Thinking out Loud (pre Cataclysm brainstorm)

So, Blizzard still seems to be debating on whether/how to replace WW in the fury rotation. Blue posts seem to waver between indicating that they're considering it, and debating whether we really need one.

Here are a couple thoughts that this brings up for me, and mainly this is a curiosity more than anything else.

Point #1: Bloodthirst, Slam, Heroic Strike, Cleave, as written do main hand weapon damage only.

Point #2: WW is our only strike that attacks with both weapons.

Point #3: having two weapons has pluses and minuses, e.g. on the up-side, we can melee swing more often (about twice), on the downside we experience 10% damage reduction (for current incarnation of TG) and our miss percentage goes from 8% to 27%.

So, let's take a look at an idea here, suppose that we consider a Fury build that is based around only carrying one 2 hander instead of trying to dual wield. On the one hand, this is not the direction this was normalized in, but on the other hand....

Suppose our melee damage (white swings) are intended to be about 30% of our overall damage. Let's suppose that means that we have two weapons swinging at about the same time doing 30% of our damage. Let's also suppose that we've invested the large amount of hit rating needed to hit cap our white swings. Now, the other 70% of our damage (except on multi-target pulls) doesn't benefit at all from the off hand swings. Only rage generation gets any boost at all.

So, if we trade off our off hand for a single two hander, we gain 6 talent points (maybe more depending how important WW is) to place other spots on the tree (maybe handy, maybe not) including the heretofore undesirable Unbridled Wrath (who knows how this will fare in Clysm?). Let's suppose those extra talents kind of wash out some of the unmeasureable factors, i.e. suppose that those extra talent points in things like Anger Management and Unbridled Wrath cut our rage generation loss so we still generate about 70-80% of the rage we did before instead of 50%, and otherwise have no real effect.

I'll use relative terms so we can compare directly.

Now, not having TG means that our 70% of yellow damage is actually 77% now, and the 30% of white damage becomes 16.5%. However, all that hit rating we no longer need (19% hit rating = 623 hit rating currently) can be transferred to extra haste/crit (interestingly enough, 623 Haste rating = 19% haste currently). So, we can add 20% to the white numbers as well as 20% of our rage generation as well. If we also assume that we are capped on our crit rating (say 50% for a nice comparison) that extra crit + haste interaction will also generate an additional 10% for both white damage and rage generation, thus giving us a total of 30% increase to those two numbers.

So, we're looking at Yellow Strikes making up 77% damage, white strikes making up 21.45% damage and rage generation at about 91-104%.

So, in theory, at least it would seem that swapping to a single weapon style with Fury would yield about the same end result as trying to dual wield.

Rage Generation (normalized to 2H Fury)

TG fury: 100%

Single Fury: 91-104%

Damage:

TG Fury:

30% white + 70% yellow = 100%

Single Fury:

21.5% white + 77% yellow = 98.5%

I can't wait until our talent tree has a preview available so I can see how feasible this idea is.

The Clysm raid changes, and some raid thoughts.

They look interesting, but I'm of mixed emotions about them.

For one thing, I like the fact that I could run with my 10 man group all the time instead of having the "herding cats" experience that 25's can become, but since they're still going to incentivise doing the 25 mans (by offering more badges, etc) it may mean that the only way to get the "good" gear quickly is to run the 25's. I guess it will depend on numbers a lot. For example, if they make the next tier items cost the same (60-95 emblems) as the T10 gear, and if a raid boss offers 2 emblems on 10 man, and 4 on 25 man, since you can only do one of them, it will take you twice as long to work towards tier gear doing 10 mans.

But if they don't incentivise 25's that way, I know many many people who will choose to "cut the fat" so to speak and just run with a 10 man that they are comfortable with. Less demand on their machine, so better frame rates, etc. and overall easier to communicate, and fewer people to have to worry about.

