• First and foremost, as a ground rule let’s keep this one thread free of pleas about ability feedback, DPS being too low or other subjective declarations. This thread should be about information sharing. If you aren’t a theorycrafter, this thread may not be for you.

• We feel the numbers are in a pretty good place right now. If you’re a theorycrafter who has been waiting for things to stabilize before submitting your class balance analysis, this is your cue to have at it.

• Make no mistake, we’re confident in our ability to balance the game. On the other hand, we greatly value player feedback. And reconciling our numbers with yours is part of that.

• Don’t consider this thread to be evidence that we feel class design for Mists of Pandaria is pretty much done. It also shouldn’t be a sign that X issue you may have been posting about for the last month is going to be ignored, or that we just don’t agree with you.

• The primary goal is to maintain a relatively stable class system for a healthy period of time in the beta, so the number crunchers among you can really start to get into the nitty-gritty details without worrying that everything will change in the next beta build.

• If there are any mechanics that are proving particularly hard to understand, feel free to ask in this thread. We understand there is a narrow line between squelching and fostering the theorycrafting community, and we’re not trying to solve everything for you. On the other hand, we don’t want you to burn too much of your time trying to figure out how potentially confusing mechanics work under the hood (e.g. monk weapon normalization). That said, we won’t just dump the coefficient for every spell -- you should be able to figure that out. However, if you just can’t figure out how a spell is designed, don’t hesitate to ask. We appreciate honest questions.

I am VERY interested in seeing the community's Thoughts on how to equalize 2h and DW Frost. Not from a "damage on beta" But equalize it for the future. It is obvious how one sided the damage is currently.

This isn't about wishlisting, it's about analyzing what is currently in the beta. Theory-crafting.

What level of uptime is Haunt being balanced around?

Is 'filler twisting', where you swap in Drain soul for Malefic Grasp to get shards back above 80% target health, the intended way for Affliction to be dpsing?

What on earth is going on with Brewmaster mitigation? I don't even want to start theorycrafting because it feels/looks so broken :<

It should be apparent by the information present in this thread that multi-shot is in desperate need of a retuning.

On behalf of the Paladin community on Elitist Jerks, I would like to re-post something here about Crusader's Zeal (credit to post goes to Exemplar):

Protection warrior rage is still flakey in the beta, assuming you want us to be in defensive stance. So I guess the first question, is are we intended to be using battle stance this much, with the potential of constant stance dancing there?

Assuming thats not the case, with a fair chunk of rage generation coming from enrage ( ie critical blocks ) and revenge, the current clunky feel when off tanking or fighting magic only bosses on live has become exacerbated, as we're now also getting hit with a large rage income reduction in these situations.

Holy priest mana regeneration seems really low. Compared to other classes, Holy doesn't seem to have the longevity to last in a heroic or raid, and feels much like early cata, where Priests were never considered until there mana regen was nearly doubled.

That's a very wide spread there. Mastery is by comparison utterly horrible for Shadow at present. It doesn't help that the extra ticks don't function like real extra ticks (more chances to proc things) with the exception of the mana regen from a procced VT tick.

I did make a bug report out of this though I am reposting this here just for future reference. there is currently a bug with Faerie Swarms' damage.

Also what is the status of crit suppression? Is it totally gone? Just gone for spells? Or still there? It's something that is extremely painful to test in-game.

With regards to Priest mechanics, the only two "difficult" things to measure accurately are the damage modifications due to range on Cascade on Halo.

We of course don't need direct coefficients for most spells as we data-mine them anyway (and then test). There are some coefficients that we don't have data for and are a bit harder to test. Mostly pet related abilities. Shadowfiend etc. I've come up with decent enough numbers for them though.

Shadowy Apparitions have been a bit....strange. The coefficients in-game have never exactly matched what they actually do for their entire existence (I submitted bug reports about it during the *Cata* beta). At present their actual damage is *far* more than the tool-tip says. Any idea if the tool-tip on them might be fixed for MoP so we know which coefficient and base dmg are intended? ;)

I know that modeling totem pets like the Fire Elemental has been annoying for the various Shaman theorycrafters. They seem to perform some actions randomly and they have an unexplained long "start-up" time. Any information you can give on how these things function under the hood would be welcome.

In terms of number comparisons are you also "generally happy" with the AoE and multi-dotting/cleave numbers as well? We've only got a few classes implemented in SimulationCraft but there are some *wildly* different numbers when it comes to AoE.

With Shadow Priest talent balancing, you've done a good job it seems getting Tier 3 talents to be a lot closer to one another now. Tier 6 talents still have a bit of a spread. Divine Insight seems the clear choice by the numbers on that tier unless you're able to "game" Twist of Fate to increase its uptime in which case the two become viable. If you're unable to game it then Twist of Fate is around the same level as Power Infusion which seems to be generally the worst option on that tier.

While it's possible that our Retribution Paladin modeling *might* be off in terms of the exact usage of abilities, the damage range on the abilities used is something I've verified to be correct to +/- 1 damage in-game. That said, Retribution seems to be performing fairly poorly at level 85 compared to the other classes we've implemented. It has mana issues for one and I've got it Seal swapping to regen mana if it gets low, but even without mana issues its DPS still seems too low in comparison. How are they performing at 85 for you? (We've been waiting on the release of some level 90 PvE gear before worrying too much about level 90 balance for now).

We will probably start pushing out our "raid" damage breakdown pages for SimulationCraft-MoP soon for the classes implemented (Shadow Priests, Warlocks, Ele/Enh Shaman, Feral/Balance Druids, Retribution Paladins and soon Windwalker Monks). We'll try to include some multi-target reports as well. If we notice any glaring issues we'll bring them up.

