WotLK talent Preview/Discussion - Page 138

Agrimat · 10/22/08, 6:11 PM

Originally Posted by Kinzuru

to maximize efficiency, wouldn't it be best to use it every time its up?

I understand that using it during bloodlust would be baller --- but if you never use it, in contrast, unless blood lust is up --- arnt you missing out on the additional attack power u could have once every 2 minutes?

Good lord. You just answered your own question.

Yes, it's good to use it often. Yes, it's better to use it during bloodlust than some other time. No, no one is saying to only use it during bloodlust. That's ridiculous.

His advice still stands: don't macro it and instead use it intelligently by stacking it with other buffs. This is what separates good DPS warriors from bad (macroing) warriors.

Wolvynskye · 10/24/08, 9:41 AM

So, sudden death is not getting changed according to a blue post on mmo-champion; this makes things interesting again.

Pixen · 10/24/08, 10:53 AM

Originally Posted by Wolvynskye

So, sudden death is not getting changed according to a blue post on mmo-champion; this makes things interesting again.

From what I've heard they were actually looking at nerfing SD beyond the 3/6/9% hit nerf, but decided not to; this leaves ambiguous whether they mean it's staying at 3/6/9 or going back to chance on crit, but I'm inclined to think it's the former.

hellord · 10/24/08, 11:37 AM

Anybody knows the approximate armor values for bosses in WotLK?
I read something like 11k from Beta forums so I'll just speculate on this value for now until I can have more precise numbers.

Armor penetration in TBC after patch 3 has become much less worth in therms of itemization points, mainly because bosses have 2990-4490 armor after debuffs. This means 1% ArP (7.4 ArP rating @70) removes 29.9 to 49.9 armor depending on boss armor class (6.2k or 7.7k).

Supposing 11k armor values for level 83 bosses we'll have:
11000 - sunderx5 (3925) - FF (1260) = 5815 armor, thus 1% ArP (15.4 arp rating @lvl 80) will ignore 58.15 armor

If they raised armor class by 10% we should have 11000*1.10 = 12100 armor for lvl 83 bosses.
This translates to:
12100 - 3925 - 1260 = 6915 armor, thus 1% arp will ignore 69.15 armor.

So after debuffs (that are static values) the 10% increase in bosses armor raise the value or ArP rating by ~19% in therms of itemization points.

5815 armor vs a lvl 80 player reduces 35.52% damage.
To get 1% damage increase you need 4.3% armor penetration (~67 ArP rating @80)

6915 armor vs a lvl 80 player reduces 39.58% damage.
To get 1% damage increase you need 4.1% armor penetration (~63 ArP rating @80)

So this change reduces physical mitigatable damage by 4.06% that is not neglible, but I think that probably will hit more prot warriors damage rather than tg/arms build since they do more damage throug bleeds.
The effectiveness of ArP is not increased by much, even if the armor ignored is higher per rating point.

Will be worth stacking ArP at level 80? I'm not yet sure.
What do you guys think?

Bregonn · 10/24/08, 1:46 PM

Originally Posted by Pixen

From what I've heard they were actually looking at nerfing SD beyond the 3/6/9% hit nerf, but decided not to; this leaves ambiguous whether they mean it's staying at 3/6/9 or going back to chance on crit, but I'm inclined to think it's the former.

3/6/9% on hit gives exactly the same procrate as the old crit proc at 30% crit. Hence, for the general populace it's a wash or a slight buff. That it is a nerf for top end players doesn't make the change in itself a nerf. They stated that they wanted to make crit less a stat to stack excessively, and they picked the right (even slightly generous) cutoff point for that.

I agree with you that they probably mean it'll stay in it's current state (3/6/9 hit proc).

Pixen · 10/24/08, 2:27 PM

Originally Posted by Bregonn

3/6/9% on hit gives exactly the same procrate as the old crit proc at 30% crit. Hence, for the general populace it's a wash or a slight buff. That it is a nerf for top end players doesn't make the change in itself a nerf. They stated that they wanted to make crit less a stat to stack excessively, and they picked the right (even slightly generous) cutoff point for that.

