote EP values at my peril, but they're really the only way we have comparing relative stat worth.

When I was testing BiS setups for my own character, I was seeing values for crit as low as 0.7, and values for hit as high as 3.0 (or more).
And perhaps a much more important observation, when I reconfigured my BiS setup for a more hit oriented gearset, I noticed a DPS increase in the sim of ~200dps.

So while I agree with everything you've stated, even your final point (which I quoted) is fundamentally true, the crit cap will have a significant effect on our DPS, and we can improve it drastically by being aware of this cap, and gearing accordingly.

Nevets_69 · 01/12/10, 11:05 AM

Originally Posted by Rouncer

Easiest way to deal with this is to use Rawr. It shows you your melee crit rate including all raid buffs and it shows you your melee hit rate as well. So all you have to deal with is Elemental Devastation and trinket procs.

Sorry for double post, Rouncer posted while I was typing.

Rawr actually adds a portion of Elemental Devastation to the displayed crit chance, it's based on the calculated uptime for ED. I believe that it does that same with trinket procs, but I need to check this.

Unfortunately this is misleading when looking at the crit cap, since it won't tell you that you're wasting 1% crit while ED is proc'd, since it only adds a portion corresponding to the uptime (usually in 75% area). So 0.75*9% = 6.75% crit.

Anyway, just wanted to point out that you can't just read the crit rate from Rawr, because it does add other procs into that crit rate.

Synkronos · 01/12/10, 11:10 AM

Originally Posted by Rouncer

Don't worry about the yellow cap anyway because yellow attacks can't glance, so that's an additional 24% of room before you would even start to impinge on that cap.

Aye, I realised this on the way home, too late to amend my post. Yellow attacks are also hit capped, adding an additional 9% leeway in the example.

Levva · 01/12/10, 11:24 AM

Originally Posted by Rouncer

Don't worry about the yellow cap anyway because yellow attacks can't glance, so that's an additional 24% of room before you would even start to impinge on that cap.

Easiest way to deal with this is to use Rawr. It shows you your melee crit rate including all raid buffs and it shows you your melee hit rate as well. So all you have to deal with is Elemental Devastation and trinket procs.

I've modified Rawr to show on the tooltip how much you are over the melee crit soft cap. This is after all procs etc.

The notable effect of this change and tweaks to the way Rawr calculated crit (it was just adding ED crit without checking the cap again), is that hit rating gets better, as that reduces your miss thus ups the crit cap.

I'll post a modified Rawr.Enhance.dll so people can test this.

The code is ...

            chanceWhiteCritMH = Math.Min(chanceCrit, 1f - GlancingRate  - whiteCritDepression - chanceWhiteMissMH);
            chanceWhiteCritOH = Math.Min(chanceCrit, 1f - GlancingRate  - whiteCritDepression - chanceWhiteMissOH);
            chanceYellowCritMH = Math.Min(chanceCrit, 1f - yellowCritDepression - chanceYellowMissMH);
            chanceYellowCritOH = Math.Min(chanceCrit, 1f - yellowCritDepression - chanceYellowMissOH);
            if (chanceCrit > 1f - GlancingRate - whiteCritDepression - chanceWhiteMissMH)
                overMeleeCritCap = chanceCrit - (1f - GlancingRate - whiteCritDepression - chanceWhiteMissMH);
            else
                overMeleeCritCap = 0f;
            // now apply crit depression
            chanceWhiteCritMH = Math.Max(0.01f, chanceWhiteCritMH - whiteCritDepression);
            chanceWhiteCritOH = Math.Max(0.01f, chanceWhiteCritOH - whiteCritDepression);
            chanceYellowCritMH = Math.Max(0.01f, chanceYellowCritMH - yellowCritDepression);
            chanceYellowCritOH = Math.Max(0.01f, chanceYellowCritOH - yellowCritDepression);

Can others run their eyes over that to verify that looks right please.

I've attached a new version of Rawr dlls with this change to test it copy the files over the top of your existing v2.3.5 install.

Volodymyr · 01/12/10, 11:31 AM

Originally Posted by Nevets_69

Rawr actually adds a portion of Elemental Devastation to the displayed crit chance, it's based on the calculated uptime for ED. I believe that it does that same with trinket procs, but I need to check this.

Are you absolutely certain on this? I played with Rawr for about 4 hours yesterday trying to affect "Melee Crit:" on Rawr by changing how many points I placed into ED, but it never changed. Without buffs, my melee crit is the exact same as armory. Removing all my points from ED, I keep the same crit rating as well.

bestpike · 01/12/10, 11:34 AM

Are we 100% sure that yellow attacks' crit conversion can actually be removed with enough crit? Not that this affects gearing in any way, since you need 104.8% crit to achieve that, plus crit's AEP becoming considerably lower after whites are capped. But it would be nice to know.

The only way i can think of confirming this is at the spore boss in Naxxramas (its name evades me at the moment) that gives you a crit buff, and while having the buff see if your yellow attacks arent all crits. When i will be able to test this i will post my results in this thread.