sejer

But I go back to my previous point, this is a fury only issue. Changes that affect anything other than fury warriors are unecessarily complex when you consider the timescale to 3.1. They've identified a perfect fury talent to tweak and they are doing so. No point in making more work for yourself when you already have a pretty good solution.

 

Polishedhead

In reply to World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Justification for Imp Berserker Stance Nerf?

Giving us agility on our items would fix the problem. At the moment we have a choice between lets say Plate Str+Crit or Leather Agi+AP+Crit... Even if these items are equal itemlevel, and even though agility isn't great for us, and even though the armor on plate costs 0 itembudget, the leather item would give us more DPS.

However given a choice between Plate Str+Agi+Crit or Leather Agi+AP+Crit... We would choose the plate item just because of Kings.

A plate item with it's budget split between Str+Agi+Crit would be superior to an equal itemlevel item that has its budget split between Str+Crit. Every piece of Leather melee DPS loot has Agility and AP as base stats so why can't Plate have Agi and Str as a base?

Apologies for posting this here since i know it isn't really Fury DPS Discussion, it's more like design theorycraft, but i'm banned from the official forums; hopefully people will read this and pass on the message.

 

sejer

They did that with tier six. Plate gear is meant to be used by DKs and paladins too and I'm sure that agility isn't so great for them either. If you read what GC is saying (and what I've been repeating in my last few posts), he wants to avoid major design overhauls when it looks like the issue can be resolved with one simple talent change.

 

Jayde

Agility on Plate gear is not bad. I'm not sure why Blizzard has decided in WotLK that it is.

Personally, I would prefer having Agility on Warrior tanking and DPS pieces like in T6 rather than how it is currently.

It would be a much better use of the item budget, and the Agi -> Crit/Dodge ratio for Warriors is more than enough to make it more useful than, for instance, excess Stamina on DPS Plate or excess Strength on tanking Plate.

In regard to the other Plate classes: Paladins have a slightly better Agility -> Crit ratio than Warriors, and DKs have the same ratio as Warriors. So, in that area, there's no reason that the concept is not relevant for them as well.

Honestly, I find it a bit strange. There is a band of items with a good mix of Agility Plate and other DPS stats, mostly in the Heroic ilevel 200 area.

Many of those items are actually quite competitive as 'early raiding' items, and some even beat a number of epic Naxx-10 drops due to their superior budget allocation. (Oddly enough, though, they are all itemized with Hit or Haste...)

 

Polishedhead

I don't see how being forced to spend 8-10 talents just to make Plate EQUAL to Leather is a solution. I also don't see how giving Plate items Agility is a major design overhaul. I could do it in a couple of hours if i had the tools that they have (item budget calculators).


Check this nice simple comparison to see my point. Lets pretend Crit and Hit are equal here, we're left with 1 str + 13 crit vs 28 agility.

13 Crit rating = 0.283% chance to crit
28 Agility = 0.492% with Kings

The agility bracers are clearly superior. This is fair itemization. Problem fixed. Then they should work on DPS balance. If they dont want us to have this "(almost) optimal" set-up until later tiers, then Rogues should be in the same boat and have to choose between Agi or AP on their items as their base stat until Icecrown.

Keep high stamina values eating budget, keep giving us Haste/hit instead of crit/arpen, im fine with this.

 

Kwanza

I was hoping I could get some critique of a new physical DPS ArP calculator that I made according to 3.1 math. It assumes the following:

-Class abilities are multiplicative in value
-Actual ArP rating is additive with the other multiplicative values
-Armor pen will be calculated correctly by the time 3.1 launches.

Have a look and tell me what you think... Also don't change any cells that are not highlighted in yellow or you'll break the formulas...

Edit: Added auto-calcs for Grim Toll and Incisor Fragment

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...h6RH02aQ&hl=en

 

Grayson Carlyle

They didn't though, and that's where the argument falls apart. They replaced one of our typical 3 DPS stats with agility. They didn't add agility as a 4th DPS stat. And because of this GC is using the excuse that "oh, warriors complained about agility on their gear before". What we complained about was the nerf to our DPS we would get because hit/crit/armor pen/haste was replaced by agility. It's a straw man argument, and it's not doing anyone any favours. It makes itemization wonky where we want to use leather, and that results in silly band-aids like we're seeing now. Adding agility as the 4th DPS stat would solve the root issue, and not only making itemization simpler, but the whole talent/ability balance problem much easier.

 

Machinator

I agree for the most part. Things like AttT shouldn't be necessary since if things were itemized right we would be taking the plate anyway. Though to be fair, things like hit for rogues are not as useful without things like combat potency.

