Like Water - The Brewmaster's Resource [5/21/13] - Page 11

Taser · 02/18/13, 10:54 AM

In the wake of all this discussion about trinkets and mastery I thought of exploring another point of view. With 5.2 the value of mastery is going to change. Currently we get 0.5% stagger per 600 masteryrating. With 5.2 this will be buffed by 25% to 0.625 per 600 masteryrating. How much effective health do we gain from mastery? As PTR is PTR my calcs will be based on the current value of 0.5.

To calculate your EH you have to calculate backwards from your HP. Let’s take a tank with 500k HP and say that he has 25% reduction through armor and an additional 25% from stance (back in the old days only armor was considered but nowadays dmg-reduction from stance must be included).

500’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 = 888’888 EH

Now we include mastery in the equation. Let’s just calculate the base 24% stagger + 20% from shuffle:

500’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / 0.56 = 1’587’301 EH

Now let’s say we reforge 1200 hasterating to masteryrating to get 1% additional stagger:

500’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / 0.55 = 1’616’161 EH

Our EH just increased by 28’860. To get the same effect from stamina we would need

1’616’161 x 0.75 x 0.75 x 0.56 = 509’090 – 500’000 = 9’090 HP / 19.4 = 468.56 stamina.

This figure changes if your initial HP is lower or higher. The more HP you have the more EH you gain from mastery. Same example, but with 600k HP:

600’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 = 1’066’666 EH

Now we include mastery in the equation. Let’s just calculate the base 24% stagger + 20% from shuffle:

600’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / 0.56 = 1’904’761 EH

Now let’s say we reforge 1200 hasterating to masteryrating to get 1% additional stagger:

600’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / 0.55 = 1’939’393 EH

Our EH just increased by 34’632. To get the same effect from stamina we would need

1’939’393 x 0.75 x 0.75 x 0.56 = 610’908 – 600’000 = 10’908 HP / 19.4 = 562.26 stamina.

What is the best about mastery in regards to EH? The effect is not linear. For every additional point of mastery you get more EH than for the previous one. This is the case because mastery has no DR unlike armor. The same is NOT true for stamina. Stamina gives you the same EH for every single point. Therefore there is a breakpoint at which you gain more EH from a 320 mastery gem than from a 240 stamina gem.

For example at 600k HP 25% armor it would be:

240 x 19.4 = 4’658 HP
320 / 600 * 0.5 = 0.2667% stagger

604’658 / 0.75 / 0.75 / X = 600’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / (X-0.002667)

For simplicity’s sake let’s just say 604’658 / 0.75 / 0.75 = A and 600’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 = B. Now it is:

A / X = B / (X – 0.002667) |*X, /B

A / B = X / (X – 0.002667) |*(X – 0.002667)

(A * (X – 0.002667)) / B = X

AX / B – 0.002667A / B = X |-(AX / B)

-0.002667A / B = X – (AX / B)

-0.002667A / B = X * (1– (A / B)) |/(1-(A / B))

(-0.002667A / B) / (1-(A / B)) = X

Now we can fill in the figures:

X = (-0,002667 * (604’658 / 0.75 / 0.75) / (600.000 / 0.75 / 0.75)) / (1-(604’658 / 0.75 / 0.75) / (600.000 / 0.75 / 0.75)) = 0.3461617 = 65.38383% stagger = 65.38383 – 44 = 25.38383 /0.5 * 600 = 30’460 Masteryrating

30k Mastery rating is quite far away, isn’t it? But what if some Monk goes for a really heavy EH-built with max stamina-stacking? Let’s say he gets to 750k HP?

X = (-0,002667 * (754’658 / 0.75 / 0.75) / (750.000 / 0.75 / 0.75)) / (1-(754’658 / 0.75 / 0.75) / (750.000 / 0.75 / 0.75)) = 0.4320355 = 56.79645% stagger = 56.79645 – 44 = 12.79645 /0.5 * 600 = 15’355 Masteryrating (with 5.2 only 12.79645 /0.625 * 600 = 12’284 Masteryrating)

I would say that these are numbers that will be reachable with T15 gear. There are Brewmasters out there that have about 11k Mastery with iLVL500 while still being at 7.5% hit and expertise and about 550k HP unbuffed. At this point it is no longer just about EH but also about mastery providing damage-reduction through PB. I am not promoting mastery to becoming our go-to-stat with 5.2, I just want to point out something that might not be aware to some guys. In further Tiers Stamina will no longer remain the No.1 EH-stat for monks. This will be mastery. You will only want stamina for Lei Shi-like magic heavy fights.

