Windwalkers - State of DPS 5.4

[Callimonk]

Raid utility is just as important in 25s as 10s. Let me explain with an example:

You just hit Ra-den. After a dozen pulls, you realize that you can only bring 4 melee or otherwise the orbs don't die on time. You know that there is intense aoe damage in phase 2. Your roster:

2x rogues - smoke bomb and curse of elements (also symbiosis target)
1x warrior - rallying cry, shatter, skull banner
2x dk - amz and death grip (also symbiosis target)
1x feral - tranq, rez, sunder armor
1x enhance - assloads of healing, stormlash totem
1x ret - devotion aura, hands
1x windwalker - {null}

As a raid leader, what comp would you pick, assuming equal skill? Personally, I'd go with 2x rogues, warrior, enhance. Maybe replace one rogue with a feral. If I had more room, the classes that would get slotted in order would be: rogue/feral, dk, ret, dk, windwalker.

I have to disagree with this - Windwalker would actually be very useful here, as we can SEF onto the orbs.

However, your point DOES stand. I just don't find it as strong of an example Perhaps a stronger example might be Dark Animus, where the Windwalker would not have the raid CDs for several Interrupting Jolts. Though, WW is great here for single-target damage.

[Requital]

I have to disagree with this - Windwalker would actually be very useful here, as we can SEF onto the orbs.

However, your point DOES stand. I just don't find it as strong of an example Perhaps a stronger example might be Dark Animus, where the Windwalker would not have the raid CDs for several Interrupting Jolts. Though, WW is great here for single-target damage.

But doesn't it seem silly a Ret Paladin on Ra-den can get symbiosis and spam wrath and do more damage then our images?

[Callimonk]

But doesn't it seem silly a Ret Paladin on Ra-den can get symbiosis and spam wrath and do more damage then our images?

Right - was about to do an edit that my only argument is that I don't find WW to be completely useless on Ra-Den. Point still stands that SEF + high damage sitll won't change a damage reduction CD or a CD that increases the damage of a raid as a whole. Still, SEF is still more useful than a Rogue's Throw.. Just not his/her smokebomb.

[Totaltotemic]

Increased SEF damage is nice, but it doesn't quite make up for the fact that the mechanics of the ability itself are very clunky. For the 1 GCD and 10 energy you do not get x% damage split to the other target, it has a lot of bells and whistles that make it function a lot worse than an ability like Havoc. At best, it's a (potentially) ranged version of pre-rework Blade Flurry, but we know how well that worked out for Combat. In the end, low single target damage with no raid utility to speak of does not make the spec an attractive pick for a roster.

[Requital]

Right - was about to do an edit that my only argument is that I don't find WW to be completely useless on Ra-Den. Point still stands that SEF + high damage sitll won't change a damage reduction CD or a CD that increases the damage of a raid as a whole. Still, SEF is still more useful than a Rogue's Throw.. Just not his/her smokebomb.

I think Cooldown/Utility race is too subjective of an argument and that is one reason Blizzard ignores it. For instance my guild all raid cooldown based no raid CD you are first out no matter what damage you can do unless you're range then you're safe. I've seen other guilds that realized WW with RoR and Ferals with RoR do incredible damage when they can tunnel so they said sit on Ra-den and push faster.

These are the arguments Blizzard sticks by and we have to get around them but not every guild leader in fact I would say less then 25% are going to see damage as being more important then a raid CD unless you are hitting the enrage timer.

[Frogged]

Uh oh. Lore's comment brought out the arrogance again. I thought we had a good thing going for a little while, too. Good luck in 5.4 I guess.

[gynshon]

Requital - what is that supposed to prove? Crit is the same in both cases and swapping 1k of haste to mastery wouldn't make up that much of a difference in the long run.

[DarkHatred]

That alone is not supposed to prove anything. It's meant as a starting point, it's clearly going to take some serious tweaking of stats in very small increments to figure out what Blizzard is seeing that we aren't. Req has merely chosen Crit as his first "primary" stat to stack and is slowly backing off it into others. So just either, help him out, or be patient.

There's no need to say "THAT IS USELESS INFO, WHY POST IT". Some open-mindedness would really do people some good.

[Totaltotemic]

Requital - what is that supposed to prove? Crit is the same in both cases and swapping 1k of haste to mastery wouldn't make up that much of a difference in the long run.

It's just a baseline, looks like he reforged one piece of gear and tried it again. The fact that he got almost exactly the same DPS lends credibility to his testing. Now we know that if (or when) he posts more results with different builds, there's no baseline variance interfering. If I could be bothered to sit in front of a dummy for 30 minute tests I'd probably be doing this too. I have some concerns about not using TEB and how that affects testing (since mastery is then not involved), but I'm sure there's some kind of reasoning behind it.

