Theck's MATLAB thread - Cataclysm/4.x

This is probably beyond the scope of the sims, but would the following "common sense" guidelines make sense? This is for maximising dps, rather than initial threat or anything like that (which between the new multiplier and and misdirects should be trivial at least in a 25 man raid):

i) if you have 3 HP and you expect your vengeance to drop by a significant % over the next 9 seconds, you will probably be better off using SotR even if Inq and SD are both inactive. e.g. tank swaps on Baleroc, certain situations on Ragnaros (depending on other tank's stack RNG).

ii) similarly if AW is going to fall off before you get your next 3 holy power you will probably get more damage by using SotR regardless of Inq/SD status.

iii) even if you're not receiving tricks on the pull, AW usage should probably be delayed until you have a significant % of your max vengeance. Likewise after a low damage phase change, you should wait for vengeance to pick up again before popping AW. e.g. after first sons of flame on Rag, you'll have fairly low vengeance until after he's done his first smash and resumed meleeing you. Another example - blowing wings on Alys adds the moment they become attackable is less preferable to letting them stack your vengeance a bit first.

iv) (This one's within the scope of the sims.) I'm sure I read in this thread about the following special situation, but "[t]here's no apparent gain in prioritizing AS over CS in any circumstance (#1 vs #4/#7). " seems to contradict it. I'm thinking of the subset of #7 (SotR>AS+>CS>AS>J) where AS+ is only used ahead of CS if by not using it before CS the proc ends up expiring. That situation would only arise due to an attack not connecting when it should, but an example would be: 2HP -> CS (GC procs, 4.5 seconds left by end of GCD) 3HP -> SotR miss (3s left on proc) -> SotR hit (1.5s left on proc) -> use GC proc or CS and lose the proc. I think it was decided that in this particular case it was better to use the GC proc rather than lose it completely?

Rhiannon wrote:iv) (This one's within the scope of the sims.) I'm sure I read in this thread about the following special situation, but "[t]here's no apparent gain in prioritizing AS over CS in any circumstance (#1 vs #4/#7). " seems to contradict it. I'm thinking of the subset of #7 (SotR>AS+>CS>AS>J) where AS+ is only used ahead of CS if by not using it before CS the proc ends up expiring. That situation would only arise due to an attack not connecting when it should, but an example would be: 2HP -> CS (GC procs, 4.5 seconds left by end of GCD) 3HP -> SotR miss (3s left on proc) -> SotR hit (1.5s left on proc) -> use GC proc or CS and lose the proc. I think it was decided that in this particular case it was better to use the GC proc rather than lose it completely?

Yes, it's better to use GC than lose it, but you have one extra GCD available to use AS over what you might assume, because it doesn't trigger exactly on the CS, but half a second later, or so. So, you can CS(trigger), SotR (miss), SotR (hit), CS, GC quite comfortably. The extra GCD starts to push the expected number of clashes down pretty low, even with terrible hit/expertise, so it's a fairly minimal optimization. Consider that you have to miss ShoR 3 times in a row after proccing GC on a successful CS that generates a 3rd HP, and you probably run into the situation under once per fight, even with the nirvana of 0 hit/expertise.

Not that it's not worth doing, it's just pretty rare.

Yeah that makes sense, I put two misses in first from what I remembered in-game and then changed it thinking I was miscounting. Conversely on bosses with enormous hitboxes (e.g. Rag) due to the ridiculous travel time on projectile attacks you sometimes get a very small window to react to an AS proc, e.g.

[18:22:56.961] Rhia casts Avenger's Shield on Ragnaros
[18:22:58.191] Rhia Avenger's Shield Ragnaros 25325
[18:22:58.205] Rhia gains Sacred Duty from Rhia
[18:22:58.455] Rhia casts Shield of the Righteous on Ragnaros
[18:22:58.700] Rhia Shield of the Righteous Ragnaros *48757*
[18:22:59.093] Rhia's Sacred Duty fades from Rhia

vs

[18:31:36.418] Rhia casts Avenger's Shield on Ragnaros
[18:31:37.580] Rhia Avenger's Shield Ragnaros 19562
[18:31:37.868] Rhia gains Sacred Duty from Rhia
[18:31:37.955] Rhia casts Inquisition

In this particular situation (GC proc at 2 HP vs boss with long projectile travel time) if one isn't able to guarantee they'll be able to react in that window I guess they should go with SotR even if Inq isn't up?

In-game ilvl is a straight average, not weighted. Easy to test using high-ilvl vendor items, buy/vendor and watch your ilvl bounce.

Rhiannon wrote:i)-iv)

i)-iii) are all probably slight increases.

iv) will also be an increase, but it's a relatively rare event. Rare enough that "SotR>AS[buffGC<1.5]>CS>AS>J" was less than 10 DPS ahead of the basic 939 last time we checked. That said, it is an increase; I'll update the sims and text to reflect that when I find some time.

Rhiannon wrote:Yeah that makes sense, I put two misses in first from what I remembered in-game and then changed it thinking I was miscounting. Conversely on bosses with enormous hitboxes (e.g. Rag) due to the ridiculous travel time on projectile attacks you sometimes get a very small window to react to an AS proc, e.g.

...

In this particular situation (GC proc at 2 HP vs boss with long projectile travel time) if one isn't able to guarantee they'll be able to react in that window I guess they should go with SotR even if Inq isn't up?

I'm not sure I follow - where does the projectile time factor in? The Holy Power from Grand Crusader is granted immediately upon casting AS, it doesn't wait for the AS to reach the target.

