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Friday, May 29, 2009
[General]Blog pimpage
And while we're on the subject of blocking wackiness, please check out this awesome history of block by Tel. It's a fun read, and he's a good writer.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
[General] The future of block part 3 - long term fixes
The setup for this series is here, and the first (short term) suggestion ideas are here.
What about the long term solution to block? This has some more interesting design constraints, but we'll go with some basic observations first.
For starters, one of the reasons that mitigation is so good right now is because boss damage is so high. The last time that every boss could melee two-shot tanks was Sunwell; and even then, it was only Brutallus. While most bosses can't do that all the time in Ulduar, it's more true than not that a tank can just be pasted if unlucky.
But why is that?
Part of it is because avoidance is simply too high. Pre-Naxx geared tanks started at around 40% avoidance, and by the time they were done with Naxx they were near 60%. By comparison, TBC tanks didn't get to the 60% threshold until they were through with BT. What this means in practice is that if designers want to challenge healing, all the attacks that do go through must hit fairly hard.
This leads to healers being forced to spam heals on the tank regardless of what's going on. Which means mana regen can't be as much of a factor, and caring about whether a 20k hit is blocked for 2k doesn't factor into it. It simply doesn't matter because healers must heal as if you had zero avoidance and zero other mitigation.
Because if they don't, the tank can get unlucky and die.
Now, this has another annoying side effect - healing is really dull. Healers are rewarded not by casting heals as needed but proactively healing, and then they pretty much have to. There aren't rotations possible; they must heal their absolute worst case scenarios. It also means that whether they are casting or not isn't really a decision.
Then you have block coming into it. Block doesn't scale with mob damage, and mob damage is steadily increasing. It becomes less reliable and less relevant. Avoidance continues to increase, health increases, and because of this hits become harder and harder...and healers get more and more bored.
So how do we change block such that it's relevant and fix everything else? GC has a hint, today:
Let's give an example of what he's talking about here.
The worst case scenario is no avoidance. Let's treat block as avoidance. In the above scenario GC describes, all tanks have exactly the same mitigation. Thus, all tanks have exactly the same worst-case TTL assuming their effective health was similar.
In the average case, however, you get the situation where you have the 'avoidance' tanks and the 'block' tanks. Here's how it works:
1) The avoidance tanks either take no damage (dodge) or fully mitigated damage (not dodge). We'll say that they avoid 40% of the time, so they take a full hit 60% of the time and dodge 40%.
2) the block tanks avoid 30% of the time, but block 30% of the time. So 40% of the time they take a full hit. 30% of the time they avoid everything. 30% of the time they block (say 33% of the damage).
In this situation, both tanks have the same worst case possibility. The blocking tanks will take on average the same damage over time. However, their damage will be much less spiky because of the avoidance issue; they'll take much fewer 'big' hits that aren't blocked, nearly half as many. 10% of the time the avoidance tank will take 0 damage ,or 10% less overall damage. 30% of the time the block tank will take 33% less damage, which is again 10% less overall damage.
Of course, this would require that block actually scaled with incoming attacks AND avoidance was heavily nerfed.
So what would this world look like? What stats would look like what?
Let's take another assumption: that on 'hard' fights the tank's basic time to live on average is around 4 melee attacks without heals. This means you can do nothing and be killed by the boss after four attacks most of the time. That's the baseline for 'hard'. Now, with avoidance at 50%, this means each attack must be (on average) at least 50% of your health - and that's where we are now. But at a 30% avoidance cap, the attacks don't have to be nearly so high, and 3-rounds are fine.
The obvious conclusion is that avoidance would be heavily nerfed and still be subject to diminishing returns. Instead of now, where the 'cap' on avoidance is set around 70% (and it becomes very difficult to get more than 60%), you'd need to set the cap closer to 40%. The goal would be that in the highest tier gear, you'd want to go for 40% at best. And that would be for the non-blocking tanks, remember. For the blocking tanks avoidance would want to cap near 30% in most cases. And admittedly, I'm totally making this up. It could be much, much worse than this. 40% as the high end seems reasonable though, but keep in mind that the primary reason I chose it was because it means bosses should not 2-round you (or can't really be designed to) - since the 'average' case would mean you'd die in two shots (if those two shots connected) more often than not. That's not really reasonable.
Furthermore, you'd want to do the same thing for block. Block rating would need to cap around 20-40% in general. Under no circumstances would you want anyone to be passively uncrushable/unhittable either; if you did that, they'd immediately become the best tank choice by a landslide. However, block rating would still remain as a stat. And more importantly, it'd remain a fairly desirable one; it would be essentially as good as dodge rating is right now.
Next, you want to make sure that no matter what else, block was relatively as good as avoidance against hard-hitting mobs. This means that it must scale with incoming damage. The simplest way to do this (as shown in the short term solution list) is to make it increase armor. This can scale or it can be a flat value; I'd recommend that it scales with block value to some degree, but only some degree. Why? Because the goal is to have your total amount of damage blocked * the chance of block equal or close to the total amount of damage avoided by the 'avoidance' tank. It's hard to do that if you can have wildly fluctuating values depending on gear. Possibly a better solution in the long term is to make block value a second mitigation that multiplies, just like defensive stance/PotP do now. And have that scale with block value.
And actually I take it back; the easiest solution is to have a block always reduce damage by a certain percentage and remove block value entirely. It was already a confusing stat; this might be best. We'll just have block always mitigate a flat 25% damage. If you like, you can put in a static component that does something like 'blocks at least 25% damage or X damage, whichever is higher' so that heroics/trash is a bit more manageable.
The important thing is that the block % * the block rate should equal the extra avoidance that the avoidance tanks have, and it should do so at all tiers. This isn't that hard to balance either. In fact, the block tanks can have different percentages of damage blocked and blocking rates as well, differentiating them even further.
I'd probably have the four tanks look like this:
Tank A: 40% max avoidance, 60% unblocked hits, 0% blocked hits for 0%.
Tank B: 35% max avoidance, 55% unblocked hits, 10% blocked hits for 50% blocks each
Tank C: 30% max avoidance, 40% unblocked hits, 20% blocked hits for 50% block each
Tank D: 30% max avoidance, 30% unblocked hits, 40% blocked hits for 25% block each
So we've dealt with block and avoidance. Next up, health and armor.
Health and armor amongst all of these tanks should be roughly the same or similar. The important thing to note is that effective health should really be the thing that stays the same. Why? Because the worst-case TTL should remain about the same between the tanks. This is a lot easier to balance than it was before, however; instead of having to compare blocking tanks with armor and do static vs. scaling damage, you've got armor for all of them and that's all. Same with health. Some tanks can have higher armor, but will need to trade that for lower HP. Same in reverse. But this is pretty easy to manage overall, and as long as effective health remains pretty much the same (within a few percent) this will be easy to balance. If I were doing this, I would have one of the avoidance tanks be the high armor, one be the high health. Do the same for the block tanks. Each would have marginal advantages on certain fights, none would be advantaged for all.
And of course, the ones with high HP should have less magic mitigation than the ones with lower HP.
So what happens to SD? SD becomes something of the odd man out. I think that for this specific case, you'd just remove it. Because it doesn't deal with the hit table, balancing it against block (which does) is very difficult. It's hard to 'guarantee' a certain uptime given crit, hit, expertise values. And it goes away from having two tanks with shields, two without. That being said, it may stick around as exactly what it is - a way to mitigate static amounts of damage. That still has value, especially in lower level dungeons. It just won't be used as the primary mitigation balancer.
Now, this breaks a lot of things. This breaks the idea of paladins blocking every attack, for instance. It breaks block being so much better on trash...maybe. There are possibilities here. Think, for instance, that while holy shield is active all attacks are reduced by a certain static damage, and as long as holy shield has charges attacks are reduced by a percentage - and the amount of charges is small. That means against bosses, you'll get both static and percentage reduction. Against multiple mobs, you'll get that static reduction and only a couple percentage reductions. That might work, and it'd be similar to what SD would be like in this world.
So how do shields work? They function quite a bit on giving massive block value by themselves. Well, you could simply use that (and that alone) as the way to do the percentage reduction. I don't like that, personally. You could just remove that value entirely. You could make it solely a threat stat for paladins and warriors. I'd be in favor of removing it, but there is some value in keeping two stats around and making percentage reduction something you can scale with. It's still confusing though.
Would this fix or improve healing? Possibly. With a maximum 40% avoidance chance, a number of potential nice things come up. For starters, the real possibility of having ohshit buttons that do avoidance primarily becomes attractive, even if they're not 100%. This is because bosses wouldn't be hitting for half your health every time; they wouldn't need to. So something that doubled your avoidance would massively reduce the incoming damage, but could still be fair and useful. Damage could be cut in basically half and still threaten tanks, since chances are they'd take the same damage most of the time. All tanks would be significantly less spiky due to the loss of avoidance. Some reactionary healing (and less healer-stacking) may be possible. Healing spells could be reduced in size as well, to correspond to this healing. And mana regen might be able to be nerfed too; if the primary problem is just throughput of heals, not bursty scary 2-hit combos, that might work to help things.