I agree with you that they probably mean it'll stay in it's current state (3/6/9 hit proc).

It's not a nerf to a lot of people, so it's not a nerf? What does that even mean? It's a nerf for a large percentage of warriors on this forum.

For starters, 3/6/9% chance on hit is not the same as 10/20/30% chance on crit with a 30% crit rate; crit is calculated across all swings, where chance on hit is only calculated on swings that connect with the target. Assuming a 15% total chance to miss/parry/dodge on the target, a 9% proc on hit is equivalent to about a 7.7% chance on swing to proc SD. As you add hit, expertise, and attacking from behind, that gap (7.7% to 9%) obviously closes measurably to the point where they're functionally similar, but I think it's still an important distinction to make.

Further, most geared warriors have (in many cases substantially) higher than 30% crit, especially raid buffed. It's also ridiculous for them to claim that they nerfed SD to prevent warriors from stacking crit when warriors will stack crit anyway because of the fantastic scaling for DW and Impale, as well as better chances to proc Frenzy, Trauma, etc. Warriors will have high crit regardless. This just slightly discourages speccing Axes over everything else, but people are going to do that anyway.

thefatman999 · 10/24/08, 3:17 PM

I have not heard a confirmation from the blues on their meaning as far as the change to sudden death, however the patch notes on the PTR no longer show the change to 3/6/9 percent on hit so that leads me to believe they are leaving it at 30 percent on crit. I am almost posivite that was in the patch notes before, but I dont have the new patch downloaded yet to test for sure.

Darian_TruBlade · 10/24/08, 3:40 PM

Originally Posted by Pixen

It's not a nerf to a lot of people, so it's not a nerf? What does that even mean? It's a nerf for a large percentage of warriors on this forum.

For starters, 3/6/9% chance on hit is not the same as 10/20/30% chance on crit with a 30% crit rate; crit is calculated across all swings, where chance on hit is only calculated on swings that connect with the target. Assuming a 15% total chance to miss/parry/dodge on the target, a 9% proc on hit is equivalent to about a 7.7% chance on swing to proc SD. As you add hit, expertise, and attacking from behind, that gap (7.7% to 9%) obviously closes measurably to the point where they're functionally similar, but I think it's still an important distinction to make.

Further, most geared warriors have (in many cases substantially) higher than 30% crit, especially raid buffed. It's also ridiculous for them to claim that they nerfed SD to prevent warriors from stacking crit when warriors will stack crit anyway because of the fantastic scaling for DW and Impale, as well as better chances to proc Frenzy, Trauma, etc. Warriors will have high crit regardless. This just slightly discourages speccing Axes over everything else, but people are going to do that anyway.

Crit is calculated across all swings for regular melee attacks, but functions the same as "on hit" for specials due to the two roll system.

I don't find it particularly ridiculous for Blizzard to say that they nerfed SD in order to counter crit stacking for Arms Warriors. The change may not have broken the desire to stack crit, but it inarguable that the value of crit relative to other stats is less than it was before the change. While Crit is still an Arms Warrior's primary stat, it's much more imaginable that a point could be feasibly reached where other stats catch up.

Bregonn · 10/24/08, 7:45 PM

Originally Posted by Pixen

It's not a nerf to a lot of people, so it's not a nerf? What does that even mean? It's a nerf for a large percentage of warriors on this forum.

It is a change. The nature of the change is such that it is inherently a nerf to some players and a buff to others. Depending on how they make the change it could be a buff for the average (or median) player or it could be a nerf. In this case I think it is a slight buff for the average player (not fully raid buffed, but the average player isn't very often fully raid buffed either). IMO that makes it a change, not a buff or a nerf.

Otherwise you might as well argue that a change which is a buff for 99% of all players and a nerf for 1% is still a nerf (exaggerating to make the point clear).

