In my earlier post, I talked about my personal worries about weapon scaling in Cataclysm. The core of the problem is that in both BC and LK, Fury Warriors started the expansion at the bottom of the DPS heap, putting out laughable damage and really only existing as an offspec for someone who was normally the tank. By the end of the expansion cycle, however, Fury Warriors top the charts all over the place. If you think of a DPS vs Gearscore chart, the Fury Warrior line has a lower Y intercept, but a much steeper slope (and it actually isn't linear, but instead seems to be polynomial in GS where many other classes ARE linear - and that's the problem).
Rage: The Source of the Problem
Why do Fury Warriors scale so strangely? The short answer is: Rage. Rage is a funny thing, you get it when you hit a mob with a white attack, and the harder you hit the more rage you get. You use rage to fuel your special attacks (yellow hits) which, in addition to costing rage, don't generate rage. So, the first-order analysis yields a simple issue: the harder-hitting your weapons, the more rage you generate.
Rage generation wouldn't that big of a problem normally, because Fury Warriors really don't have all that much to do with their rage. In Berserker Stance, you've got two instants to throw out: Whirlwind and Bloodthirst. Whirlwind has a (glyphed) 8 second cooldown, and Bloodthirst has a 4 second cooldown. So, every 8 seconds you have to press 3 buttons, leaving you with 2.5 seconds of sitting around waiting for abilities to come off of cooldown. Even with a majillion rage, you're still just going WW BT BT (wait) WW BT BT (wait) and so on. So what's the problem?
The thing is, when you've got more rage than you can dump with the base rotation, you start hitting Heroic Strike. Currently, Heroic Strike "converts" your next mainhand swing from a white (rage-generating) attack into a yellow (rage-consuming) attack. Heroic Strike is the rage dump for warriors, since you not only pay 15 rage to use it, you also lose out on the 30+ rage your mainhand attack would have generated. Still, when you're sitting at 100 rage, you might as well do something, and all Heroic Strike really does is add an extra 495 damage to the attack, right?
Wrong.
Yes, Heroic Strike makes your next attack do 495 more damage, which is nice, but it also converts that attack into a yellow attack. Yellow attacks have an 8% chance to miss the target, compared to a 26% miss chance on white attacks. You'll have enough hit rating to make sure your yellow attacks never miss, but white attacks still do miss. Furthermore, yellow attacks cannot be glancing blows, whereas about 24% of your white attacks will be glancing blows (which do about 35% less damage). Yellow attacks are also "abilities", so impale means they crit at 220% instead of the normal 200% of white attacks. Finally, you probably have the Glyph of Heroic Strike, so you actually end up getting 10 rage back whenever HS crits. So, heroic strikes are a LOT better than white attacks, and if you can convert 100% of your mainhand attacks to heroic strikes, you're doing a lot more damage.
Wait, did I say finally? I forgot: Bloodsurge. More heroic strikes means more Bloodsurge procs, which means more free Slam attacks. By the time I got to about a 5200 gearscore on my warrior, I pretty much always had the free slam proc up whenever I had a free GCD in which to use it.
So as warrior gear increases, their rage generation increases. Eventually, they're getting so much rage from their offhand swings (which are not converted to yellow attacks from heroic strikes) and procs from the heroic strike glyph that they can convert 100% of their mainhand attacks to heroic strikes. Moreover, they eventually get a high enough crit rate that Bloodsurge is always up.
As warriors progress in gear, they go from being limited by rage in terms of what they can do to being limited by GCDs in terms of what they can do. As far as I know, no other DPS class makes this inversion. No matter how cool your gear is, Death Knight runes still only regenerate at the same rate, and they only get 10 runic power per rune spent, whether that rune did 10 damage or 100000 damage. Rogues are limited by energy regeneration rate, and while they have tricks to improve energy regen, it's mostly based on talents (excepting combat potency procs, which scale with offhand hit and haste, but aren't as overwhelming as rage generation through hits). When that inversion takes place, Fury DPS shoots through the roof.
Normalizing: Attempts to fix the problem
I am not going to talk about the first ill-fated attempt to "fix" rage generation back in the Burning Crusade, because I was playing a warlock at the time and didn't really pay close attention to it. The current plan for Cataclysm is (at least, what I've seen from reputable sources): you will generate a fixed amount of rage per hit (not miss), which is based entirely on weapon speed. Slow weapons will generate more rage per hit. On the surface, this "fixes" the problem by creating a new one: instead of being really rage-based, DPS warriors get a smoothly-refilling resource pool that's independent of their gear. In other words, they fixed the rage problem by turning Rage into Energy, Focus and Runes, only that they don't regenerate (and in fact decay) out of combat.
Yay. You know, I always wanted to play a rogue. So, I rolled a rogue. But then I decided I liked warrior mechanics more. So I don't play a rogue. But now DPS warriors are the new rogues.
Wait, you say. Hold everything! Rage doesn't just refill at a constant rate, it will be scale with haste and crit! If you crit, you'll get 2x the rage from that hit, and rage generation per hit is a function of base weapon speed, meaning haste is finally a meaningful stat for warriors. Hooray!
So, in order to fix the Cataclysm warrior, they are changing the rage generation mechanic from the interesting (yet flawed) system of Yore to a new system that looks more like everybody else, except it still scales with crit and haste just like the old system did?
Well, that seems like a stupid idea.
