Let's Talk Maths!
9:03 AM
Posted by Reygahnci on Thursday, September 16, 2010
I know I know... I'm the only one who gets giddy about maths. They finally got my Level 85 Troll Druid Premade created and in a playable state, so I wanted to see what the coefficients were going to be:
1) 2576 Agility, 170 Str = 7730 attack power in Cat Form. This illustrates exactly what Blizzard said about Agility being a 2:1 AP conversion, sweet!
2) That 7730 AP gives 552 dps to the paper doll as expected; nothing changed there.
3) 1015 haste rating gives 7.93% haste. This means roughly 128 haste rating = 1% haste.
4) 539 hit rating gives 4.49% hit. This is roughly 120 hit rating for 1% hit.
5) 22.32% crit, but only 343 crit rating, which gives 1.91% crit. Crit is basically 180 rating per 1%. This also shows that 20.41% of my crit comes from agility alone, which gives us a ratio of 126:1 as agility:crit.
6) 1583 Mastery Rating gives 8.83 mastery "points". This gives roughly 179 rating per point of increase.
Okay, these numbers are all big and scary. However, you need not worry... keep in mind how ridiculous things are in Cataclysm. Item levels are being increased hugely to make up for the difference of there only being a five level gain for this expansion. Similarly, enchants, gems, etc are all having their item levels boosted as well. Keep in mind, also, that my premade character has only greens and one blue, so we expect that all the item levels will be improved towards end-game gear.
Okay, time for the bad news... it looks as if Blizzard is content with the scaling aspect of Haste for melees being confined to faster attack speeds and quicker resource replenishment. Therefore, Haste will only increase our white swing speed and our rate of energy regeneration. Therefore, I do not know which stat will be the outright winner in terms of best damage-dealing stat. It is actually pretty interesting.
Currently, Mastery looks to be in the lead even though its ratio is a lot steeper than Haste, given that it increases bleed damage by a ratio at 2.5% extra damage per 1 Mastery rating (you you have 8 Mastery Rating baseline at 85 giving you a flat 20% bonus to Rip and Rake baseline). You can really boil it down to 179 Mastery Rating is worth 2.5% more damage to Rip and 2.5% more damage to Rake. This is actually a REALLY strong stat at the moment given that Critical Strike Rating (for example) gives you roughly 1% damage boost (against zero-resil targets) for 126 crit rating. Additionally, the agility:crit ratio seems to be holding strong given that I have ALMOST half the critical strike percent on Beta that I have on Live, but I am in greens on Beta and in BiS on Live.
Haste may end up still being favorable, however, as regenerating energy more quickly and a strong increase to white damage output will mean a strong stat all around. It will scale in more directions than Mastery, if nothing else; however, Haste will ultimately be affected by damage reduction via armor while Mastery will not. Similarly, we can see that Mastery Rating will end up playing a little stronger since on Live your bleeds amount to roughly 30% of your overall damage, but this is in a setup where Armor Penetration has ruled the game; once ArP is gone, every damage-dealing attack we have will go down except for Rip and Rake. By simple proportions our bleeds will become more than 30% of our overall damage.
The numbers are, of course, completely unfinished and I certainly expect to see some tweaking (hopefully more sooner than later), but this gives us a really rough estimation as to the direction of Ferals in Cataclysm:
1) Agility will still provide a strong critical strike percentage.
2) Critical strike chance will NOT be diminished by Resilience (awesome).
3) Haste will increase energy-regeneration rates which will lead to more attacks per minute (awesome).
4) Mastery will make our bleeds tick stronger and stronger.
5) We have a 60% damage reduction cooldown which we can use while in Cat Form and keep offensive pressure rolling (cannot be dispelled).
6) Barkskin cannot be dispelled anymore.
7) Infected Wounds cannot be auto-dispelled anymore (horray targeting shammies).
8) Skull Bash is a 10s cd charge which also interrupts casting for 5 seconds AND applies a 10 second physical (non-dispellable) debuff which increases casting costs by 30% with 2/2 Brutal Impact.
9) Even though MS-effects were nerfed to 25% across the boards, we STILL receive 20% bonus healing in Cat Form.
10) Vengeance makes Bear Form a REAL threat if you train it to the point where Vengeance stacks pretty high. Remember, it maxes out at 10% of your HP as Attack Power.
Oh btw... in greens at level 85, I have ~77k hp... so that'll be nice too. That's 7.7k attack power with a full Vengeance stack btw... and I only have around 4k AP in Bear Form naturally, which is where our damage is balanced around currently. Can't wait to test out some damage later on the Beta.
Hopefully, I'll be able to get in some PvP, too!
September 16, 2010 at 8:41 PM
Thanks for the numbers, especially the Haste Rating!
Been looking for this everywhere.
Now I can get down to some intense theorycrafting which will doubtlessly be rendered meaningless by the next patch :D
September 22, 2010 at 2:31 AM
You mentioned the Crit Rating and Agi to Crit formulas. Are those for Cat only? Are they the same for Bear?
I dabble in PVP, but I'm mostly a bear tank, and I want to start theorycrafting crit vs mastery for how Savage Defense will work out but I can't find solid numbers on ratings @85 for bears.
Thanks, love the blog!
September 22, 2010 at 8:14 AM
These numbers are for Cat. I will try and make some time to get all the numbers up later.
Why would it be "crit vs. mastery?" From what I've seen on gear, it's basically going to be 2 secondary stat points for most beginning level gear; you might even see 3 on end-game purps. That being said, I would think that Critical Strike Rating and Mastery Rating would be your go-to secondary stats in Cataclysm as a Bear Tank.