MMO-Champion BlueTracker - @GC.. Why nerf Deep Wounds?

Guess it was bound to happen since Fury Warriors are doing practically the same damage (compared to other classes) now as they were in TBC but only because Deep Wounds was actually being useful for a change. I don't think he understands why Deep Wounds is so good compared to the rest of our abilities right now and Thaddius/Malygos aren't good examples to use as the be all end all example which he's obviously doing. Maybe if ArP wasn't complete and utter trash you would see DW contributing less of the total damage overall. That's the main reason it contributes so much right now...we are affected so much by AC.

Don't you just love how he says Fury gained "too" (two) buffs in the upcoming patch? Sorry, the WW change and Bloodsurge change with all the collision issues isn't a buff and is more of a nerf on trash and any fight with adds.

I think he ment the removal of the TG penalty and the WW change, both where significant buffs. In my simulations the Bloodsurge change is only a buff for PVP, Slam contributes 6% damage in a raid setting with the patch changes, as it does before. With the WW change i can see us doing more damage on trash, don`t we?

Has anyone seen numbers of the upcoming DW nerf?
He mentioned that Arms damage is too low, now i am quite interested in the next patch notes .

If there wasn't more than 4 mobs and they were all up for more than 7 seconds then sure, it's a small buff. Most of the time though large packs are exploded down so fast that all that's left are 1-2 after your first rotation. And when that happens you usually have your rageless Victory Rush to go along with a Cleave to finish them off or WW again if they are still alive after that. He also didn't say (in that link anyway) they were nerfing DW in the upcoming patch, only that he feels it needs to be changed.

I'm honestly not looking forward to what the new rotation will look like with the new Blood surge proc interfering with our rotation...

It's a fine line; if they nerf Deep Wounds too much, Arms will suffer from it terribly. Ghostcrawler then mentioned that they might do something with Slam to make up for it, but that would also buff Fury via Bloodsurge, unless they tie it to the Improved Slam talent.

Deep Wounds did contribute too much to our total damage, but we can't really take too large a hit on damage either as that'd bring us below other classes' damage outputs.

It doesn't look like that these numbers are on the PTR at the current time though, and I'm not even sure that the linked thread is any constructive means of basing it on.

Maybe with that "nerf" to DW, ArP will be a stat to consider for us ? Since all our others damages are affected by AC.

I'm on the PTR right now, and Deep Wounds is doing 19.7% of my damage. Seems about right with no buffs.

The new Slam Rotation Bloodsurge whatever the fuck you want to call it is garbage. Total, awful, garbage. Sure occasionally it may be cool or something, but oh ok a stupid proc we have to babysit now. This instead of BT CD almost up, get ready for possible Slam!.

Napkin math leads to stupid proc mechanics and stupid Sudden Death mechanics. Did anyone honestly think that huge RNG executes that effectively end the game would ever be good?

I'm still not sure what the DPS issues are. It seems like equal skill people do equal damage give or take RNG variables for most fights. Everyone looks at some random number of X damage done in Y fight over Z length and seems to conveniently forget that the pve skills of those classes can be a huge factor in 'winning the meters'.

I see doom all around us with a deep wounds nerf when it comes to balancing us for arena, and Arms PVE DPS. Do we really need two dps specs? Why isn't arms our PVP tree and then we're done with it. I'd love for an explanation of how TG is not our default PVP build once matches last longer than 15 seconds.

All in all I'm just pretty disappointed that it took until now to, I guess, try to solve some issues. But hey, at least my Beta invite finally came on 11\13\08!!!!!!!

I can see why gemming for hit seems silly to you, when you aren't even trying to reach the hit cap. But there are still [Fury] warriors in the game that doesn't have full access to raiding epics and they'd have to work for the 10% hit (and 19 expertise as well).

The TG change was indeed a buff, saying otherwise is pretty dumb. Removing the 5% hit penalty allows Fury warriors a much wider gear choice.

I hope it won't be as bad as babysitting Rampage in TBC was. Anyway, new Bloosurge change doesnt seem to me as something super interactive, its rather annoying (judging by my limited time on PTR).

Go to the thread here: http://elitistjerks.com/f81/t37462-f...n_spreadsheet/

Download the spreadsheet input your data and see.