Of course, besides Blizzard nobody knows what the average player is (unless someone has written an armory data mining program which determines this). So it could still be a small hidden buff or nerf. But I'd be pretty hard to determine exactly.

Caggy · 10/24/08, 8:12 PM

I'm assuming their idea was this:

An average warrior now runs about 30% crit for dps purposes in most high end raids. A 30% crit off that would mean an average 9% chance of occuring. This position is usually average for even sunwell folks, who would balance around this and 2k ap, 96/142 hit as the baselines.

However at a 30% off crit would mean stacking anything above 30% crit begins to pretty much stack on a curve from what I can tell. at 40% crit, its a total of 12% chance of occuring, and with that amount of crit, you would be able to spam near full bar executes rather often.

Yea, its a nerf, but not very bad one.

DarthGreg · 10/24/08, 10:08 PM

30% crit since 3.0 isn't average, it's low.

Shha · 10/24/08, 10:56 PM

Originally Posted by DarthGreg

30% crit since 3.0 isn't average, it's low.

Its more like ABYSMAL. In every raid basically you get 5% crit from lotp 3% crit from ret/elem 3% from totems 2% from kings/motw around. Easily extra 1% from sharpening stones. Cautious count says buffs give you 16% without counting mongooses . With dual mongoose you can expect to have 20% crit from BUFFS. So 10% unbuffed crit is when it evens out...

Lithose · 10/25/08, 8:47 AM

Originally Posted by DarthGreg

30% crit since 3.0 isn't average, it's low.

Which was probably the problem, the skill was a design oversight, just like letting fast off hands "proc" MH deep wounds. For those of us using it in PvP it became painfully obvious very quickly it would need to be limited (Though less so in PvE.).

I still do think its a bit poor of a limiting factor, it still pushes DW in the arms tree. It should be changed to how the old mace spec worked, a PPM, or around 10% for 3.5/3.6 weapons and decreasing slightly as the weapon gets faster.

Enkidu · 10/25/08, 1:07 PM

Some findings on the new Deep Wounds (pastes from my posts on EU beta forums):

Bugs:
1. Deep Wounds from BT will do offhand level dot damage.
2. Simultaneous crits from both weapons (whirlwind, both swings landing at the same time, etc) will only give you 1 deep wound, once again at an offhand level.

Offhand damage:
Offhand crits give you deep wounds at the level of 15.9% offhand damage range. This should currently be roughly doubled if we include Offhand penalty double dipping onto itself here (that is - your offhand does 62.5% already, you won't be doing 48% of that, double dipping means you would be doing 62.5% of the 48% aswell, or 30%).

Deep Wounds still double dips into damage modifiers.

I think with these bugs fixed Fury will be pretty well inline with other classes, without them being fixed I have difficulty imagining Fury being up there with Arms, assuming using a single weapon has no such bugs for Arms, BT will do OH damage Deep Wounds even if you have none equipped.
Edit: In my case with 3300 AP that means 8 damage/tick on a BT crit with no offhand equipped.

chanda · 10/25/08, 8:01 PM

tonight, i've done a full cleared nax with a tg spec like 18/53/0 2slow weapon 204dps 3.4 ( unbuff stats 31 % crit ~4500ap 16%hit 13%haste )

what i ve saw is that deep wound nerf/bug went from 20 % of my dps to something like 10 %
+10 % armor on boss is another hard one with rage generation i was rage starved a lot ( haven't test yet with a fast oh )

but what annoy me the most was that hunters are still by far the best dps..

Rishkkin · 10/27/08, 9:45 AM

First time poster, long time reader here.

With the help of the nice folks at Tankspot I came up with a simulator for Deep Wounds you can check out that thread over there: Warrior Deep Wounds Simulator - TankSpot

If you guys can find any issues with it, please let me know, I'll be trying to fix them.

So far I think that for arms, it's quite on the spot. For fury, it might have some 'issues' (based on BT's DW being calculated on OH dmg for example)

dr_AllCOM3 · 10/27/08, 10:49 AM

It would be nice, if you could provide a download link.
I'm also interested in the source code, the way you calculate the Deep Wounds damage to be exact.

