Arms DPS: 4.0 and Cataclysm - Page 3

Spiattalo · 10/18/10, 1:11 PM

Originally Posted by Belltoll

Very limited data from last night: execute hits significantly harder then MS after the hotfix. Not quite double but up in the range of 75% more damage.

I can confirm this. I've seen my MS hit for 14k while Execute going for 21k. As a reply to Rsydion, you might want to drop OP but not MS due to LttS talent.

Aedilhild · 10/18/10, 1:34 PM

Damage for Strikes of Opportunity has been increased to ~115% as per patch notes.

The boost may also increase the value of Expertise, since Mastery procs are tied to melee hits — reducing the compensatory potential of Overpower. If a dodged melee attack and its lost Opportunity Strike would not have critted, a rare normal Overpower hit would result in a ~25% damage loss (breaking even with LttS); while a critical Overpower would produce up to double damage with LttS. But if both the dodged melee attack and its lost Opportunity Strike would have critted — increasingly likely as gear improves — a critical Overpower would need LttS to produce a slight net gain. Even assuming no repercussions from Overpower's GCD and rage cost, that's an awful lot of makeup work.

Belltoll · 10/18/10, 4:06 PM

Originally Posted by Aedilhild

Damage for Strikes of Opportunity has been increased to ~115% as per patch notes.

The boost may also increase the value of Expertise, since Mastery procs are tied to melee hits — reducing the compensatory potential of Overpower. If a dodged melee attack and its lost Opportunity Strike would not have critted, a rare normal Overpower hit would result in a ~25% damage loss (breaking even with LttS); while a critical Overpower would produce up to double damage with LttS. But if both the dodged melee attack and its lost Opportunity Strike would have critted — increasingly likely as gear improves — a critical Overpower would need LttS to produce a slight net gain. Even assuming no repercussions from Overpower's GCD and rage cost, that's an awful lot of makeup work.

Likewise the buff to the mastery swing further drives down the value of slam if slam pauses the swing timer still (which I'm pretty sure it still does) because using more slams will drive down the number of whites and therefore the number of Strikes of Opportunity (SoO?).

I'm not sure slam really has much of a role in our "rotation" now. With the 15 second rend, 3 second heroic strike CD, 6 second MS CD, and 6 second OP CD (when exp capped), I never found myself in a position to not be able to use one of those. The slam damage is so far behind heroic strike and the rage cost so high- it doesn't seem to have a place.

Bladestorm also seems to have no role for single target DPS as the WW crits were around 40% of a heroic strike or MS for me and even corrected for GCD it's well behind another attack for single target DPS.

MystEU · 10/18/10, 6:25 PM

Raided ICC25 as Arms this weekend. Check armory for spec and gear. Favoring Heroic Strike + 3/3 Incite over Slam + Battle trance in regards to priority and those couple of talent points. On most fights, I only used Slam when flooded with excess rage or during Deadly Calm with maximum HS usage. Here is the WoL raid parse for Friday night for you number-crunchers if it can be used to help gather some information.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I haven't raided as Arms since Ulduar so there's a little bit of learning curve here because of that and the new talents, but the above priorities and having Incite appeared to do really well.

Seerow · 10/19/10, 10:12 AM

New Beta Build has this little gem in it: "Taste for Blood will not occur more than once every 5 sec, down from 6 sec."

This seems pretty useless if Rend is still not scaling with haste, making a difference only in the occasional case of a clipped rend, which while useful, won't come up often.

I'm wondering if maybe that change is a sign that they decided to relent on their position and allow melee DoTs to scale with haste. A 5second ICD would allow Rend/TFB to scale without any problems up until 20% haste, which is a pretty solid softcap for haste, all things considered. Anyone on Beta want to test to see if this is the case?

Elimbras · 10/19/10, 10:38 AM

Originally Posted by hellord

We probably can simplify saying that the buffs on YOU are applied on cast/refresh, the debuffs on the target may be applied on tick and the refresh extends the duration by the entire tick count (in the case of Rend 6), but I didn't do extensive testing.

That's not really correct.
The best way to say it is that damage multipliers debuff on the mob are applied on tick, any other buff/debuff is applied on cast / recast, and that refreshing between the 2nd to last and last tick is equivalent to refresh just after the last tick.

As for testing, you might want first to test in an other spec, where you can try to pop trinket / use cooldowns, and study their effect and the refresh mechanism.