[Requital]

Requital - what is that supposed to prove? Crit is the same in both cases and swapping 1k of haste to mastery wouldn't make up that much of a difference in the long run.

Well it has been answered but basically we have to figure out on our own what difference they are doing to have this so called higher dps then the public. They aren't going to tell us and I'm pretty determined to find it. The biggest issue is the gear I have access to doesn't allow me to get 13K in any of the 3 secondary stats without a lot of work but it does allow me to see that different levels of secondary stats make very little difference.

You are going to see my numbers jump around a lot I'm not going to re-gem every build but once I have a better idea of where the vlaues are changing then i'll start re-gemming to get more of the value.

[gynshon]

That alone is not supposed to prove anything. It's meant as a starting point, it's clearly going to take some serious tweaking of stats in very small increments to figure out what Blizzard is seeing that we aren't. Req has merely chosen Crit as his first "primary" stat to stack and is slowly backing off it into others. So just either, help him out, or be patient.

There's no need to say "THAT IS USELESS INFO, WHY POST IT". Some open-mindedness would really do people some good.

You are half right. Keeping main stat at the same level, and only chaning 1k of another would never make that big of a difference. Tweak stats, sure NP. But you need to tweak them a little more than 1k of a secondary stat to see a difference. Hell, RNG alone could be that little difference without changing anything at all.

I never said it was useless info, I asked why he was posting it with just a 1k swing. Go look through a lot of my other posts, you will see I am helpful and have done a lot for the community.

[Requital]

It's just a baseline, looks like he reforged one piece of gear and tried it again. The fact that he got almost exactly the same DPS lends credibility to his testing. Now we know that if (or when) he posts more results with different builds, there's no baseline variance interfering. If I could be bothered to sit in front of a dummy for 30 minute tests I'd probably be doing this too. I have some concerns about not using TEB and how that affects testing (since mastery is then not involved), but I'm sure there's some kind of reasoning behind it.

I just wanted to remove as many random variables as I could to get an idea of what is or isn't causing the dps changes. I'm getting pretty bored with it but I'm pretty irritated with Blizzard.

[Jaggid]

So i was playing around on the ptr tonight with just the gear i have from live, no new trinkets or 5.4 gear. I unequiped my RoR in favor of the Renataki's, and have it paired with a bad juju. My ilvl is 540, my weps are normal thunder forged 536. I tried to play with chi brew and it seems nice for that burst, but for me it felt a bit sluggish at times, so i went back to ascension and picked up chiburst instead of chi-wave, kept xuen.

I did go in with both self buffs, as well as 300 food and flask.

Rotation was super simple once i got it started i would get to 10 stacks of TeB, Blow TeB before RSK came off cd and hit Chiburst then RSK, and had enough time to get another RSK off as well as most of a FoF. This had me sitting at around 175k ST over 3 Xuens so about 6 minutes and i did have dips to 169k back up to 179k, again i had some rotational issues it seems like we want to use FoF often but something like this TeB/Chi-Burst/RSK/FoF/RSK. Obviously if you can squeeze in a TP or BoK do it.

I am not the best WindWalker and i do have nice gear but weps are kinda shitty compared to some of our heroic guys. Has anyone played with the use of chiburst as an after TeB cd? It was taking between 24-30 secs to generate 10 stacks of TeB so sometimes i would wait for Chi to come off CD before popping TeB when i did this DPS would go back up a bit.

Unbuffed - stats
17.24%: 7328 haste
43.90%: 11,456 crit
42.55%: 5412 mastery (note i am going to put a bit more into mastery this was done very quickly)

Gems i took Agi/Crit for yellows, i took agi for reds, and agi/hit for blues.

Again i'm not a numbers guy i am just on here playing with some things and taking notes. Seems like on aoe/cleave fights were going to be very competitive, seems on ST we will be relatively comparable to live at the start. I will continue to play with things on test and see what i can come up with. I hope this helps our number cruncher's a bit, if you need to check my gear Baku: Azjol-Nerub. I feel like im on the right track i just need to get some things tweaked out.

I will keep you all updated as to what i find. The more of us that contribute the sooner we can find out what we might not be seeing. Gonna keep at it, again if you number guys need any specific details from me as another data point let me know i will try to get you what i can.

*EDIT

Quick update dropped the crit a little for some extra mastery was running 166k-170k over about 8 minutes. using the same method as above, again i had tiger power fall off a few times so it could have been higher. Again i am not sure if this is decent for the gear i am wearing on a dummy but its what im finding. I dont think we want to completely lose all of our haste from what i am seeing.

Chi-Brew is still worth testing and playing with because i think it has potential especially since it has 2 charges. that's basically 4 chi =1-2 TeB + 2 TeB x 2. between 6-8 quick TeB generation. Seems like something hat would work nicely on a fight where we want to lust/hero at the start.

