Happy Monday’s

Another Monday night off badminton with the bloody wrist, on the up side another night playing WOW (yeah yeah, I know its Wednesday, I’m slack) and another night where I offer my services should they be needed and was taken up on the offer straight away.  This was only my second 25 man experience, my first coming two weeks ago, exactly the same situation as my original post then.  Part way through the instance, stalling on Ascendant Council.  This time I was a touch more prepared having read up on the strategy after the last fight out of curiosity; turns out i was doing everything right (thanks in the main part to an excellent explanation from the raid leader), but now I was confident I was doing it right, and knew the reasons why I was doing it. 

I was pleased with my performance in all, upping my DPS by 1k on the first attempt and by just over 2k by the 3rd and final one in which we were successful.  Again, whilst my DPS output wasn’t close to the best guys in the raid, it was no where near the lowest, and I managed to survive each encounter through till we were about to wipe on the two failed attempts.  As an added sweetener I picked up the DPS trinket as no one else fancied it
Onwards and upwards to Cho’gal for a few learning attempts; most of the guild haven't seen this guy yet so it was a few attempts which went reasonably well to get to grips with the fight before the call.  A thoroughly enjoyable night, even with my sub par gear it was a nice ego boost to realise I picked up the fight quicker than a lot of the more regular raiders, still trying desperately to avoid catching the raiding bug again. Destined to fail.
One thing that I’ve decided as a result, I’m stopping slacking on the buffs front, I’ve been busy sorting the cooking out which I’ve been avoiding like the plague for the last few months, getting a stock of flasks so I don't have to rinse a guildie of their spares or raid the auction house, and start reforging for a bit more hit on my gear as the raid hit cap is higher than heroic cap.  Still think I’d prefer to be healing in raids if I’m going to do it longer term, but not confident enough to have them relying on me yet.

The shifting sands of stat weightings

In continuation to my earlier blog on evaluating your SimulationCraft results, this post covers the stat weightings (or scale factors) in much more detail. These are the numbers that anyone new to SimulationCraft will generally be looking for, they are the way you decide one piece of gear is better (for you) than another, the way you chose your gems, enchants, how to reforge and even which buff food and flasks you use. There are a few things to note about stat weights, firstly they are variable, as your gear evolves, so do they; secondly they are unique to you and your gear, this means that the websites proclaiming the definitive stat weights for your class are, at best, an approximation of an approximation – unless they've been calculated with your stats in mind they won't necessarily be applicable to you; finally, and probably most important, the weightings are a reference, and nothing more – unless you are absolutely perfect in your DPS rotations and positioning, your play style will have a far bigger impact on your DPS, use the stats as a framework for improving your overall performance, but don't expect getting your stats right to instantly make you hit 18k DPS.

A word on variability of stat weights

As I mentioned above, stats weights will vary with your gear (and the level of the mob you're fighting) I've knocked together this graph to try and illustrate this from the five examples I made for my last post. Notice how Mastery gains in importance as your gear (or buff level) improves. You'll also notice that Spirit and Hit are useless to me in heroics, that is because I've reached the hit cap (Spirit gives hit with the xxxxx talent). The other weights vary as your stats change, this is why it's important to run a simulation yourself, I'd even go so far as to run one each time your gear changes so that you understand what the implications are. If you're a more serious raider, you might want to play around comparing what your performance should be like with and without raid buffs so that you can adapt your unbuffed gear to give you the best performance when in a raid.

SimulationCraft: What does it all mean??

It's been a pretty busy week on my blog, the busiest one traffic wise since I started spewing my ramblings onto paper (well electronic paper). My post on SimulationCraft seems to have struck a few chords so in an attempt to aimlessly chase ratings expand on my success I thought I'd have a stab at explaining what the actual results mean in plain English.