Rishkkin · 10/27/08, 11:32 AM

Originally Posted by dr_AllCOM3

It would be nice, if you could provide a download link.
I'm also interested in the source code, the way you calculate the Deep Wounds damage to be exact.

Warrior Deep Wounds Simulator - TankSpot The file is in the 1st post :P

It's an HTML file, the calculator runs in JavaScript, so feel free to check out the code.

Simply put you define a bunch of values (Attack Power, Crit %, MH Weapon Speed, OH Weapon Speed, Actual Swing Spped (MH / OH), Weapon DMG (Low-high for MH), Instant Rate (rate at which you use your instant attacks) and the duration of the test)

After the values are entered, the simulation runs (Swings / instants are performed, if a crit occurs, DW is activated after it's damage is calculated based on the talents you chose)

Results are printed out on the page after the test runs

Edit : Direct File access --> TankSpot

Shha · 10/27/08, 11:55 AM

Can anyone actually log on and post on blizzard beta forums recently?

Rishkkin · 10/27/08, 11:56 AM

Originally Posted by Shha

Can anyone actually log on and post on blizzard beta forums recently?

What ???? We could ?
I mean.. I've never been able to, with both of my beta account :-(

• ebs2002 · 10/27/08, 12:01 PM

Bugs:
1. Deep Wounds from BT will do offhand level dot damage.
2. Simultaneous crits from both weapons (whirlwind, both swings landing at the same time, etc) will only give you 1 deep wound, once again at an offhand level.

Offhand damage:
Offhand crits give you deep wounds at the level of 15.9% offhand damage range. This should currently be roughly doubled if we include Offhand penalty double dipping onto itself here (that is - your offhand does 62.5% already, you won't be doing 48% of that, double dipping means you would be doing 62.5% of the 48% aswell, or 30%).

Hey guys, one of the Tankspot posters that's been doing DPS Warrior theorycrafting with Rish.

I just want to make sure I'm reading this correctly:

An off-hand crit (or a BT crit) does Deep Wounds damage like this:

- Calculate weapon damage of your offhand
ex: 180-335 for Vanir's Right Fist, average damage is 257.5
- Add AP modifiers
ex: with 3500ap on Vanir's Right Fist, that's 3500/14=250, or 507.5
- Multiply weapon speed
ex: with Vanir's Fist, 507.5*2.5 = 1268.75
- Off-hand penalty
ex: with 5/5 DW spec, 62.5% of 1268.75 = 792.96875
- Take 48% for Deep Wounds damage, with the off-hand penalty = .48*.625=30%
ex: 792.96875 * 0.3 = 237.89...
- Over 6 ticks, each tick deals ~39.6dmg

Is that what you mean by Double-Dipping?

Or, to simplify:

OH_DW_TotalDmg = (AvgWpnDmg + AP/14)*WpnSpd*OHPen*0.48*OHPen
or
OH_DW_TotalDmg = (AvgWpnDmg + AP/14)*WpnSpd*0.48*(OHPen^2)

Do I have this right?

Shha · 10/27/08, 12:01 PM

Well I could, until recently anyway. Well regardless, Ill post here what i planned to post there. Hopefully it will give some ground for discussion - although its obviously aimed at GC. Ill keep trying to post it there as well, but in the meantime maybe someone will point mistakes and such in it.

Deep wound and Fury dos feedback (with some Arms addings)

1) Deep Wounds.