The problem is dropping down to just the base 9 (or 8% now?) hit cap means you will be missing 5% more white hits than you currently are, which will lead to less dps on base melee and streakier rage flow, which in no raiding epics is my current problem. I know a few people on here have already mentioned they won't be lowering their hit rating even after the patch. It will just give you more wiggle room when it comes to choosing new gear pieces. The changes to Bloodsurge & TG or WW Glyph are far from what I would call a buff in the true sense of the word. A nerf to DW could lower our dps way more than the tiny dps gain we will get from these "buffs".

The people that wont be regearing/regemming once the 5% hit penalty is gone are numnuts. Str/AP/Crit is always better once you've reached the special attack hit cap, this was true in TBC and it's true now. Otherwise what's their argument against having 18% hit vs 13% hit? That's a 5% drop too.

It's really, really simple: Once you reach the special attack hit cap (which is 13% currently and will be 8% once patch 3.0.8 goes live), then extra hit rating only affects your white damage and of course rage generation. But your rage generation with 19% white misses is already fine even with slow 2H weapons.

Str/AP affects every single attack a warrior performs. It'll always be better than hit, once you've reached the special attack hit cap.
Crit affects every single attack a warrior performs. It'll always be better than hit, once you've reached the special attack hit cap.

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As for Vhad's comment about the TG change being minuscule; yes, it's not a huge deal. Which is exactly the reason Blizzard removed it. It wasn't a big penalty and removing it isn't a big buff. But it is a buff and calling it anything else seems rather silly to me.

I do currently have 10.31% hit. Once the patch goes in, I'll be replacing four 16 hit rating gems (1.96% hit) with four 16 Str gems. I'll also be replacing my Spiked Titansteel helmet with Obsidian Greathelm, which is another 1.80% hit loss. That drops me down to 6.55% hit, which with 3/3 Precision is 9.55%. So I switch to 2/3 Precision and sit with 8.55% hit. That's a minuscule buff of 64 Str and 1 talent point.

But since I'm swapping my helmet, I gain a ton of expertise, which puts me at 6.50% from gear alone. So I can drop 2/2 Weapon Mastery too. So in total I gain 64 Str and 3 talent points I can reallocate and I still got 0.55% hit which I can use as a "safety buffer" for when I get gear upgrades.

People see the 5% penalty being removed and go "meh, it's just 5% hit". But in reality it allows us greater flexibility in our gear, gem and talent choices.

I do think Deep Wounds needs some fixing. The double gains deep wounds dot gets from damage increasing buffs like Deathwish, Hysterya or some boss specific buffs like Thaddius charges and Malygos sparks is too much and skyrockets deep wounds damage to overpowered levels.

If Blizzard only removed the double gain from deep wounds I wouldnt worry much.
But on all the other fights without weird mechanics I think we're fine and deep wounds is perfectly balanced to a very similar ability like mages Ignite. I ignore which are the Ignite mechanics but I see how for mages Ignite is the same on a fight like Thaddius or Patchwerk while for us Deep Wounds on Thaddius is crazy. And in my opinion that's the only unbalanced part of Deep Wounds.

If the nerf is reduce the base deep wounds damage, I don't think it's justified.

Just to clarify: there has NOT BEEN an actual nerf to Deep Wounds on the PTR yet. They only said that they will likely nerf it. The only changes currently in 3.0.8 are the Hit Penalty Removed, Bloodsurge Change, and the Glyph changes.

What they need to do is make deep wounds happen off of white or heroic strikes only, and perhaps increase the base damage to 60% or 75% with three talent points. This would remove the deep wounds damage coming from special attacks like bloodthirst, slam, or whirlwind. This would also help with making haste and hit more appreciative for warriors.

To fix the double dipping issue however would require a whole re-work of the paper doll or just make it not scale with Damage Increasing Multipliers (DIMs) or have deep wounds be based off of something else besides weapon damage. If I was a Blizzard developer, I would pick #3. Probably change it to some bastardized ratio of AP. You would also have to change rend too, and some other classes abilities.

I don't know who actually thought it was going to be good. Anyone who played Arms "the proper way" after 3.0 knows how that spec played. Now transpose that on top of Titan's Grip and you should have known what to expect. So now not only is DPS going to drop very slightly (or at best remain the same) with the Bloodsurge and WW changes, GC thinks it's somehow going to boost damage and put us over the top which is his justification for nerfing DW.