I think it's safe to say that even if the rest of the gear drop amount goes up, I doubt that will really make the difference, i.e. if 2 pieces of gear drop from 10 mans, and 5 pieces of gear drop from 25 mans it's still exactly 1/5 of the raid that has the "chance" to get a piece of gear, regardless which one you're in. In my experience it's easier to get the 10 man gear, because the 10 mans will be consistent, so if someone wins a piece one week, they won't need it next week. I don't want to tell you how many people won the Dual Blade Butcher from week to week in our ToC 25's and then never came back to the raids. I drooled every time it dropped, and every time it went to someone else, sometimes a ret paladin (Armor Pen? Really?) and sometimes a DK or Warrior, but the axe never came back equipped to the raid.

On a secondary note, if you are a raider, please don't do this. You have to realize that everyone is trying to get the same gear as you, so if you don't know what the optimal gear is for you, please look it up. And if you are taking something because it "might" be cool, at least wait until everyone else has had a shot at it.

Examples of things that have annoyed me in the past:

Please, if you want to be a raider,

• Fury warrior rolls on a second (name of weapon removed) but never equips it to raid, because really it wasn't as good as his other off hand weapon
• Raid leader decides spuriously to award a hunter a melee weapon over a melee class who won the role because "the stat bonuses (agility) are more itemized for a hunter".
• Someone rolls and wins item X and then later that night rolls and wins item Y which goes in the exact same slot, but rather than trade it off to someone else, has to sell item X since they gemmed it immediately not realizing there were much better upgrades. Note: both items about the same level, just stat bonuses were in different places.
• Despite our guild's policy for the T10.5 upgrade pieces, someone rolls for a second or even third Sanctified piece of gear and wins over people who have none.

Please, if you want to be a raider, don't do these kinds of things. For example, I have a list right now of the 7 pieces of gear that might drop from ICC 25 that I would like. They are the ONLY pieces of gear I will roll on, and they are prioritized. For example, I have a drop from Saurfang that takes precedent over the drop from Deathwhisper, and both of those take precedent over all other drops in ICC. I would gladly put dkp on the drop from Saurfang if it came to that, but since our guild doesn't use point systems, it's a matter of politeness. Unfortunately for me, that trinket has a low drop rate and is the best in slot for a lot of dps classes, but here again, the trinket is an armor pen trinket, so if I lose the roll to a hunter, rogue, or fellow warrior, or even a DK, I'm fine, I'd have to have a good talk with a friend of mine if a retadin or ele shaman rolled on it though (and ask him WHY would they need it?).

A little research and politeness go a long way, finding out a little bit about what gear you actually want is definitely more worthwhile than just rolling on everything that might apply to you. Not to mention, if people see you allowing things to spread evenly, and then one day you request something specific, you might get the chance to have priority for a change.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you can't post a list of items you would roll on (and also a list of possible upgrades for those items that might be gotten) you probably shouldn't roll on things until you can.

Up to a point, I believe that these raiding loot rules work pretty well:

• Research ahead of time. If you don't know if something is better for you, ask.
• Look at the other people who are rolling on gear. If something is kind of so-so for you, but would improve their gear dramatically, it will improve your RAID dramatically overall. In that case, you should pass it to them.
• Everyone present has the same chance to get items that are appropriate for them. If you don't know what is appropriate for you, please see the first rule.
• Especially in big raids, try to use the 1 drop per person per raid rule, and for infrequent drops, possibly even 1 drop per person until everyone has gotten one. If no one is interested in an item, it can become sort of fair game to try to claim a second or third piece, but until then, stay out of those rolls. This also means you should save your rolls in some cases for those pieces you REALLY want, or if you win one and you might want something later, you can apply the second rule.
• There will always be some exceptions, such as the legendary hammer pieces that drop in Ulduar. For a raid to benefit from that kind of thing, the same person has to get all of them. In that case, the decision should be made as a group who gets those items, and that person should be someone that can be counted on to be at the raid so that those items get used as much as possible. Similarly with the legendary axe that drops in ICC, a decision should be made who gets the "first" crack at it, and all others can be on a "next in line" basis. Otherwise it will take forever to get one in the raid.