So you've read the idiots guide, you've ballsed up at least 5 attempts at simulating your characters DPS, you've gone back and read the guide again, read the official help files a bit, scratched your head a bit, and finally got some figures that look like what you've been reading on the interweb. Brilliant! You've got a page of completely incomprehensible maths, statistics and pretty graphs that'd look more at home on a PowerPoint at that next dull management meeting you were trying to avoid…

There are some figures that (may) make sense to you instantly; there are others that are best when compared to an average, or a target of where you want to be. If you're comparing something you need a baseline, for this example that's you! (or me as the case may be). For the record, I've run 5 different simulations; one with the ultimate tier 11, 25 man gear, with all the raid buffs and trimmings; one with the equivalent 10 man gear and the same buffs; one with my crappy heroic gear with all the same buffs and trimmings; one with (a slightly unrealistic) all the buffs and trimmings but with the target_level override set to 87 (i.e. a heroic boss), you'd NEVER get this amount of buffs in a 5 man as you simply wouldn't have the classes there required (you're pushing it for a 10 man); and then finally, a far more realistic 5 man scenario with just plain old Fort, Int, and MOTW (a reasonable assembly of buffs in my view), oh and replenishment as you'll be keeping that up at all times (WONT YOU?!?) as it's one of your main sources of DPS. The baseline scenario will be the final, and probably worst DPS(it's chugging away as we speak, so we'll see if my prediction shows me up to be the eejit you suspect me to be).

I'm setting the fight length to 350 seconds (nearly 6 minutes), 2 adds, Patchwerk style fight, and assuming you're the best of the best when it comes to mashing keys and given you (well me) an elite skill level – the trick is to only change one variable (or set of variables) at a time so the comparison has some meaning. As homework, I'll leave you to run your own simulation, with your gear, with a realistic skill level and fight scenario, I can't stress highly enough that stat weightings will vary massively depending on your ability (or lack of it), your gear, the number of adds, the type of fight, and a whole host of other variables, what is certain is the figures are a model (a model, by definition is an approximation, and only an approximation) of reality. Go read about statistical modelling in a text book or here on Wikipedia or somewhere else where stats geeks lurk.

Lecture over, and here we are, remember I'm using me as the baseline, the links to the full reports are at the end, I'll reference sections only, for comparison in the main text to keep my ramblings to sub War and Peace word count.

First of all, and the thing you're almost all certainally here for, the scale factors, or stat weighting s as they're sometimes known. You'll notice two values, a scale factor and a normalised value; the latter is the one you want, it simply skews everything so that it's a direct comparison to your best stat (Int) to make it easy(er) to compare one stat to another when you come to chosing your gear. I'll be posting some specific analysis on stat weights in my next blog so if you're still confused check back and I'll endeavour to confuse you more.

Int will always be best, if haste comes in at 0.5 and Crit at 0.25 it means that Int is twice as good as Haste, and Haste is twice as good as Crit (and thus Int is 4 times better than Crit). Put simply, if given those weights, you have a simple choice of a tunic with 100 Int and 150 Haste, you'd always chose the first one (but it's never that simple is it?).

Next you're at the charts, the damage per execute is a telling chart, if interpreted correctly; it's basically saying for the amount of time you spend casting these are the spells which do the most damage – i.e. devouring plague is an instant cast spell so does the most damage per cast.

Next is the damage source pie chart, you'll notice that mind flay is near the top in all, which seems counter intuitive given the last statement. But think about it for a second, mind flay is your filler when all of the other spells are on cooldown or waiting for procs, you're casting it for the most time, so it does lots of DPS, but bang for buck its lower than the others.

The other thing to note in these early graphs is the mana timeline graph, if you're going oom regularly, you're doing something wrong (or something right, i.e. emergency healing which is saving the wipe), I've heard a few Shadow Priests complain about mana issues, this should never be the case with any level of gear.

The most important graph in my opinion is the DPS scaling at the end, this basically says if you add 100(for the sake of argument, you could use any figure) of any given stat, what is the expected DPS increase? You'll notice for me Haste Crit and Mastery all look pretty much the same, crossing once or twice; for the best spec there's a far bigger difference as you follow the graph up with Haste becoming the worst and then the best and then the worst etc. as you go up. This is because of a whole heap of internal metrics (some of which we know about or can approximate, some which Blizzard keep close to their chests).

Notice on the t11 graph, Hit and Spirit have a scale factor up to 0 (i.e. if your gear was worse) and then abruptly stop giving a dps boost – this is the hit cap. Also notice for me, it's pretty much horizontal (at target_level 87) which means I'm over my hit cap for heroics (naughty me, I'll be remedying this immediately).You'll also notice, if you look at the 3rd scenario that my dps drops, even though I've got massive buffs, this is purely because of the hit cap dynamic, and is a good reminder to follow the basic principles that have been with us for all (well almost if you forget the last 3 months) of WOW - get hit capped first!

