Legion Theorycrafting [7.3, All specs]

[Deleted]

Hey Effinhunter thanks for your good work.
I have question can you make comparison for trinkets BM for mythic+ like 3/6/9 targets or so? Trying to figureout best trinkets for mythic+ BM.
Thanks in advance.

[Effinhunter]

Legion Mythic Dungeon Gear for MM @ 1 Target shows the BM results.

Icy Veins lists Haste as being the worst stat for BM (pre expansion patch) I'm interested in why that will change in Legion, will Hati benifit so much from Haste?

Thanks for the catch. This was apparently the talent sims for 1 target. If there's something else I'm missing, please let me know. Silly copy/paste errors! As others have noted, Icy Veins is currently showing level 100. We're working on a profile that is mythic dungeon geared at level 110. I need to work on stat plots so people can see that too, as well as potion inclusion.

@silverstarzs

If you don't want to take Barrage (which is really what can cause crazy pulls in dungeons), the best you can hope for appears to be the combination of Steady Focus, True Aim, Patient Sniper, A Murder of Crows, and Sidewinder.

Top MM Single Target All Talent Combinations (from run on 8/13/2016)


Barrage or Volley are pretty much mandatory for multi-target of 3+ mobs though. I really can't recommend enough going with the stock talent combination of Lone Wolf, Lock and Load (or TA, really), Patient Sniper, Barrage and Sidewinders.

What I would recommend, instead of changing your talents, is to instead roam around a highly populated mob area that you can handle dpsing without much problem, regardless of how many you pull. When I was testing out Sidewinders and Barrage mechanics, I used the area of mobs to the left as you are looking at the Hellfire Citadel instance. To the left, there are lots of Hulking Berserkers and Dragoons and all kinds of mobs just standing around there. If I were you, I'd practice Sidewinders with these. Understand the cone it uses, how facing matters, and things like that. Test this in combination with Marked Shot because honestly, that interaction is really kind of bizarre if you end up turning away from the targets you Marked with Sidewinders. It seemed like if the targets are still in front of you, the Marked Target is consumed up to the distance you can shoot with autoshot. Behind you, it seemed like it was more 40y (this knowledge comes in handy if you have to kite ).

I also played around with this a lot in Mythic ID while trying once again to get that damned Kihras warforged. ID is mostly open area with mobs spaced out in really predictable, easy to view distances.

As with anything, practice is important. If you understand the 50y range of Barrage, you know where you can and cannot stand while using it. You can play with your facing so you are essentially just using the sides of your conal to sculpt your Barrage away from other packs. You can try this throughout HFC right now, for instance right after Socrethar going toward Tyrant (after the silly portals), you can work on positioning yourself so you don't barrage additional packs going into Tyrant's room.

I would not advise avoiding AoE talents that are useful. I would advise practicing so you understand the actual range and mechanics of both Sidewinders and Barrage (and Marked Shot), since all of these are going to be important during Legion raids, as the talents and builds currently look for the foreseeable future.

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Hey Effinhunter thanks for your good work.
I have question can you make comparison for trinkets BM for mythic+ like 3/6/9 targets or so? Trying to figureout best trinkets for mythic+ BM.
Thanks in advance.

Yeah, I can look into that. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Xuven]

Increases ability dmg and crit chance , think thats what he meant.

Oh, the pet's charge increases it's damage also, by 25% even. If you can manage to use the move ability and get him to charge, it's a big buff and often triggers Hunting Companion.

I really think this should be looked into

[Deleted]

Oh, the pet's charge increases it's damage also, by 25% even. If you can manage to use the move ability and get him to charge, it's a big buff and often triggers Hunting Companion.

I really think this should be looked into

You are still losing auto attack dmg on your pet and not to mention , in raid environment wouldn't work too well , if at all. Imagine having to do raid mechanics while also worrying about moving your pet in and out of bosses melee range.

[Derian]

Yep, any attacks that come from your pet benefit from the +10% damage/+10% crit chance that Spiked Collar confers.

Doesn't seem like flanking strike does, the pet portion did the exact same damage per cast (14737) as both Ferocity and Tenacity when I tested just now.

[3clipse]

Doesn't seem like flanking strike does, the pet portion did the exact same damage per cast (14737) as both Ferocity and Tenacity when I tested just now.

You're right, I derped on the wording of Spiked Collar, the flat damage is only for Basic Attacks. It should increase crit strike though.