Thanks heaps for this opportunity.

Will Detonate indeed not be affected by Solar Eclipse?

Is Bloom intended to be used in AoE healing rotations? How will it affect Harmony?

The changes to talents have led to a pretty big change in hunter pet focus regen. Currently BM is the only hunter spec which has any talents which regen pet focus. Since pet base focus regen is fairly low, this means that the frequency of basic attacks for non-BM pets has dropped quite a bit. Even for BM the regen is pretty low (although that at least will improve with crit rate). I'm not sure if the intention is to make hunter pets do significantly lower damage or to tweak the pet melee attack to do a far larger portion of the pet damage, or if this is just a mechanic that hasn't really been worked on yet.

There was a post not too long ago telling the Moonkin players that you were looking into a way for us to play around with our Eclipse.

Do you expect the level 30 monk talents to fit into monk rotations? Are they just there for a heal/damage combo that we'd situationally use over a more damaging attack or should we be expecting to fit them into our normal ability usage?

Is energy regen finalized for monks at 8/s for Windwalkers and 10.4 for Brewmasters?

Mastery - As of right now Mastery is going to be the stat to miss COMPLETELY. Only two (three with Incarnation) abilities will benefit from it, both of which are based on Attack Power ONLY. Even then in 483 PvP gear, with full raid buffs and ZERO Mastery, Rip is still hitting for 300k damage.

Incarnation - As of this point Incarnation is bad for Feral druids. Due to Ravage and Pounce's 50 energy cost, there is just not enough energy to compensate normal shreds. based on my analysis you are looking at a 600 dps loss if you spec into Incarnation. If Ravage and Pounce cost 40 energy instead, then it would be a dps buff.

I'm still in the early stages for Guardian but as of this point bears will only need to gear for dodge > crit > hit/exp > haste > Mastery up to 6 rage per second. This allows for at least 1 stack of Savage Defense will be available at all time. Beyond 6 Rage Per Second you will get to 0 stacks at some point during the fight. Beyond 6 RPS, uptime on SD only grows minisculally beyond 60% (6.66 RPS - 61.16% uptime; 7.5 RPS - 61.33% uptime; 10 RPS - 61.6% uptime) For example, with 6.666 RPS, we can use Savage Defense every 9 seconds up to 3 minutes into the fight. Afterwards we can use it every 10 seconds.

Circular references are driving me insane when it comes to simulations! Insane!!! I want my Recount so that I can obtain realistic samples :(

3% is huge. If you don't think people are going to drain twist for 3% damage you're crazy.

I've found it incredibly frustrating that Misdirection hasn't worked from day one.

Spending a lot of our day trying to keep both Harmony and Lifebloom up (while trying to take advantage of all the new toys we got in MOP) is just too overwhelming even in MOP 5-mans.

A series of Enhancement dummy tests

Oh, something else from those logs I posted, despite being both hit and expertise capped, Earth Elemental was being dodged. I did not notice it for Fire Elemental.

Oh, speaking for secondary stat balancing, the last lot of numbers I ran for Shadow Priests had Haste at something like 0.8 (relative to Int at 1.0, though true this was before Mind Surge was removed), Crit around 0.5 and Mastery a pretty poor 0.25. (Numbers for level 85).

Is there any particular item level you're interested in exploring at the moment, for the sake of comparing apples to apples?

I've discussed this in the Mage threads, but one source of concern at the moment is the three Bomb spells and their interaction with Brain Freeze. Taking just the bomb spells themselves, they all obviously have different strengths at different numbers of targets and in different situations. Frost Bomb is weaker than the other two bombs in 2-3 target cleave situations, and that's fine.

However, with the buffs to Brain Freeze FFB, we run into a more significant problem. When only a single bomb is active, all three bombs produce similar Brain Freeze PPM, but multidotting changes the picture a great deal.

On the topic of Shadow Priest AoE again, obviously at level 90 we're going to be balanced around using our level 90 talent pick when it comes to AoE. However without that talent (as we haven't yet modeled them all) at present Mind Sear certainly seems to be under-performing.

some specific numbers regarding AotD and Gargoyle. the question becomes are they really meant to be so low?

* Devouring Plague procced ticks do not heal unlike non-procced ticks.
* Shadow Word: Pain procced ticks do not proc Shadowy Apparitions or Divine Insight. Last I checked they also didn't benefit from 4pc T13.
* Vampiric Touch procced ticks do not proc From Darkness, Comes Light. They *do* give the extra mana regen however.
* Mind Flay procced ticks that crit didn't reduce the cooldown on Mindbender/Shadowfiend but that's no longer an issue.

Also from what I recall (memory hazy here) procced ticks also didn't count as periodic damage when it came to proccing things like the Necromantic Focus trinket.

*edit* I don't recall offhand if the procced ticks could in turn proc Wrath of Tarecgosa or not. Speaking of Dragonwrath, it performs poorly with Devouring Plague. If DTR procs on your Devouring Plague direct damage it casts another DP with "zero" orbs and overwrites the existing DoT for one that still "ticks" silently but for 0 damage per tick. Of course DTR isn't likely to be a huge concern for you at present but if you were to implement something similar in future something to watch out for.

Also, Powershot vs Barrage. Currently as is, there is no reason in to take Powershot over Barrage for PvE, unless you specifically need it for the knockback. They have the same focus cost, same effective cast time, same damage... but Barrage has half the cooldown, making it the clear winner. And while they both have the same effective cast time, Barrage is channeled, which means damage happens right away up front. Powershot requires a 3 second cast.

Lynx Rush's damage, in all the testing I've done, is abysmal. It does not warrant a 1.5 minute cooldown at all.