Fury Changes in Clysm

So, I'm pondering the possible outcomes of being Fury come 'Clysm, and I'm thinking that I read something on EJ's site that makes a lot of sense.

In order to get us to want to prioritize abilities correctly they'll have to do something like this for a sort of damage order:

Bloodthirst > Slam (proc) > HS > WW > Furious Sunder

The one thing I'm not certain about is whether HS (max) > Slam (proc) > HS (min) or

Slam (proc) > HS (max) > HS (min). Both have some use, but I think the latter would better preserve the use of the procced slam mechanic.

Now, I think this is going to be something very similar to the actual damage allotment, since otherwise, one of the no cd abilities would trump the cd abilities.

I know that all the talent trees are going to be revamped anyway, but they sound like many of our core talents will be left primarily in place, we'll just lose some of the passive "gain X% damage" type talents, and there should be some shifts, but for the purpose of this discussion, we'll mention the talents for these abilities as though they will remain largely the same.

I.e. If HS > Slam (proc) then why would you bother with waiting for Slams to proc? Plus, that frees up talent points, since that is all that talent does. Imagine, if HS trumps Slams even if it has to be maxxed to do it, I think most warriors would choose to use HS every chance they can, and place the 3 talent points into rage generation to help pay for their expensive HS's. If HS > Bloodthirst, then why bother using it? Essentially, they'll want to keep BT and Slam as the two top damage dealing abilities for a warrior's single target, and just use HS as a really good way to fill the gaps between the Bloodthirsts when Slam isn't proccing.

Regarding the right end of the spectrum, Furious Sundering was announced as a way to lessen the cost of needing to apply sunders, and is not supposed to be a move that replaces HS in any way, and I'd bet that it isn't supposed to be greater than WW either, and is just supposed to be a filler move. Of course, on the flip side of that argument, with sunder stacks reducing to 3, and the importance of keeping them up no longer as noticeable, perhaps they'll want to make it close to the minimum HS level, perhaps slightly below. Then you can do a 10 rage attack for about the same damage as minimum HS, but if you want to wallop off extra rage you can do a maxxed out HS.

They'll definitely want to keep WW low on this list in order to force us not to use it in single target fights, regardless.

And they've said they're considering giving us something else to push also, which would be nice, considering as it is we're looking at (count with me)

1. Bloodthirst
2. Slam
3. Heroic Strike
4. Sunder

total buttons we need to use in combat. Of course there will be the shouts as well, but depending on what they do about the "more powerful spell in effect" some people may not be shouting either. Or else we'll all need to take the talent that improves our shouts for 5 talent points whether we want them or not.

But I think having at least one more ability would be nice. If BT will stay on it's 4 sec cd, I think another 8-10 second cd ability that trumps it would be appropriate. I think it would be best if it made use of the dual weapon style that Fury uses, so some kind of double slam, similar in nature to a rogues Mutilate ability, or perhaps similar to a DK's Obliterate, some kind of ability that has a % damage effect, but if you are dual wielding it also adds a certain portion of your second weapon's damage.

A New Day's Insight into Yesterday's Fears

Hello again,

So, I've been really pondering. There are still concerns I have, but I think I can supply some counter-fears as well, which may help to alleviate my concerns a lot.

For example, in reference to the WW changes, I think the end result will be a completely new and revised warrior rotation/priority system.

For example, I wouldn't be entirely shocked if the rotation became something as simple as HS (unless Slam becomes instant or BT is off cooldown), and use a sunder every 20 seconds or so.

I think the issue is whether this is an improvement over our current rotation (which is debatable).

But, until we have numbers to look at, don't be afraid of new rotations. They may work out better for us, who knows.

I also expect that since we won't have as much burst damage, they'll have to increase our damage from our abilities or our white strikes to compensate. Don't be shocked if we end up seeing 30-55% of our overall damage coming from nothing but white strikes.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the overall damage will go down, just that the rotation may get less interesting than it is now.