That's it for the basics, there's loads (and loads and loads) more, have a read, if there's anything you want me to explain (or make up on the spot) leave a comment, or email, tweet, or send a carrier pigeon. I'll be posting an additional blog on the differences of the stat weightings specifically tomorrow.



Report Download

Scenario 1 – best T11 25 man gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 2 – T11 10 man gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 3 – my crappy gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 4 - my crappy gear, all buffs, heroic boss

Scenario 5 - my crappy gear, sensible buffs, heroic boss



 

Go Forth and Reforge

I'd like to state up front, these stat priorities are quite probably slightly out for tier 11 as it seems simlecraft is a bit buggy, but it's the best we've got at the moment

I'd also like to say that, like normal, if your gear is different then the stat weights will be different – this seems especially so since 4.0.6 as Haste and Mastery seem to swap over in importance as your gear improves.

I've stolen referenced the information here from a number of sources across the web, it's a combination of what people are saying with what I know not to be correct, the sources are generally good and I trust them, however it may not be fully correct.

Stat weights

Intellect 1.00
Spellpower 0.79
Spirit/Hit 0.43 (before hit cap)
Mastery 0.43
Haste 0.40
Crit 0.39

Rotation

The rotation shouldn't change really if you were doing it right before 4.0.6 hit, Mind Blast has obviously had a bit of a buff so you'll want to cast it as soon as you can (providing you have an orb up).

Hit Cap

That's right, there now seems to be a hit cap, as I suspected due to the changes to Mastery it now means things hit harder thus the knock on effect is that it's more efficient to make sure you hit first time; go forth and reforge!

For heroics only it's 6%

For raiding you'll want 17%

I'm told PvP is 4% but I haven't dabbled at all in it since I returned to WoW so haven't done much reading on the subject

Reforging, Gemming and Enchanting

Obviously you want to be aiming for more hit if you weren't hit capped previously, you need to start removing those Mastery to Haste reforges that you've had on your gear per 4.0.6. Gems and Enchants need to follow the stat weightings, be careful to take into account socket and meta gem activation bonuses when doing so. You may have noticed that all of the secondary stats have levelled out somewhat in importance, so even if you get it wrong, you shouldn't make too much of a dent in your DPS (that's not to say you shouldn't try and do it right in the first place).


 

Melting faces after 4.0.6

As I've done for Holy, this is a look at the effects of the changes to the mechanics on your friendly Shadow Priest which should hopefully hit the EU servers today. As with my previous post, this is based mainly on the patch notes which MMO Champion have published and a few other sources that I've been reading.

On the face of it, not much has changed, the shadow priest specific changes are a measly two lines, looking at the general changes there are a couple more that affect shadoo and a glyph change, but that's it, so same old same old then yes? No.

Mind Blast now does 18% more damage than mind spike, now this seems to be a cack-handed way of describing what a spell does, basing it on what another spell does, but what does it actually mean. Well not much really, I suspect, for boss fights anyway; I'm yet to see the cold hard stats in the light of day, but I suspect this will still keep MB as a buff for other spells rather than a direct source of DPS. It will however increase your numbers on trash if you're using MS / MB / SW:D combinations because they go down too quickly to warrant a full rotation. Nothing to write home about really.

Mind Sear damage increased by 15% AND (and it's a big AND) you can now target it on a friendly player which is an even bigger DPS boost. Stay with me here… being able to target it on a friendly player is a DPS increase because it gives you one extra target to hit (it doesn't damage the target). Here's why; let's say you average 1000 DPS (for the sake of argument) using Mind Sear alone on a group of 5 mobs (i.e. you're targeting 1, and damaging the other 4) now you target the tank, and damage 5 mobs so 1000/4 = 250 dps per mob = 1250 DPS for 5 mobs which is a 25% increase. An additional 15% on top of that and you're up to 1437.5 DPS. That's a massive 43.75% damage increase (for 5 mobs, it varies depending on the pack size). Searingly HOT.

Shadow Orbs benefit from mastery increased by 16% this is a BIG change, I'm seeing on twitter and the occasional US based blog (who've already got 4.0.6) that this means that mastery is now more important than Haste! Did I not tell you it would be? Yes I did, right here.