2) Overlapping Mangle procs.
3) Thrash 6 second CD.
4) Dead GCDs.

Is it intended that Enhancement Shaman can't proc "on melee hit" trinkets from regular melee attacks during Ascendence, or just a side effect/bug of the initial implementation due to the change from physical to spell damage? I suspect the Enhsim guys would find that information useful.

Are Tiger Strikes supposed to be additional melee attacks for the purposes of enchant procs? They don't seem to be affected by dodge, parries, or glancing so I'm wondering if they're really just doubled autoattacks.

Actually, is the design intention to have both Eclipses with the same damage output for single targets and AoE?

Powershot and Barrage are both broken. Neither of them are doing 400% weapon damage (Edit: to primary target). Tested with static damage white bow, no pet and no gear on. On top of that, there's no scaling from RAP. So, they're extremely underwhelming for PVE.

As part of my work on SimulationCraft I've been trying to determine exactly how the dot-speedup mechanic of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul works, and I've decided the way it currently works must be a bug:http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5633977563

I guess my main concern with the current windwalker is that 20-30% of simulation time is spent waiting. (while this is just an early similation and definitely not complete).

Regarding Windwalker Monks, the new Blackout Kick dot component is a little broken at the moment. The assumed function (or at least our consensus) of the dot was to roll in a manner similar to ignite ticks for mages, but it currently seems to do almost anything but roll at all. Is the dot supposed to stack or 'roll', or are we supposed to monitor its duration to ensure no overlap?

In addition, Fist of Fury is presently in the running to be included in the Windwalker single target damage rotation. Is this an intended design, or should it be used a little more sparingly as the situation calls for?

Currently estimating Frost's and Fire's damage distribution to be something roughly like…

The general consensus among rogues is that the Glyph of Sinister Strike is a trap glyph. The added 25% damage done by Sinister Strike for a 25% increase in energy cost is not enough to offset the damage lost due to reducing combo point generation by 25%. Less Sinister Strikes will slow down Bandit’s Guile progression and will lead to less finishers thus slowing down Restless Blades interaction and resulting in fewer uses of Adrenaline Rush and Killing Spree. Is this glyph supposed to be used by Combat rogues in PvP and not in PvE, or are there any plans to address this issue?

Ghost, what about the damage spread of Obliterate, Frost Strike, Howling Blast, and Icy Touch? The discrepency is huge which means not using Obliterate feels bad, especially with Killing Machine. Are you guys looking into spreading around the damage better for 2H Frost?

And atm a mistweaver wiht a agility wepon is hitting harder wiht some abilities since most of the melee abilits scales wiht wepon damge, are you going to fix that in a good way? Cuz i can see alot of mistweaver going for an agility weapon. And abilites like Chi torpedo (doing 10k healing in agility and 2k in intell) and rushing jade wind do more dmg in agility gear then intell, even tho we have more attackpower in intell gear.

I have a question about Mastery: Master Demonology and Metamorphosis
This ability gives X% damage bonus in caster form and Y% damage bonus in demon form. The tool tips (which could certainly be wrong and in any case they are somewhat ambiguous even if they are right) imply that when you switch from caster to demon form you KEEP your caster bonus and the demon form bonus is added on top of it. However, when I compare Soul Fire damage (since that ability is available in both forms) with and without Metamorphosis it seems low, as if I was actually LOSING the caster form bonus when I went into Metamorphosis. Regardless of whether the game and/or tool tips are broken, can you tell us if you intend for the caster from bonus to stay or be dropped when you use Metamorphosis?

Also on the subject of Metamorphosis
When I go into demon form I start doing some kind of auto-attack (I'm not sure that it actually IS auto attack but it seems like it) and I was hoping you could shed some light on what is happening because it behaves very strangely. If I equip a wand I launch “fire” balls that do white damage and the attack rate is very slow, but if I equip a staff (which has a slower attack speed than the wand) I actually speed up, launch “shadow” balls, and do yellow damage instead, and if I go unarmed it does the same thing as with a staff but less damage and maybe slightly faster.. (BTW, “fire” and “shadow” refer to the graphic you see not the magic type) I haven't yet had a chance to try swords or daggers to see if that makes any difference. What exactly is going on here?

In a future build, you should find that glyph turned into Glyph of Adrenaline Rush: Reduces the global cooldown of your Sinister Strike, Revealing Strike, Slice and Dice, Eviscerate, and Mutilate by 0.2sec while Adrenaline Rush is active.

The execute ability is currently doing a TON of damage (equivalent to around 2 slams) is this intended?

The removal of rage from white swings has completely removed Haste as a viable defensive stat for prot warriors… even for bears it's scales with their rage generation

Crit is somewhat in same boat, it offers no defensive value.

Conversely Expertise and Hit are ridiculously powerful against rage dry spots.

I really do think Bears Rage model is really good, half their rage from white swings half from active abilities.

So you're not concerned about Execute displacing Overpowers, completely removing Heroic Strike, and possibly also displacing Mortal Strike?

Why has all to be a mystery that has to be reverse engineered so we can mildly understand it?

Currently Cenarion Ward will not consume the healing bonus from Dream of Cenarius. This makes Dream of Cenarius completely and totally undesirable for Guardians. That may be intentional, but some clarification would be appreciated.

Is it intended that to get max dps out of pets we have to have a macro that spams their special attack?

That sounds much better for sustained DPS comparisons of 2H and DW side-by-side, but will you address weapon twisting? I don't want carry around two 1Hs and need to have "/cast [equipped:one-handed] Frost Strike; /equip 1Hs" and "/cast [equipped:two-handed] Obliterate; /equip 2H". As others have mentioned the respective +50% damage bonuses are far too significant and ought to be spread across other abilities, which will also rein PVP burst in.