At the very least, boss damage would not need to be consistently 50% of a tank's health all the time.
So this would all work. The question remains to me - would this be fun? The four tanks wouldn't be all that different from a healer perspective. The block/nonblock tanks would be especially close to each other by necessity. There wouldn't be a lot of advantages or disadvantages to bringing one over the other, especially if cooldowns were balanced. Sure, paladins would block more on trash, druids would have higher HP (or armor, whatever), but everyone would kind of want the same stuff and be about the same viability at any given tier.
Is that fun? I'm not sure. Honestly, I always felt that there should be niches for tanking (4), and that each of the four tanks should have a primary and secondary 'good' niche. I would like to see a diversity of tanks required in raids. My idea would be that each tank would have one main niche, one secondary niche, and they overlapped so that any two tanks would cover all four niches at at least a secondary level of competence.
Because I think there is definite advantage in feeling like your character is 'best' in something. And I think it's fun to try and min-max and get advantages in fights by using what you have. To me, that's part of the fun. But I admit, that's not absolutely the case everywhere.
This kind of plan I've outlined for the long haul would certainly balance things out, or make things close enough that there wouldn't really be any big deal on the survival side. Threat, cooldowns, special abilities - that's all another side. But this would bring them all pretty close together.
I'd be shocked if this was done in time for Icecrown. But I'd not be too shocked. GC seems like he's been thinking about this for a while and has some very definite ideas on how to get there, and if he needs to radically revamp everything, so it goes. It would be the single biggest change to the game during a release that had happened since..1.8, I guess, and I think they've got bigger fish to fry in the interim. However, I wouldn't have thought that druids would get something like savage defense in a content patch either. Each content patch appears to be doing a lot of rebalancing. 3.1 was very ambitious.
My prediction is that you won't see this for 3.2. 3.2 is going to come out fairly soon and be a quicker patch, I think. And it probably won't have tier 9 gear - it'll be a T8.5 type of thing. Then we'll get Icecrown, and it's quite possible we'll see it there.
What about the long term solution to block? This has some more interesting design constraints, but we'll go with some basic observations first.
For starters, one of the reasons that mitigation is so good right now is because boss damage is so high. The last time that every boss could melee two-shot tanks was Sunwell; and even then, it was only Brutallus. While most bosses can't do that all the time in Ulduar, it's more true than not that a tank can just be pasted if unlucky.
But why is that?
Part of it is because avoidance is simply too high. Pre-Naxx geared tanks started at around 40% avoidance, and by the time they were done with Naxx they were near 60%. By comparison, TBC tanks didn't get to the 60% threshold until they were through with BT. What this means in practice is that if designers want to challenge healing, all the attacks that do go through must hit fairly hard.
This leads to healers being forced to spam heals on the tank regardless of what's going on. Which means mana regen can't be as much of a factor, and caring about whether a 20k hit is blocked for 2k doesn't factor into it. It simply doesn't matter because healers must heal as if you had zero avoidance and zero other mitigation.
Because if they don't, the tank can get unlucky and die.
Now, this has another annoying side effect - healing is really dull. Healers are rewarded not by casting heals as needed but proactively healing, and then they pretty much have to. There aren't rotations possible; they must heal their absolute worst case scenarios. It also means that whether they are casting or not isn't really a decision.
Then you have block coming into it. Block doesn't scale with mob damage, and mob damage is steadily increasing. It becomes less reliable and less relevant. Avoidance continues to increase, health increases, and because of this hits become harder and harder...and healers get more and more bored.
So how do we change block such that it's relevant and fix everything else? GC has a hint, today:
Let's give an example of what he's talking about here.
The worst case scenario is no avoidance. Let's treat block as avoidance. In the above scenario GC describes, all tanks have exactly the same mitigation. Thus, all tanks have exactly the same worst-case TTL assuming their effective health was similar.
In the average case, however, you get the situation where you have the 'avoidance' tanks and the 'block' tanks. Here's how it works:
1) The avoidance tanks either take no damage (dodge) or fully mitigated damage (not dodge). We'll say that they avoid 40% of the time, so they take a full hit 60% of the time and dodge 40%.
2) the block tanks avoid 30% of the time, but block 30% of the time. So 40% of the time they take a full hit. 30% of the time they avoid everything. 30% of the time they block (say 33% of the damage).
In this situation, both tanks have the same worst case possibility. The blocking tanks will take on average the same damage over time. However, their damage will be much less spiky because of the avoidance issue; they'll take much fewer 'big' hits that aren't blocked, nearly half as many. 10% of the time the avoidance tank will take 0 damage ,or 10% less overall damage. 30% of the time the block tank will take 33% less damage, which is again 10% less overall damage.
Of course, this would require that block actually scaled with incoming attacks AND avoidance was heavily nerfed.
So what would this world look like? What stats would look like what?
Let's take another assumption: that on 'hard' fights the tank's basic time to live on average is around 4 melee attacks without heals. This means you can do nothing and be killed by the boss after four attacks most of the time. That's the baseline for 'hard'. Now, with avoidance at 50%, this means each attack must be (on average) at least 50% of your health - and that's where we are now. But at a 30% avoidance cap, the attacks don't have to be nearly so high, and 3-rounds are fine.
The obvious conclusion is that avoidance would be heavily nerfed and still be subject to diminishing returns. Instead of now, where the 'cap' on avoidance is set around 70% (and it becomes very difficult to get more than 60%), you'd need to set the cap closer to 40%. The goal would be that in the highest tier gear, you'd want to go for 40% at best. And that would be for the non-blocking tanks, remember. For the blocking tanks avoidance would want to cap near 30% in most cases. And admittedly, I'm totally making this up. It could be much, much worse than this. 40% as the high end seems reasonable though, but keep in mind that the primary reason I chose it was because it means bosses should not 2-round you (or can't really be designed to) - since the 'average' case would mean you'd die in two shots (if those two shots connected) more often than not. That's not really reasonable.
Furthermore, you'd want to do the same thing for block. Block rating would need to cap around 20-40% in general. Under no circumstances would you want anyone to be passively uncrushable/unhittable either; if you did that, they'd immediately become the best tank choice by a landslide. However, block rating would still remain as a stat. And more importantly, it'd remain a fairly desirable one; it would be essentially as good as dodge rating is right now.
Next, you want to make sure that no matter what else, block was relatively as good as avoidance against hard-hitting mobs. This means that it must scale with incoming damage. The simplest way to do this (as shown in the short term solution list) is to make it increase armor. This can scale or it can be a flat value; I'd recommend that it scales with block value to some degree, but only some degree. Why? Because the goal is to have your total amount of damage blocked * the chance of block equal or close to the total amount of damage avoided by the 'avoidance' tank. It's hard to do that if you can have wildly fluctuating values depending on gear. Possibly a better solution in the long term is to make block value a second mitigation that multiplies, just like defensive stance/PotP do now. And have that scale with block value.
And actually I take it back; the easiest solution is to have a block always reduce damage by a certain percentage and remove block value entirely. It was already a confusing stat; this might be best. We'll just have block always mitigate a flat 25% damage. If you like, you can put in a static component that does something like 'blocks at least 25% damage or X damage, whichever is higher' so that heroics/trash is a bit more manageable.
The important thing is that the block % * the block rate should equal the extra avoidance that the avoidance tanks have, and it should do so at all tiers. This isn't that hard to balance either. In fact, the block tanks can have different percentages of damage blocked and blocking rates as well, differentiating them even further.
I'd probably have the four tanks look like this:
Tank A: 40% max avoidance, 60% unblocked hits, 0% blocked hits for 0%.
Tank B: 35% max avoidance, 55% unblocked hits, 10% blocked hits for 50% blocks each
Tank C: 30% max avoidance, 40% unblocked hits, 20% blocked hits for 50% block each
Tank D: 30% max avoidance, 30% unblocked hits, 40% blocked hits for 25% block each
So we've dealt with block and avoidance. Next up, health and armor.
Health and armor amongst all of these tanks should be roughly the same or similar. The important thing to note is that effective health should really be the thing that stays the same. Why? Because the worst-case TTL should remain about the same between the tanks. This is a lot easier to balance than it was before, however; instead of having to compare blocking tanks with armor and do static vs. scaling damage, you've got armor for all of them and that's all. Same with health. Some tanks can have higher armor, but will need to trade that for lower HP. Same in reverse. But this is pretty easy to manage overall, and as long as effective health remains pretty much the same (within a few percent) this will be easy to balance. If I were doing this, I would have one of the avoidance tanks be the high armor, one be the high health. Do the same for the block tanks. Each would have marginal advantages on certain fights, none would be advantaged for all.
And of course, the ones with high HP should have less magic mitigation than the ones with lower HP.
So what happens to SD? SD becomes something of the odd man out. I think that for this specific case, you'd just remove it. Because it doesn't deal with the hit table, balancing it against block (which does) is very difficult. It's hard to 'guarantee' a certain uptime given crit, hit, expertise values. And it goes away from having two tanks with shields, two without. That being said, it may stick around as exactly what it is - a way to mitigate static amounts of damage. That still has value, especially in lower level dungeons. It just won't be used as the primary mitigation balancer.
