GC: Prove 5-10% DPS difference between two specs = FIX

[Endus]

"Scaling" is how much your DPS increases with stats. It's an issue when your class starts our strong, and falls way down the charts as people gear up, or you start low and fall further and further behind relative to the pack as time goes on. That's not really the case with Shaman specs; Enhancement's been fine, Resto's apparent scaling issues are ENTIRELY due to how their Mastery works and is affected by increased gear levels on the rest of the raid group and healers, and Elemental started low and held place; Elemental's issue is that they're just tuned too low, not that scaling is giving them an issue.

[zenga]

"Scaling" is how much your DPS increases with stats. It's an issue when your class starts our strong, and falls way down the charts as people gear up, or you start low and fall further and further behind relative to the pack as time goes on. That's not really the case with Shaman specs; Enhancement's been fine, Resto's apparent scaling issues are ENTIRELY due to how their Mastery works and is affected by increased gear levels on the rest of the raid group and healers, and Elemental started low and held place; Elemental's issue is that they're just tuned too low, not that scaling is giving them an issue.

Just to make sure I understand what is meant by scaling:

Spec X has 4 stats
stat A with a stat weight of 4
stat B with a stat weight of 3
stat C with a stat weight of 1.6
stat D with a stat weight of 1.4

Spec Y has 4 stats
stat A with a stat weight of 3.9
stat B with a stat weight of 2.8
stat C with a stat weight of 1.3
stat D with a stat weight of 1.1

For the sake of the example X and Y have similar spells / mechanics, and Y has always a lower stat weight than X for each stat.
Let's say that at the starting point they do equal damage, but as both acquire more stats due to gear, X pulls ahead in damage compared to Y, because the stat weights are higher, i.e. X gains more from getting 1 additional stat than Y does.

That is always what I understood scaling meant? Unless I miss something ... so if x is the fire mage and y the ele shaman, then ele scales worse with gear than the mage, correct?

[Endus]

Just to make sure I understand what is meant by scaling:

Spec X has 4 stats
stat A with a stat weight of 4
stat B with a stat weight of 3
stat C with a stat weight of 1.6
stat D with a stat weight of 1.4

Spec Y has 4 stats
stat A with a stat weight of 3.9
stat B with a stat weight of 2.8
stat C with a stat weight of 1.3
stat D with a stat weight of 1.1

For the sake of the example X and Y have similar spells / mechanics, and Y has always a lower stat weight than X for each stat.
Let's say that at the starting point they do equal damage, but as both acquire more stats due to gear, X pulls ahead in damage compared to Y, because the stat weights are higher, i.e. X gains more from getting 1 additional stat than Y does.

That is always what I understood scaling meant? Unless I miss something ... so if x is the fire mage and y the ele shaman, then ele scales worse with gear than the mage, correct?

It's less useful to look at specific stats, since itemization can shift that slightly, the biggest factor comes from Intellect/Agility/Strength, and then the cumulative of all the secondaries, as well as other factors like weapon speed for melee.

To better explain it in a simpler way, though, if most specs are gaining about 20% DPS over 15 ilvls, and one spec only gains 10%, that's a scaling problem. In practice, if everyone started at about 100k, you'd see the poorly scaling spec start out even, and then end up at 110k when everyone else is at 120k.

Elemental's issue is that they're starting at 90k and gaining +20%, not that they're starting at 100k and gaining +10%, from the data I've seen. If they had a scaling issue AND were starting at 90k, they'd be hitting 99k when everyone else hit 120k, meaning the gap's gone from a 10k difference to 20k; it starts getting increasingly worse, and that's not really happening (maybe very slightly, but it's not the major factor).


It gets a bit more complicated in that even direct numbers tweaks are adjustments to scaling, so these aren't entirely separate issues. My counter example would be T11 at the start of Cataclysm; Elemental started fairly strong, and fell off the bottom of the chart by the end of the tier. That was a scaling problem, and you could tell because of how our position relative to other DPS was getting increasingly worse.

Graphically (and this is a graph from ages ago, I'm just making points regarding average slope and such though);


The little red bar on the right I added for a past discussion about the range we should want to be within to be "balanced", ignore it for this discussion. What we want to look at are the mage and warrior specs at the bottom (reasonably sure that was Arcane and Arms at the time, but it doesn't matter). The Warrior spec's line has a similar slope to the bulk of the specs above it; that's not indicative of a scaling issue, the issue is that they just start way low. The mage, on the other hand, starts higher and has a shallower slope than the specs above; THAT is a scaling issue. It was an issue for mages overall at the time; at the top you can see the other mage spec starting out at #1 and ending at #3 because they stayed almost flat, while everyone else continued to increase.