Glyph of Fae Silence, I keep asking this and never get a response I hope I can get one here. Is it intentional that Fae Silence does not work on targets already affected by Faerie Fire or is it a bug?

Mangle Procs Galore
Bottom line up front: We have procs flowing out our ears between double bleeds and application all granting a 25% chance to go off.

Seeds of Corruption:Now this spell has turned into an amazing spell compared to its current state on live. You get to keep corruption AND can have 2 seeds on one target (soulburn and regular seed) which is amazing. The question is, How are we suppose to use this spell now? spam seed the same target or do it on multiple ones? The problem is that it takes really long to detonate (cast time + travel time + detonation time) especially if you are trying to seed multiple targets. I am not sure if affliction can keep up with the other classes since the aoe is not bursty and on demand like for example, Mind seer.

I've been reading the new thread at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5889309137 and I have some things I want to add however I m in EU server and I can't log to pitch in. Would you consider posting a reply on my behalf?

While I did a lot of number crunching in college, I have little desire to do this currently, but I do have something I feel is very important to add to this discussion:

Thank you.

Given the fact that Balance is such a touchy issue, and no one takes to the forums to complain when they're top dps, I feel the devs at Blizzard put up with an amazing amount of complaining, and still do an amazing job. I applaud the CM team for sifting through the rants and raves and passing on the relevant information to the Development team, and I thank Blizzard as a whole for continuing to maintain such an incredible game.

It shows a lot of humility for Blizzard to acknowledge that despite the powerful resources at their disposal, there is a great deal of power, information, and just plain ingenuity in the community of fans. And the people at Blizzard value this information. That's a big part of why I keep playing. People from the casual gamer to the hard core theorycrafter stumble upon unforeseen builds and rotations, and the creativity of the community no doubt leaves Dev's scratching their heads at many times. So hats off to you Blizzard, keep making amazing things, and every now and then, I hope you find a thank you here and there to keep you going.

I did some very simple 5 minute pet-only parses on the Raid dummies on my Warlock to compare pet damage, and I found a few issues. All the tests were done with Grimoire of Supremacy, and I did not use macros to force pet attacks. I'll investigate more thoroughly when I have more free time.

One other thing related to global mechanics - with the change to hit and expertise cap points, and crit depreciation, have there been any changes made to the way melee roll tables work overall?

Patch isn't live, but the tooltip for Sturdy Ox says the bonus regen was cut down to 15%, which puts us all the way down at 9.2/s.

Drain Soul is supposed to replace Affliction filler malefic grasp at certain points in fights, most notably during the execution phase of any fight sub 20%, but it is not currently supported by the talents that are supposed to affect Warlock filler spells (Soul Leach and Affliction's Grimoire of Sacrifice)

Easiest one to test with, and the one I know for certain didn't work prior to todays build, is Wrath of Unchaining. You can pop Ascendance, open and still gain stacks from using Stormstrike, but it will just idle at that initial stack count despite your standard melee attacks continuing to go off.

In short, shouldn't Grimoire pets do as much dmg as regular pets for that duration and benefit from mastery, crit, haste and sp equally?

The heal spells you want to apply these buffs to are 2+ second cast time spells, and if you are still casting when the buff fades you do not gain the benefit. Which means you have 2~ seconds from casting Unleash Life to gain the Unleash Fury buff's benefit. This is an extremely short window of time!

Also what's the deal with this (identical characters in identical gear):

Live

Dodge -17.33% (14.51, 2565 Rating)
Parry - 18.71% (16.57, 2928 Rating)

Beta

Dodge - 11.90%
Parry - 24.60%

How exactly does Shadow Word: Insanity work?

It seems like the damage is increased in some way based upon how long each DoT consumed has been ticking when Insanity is cast. Is it based off number of ticks? % of base ticks? % of ticks adjusted for haste?

In PvE settings, there aren't too many DoT effects that present life or death decisions. Magics, Poisons and Diseases are either handled by the healer or by the Paladin him/herself. I'm assuming part of this is to help between Cleansing/Dispelling because of the new CD, but DoT effects only ever tick once every 2-3 sec; that means this Hand spell only reduces 2 or 3 of the DoTs ticks by 70%.

Another question regarding Brewmasters: A few builds ago we had Recoil as a proc from our autoattacks that generated extra energy. I no longer see it in my spellbook.

I don't recall seeing any mention of this in any list of changes posted anywhere so was this removed intentionally or is this a bug?

How is the Sacred Shield talent intended to work?

Regarding the healing per mana versus the healing per second between the chakra serenity and chakra sanctuary stances:

With the removal of Vengence, it did not fix my issues with Defensive Stance, but more so nerfed the better alternative. (No vengence = less Attack Power = weaker Barrier) Even so, Battle Stance still out-does Defensive by a fair margin.

Lots of enhancement parses incomming! I used the ilvl 483 pvp armor and ilvl 489 pvp weapons for this test, fully gemmed and enchanted with Cataclysm materials. I used 2 potions of the tol'vir per test, but no flasks/elixirs. Heroism was used at the start of each test.

I can think of many things - but Anger Management used to be a part of our toolkit and that added into our current design would help break the spikey feeling without worry of making the pool too big from auto-attacks.

-You seem to have given the Succubus (and the Shivarra) a “regular” (in the sense that it is not a resource consuming auto-castable ability you can click on and off) auto attack which she does not have on live. Is this a bug? If not, is there any possibility the Imps will get a similar ability since they are now the only pet that doesn't have one?