[Effinhunter]

Jade posted a new APL and some different gear that he appears to be putting into the new default Legion MM APL. I'm tweaking around his and swol's APL as well as inserting Marked Shot at higher priorities, as I noted back on page 4 of this thread. Here are the results for several fight scenarios.

Simcraft source

MM APL Tweaks, Single Target, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, 50k iterations


MM APL Tweaks, Three Target, 50k iterations, 20s fixed time (includes true shot for 15s of 20s or 3/4 of time)


MM APL Tweaks, Three Target, 50k iterations, 60s fixed time (includes true shot for 15s of 60s or 1/4 of time)


MM APL Tweaks, Six Target, 50k iterations, 20s fixed time (includes true shot for 15s of 20s or 3/4 of time)


MM APL Tweaks, Six Target, 50k iterations, 60s fixed time (includes true shot for 15s of 60s or 1/4 of time)


The changes I made to Marked Shot usage are in the actions.sidewinders list and essentially use a Marked Shot in one of three locations in this listing (corresponding to 3 levels of priority higher than where it is currently being used). Why would I think Marked Shot should be higher in the list? Because the DPE for Marked Shot is absurd (especially for only 30 focus) and putting it 4 levels down the list is unlikely to be its best usage. This is especially true in AoE as the DPE for Marked Shot with 6 targets goes to 2.65M!

Are either of these three options actually the best APLs possible? Highly unlikely. If I get more time to look into them, I may try to rewrite some of this. It looks really complicated for what should be a pretty simple MM APL. Anyway, I'm going to start using my newer mm_marks_underwind_old_gear profile as a base for the potions tests, as it performs better than the old APL and Jade's APL on all tests. Just thought I'd outline why I'm making the changes. I had talked about upping the MarkS priority back on page 4, but other sims got in the way!

[Xuven]

You are still losing auto attack dmg on your pet and not to mention , in raid environment wouldn't work too well , if at all. Imagine having to do raid mechanics while also worrying about moving your pet in and out of bosses melee range.

I have been doing it, and seeing some great Flanking Strike crits from my pet. The 25% damage bonus from charge DOES work with Flanking Strike.

A /cast Charge(Tenacity Ability) /cast Flanking Strike macro has been working well for me.

/petmoveto macro has been working well, you only have to move it 8 yards from the boss.

[Nakauri]

.... Legion MM APL.

As mentioned in the other thread -
Large fixes are going out to the SimC Marksmanship engine. You can see them summarized here:
https://trueshotlodge.ca/forums/inde....msg331#msg331
Which was an investigation stemming between comparisons between SimC, AMR and mismatched game values:
https://trueshotlodge.ca/forums/inde....msg329#msg329

Once these changes are in the nightly build Marksmanship will be in a more finalized version to be retweaked with its APL again.
The first post of that same thread will get you started with SimC for anyone who is new to tweaking APL. Hit the spoiler dropdown:
https://trueshotlodge.ca/forums/index.php?topic=42.0
The same process can be done on AMRs APL by clicking the copy button at:
http://beta.askmrrobot.com/wow/theor...p&version=beta

Ideally, archive any changes that are of note on the TSL forum so they're easier to find.

[Effinhunter]

Yeah, Nakauri and I were talking about this in discord. I'm going to post the following potion sims, but understand some pretty major things are going to be changing in the hunter module and all of this is about to change. Apparently, Trick Shot and Trueshot were not working correctly and should see big buffs. You can see that Trueshot is not providing any haste in the potion sims below (if it was providing haste, the RPPM would have proc'd more and dps for the potion usage during Trueshot should have gone up).

BM potions, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source


MM potions, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source


SV potions, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source


I'll run these again shortly after the new fixes to Trueshot are available. I'll also be rerunning all the MM talent sims.

[EliteNightKnight]

I strongly believe that once MM hunter gets Ullr's Feather Snowshoes legendary (The remaining cooldown on Trueshot is reduced by 1.0 sec each time you cast a damaging Shot) + Quick Shot artifact trait (with relics) it will outperform BM.

3 minutes cd on Trueshot.
2.5 minutes with 3/3 trait
2 minutes with 3/3 trait + 3 relics (6/6)
With Ullr's Feather Snowshoes I think we can reduce cd to 1 minute.

Yeah, that's extreme case - you need legendary and 3 relics, but these items are obtainable.