Now, this breaks a lot of things. This breaks the idea of paladins blocking every attack, for instance. It breaks block being so much better on trash...maybe. There are possibilities here. Think, for instance, that while holy shield is active all attacks are reduced by a certain static damage, and as long as holy shield has charges attacks are reduced by a percentage - and the amount of charges is small. That means against bosses, you'll get both static and percentage reduction. Against multiple mobs, you'll get that static reduction and only a couple percentage reductions. That might work, and it'd be similar to what SD would be like in this world.
So how do shields work? They function quite a bit on giving massive block value by themselves. Well, you could simply use that (and that alone) as the way to do the percentage reduction. I don't like that, personally. You could just remove that value entirely. You could make it solely a threat stat for paladins and warriors. I'd be in favor of removing it, but there is some value in keeping two stats around and making percentage reduction something you can scale with. It's still confusing though.
Would this fix or improve healing? Possibly. With a maximum 40% avoidance chance, a number of potential nice things come up. For starters, the real possibility of having ohshit buttons that do avoidance primarily becomes attractive, even if they're not 100%. This is because bosses wouldn't be hitting for half your health every time; they wouldn't need to. So something that doubled your avoidance would massively reduce the incoming damage, but could still be fair and useful. Damage could be cut in basically half and still threaten tanks, since chances are they'd take the same damage most of the time. All tanks would be significantly less spiky due to the loss of avoidance. Some reactionary healing (and less healer-stacking) may be possible. Healing spells could be reduced in size as well, to correspond to this healing. And mana regen might be able to be nerfed too; if the primary problem is just throughput of heals, not bursty scary 2-hit combos, that might work to help things.
At the very least, boss damage would not need to be consistently 50% of a tank's health all the time.
So this would all work. The question remains to me - would this be fun? The four tanks wouldn't be all that different from a healer perspective. The block/nonblock tanks would be especially close to each other by necessity. There wouldn't be a lot of advantages or disadvantages to bringing one over the other, especially if cooldowns were balanced. Sure, paladins would block more on trash, druids would have higher HP (or armor, whatever), but everyone would kind of want the same stuff and be about the same viability at any given tier.
Is that fun? I'm not sure. Honestly, I always felt that there should be niches for tanking (4), and that each of the four tanks should have a primary and secondary 'good' niche. I would like to see a diversity of tanks required in raids. My idea would be that each tank would have one main niche, one secondary niche, and they overlapped so that any two tanks would cover all four niches at at least a secondary level of competence.
Because I think there is definite advantage in feeling like your character is 'best' in something. And I think it's fun to try and min-max and get advantages in fights by using what you have. To me, that's part of the fun. But I admit, that's not absolutely the case everywhere.
This kind of plan I've outlined for the long haul would certainly balance things out, or make things close enough that there wouldn't really be any big deal on the survival side. Threat, cooldowns, special abilities - that's all another side. But this would bring them all pretty close together.
I'd be shocked if this was done in time for Icecrown. But I'd not be too shocked. GC seems like he's been thinking about this for a while and has some very definite ideas on how to get there, and if he needs to radically revamp everything, so it goes. It would be the single biggest change to the game during a release that had happened since..1.8, I guess, and I think they've got bigger fish to fry in the interim. However, I wouldn't have thought that druids would get something like savage defense in a content patch either. Each content patch appears to be doing a lot of rebalancing. 3.1 was very ambitious.
My prediction is that you won't see this for 3.2. 3.2 is going to come out fairly soon and be a quicker patch, I think. And it probably won't have tier 9 gear - it'll be a T8.5 type of thing. Then we'll get Icecrown, and it's quite possible we'll see it there.
[General] The future of block part 2 - short term fixes
Part one is here and establishes some of the rules and goals.
Let's first go with the short term fix for paladins and warriors gaining some traction. This is similar in thinking to Savage Defense; we know that an overhaul is in order and things aren't working right, but we assume they're not going to radically change two specs, multiple stat weighings, gear choices, mechanics, etc all in a content patch. Savage Defense is on the level of the kind of change we can expect: a minor mechanic change combined with an alteration of existing talents and skills to balance it out.
Here's the list again of the issues:
So what could they do? Let's take a look at a current protection warrior - Xav of Premonition. He's on the well-geared side currently, which is why I wanted to look at him since this change will likely affect people going forward from 3.2 at the earliest. He currently has 29k armor but has geared away from block - 12% block chance and 1400 block value after buffs. That's going to be on the low end, but it's not unreasonable anyway. Even if you have a warrior who stacks block, they're going to be on the order of 2000-2500 BV anyway.
By comparison, I personally have 33k armor. And that's all the time. Plus I have savage defense, which (when it goes off) blocks for more on a hit than the warrior, though the warrior has shield block and critical block to play with.
Remember, our goal is to get the warrior to the point where when they block, they take less damage than the DK or in theory a druid (I'll get to that point in a bit). But when they don't block, they take more damage. How to accomplish that?
Well, for starters as it stands now without any modifications they'll take more damage when not blocking anyway. Let's stick with that. That's easy.
So when they block, how about something like this:
Now, Xav would have 32k armor, roughly, from any blocks he made. That's not good enough - but he's gone as far away as possible from getting any block rating or value. Plus, he has critical blocks that he can use, and he has shield block which gives him essentially 35k armor and 3k absorbsion for a 10-second duration. It's not quite barkskin, but it's getting much closer; he's increased his armor by almost 25%.
If this didn't prove to be good enough, having a 3x multiplier would likely be fine. Heck, a 4k multiplier might not be too horrible.
Of course, they'd still be the spiky tanks, so a warrior would need to get more HP. Blizzard is fond of giving 10% boosts. We'll go with that.
How does this fare with the 9 rules from before? It fixes 1,2,and 3 outright. 9 isn't an issue since BV isn't changing, nor is 8. 7 isn't that much of a concern since it's effectively impossible to get perfect uptime as it stands now. 4,5,and 6 don't apply.
Okay, that takes care of warriors. What about paladins? Paladins would require something of a nerf and a homogenization, possibly. The easiest solution is to turn holy shield into almost precisely the same thing as shield block.
But that's really inelegant. It also takes away from the very well-established ability of a paladin to deal nicely with many, many mobs via holy shield charges. Let's use one of our guild tanks - Vyre. A bit less geared than Xav, but still pretty decent overall. He has 28k armor and 1600 block value.
What I'd propose is making paladins the other 'steady' tank to complement DKs, and make druids the spiky tank. (again, I'll get to that in a bit). How do we do that? Well, we assume that they're going to have 100% uptime on their shield thanks to holy shield. If we need to, we can guarantee this by giving it even more charges. We only add their BV to their shield once, giving in this case around 30k armor. That sounds a bit low, and it might be - but it's something to balance out in the end. They'd not need any real changing; their armor would stay consistent around 30-32k, and their health is 'balanced'.
To go with the rules again, this is fine with 1,2 and 3, 7, 8, and 9. Magic mitigation might need to be addressed.
So above I said that I'd like to see druids be the other 'spiky' tank. And this isn't that hard to accomplish either, though it might be hard to do with all the other things that we'd like to fix floating around. The reason I'd like them to be spiky is simple: their HP. They already have huge HP multipliers, and HP has traditionally been a druid strength. Armor has as well, but you can't have both huge armor and huge HP in a world without crushing blows to counterbalance; something has to give. And I'm choosing to make it armor for now.
So the way to make a druid 'more' spiky is to reduce their armor yet again. In fact, let's just remove the sotf bonus completely. Insane! But that drops a druid to 26k armor. Yes, that's right - I want super spiky. Now they're the lowest-armor tank of the lot.
Then we supercharge SD. SD will get the following changes:
And if that's not enough, make it even mightier - 200% of AP. 39k armor when it's active! Suck on that! That's probably a bit high, but it's adjustable. It's another level to move. And with SD's relatively high uptime on single boss fights, it might be fine at 100% AP simply because it should be working so often.
This might require that druids get a health boost, but I doubt it. They're already doing pretty well on that end. It also might require something of an avoidance boost. Nothing drastic, but something close to a 5% improvement overall.
How does this meet the rules? 1,2, and 3 are still okay. 4 isn't addressed. 5 is the dramatic improvement. 6 might need to be improved. 7 through nine are fine.
Finally, DKs. DKs are the baseline model to work off of, since they have no shield mechanic. The only thing they would need to be balanced, I think, is a slight nerf to their HP. Since they're taking the least spiky damage of any of the tanks, they need less HP to counterbalance that.
I'll answer folks questions and comments here shortly.
Let's first go with the short term fix for paladins and warriors gaining some traction. This is similar in thinking to Savage Defense; we know that an overhaul is in order and things aren't working right, but we assume they're not going to radically change two specs, multiple stat weighings, gear choices, mechanics, etc all in a content patch. Savage Defense is on the level of the kind of change we can expect: a minor mechanic change combined with an alteration of existing talents and skills to balance it out.
