[WINDWALKER] 7.X Discussion thread

[Deleted]

I dont know of anyone who has run sims for "BiS" in t20, mostly because thats what I do, and I haven't done it yet.

Just a shame it's such an abysmal pair of set bonuses. I tend to avoid BiS lists, but sims about how useful the bonuses are are always useful! What are your thoughts on us WWs still running T19 2pc, particularly with a Serenity build, as the lowered CD really helps there (for looping RSK-SCK-BoK, with the odd SotW if it's off CD)?

Thanks for all the PoS articles; really nice to get an experienced and skilled (hint: I'm nowhere near either!) WW's viewpoint on the changes.

[Deleted]

Alright lads. As a returning player i have a question i hope you can help me with. I have the legendary Chest and Wrists and atm im seeing these as the best 2 legendaries? if using these is WDP or Serenity the Higher of the 2 DPS wise? IS there much of a difference? also how do i go about using the chest if using Serenity? Thanks alot lads.

[Deleted]

Alright lads. As a returning player i have a question i hope you can help me with. I have the legendary Chest and Wrists and atm im seeing these as the best 2 legendaries? if using these is WDP or Serenity the Higher of the 2 DPS wise? IS there much of a difference? also how do i go about using the chest if using Serenity? Thanks alot lads.

Do you have the 2pc T19? If you do, then certainly go Serenity for ST (chest is only BiS for ST). No resources actually state this, but you want to do two things:

1) Extend Serenity as much as possible; RSK-SotW-SCK-RSK-SCK-BoK (basically loop RSK-SCK-BoK, with SotW in when it's off CD)..., and end on a FoF. Delay FoF here, DON'T use it on CD. I picked this up from a simcraft analysis, and it was a 50k+ boost to my dummy DPS pretty much instantly. Not entirely sure if this is worth doing without 2PC, as that would require RSK-SotW-SCK-BoK-SCK-RSK-SCK-BoK-SCK-BoK-RSK-FoF, but probably is worth it still. Worth testing on a dummy.

2) Use a WA or similar to alert you when you're at ~15+ stacks of the buff, then use CJL when you've got dead time in your rotation. Or, on some fights like Tich, when you're forced out of melee range (i.e. Pillars).

[Ustabil]

2) Use a WA or similar to alert you when you're at ~15+ stacks of the buff, then use CJL when you've got dead time in your rotation. Or, on some fights like Tich, when you're forced out of melee range (i.e. Pillars).

You almost never want to use CJL at as low as 15 stacks, after playing around with the chest, The best part isnt the DMG or the raw stats from it, Rather it comes from the energy regen you can get while at 20 Stack. A good timed CJL at 20 stacks will reduce your downtime a lot. Sure certaint circumstances using at whenever stacks can be ok, but most of the time, its best to do at 20 stacks

Also check out http://www.peakofserenity.com/ all you want to know is here, most content there is heavily tested, so no missinformation either =)

[Deleted]

You almost never want to use CJL at as low as 15 stacks, after playing around with the chest, The best part isnt the DMG or the raw stats from it, Rather it comes from the energy regen you can get while at 20 Stack. A good timed CJL at 20 stacks will reduce your downtime a lot. Sure certaint circumstances using at whenever stacks can be ok, but most of the time, its best to do at 20 stacks

Also check out http://www.peakofserenity.com/ all you want to know is here, most content there is heavily tested, so no missinformation either =)

There's literally nothing on Peak about using Serenity/chest; about all there is is "don't delay any big CDs for it, and don't go over 20st", so being aware when it's over 15 lets me usually cast it at around 17ish during downtime. To me, the main advantage of the chest is that it fills those dead points in the rotation when you're waiting for stuff to come off CD.

[Ustabil]

But then ure not using it to its best.
When at 20 stacks it uses 0 energry, and therefore not only can you use it during deadtime, but can also use it to gain lets of energy without having to just stand there still AA-ing


Also direct quote from PS
"HOW IT WORKS:
When you use any ability that use Chi, you gain a stack. Once you hit high stacks, preferably 20, but 18 or 19 are acceptable"
- http://www.peakofserenity.com/windwa...e/legendaries/

Im not trying to attack you, i just dont want missinformation spread around =)

[Deleted]

But then ure not using it to its best.
When at 20 stacks it uses 0 energry, and therefore not only can you use it during deadtime, but can also use it to gain lets of energy without having to just stand there still AA-ing


Also direct quote from PS
"HOW IT WORKS:
When you use any ability that use Chi, you gain a stack. Once you hit high stacks, preferably 20, but 18 or 19 are acceptable"
- http://www.peakofserenity.com/windwa...e/legendaries/

Im not trying to attack you, i just dont want missinformation spread around =)

Hmm, my bad, thought it said to use it when highish+dead time but not to overcap. Was sur I'd seen that, maybe it was outdated. Although, I will point out that you do want to use it at around 14ish stacks pre-serenity (Serenity is, what, 11 chi spenders? 4 RSK's with two in between each, plus a FoF at the end, so that'd be 5 overcapped at 14), so don't want to overcap too much. My point about Serenity being almost completely unmentioned (which wasn't aimed as a dig at anyone, just an observation, presumably because it's relatively recently that people have been finding that rotation) stands, though.

