Souldrinker vs. Hand of Morchok

The CTC is easy to make up with VP items. The Relic is Mastery heavy, and there is a Mastery trinket. I have consistently lost LFR Souldrinkers to DKs but I will keep farming for it, it will probably be a few weeks before my tank gets a Normal Mode Madness kill, given that raid tends to be only 3 or so hours once per week. but my tank only ahs a 378 weapon, so even the LFR Souldinker would be nice if I could get it.

The first time I lost it to a 'frost' DK, I was pissed. I mean sure the proc can do extra dmg for a dps, but the heal is frequently going to be wasted for them outside of AOE environments.

At the end of the day though, I'm more annoyed at how things are coded than by how people role. That DKs can get a role bonus on Agi items is especially annoying. I role on anything and everything I think is an upgrade. And actually, in LFR on my mage, this one DK won both Tier helms (I rolled on both too), so I whispered him if he didn't need both if I could have one, and he Traded it to me

Hrobertgar wrote: I mean sure the proc can do extra dmg for a dps, but the heal is frequently going to be wasted for them outside of AOE environments.

I'd say the 5 to 8k heal the souldrinker gives, can be regarded as 'noise' or more healers overheal for both tank and dps.

djlar wrote:Warriors can roll need on LFR on Souldrinker and get a bonus.. that's completely bullcrap..

There's a lot of single-minded fury warriors that can use them, so that's not too bad.

I ran a LFR with no DKs and a greedy ret/holy pally needed on it...I've taken to not expecting loot at all with this broken system.

Like i said before, i observed souldrinker dmg to stand for about 3% dmg done (this was for multiple warriors)
Seems like we have the explanation for seeing 5-6%dmg on parses for paladins, with seal of truth also proccing it, giving you twice the ammount of chances it could procc with.

Treck wrote:Seems like we have the explanation for seeing 5-6%dmg on parses for paladins, with seal of truth also proccing it, giving you twice the ammount of chances it could procc with.

And that was just nerfed:

The bug was with Seal of Truth, so Souldrinker will proc less for paladins as well.

Censure was not proccing the weapon. Seal of truth was, and this caused ret to have double the chance to proc it on melee attacks. This is what they are fixing.

No amount of latching on to the accidental use of the word censure will change that. There is a reason it was worded as "double the proc chance," because melee attack + seal was the problem. Censure triggering the weapon wouldn't even add that many procs to be an issue.

The specific bug was that paladins running Seal of Truth had two chances with every swing to trigger the proc with Gurthalak or Souldrinker. They now have one chance.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/2153 ... than-dwtr/

And that was EXACTLY the point.

Treck wrote:And that was EXACTLY the point.

Considering the fix for Paladins using Souldrinker, thoughts then on the Normal Souldrinker vs. Heroic Hand of Morchok?

Can one really be said to be definitively better than the other? Or is it more based on what fight you're on?

I've got the normal Souldrinker and I've been passing on heroic Hands because I thought they were slightly worse, lol.

Normal Souldrinker would still outperform heroic hand of morchok in terms of damage, would be good if someone could support that with math.
Hand of morchok would just more mastery and stamina.

I have sims showing LFR souldrinker ahead of pretty much every other potential tanking weapon in DPS, but that was using the old bugged implementation. I'm hoping to update the sims tonight or tomorrow with the hotfixed version, but suffice to say Souldrinker should remain the stronger option for DPS. The only thing that comes close, iirc, is No'kaled (another proc weapon).

The weapon sim is updated with the post-hotfix version of the Souldrinker proc. Like I suspected, even post-hotfix the LFR version of Souldrinker is almost as good as heroic Hand of Morchok, and Normal/Heroic Souldrinker are unmatched.

Allow me to expand on that :

• The ilvl-equivalent Souldrinker/No'Kaled are almost identical. It doesn't really matter that NK isn't a Strength-based weapon, the proc is stronger than Souldrinker's. They end up neck to neck, both at 410 and 416. [see edit]
• LFR Souldrinker is better than anything from T11.
• Normal SD/NK (403) are better than anything from T12, except their ilvl 416 counterparts. Yes, better than all the ilvl 410 options.
• Hand of Morchok is fairly unimpressive. It's worse than LFR Souldrinker, and heroic HoM is worse than normal SD/NK.
• SD/NK scale better with hit/expertise than any other option. In other words, any serious parse hunter must a. get one of them, b. hard-cap expertise.

EDIT : An updated NK model puts it ahead of SD by at least 200 DPS (depending on hit/exp/priority queue).

tlitp wrote:Hand of Morchok is fairly unimpressive. It's worse than LFR Souldrinker...