Here's the list again of the issues:
- Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
- Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
- HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
- Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
- SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
- Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
- Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
- Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
- Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.
So what could they do? Let's take a look at a current protection warrior - Xav of Premonition. He's on the well-geared side currently, which is why I wanted to look at him since this change will likely affect people going forward from 3.2 at the earliest. He currently has 29k armor but has geared away from block - 12% block chance and 1400 block value after buffs. That's going to be on the low end, but it's not unreasonable anyway. Even if you have a warrior who stacks block, they're going to be on the order of 2000-2500 BV anyway.
By comparison, I personally have 33k armor. And that's all the time. Plus I have savage defense, which (when it goes off) blocks for more on a hit than the warrior, though the warrior has shield block and critical block to play with.
Remember, our goal is to get the warrior to the point where when they block, they take less damage than the DK or in theory a druid (I'll get to that point in a bit). But when they don't block, they take more damage. How to accomplish that?
Well, for starters as it stands now without any modifications they'll take more damage when not blocking anyway. Let's stick with that. That's easy.
So when they block, how about something like this:
Whenever you block an attack the attack's damage is reduced by your block value. In addition, your armor is increased by twice the amount of your block value for that attack.That's it. Not very difficult, is it?
Now, Xav would have 32k armor, roughly, from any blocks he made. That's not good enough - but he's gone as far away as possible from getting any block rating or value. Plus, he has critical blocks that he can use, and he has shield block which gives him essentially 35k armor and 3k absorbsion for a 10-second duration. It's not quite barkskin, but it's getting much closer; he's increased his armor by almost 25%.
If this didn't prove to be good enough, having a 3x multiplier would likely be fine. Heck, a 4k multiplier might not be too horrible.
Of course, they'd still be the spiky tanks, so a warrior would need to get more HP. Blizzard is fond of giving 10% boosts. We'll go with that.
How does this fare with the 9 rules from before? It fixes 1,2,and 3 outright. 9 isn't an issue since BV isn't changing, nor is 8. 7 isn't that much of a concern since it's effectively impossible to get perfect uptime as it stands now. 4,5,and 6 don't apply.
Okay, that takes care of warriors. What about paladins? Paladins would require something of a nerf and a homogenization, possibly. The easiest solution is to turn holy shield into almost precisely the same thing as shield block.
But that's really inelegant. It also takes away from the very well-established ability of a paladin to deal nicely with many, many mobs via holy shield charges. Let's use one of our guild tanks - Vyre. A bit less geared than Xav, but still pretty decent overall. He has 28k armor and 1600 block value.
What I'd propose is making paladins the other 'steady' tank to complement DKs, and make druids the spiky tank. (again, I'll get to that in a bit). How do we do that? Well, we assume that they're going to have 100% uptime on their shield thanks to holy shield. If we need to, we can guarantee this by giving it even more charges. We only add their BV to their shield once, giving in this case around 30k armor. That sounds a bit low, and it might be - but it's something to balance out in the end. They'd not need any real changing; their armor would stay consistent around 30-32k, and their health is 'balanced'.
To go with the rules again, this is fine with 1,2 and 3, 7, 8, and 9. Magic mitigation might need to be addressed.
So above I said that I'd like to see druids be the other 'spiky' tank. And this isn't that hard to accomplish either, though it might be hard to do with all the other things that we'd like to fix floating around. The reason I'd like them to be spiky is simple: their HP. They already have huge HP multipliers, and HP has traditionally been a druid strength. Armor has as well, but you can't have both huge armor and huge HP in a world without crushing blows to counterbalance; something has to give. And I'm choosing to make it armor for now.
So the way to make a druid 'more' spiky is to reduce their armor yet again. In fact, let's just remove the sotf bonus completely. Insane! But that drops a druid to 26k armor. Yes, that's right - I want super spiky. Now they're the lowest-armor tank of the lot.
Then we supercharge SD. SD will get the following changes:
- 1. Can stack to 3 charges
- Increases armor by 100% of AP when active
And if that's not enough, make it even mightier - 200% of AP. 39k armor when it's active! Suck on that! That's probably a bit high, but it's adjustable. It's another level to move. And with SD's relatively high uptime on single boss fights, it might be fine at 100% AP simply because it should be working so often.
This might require that druids get a health boost, but I doubt it. They're already doing pretty well on that end. It also might require something of an avoidance boost. Nothing drastic, but something close to a 5% improvement overall.
How does this meet the rules? 1,2, and 3 are still okay. 4 isn't addressed. 5 is the dramatic improvement. 6 might need to be improved. 7 through nine are fine.
Finally, DKs. DKs are the baseline model to work off of, since they have no shield mechanic. The only thing they would need to be balanced, I think, is a slight nerf to their HP. Since they're taking the least spiky damage of any of the tanks, they need less HP to counterbalance that.
I'll answer folks questions and comments here shortly.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
[Druid]Nelf bears!
And because I need to write even more this week, here are the new Nelf Bears:
The lower right one is pretty awesome looking. The rest aren't as impressive to me, but I've not had to spend 4 years staring at them. :)
The lower right one is pretty awesome looking. The rest aren't as impressive to me, but I've not had to spend 4 years staring at them. :)
[General] The future of block part 1
This comes from a very long thread about the weakness of block in the current game, and how warriors and paladins are decently behind druids and especially DKs in content.
First off, what's the actual state of affairs right now? Well, right now the example is more like this:
Druids & DKs take around 18k a hit, and sometimes (if a druid is lucky) 16k.
Paladins and warriors take around 24k a hit, and sometimes they'll take 22k.
Clearly that's not reasonable. And yes, this is with all the relevant factors of mitigation thrown in. The fact is, with things hitting as hard as they do block at a static component is not useful compared to armor. I showed this in the SD math post a while back; SD is great against small hits and weak against big ones.
So the situation is that warriors and paladins take both more incoming damage overall and more spiky damage. Some of this is offset relative to druids with slightly superior avoidance, but even that's more spiky. The big worry about block being too good is clearly wrong. Block isn't too good. In a world where blocking isn't required because crushing blows don't exist, armor is king.
The thing is - we already knew this from BC. We knew that on any fight where the boss couldn't crush and where there wasn't some inane 'must block' mechanic, a druid was going to be better due to armor. Well, druids have less armor than ever before but they still have more than any other tank, and most everything else is equal. Is it a surprise that this rules the roost? Same goes with DKs - it shouldn't be surprising that they're better off in pure mitigation on the boss fights in Ulduar.
And I'm not alone in saying this; it's been talked about on the forums, at TankSpot, in a really good overall article by Allison Robert at WoWInsider, etc.
So. Block is broken. GC recognizes it. It's pretty clear when there are a lot of comments by GC that changes are upcoming, even if they've not been finalized. We have seen this before with things like druids being able to use all weapons and get FAP no matter what, or with the trinket armor being a problem, or with savage defense. This is the first stage - sounding ideas off the community to let them know that something is coming down the pipe.
I suspect that we'll see an actual mechanic change here in the next couple of weeks. The question is, what will it be?
A lot of people on that thread are saying that it's unfair that the 'spiky' tank has less HP than the other tanks, and are upset that GC isn't commenting on this. I think that this is just because Blizzard hasn't solidified a design for all the tanks in this 'block is good' world. Why not? Because there are a LOT of things to consider. Let's go through some of them and see if we can figure something out.
Sorry for the long wall of text, but I wanted everyone to be on the same page.Think about it this way.
Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.
Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it's consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player's perspective, because it can't save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you... well, it won't. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.
Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you'll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.
Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.
We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.
We also don't think it's necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can't get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don't think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.
If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.
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Take my examples with a grain of salt. I think some of you are trying to plug them in to today's encounters without changing anything else.
I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you're calling that "spike damage" and saying it's unacceptable, then I'm afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.
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Yes, this is why I said not to assume everything else stays the same. We are in a world where almost any healer can heal a tank to full health in just a few GCDs. When healers can heal half your health pool, then bosses have to hit very hard. The test of survival for a tank is whether they can survive two hits or so without a heal landing. Health pools probably just need to be higher. Currently being the mana sponge tank isn't very scary because healers don't realistically run out of mana on most fights and the only real threat is whether you can get the tank back up to 100% before the next hit lands. Mitigating damage isn't seen as something that preserves healer mana. It is seen as something that might let you live through one more hit.
In a world where taking a little less on some hits and a little more on others doesn't translate into scary spike damage, then we think the block mechanic described above world work in some form, especially if you could force a block for those times when you did get a string of unblocked hits.
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Crushing blows hit for 150% of normal damage. So a 20K hit normal hit would be an unpredictable 30K crushing blow. If crushing blows were 120% of normal, but you also had an equal chance for an 80% of normal hit, then it would even out in the end... provided that the spikes were not too big.
It may also be that the blockers would need to take even less damage when blocking because there is some merit to the argument that the tank with the lower variance on damage is easier (or at least more attractive) to heal even if the averages came out the same.
