• Darkmyst

I did that for the eng helms. It was the right choice but I *hate* not being a miner. So much money I could have made and saved.

 

Azonos

Hey all, I've been having a lot of trouble with my crit rate on boss fights being much lower than what is reported in my character sheet for 25 man boss fights. I was hoping someone here might have an idea why. I have most of the best gear available to me now, and raid as 33/28/0 (currently the only DPS warrior in the guild). My character sheet has me at just below 32% to crit in zerker stance raid buffed without a feral. Most WWS reports and recount meters have been showing me between 20%-25% crit rate for boss fights for quite a while now (at least 6 weeks). Even with a feral, my crit rate has been coming through between 5%-10% lower than my character sheet.

It had been suggested that not being hit capped is hurting my crit rate so I have been using the hit food lately, but that has not changed anything. A final note, this only seems to be happening in BT / Hyjal. I've done a few ZA runs and my crit rate has been relatively consistent with my character sheet there. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

Grymm

HS adds a bonus amount of threat per use. It adds a varying amount of damage per use. The damage added is a summation of the bonus damage on the swing plus the reduction to miss, elimination of glancing, and the magnification of the crits due to impale. At certain levels of gearing, I think it has been shown that the damage added aside from the base talent bonus damage can dwarf the bonus damage. I've had 3k HS crits. The impale damage on that swing alone would be 272. Thus, getting as much damage per usage actually improves your damage/aggro ratio. Thus, a slower weapon, while costing proportionately more rage, is my preference.

When evaluting haste, I always take it as a ratio to hit rating as the perform similarly. Over a 100 swing timed period, 1% hit will net you one weapon damage. 1% haste will net you one swing event. Now, under most circumstances, 1 swing event even after misses and glances, is more than 1 hit event in damage. When you mix in that a percentage of attacks are HS instead of hits, the value of haste inflates. I don't at current use any haste gear largely because it is poorly itemized, but come 2.4 I should be picking some up.

I do wonder how people average 5k attack power in a raid. I raid with a sapphire on (2112 base AP in zerker) with an enh shaman and the highest AP I have ever hit was 5280. I average over 4000 pretty cleanly but I need a WF proc with Zerker Call up to top 5k. I wonder where I am missing out on all this extra AP. Of the couple T6 instance drops I could still get, none represent a serious AP increase. 2112 is a decent start.

 

DecoyBL

so with sunwell loot being released, what are people's thoughts on ArP vs. all the new haste gear available for 33/28.

 

Korlong

I've just been going through some of the new 2.4 loot that has been found on the PTR - does it disturb anyone else that the best DPS shoulders would now seem to be druid gear? As in with intellect?

Demontooth Shoulderpads - Items - World of Warcraft

 

Bevz

I saw this aswell but Ive never been against wearing odd bits of of mail and leather even with the int on them. If its best in slot, its best in slot not much more to say.

For me personally, I am going to keep the tier 6 shoulders and grab the other t6 pieces from sunwell, combined that with the four best legs, head, chest and gloves (of which 3 are leather) seems to be the best setup for a slam build.

 

Moogul

I think that the pauldrons of berserking are about equal. Taking the socket bonus into account (the leather ones have a blue socket so are less efficient), they come out fairly close, though it obviously depends on exactly how good haste is - I've still to see a convincing account of it's viability. Still, it's better than hit and I think it should balance out between both of them.

 

Bevz

Yeah until we see how the extra haste performs I think its just something of a bonus stat on the items, something similar to hit rating as you wouldn't really gem for it, same as you wouldnt really aim to get just the items with haste on them. If that makes sense :p

 

Moogul

Yeah, that's pretty similar to how I approach haste, though just because I don't actively aim for +hit, doesn't mean I discount it completely.

I've been trying to compare haste to hit to find an acceptable comparison ratio.

As Grymm said, haste gives you an extra swing, rather than hit, and that swing has a chance to crit - however it also has a chance to miss, or be dodged or parried. Generally DPS warriors don't run with much expertise, but then ideally we're attacking from behind so parry shouldn't really be an issue.