Giving a bonus to str is a step in the right direction, but the itemization needs to come with it. +50 str/+50 haste plate or +100AP/+50 crit leather?

"Information is ammunition."

 

Liar

200 or whatever BV you get from that aren't a big deal. It won't make or break Prot viability on bosses that matter (which are the ones you tank without any +BV gear). I think people overestimate the value of Block on hard hitters - and if it doesn't hit hard enough to endanger a tank then it's trivial anyway, with or without Block. On top of that, AttT doesn't scale well. It's more like a static +AP (or +Str) buff you get from dinging level 80 and getting epics in all slots and that's that.

I for one don't see any problems from reverting AttT back to it's old version which should be 1 Strength for 180 AP anyway and not your number (I assume you just went with a 2 AP --> 1 Str conversation when Blizzard intentionally increased the AP gain from AttT to compensate for lack of scaling from BoK and other +Str% talents).

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Jayde

Yeah, the major problem with AttT is that with current armor scaling values it may as well be something like "Increases your Attack Power by X per Level."

It's only going up at a rate of like 2% per tier, which is basically nothing.

As far as talent scaling goes, it's not a super-great design. Static (or mostly static) talents are almost always avoided. It would make more sense to convert it to be a % of Stamina rather than a % of Armor, as Stamina will scale at the rate similar to other forms of Attack Power-oriented itemization.

It's ok to convert X to Y, provided that both X and Y are on similar scales so the rate of gains from various sources is consistant. The issue here is that Y--being Strength or Attack Power--provided by armor scales at a rate 4-6 times as fast as X--being armor--and thus the relative gain will never be consistant over time.

 

sejer

OK, I was mistaken with my logic on the T6 argument but my point about paladins and DKs still stands I think. Wouldn't the addition of agility on non-set gear reduce its value for paladins and DKs?

 

skdal

I think people are looking at this whole imp zerk change in a completely different light than Blizzard is.

Blizzard simply wants Warriors to wear plate, regardless of the stats on it. Whether you gain or lose DPS by switching from leather to plate is largely irrelevant to them. They just want to get Warriors wearing plate. Then after they achieve that, they can use that as a baseline to balance DPS around. If its too low while wearing plate, they will increase it.

Thats their line of thought and thats why no amount of comparison between the DPS value of leather vs plate will change their mind. Blizzard stumbled upon a way to nerf all other alternative armor types for Warriors and Warriors alone. Now they are going to exploit that talent to use it to their advantage.

 

NoTaeves

And to be honest that is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the talents are attractive enough that we want to wear plate over leather and our dps is balanced, I honestly see no problem with this route. It seems a lot less work than completely redesigning every item and rebalancing our talents accordingly. As blizzard said they can make any itemization work through tweaks to the class.

This goes without saying that the talents remain attractive as gear scales.

 

◊ Birdemani

What he's saying is our DPS for this new tier won't be balanced around the assumption of that stat balance. The overhaul would be needed if you changed the Plate itemization paradigm. The disconnect comes from players looking at min/max breakdowns on a per piece basis where GC seems to approach it from what our DPS and total damage done numbers are. What is the point of moving numbers/stats/talents around just to get us to the same place on the epeen charts? The difference is we would be happy to see the stats line up with other armor classes.

I'm willing to give them a chance to make this work and I hope they can do that before 3.1 goes live. I'll be honest that I'm not overly optimistic.

Relwin: Besides, the BB is not some ivory tower of WoW knowledge, it's just less stupid here than elsewhere.
DeeNogger: Not less stupid, better stupid. The BB takes stupid very seriously. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go misspell the word fire.

 

Grayson Carlyle

Paladins would love it. They get even more crit from agi than we do (it's nearly on par with crit rating for them). In fact, because the Ulduar set bonuses are not nearly as impressive as T7 set bonuses, the min/maxers will be using leather. Then Blizzard will hate on Paladins for not using plate.

If you take the current tier of loot (Naxx, EoE, OS) and shift budgets around so that they'd look like a typical leather budget, then it'd be a wash for DKs. Current plate itemization has only a bit more str than leather's equivalent AP budget. DKs get str multipliers and conversions all over their talents; they'd prefer a str biased set, but 4 DPS stats is still better than 3. So a win for Paladins, Warriors and a wash for DKs.