[Babylonius]

Hmm, my bad, thought it said to use it when highish+dead time but not to overcap. Was sur I'd seen that, maybe it was outdated. Although, I will point out that you do want to use it at around 14ish stacks pre-serenity (Serenity is, what, 11 chi spenders? 4 RSK's with two in between each, plus a FoF at the end, so that'd be 5 overcapped at 14), so don't want to overcap too much. My point about Serenity being almost completely unmentioned (which wasn't aimed as a dig at anyone, just an observation, presumably because it's relatively recently that people have been finding that rotation) stands, though.

The whole part of that page:

HOW IT WORKS:
When you use any ability that use Chi, you gain a stack. Once you hit high stacks, preferably 20, but 18 or 19 are acceptable if you have the downtime space to fit a full channel of Crackling Jade Lightning in without delaying anything else, you can channel Crackling Jade Lightning. This will both do damage and allow you time to regen energy and other resources, as well as give you time to plan out the next few abilities. If you’re above 14ish stacks before Serenity, you’ll want to clear it before going into Serenity so as to not waste.

- - - Updated - - -

You can run BiS on AMR, that's what I meant.

Considering how off AMR has been for t19 in terms of stat weights, I'm not sure I'd trust the BiS from the AMR generated weights.

[Deleted]

The whole part of that page:

Honestly? I missed some of the info on that page, I do apologize. I'd already admitted and apologized for being wrong wrt the chest, and it's kind of mentioned under the bracers on there about how to use serenity (which, due to my poor wording everybody assumed I meant just with the chest). Was more hunting in the wrong place for it, i think.

[Babylonius]

Honestly? I missed some of the info on that page, I do apologize. I'd already admitted and apologized for being wrong wrt the chest, and it's kind of mentioned under the bracers on there about how to use serenity (which, due to my poor wording everybody assumed I meant just with the chest). Was more hunting in the wrong place for it, i think.

Not a problem, that's good feedback for me in considering how I set up each page.

[Zoopercat]

Considering how off AMR has been for t19 in terms of stat weights, I'm not sure I'd trust the BiS from the AMR generated weights.

It sounds like you might be looking at the default weights, which are just based off one type of character. When people run a custom strategy, they get customized results: http://i.imgur.com/r2gpuBW.jpg

Lastly, when you run a custom setup - we also sim every item with a proc and use that data when ranking items with procs. So having that info when generating a custom BiS is really helpful.

On the other hand, it something seems really off, let me know and we'll look into it!

[Babylonius]

It sounds like you might be looking at the default weights, which are just based off one type of character. When people run a custom strategy, they get customized results: http://i.imgur.com/r2gpuBW.jpg

Lastly, when you run a custom setup - we also sim every item with a proc and use that data when ranking items with procs. So having that info when generating a custom BiS is really helpful.

On the other hand, it something seems really off, let me know and we'll look into it!

AMR has always really loved crit more than mastery and other stats and none of us have been able to make any other resource do the same. When we brought it up months ago, we were told that we were wrong and AMR was right, despite SimC, spreadsheets, and napkin math pointing elsewhere.

[Zoopercat]

I can ask Swol to talk to you more in-depth about it, since he plays a Monk.

It sounds like you're referring to default weights still? I ran a custom strategy for your character and see that crit is slightly favored over mastery for lower gear levels, and mastery is preferred at higher gear levels. Here's the report for your character if you want to check it out or use it: http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/simula...2e1e8589a401ed

Also, remember that SimC's stat weight functions are a lot more basic. It only looks at 2 data points per stat and draws a line between them to get the slope for your stat weight (2 data points isn't statistically sound methodology). The stat weights also don't take stat interactions into account on SimC (reforge plots do, which can be used to interpret results and eyeball stat weight adjustments).

AMR's stat weights look at 1000s of data points, run a multiple linear regression on them, and also takes stat interactions into account. It's been a while since we chatted about that, so hit me up if you have any questions.

I'm not saying the sim is perfect (bugs happen.. in AMR, SimC, in warcraft itself). So if you do find something that would make the results odd, let me know and I'll dig into it. For other things, remember you can customize nearly everything. Happy to help with that as well.