If anybody is interested, I created a spreadsheet to calculate these values automatically: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...Wc1NjBLeENKOXc

Hope that I got my math right in the first try this time…

Pisshands · 02/19/13, 5:41 AM

This is good work, Taser, and it supports something I've thought about Mastery for a while. We know that as damage reduction statistics, armor, dodge, parry, crit and haste all have diminishing returns of some sort. The amount to which each diminishes is different and typically based upon other values.

In the history of WoW, at least as well as I can remember, there has only been one statistic that become increasingly powerful as you acquired more of it. Who played melee in Wrath of the Lich King? Remember Armor Penetration? ArP was more powerful the more of it you had, because it was working in directly inverse proportion to armor - which has diminishing returns.

I have believed for quite a while, and am now willing to openly propose, that Monk Mastery will behave similarly to Armor Penetration in Wrath of the Lich King. ArPen was a garbage stat early in the expansion that only saw minimal use. It was buffed by 25% in the first major content patch, and began quickly being picked up by a handful of classes, and was the end-all, be-all stat of the expansion for melee dps by ICC.

Equivalently, while some high-end Monks have sworn by it, general consensus for Monks has been split on its value (at best), with more Monks generally in favor of haste gearing. I still hold this opinion, for now. It is being buffed by 25% in the upcoming patch, and I think by the end of next tier, or possibly in the middle of the following tier, we will be grabbing as much Mastery as we can afford.

Now, I may be wrong, but here is my position: I highly favor Haste gearing, and at present I am not capable of exceeding roughly 8600 Haste. I have gone over a few times, but I frankly find any more Haste a bit clumsy to play. To take an extreme example: Sha of Fear with Lei's Hope, I struggle to expend my energy without capping when overloaded with Haste. It becomes an annoyance, a burden. So, by my own experience, I feel that beyond around 9000 Haste is wasted. Math and playstyle may disagree - to each their own. Nonetheless, there is a value of Haste at which you can no longer reasonably perform the rotation with capping, and that value will be realistically attainable during this expansion. It will also be quite a bit lower than the haste "hard cap."

Crit is a good secondary stat to fall back to from Haste. Great, even. It provides a lot of damage, the most damage for your secondary stat buck, and good avoidance. Crit has a similar issue to Haste, though, in that a lot of EB procs can be wasted. Case in point, a few posts back I linked to a Will of the Emperor in which I lost about 30 seconds of Elusive Brew uptime. That wasn't because I was careless or stupid, it was just all wasted EB procs beyond 15 while I was doing the safety dance. Now, hopefully most bosses in the coming tiers won't have forced uselessness periods for EB, but we can again reasonably expect that the value at which crit stops being useful for EB is quite a long way below any form of "crit cap."

Back to Mastery. Mastery is effective health. It provides no damage reduction on its own, just cushion, and it works substantially better than Stamina.

Let me compare some of Taser's numbers and expand in a direction of my own.

Originally Posted by Taser

To calculate your EH you have to calculate backwards from your HP. Let’s take a tank with 500k HP and say that he has 25% reduction through armor and an additional 25% from stance (back in the old days only armor was considered but nowadays dmg-reduction from stance must be included).

500’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 = 888’888 EH

Now we include mastery in the equation. Let’s just calculate the base 24% stagger + 20% from shuffle:

500’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / 0.56 = 1’587’301 EH

Now let’s say we reforge 1200 hasterating to masteryrating to get 1% additional stagger:

500’000 / 0.75 / 0.75 / 0.55 = 1’616’161 EH

Our EH just increased by 34’632.

Rather than compare Mastery to Stamina, let's compare Mastery to Mastery.

