[5.4 PTR] SS Nerf and EF

As of 4-5 days ago having 3 stacks of BoG was enough to be able to cast WoG/EF with the 4P regardless of how much HoPo you have.

Thels wrote:Do we actually still need 3 HoPo when we use the T16 bonus? My understanding was that if we have 3+ BoG, WoG (and thus EF) become free.

No, 3+ BoG just makes it free, there's certainly many options when starting an encounter other than just waiting for 3-5 BoG. Get a 1 BoG EF up if you want, use DP, don't tank first, etc, those first seconds of the fight can really be made less threatening in a few ways.

daishan wrote:As of 4-5 days ago having 3 stacks of BoG was enough to be able to cast WoG/EF with the 4P regardless of how much HoPo you have.

Yeah anything 3 or above BoG will make your next WoG/EF free and cast as if 3 HoPo were used.

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Thanks Theck for crunching out the better numbers and aiding my crusade to use EF! Always appreciate the detailed work.

theckhd wrote:5.3 Results, 4T15:
EF: 313602 dps, 106138 dtps, 105735 hps, 339.5 TMI
SS: 315417 dps, 55366 dtps, 99790 hps, 150.3 TMI

5.4 Results, 4T15:
EF: 257571 dps, 107743 dtps, 106385 hps, 3979.9 TMI
SS: 258832 dps, 74490 dtps, 46100 hps, 10950.4 TMI

Re-reading that, that's a pretty big difference in TMI. If we look at EF, which is getting buffed, our TMI still increases more than tenfold.

What is changing in 5.4 that makes us so much more vulnerable?

Thels wrote:Re-reading that, that's a pretty big difference in TMI. If we look at EF, which is getting buffed, our TMI still increases more than tenfold.

What is changing in 5.4 that makes us so much more vulnerable?

Does TMI work like that tho?
10 times the TMI doesn't mean 10 times as spiky dmg intake, if I understood Thecks original blogs about TMI that is.

I know it's not like we're taking 10 times the damage. However, it is a major difference. Sure, Vengeance is lower, and we no longer get any GC procs off CS, but neither feel like they would have that much impact on TMI.

It just feels like a big difference in numbers, and I wonder what changes cause these differences.

Vengeance nerf, primarily. You're looking at a drop from ~231k Vengeance to ~191k.

Also note that the sim does cast Divine Protection shortly after the pull.

theckhd wrote:Vengeance nerf, primarily. You're looking at a drop from ~231k Vengeance to ~191k.

Also note that the sim does cast Divine Protection shortly after the pull.

mh... that's strange then where does this huge spike in the sim comes from I mentioned earlier? :>

while testing EF yesterday in Flex I basically, as Slootbag sugested, let or other tank start the fight (if posible) while I built some BoG stacks while waiting for my turn.

Since I'm used to open with Holy Avenger, and have yet to find a reason to stop doing that, I don't consider "start of the fight" a real issue. However, I just checked one of the results, and Divine Protection was not glyphed, so it didn't reduce that much damage.

I'm surprised to see Vengeance having such an impact, but upon closer inspection, our HPS with 5.3 SS is way higher than our DTPS, which of course has a serious impact upon TMI. For all EF results, our HPS is slightly smaller than our DTPS, which makes the net total damage we take very small, and thus leave the end results to vary quite a bit more than when our HPS would either be way smaller or way higher than our DTPS

(Spoken about glyphs, all 6 glyphs are listed in the result, but the talents are a link. Since there are also only 6 talents, and talent names are often shorter than glyph names, wouldn't it make more sense to simply list the 6 talents as well? I guess this is a leftover from when talents were actually talent trees.)

Didn't think to check whether Sloot had DP talented, but that would probably explain the early spike.

Regarding the talent reporting: yes, it probably would. Not really my department though. You should suggest it as an enhancement issue: https://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/issues/list

Nice work Theck! Glad to see the EF numbers panning out.