Vampiric Embrace now lasts until cancelled. Finally! Do the same to Inner Fire please.

Glyph of Mind Flay no longer requires SW:P to be on the target, flay away boys! Given the mastery increase this may mean that you flay first, get an orb and then DoT up, this sounds dangerous to me, I need to do some nasty maths (or steal someone else's) but I don't have time at the moment. It may also make MF viable as a trash melter as a replacement / augmentation to MS / MB.



And that's it! Well, that's it for the patch notes, there is one more, potentially massive change to the way you'll need to stack stats. I'm hearing on the grapevine that Hit, or more specifically, the Hit Cap is back as of 4.0.6, there's nothing to indicate directly why this is in the patch notes, perhaps as a consequence of the Mastery buff. If this is the case, then there will be a lot of Shadow Priests breathing a sigh of relief, there was no definitive "you must have x% Hit" prior to 4.0.6 which left lots of muppets making totally unsubstantiated statements about it. If there is now a hit cap then it makes things a lot more cut and dry, get 17%, reforge and regem immediately. I won't tell you again. It might even make smelly Spirit more desirable.

I'm still trying to dig out some hard evidence for this, and have run out of time for the moment (some of us have work to do….) but I'll post an update as soon as I have anything.




 

Hit me!

Something has been troubling me since I came back to WoW, well lots of things have actually, but one thing more than most; hit caps, or the lack of them. My natural instinct when hitting 85 (if you'll excuse the pun) was to ensure that I was hit capped above all else. When you do some reading, and I've done lots, it would seem that hit is no longer the be all and end all of stats. Head over to shadowpriest.com and you'll see that the stat priority is as follows:

Int: 1.0000
SP: 0.7935
Haste: 0.5031
Crit: 0.4040
Mastery: 0.3857
Hit: 0.3741
Spirit: 0.3732

You'll notice that hit languishes just above spirit and the ginger step child in terms of priorities, now normally this would come with some sort of disclaimer along the lines of "hit calculated after reaching cap of xxxx" but no such statement was made. Was this a mere oversight, is hit still as important as it ever was? It seems not! You might have got an inkling by now that I'm not the type of player who takes things completely at face value, I like to know what's going on under the hood as it aids my own sanity, and I feel understanding the mechanics of the game help me to improve. So off I trotted to various forums and Google in my quest to get some answers, not any old answers or opinion, good hard FACT's backed up with some old fashioned honest evidence.

I have to say I was sorely disappointed; I accept that there's always going to be a bit of a grey area with 'the best' way to DPS because Blizzard don't publish their algorithms for calculating damage done, nor should they, and the fact that everyone's gear, lag, play style and a multitude of other factors will be ever so slightly different. As with any scientific investigation it is possible to develop test theories by modelling observations, which is pretty much what the simlecraft community have done to give us the stat priority.

I had a bit of a Google for material, checked the usual suspects, Elitistjerks.com, shadowpriest.com etc. and the official 'shudder' forums which reminded me why I never go there; I swear half of the people posting there still think the world is flat because "it said so in a book, once". Anyways I digress. In summary, I struggled to find the good hard facts I was looking for, I tried to sift out the mere conjecture and the downright idiotic to give me the next best thing to facts, anecdotal evidence based on observations which have log's or models which hold true in most cases. These theories are not necessarily wrong, or bad for that matter, just incomplete, and in lieu of a complete the best we have to work with.

So in an attempt to concisely answer my question of "is getting to the hit cap top priority" I've made a long and rambling post to come to the conclusion of…."possibly not"… sorry. Here is a summary of what I believe are the key points

• Anything over 17% is (still) completely pointless.
  
• The 17% hit cap seems to sacrifice DPS, stacking Int and haste in favour of hit if you're at the 15% level seems to be the way forward.
  
• I suspect, hit is suffering from a diminishing return type rule, if you're vastly under the hit cap then its value to you increases – I've yet to read and digest the simlecraft in its entirety and fully get to grips to say this for certain.
  
• I'm really not sure why hit is slightly better than spirit on the priority list, spirit gives mana regen in addition to hit, so surely it should be slightly higher (even if this is nominal) rather than lower? – again I need to do more reading as it's far more likely that I've missed something that the numbers being wrong.
  