And, while I'll be the first to tell you that I'm more concerned about overall interesting rotation, the raid is more concerned about overall damage.

I suspect that since our sunders will be less mandatory, and our other debuffs are replicable by other classes, our damage on a per strike basis will have to come up. Perhaps this alone is part of the reduction in the weapon damage component to WW, they're afraid that without this, our AoE damage will tear through the roof.

However, along with that, I wouldn't be surprised to see our new AoE rotation becoming Cleave, cleave, cleave, cleave... (etc.), and only switching to include a WW once every cd if we have more than, about 4-6 mobs in the pull.

Again, though, don't expect this to be a necessarily bad change, it's clear that it will be less interesting from our side, but the damage output may be normalized so that it still works for the raiding environment.

Warrior change preview

Well, if you haven't already, please go check these out on the forums:

MMO-Champion's Blue sheet

The forums

There are a lot of concerns I have, and the devs keep telling us to calm down and see what they are going to do, but compared to the other class previews, I wouldn't expect to be too happy.

Protection warriors will be happy, Arms PvPers will find some good things and a couple down sides, but overall will be ok. Fury warriors may as well just consider becoming tanks or arms warriors or changing to a DK/rogue/hunter etc. I hate to say the sky is falling, but if you recall the beginning of WotLK, when the TG changes went in and most warriors switched to Arms because the damage was better, and the rotation was more fun, Cataclysm looks like it may be similar.

I'm actually trying to keep a "Wait and see how beta goes" attitude, but so far, I'm having a really hard time keeping an open mind about the effects on Fury. This only bothers me because Fury is a warrior's only viable PvE dps spec, and we're seeing it being ignored by the developer's preview of upcoming attractions, and only getting nerfs to some of our core abilities. It's' clear that they're giving us plenty of rage generation abilities, but since our rage dump will be on the gcd along with everything else, there's going to be a finite amount of button pushing we can do regardless of how much rage we have.

On that note, with regard to the lack of haste improvements, I tried to explain my fears to a friend earlier today as follows:

Let's propose a test to see how much resource management actually limits damage dealt.

Phase 1: take one member of each class, have them do whatever rotation they think will maximize their damage for 10 minutes to a target dummy in basic gear (or no gear, whatever) but with haste nullified.

Phase 2: take the same people, but set their resource (runes/energy/focus/rage/mana) at maximum and never diminishing at all. Have them do whatever they have to do to max out dps for the same time period (still with haste nullified).

Now compare these two numbers.

What will this test tell us?

If someone's damage goes up significantly (as I believe it would in the case of rogues/hunters/DK's) then that class has their damage tied directly to their resource management, so haste being something that increases their resource gain would be beneficial to their overall dps, and you could even use those numbers to see if any abilities needed tweaking.

If someone's damage stays pretty much the same (as I believe it would in the case of paladins and warriors) then that class really doesn't benefit much at all from increased access to resources, and thus, haste doesn't really do what was promised by developers.

The reason I suspect that rogues/hunters/dk's would see a pretty noticeable improvement is that they're the classes whose resources really do limit how often they can press a button. Rogues' buttons are only pressed on gcd during the initial phase and when they have sufficient energy to allow it, and the rest of the time they're waiting for more energy to build up. Hunters, with the new focus resource, would likely be similar. DK's are limited in a different way, but still by their resource. If runes were permanently activated, a dk's rotation would be (1) apply diseases, (2) spam big attack (Heart Strike/Death Strike/Obliterate/Scourge Strike) until diseases needed to be reapplied. So, in the case of DK's, their resources limit their choices in which abilities they can use next.

Give infinite resources, all three are then able to spam their best attacks continuously in perfect rotations to achieve big increases.