[Requital]

What i'm picking up from all the testing that I have been doing is there is no way secondary stats are making this huge impact as Blizzard claims unless they are doing it in 100% Heroic SoO gear. You can really see that there is very little difference between all three builds.

What next it has to be related to talents or special abilities such as Expel Harm, Chi Wave, Xuen or even Fists of Fury.

[Battery-Turalyon]

I have been able to put out anywhere from 216k to 245k with the build i currently have on PTR. 7630 haste, 11,129 crit, 5373 mastery, 551 ilvl, TED and HT trinkets in t16 5pc.
This was an average run:


Biggest difference seemed to be the number of Flurry of Xuen procs, and if they lined up woth FoF or not.
I was using RSK, FoF during 10 stacks.

[Requital]

I'm done testing for the night, I'll do more testing tomorrow. Conclusion as of right now there is no way " devs are using less haste " and getting better results unless one of the following things are bugged.

Expel Harm, Xuen, Chi burst, Power Strikes, Chi Brew or TeB!

I'll continue to narrow the issue down tomorrow.

[Deleted]

I'm starting to get pretty close results on a dummy compared to what I can do on live. I can only reach this by going full on haste however, so quite the opposite of what Blizzard is suggesting. I spend some minutes to reach 200M damage on a target dummy on live and PTR and logged the results. They are not perfect, as the dummies have been hit by others and Xuen acts differently on PTR as compared to live (he likes to AoE more it seems).

Live log: www dot worldoflogs dot com/reports/6ajtigvyz0s10w9i/sum/damageDone/ (189,411 DPS)
T3 Talent: Ascension
Trinkets: 543 Renataki + 530 RoRo
Weapons: 2x 543
Stats:
- iLvl: 541
- AP: 43,258
- Exp: 8.47%
- Haste: 20.42%
- Hit: 7.5%
- Crit: 38.95%
- Mastery: 4.49%

PTR log: www dot worldoflogs dot com/reports/yyw4uifx6c2fq84d/sum/damageDone/ (186,825 DPS)
T3 Talent: Chi Brew
Trinkets: 543 Renataki + 530 Vicious Talisman
Weapons: 2x 543
Stats:
- iLvl: 541
- AP: 46,866
- Exp: 8.47%
- Haste: 25.56%
- Hit: 7.6%
- Crit: 42.92%
- Mastery: 43.66%

Xuen seems to have boosted DPS quite a lot. I'm not sure yet if that is because he was AoE-ing too much. Will have to try again with other target dummies. The boss on the PTR also had curse of elements up for 28.1%. Other than that he didn't have any other debuffs that influenced my DPS as far as I can see.

[Gulvan]

Im pretty sure its going to be TEB because if you think about it, more Mastery means more TEB stacks which means a higher uptime of 60% dmg bonus. I haven't read through all the latests posts in this thread in particular other than just the raw data but its looking like another RoRo situation. Get more procs of the mastery, get better dps.

Can't wait to see your tests from tomorrow Req.

[Callypso]

What i'm picking up from all the testing that I have been doing is there is no way secondary stats are making this huge impact as Blizzard claims unless they are doing it in 100% Heroic SoO gear. You can really see that there is very little difference between all three builds.

What next it has to be related to talents or special abilities such as Expel Harm, Chi Wave, Xuen or even Fists of Fury.

I have a few issues with your tests requital:

No TEB usage makes mastery useless, so any build with less mastery will outperform the ones with more mastery, ceteris paribus.

The extreme low haste builds ( 3k and lower) are likely underperforming compared to the 10k plus ones simply because the flow of the rotation gets mucked up at those haste levels.


Can you run one or two more balanced builds to see how those compare to the others?

[Requital]

I have a few issues with your tests requital:

No TEB usage makes mastery useless, so any build with less mastery will outperform the ones with more mastery, ceteris paribus.

The extreme low haste builds ( 3k and lower) are likely underperforming compared to the 10k plus ones simply because the flow of the rotation gets mucked up at those haste levels.


Can you run one or two more balanced builds to see how those compare to the others?

I'm not running these tests for DPS i'm running them to figure out what ability is causing this extra damage that the devs see but we don't. It does me no good to just perform mindless tests without being able to pinpoint where extra damage is coming from. If you look at the tests you will see I did 3 tests 13k Crit, 12k Mastery, 12K Haste.

You will also notice that the values are changing as I add more abilities into the mix, There is a high Crit with even Mastery/Haste that is using FoF, I'll continue down the tree tomorrow until all stats have tests and results for adding individual ability use into each test. Soon we will have basically 3 Types of Tests with about 5-6 results per.

I know the lower haste builds are awful I did the tests for them but I did the tests to prove that players aren't using too much haste. I couldn't just say X is too much I had to have multiple values and results.