WoD Theorycraft testing: Tiger Strikes

[Rockets]

I did some testing on Tiger Strikes last night, just to confirm what we'd theorized already. I have a nice 20 minute log that I'll share once WarcraftLogs stops thinking it's only 1m10s long. Skip to the TL;DR at the end if you aren't interested in the methodology.

Spec: Brewmaster, Level 100
Target: Mythic damage dummy
Weapon: Dual-wielding the pvp swords, 2.6 speed
Haste: 12.22%
Multistrike: 26.30%
Crit: 30.35%
No weapon enchants or trinkets with procs.

Over 20 minutes I got 1014 autos, of which 209 missed (20.6%) and 255 were crits (25.1%). This is attacking a +3 of course though, so it's to be expected that miss is a bit high and crit is a bit low.

On top of that I got another 544 multistrikes, of which 145 were crits. That's 26.6% crit rate on the multis, so crit suppression is working as expected here too. You get two chances to MS per hit that isn't avoided, so my average effective multistrike here was 33.7% -- about 7.5% higher than the tooltip, so that's about what Tiger Strikes contributed. I don't know if multistrike gets suppressed against higher level mobs like crit does, so maybe TS contributed even more than that.

So out of the 1349 hits that qualified for proccing Tiger Strikes, I got 48 procs total, for an average proc rate of 3.56%. That's rather low; it's supposed to be 5% for dual-wield, but I might have just gotten unlucky; 1349 isn't a lot of trials for something with only a 5% proc rate.

But most importantly, 15 of those 48 procs happened while TS was already up, and showed in the combat log as refreshes. On average these added 3.41 seconds of uptime each; I'd have expected it to average to about 4, ie. distributed evenly across the 8s window, but actually 4 of them happened basically immediately, so I got a proc on the initial hit and then got another on the offhand swing or one of the multistrikes. Ignoring these multi-procs, the other refreshes added an average of 4.66s to the timer.

With my swing speed being 2.32, the refreshes tended to clump up; there were 4 at ~0s, 3 at ~2.3s, 5 at ~3.6s and 3 at ~6.9s. I guess the mainhand and offhand are staying pretty synchronized these days. This does mean that there's a haste breakpoint here; once you bring your swing timer below 2.0s you'll have just enough time to land an extra swing at 7.99s before the buff drops off.

It looks like TS doesn't qualify for the Pandemic rules. If it did then the refreshes at 6.9s should have rolled in the remaining 1.1s and eventually fallen off after another 9.1s, but that didn't happen; they dropped off right at 8s like everything else.

So to math this out properly for a spreadsheet, you need to take into account:

1. how long it takes on average to get a proc while TS is down
2. probability of extending TS with another proc on one of the 3 useful swings (4 if >30% haste) that happen while the buff is up
3. average buff duration including refreshes
4. average uptime as #3/(#1 + #3)
5. #4 * 25% is how much multistrike TS is worth on average

I tried doing the math to express it as a nice formula and ended up with something horribly messy and gave up on it.

TL;DR conclusions:

• Tiger strikes can refresh itself while it's already up.
• Refreshing it early does not benefit from the Pandemic refresh rules.
• You can get multiple procs all at once sometimes, eg. if you're dual-wielding and both hands hit and get a 2x multistrike, you have 6 attacks that can all potentially proc. Getting multiple procs this way has no benefit since it doesn't stack or extend the duration past 8s.
• There is a haste threshold at 30% where you start getting a 4th auto with each hand before the buff falls off, giving you an extra chance to refresh it. For 2h it'll be at 28.57% because of how haste and Way of the Monk interact.

[Hinalover]

I would STRONGLY suggest you re-post this in the Theorycrafting thread. If you cannot, let me know and I'll re-post this. I'm hoping the Pandemic refresh rule is a bug.

[Rockets]

Done. Hopefully CT comes back to that thread at some point; I posted some stuff in there about GotO last week too and he hasn't answered any questions since.

[Totaltotemic]

This is some great work, the haste breakpoint insight wasn't even something that crossed my mind before.