[Swol]

Well, I can say for sure that I've been over the AMR Windwalker implementation from top to bottom. I have one small update to Thunderfist sitting on our test servers that I still need to push to the live site once we're done with testing some new features, but it is a very minor change in DPS.

There are many situations where Crit makes sense as a stronger stat than mastery. In particular, when you are using Xuen. That shifts a very large chunk of your damage into something not affected by mastery. Our default weights are for a character without particular legendary items or set bonuses, so they use Xuen, which is optimal in that situation. Hit Combo pulls ahead as you get some of the better gear and items.

Certain items significantly increase the value of Mastery, notably the wrists and boots. Conversely, if you have proc trinkets, like Arcanogolem Digit, the value of Mastery goes down. If we look at a Spellblade sim for my monk, we get something like this (I usually use fights with multi-target for my monk gearing strategies since that is what we're best at.):
http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/simula...8c6617a06785cb (903.3k DPS)

We can see here that about 11% of the damage I do is not affected by Mastery in any way (Thunderfist, Arcane Swipe, Touch of Karma, Crosswinds, Satyr). Crit doesn't affect Touch of Karma either, so it's about 9% of my damage that is affected by Crit and not Mastery. This is why it is not surprising to me that getting more Crit ends up being slightly (very slightly) better than getting more Mastery. I also don't have the wrists or boots (fml).

Also, I use the Machine Learning instead of stat weights. Getting no mastery at all would be bad. There is going to be an optimal relationship between crit and mastery depending on your gear. For my gear, getting more Crit than Mastery yields higher theoretical DPS. I know from experience that using this gearing strategy works. For the raids I do, I consistently parse in the top 90%, and often top 95% for my item level, even without the best legendary items. So, using gear with more Crit than Mastery is certainly viable.

If the loot gods ever give me the better legendary items, I'm sure I'll shift more towards Mastery.

We can spot-check the above simulation and do it again by dropping 3000 crit and putting it into mastery, flip-flopping the ratio:
http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/simula...de032a52562e96 (898.8k DPS)

Getting more Mastery doesn't make the damage go up for my character right now. (It also doesn't really make it go down noticeably.)

Right now we recommend that people calculate custom gearing strategies for their character if they care about small differences in theoretical DPS. Once we have "version 2" of our gearing strategies done in a few weeks, the default "auto" strategy will be able to cover a lot more cases out of the box than it does right now. We'll let people know when those are ready.

EDIT: I ran a gearing strategy last night for my current gear and I see this:
http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/simula...4a72d07a7475cc

Essentially Crit and Mastery are equal and I want a balance of the two stats on my gear. The 4 piece bonus gives me a constant 2000 mastery, so I want a tad more Crit on my gear to keep the balance. The important thing here is that for my gear, stacking either stat to the exclusion of the other is going to be sub-optimal.

[Babylonius]

EDIT: I ran a gearing strategy last night for my current gear and I see this:
http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/simula...4a72d07a7475cc

Essentially Crit and Mastery are equal and I want a balance of the two stats on my gear. The 4 piece bonus gives me a constant 2000 mastery, so I want a tad more Crit on my gear to keep the balance. The important thing here is that for my gear, stacking either stat to the exclusion of the other is going to be sub-optimal.

Well I was going to try and show how the other resources were valueing stats, but nothing seems to agree right now.

Raidbots has you using Xuen instead of Hit Combo, and the AMR page is using the Spellblade, so not quite single target, so I can't run equivalent stuff since I'm at work.

[Gib Lover]

AMR works okay for me when I tell it to lock the boots on so it stops telling me to put on the gloves. If I run a custom gearset and tell it to just optimize my best in bags it puts way too much emphasis on crit and by it's own sims I'm doing a good chunk less dps.

Also what the h*ck is that vers stat prio

[Babylonius]

For contrast, here's my monk on raidbots and my spreadsheet:

Raidbots:
Agi 20.3
Mastery 15.83
Vers 15.27
Crit 14.96
Haste 12.28

Spreadsheet:
Agility 20.990
Mastery 16.421
Versatility 16.003
Crit 15.653
Haste 13.511

The numbers aren't far off and the order is the same.

[Juliansfist]

Aside from haste aren't the differences so small that it's basically irrelevant?

You could consider other benefits - crit also affects our heals which although small could potentially save your hide.
Versatility offers a little extra survival which could also be very useful.

[Zoopercat]

Gib - what is your character name and realm? I'll run a custom set and then run some tests.

[Gib Lover]

Gib - what is your character name and realm? I'll run a custom set and then run some tests.

NA Bleeding Hollow, Burzu