Questions re: Crit, SimC, & RPPM for Enhancement

[Embermoon]

First, let me say that this post is mainly to figure out how and why our community has overwhelmingly arrived at the conclusion that crit is less valuable than either haste or mastery, for enhancement. My intent isn't to argue against that belief, but simply to understand the methods that people used to arrive at it.

Given the complaints about Enhancement's AoE, as well as single-target damage (in a high-haste build, and with no major cooldowns used), I have to wonder if the theorycrafting community has possibly missed the boat, so to speak, in regard to the value of crit rating. I've seen my own AoE damage perform very well, with more mastery and crit, and less haste.

Further, I have questions about the inner workings of haste, as a function of flurry procs. More crit rating = more flurry uptime = I feel like I have a ton of haste, when really, all I have is crit.

When I look at my character sheet stats, and see "melee haste" jump to a huge number (over 100%) during flurry procs, is flurry doing anything more, behind the scenes, than just simply speeding up my next five melee attacks? Does the game client actually speed up my dot ticks, for the duration that flurry is active? Ability cooldowns?

Or, is the game client differentiating between true haste (i.e. - affects EVERYTHING), and simply haste that affects the # of melee swings?

Is SimC modeling crit accurately, or are there any lingering bugs that might negatively skew crit's value? I recall, from about 6 months ago, that warriors' crit banners were not modeling correctly, and that it was suspected that crit may have been undervalued.

Are the RPPM mechanics affected, in any way, by flurry's "haste" boost?

Are haste and crit (ratings) providing the same relative amounts of crit and haste, or does the same amount of rating make haste (percentages) scale more than crit?

Does the theorycrafting community's belief in haste/mastery > crit take movement into account, - or - is everyone running reforge plots in SimC, based on the assumption(s) of a patchwerk-style fight, and Elite player skill?

I've seen many posts that deride crit's value, citing RNG. However, the more crit you have, and the longer the fight is, the less RNG is an issue. I'd even go so far as to say that, on a patchwerk-style fight, crit should scale just as well as haste, under the assumption of constant contact with the boss.

Also adding to my question of the collective assessment of crit, is that any time I've looked at a reforge plot, of haste vs. mastery vs. crit, each value seems to have always followed the same linear scale; that being that mastery and haste were almost identical, and that crit always showed a very slight angle, from the other two, indicating that crit became increasingly more valuable than either haste or mastery, the less you had, and increasingly less valuable than either haste or mastery, the more you have. What makes us/the theorycrafters so certain that SimC is accurately modeling, the way that Blizz designed the game? Could it be that Blizz actually designed enhancement for this xpac, so that haste, mastery, and crit would all scale equally? Or, is that a pipe dream, to think that blizz could achieve such a balance between the three stats?

If all three stats do scale equally, then it seems to me, that mathematically, you'd want haste = crit = mastery, or as close to it, as possible. I say this, based on the assumption that we could view our dps as being a product of the three stats, as indicated in the following chart. If so, then the closer the three are to a perfect balance, the greater our dps. Note that I'm not a math major, so math gurus, please feel free to educate me, if I have something wrong:

Mastery...........1,000............1,499.............2.............500...............999.. ........2,998
Haste..............1,000............1,499..........2,996........2,000..............1,002.. .........1
Crit.................1,000...............2...............2.............500................ 999.............1
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Product.....1,000,000,000....4,494,002......11,984....500,000,000....999,997,002....2,998

Lastly, before I go do a bunch of expensive in-game testing, with reforging and re-gemming, and doing a series of training dummy tests, has anyone done any in-game testing of any of this, to further conclude that crit doesn't provide enough benefit, to ever bother reforging or gemming for it?

[shadowboy]

Flurry doesn't just increase your attack speed, it gives you 50% more benefit from haste rating, so that's more realppm proc rate, plus you only need 283 haste rating to gain 1% haste instead of 425. All you need is enough crit for good flurry uptime, beyond that you aren't really benefitting from it.

Keep this in mind, 1% crit is only 1% additional damage, and it takes 600 crit rating to get that 1%. 1% haste may not be quite 1% damage--but you only need 283 haste rating to get that 1%, once flurry has 100% uptime. 12.9% crit is the median crit chance needed to proc flurry within 5 swings (that is, at 12.9% crit, you'll get a crit within 5 swings or less, 50% of the time, and 50% of the time it will take more than 5). You can get this amount of crit from agility alone, and it's ignoring crits from lava lash, stormstrike, and windfury attack--just autoattacks.

Point for point, crit also does not give as many maelstrom weapon procs as haste will, and once flurry uptime is high, crit doesn't give you any additional MW procs.

It all comes down to this: all you need is enough crit to get high flurry uptime (100% is not even required), and haste will offer you more benefit.

[Embermoon]

Ah, yes, I was completely forgetting about the added haste benefit from flurry - thanks for reminding me.

After writing that book, on Friday, I went home and tested my solo single-target dps, on the training dummies. I still had Agi-centric gemming at the time, and found that a crit-centric reforge strategy was just an overall dps loss.

I decided to take a leap of faith, and trust Mr Robot's advice, that I was at the point to switch from a mastery-favoring build, to a haste-favoring build, including gemming. I'm not sure that I'm far enough in gear to see much of a dps difference yet, but I love the feel of the haste I have, now.

[Ryethe]

I see tons of people going full haste right now and tbh I'm not quite sure what they are getting at. I've run multiple simulations and even at 516 ilvl haste reforging and geming is a straight up DPS loss (by about 1500 DPS). Sure you can say sims are patchwerk and whatnot but that only makes haste worse since movement will only further hurt the value of haste since you have a harder time sticking to the boss, which it is wholly dependent on. mastery on the other hand retains more value while moving.

Not saying we won't want to be haste this tier but I think people are jumping on the haste bandwagon far to quickly

[Nitwit]

I see tons of people going full haste right now and tbh I'm not quite sure what they are getting at. I've run multiple simulations and even at 516 ilvl haste reforging and geming is a straight up DPS loss (by about 1500 DPS). Sure you can say sims are patchwerk and whatnot but that only makes haste worse since movement will only further hurt the value of haste since you have a harder time sticking to the boss, which it is wholly dependent on. mastery on the other hand retains more value while moving.

Not saying we won't want to be haste this tier but I think people are jumping on the haste bandwagon far to quickly

Chances are they're seeing a haste stat weight that's artificially high due to them having a low amount of haste and then just rolling with it instead of doing reforge plots / etc. to determine an optimal balance of stats.

[Embermoon]

In my case, the last reforge plot I ran showed haste as a tiny smidgen above mastery, as well. But, I don't trust SimC 100%, so I like to factor in other sources.

[kreearra]

I see tons of people going full haste right now and tbh I'm not quite sure what they are getting at. I've run multiple simulations and even at 516 ilvl haste reforging and geming is a straight up DPS loss (by about 1500 DPS). Sure you can say sims are patchwerk and whatnot but that only makes haste worse since movement will only further hurt the value of haste since you have a harder time sticking to the boss, which it is wholly dependent on. mastery on the other hand retains more value while moving.

Not saying we won't want to be haste this tier but I think people are jumping on the haste bandwagon far to quickly

at full heroic T15 gear with PE+AcS
~Haste = 2.35
~agi = 4.60
~mastery = 2.00
in T14 and T15 normal agility is still king but with PE+AcS talents haste is much better than mastery.