Deep Wounds seem to receive a hidden nerf in the patch. OH crits no longer generate MH damage deep wounds. Overall its a welcome and expected change - something to put the crazy 35% dmg contribution Deep Wounds to stop with slow/fast combo, a change that i suggested many times on those forums so far. However, there are several implementation problems/bugs, making the nerf too big and simply buggy.

a) OH deep wounds seem to only use rank 1 of talent to calculate. No matter how many points I have put into Deep Wounds OH crits only generated 16% of damage/crit. 16% of the OH damage range to be exact - so modified by OH damage penalty. Its pretty obvious only rank 1 deep wounds apply there. Its an obvious bug so I guess we could expect a fix.

b) Simultanous crits (matched speed weaponds, WW , Sword spec attacks, etc) seem to only generate 1 application of deep wounds.Again since it wasnt the behavior before the patch hopefully we can expect a fix.

c) Bloodthirst crits seem to generate OH level deep wounds (and ones "bugged" as in a) ). Another bug to fix.

Those 3 changes should be easy to fix (since they didnt seem to happen before the nerf). Overall the Deep Wounds nerf should put the damage of deep wounds still 25-60% below prepatch value depending on weapons used - a Slow/Fast combo would get from 35% to ~ 15% Deep Wounds damage, while Slow/Slow would go from ~20% to ~15%. Its a welcome change, but current the damage is even lower - at around 12% damage which isnt necessary and simply penalizes dual wielding and fury builds (which were supposedly a candidate for "buff).

In case there are problems with implementing a working solution for OH Deep Wounds, I would suggest removing Deep Wounds procs from OH completely. In "return", you could incorporate the damage lost into Dual Wield Specialization talent - one that is considered by most as overinflated and weak. Remove OH deep wounds , and change Dual-Wield spec to one on par with Rogue, and it will fix a lot of fury issues, while at same time spreading the damage buff more evenly across the talents.

2) Fury current state.

Lets count the "buffs" to fury so far.

a) TG 12%->5%. Unlike a lot of people think it doesnt mean we got straight 7% buff to hit. White damage is still an important source of dps, and while hit past the "yellow cap" falls to one of/worst dps stat for a warrior, it still places around 50% of crit value per rating point. So more accurate way of quantifying the buff would be to say we got 2.5~3% free crit. Not as much as people say. In other words - maybe more understandable :

- If you were hit capped before you can convert the hit to 5% crit for example. But at the same time you still lose 7% of hit chance on your white damage - not extremely important damage , but still substantial (~30%).

- If you were at 11% hit + precision before (new cap), you will gain basically 7% yellow damage (which contributes to ~30% of your damage) - aka 2.1 % damage gain.

Those are rough estimates - but its here to point out the TG penalty wasnt AS bad as people said (and being not hit capped wasnt end of the world), and reducing it didnt give us a magical 7% dps boost. Depending on previous stats the boost is from 2-4.5%

b) BT 45-50% and 6->5 seconds. That means going from 7.5% ap/sec in damage to 10%ap/sec. 33% boost. However the skill itself didnt do that much damage in first place - so the buff is in the realm of ~4%
c) Bloodsurge got 20% more chances to proc due to lower BT cooldown. Again with best gear and no wasted procs you couldnt expect over 6% BS damage (most people reported less). ~2% more damage at best.

So far the whole "buffs" to fury tree add ~10% damage to TG builds. less then 5% to 2x1h.

Nerf is one but big one - Deep Wounds. The nerf here can be divided into 2 categories:

a) Slow/Fast setups. Deep Wounds contribution went down to ~15-20% (at very high gear/crit level) from 35% (1h) to 45% (TG using 2h in MH and fast dagger in OH). That nerf was needed , although whether new fury will become competitive at 80 is to be seen.

b) Slow/Slow setups. Deep Wounds contribution was around 20% here be it TG or 2x1h. It was nerfed by 8% (counting current OH "bugs") to 5% (if they become fixed).

Overall a "proper" Slow/Slow TG (or at least using TWO 2handers), gained ~0-2% damage, same for Dual Wield fury. A Slow/Fast setups could be nerfed as much as 30%.

In short - the recent patch was NOT a buff to Fury and to TG. In fact if you count extra armor on bosses it was a NERF.

As for Arms - 2h arms seems completely unaffected except for armor nerf. Dual wield arms got gutted so much I believe its intended and blizzard just doesnt want this style of play to exist. Regardless of what people say about SD nerf (as in if its better or worse for 2h or Dual Wield arms), the change made SD much weaker. The change made Deep Wounds much weaker. And dual wield arms was based on THOSE 2 sources of damage to constitute 60% of their dps.