The biggest problem is Ulduar though. At the current tier, leather is only 0-5% better in most cases, Frosted Adroit and Recluse being the only major exceptions. Ulduar leather is at minimum, 5% better, simply because a higher ratio of plate budget is spent in stamina compared to the current tier. Bring that stamina down and convert the budget into agi, but leave the rest of the stats the same. It's free DPS stats. So for all classes, it would increase the value of the gear substantially. Adding a 4th DPS stat while maintaining the current 3 cannot decrease the value of an item for any class.

 

sejer

Birdemani understands what I am trying to say. I'm not trying to argue the case for Blizzard, I think GC can do that, I'm just trying to translate what the intended vision is and my interpretation of it. That is to say, Blizzard have a paradigm and why would they change this way of thinking for one spec of one class?

A better question to ask might be: if putting agility as an extra stat on plate is simple-end-all answer, why aren't they doing it? I still maintain that it is to do with the potential impact of other classes.

 

zurayth

As much as I would like to see this change go through and the relative ease of its implementation, I'm still pretty sure that Blizzard is not in the mood to touch DPS plate stats. The imp Berserker stance change was used so that Blizzard didn't have to touch the items.

 

◊ Birdemani

They may already have the plans to do that in Icecrown with Tier 10. Remember, we are entering the same cycle phase as Tier 2 and Tier 5 were to their respective WOW versions.

Relwin: Besides, the BB is not some ivory tower of WoW knowledge, it's just less stupid here than elsewhere.
DeeNogger: Not less stupid, better stupid. The BB takes stupid very seriously. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go misspell the word fire.

 

dysent

Something to keep in mind is that warrior/DK have the worst Agi-crit value of all classes who don't get AP from it:
with BoK:
Warr/DK ~ 56.8 agi = 1% crit
Paladin ~ 47.4 agi = 1% crit
Crit rating - 45.91 = 1% crit

Depending on how ArP is postpatch, we may be better off with Crit/Str/ArP, because for warr, agi takes about a 20% penalty (after bok) relative to crit rating. Comparatively, Agi is 97% of crit for paladin. The formula for dodge has similar warrior penalties compared to paladin.

As a result, agi on plate gear would need to be tuned against the increased gains for paladins compared to warr/dk, because Warr and DK are penalized for having Agi in a way that paladins are not.

I know I'm not considering the AP gain from the little bit of armor on agi, but it's nearly negligible.

interesting aside: with crit rating being both melee and spell now, does that mean agi is a worthwhile caster stat (same conversion as paladin), or is agi's crit rating still melee only?
[edit: had to look around a bit, but found confirmation that in wotlk, agi is still only melee crit]

 

Hirurg

nope; for expample, agi's crit doesn't work for dk's 'spells' - death coil, howling blast, etc.

 

Liar

I think the point was to add Agility as extra stat to spread the budget a bit more. Agi is obviously worse than Crit Rating but you can get both stats on one item (just look at any Leather or Mail item) whereas you can't get Strength and AP on one item.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

dysent

Aye, understood - my point was twofold
1. Agi on plate may put paladin out of whack with warr/dk in terms of "hybrid" dps if they ever do get us all balanced
2. The penalty on Agi and the buff to ArP may make ArP a better stat, such that a better mix of str/crit/arp/haste/hit/exp would provide higher overall benefits than having mixing agi into the mix with its penalty... though right now haste < agi by a smidge, so moot point unless that changes.

 

hellord

You aren't considering the side-effects from crits.
Warriors have deep wounds (48% damage) and different side effects for each spec (flurry, rampage, trauma, wrecking crew, imp def stance). Impale and poleaxe spec have benefits aswell.

Dks have a higher crit dmg bonus on major moves.

Paladins have RV (30% damage) triggered only by judgements, cs and ds, no critical strike bonus from talents (iirc) and get fol cast time reduction. Their critical strike chance is already high on most spells and the increase from crit is not as high as for wars and dks.

I think if you factor in every side effect the paladins will gain more or less the same damage increase (or even slightly less) than the other 2 classes.

ArP Whore

 

Laurana

Adding agility would be a pretty decent solution in pve; in pvp though, it would even further increase the insane survivability of DKs against melee. Even if they excluded PvP plate from the change, most DKs would simply keep most of their pve plate and get their resilience throught the other slots. It would obviously also affect warriors and ret paladins, but to a lesser degree.

 

hellord

Dodge from agility suffers DR, so the big chunks of avoidance should still come from talents rather than gear. What would scare me about Dks wearing pve plate is the enormous amount of stamina on it rather than the small dodge that would come from Agi.
This anyway isn't the thread to discuss this. Maybe we've gone too far from the subject

ArP Whore