-I realize that fel energy regen is bugged, but I was wondering: does the what the fel energy tool tip says, that regen is 10 energy/second, reflect what is supposed to be happening and therefore we should sim with that number?
-On a related note, since pets are supposed to be energy limited rather than time limited will energy regen scale with haste or is it intend that pets won't really scale with haste (except for auto-attacks and when starting from 200 energy and cast time is briefly the limiting factor)?

-Even though regen is currently too fast, mathematically at least some of the pets should be able go Out of Energy just by casting their “main” auto-cast ability, but they never do. Using the Felhound as an example, I have seen it sit there and not cast Shadow Bite even when it has more than 60 energy and SB is off cool down. Instead it tends to wait until roughly 100-110 energy before casting, which is great because when I want to cast a time critical ability like Spell Lock there is, or very soon will be, enough energy to use it rather than having to (possibly) build all the way up from zero. Did you do this on purpose or is this a bug?

Lastly, I think there needs to be some change to the guardian cooldowns so that we can actually use them on most attempts in raid PvE without having to worry if it will be wasted on a wipe. I won't rehash all of the proposed solutions becuase that's been done enough, but with DS teir being replaced by new gear I am worried about going back to the way things used to be.

Most of what we've been modeling so far has been focused on nailing down our "rotation" and the interaction between Purifying Brew and Blackout Kick/Shuffle. Mostly we've been trying to figure out when to use which one, and if we'll have any chi left over for anything else.

It's something I do want to add as soon as we can hammer that part out, though. Think I have most of the mechanics down on it... Seems to proc from any melee attack (including Tiger Strikes?), and doesn't appear to have an ICD.

Only question I have is what the actual proc rate is, since that's pretty darn tricky to work that one out. Guessing it varies with weapon speed?

Alright, i've been testing Incarnation for some time and i have a few questions about it.

If you guys have the time, would you mind confirming for me how Overload works with Chain Lightning, and how this behaves with the glyph.

I'm assuming that the overload chance (X) is divided by 3 and applied to each CL hit (ie: each hit gets X/3, which means the chance of a single CL overload is (1-X/3)^3).

What I'm not sure of is whether the glyph applies X/3 to all 5 hits, so the chance at least on would be (1-X/3)^5, or it goes to (1-X/5)^5 instead.

One of the things that I've noticed when testing Elusive Brew is that the stacks will sometimes fall off when using a slow 2hander. It turns out 3.6 base speed is a bit too slow to reliably crit every 30 seconds with ~20% crit, especially when facing boss parry/miss rates and crit supression.

Even my nearly hit/exp capped monk had his stacks fall off, as opposed to DWing's rather constant and steady gain of stacks.

Is this on the radar?

Thanks for the reply. Is the intended design to have the 6 second timer ticking no matter what or start only when the target of Sacred Shield begins to take damage? Say I cast it on the tank, who doesn't take their first hit until 3 seconds after my cast. Will the second absorb be up after initial cast plus 6 seconds or initial cast plus 9 seconds?

Edit: That's Guardian's damage on a standstill target (just to clarify) :) It just doesnt have the noticable impact or power I guess I'd expect on a 5min CD ability.

I ask this since 1 point of spirit will be essentially worth the same regardless of Tier of Gear. A crossoverpoint of the importance of spirit/regen will exist. (I thought was the goal of having fixed mana pools was to avoid this.. as is, we potentially run the risk of being able to "overgear content with spirit")

its no surprise. I am against Rapture as a regen mechanic. Its imbalanced against holy (as illustrated in the previously linked blog post of mine that others have posted). Don't get me wrong, I LIKE having lots of regen... it just really isn't fair. Then add in the fact that Weakened Soul with multiple Disc Priests is always a fight in 25's with multiple discs. (now I understand that Rapture seems to be balanced round a 60 second Rapture CD... it still presents a potential stacking issue).

So I think that removing the Rage income from these skills would be a bad way to push us into using Defensive Stance. For me, it would feel much more intuitive that leaving Defensive Stance even further reduced my defensive capacity rather than that it made me have to attune to an alternate form of Rage generation.

Just curious, and perhaps not relevant, but to what extent do abilities and their scaling get planned out for the increased ilvl that comes with each successive tier of content? Does that sort of thing get looked at during the beta, or is it more of a "we'll deal with that later because things are going to change anyways"?
It seems like every expansion healing is really tight at launch, and turns into roflaoefest in the last tier, because that's the only way to "challenge" the healers. Similarly, (shield) tanks are short on their avoidance early on, but then end up capping their CTC.

Oh no, they'll see my op multi dotting :(

However, there's no way that all of this accounts for the giant discrepancy between Blood and Brewmaster damage, nor does it explain why DK's should even be thinking of using Heart Strike over Death Strike - but if we want to come close in damage we have to.

Man, GC. I know this is your job and everything, but how do you keep all of this info in your head? I don't think I could handle this for just a couple classes, much less the entire spectrum. Ins and outs of everything from the individual workings of spells to how an entire spec should flow. Just -SO- much information.

Isnt this especially problematic to balance specs though?

The ppm model for combat potency on combat rogues: It's pretty clear from tooltip wording (and from my initial tests) that slower offhands will have a greater chance to trigger combat potency. What I was wondering is if Main Gauche sourced combat potency procs are based on the main hand speed, the off hand speed, or a fixed proc chance entirely?

Currently Stormlash totem is scaling to ridiculous levels for certain classes(I've noticed Warlocks, Balance Druids, and Warriors so far) getting almost 400% more usage out of the totem than the myself as Elemental(With 2 back to back totems during heroism it did 300k damage for myself, but 1.2m for the warrior, 1.6m for the demo lock, 1.6m for the Balance druid.) Are you going to balance this down to those classes and then look at Stormlash and balance it around 25m but make sure it'll still be worth it for 10m.