However, we are still just going to reject the notion that anything with an RNG component is unacceptable (provided you have the tools to occasionally get by when you get unlucky). I can totally understand as a player why it's in your best interest to minimize the RNG when tanking. You can also understand, I hope, why it is not in our best interest.
As I said above, once you can totally math out how much damage you're going to predictably take at the start of the fight, it will absolutely be an easier fight to tank... probably to the point of boredom. Imagine the 0% avoidance, 90% mitigation tank in a land in which bosses can never crit or crush. Is that going to be an effective tank? Yes. It it going to be fun to play? I doubt it.
First off, what's the actual state of affairs right now? Well, right now the example is more like this:
Druids & DKs take around 18k a hit, and sometimes (if a druid is lucky) 16k.
Paladins and warriors take around 24k a hit, and sometimes they'll take 22k.
Clearly that's not reasonable. And yes, this is with all the relevant factors of mitigation thrown in. The fact is, with things hitting as hard as they do block at a static component is not useful compared to armor. I showed this in the SD math post a while back; SD is great against small hits and weak against big ones.
So the situation is that warriors and paladins take both more incoming damage overall and more spiky damage. Some of this is offset relative to druids with slightly superior avoidance, but even that's more spiky. The big worry about block being too good is clearly wrong. Block isn't too good. In a world where blocking isn't required because crushing blows don't exist, armor is king.
The thing is - we already knew this from BC. We knew that on any fight where the boss couldn't crush and where there wasn't some inane 'must block' mechanic, a druid was going to be better due to armor. Well, druids have less armor than ever before but they still have more than any other tank, and most everything else is equal. Is it a surprise that this rules the roost? Same goes with DKs - it shouldn't be surprising that they're better off in pure mitigation on the boss fights in Ulduar.
And I'm not alone in saying this; it's been talked about on the forums, at TankSpot, in a really good overall article by Allison Robert at WoWInsider, etc.
So. Block is broken. GC recognizes it. It's pretty clear when there are a lot of comments by GC that changes are upcoming, even if they've not been finalized. We have seen this before with things like druids being able to use all weapons and get FAP no matter what, or with the trinket armor being a problem, or with savage defense. This is the first stage - sounding ideas off the community to let them know that something is coming down the pipe.
I suspect that we'll see an actual mechanic change here in the next couple of weeks. The question is, what will it be?
A lot of people on that thread are saying that it's unfair that the 'spiky' tank has less HP than the other tanks, and are upset that GC isn't commenting on this. I think that this is just because Blizzard hasn't solidified a design for all the tanks in this 'block is good' world. Why not? Because there are a LOT of things to consider. Let's go through some of them and see if we can figure something out.
- Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
- Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
- HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
- Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
- SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
- Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
- Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
- Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
- Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
[Druid]NEW FORMS OMG OMG OMG
From the official site:
"There will be five different designs for each of these forms for the Horde and Alliance. Night elves can choose to change their cat and bear look at any time by visiting the barber shop and changing their character's hair color, while tauren will be able to change which look they use by switching skin tones in the barber shop -- a new feature for tauren in the next major content patch. Given that there are more hair colors and skin tones than unique form looks, some colors and tones will overlap with these new textures. The hair and skin colors chosen will, in most cases, correspond with the color seen in the look of each form. Some similar colors that may share a particular cat texture will not necessarily share the same bear texture. "
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
Okay, analysis time. I'm not happy that this isn't tied to gear directly. I'd really like to have the skin modify with gear on some level. I'd also like it not to be tied to the skin tone of the tauren; what if I like one bear but hate the cat?
But it's SO much better, I don't really mind. The black one looks damn good.
Can't wait to see what they did with the Tauren cat.
Monday, May 25, 2009
[General] Thoughts on normal modes of Ulduar
As of Friday Fire and Blood downed Yogg-Saron, a hordeside first and a server second.
Yes, our server is a bit backwater. :)
Yogg is probably my favorite fight of the entire instance so far, though it's also very easily the most frustrating. Mimiron is more fun, but Yogg is harder (and thus I enjoy it more). But to explain this, I need to break this up into smaller bits.
See, some fights aren't really pushing any one quality of raiders, one way or another. Flame Leviathan is the biggest extreme; it requires so little from raiders that they don't even need to know how to play their own class to down the boss. Other fights are basically this way - ultra-forgiving, mechanically simple, etc. Thankfully there aren't that many fights out there.
Other fights emphasize an aspect of the trinity of raiding. For example, XT emphasizes (or at least emphasized) DPS. The healing requirements were not huge and did not require a lot of coordination, and the tanking was 'stand still'. But DPS needed to be on the ball to beat the enrage, to focus fire certain things, to do both massive single and AoE target, etc. This is commonly known as a 'check'. And checks are interesting, but they're not all that challenging most of the time because even with them, there's a lot of room for really good players to boost up the mediocre ones.
Most of Ulduar are 'checks' in one form or another. Razorscale's a tank check. Ignis used to be a tank check. XT is DPS. Kologarn is primarily a DPS and healer check. Hodir's a DPS check. Thorim is largely a healing and tanking check. Vezax is a tanking and DPS check.
What about the others? That's when you get into the next level of difficulty - raidwide coordination. This requires a big dance and a lot of coordination to get down. Freya's all about coordination; focus firing adds in certain ways, moving around, etc. Mimiron is a great example of a coordination fight. Coordination fights are often characterized by multi-phase encounters and often with weird roles that classes normally don't play, such as a ranged DPS acting as a tank. Iron Council (really, any "council" or multi-boss fight), Mimiron, and Yogg are this way - and Mimiron's the best of the lot.
So what makes Yogg harder? Yogg has the final (and in easy-mode Ulduar, the only) aspect of raiding: personal accountability. AKA the Teron Gorefiend/Ledge boss issue. Most fights require a certain amount of raidwide output; raidwide damage, raid tanking, raid healing. If one person isn't as good or doesn't do exactly what they need, it's usually recoverable. Some roles are obviously more important, but even in that case you know that you can put your best X (tank, DPS, healer) in that role and you'll be fine.
But some fights require that every single person in your raid is at least not horrible and knows what to do and how to do it - and if they don't, it's a wipe. Teron was the bane of many guilds because of this mechanic, where anyone might be selected for death and the dreaded construct duty. And every guild seemed to have 'that guy'. The guy that just for whatever reason couldn't do constructs to save their life, or freaked out, or always DCed right when they were selected and stood in the middle of the raid drooling, or whatever.
Yogg is really the only fight that has this degree of difficulty. And honestly it's not that huge by comparison to Gorefiend; it's still recoverable a lot of the time. Nevertheless, lots of ways to mess things up in phase 1 alone:
For the record Friday was my first look at YS, but our guild had been working on him for a couple weeks. So they had worked out a lot of the kinks: positioning in Phase 1 and who does what, how to take the portals, how to keep melee from dying, etc. Each wipe does that, and that's why even when you don't have what it takes to down a boss right then that it's still valuable to practice. And yeah, I did n00b it up. I did take someone else's portal, I didn't call out for a BoP when I was constricted, I probably did too much damage to an add and made it blow up outside of a raid (pesky rip/rake dots are too damn good sometimes).
But I only made the same mistakes once.
From a cat perspective, YS is kind of annoying in that there's very little to backstab on YS. The way we did it there's nothing at all. I actually pulled out the bracers and boots from Sunwell and got ye olde 2pT6 bonus to do more manglespam, which wasn't so bad. Cats do have lots of advantages though - between being faster by default, having pounce and very good bursty AoE, they do a lot for the raid.
Anyway, YS is definitely the hardest fight because it requires such personal accountability. You can't carry people on it. People do have to perform at a reasonable level, but most importantly they can't screw up. It was nice to be able to do a fight like that again.
On a personal note, I got my second Ulduar piece of loot - Garona's Guise. None of the rogues wanted it, which I can understand; no armor pen, less AP, and a lot of unneeded stamina. But for a bear? Good times. I also got lucky on Emalon and got the Armwraps of Triumph. Three upgrades for tanking so far. Nothing for cat though. Although...honestly, cats don't need it. At least I don't. Even being a month behind on cat gear I'm still doing really strong DPS, 5k on any fight at least and often much higher. Cat DPS may need nerfing, honestly. Or at least better scaling.
Next up, hard modes for our guild. This should be interesting. Unlike T7, most hard modes in Naxx are gates. In other words, you can't just leave up a boss and go do the other stuff first, then go back and do the hard mode. FL, XT, all the Watchers, Vezax and YS are all this way. That leaves basically Iron Council as the only optional hardmode boss. So I'm curious - how are guilds out there planning on taking these guys on and making sure that you down the rest of the content? When do you give up on a hard mode for the week and go kill the rest of the stuff? I believe our plan is to spend our first raid night clearing up to the Watchers and killing the ones that we're not going to do hard modes on for a while (Mimiron for sure, Freya perhaps) and leave the optional bosses up. Then start work on the hard modes from then until night 3. On night 4, mop up everything we have left. It's a bit risky, but the alternative is to not kill the bosses we've already killed, and that means less improvement for the raid overall.