Now look at paladins and warriors. We already have pretty much infinite resources, but our damage isn't infinite. It's still limited. This is because we have not one resource (mana/rage), but 3. Our most obvious resource is rage/mana, but our other resources are gcd's and cooldowns. If you wanted to see the same results from this test as you saw from DK's, rogues, hunters, etc. from warriors and paladins, the only thing you could do would be to take away gcd's and/or cooldowns. Since gcd's are an inherent part of the game and are part of what allow the server time to deal with things, let's focus on cooldowns.

Let's say Bloodthirst is our best ability. We can hit it once per 4 seconds. Notice that this is the same whether we have just barely enough rage to hit it, or an infinite amount of rage. In fact, if that's the only button we have, unlike the dk's, rogues, hunters, etc. our damage would stay EXACTLY the same in this test, because rage is not what holds our damage back, it's the cooldowns on our abilities. Now, if rage were enough of an issue that it prevented us from using our abilities every cooldown, then the argument could be made that this would be a good thing. However, they'd need to normalize our abilities to do MORE damage to allow this to be the case.

So, in short, if they really want to make haste better for us, it seems like one way to do it is to constrict us with rage starvation. Force us to wait more than our cooldowns for enough rage to hit a button, and then amplify our damage from each ability to compensate for that. Then, when we get haste, we'll get rage faster, be able to hit buttons faster, and all will be well, except then we'll be QQ out of the frustration of sitting at our computers waiting to hit a button.

An alternative is to let haste shorten our cooldowns.

Frankly, I like the second one better.

New Rage Mechanics in Cataclysm, some numbers

Hi, guys.

So, just for my own edification I set up an MS eXcel simulator to see what the numbers would look like in cataclysm for rage generation as dps.

Most of what I found wasn't unexpected, but I'll talk about it anyway.

To begin with I set up a trial combat similar to what might happen vs a target dummy. I did not take level or damage or anything else into account, since according to blue's those won't figure in anyway. Instead I held a few things that I could modify to run the numbers.

First, I'm assuming expertise cap. Perhaps this is a mistake, but if not, it just makes the misses happen more frequently and I'll talk about those in a minute. Second, I didn't exactly use appropriate battle tables since all I'm looking for is a basic understanding of what will be happening. Third, I allowed user input hit percentage (and I assume you're at the 27% dh miss chance), crit chance, and haste rating to allow for any combination that matters to you. I also allow the user input of blizzard assigned elements such as rage per second from hits (this is the normalized value that the weapon speeds would modify so they all had a standard rps output) off hand modifier (which blizzard states will be 1/2) and crit modifier (which blizzard states will be 2).

Now, to get a solid and clear understanding of what happened, let me give you some of those numbers. I randomly picked 1 as my base normalized rps number. Regardless of what actual value is here, the results will simply be multiplied by the resulting number so that I can talk about absolutes such as twice as much rage as X situation or whatever.

Next I wanted to get some baseline numbers so I could compare haste's benefit to rage vs crit vs hit. The easiest way to do this is to start with white hit cap. Yes, I know that's WAY up there, but that's where I'm starting since I think that's probably going to end up how we have to do things.

Then I started with 0% crit chance or haste (which is not that reasonable) and modified haste up to 100% and then did the same with guaranteed crits every swing. Here is the table of those results for baseline numbers:


So, what do these numbers mean? The first thing I notice is that crit %, in the new system, will translate directly to a multiplier for rage generation, just as it does for dps now. Clearly with numbers between 0 and 100 % crit, there will be variation, but again, these are just baseline numbers.

Notice that with no chance to crit and no haste to speed up your weapon swings, your rps is pretty close to the 1.5 you might expect from the description of how rage is generated. 1 rps from your main hand, and .5 rps from your off hand.

As you add haste, you notice a slight improvement, approximately on the order of a multiplier to rage gained. 10% haste is roughly equivalent to 10% more rage gained, as you might expect. And, clearly, since crit also multiplies, we're not surprised when double rage from crits and double rage from haste stacks to give us approximately 4 times the rps.

I want to reiterate that these are baseline numbers only and cannot be used definitively until Blizzard makes these plans more concrete. So, now I have a fairly good idea of what to start from and I have some clear notions immediately.