So, if we say 1 unit is the damage from an extra hit, then the extra swing from haste will give us (1 + 1*crit - 1*dodge - 1*miss) damage, where crit, dodge, miss are your respective chances (in decimal form - eg. 0.35 for 35% crit).

In order for haste to be better than hit, you need crit > dodge + miss, where miss is going to be the default boss miss chance (0.27 or something?) minus your +hit. Dodge change is 0.056 I think for bosses, so you get something like:

crit > 0.056 + 0.27 - hit
crit + hit > 0.326

So that is, if you have total crit and plus hit of more than 32.6% (which I assume *every* dps warrior will have), then haste is generally going to be better than hit. The exact ratio will vary, but the more crit and hit you have the better haste will be.

Note: This is a very simplified form of the equation - it doesn't take into account haste you already have (stacking haste should increase the value of hit compared to additional haste), it doesnt account for expertise (I assumed 0), and it also doesn't take into account the harder to define aspects of hit and haste (ie. hit should give more PPM procs, haste (as far as I understand it) won't. They'll also affect rage generation in different ways (whilst the overall rage gain will be the same, the 'smoothness' of rage generation won't be).

For 2H warriors (I'm DW), I'm assuming you'll be capped already so this comparison is rather pointless, it's rather clear that haste is better than hit once you have 9%.

Edit: Also I assumed a 2x modifier for crit damage, if you run with [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond] (I do), then that will also increase the value of haste in relation to hit.

 

• Mjollnir

Using your base stats on armory:

str: 643 (applied)
2/2 imp soe totem: 99str ~> 218ap
20str food: 20str ~> 44ap
BoM: 220ap ~> 242ap
trueshot aura: 125ap ~> 137ap
5/5 imp hunter's mark: 440ap ~> 484ap
5/5 imp motw: 19str ~> 42ap
unleashed rage: (ap x .1) (apply last)
kings: (str x .1) ~> 64.3 ~> 238ap
5/5 imp bshout (trinket): 468ap ~> 515ap

2112+ 218+ 44+ 242+ 137+ 484+ 42+ 238+ 515= 4032 (apply UR) = 4435

This is neglecting EW from a survival hunter, and assumes imp HM from a marksman hunter. This also assumes 5/5 imp zerk stance. Personally I've seen 4k sustained, but I'd be curious to know what sort of makeup achieves 5k.

 

Moogul

How many guilds raid with a marksmanship hunter in the melee group? It's hard enough fitting in the rogues, dps warrior, enh shaman, feral druid, ret paladin already.

 

Amorpheus

Come Death Knights the solution will be 2 dedicated melee/buff groups... too many ferals get stuck in the tank group when dpsing as it is. Or hunters someplace else.

"You are better than I am," Inigo admitted.
"So it seems. But if that is true, then why are you smiling?"
"Because," Inigo answered, "I know something you don't know."
"And what is that?" asked the man in black.
"I'm not left-handed."

 

• Mjollnir

Included in order to stack as much ap into the calculations as possible, obviously.

 

aclark360

how many hunters are marksmanship spec these days? all seem to be BM

 

Malorneecs

Thanks Grymm, your comments were really insightful. However, although it is very clear that your damage/threat ratio is higher with a slower MH, this is sort of the obvious conclusion. The more significant question in this debate is whether that matters or not. If you do more total damage with a fast OH rogue sword but never become threat capped, then damage/threat ratio becomes immaterial.

Let's take threat out of the equation for a minute. If you're swinging a faster weapon, does the extra Heroic Strike damage even make up for the decreased Whirlwind damage? If it doesn't then we can conclude that a slower weapon is ALWAYS better regardless of any threat calculations. Only if the faster weapon proves to do more damage do we even need to think about threat.

Is there any way to do the maths to get at this question? I'm not the most inclined number cruncher, nor do I even know the threat formulas.