So how are y'all doing it?
Yes, our server is a bit backwater. :)
Yogg is probably my favorite fight of the entire instance so far, though it's also very easily the most frustrating. Mimiron is more fun, but Yogg is harder (and thus I enjoy it more). But to explain this, I need to break this up into smaller bits.
See, some fights aren't really pushing any one quality of raiders, one way or another. Flame Leviathan is the biggest extreme; it requires so little from raiders that they don't even need to know how to play their own class to down the boss. Other fights are basically this way - ultra-forgiving, mechanically simple, etc. Thankfully there aren't that many fights out there.
Other fights emphasize an aspect of the trinity of raiding. For example, XT emphasizes (or at least emphasized) DPS. The healing requirements were not huge and did not require a lot of coordination, and the tanking was 'stand still'. But DPS needed to be on the ball to beat the enrage, to focus fire certain things, to do both massive single and AoE target, etc. This is commonly known as a 'check'. And checks are interesting, but they're not all that challenging most of the time because even with them, there's a lot of room for really good players to boost up the mediocre ones.
Most of Ulduar are 'checks' in one form or another. Razorscale's a tank check. Ignis used to be a tank check. XT is DPS. Kologarn is primarily a DPS and healer check. Hodir's a DPS check. Thorim is largely a healing and tanking check. Vezax is a tanking and DPS check.
What about the others? That's when you get into the next level of difficulty - raidwide coordination. This requires a big dance and a lot of coordination to get down. Freya's all about coordination; focus firing adds in certain ways, moving around, etc. Mimiron is a great example of a coordination fight. Coordination fights are often characterized by multi-phase encounters and often with weird roles that classes normally don't play, such as a ranged DPS acting as a tank. Iron Council (really, any "council" or multi-boss fight), Mimiron, and Yogg are this way - and Mimiron's the best of the lot.
So what makes Yogg harder? Yogg has the final (and in easy-mode Ulduar, the only) aspect of raiding: personal accountability. AKA the Teron Gorefiend/Ledge boss issue. Most fights require a certain amount of raidwide output; raidwide damage, raid tanking, raid healing. If one person isn't as good or doesn't do exactly what they need, it's usually recoverable. Some roles are obviously more important, but even in that case you know that you can put your best X (tank, DPS, healer) in that role and you'll be fine.
But some fights require that every single person in your raid is at least not horrible and knows what to do and how to do it - and if they don't, it's a wipe. Teron was the bane of many guilds because of this mechanic, where anyone might be selected for death and the dreaded construct duty. And every guild seemed to have 'that guy'. The guy that just for whatever reason couldn't do constructs to save their life, or freaked out, or always DCed right when they were selected and stood in the middle of the raid drooling, or whatever.
Yogg is really the only fight that has this degree of difficulty. And honestly it's not that huge by comparison to Gorefiend; it's still recoverable a lot of the time. Nevertheless, lots of ways to mess things up in phase 1 alone:
- You could decide that clouds should not be avoided and should be hugged. Adds are fun! Worst part about this is that you can recover from this eventually...but you'll waste too much time to beat the enrage.
- Or you just kill the adds in Phase 1 too early and they don't explode on Sara, meaning you're 20-30 seconds behind.
- Or you don't interrupt a couple and kill off too many people (and make them stand still for too long)
- You could go sit in the sanity well and do half dps for a while.
- You could just not kill crushers that appear on the other side of the raid
- You could be a melee that's going down the portals and miss your portal...
- ...or take someone else's...
- ...or get grabbed by a tentacle and not call for a BoP...
- ...or go into the portals and die because you couldn't turn around enough
- ...or stay too long in the brain and get MCed
- ...or not down the tentacles in the brain fast enough and wipe the outside raid
For the record Friday was my first look at YS, but our guild had been working on him for a couple weeks. So they had worked out a lot of the kinks: positioning in Phase 1 and who does what, how to take the portals, how to keep melee from dying, etc. Each wipe does that, and that's why even when you don't have what it takes to down a boss right then that it's still valuable to practice. And yeah, I did n00b it up. I did take someone else's portal, I didn't call out for a BoP when I was constricted, I probably did too much damage to an add and made it blow up outside of a raid (pesky rip/rake dots are too damn good sometimes).
But I only made the same mistakes once.
From a cat perspective, YS is kind of annoying in that there's very little to backstab on YS. The way we did it there's nothing at all. I actually pulled out the bracers and boots from Sunwell and got ye olde 2pT6 bonus to do more manglespam, which wasn't so bad. Cats do have lots of advantages though - between being faster by default, having pounce and very good bursty AoE, they do a lot for the raid.
Anyway, YS is definitely the hardest fight because it requires such personal accountability. You can't carry people on it. People do have to perform at a reasonable level, but most importantly they can't screw up. It was nice to be able to do a fight like that again.
On a personal note, I got my second Ulduar piece of loot - Garona's Guise. None of the rogues wanted it, which I can understand; no armor pen, less AP, and a lot of unneeded stamina. But for a bear? Good times. I also got lucky on Emalon and got the Armwraps of Triumph. Three upgrades for tanking so far. Nothing for cat though. Although...honestly, cats don't need it. At least I don't. Even being a month behind on cat gear I'm still doing really strong DPS, 5k on any fight at least and often much higher. Cat DPS may need nerfing, honestly. Or at least better scaling.
Next up, hard modes for our guild. This should be interesting. Unlike T7, most hard modes in Naxx are gates. In other words, you can't just leave up a boss and go do the other stuff first, then go back and do the hard mode. FL, XT, all the Watchers, Vezax and YS are all this way. That leaves basically Iron Council as the only optional hardmode boss. So I'm curious - how are guilds out there planning on taking these guys on and making sure that you down the rest of the content? When do you give up on a hard mode for the week and go kill the rest of the stuff? I believe our plan is to spend our first raid night clearing up to the Watchers and killing the ones that we're not going to do hard modes on for a while (Mimiron for sure, Freya perhaps) and leave the optional bosses up. Then start work on the hard modes from then until night 3. On night 4, mop up everything we have left. It's a bit risky, but the alternative is to not kill the bosses we've already killed, and that means less improvement for the raid overall.
So how are y'all doing it?
Monday, May 18, 2009
[General]The hardness of hard modes
I get the weirdest flak from people about the oddest things, some times.
In an earlier article on removing crits from Thorim, I got called on this comment:
And some wanted to know what I meant.
Well, what I did was look at GuildOx's percent rankings at the time. I checked what % of raiding guilds had done each hard mode, and assumed that this corresponded reasonably to how 'hard' a mode was. There are some caveats to this, but it's a reasonable thing. Let's look at a snapshot from today to see what's up:
Flame Leviathan, 1 tower: 21.56% of all guilds (5800)
Iron Council Molgein: 5.44% (1450)
Flame Leviathan, 2 towers: 4.95% (1320)
Freya, 1 watcher: 1.73% (461)
Hodir: 1.44% (384)
Thorim: .88% (234)
Flame Leviathan, 3 towers: .75% (200)
Iron Council Steelbreaker: .47% (125)
Yogg, 3 watchers: .32% (85)
Freya, 2 watchers: .24% (64)
Flame Leviathan, 4 towers: .17% (43)
Freya, 3 watchers: .09% (24)
Vezax: .06% (16)
Yogg, 2 watchers: .03% (9)
Yogg, 1 watcher: .02% (5)
Mimiron: .01% (1)
XT: 0% (0)
Yogg, 0 watchers: 0 (0)
The numbers are either the total guilds that have done it or are the extrapolated number of guilds from the percentage. I do not guarantee their accuracy, but they should be close.
Of these, Iron Council Molgein is the first hard mode on the way to Algalon. Then Hodir, Thorim, Freya3, Mimiron and Yogg1.
What's interesting is that in a week, Hodir went from (IIRC) .4% to 1.44%. Why? Because they increased his enrage timer on the hard mode from 1:55 to 2:55 during that week, and I suspect a lot of guilds hadn't tried him yet or had already downed him by the time that hotfix got put in. It seems clear that of the 4 watcher hard modes that give the quest for Algalon, Hodir's the easiest.
I also suspect that XT is not that difficult relative to some of these, but no one bothers because he's a gate boss and they'd rather move on to better things. That being said, the hard mode for XT sounds insane to me; 150% more health for having already 24 million HP? Nuts. Same thing for Flame Leviathan; it's probably not that hard of a hardmode, but because you must do him before doing anything else, a lot of guilds are reluctant to waste too much time on his hard modes too early. That should be changing in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, I do not and am not saying that any of these are ridiculously easy. But I will say that if you're going to try for a hard mode, chances are Hodir is a good one to try for - and Thorim is next.
In an earlier article on removing crits from Thorim, I got called on this comment:
Would I do this? No. It's not that hard of a hard mode anyway, and if you don't already have the deadly gear it's probably not worth grinding for it.Some folks thought I shouldn't say this given that we've not finished Yogg much less attempted any hard modes, and that's reasonable. Some thought I was saying it was easy - which I wasn't.