Phallacracy · 10/19/10, 10:56 AM

Originally Posted by wildbodom

...so the priorities stats are now:

Hit til cap (8%) > exp (26) > str > crit til ~30% > mastery > crit > haste.

Correct?

One more thing, after seeing so many logs and graphs, at execute phase, stay at zerk stance for MS Execute spam and skip OP, rend or slam (+HS when DC)

Kind of, apparently you only need an expertise rating of 172/173, or 22 expertise, to not get dodged while behind a boss. Obviously adjust the necessary rating for weapon racials.

Rysidion · 10/19/10, 11:18 AM

Originally Posted by Seerow

New Beta Build has this little gem in it: "Taste for Blood will not occur more than once every 5 sec, down from 6 sec."

This seems pretty useless if Rend is still not scaling with haste, making a difference only in the occasional case of a clipped rend, which while useful, won't come up often.

I'm wondering if maybe that change is a sign that they decided to relent on their position and allow melee DoTs to scale with haste. A 5second ICD would allow Rend/TFB to scale without any problems up until 20% haste, which is a pretty solid softcap for haste, all things considered. Anyone on Beta want to test to see if this is the case?

I think this has more to do with server latency. It used to miss procs at every 6 seconds pretty often, so I'm sure they just changed it to get rid of that problem (unless you have extreme amounts of latency lag). Rend shouldn't miss overpower procs now. I know in raids I used to miss the OP proc on some ticks of rend every three or four rend cycles, and it really messed up my groove.

I remember posting about this over a year ago (edit: about 10 months ago) on the Warrior forums (edit: bug report forums) as a change that needed to happen due to messing up rotations from missed procs due to rend and Overpower being so tightly tuned to have to occur exactly in sync lest a proc is lost.

My quote in December of 2009:

The second bug is Taste for Blood missing procs. If I am correct in my assumption, it is designed to "proc" every six seconds considering you have rend up (coinciding with the ticks, of course). However, it will fairly often skip a tick (and sometimes even two) before proccing again (for example, it will proc at the first tick of rend at 18 seconds remaining, then skip the 12 second remaining tick and proc on the 9 or even skip that one and proc on the 6). I am fairly sure this has to do with latency creating a delay, and the delay eventually leading to disrupting the skill ICD. Again, this pretty much kills our rhythm, which is very important to being successful as Arms compared to everyone else today. I suppose one solution would be to change the ICD to something like 5 seconds instead of 6, since rend only ticks in three second intervals anyway. It would give a bit more leeway on any latency issues and wouldn't generate any more maximum ticks than the current implementation (aside from MAYBE one every six rends or so if you time the rend applications perfectly).

Source:
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [BUG] Sudden Death + Taste for Blood (PVE)

As a response to earlier posts, I don't see dropping Overpower in the execute phase as a good idea. it has a one second GCD and almost always crits, making it do more damage on average than the other skills (per use, aside from Execute), and far more damage per rage. Of course, that being said, it does require that you apply rend every 15-18 seconds to keep it going, which costs an Execute. This is another situation where having a simulation model would be wonderful.

Facemasher · 10/19/10, 2:01 PM

If TfB can proc every 5 sec, and Rend ticks when you apply it. Can you apply rend every 5 sec to get quicker TfB procs? Not that it would even be worth it, just curious.
I guess if this was possible then you would be able to spam rend and see dmg every gcd, which I don't think is the case.

Rysidion · 10/19/10, 2:33 PM

Originally Posted by Facemasher

If TfB can proc every 5 sec, and Rend ticks when you apply it. Can you apply rend every 5 sec to get quicker TfB procs? Not that it would even be worth it, just curious.
I guess if this was possible then you would be able to spam rend and see dmg every gcd, which I don't think is the case.

That would be very difficult and a definite DPS loss considering the GCD is 1.5 seconds. You would have to delay skills to do that. It would go something like rend > mortal strike > (GCD skill or Overpower) > wait 1 second or 0.5 seconds, depending on what you used > rend again.

Should definitely be possible though, since it does proc off of the initial rend application damage.

Edit: Hellord has the better answer. I forgot that applying rend extends the duration instead of resetting it (by 3 seconds I think?).

hellord · 10/19/10, 2:34 PM

Applying Rend while it's ticking doesn't change the tick frequency. The only possible way to increase the procs is applying additional Rends with skewed frequency.