1 - As far as rage generation is concerned, haste and crit will work multiplicatively to increase your rps.

2 - Since according to the blue posts so far, haste will do nothing else than what it already does for us, the dps impact of these stats will remain approximately equal.

3 - As far as rage is concerned haste and crit are equivalent in terms of adding, but having both haste and crit values will be equivalent to the product of the two, hence better than the sum.

I also do not yet know what position in this table Blizzard will pick to normalize around, but notice that if your standard rotation (feels good, plenty of rage, but not too much) is normalized at about 3 times the set base rps, people in low gear levels might feel considerably rage starved, and in high level gear (which will now stack crit / haste / hit instead of current stacks of armor pen/strength/crit) you'll be seeing about twice as much rage generation as they've normalized around, and you may still find yourself rage bloated.

Knowing that rage generation is about the same, but also knowing the cost of each point of crit/haste, we can maximize a functional over this set of parameters and see that the optimum ratio of crit / haste (admittedly using current values for these, which may change in Cataclysm)

will be 2/3. So, if you have about 1.5 times as much haste percentage as you have crit, you will optimize your rps.

Ok, now for the secondary side of this.

Note that they still haven't changed the way haste works for dps. Unless they do something about this later, all we'll have going for us in this department is the hope that our white swings will do more damage. As it stands, a good raiding warrior should be seeing white damage in the neighborhood of about 10-12% of his overall dps. With haste affecting nothing other than white swings, this means we really see only 10-12% of the effect from haste that we see in critical strike as far as dps go.

If we factor that in, from a dps perspective, we see our cost for haste skyrocket to somewhere between 273.25 for one percentage point dps increase up to 327.9. At that cost, the optimal ratio for our crit/haste goes to 7/1.

So, essentially, dps would dictate we should budget for 7 times as much crit as haste, but rage generation dictates we should keep a 2/3 ratio of crit chance to haste. This will likely create the dilemma for all of us at the release of Cataclysm, having to decide between a ratio closer to 2/3 for purposes of rage, or 7/1 for purposes of dps.

Now, in all of this, I haven't yet addressed hit rating. From everything I did in tests, any miss chance, be it from misses or dodges (or parries if you're standing in the wrong place) start from those baseline numbers and begin to reduce your overall rps. How much is not entirely clear without some meta-analysis of these simulations, but from initial inspection it seems that the drop is basically equivalent to the miss percentage on average.

So, if you are expertise capped and have 17% hit rating, you can expect to reduce the numbers in the above table by approximately 10% all the time from misses. So, what you see then is a formula something like:

total rps = BaseRPS x (1 - miss/dodge/parry chances) x (1+crit chance) x (1+haste percent)

And I think the lesson I took from this is that every 1% hit you don't have will correspond to a more than 1% rage loss.

So, I expect (and this is completely aside from any values these things may take, and is based solely on their explanation of how rage will work) that we will see a score priority of something like:

hit until white capped, expertise until soft capped > haste, crit

(and the ratio of haste to crit will be up to the individual, but I suspect that it will probably end up at 7 crit = 1 haste, since I figure that raiding individuals SHOULD be able to easily hit the normalization level that Blizzard sets, so they'll focus on the dps instead of extra rage we can't bleed off.)

Hit replacing Armor Pen?

Well, this will be odd, but I suppose since we won't have armor pen in Cataclysm, at least we can use those 1400 points to eke out our 24% hit rating (obviously assuming some 3% extra hit talent or whatever) and still have 600-700 points left over to add more haste and crit.

So maybe there's some silver lining after all, but I can't claim to be excited at the thought of stacking nearly 900 hit rating (which does very little for my dps, really, it can maybe add as much as 5% total) as a replacement for armor penetration. I'm adopting a wait and see attitude, because I'm sure that Blizz has caught all this stuff, but I'm also nervous to see how our starting dps compares to other classes that aren't losing their most important stat.