And some wanted to know what I meant.
Well, what I did was look at GuildOx's percent rankings at the time. I checked what % of raiding guilds had done each hard mode, and assumed that this corresponded reasonably to how 'hard' a mode was. There are some caveats to this, but it's a reasonable thing. Let's look at a snapshot from today to see what's up:
Flame Leviathan, 1 tower: 21.56% of all guilds (5800)
Iron Council Molgein: 5.44% (1450)
Flame Leviathan, 2 towers: 4.95% (1320)
Freya, 1 watcher: 1.73% (461)
Hodir: 1.44% (384)
Thorim: .88% (234)
Flame Leviathan, 3 towers: .75% (200)
Iron Council Steelbreaker: .47% (125)
Yogg, 3 watchers: .32% (85)
Freya, 2 watchers: .24% (64)
Flame Leviathan, 4 towers: .17% (43)
Freya, 3 watchers: .09% (24)
Vezax: .06% (16)
Yogg, 2 watchers: .03% (9)
Yogg, 1 watcher: .02% (5)
Mimiron: .01% (1)
XT: 0% (0)
Yogg, 0 watchers: 0 (0)
The numbers are either the total guilds that have done it or are the extrapolated number of guilds from the percentage. I do not guarantee their accuracy, but they should be close.
Of these, Iron Council Molgein is the first hard mode on the way to Algalon. Then Hodir, Thorim, Freya3, Mimiron and Yogg1.
What's interesting is that in a week, Hodir went from (IIRC) .4% to 1.44%. Why? Because they increased his enrage timer on the hard mode from 1:55 to 2:55 during that week, and I suspect a lot of guilds hadn't tried him yet or had already downed him by the time that hotfix got put in. It seems clear that of the 4 watcher hard modes that give the quest for Algalon, Hodir's the easiest.
I also suspect that XT is not that difficult relative to some of these, but no one bothers because he's a gate boss and they'd rather move on to better things. That being said, the hard mode for XT sounds insane to me; 150% more health for having already 24 million HP? Nuts. Same thing for Flame Leviathan; it's probably not that hard of a hardmode, but because you must do him before doing anything else, a lot of guilds are reluctant to waste too much time on his hard modes too early. That should be changing in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, I do not and am not saying that any of these are ridiculously easy. But I will say that if you're going to try for a hard mode, chances are Hodir is a good one to try for - and Thorim is next.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
[Druid] Updated loot listing for Ulduar along with some analysis
I've made a fairly large update to the loot listing article for Ulduar. It should be mostly complete at this point. We don't know Algalon's loot table and we don't have the weapons down, but everything else should be set.
Go check it out.
On a side note, doing some meta analysis leads me to the following conclusions:
-The easiest pvp item to get is the bracers, which happens to be close to best in slot and is best in slot for normal-mode content.
-however, for pure bang-for-your-buck, the pvp belt is a much bigger upgrade from T7 content. Then the boots, then the bracers.
-The best tier token to get as an upgrade is the gloves, followed by the legs. The head is okay. The chest and shoulders are both meh.
-Leviathan's Coil is one of the biggest potential upgrades in the game for bears.
-So are the gloves.
-So is Heart of Iron.
-Shoulderpads of the Intruder are simply the best item on the Ulduar loot table for bears, and they should always be prioritized no matter what else you have.
-necks aren't that good.
If I had to do a priority list of gear from Ulduar normal content, I'd do it like this:
Hands
Leviathan's Coil
(big gap)
Legs
Heart of Iron (depending on what your other trinkets are)
Feet (go for PvP if you can)
Waist (go for PvP if you can)
(big gap)
Head
Chest
Wrist (go for PvP if you can)
Shoulders
(sidegrades)
Back
Neck
Hope that helps some.
Go check it out.
On a side note, doing some meta analysis leads me to the following conclusions:
-The easiest pvp item to get is the bracers, which happens to be close to best in slot and is best in slot for normal-mode content.
-however, for pure bang-for-your-buck, the pvp belt is a much bigger upgrade from T7 content. Then the boots, then the bracers.
-The best tier token to get as an upgrade is the gloves, followed by the legs. The head is okay. The chest and shoulders are both meh.
-Leviathan's Coil is one of the biggest potential upgrades in the game for bears.
-So are the gloves.
-So is Heart of Iron.
-Shoulderpads of the Intruder are simply the best item on the Ulduar loot table for bears, and they should always be prioritized no matter what else you have.
-necks aren't that good.
If I had to do a priority list of gear from Ulduar normal content, I'd do it like this:
Hands
Leviathan's Coil
(big gap)
Legs
Heart of Iron (depending on what your other trinkets are)
Feet (go for PvP if you can)
Waist (go for PvP if you can)
(big gap)
Head
Chest
Wrist (go for PvP if you can)
Shoulders
(sidegrades)
Back
Neck
Hope that helps some.
Monday, May 11, 2009
[Druid, 3.1] Thorim Hard mode gearing
In this thread on the official forums (don't worry, it's not that bad) one of the tanks (Adamas) posted that for their Hard-mode kill, they used one druid - and that the druid in question solo-tanked Thorim on hard mode to 14 stacks and had 56k HP.
The druid in question is Sudhir, who you can check out here. They probably don't have their max stam setup on right this instant, so don't worry about it.
The 56k health is nice, but the big problem with Thorim isn't the high health requirement, it's dealing with Unbalancing strike. Being crittable is no fun, especially when the attacks are coming every .5 seconds and are hitting for 14k+ a hit on normally armored bears. How is he solving this?
Well, for starters, I suspect he's crittable. That's not as horrible as you might think; if the healers know that you're the only tank that's going to take big damage, spam healing someone through 25k hits is not the worst thing in the world. But my gut feeling is that while he's crittable, he's using PvP gear to deal with some of this.
But what if we use enough PvP gear to completely remove crits from the equation, even with unbalancing strike? We may still get crushed, but the crits will be gone - and they're the real danger.
First off, what you need: with 6% crit removal from Survival of the Fittest, Thorim's ability puts you 7.6% in the hole. That means you need a total of 623 resilience or similar defense to deal with this. The easy way to figure this out is with Rawr; you need a total of -8% crit reduction in Rawr in order to be safe from Thorim.
How does this gear look? Well, I decided to not go after any Furious gear. Why? Because deadly gear requires no rating requirement in any slot, and it can be bought via conquest badges if you are so inclined. Plus you get two chances to get it - from Emalon 10-man and Archavon 25-man. I am using JC and Leatherworking; JC really helps, but it's not a requirement. And (this is the important bit) I'm not using a single Ulduar-level item. If you have them, this will only be easier.
Head Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm
Neck Boundless Ambition
Shoulders Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders
Chest Polar Vest
Waist Titan-forged Belt of Triumph
Legs Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards
Feet Polar Boots
Wrist Deadly Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph
Hands Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves
Finger1 Hateful Gladiator's Band of Triumph
Finger2 Deadly Gladiator's Band of Ascendancy
Trinket1 Figurine - Monarch Crab
Trinket2 Essence of Gossamer
Back Deadly Gladiator's Cloak of Triumph
MainHand Origin of Nightmares
Ranged Idol of Terror
Health: 50801
Agility: 1180.112
Armor: 30899.22
Stamina: 4057
Resilience: 598
Dodge: 39.380%
Miss: 7.762%
Mitigation: 70.128%
Avoidance PreDR: 52.064%
Avoidance PostDR: 47.142%
Total Mitigation: 84.931%
Damage Taken: 15.069%
Savage Defense: 77.388% ~ 1586
Chance to be Crit: -8.055%
So just under 51k health, can't be crit, just a bit less than 50% dodge. Not too shabby. And again - this is pretty much bottom of the barrel. If you have access to Furious gear, it becomes a bit easier (and you get a lot more stamina).
Would I do this? No. It's not that hard of a hard mode anyway, and if you don't already have the deadly gear it's probably not worth grinding for it. (If you have the furious gear or want to get it, that's another story). The amount of resilience gems used makes a lot of this stuff pretty unusable anywhere else; I tried to make the gemming such that only the PvP gear is using the resilience gems, but it's still annoying.
But if you're bored or interested in trying something new, I'd recommend it. I'd also recommend throwing on resilience gear for this fight if you have it anyway (and it's comparable in the slot you're replacing). Having less of a chance to take crits even when you're swapping can really make a difference.
The druid in question is Sudhir, who you can check out here. They probably don't have their max stam setup on right this instant, so don't worry about it.
The 56k health is nice, but the big problem with Thorim isn't the high health requirement, it's dealing with Unbalancing strike. Being crittable is no fun, especially when the attacks are coming every .5 seconds and are hitting for 14k+ a hit on normally armored bears. How is he solving this?
Well, for starters, I suspect he's crittable. That's not as horrible as you might think; if the healers know that you're the only tank that's going to take big damage, spam healing someone through 25k hits is not the worst thing in the world. But my gut feeling is that while he's crittable, he's using PvP gear to deal with some of this.