I'm curious about the Hunter technique of macro'ing Fox and Hawk into cast time/instant shots, respectively, to maximize uptime with the Hawk AP buff while moving.

Barrage:
This ability seems to do 400% weapon damage in total but it does not seem to be normalized, unlike powershot which is normalized (as well as just about every other hunter ability). Is this an oversight or is it not normalized for a reason?

Currently because of the mana cost of spells and how slowly we generate Holy Power, im basically relying on Holy Shock and Holy light, with some WoG's / Eternal Flame on the tank. But im almost forced to not use Flash of Light of Divine Light because of the mana cost to heal ratio. More than a few casts of either of those will put me in the danger zone of going oom, with not a lot of healing to show for it. Also Holy Radiance doesnt do nearly as much AoE healing as it was in Cataclysm, where i could rely on it to keep the group up during rough raid damage periods.

How committed is the development team to having all tanks perform within an "acceptable variance" on all encounters? In Cataclysm we saw several "niches" become severe problems for tank balance on certain heroic encounters. For example:

Deathknights on Yor'Sahj
"Bearcatting" on Madness, Spine, Ultra, and Blackhorn
Deathknight and Druid compared to Paladin and Warrior for Impales on Madness
Warriors for Blood tanking on Spine
Paladins for most of heroic T12 due to Divine Guardian
Warrior/Druid/Deathknight vs Paladin on Al'Akir

GC - you wanted more info on the Earth Elemental dodge thing:

It was explained that "Expertise will negate dodge and spell miss, then parry".

No. I've tested this. Expertise reduces Dodge then Parry. Paperdoll is wrong and hasn't been updated yet.

Nature's Vigil is currently affecting Frenzied Regeneration. That doesn't seem intentional.

Hi Doctor Street. A question has arisen concerning the mage tier 6 talents and if we'll be balanced around 100 up time on their use for our dps to be competitive with other classes.

Is that a range Mistweaver or a melee one?

You're missing the point. Expertise doesn't help spell miss, which is a huge problem for any melee class that still has abilities on the spell hit table.

What was the decision process behind moving Vampiric Embrace from a passive ability to an active one?

Nowhere was a promise made that Piercing Shots, Mastery, et al. would be exempt from break CC. "Not a fair requirement" and "probably do need to pause" are not the words of a promise.

What? It's already not worth using either single target or in an AoE situation. Also, hunter shots are currently partially blockable as are pet attacks. Pet attacks are also suffering from glancing blows. Is this intended?

In regards to the mage level 90 talent Incanter's Ward, I have a bad feeling the fact that Priest shield spells are absorbed on higher priority than IW is going to foster a hateful relationship between a mage with the talent and the disc priest who is spell-blocking him. It would be a nice improvement to have Incanter's Ward at least have a higher absorb priority than other raiders' absorb spells if not also higher than Ice Barrier.

Is Mage mana regen intended to increase only with Haste Rating, or with total haste? At present, it appears that neither the Frost Armor 5% haste buff nor the 5% haste aura increase regen.

We're also really wondering about the various "ignite-like" mechanics in the game....

Specific questions: Do these mechanics have the same basic implementation internally? In other words, can we trust that there is a single set of assumptions we can make about how the damage calculation and propagation works that will allow us to simulate all these mechanics correctly? And are there any details you can give us that would reduce the number of assumptions we need to make?

How does Psyfiend pick which target and in what order to fear if there are more then one enemy attacking the priest? Is it based on location, order of who attacked when, or is it totally random?

What counts as the three direct attacks for Spectral Guise? Any attack that isn't a DoT, or is there more specific list of attacks?

What exactly is considered a range attack for Phantasm? Is it any attack that can be cast beyond melee range, or are there spells that are exception to this?

Our shaman guy is working on implementing Stormlash, but he's lacking details on how the damage scales, in particular whether or not it scales with the cast time of the proccing spell, and if so what the formula is. I haven't looked into it myself so I don't have any more specific questions, but any other details you could share on Stormlash would be helpful as well.

I'm assuming you're referring to the dot it triggers, Shadowflame, but that functions as a dot with a stacking mechanic: For one, it can crit, which seems counter to the whole premise of rolling forward a fixed amount of damage. It also just doesn't roll damage in that way at all - I can cast two HoGs back-to-back or I can wait and do the second one just before Shadowflame wears off, and after the second HoG I get a 2-stack dot ticking 7 times for the same amount in both cases.

Pre-MoP Deep Wounds used this mechanic - does the MoP version continue to use it, or something else?

Why do Unholy Aura/Windfury Totem (and other attack speed buffs) not increase rune regeneration speed? Same question with goblin racial. Heroism and Unholy Frenzy however do.

In contrast a caster's Cast time, DOTs and HOTs are affected by group buffs as well as things like Heroism and Power Infusion.

Is this a bug?

If not, could you please outline exactly what it is that will affect a Death Knight's rune speed regeneration?

That bears the question: Is everyone else too low, or are they too high?

Another issue is our aoe threat. Currently blood boil and DnD hit like wet noodles and that creates a lot of issues with aoe threat. The first few seconds are also an issue. Having to apply diseases to get the weakened blows debuff on the mobs can be a pain compared to the other tanks. With the few seconds time of getting diseases up can cause even more aoe threat problems.

What is the final word on DoT specs?