It also seems like he's using examples of fights that are two minutes or less where Death Wish + Bloodlust uptime is going to be skewed. Of course a Warrior can hit 6k - 6500 DPS with a bunch of lucky RNG bursts during periods of damage multipliers, but double the timeframe and it doesn't come out the same. They can't really do too much more to the class before the whole "bring the player, not the class" crap starts showing him how wrong he is.

Are you actually seeing an increase buffless on a dummy or are you seeing an increase in a 25 man raid fully buffed? Huge difference.

I was simply comparing my dps on test dummies on both live and the PTR. The only thing that I didn't check was the percentage of damage contribution I get from Deep Wounds on them. I assumed it would be equal, but can see how that may contribute more in a raid environment. I don't know if our actual melee damage would increase proportionally on fights without DIMs.

That's actually something I'd like to know, now that I think about it. My eyes tend to glaze over when I start seeing a bunch of math, but I don't recall it being discussed anywhere. I'll try to spend some more time with it today.

Making deep wounds proc only off white hits/HS would buff haste but not hit (though that might still be a good thing).

As for the double scaling issue, I agree with your choice of #3 as ideal; it'd be nice to reduce dependence on slow weapons. However, they can certainly make it simply not benefit from flat damage bonuses if they want, which might be an easier change--after all, they did the same thing to ignite a while back.

I have a technical question about Deep Wounds. (Fair warning: This is a fairly esoteric issue.)

My understanding of the ability as is (specifically not post-change, whatever that change might be, since I know there's been a lot of discussion about that topic) is that when you generate a DW proc while a DW is currently on the target, the remainder of the current DW not yet dealt is added to the value of the new DW, and that total amount is then distributed over the following 6 ticks.

For example:
I crit a target and it procs DW that will deal 600 total damage.
One second later, DW ticks for 100 damage.
Two seconds later, DW ticks for 100 damage.
Three seconds later, DW ticks for 100 damage.
After three seconds, I crit the target again, procing a new DW that will deal 600 total damage. The remaining 300 damage from the first DW is added to the 600 from the new DW, leaving 900 damage to be dealt.
One second later, DW ticks for 150 damage.
Two seconds later, DW ticks for 150 damage, and so forth.

According to Landsoul, you can stack multiple DW on top of one another, resulting in a delayed tick if you crit quickly enough, which I infer means a second crit following a first by no more than the 1 second it takes for the first tick to come. (I'm not entirely certain about the first tick delay being one second, but I just tested it to confirm, and it seems to be in the 1 second ballpark.)

That being said, I was curious whether it was possible to delay the first tick of DW by some arbitrary length of time by guaranteeing that you would crit faster than a second perpetually -- for instance, using only a fast 1H weapon on Loatheb with a 50% or higher crit rate before the spore's crit buff, along with enough haste to get below a 1.00 attack speed.

Admittedly, any manner of guaranteeing you consistently swing faster than ~1.0 seconds (such as using a single 1H weapon with Windfury, etc.) is likely to result in lower overall DPS, but out of pure morbid curiosity I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to stack up DW to some ridiculously large number.

I tested the concept in a duel by getting Heroism before the duel began while using a 1.5 speed 1H weapon, wearing a small amount of haste gear (about 100 haste rating, since it's what I had on me), and having the other person spam /sit. I was surprised to see that Deep Wounds apparently is forced to tick every ~3 seconds, even if you're consistently critting faster than the length of time between each DW's application and each respective debuff's first tick.

Granted, even if you only lose one tick every now and then, DW will continue stacking up, but I was curious: Does anyone know if I'm correct in concluding that Deep Wounds is forced to tick every few seconds, regardless of the rate that one crits the target?

I build a warrior rotation simulation as part of Rawr.Warrior and found the answer to the question if you should priorize Bloodsurge proccs over WW and BT or not. You should NOT .

With nearly perfect gear i got around 5800 DPS doing the old rotation with WW>BT>Slam, with Slam>WW>BT i got around 5700. If someone wants to check the code or play with it download the Developer Version of Rawr.
It has all current 3.08 changes and rotations for Arms and TG-Fury. But i don`t know if its all correct, it would be nice if someone with coding and theorycraft knowledge could check it.

But you're not checking WW > SLAM! > BT. I frequently will delay my BT a fraction of a second to catch a SLAM! proc so I don't waste a potential crit BT. Over the course of a fight you probably won't lose more than 1-2 BTs because of this, and will get significantly better SLAM! usage.