Things as they are today are a bit more weighted against Elemental, but the slope of our graph on raidbots is still pretty close to everyone else's. Boosting the base performance of our spells will boost our scaling slightly as a consequence too, which should address what little dip there is on our line.

[SenSayNyu]

I still don't understand how and when Blizzard decides that numbers are off and takes action. Elemental already 5-8% behind enha and they did nothing. It wouldn't break anything If they buff our damage through FS and ST damage, but they are reluctant to do so.

[Christan]

You're bad at math.

.8^m, where m = months. That won't ever hit zero.

Not that what the guy you quoted said is right. Blizzard targeted their scaling in previous nerfs as well, I doubt fire scaling will ever be out of control.

let me get this straight, after 12 months it would be .8^12 = 0.06871947673
if i am right .068 is lower than .8?
24 months would be 0.00472236648

i definitely see that getting closer to the zero you said was wrong (an infinitely small decimal is in fact still zero)
granted in practice it would never get that low of course.
he was right though, the guy you quoted.

as for the discussion at hand... my "main alt" atm is Glendrider, main is Hakujaden, both on darkspear us....
i was enhance in ds era as os, resto always for ms, i decided to keep up resto as mainspec though, and do Ele offspec...
this thread is saying ele is going to stagnate?
not sure where it's leading but lmk...just gear's a bit harder to come by atm so enhance gear is a bit harder at that.

[Nebria]

well there was a tweet from binkenstein to ghostcrawler on Feb 2nd

@Ghostcrawler Is "They are fine" referring to the current PTR build, or an internal build?

unfortunately he didn't get an answer yet

[Deleted]

GC is good at avoiding questions. Did he really need another platform to ignore peoples questions when he joined twitter? Was the official forum not enought?

[Sarevokcz]

GC is good at avoiding questions. Did he really need another platform to ignore peoples questions when he joined twitter? Was the official forum not enought?

They are ignoring ele questions because they are under impression ele is fine.

[TJ]

They are ignoring ele questions because they are under impression ele is fine.

Their impressions are always wrong. Hell, just look at the amount of things people reported in the beta which would be OP/unbalanced which Blizzard ignored, now, after live release and several months later they run into problems with them. Warriors are a good example of this.

[Sarevokcz]

Their impressions are always wrong. Hell, just look at the amount of things people reported in the beta which would be OP/unbalanced which Blizzard ignored, now, after live release and several months later they run into problems with them. Warriors are a good example of this.

You dont have to tell me, Im well aware of their track record regarding shaman for last couple of years. But I just about gave up and Im taking a break from WoW, no point in playing spec I love, but being demolished in almost every single aspect of the game by everyone else.

[SenSayNyu]

well there was a tweet from binkenstein to ghostcrawler on Feb 2nd

unfortunately he didn't get an answer yet

That kind of question rarely answered by Blizz. GC don't like non-specific question; more about certain abilities or mechanics.

[binkenstein]

I don't really expect responses to those sort of questions. I know that they can't be easily answered via twitter, but I know they read the questions and won't just dismiss them out of hand. Also, I made a blog post on the scaling thing, which suggests that there's some issues with that. http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=80

[Nebria]

I don't really expect responses to those sort of questions. I know that they can't be easily answered via twitter, but I know they read the questions and won't just dismiss them out of hand. Also, I made a blog post on the scaling thing, which suggests that there's some issues with that. http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=80

did you tweeted this link to gc as well?^^

[binkenstein]

did you tweeted this link to gc as well?^^

Nope. I posted it in the thread which is sufficient to get them to see it, and I know they read my posts.

[Nebria]

Nope. I posted it in the thread which is sufficient to get them to see it, and I know they read my posts.

thats good

[Deleted]

I don't really expect responses to those sort of questions. I know that they can't be easily answered via twitter, but I know they read the questions and won't just dismiss them out of hand. Also, I made a blog post on the scaling thing, which suggests that there's some issues with that. http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=80

Awesome... now we can say without a doubt that they're ignoring us, if no change happens during PTR.