Stagger Amount	Calculation	EH	EH increase from 1% Mastery	% increase over prior
4% (Base)	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .56	1,587,301 EH	N/A
5%	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .55	1,616,161 EH	28860	N/A
6%	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .54	1,646,091 EH	29930	3.71%
7%	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .53	1,677,149 EH	31058	3.77%
8%	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .52	1,709,401 EH	32252	3.84%
9%	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .51	1,742,919 EH	33518	3.93%
10%	500,000 / .75 / .75 / .50	1,777,778 EH	34858	4.00%

So, what we see here is that continued accumulation of mastery has increasing returns to our effective health. As Taser has already shown, it scales together with Stamina and is superior to Stamina in terms of increasing our EH. To summarize, I do not think that the time has yet arrived, but I do believe there may come a time soon when, due to its increasing returns, that reaching a self-determined breakpoint of Haste/Exp/Hit and then stacking Mastery should be the standard for Monk gearing. All that we technically need to accomplish through Haste/Exp/Hit is to create enough Chi to keep Shuffle up 100% of the time and then use left-over Chi to Guard and PB. This will become especially true when our Chi heals are made free of charge next patch.

Kraun · 02/19/13, 12:00 PM

I just read this in the latest patch notes and it made me very sad

Chi Wave now does 100% more damage, but its healing reduced by 14%, and no longer costs Chi, but now has a 15 second cooldown.

edit: nevermind they updated the tooltip again:
Chi Wave now has spec specific tooltips. Healing now scales with AP and base damaged increased. i'm guessing they just decreased the base heal by 14% to compensate for the boost it will get from AP. With heavy vengeance this will work nicely.

Taser · 02/19/13, 2:08 PM

Maybe some of you remember that during Beta GC nearly desperately tried to convince us that mastery was not as bad as we thought as it also contributes to our EH. I have to admit that back then I also promoted mastery to be a bad stat because it was much weaker than haste or crit in regards of damage reduction.

With 5.2 almost all changes push us to mastery.

+25% stagger from mastery
LVL30 Talents get their Chi cost removed
4set T15 gives us free PB

Those change devalue haste and increases the value of mastery. Pisshands is right in saying that haste and crit have some kind of ceiling that is lower than an actual cap.

lairpie · 02/19/13, 5:42 PM

I'd be interested to see how agi, dodge, parry, and mastery stack up once you've effectively capped hit, exp, haste, very, very fuzzy crit capped. Mastery has the obvious advantage of increasing effective health, but there's only so far that's actually very useful. With 4 stats effectively capped in the quite near future, how do the remaining options for gems and reforges play out? How far into the realm where you're wasting some EB stacks does crit still stay ahead of parry and dodge for damage reduction, or agi for that matter?

Taser · 02/21/13, 5:10 AM

To continue our recent discussion about mastery, I created another spreadsheet (be warned: it is not very pretty) to do some calculations. But what did I do?

1. Set some values as starting points (30k stam, 18k armor, 5k mastery, 70% stagger purified)
2. Set up 3 different tables
3. 1st table = stamina gets increased by 1k each step, everything else unchanged
4. 2nd table = armor gets increased by 1k each step, everything else unchanged
5. 3rd table = mastery gets increased by 1k each step, everything else unchanged

In the first table only the development of the EH is being calculated. The armor and mastery tables also include a DMG-reduction component. There I calculated the total benefit in relation to overall dmg and the relative benefit as relation to the remaining damage.

What we can see is, that mastery not only scales like old Armor Penetration in regards of EH but also in regards of damage reduction. Every single point of mastery is worth more than the previous. Just as Pisshands said…we have increasing returns. Next thing would be to calculate breakpoints in relation to other stats.

Link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...EE&usp=sharing

Now I would like to ask for some help. I am experiencing some odd behavior from the Guards of our statue. For example:

At the beginning of a Mel’jarak fight one Raidmember got my first 5! Guards. None of the overwritten guards got consumed. Overall he consumed 58k of them. At least all had a higher value than the previous/remaining. This behavior is consistent throughout the fight. At the end of the fight 58 of my 78 Guards were cast on 2 Raidmembers with a whopping 91.2% and 93.3% overheal. No other Raidmember had more than 4. I had a raw healing of 30’512’068 in that fight with 72.8% overheal.