There is no doubt that "Split DPS" can influence a guild to take a DoT class over burst but encounters like Spine of DW can also encourage guilds to take burst dps over a DoT class

However, I have done raid testing on two healing classes (shaman/paladin), and in both cases, regen feels too weak, and definitely feels weaker than it did starting T11 raids in blue gear. It feels like you need to spam your low throughput/slow/efficient heal more than ever. This is surprising given the fact that we are scaled to first tier epic gear levels for raid testing. It feels like either regen cooldowns or Spirit scaling needs to be bumped up across the board.

Rupture can still be made to be used for primary sustained dps ability by it doing the correct dmg but for fast burst like what is needed in most of the raids Sanguinary Vein has to go back to all bleeds. This also needs to be changed to make the spec usable in pvp with the lower combo point generation.

The current way Sanguinary Vein works is like how Bandit's Guile works on live which you said was to punishing. Is there anything going to be done to make this mechanic less punishing to match what was done for the other 2 rogue specs?

HS does around 20% of your DPS. Switching to Blood Boil, then, will be a considerable drop. DS does 15% of your DPS.

Touch of Chaos is used to refresh Corruption, then is manually canceled prior to dropping from Metamorphosis to prevent any in-flight bolts refreshing Corruption without the buff Metamorphosis confers?

1) Currently having 1 pet and the glyph to duplicate said pet (assuming Ferocity) does significantly less (about ~40-45%) of having 5 Ferocity pets on-call when using Stampede. Can you clarify if there is a bug currently with the glyph?

2) Assuming the glyph is being used and 4 duplicates of your current pet are called, are the 4 duplicates called with the baseline stats, or are the buffs from the original pet copied to them; i.e. is the design of Stampede intended for it to be used after AP procs and Rabid/Bestial Wrath to maximize the damage of the other pets? It seems to fit the niche of the Doomguard for Demo currently where lining up buffs causes the Doomguard to scale in damage and would add a measure of complexity to the CD.

how is the interaction with Malefic Grasp/Drain Soul speeding Dot ticks and KJ's cunning supposed to work? Does the slowing of cast time have some interaction with the dot ticks or does it only affect the channeled spell's tick time (and therefore dmg)?

Also, what is the intended interaction between burning rush and KJ's cunning?

* What are the Echo of the Elements proc chances for Enhancement and Elemental?

* How does Flurry interact with auto-attack swing times? If you gain the Flurry buff on an auto-attack, does the next auto attack from that hand gain the haste benefit? When dual-wielding, does the Flurry buff that gets removed / added "mid-swing" affect the remaining auto-attack swing time(s)? Finally, at what point is the Flurry stack decremented?

Is the Gargoyle intended to gain any benefit from Unholy Presence or Improved Unholy Presence, given the latter's classification as increased attack speed and rune regen?

Question >> Do the developers intend/want Holy pallys to use Selfless Healer, Glypth of Ascetic Crusader, and those types of rotations (Crusader Stirke for melee range, Judgement for extended range) to manage mana/heals?

Question >> Is the expectation that Holy pallys will be an ultra specialized raid class? I'm curious on this, as currently the mutliple situtaional rotations are complex at best.

While I agree with your stance and understand that this is the ideal direction and that it is going to be hard to reach it, you have to at least acknowledge that SH is going to be better in mostly any scenario for PvE. If this continues to be the case I assure you that it will not be an option, it will become a mandatory talent.

I agree that the issue is LoD being ridiculous right now. But there's more to it. Perhaps a solution to look at is adding Holy Power generation back to Holy Light. Maybe not every cast, but perhaps every 2 Holy Lights you cast you generate one Holy Power. Right now HR is barely worth casting, and as such very few are going to take advantage of it. Holy Power generation feels weak because of it. Mana feels weak because of Holy Power generation.

This might work in an average raiding guild. But I'll tell you right now I can already spot a few encounters where a particular class is going to outshine another class due to the mechanics of the encounter and abilities of a class.

I liked the old model of Wrath far more than Cata and Mists current model. When you try to make each healer a jack of all trades you essentially take away a very key aspect of why players chose to play the class to begin with. I love tank healing, and it's actually why I rolled a Paladin to begin with. But, we've been such strong AoE healers all expansion that over the course of time tank healing duty has shifted from paladins to other classes that cannot put out the output that paladins do.

>- Is the Healing from Light's Hammer supposed to scale with Inquisition? The other 2 L90 Talents' damage scales with Inquisition but not the healing, is this intended?

>- Also, some Hand spells are now 40 yards, while some are still 30. Is this intended as well, or an oversight?

>- Glyph of Immediate Truth... where to begin...

What is the design goal for Hand of Salvation?

>- What is the design goal for the Battle Healer glyph? The only spec that is in "Seal of Insight stance" is typically Holy.

Ghost, this is another question I've been meaning to ask: Will you continue to work on the Pet/Minion AI? Despite improvements over the years, it really leaves much to be desired.

I'll provide some examples from a Death Knight perspective, but I'd welcome any input from classes or specs that have had a similar experience.

Is it worth us double checking pet scaling now (specifically FE & PFE as it appears that Primal Elementalist has some scaling issues as Elemental gears up)?

Is there a reason Light of Dawn absolutely has to retain the beacon transfer?

Long story short, if you're hit/expertise capped as appropriate to your class, your pets will be too. If they didn't split it like that, then warlock melee pets would have twice as much hit as what they need, and no expertise.

One other change I'm concerned about and find frustrating is the cooldown on cleanse. This serves no PVE purpose that I can come up with, and seems to only serve to limit encounter design and raid composition. I've found a couple places (admittedly in 5 man instances) where mobs put dots on the group more frequently than the cleanse CD, which forces me to heal through the remainder until cleanse comes off CD. It's not difficult in these cases, so it's not a question of it being game breaking, but it's frustrating being forced to spend more mana to heal through something I could cleanse if it wasn't for a CD which serves no PVE purpose. It feels like I'm being forced to play suboptimally, especially coming from a situation on live where that isn't the case.