SD nerf in fact is too severe in my opinion. I strongly support changing it to chance on hit but 9% is ridiculously low. I believe talented with full raid buffs im around 25-30% crit NAKED (counting axe spec). So giving the breakpoint for new SD effectiveness towards old at 30% crit seem ridiculous. It has nothing to do with stacking crit. If i gem for anything BUT crit, at 70 (which is better view point due to more "advance on gear curve") I will be over 45% raid buffed. Change the chance to 5/10/15% on hit and it might be the right solution.

Some talent feedback for Fury

Armed to the Teeth. - Its a good talent but it needs a "buff". It simply doesnt fill its role of making plate appealing. Like I said talent is good in itself, and making it stronger per talent point would be too much in my opinion. However buffing it to 5 ranks giving 1/2/3/4/5 attack power would actually put plate items on par with leather.

Dual Wield Specialization - if you read part about Deep Wounds then you can make quick calculations - at 50% crit raid buffed Deep Wounds "should" add ~18% to OH damage and possibly "cause problems". Removing OH dw completely and changing Dual Wield Specialization to 10/20/30/40/50% would keep damage from OH at desired level, while at same time elimination most of Deep Wounds 'bugs', and making Deep Wounds less and Dual Wield Specialization more appealing (balancing talents in power).

Complete lack of useful talents in tier 2-3 fury. Well not for pvp maybe, but from pve perspective.

- Imp DS/Commanding presence - not too useful for its talent contribution. Replacable by better base debuffs.
- Imp Cleave - too situational
- Blood craze - getting crit in pve?
- Piercing Howl - situational, and even if we claim its useful for pve (its not bad) its 1 useful talent point in 2 tiers.
- Unbridled Wrath - abysmal in effectiveness.

Some SMALL tweaks

- Unbridled Wrath - changed to generate 3 rage points. Chance to proc halved. Overall a 50% buff to effectiveness of the talent, and no longer 3 points in it "cap out" for slow 2handers.
- Imp Cleave - Reduce rage cost by 2/3/5 rage. Stackable with glyph would make cleave more "fun"
- Blood Craze - give it some pve component - something really small - like 1/2/3% extra AP
- Imp DS/Commanding presence - merged at tier 2 into improved shouts.

Overall those changes would provide maybe 2-3% more dmg to both warrior specs IF arms warriors would go deeper into fury (which is debatable).

More damage increase can and in my opinion SHOULD come (as without "abusing" Slow/Fast DW TG still falls behind), as buffs to Unending Fury. The talent atm is too weak and need some more "oomph". Give it an extra 1/2/3/4/5% bonus to flurry haste and it will be just fine.

Kakitajamie · 10/27/08, 12:26 PM

Originally Posted by Shha

Well I could, until recently anyway. Well regardless, Ill post here what i planned to post there. Hopefully it will give some ground for discussion - although its obviously aimed at GC. Ill keep trying to post it there as well, but in the meantime maybe someone will point mistakes and such in it.

You really need to spell out Deep Wounds and Dual-Wield. While if you read the whole sentence you understand but as your reading it there are points where it can be questionable, thus making you reread the sentence.

Vulmio · 10/27/08, 12:32 PM

As 70 on live as a 2handed Arms warrior with BT + early sunwell gear (bracers, craft gloves, belt and legs), I have a good dps but huge aggro problems. I heard execute had a 125% aggro penalty, is that true or just an urban legend ? In that's true, I really wouldn't mind losing dps from Sudden Death and gaining it from somewhere else.

Vulmio · 10/27/08, 12:34 PM

Originally Posted by Kakitajamie

You really need to spell out Deep Wounds and Dual-Wield. While if you read the whole sentence you understand but as your reading it there are points where it can be questionable, thus making you reread the sentence.

And he didn't mention Death Wish yet