• The general consensus seems to be to always gem for Int and Haste where possible, unless gemming for something else gives you better overall stats by triggering a slot bonus or enabling a meta-gem.

If it is the case that the hit cap isn't vital, is there a sweet spot to which we should aim? 13-14% would seem to be about there, but this is purely speculation. There's also the human factor to it, people like seeing big numbers on the screen, and hate seeing "MISS" blazing up in front of them, whilst not attaining the hit cap may be optimal, I can see a large proportion of hit-cap-zealots carrying on regardless and casting out the heretics who speak otherwise to their mythical round planet... if there is a sweet spot be it the lowest hit you can attain (there will be a natural minimum for your gear set where you simply can't get any lower), or somewhere in between, the only way we can find out for certain is through simulation and modelling.  

A word on statistics  

The statisticians are lurking at this point, dying to tell you that probability is, by definition, a random effect; what happened last time, and what will happen next time have no bearing on what happens now: if I were to win the lottery tomorrow, my chances of winning it next week would be EXACTLY THE SAME, in the same way if you've just missed with a spell, you're next spell has EXACTLY THE SAME chance of missing, it may miss, and you can consider yourself unlucky if it does, but it will happen occasionally. If you don't believe me try tossing a coin 100 times, did you end up with roughly 50 head and 50 tails? Yes? Did they all come in a nice symmetrical order of Head, Tail, Hail, Tail, etc…? no? that's just what probability does for you, given an infinite number of events it will always even itself out, now infinite is impossible, so we have to settle for statistically significant – if you didn't know for a fact that a coin had a 50:50 chance of landing as a head or a tail, you could work it out by tossing it a few thousand times and recording the results (it will actually, in reality, tend to favour tails very slightly, as the heads side tends to be heavier and is more likely to land face down, but that's by-the-by).

Human nature and intuition is a strong factor, even if it is wrong, if you still not convinced, play a little game with me, it won't take 30 seconds, pick me eight random numbers from 0-9 and write them down on a piece of paper sequentially. Then scroll to the end of this post for some predictions which will astound and amaze you…

My other concern is that if you're unlucky miss on a couple BIG spells like SW:D at sub 25% health or similar then, in a single fight, your DPS will be significantly skewed downward, however your average DPS over, say, 100 identical fights would be better – is this a good thing? Is it better to guarantee(or as close to guaranteed as you can get) a minimum dps for every fight being hit capped, or is it better to have a higher average DPS figure overall? 

So what's my point I hear you say? Well it's this, human beings, by nature, try to look for patterns where there are not. Just look up at the moon, see the face on it? Of course you do, but I guarantee it's not actually a face. Don't mistake your single observations over a short period of time for fact, yes how you play the game is crucially important to your ability to maximise DPS, but when dealing with figures try and take the emotion out of it, look at your logs and always try and prove your assumptions wrong, if you can't you're doing the right thing, even your own logs probably aren't statistically significant keep an eye on the simlecraft and other theroycraft posters, or if you don't like maths, or simply don't understand, pick a few bloggers or forum posters who are reasonably active and you trust (hopefully with time, I might be one of those) and pass an eye over their musings once in a while.
 
So there you are, hit caps, probability and human nature in a nut shell. Simples. I don't really know all the answers (yet), but I'll leave you with a final thought: Don't be a slave to the DPS meters; bosses will go down far quicker if DPS spent the time they do trying to squeeze that extra hundred DPS out of their rotations, instead making sure that they avoid that crap on the floor they haven't noticed which is about to kill them.




Mystics predictions (spoiler alert if you haven't read above yet) 

I'll bet you 20 English pennies that you didn't repeat any numbers in the sequence? If you did I'll bet you're either mathematically orientated in your work or schooling (or you've seen this before and you knew I was trying to trick you), or you repeated only one number? If you asked the same of a truly random number generator, the sequence 11111111 would be just as likely as, say, 92583107 to come out, yet human beings can't tend to manage truly random things.

I'll wager another 20p that some sort of pattern emerges in most cases; along the lines of always going higher than the last number then lower, then higher and so on… or never having two number next to each other which occur naturally next to each other i.e. 0123456789? etc. etc.