Double Dipping: the Real Problem
The real problem with how rage mechanics respond to gear is double dipping on DPS stats. When a DPS stat not only directly improves your damage output (critical hits do more damage), but also indirectly improves your damage output (more rage means more specials), you've got a scaling problem. We know this is a scaling problem already. Rogues stack the heck out of haste, and love it when you hit heroism and drop a windfury totem, because more attacks means not just more damage, but more procs as well. Fury warriors get so much rage and extra special attacks from critical hits that getting Impale and Deep Wounds for "only" extra flat damage on crits is really just gravy.
Another huge part of the Lich King scaling is the unexpectedly wide range of gear item levels. Between the 10-man and 25-man gap, there is also the hardmode and easymode gear, so there had to be a very large range of stat improvements from the start of the expansion to the end of it. It may be possible to tweak everybody in such a way that they scale more-or-less in a linear fashion for the limited region of item values that exist for the Cataclysm release, but this problem of nonlinear scaling and double dipping from DPS stats does not seem like it will go away.
Unless the designers convert the basic assumption about Warrior DPS rotations. If they make Warriors always GCD limited rather than resource limited, then having a lot of extra rage toward the end of the expansion isn't all that big of a deal.
Hmm. Did I mention that they're taking away the on-next-swing mechanic from Heroic Strike? It's going to be a GCD-based special. So it looks a lot like warriors in the cataclysm expansion will be GCD limited rather than resource limited.
And here you thought Ghostcrawler was doing you a favor, keeping you from having to watch your swing timer and spam heroic strike at the right time.
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Actually, I think it will still be rage based rather then GCD based. From all the noise from blues, it sounds like whirlwind is being removed from the rotation. I expect them to turn it into just a base damage ability not modified by weapons. Do that, drop the cooldown a few seconds, and you have a rather potent AoE. Of course, it would do less damage then a slam or bloodthirst, but that's kinda the point.
ReplyDeleteThat leaves Slam, HS, and Bloodthirst. I think we're going to see some kind of change to slam making it decent filler, such as being able to move while using it. Then, turn the insta-slam talent into proccing say Victory Rush, and you'd have a very largely changed rotation.
Also, I'm getting the sense as well you'll see more skills like Bloodthirst, and less like Mortal Strike. If SMF made slam and HS hit with both weapons, add in some rage normalization (which going off teh way they said they'd do it, it sounds like there won't be as big a gap between 2h and 1h), and you'd have some very similar rotations and power. Where the issue comes in is the stats of a 2h to a 1h.
Currently, a 2h has pretty close to 2x the item budget of a 1h. However, a 1h only has 1/2 the budget of a chest piece, so over all you're talking about a minor stat boost.
Take a LK-25-HM 2-hander, it has 344.2 DPS, or ~309 DPS after TG. If SMF gave 10%, a 264-DPS weapon from the same boss becomes 290.4. Now, if they are indeed normalizing abilities to do more damage, the could end up making 2h's and 1h's have the same stat points. Now, while it might look like TG would win, that 10% applies to all other abilities as well, so where TG would do more White then SMF, SMF would do more BS/Slam/HS (If hitting with both) then TG. I think that would make them end up pretty darned close, and it would only take tweaking one or both of the %'s to balance them perfectly.
However, that only works in a world where they normalize SMF to gain rage as fast as TG. I think you'll see them get rage gain where they want it, balance the rotation, and then tweak %'s on SMF/TG. Following that process, it might actually asuage your fears by a lot.
Though, that's just my idea of what they'll do.
First of all, both TG and SMF setups should have just about exactly the same rage generation, given otherwise-equal stats. Rage is supposed to generate at N / S per hit, where N is some normalization constant and S is the melee swing speed of the weapon. So faster 1H weapons will gain less rage per swing, but swing more. It'll all average out to N rage per second baseline, increased by haste and crit.
ReplyDeleteThe way HS works right now, it's almost always "useable". It doesn't eat all your rage, it eats a scaling amount from 10-30 depending on how much rage you currently have, so at 50 rage it takes 20 and at 100 rage it takes 30. Damage also scales with rage spent, although not as well as execute (making execute strictly better when appropriate). But there should almost always be enough rage for a HS in 4.0, especially since HS is moving to a GCD-based attack.
Because HS is going off the next-swing mechanic, spamming it will not interfere with rage generation, it's just a relatively expensive GCD that you'd probably use as a "if nothing else is lit up" button.
I also heard that fury warriors were going to be getting a talent that would proc Victory Rush as a replacement for whirlwind in single-target fights, more or less.
Between HS, BT and VR, I'm sure we'll have plenty of GCDs to fill. The real question is about rage generation early and late in the expansion. I'm sure that early on, we won't have enough rage to actually spam HS every free GCD. But as crit and haste increases toward the end of the xpac, rage generation will increase apace.
That's the danger I see in the rage-gcd limitation exchange, and it's why I'm worried that the new system won't fix anything really, just put off problems until the end of the xpac (again).
See, I see them going towards a consistent rage gain. The path I see them going early expansion is you will have a decent amount of rage and be using HS off and on, while end-expansion you'll be using it every free GCD. Kind of like you're operating at 50% at fresh 85, and finally in Tier-Whatever you're hitting 100%. Of course, a bad string of luck could hurt, but that's always been there. I think they want to make rage the median between runic power and energy. If it's normalized right and doesn't scale insanely, that might end up happening.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that seems to be what I see them doing so far. It's just that there is noise about the more or less same problem of going from rage starvation and low DPS early in the xpac to rage overflow and ridiculous DPS late in the xpac. It's the ridiculous DPS right now that has the nerfbats getting warmed up.
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