 

• Mjollnir

WF totem. The biggest external factor in warrior dps, gets the best mileage out of a slower weapon. Napkin math I once did put the benefit of WF of arms compared to fury at 4:3.. mainly due to weapon speed. I'd need to dig that up though.. it might be on forums I no longer have access to

 

Bliss

Like was said, no melee group ever has trueshot anymore. But also, Imp Hunter's Mark does not apply to the character sheet, so it does not get a bonus from Imp Berserker Stance or Unleashed Rage as far as I know.

 

Darkrenown

Whoever mentioned critcap to you is wrong, it's ~(45%+ your hit) from behind.

You might want to link to your WWS so we can check, but my thoughts would either be bad luck (unlikely over that long) or you're not attacking the boss from behind.

 

Quixotic

The thing you also have to take into account is excess rage generation. On fights with incoming damage like Teron, with good gear I don't even have to look at my rage half the time and still have enough to keep bloodthirst/whirlwind/rampage/battle shout on cooldown and spam heroic strike basically non-stop.

In that situation 1% hit would give me a small amount of rage (assuming it gives me an off-hand hit), versus 1% haste giving me another heroic strike. Just another factor to compare, it's all very complicated with how streaky the rage mechanic is and what group buffs you typically get when choosing how to gear.

 

Graul

I am under the impression that Teron is one of the worst fights you can use to guage gear effectiveness on as a Warrior. It's a good fight to benchmark maximum DPS posibilities, but only because the rage is almost free flowing and without pause, so a hit deficiency or the benefits of haste won't really show up as much. The majority of fights are nowhere near that. Patchwerk was by far the best test, but there aren't really any fights like that at the moment. Maybe we will have a chance to do it again come the expansion if they don't change that fight too much.

 

Moogul

Teron isn't the only fight with almost 'infinite' rage though. I've found on fights like Shahraz and Anetheron I can also pretty much spam HS non-stop, and my gear is nowhere near as good as Quixotic's.

All the little extra things like heroic strike rates, smoothness of rage gain, optimal execute spam etc. all complicate the accurate evaluation of haste - my brief maths above was purely to look at the base white damage, to at least have a starting point which we can then build on qualitatively.

In a theoretical infinte rage scenario, the value of hit drops to almost nothing (as it will only affect offhand white swings), whilst the value of haste will raise (as the damage of each mainhand hit is higher due to heroic strike bonus damage and the reduced miss chance.

 

rhoxx

what do you mean by optimal execute spam?

 

Moogul

I'm referring to the ability to generate rage for an execute every global cooldown (1.5 seconds). Having to wait more than 1.5 seconds is not optimal, since excess rage is converted to damage at a lower rate than the initial hit. With slower weapons, haste helps get the speed of your MH down to 1.5 so that it's generating enough rage each hit. Also, it helps your offhand - fast offhands generally don't generate enough rage for an execute on their hit, so you want a slow offhand, but then haste helps smooth out the rage from that.

It's not the kind of thing you can really put numbers to easily, but it helps.

 

Liar

I'd actually like to see this math if possible, too. Because from what I know WF totem is already normalized (and has no cooldown either unlike WF weapon enchants) so does it really matter what speed your weapon is? Regardless of speed it will hit 20% more often (with added AP bonus); slow weapons will obviously hit harder on an extra attack but faster weapons will trigger extra attacks more often - which should make it wash. Or am I missing something here?

 

• Mjollnir

Interesting... when I still played my main, as fury, I would aim to generate as much rage as possible during execute range in order to get the excess to contribute to dps. The whole goal was to see 90-100rage Executes top off above 7k dmg every GCD if possible. (Which happened *fairly* often with trink/zerk/flurry/haste pot/recklessness/drums/haste proc/WF/lust if not already used)
You suggest an opposing senario? Generate only what you need for Execute- burn the rest off with HStrike, while keeping BT/WW going?

Edit: @ Liar: I'll look into getting access.