The arguments in favor of SS due to it saving you from a 1-shot aren't considering a key fact: If you were going to be one shot, you should be using a CD. You can't rely on SS to be that life saver as it might not have ticked to refresh in time for the hit.

Looking forward to 5.4. Lots of variables at play for pallies and we're in a good spot. Some meaningful decisions in talents now depending on the fight.

To clarify my statement on SW vs DP: DP will be favored for DPS and fishing for procs if you want to go that route. On fights that you need another reliable cooldown it will be very powerful with the uptime on SHotR and the 20% healing.

Meh, I'm gonna stick to Holy Avenger myself. DP's lack of a cooldown effect doesn't make it an option for me, which leaves SW and HA. Their HoPo generation per use are practically identical, and HA has a lower cooldown, so it'll be available more often.

Has anyone sim'd them to work out there contribution to dps?

Obviously SW and HA favour fights where they line up with high veng portions of the fight.
If there's not an obvious winner for personal survival on an encounter I'll take the highest dps option.

I imagine the winner will depend on the fight: How often the ability can be (or needs to be) used, and how important it is to use that ability at those particular times.

Let's return the discussion to Eternal Flame for a moment (and perhaps someone should change the title of the original message to include EF).

How do we optimize Eternal Flame output? With T16 4pc this is reasonably simple, since as long as you have at least 3 BoG, you don't care about HoPo for EF. Also, since you don't spend HoPo on EF, you thus spend more HoPo on SotR, and thus have more BoG than without the set bonus. You can simply refresh EF the moment you hit 5 BoG, or refresh it just before it runs out if you don't have 5 BoG yet at that point. Since it's off the GCD, you don't have to worry about pushing back CS/J like you would with SS.

However, things become a little more problematic without the set bonus. First, because you actually spend HoPo on EF, your BoG stacks will be lower. You suddenly need 18 HoPo every 30 seconds, rather than 15, to max out that 5 BoG. Secondly, you need to time your EF better. You preferably want to use EF at 5 HoPo and a generator available, so you still have 3 HoPo available in a time of need.

With the set bonus, EF will be great! Without the set bonus, it'll require both decent haste and skill to pull off well. Perhaps newer players should be recommended to stick to SS until they got the 4 piece?

Thels wrote:(and perhaps someone should change the title of the original message to include EF).

Done for you dear.

I think there's still something to be said about refreshing EF with a weaker version of itself.

During high tank damage portions of the fight, which is where these things really matter imo, there's a pretty high chance that you'll want to toss out another EF on yourself to save yourself from death. I've done this pretty often and there are times when I'm been tossing them out pretty frequently via DP when it's proccing a lot.

What I'm concerned about in these situations that doesn't apply to SS is that tossing out another EF to save yourself will result in a significantly smaller dot portion, which will throw the whole comparison out of whack.

Don't get me wrong, I'm probably going to switch to EF right away as well but there's some things we can do with SS that we can't do with EF because of the hopo cost that isn't exactly easily modelled. Doing things like refreshing Ss at high vengeance vs trying to get a larger EF rolling. SS it's a no brainer, but with EF your opportunity cost goes up a fair bit. With high haste and DP this isn't that big of a deal but is still something to consider.

I still think EF is good with or without the 4Pt16 but without it we're going to run into some weird situations. It's probably going to be amazing for the patchwork situations or aoe tanking even without the set bonus but thinking on fights on the ptr that have semi-frequent tank swaps or long periods where you cannot generate HoPo SS might be a more reliable option.

Thanks Worldie.

Refreshing EF just because your vengeance is high won't work. SS is only based on vengeance. EF is also based on current HoPo and BoG. If your vengeance is higher, but your BoG stacks are lower, it's probably not worth it to refresh.

Thels wrote:Thanks Worldie.

Refreshing EF just because your vengeance is high won't work. SS is only based on vengeance. EF is also based on current HoPo and BoG. If your vengeance is higher, but your BoG stacks are lower, it's probably not worth it to refresh.