Sacred duty doesn't though - so you don't know whether you have a sacred duty proc or not until about 0.2s before the next GCD to decide between Inq or SotR.

Edit: I see how that was confusing, I erroneously described it as reacting to AS proc when it was the short time frame to react to a possible Sacred Duty resulting from that AS that I was concerned with, and I said conversely when in fact it has very little relation to what Meloree said, converse or otherwise.

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.

theckhd wrote:Back: [Dreadfire Drape], reforged hit->mast, dual mastery gems

this already has mastery on it btw

braiel wrote:

theckhd wrote:Back: [Dreadfire Drape], reforged hit->mast, dual mastery gems

this already has mastery on it btw

Meant to reply to this a few days ago, but got sidetracked. It's actually a hit->dodge reforge in the code, but I must have overlooked it when updating the text of the post. It should be correct now.

I'm really curious about the 2pc ret T13 set bonus and how it would affect our rotation. My instinct is that the set bonus would cause a change in priority from "AS > J" to "AS+ > J > AS".

Kihra wrote:I'm really curious about the 2pc ret T13 set bonus and how it would affect our rotation. My instinct is that the set bonus would cause a change in priority from "AS > J" to "AS+ > J > AS".

That would be my guess as well.

theckhd wrote:

Kihra wrote:I'm really curious about the 2pc ret T13 set bonus and how it would affect our rotation. My instinct is that the set bonus would cause a change in priority from "AS > J" to "AS+ > J > AS".

That would be my guess as well.

2pc Ret T13 changed so that Judgement *always* grants 1 Holy Power. That just seems like an insane DPS boost for Prot.

With a 100% chance to gain 1 HoPo on Judgement, I think the optimal rotation gets even more interesting, especially at Hit/Exp cap. At Hit/Exp cap, I'm pretty sure you'd do J > AS period, since you'll always have time to use AS+ without losing it and virtually guarantee 6 seconds between SotRs.

Basically if you do CS - J - CS - SotR - CS - ???, you can always use the AS as the next filler and not lose the HoPo it would have generated. Moreover you're giving yourself three chances to proc Grand Crusader. In all likelihood you're looking at a capped rotation where you would be able to fill with J and AS and have six second cycles all the time.

This just seems like a huge DPS boost, but maybe I'm over-estimating it. I strongly suspect a buff to Judgement is coming given the lowering of our 2pc absorb to 25%, so it's hard to tell how to weight Judgement vs. a glyphed AS right now. If they buff Judgement there would be a nice synergy with 2pc Prot and 2pc Ret where you'd have both bonuses encouraging you to prioritize Judgement.

Kihra wrote:Basically if you do CS - J - CS - SotR - CS - ???, you can always use the AS as the next filler and not lose the HoPo it would have generated. Moreover you're giving yourself three chances to proc Grand Crusader. In all likelihood you're looking at a capped rotation where you would be able to fill with J and AS and have six second cycles all the time.

After CS-J-CS-SotR-CS, if you haven't procced GrCr, you'll use AS, finishing the cycle with CS-J-SotR (a 1 GCD pushback of CS), and be in need of a new filler. The next cycle then won't have Judgement available at all, so failing a GrCr proc, you'll do CS-Cons-CS-HW-CS-SotR. Judgement becomes available at the same time as the final CS, so you'll be pushing it back. The next cycle is then, clearly, CS-J-CS-SotR, the initial condition, and AS will be available again regardless of GrCr procs. But you certainly can't get a reliable 6s rotation, you need GrCr procs to get there, nor a reliable 7.5 second one, as the third cycle without an AS proc fails back to 9s.

It's probably worth doing the math to find out if it's worth having some dead-time to get an 8s cycle in that third round, but it's a pretty rare condition anyway. CS-X-CS-J-SotR can be repeated forever, with 0.5s of deadtime. With over 100ms of latency, I believe that cycle can be repeated forever with no apparent deadtime, if necessary.

Meloree wrote:

Kihra wrote:Basically if you do CS - J - CS - SotR - CS - ???, you can always use the AS as the next filler and not lose the HoPo it would have generated. Moreover you're giving yourself three chances to proc Grand Crusader. In all likelihood you're looking at a capped rotation where you would be able to fill with J and AS and have six second cycles all the time.

After CS-J-CS-SotR-CS, if you haven't procced GrCr, you'll use AS, finishing the cycle with CS-J-SotR (a 1 GCD pushback of CS), and be in need of a new filler. The next cycle then won't have Judgement available at all, so failing a GrCr proc, you'll do CS-Cons-CS-HW-CS-SotR.

That situation should be pretty rare. That requires a streak of 5-7 Crusader Strikes with no GC proc. While it will happen, yes, I don't think it will be often enough to be significant.

My intuition is still that J > AS will be the best queue (at hit / hard exp cap), but we'll have to wait until it's coded to find out!

This was probably expected anyway, but the 10% increase to Might applies to Vengeance AP, which for me ends up being something like a total 4K AP buff.

Has any math been done on the PvP glove effect (+5% CS damage)? The current gloves are so well-itemized we want to use them, but if we ended up with a poorly itemized pair of T13 gloves (say, hit/parry), we'd be comparing ~30 stam, ~20 str, ~45 armor, and the 5% CS damage to 200 rating, which I would think might compare pretty favorably.

EDIT: Also, from the stat comparison:

The Vengeance->AP conversion brings Stamina up into fifth place, barely trailing AP. Note that this is true only at 100% vengeance, and Stamina's value as a DPS stat scales down linearly at lower vengeance levels.

Doesn't the value of Stamina drop quickly to zero as soon as you're not capping vengeance?