Galushi · 10/21/10, 12:13 AM

Originally Posted by Rysidion

As a response to earlier posts, I don't see dropping Overpower in the execute phase as a good idea. it has a one second GCD and almost always crits, making it do more damage on average than the other skills (per use, aside from Execute), and far more damage per rage. Of course, that being said, it does require that you apply rend every 15-18 seconds to keep it going, which costs an Execute. This is another situation where having a simulation model would be wonderful.

Using Jungard's WoL report, i think Rend is also worth using during execute phase even without TfB considerations. Assuming Execute and rend have equal crit rates (which looks/should be close to true), Execute was hitting for 17k average noncrit and Rend will be doing 6 ticks of 2.5k, which is 15k noncrit. I dont know the average rage cost of execute but even assuming 15rage as a very forgiving estimate, Rend is outperforming executes efficiency. Of course this is taking into account that rage is still a finite resource. But it seems to me like Rend is probably the most rage efficient attack we have, all on it's own. If the boss has a very short time to live, this pushes things in favor of execute, but as long as most of the rend can tick out and give OP usability on top of that, i think its worthwhile.

Assuming a world where Slam actually matters and the priority is supposed to be MS->OP->Slam then HS rage burning, i think execute simply replaces Slam in the priority list and at that point nearly all gcd's are filled so you have to skip Slams and resort to HS to burn any excess rage.

MystEU · 10/21/10, 1:54 AM

Originally Posted by Galushi

Using Jungard's WoL report, i think Rend is also worth using during execute phase even without TfB considerations. Assuming Execute and rend have equal crit rates (which looks/should be close to true), Execute was hitting for 17k average noncrit and Rend will be doing 6 ticks of 2.5k, which is 15k noncrit. I dont know the average rage cost of execute but even assuming 15rage as a very forgiving estimate, Rend is outperforming executes efficiency. Of course this is taking into account that rage is still a finite resource. But it seems to me like Rend is probably the most rage efficient attack we have, all on it's own. If the boss has a very short time to live, this pushes things in favor of execute, but as long as most of the rend can tick out and give OP usability on top of that, i think its worthwhile.

Assuming a world where Slam actually matters and the priority is supposed to be MS->OP->Slam then HS rage burning, i think execute simply replaces Slam in the priority list and at that point nearly all gcd's are filled so you have to skip Slams and resort to HS to burn any excess rage.

From my experience with Execute range, using a Rend -> MS -> Execute (with benefit of the Slaughter debuff) priority indeed doesn't really allow for Slam or Heroic Strike usage in terms of rage availability. I had enough rage for the occasional HS at the same time (especially if Deadly Calm was up again at some point in < 20%) but that's really it. I'm not sure how it would compare to skipping rend and just going through a MS/Execute-only cycle, but here is what I was doing:

- Prioritized MS > Execute for the purpose of getting the Lambs to the Slaughter buff up for my next Execute.
- The cycle then looks something like MS -> Execute -> X
- For X, I would either reapply rend, use another Execute or Overpower.
- I tried the occasional overpower to see how well allocating the Slaughter buff only to Execute worked. Weaving in the occasional OP when Rend didn't need refreshing was at least the better decision for rage conservation.
-
In conclusion, it's a no-brainer to hit MS over Execute because of that 30% modifier. The argument for using Rend during the < 20% cycle is the same as weaving in the occasional Overpower. If you're really having to watch your rage to ensure you have enough for your MS and Execute big hitters, it's probably more worthwhile to use Rend and Overpower during that time than to use Heroic Strike to burn rage.

Belltoll · 10/22/10, 12:56 PM

Deleted for being wrong to avoid spreading bad information (see below).

Rysidion · 10/22/10, 1:03 PM

Originally Posted by Belltoll

OP has still been 100% crit rate for me in raids and because of that, the low rage cost, and the lowered GCD it should take priority over MS in the rotation. It doesn't crit as hard as MS but the crit rate makes the average OP>average MS every time.

MS adds 30% damage though (Lambs to the Slaughter), so using that buff with Overpower is the point of using MS first. Since it does almost always crit, it will get a higher benefit from the 30% buff compared to Mortal Strike 4.5 seconds later.

In execute range, MS is still prioritized for the same reason. Giving Execute the 30% buff is the reason it is done.