If Blizz is going to change the guards from our statue to proc from 16*AP damage instead of 8*AP than it would be great to have a working priority system for the selection of the targets.

injured + no guard > not injured + no guard > injured + existing guard > not injured + existing guard

Has anybody else done some analysis regarding the guards of our statue?

Noobiisa · 02/22/13, 2:57 AM

On Amber-Shaper, you can see even better how whacked the statue guard prioritizing is actually (you proc so much with the dmg buff). I agree with Taser, that it is no way a smart heal as it claims it to be. It seems to stick to 2 ppl and they get most of the guards. This is very anecdotal evidence, but very rarely could I see it going to the correct injured person.

Is actually a fairly big issue if a major amount of the statue shields get wasted where there is no constant income of dmg on the raid. It seems to actually look at the current HP of a person and they get the shield, regardless of debuffs, existing guard, % of HP.

Even a bare basic check if the person has the guard up already and do not apply if indeed true, should cover a lot the overhealing issues.

Pisshands · 02/22/13, 4:44 PM

These Ox Statue Guard issues you are having are concerning. I'd like to see more to know it's not just anecdotal or in error, but even if this is an isolated incident, it indicates that the smartness of the heal is questionable, and that's a big problem.

Good spreadsheet, Taser. I think further number-crunching into Mastery value breakpoints would be an excellent use of time.

Tsuki Ko · 02/22/13, 10:56 PM

I made a quick weak aura to show when shields are cast and who's receiving them. It'll say if it's a refresh or new, and also check the raid to see if it was cast at lowest health target, measuring by absolute health - which I assume it's the criteria if there's one, which would explain why my co-tank hardly gets them.

Ideally it'd be an addon tracking shields and health levels over a fight to present a report at the end, but I have no experience making addons and it'd take a bit longer.

dm03gaGiQQlrk1OiKtbjRIiHEfrsmlQ4weP0UGGFruvnmPIJjclJQKNrKktJc5AsLSnqsFJirghrrNJO - Pastebin.com

Taser · 02/23/13, 6:56 AM

I wanted to ask if someone also experienced something like this. Of course I can back this up with WoL evidence.

To track that ingame I tried something different. I changed added some code in the lua of RSA to annonce the guards of the statue in chat. What didn't know at that point was, that overwritten guards are a spell-aura-refresh event and not the spell-aura-applied that I thought. During raid I got the guards announced in chat, but I noticed long stretches without any guards. That was when I started going deeper and evaluating combat logs.

Let's have a look at the logs now (FYI: guard is "Schutz" in german):

No. 1
Feb 6th - Windlord Mel'jarak Spell details for Schutz - 06-02 19:45 - Therapy - World of Logs
92 guards
44 on 1 player Rialin
Expression Editor with spell="Schutz" Expression Editor - 06-02 19:45 - Therapy - World of Logs
Expression Editor with targetname="Rialin" Expression Editor - 06-02 19:45 - Therapy - World of Logs
Here you can see all refreshs. What disturbs me is the following segment
[21:32:06.535] Rialin's Schutz is refreshed by Yummyumm (Remaining: 594908)
[21:32:07.751] Rialin gains Flutwellen from Rialin
[21:32:08.197] Rialin's Wutgeheul is refreshed by Knurrmagedon
[21:32:09.038] Rialin's Flutwellen is refreshed by Rialin
[21:32:09.797] Àmely Licht der Morgendämmerung Rialin +0 (O: 24208)
[21:32:10.161] Rialin's Schutz is refreshed by Yummyumm (Remaining: 590215)
There is no damage-event and the guard (Schutz) is refreshed with a lower value

No. 2
Same day - Ambershaper
34 guards
15 on Rialin
Expression Editor with spell="Schutz" Expression Editor - 06-02 19:45 - Therapy - World of Logs

No. 3
Feb 15th - Windlord Mel'jarak wipe Spell details for Schutz - 15-02 19:40 - Therapy - World of Logs
77 guards
55 on1 player
Expression Editor with spell="Schutz" Expression Editor - 15-02 19:40 - Therapy - World of Logs

No. 4
Feb 15th - Windlord Mel'jarak kill Spell details for Schutz - 15-02 19:40 - Therapy - World of Logs
78 guards
58 on just 2 players
Expression Editor with spell="Schutz" Expression Editor - 15-02 19:40 - Therapy - World of Logs

Mel'jarak is just such a good example because there so many guards. If you dig a bit deeper in the expression editor, like I did in my first example, you will find many refresh-events that are overwritten guards.