But what if we use enough PvP gear to completely remove crits from the equation, even with unbalancing strike? We may still get crushed, but the crits will be gone - and they're the real danger.
First off, what you need: with 6% crit removal from Survival of the Fittest, Thorim's ability puts you 7.6% in the hole. That means you need a total of 623 resilience or similar defense to deal with this. The easy way to figure this out is with Rawr; you need a total of -8% crit reduction in Rawr in order to be safe from Thorim.
How does this gear look? Well, I decided to not go after any Furious gear. Why? Because deadly gear requires no rating requirement in any slot, and it can be bought via conquest badges if you are so inclined. Plus you get two chances to get it - from Emalon 10-man and Archavon 25-man. I am using JC and Leatherworking; JC really helps, but it's not a requirement. And (this is the important bit) I'm not using a single Ulduar-level item. If you have them, this will only be easier.
Head Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm
Neck Boundless Ambition
Shoulders Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders
Chest Polar Vest
Waist Titan-forged Belt of Triumph
Legs Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards
Feet Polar Boots
Wrist Deadly Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph
Hands Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves
Finger1 Hateful Gladiator's Band of Triumph
Finger2 Deadly Gladiator's Band of Ascendancy
Trinket1 Figurine - Monarch Crab
Trinket2 Essence of Gossamer
Back Deadly Gladiator's Cloak of Triumph
MainHand Origin of Nightmares
Ranged Idol of Terror
Health: 50801
Agility: 1180.112
Armor: 30899.22
Stamina: 4057
Resilience: 598
Dodge: 39.380%
Miss: 7.762%
Mitigation: 70.128%
Avoidance PreDR: 52.064%
Avoidance PostDR: 47.142%
Total Mitigation: 84.931%
Damage Taken: 15.069%
Savage Defense: 77.388% ~ 1586
Chance to be Crit: -8.055%
So just under 51k health, can't be crit, just a bit less than 50% dodge. Not too shabby. And again - this is pretty much bottom of the barrel. If you have access to Furious gear, it becomes a bit easier (and you get a lot more stamina).
Would I do this? No. It's not that hard of a hard mode anyway, and if you don't already have the deadly gear it's probably not worth grinding for it. (If you have the furious gear or want to get it, that's another story). The amount of resilience gems used makes a lot of this stuff pretty unusable anywhere else; I tried to make the gemming such that only the PvP gear is using the resilience gems, but it's still annoying.
But if you're bored or interested in trying something new, I'd recommend it. I'd also recommend throwing on resilience gear for this fight if you have it anyway (and it's comparable in the slot you're replacing). Having less of a chance to take crits even when you're swapping can really make a difference.
Monday, May 4, 2009
[Druid]The net threat value of faerie fire
In the Bear FAQ, Bludge said this:
First off, the hit numbers: melee miss rate against a level 83 mob is 8%. Spell miss rate is 17%. So faerie fire misses more than twice as much as melee attacks. Making it even worse, the crit multiplier for spells is only 1.5, spell crit is typically much lower for ferals than melee crit, and for this test we're going to assume that you're totally expertise-capped too.
We'll take a typical AP value: 6000. A crit rate of 50% for melee, and 15% for spells (this is pretty correct when raid buffed). And let's go with 0 hit total. Not really realistic, but who cares - this is bold theorycrafting when smoking time.
So the value for various bear attacks in terms of damage is:
mangle: (base damage * 1.15 + 299)*naturalist * master shapeshifter * savage *armor *(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
swipe: (AP*.063+108)*naturalist*master*feral instinct*armor*(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
lacerate: (AP*.01 +88)*naturalist*master*armor*(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
Faerie fire: (AP*.15+1)*(1.5*spellcrit rate +1*(1-spellcritrate))*(1-spell miss rate)
After using 6k AP, 50% crit rate, 15% spell crit, and no hit - we get this:
mangle: 2239 damage
swipe: 698
lacerate: 163
FFF: 803
Okay, so mangle wins big on the damage - but FFF even with all of that is coming in second. Even with a 17% miss rate and a bad crit rate, it wins. But what about TPS?
Mangle TPS: Mangle damage * 29/14
swipe TPS: swipe damage * 29/14*1.5
lacerate TPS: 29/14*(damage+1031)/2
FFF TPS: 29/14*(damage+632)
So the final TPS is:
mangle: 4638
swipe: 2169
lacerate: 1237
FFF: 2974.
But wait! What about higher AP? Turns out that FFF wins at any level over swipe. Well, okay - at around 240,000AP, swipe beats FFF.
But what about a better armor reduction? After all, 30% armor is pretty high...right? Not really, but let's just take that out entirely. If your target has 0 armor, swipe will do about 120 more threat per application. But at 0 armor, your swipes are hitting for 722 damage each. I don't know about you, but that's not what mine hit for. And while you can get 0 armor as a cat under certain circumstances, chances are you'll never hit that as a bear.
What about higher crit? Even with an 80% crit rate, swipe still loses by a few hundred.
What about more hit? That's funny - because hit actually makes FFF stronger. Why? Because the hit rating to 1% hit conversion is 32.79 hit rating per 1% - but the spell hit rating only costs 26.3 hit rating per 1%. And remember - this assumed expertise capped, which means 14% reduced parry and dodge or 56 total expertise skill. Again, not really realistic; chances are against bosses you're going to have a lot less.
So for pretty much any numbers that you can think, faerie fire beats swipe, and it scales insanely well with AP. Also, if you don't have things like master shapeshifter or even naturalist, faerie fire does even better by comparison.
So yes, every time you can you should be faerie firing for maximum threat and for maximum damage. Mangle beats it, and keeping up a lacerate stack beats it - but lacerate by itself doesn't come close, nor does swipe.
You bet I'm smoking! I'm smoking the sweet smell of awesome threat, baby. Let's go to the numbers and figure out whether I'm smoking, or he's listening to anecdotal evidence.
FF seems odd because of the fact that it's based off spell hit. I notice mine missing more than any other ability I have. So using it in a rotation seems like a bad idea except to refresh it. I might be able to imagine a bear that is melee hit capped, but a bear that is spell hit capped? Now you're smoking.
First off, the hit numbers: melee miss rate against a level 83 mob is 8%. Spell miss rate is 17%. So faerie fire misses more than twice as much as melee attacks. Making it even worse, the crit multiplier for spells is only 1.5, spell crit is typically much lower for ferals than melee crit, and for this test we're going to assume that you're totally expertise-capped too.
We'll take a typical AP value: 6000. A crit rate of 50% for melee, and 15% for spells (this is pretty correct when raid buffed). And let's go with 0 hit total. Not really realistic, but who cares - this is bold theorycrafting when smoking time.
So the value for various bear attacks in terms of damage is:
mangle: (base damage * 1.15 + 299)*naturalist * master shapeshifter * savage *armor *(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
swipe: (AP*.063+108)*naturalist*master*feral instinct*armor*(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
lacerate: (AP*.01 +88)*naturalist*master*armor*(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
Faerie fire: (AP*.15+1)*(1.5*spellcrit rate +1*(1-spellcritrate))*(1-spell miss rate)
After using 6k AP, 50% crit rate, 15% spell crit, and no hit - we get this:
mangle: 2239 damage
swipe: 698
lacerate: 163
FFF: 803
Okay, so mangle wins big on the damage - but FFF even with all of that is coming in second. Even with a 17% miss rate and a bad crit rate, it wins. But what about TPS?
Mangle TPS: Mangle damage * 29/14
swipe TPS: swipe damage * 29/14*1.5
lacerate TPS: 29/14*(damage+1031)/2
FFF TPS: 29/14*(damage+632)
So the final TPS is:
mangle: 4638
swipe: 2169
lacerate: 1237
FFF: 2974.
But wait! What about higher AP? Turns out that FFF wins at any level over swipe. Well, okay - at around 240,000AP, swipe beats FFF.
But what about a better armor reduction? After all, 30% armor is pretty high...right? Not really, but let's just take that out entirely. If your target has 0 armor, swipe will do about 120 more threat per application. But at 0 armor, your swipes are hitting for 722 damage each. I don't know about you, but that's not what mine hit for. And while you can get 0 armor as a cat under certain circumstances, chances are you'll never hit that as a bear.
What about higher crit? Even with an 80% crit rate, swipe still loses by a few hundred.
What about more hit? That's funny - because hit actually makes FFF stronger. Why? Because the hit rating to 1% hit conversion is 32.79 hit rating per 1% - but the spell hit rating only costs 26.3 hit rating per 1%. And remember - this assumed expertise capped, which means 14% reduced parry and dodge or 56 total expertise skill. Again, not really realistic; chances are against bosses you're going to have a lot less.
So for pretty much any numbers that you can think, faerie fire beats swipe, and it scales insanely well with AP. Also, if you don't have things like master shapeshifter or even naturalist, faerie fire does even better by comparison.
So yes, every time you can you should be faerie firing for maximum threat and for maximum damage. Mangle beats it, and keeping up a lacerate stack beats it - but lacerate by itself doesn't come close, nor does swipe.
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