Does the HoT benefit from BoG? I was under the impression that only the initial heal of EF scaled with BoG stacks. I could be wrong but I thought they changed that in MoP Beta when you could get 200k+ ticks from EF with mastery stacking.

Edit: You can ignore this, I read threads good. It's mentioned in another thread that it was changed at some point 5.3+.

Paoanii wrote:Edit: You can ignore this, I read threads good. It's mentioned in another thread that it was changed at some point 5.3+.

I think it was changed in 5.1.

I did a check to see what low haste values would have for an effect on this. I built a character that used exclusively ToT LFR gear with Strength/Stamina/Hit/Expertise/Mastery/Parry/Dodge, then gemmed and reforged for Hit > Expertise > Haste > Mastery > Dodge/Parry > Crit/Spirit. I pitted the character against a 25 man normal boss, assuming that'll be more in line with the content the character will be performing in T16. That might've been overshooting things.

The character: http://chardev.org/profile/66069-T15LFRSS.html
Sim results with SS: http://thels.nl/t15lfrss.html
Sim results with EF: http://thels.nl/t15lfref.html

With SS, TMI was only 300k. With EF, TMI was a grand 1.6m. And that's with the T15 bonus, which benefits EF more than SS.

I do expect that EF is only advantageous, if we have the haste to quickly build up some BoG stacks. If we don't, EFs output is going to be much lower, and will cause much bigger gaps in SotR.

EDIT: Also, 1% of the SotR were avoided. Does the human racial not apply to SotR in SimC? If so, is that a bug or an adequate representation of in-game?

this would mean that there is a SS/EF Threshold. would be really curious what this Threshold might be

Thels wrote:EDIT: Also, 1% of the SotR were avoided. Does the human racial not apply to SotR in SimC? If so, is that a bug or an adequate representation of in-game?

Definitely a bug, though I have no idea how that would've been introduced. I'll have to do some digging, was this with 530-7?

Thels wrote:I did a check to see what low haste values would have for an effect on this. I built a character that used exclusively ToT LFR gear with Strength/Stamina/Hit/Expertise/Mastery/Parry/Dodge, then gemmed and reforged for Hit > Expertise > Haste > Mastery > Dodge/Parry > Crit/Spirit. I pitted the character against a 25 man normal boss, assuming that'll be more in line with the content the character will be performing in T16. That might've been overshooting things.

The character: http://chardev.org/profile/66069-T15LFRSS.html
Sim results with SS: http://thels.nl/t15lfrss.html
Sim results with EF: http://thels.nl/t15lfref.html

With SS, TMI was only 300k. With EF, TMI was a grand 1.6m. And that's with the T15 bonus, which benefits EF more than SS.

I do expect that EF is only advantageous, if we have the haste to quickly build up some BoG stacks. If we don't, EFs output is going to be much lower, and will cause much bigger gaps in SotR.

EDIT: Also, 1% of the SotR were avoided. Does the human racial not apply to SotR in SimC? If so, is that a bug or an adequate representation of in-game?

*whispers quietly* Psssssst, Thels. Your sim never used EF.

theckhd wrote:

Thels wrote:EDIT: Also, 1% of the SotR were avoided. Does the human racial not apply to SotR in SimC? If so, is that a bug or an adequate representation of in-game?

Definitely a bug, though I have no idea how that would've been introduced. I'll have to do some digging, was this with 530-7?

Yes. I haven't checked with other races yet, to see if it's really the racial.

Paoanii wrote:*whispers quietly* Psssssst, Thels. Your sim never used EF.

Boy, do I feel stupid now!

Guess I'll have to mess with the action list. I'll try something tomorrow, if I have time for that, or perhaps Theck is willing to share the action list he used?

Having never used SimC i could be very wrong here but the default action list doesn't contain Eternal Flame. It has two lines for the use of sacred shield if selected as a talent but none for EF.