Hope that helps a bit.

Neara · 02/23/13, 8:30 AM

my favorite part from my last windlord kill

← Click Here

But from logs it's not really visibly if the "smart heal" part is bugged. If the smart heal functions in a way that it chooses the target with the lowest HP (value not percentage) than it would make sense in fights like windlord with very low raiddmg that Guard will be mostly cast on the same target (the player with the lowest MaxHP)

If i look at logs for fights with high raiddmg like Empress then there aren't such chain-guards on the same target.

← Click Here

[22:42:01.584] Hains gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 267645)
[22:42:09.271] Spuu gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 265928)
[22:42:20.537] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 251619)
[22:42:29.768] Zoskia gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 279219)
[22:42:54.322] Spuu gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 244513)
[22:43:03.954] Zoskia gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 189934)
[22:43:13.619] Naminchen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 242363)
[22:43:25.262] Hains gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 239006)
[22:43:41.349] Naminchen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 255060)
[22:43:53.885] Justgreen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 187053)
[22:44:07.963] Zoskia gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 199092)
[22:44:27.721] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 220197)
[22:44:36.167] Offler gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 513677)
[22:44:37.771] Offler's Guard is refreshed by Skally (Remaining: 571587)
[22:44:47.031] Spuu gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 875921)
[22:44:52.232] Malaikat gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1076354)
[22:44:54.838] Skally gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1329423)
[22:44:57.466] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1193296)
[22:45:02.715] Grayze gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1233622)
[22:45:09.533] Hains gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1241023)
[22:45:15.609] Naminchen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1232274)
[22:45:23.252] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1243875)
[22:45:26.846] Spuu gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 975380)
[22:45:30.032] Skally gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 1109395)
[22:45:31.703] Spuu's Guard is refreshed by Skally (Remaining: 953470)
[22:46:29.265] Justgreen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 175528)
[22:47:04.389] Justgreen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 199630)
[22:47:19.780] Hains gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 232851)
[22:47:30.523] Zoskia gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 264876)
[22:47:40.573] Zoskia gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 276175)
[22:47:54.831] Skally gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 275725)
[22:48:03.926] Justgreen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 242901)
[22:48:16.821] Justgreen gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 230271)
[22:48:28.091] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 263492)
[22:48:39.420] Spuu gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 248189)
[22:48:54.970] Skally gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 261611)
[22:48:57.889] Zoskia gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 224789)
[22:49:10.773] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 198144)
[22:49:25.649] Maylow gains Guard from Skally (Remaining: 247848)

So the real problem is not that the smart heal doesn't work, but that it stays focused on it even if there is already Guard active on the target.

Kozaky · 02/23/13, 12:10 PM

Reading the tooltip on Black Ox Statue buff you get when you place the statue, it says it targets the nearest party/raid member.

Bemxuu · 02/23/13, 5:17 PM

Originally Posted by Neara

it would make sense in fights like windlord with very low raiddmg that Guard will be mostly cast on the same target (the player with the lowest MaxHP)

Seems right. It prefers same targets within one day according to Taser's logs: Rialin on day 1 and Therapy on day 2.

Neara · 02/24/13, 12:19 AM

The more i think about it, the more i'm sure that it is intended like that. If the smart heal would start ignoring targets that are already guarded it would become too powerful in fights like windlord. In a dmg phase we toss out guards every 2 seconds. Would take 20 seconds to completely guard an entire 10man raid with 500k shields. You could start detonating wind bombs with that. Of course in most fights it wouldn't be this extreme, but still. Our healing done is already pretty high, if we could start pre-shielding the entire raid it could nearly entirely take away the need for raid heal in those low raiddmg fights.

Taser · 02/24/13, 2:27 AM

I agree that a fight like Mel'jarak could end being brewmaster + 1heal. But in the end it is still designed badly. That is what they want to avoid, classes or specs that are mandatory. Maybe they should give that ability a 10 sec. ICD. There are so many possibilities. I have a Mel'jarak fight with 30 million raw healing with my 3 healers having a combined 53million.