[silverstarzs]

If you don't want to take Barrage (which is really what can cause crazy pulls in dungeons), the best you can hope for appears to be the combination of Steady Focus, True Aim, Patient Sniper, A Murder of Crows, and Sidewinder.

Thanks for that. How many artifact talents is the sim for?

I really can't recommend enough going with the stock talent combination of Lone Wolf, Lock and Load (or TA, really), Patient Sniper, Barrage and Sidewinders.

Yea, I understand that . . . but it sounds like perhaps you have not spent much time in the beta M+ dungeons? In some of them barrage + sidewinder are just fine, in some you can work around it (with positioning or just holding them for parts), but in some your team is going to hate you no matter what - you are either going to pull shit, or force extra time to clear mobs, or hold your shots and do lowish dps. . . . . .So given how 'mandatory' sidewinder really is in that sim - the question is how many artifact traits you need to put in BM and be competitive with an MM who is holding fire on barrage and sidewinder? Is it few enough traits that it would be easy to level up and not gimp the MM in raid, or does it require too much AP taken away from MM?

...........

[Effinhunter]

I strongly believe that once MM hunter gets Ullr's Feather Snowshoes legendary (The remaining cooldown on Trueshot is reduced by 1.0 sec each time you cast a damaging Shot) + Quick Shot artifact trait (with relics) it will outperform BM.

3 minutes cd on Trueshot.
2.5 minutes with 3/3 trait
2 minutes with 3/3 trait + 3 relics (6/6)
With Ullr's Feather Snowshoes I think we can reduce cd to 1 minute.

Yeah, that's extreme case - you need legendary and 3 relics, but these items are obtainable.

When Trueshot gets fixed in Simcraft downloads, I'll rerun the legendaries, talents, etc.

[Tokee]

Looking at Survival Legendaries, the Call of the Wild bracers seem to be the bees knees, and should be the go-to. Reducing Aspect of the Eagle to ~48 second cooldown (with Embrace of the Aspects artifact talent) seems to be huge DPS increase. Also having Aspect of the Cheetah and Turtle up every ~72 seconds will give us a huge boost to our survivability.

Hellbrine (waist) seems to be a solid second Legendary, and in my opinion would be ideal for priority switching once we gain access to a second Legendary slot. Speccing into Farstrider would also be best, as the sheer amount of crit on gear would almost ensure Harpoon is up every time for targets. That extra 30% is going to be huge.

Every other Legendary seems rather banal. Voodoo would beneficial for an extra survivability cooldown, but offers nothing for DPS output. Ring, Neck, Leggings, and Boots seem to offer very little for DPS output and would contribute very little to utility through their function.

[Effinhunter]

After trueshot fixes. Also, I added deadly_grace potion usage to the SV profile.

Single target potion usage

BM potions, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source


MM potions, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source


SV potions, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source


Deadly Grace and Old War are basically neck and neck for SV, but the trend seems to indicate that Old War will start pulling away into the higher ilvl gear profiles. Old War mimics your melee with mirrors, so as you gear up, I'm pretty sure it's going to pull ahead. I can run some tests on this later when I'm more confident in the wowhead item database. Right now, the item levels just don't seem right at all for most of the raiding gear.

Rerunning talents, legendaries, etc. next and updating profiles with potions and MM apl changes.

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Scale Factors at 110 Mythic Dungeon Ilvl

Includes best potion usage from sims and MM APL updates

BM Single Target, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source on first post


MM Single Target, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source on first post


SV Single Target, 50k iterations, 450s +/- 20%, Simcraft source on first post


BTW, I'm still using the spell overrides for SV mastery.

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Running talents next. Will be a while.

[Shadowes]

Yo effin, what spec is it looking like I should play for each boss in EN?

[Yuyn]

BTW, I'm still using the spell overrides for SV mastery.

If you're using a new enough build, you should drop both overrides. They were hardcoded into sc_hunter.cpp in b03b9ff6b0369, about two days ago.

[Deleted]

So haste and mastery are the best secondary stats for all 3 specs ("on papper"), that will make gearing a lot easier i guess. But mastery still seems pretty low for survival i think. I am not a huge fan of rng masteries.
I still hope for explosive trap radius buff, surv aoe seems pretty low.

[Azortharion]

Haste and Mastery are not the best stats for Survival, the scale factors are misleading. Mastery is the worst stat for Survival if anything. >_> But yeah, eat up whatever sims are thrown at you.

[Noocta]

Stats weight being how they are is probably what will make having an ranged off spec for survival main pretty hard it seems.