Going by what Theck just posted in the Matlab thread, it's only 100 dps ahead of Hand of Morchok 939SoT. Really I'd say they're about equal, and it all depends on if you'd rather have 119 mastery or the proc.

Yes, that was my reading of Theck's new results. I will use Souldrinker LFR if it drops, but given that I already have Hand of Morchok normal, I need not feel too aggrieved when the dps keep winning the rolls.

Apples and oranges ? Let's not pointlessly intertwine fundamentally different metrics. Output-wise, LFR Souldrinker is better than normal HoM. Moreover, the gap becomes larger than the aforementioned 100 when player's expertise isn't a significant factor (past softcap, or on trash).

Speaking of which, Theck (by extension, the matlabadin code) merely presents what's happening at a few specific points. That's intentional. It doesn't mean that one should extrapolate those results to the full spectrum.


EDIT : Proofreading what I've just written, I've realized that I may seem a tad grumpy. Well, I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that the original statement ("HoM is fairly unimpressive") was formulated having in mind more than comes out from the matlabadin thread.

tlitp wrote:Allow me to expand on that :

• The ilvl-equivalent Souldrinker/No'Kaled are virtually identical. It doesn't really matter that NK isn't a Strength-based weapon, the proc is stronger than Souldrinker's. They end up neck to neck, both at 410 and 416.
• LFR Souldrinker is better than anything from T11.
• Normal SD/NK (403) are better than anything from T12, except their ilvl 416 counterparts. Yes, better than all the ilvl 410 options.
• Hand of Morchok is fairly unimpressive. It's worse than LFR Souldrinker, and heroic HoM is worse than normal SD/NK.
• SD/NK scale better with hit/expertise than any other option. In other words, any serious parse hunter must a. get one of them, b. hard-cap expertise.

Typo? Maybe you meant T12 and T13?

The consensus thus far seems to be:

1. In terms of DPS output, Heroic Souldrinker is the best, followed by Normal Souldrinker. Normal Souldrinker > Heroic Hand of Morchok.

2. In terms of survivability, Heroic Hand of Morchok may provide extra stamina and mastery, however even assuming a perfect translation of extra mastery to stamina, the Normal Souldrinker would only have to proc once during a death event to match up to the stamina benefit of the Heroic Hand of Morchok. As a plus, some fights (i.e. Madness) give Souldrinker extra bang for its buck by increasing the amount healed by the proc.

Thus, it seems that it's safe to say that, all around, Heroic SD > Normal SD > Heroic HoM >= LFR SD

I'm currently using the Normal SD and I can't really see myself, given the current evidence, switching to anything until heroic SD. If anyone has further evidence that puts Hand of Mor'chok or any other weapon in a more favorable light, I'd be interested to see it.

Valour wrote:I'm currently using the Normal SD and I can't really see myself, given the current evidence, switching to anything until heroic SD. If anyone has further evidence that puts Hand of Mor'chok or any other weapon in a more favorable light, I'd be interested to see it.

Personal gear is personal. That said, Hand could theoretically (and after doing some athletic stunts with regemming) carry the mastery (and reforged avoidance) you need to cap CTC after swapping a mastery trinket to a stamina one. Situational, but still.

So even the recent Censure proc nerf doesn't affect the overall results of SD?

The simulations take that into account. I hadn't posted a data set that modeled the proc before the hotfix. The internal build I had pre-hotfix had Souldrinker even further ahead.

Does hand of Morchok drop at all?

Never seen it. Since the beginning of DS, on any raid, formal raid on 25, alt 10's, LFR's etc.. never ever seen it drop.

Drop rate that low?

Small sample size, statistically. With a 9% drop rate, not seeing it on 20+ morchok kills isn't at all surprising. 9% drop rate and 20 kills = 15% chance of never seeing it.

And it cannot drop in LFR as far as I know.

Correct. In LFR weapons only drop on Madness, IIRC.

I have both LFR SD and heroic HoM. I've spent quite some time with simc and have come to the conclusion (supported by logs of our raid) that heroic HoM is the one to go for me with my current gear. Also the extra mastery allows me to free up one trinket slot which I can use for whatever trinket works best - be it a dps trinket for the easier bosses like morchok or ultra on heroic or stamina trinkets for the later fights. I'm also quite unimpressed by the healing SD does, more than 50% (sometimes over 70%) end up in useless overheal and for most fights WoG heals me for more and much more effectively. Never seen SD drop besides LFR so I can't say anything about the higher ilvl versions.

From what I've been reading, 1 step difference (LFR vs Norm, Norm vs Her) should make SD better than HoM. 2 steps (as you're mentioning above, LFR vs Her) should have the HoM come out ahead.