Little confused.

For Hit: Do they get 50% of our hit and 50% our Exp to calculate just hit? and then calculate it again for expertise?

Or are our pets not going to be hit capped if we are hit capped. The wording confuses me.

Also, is the Unholy Ghoul supposed to receive attack speed benefits from Unholy Presence and Improved Unholy Presence?

Death and Decay: There seems to be a bug regarding this spell. The in game scrolling combat text shows that it hits 1 target 11 times, however, the combat log shows only 8 hits. Is it intended to hit 8 times or 11? And are the devs ok with the ability being in the DK single target rotation, assuming it is?

Can we get shaman elementals and fire totems to count as pets then?

Anyways, the main theorycraft question I have is in regards to stampede mechanics and intent as it relates to the extra pet's abilities. Obviously there are two styles of abilities of note that I would love to see addressed, those are the party buffs and the target debuffs.

Is the health of Mirror Images being looked at? As I understand it they are considered Guardians not Pets.

Currently they look to be 10% of the mages Hp's at level 90 (for me that is 26,628), and that is not enough to survive a single blow from a mob where we would be interested in using Mirror Images to buy us the time to kill said mob.

One thing to note about dancing rune weapon is that it currently is not copying the effects of death siphon and soul reaper. We don't want it to take a while to update the new abilities into dancing rune weapon like cata did.

I definitely would love to use it in PvP as well as certain areas in PvE, but do you think there's some room for making it attractive to Holy paladins even in raid scenarios as well, akin to Atonement and Telluric Currents or even the Mistweaver melee healing style? Because of the way we've been designed, I know most people are more comfortable in the back healing, but there have been a niche of players who would be attracted to that playstyle of Paladin, myself included.

My other question is, are the weird cooldowns for our offensive CDs intended? After playing around with two minute cooldowns in Cata, it feels so odd working with a three minute cooldown with Avenging Wrath (as Ret/Prot at least, Holy iirc has it at 2 minutes) and two minute Holy Avenger (although Sanctified Wrath kinda justifies the AW CD). The Tier 14 4-piece bonus adds to that confusion, not to mention propels Sanctified Wrath to the forefront.

Is pvp intended to follow the same model of no mandatory glyphs?

Just a question about the healing Priest 4-piece PvP bonus, Diamond Soul:

Is the resilience bonus supposed to apply only to the Priest when cast on oneself or is it supposed to extend to any eligible player target?

Just ignore the armchair moderators. If GC doesnt like the direction the thread has gone, he will tell us and get on back on the topic they want to discuss.

When you say "Melee/Ranged/Spell individually", do you mean my (warlock) pets get my melee crit chance, of which I have very little? If so, is it really intended that my caster pets crit much more than my melee pets just because I'm a caster myself?

Do pets have any sort of base crit or crit from their own base intellect/agility, to which the inherited crit from their owner is added, or do they simply get the owner's crit chance directly, overwriting any base crit that may otherwise have been there?

I am praying that the "lower" duration was a typo and what you meant was "longer" duration.

I read these two comments where one says that R Shaman have a niche (stacked up healing), and the other comment that no healers should have a niche. I'm bringing this up specifically regarding 10 man spread raid healing, 25 man spread healing for Shaman is not really an issue. There were plenty of fights outside of Dragonsoul that were absolutely painful to heal through as a Shaman, and nothing has been done to help us spread heal AoE raid damage that is coming out regularly. It seems to me that class balance is significantly lacking with regards to 10 man spread healing.Thanks again for the feedback you've been dishing out :)

Currently I believe, say, an orc dual wielding an axe and a different weapon will have 1% more expertise attributed to the swings of the axe but not to those of the other weapon, from the axe specialization racial. (If this is not how it works, please correct me.) Will pets inherit (50% of) this expertise at all? If so, is it decided by whether the owner is wielding an axe in the main hand, or in either hand, or what?

Also, what about the Draenei racial, Heroic Presence? I believe we've tested this and found it not to affect pets - can we assume this will be fixed?

In doing the raid testing over the past few weeks Disc priest feels like it is slacking behind the other healers. To me it is feeling rather weak in its healing to mana cost ratio. Also aoe healing for Disc seems to be quite lackluster. PoH throughput to mana cost just seems out of proportion. It was nice to get PW: Solace but at the same time to get the mana back you have to be not healing which seems rather counter intuitive as a healer in a raid. The other talents in the tree Mindbender and From Darkness, Comes Light just don't seem to restore the mana that Solace gives back as long as the downtime to cast it is there.

The question I am asking you is, do you feel that Disc is at a point where it is balanced compared to the single target and aoe healing that the other healing classes can throw out when considering throughput and mana cost as well as mana regen downtime?

In that case, let me rephrase a question we've already been asking amongst ourselves for some time now: How do YOU see us using Soul Reaper in a sub-35% situation?

For every theorycrafted result we've simmed/tested so far, we've estimated that its gain is so strong that sitting on a Death Rune just to match with the cooldown is more than worth it. Not using it off cooldown is a loss. Thus, it dominates our rotation completely and frankly makes for rather unenjoyable gameplay, given how antithetical holding back runes feels.

As such, we're also getting numbers higher than your stated 7% for Unholy and 4% for Frost- far higher.
This is one of the primary reasons why we're so slanted towards generating and maintaining Death Runes as constantly as possible, and thus why we say talents like Blood Tap and Plague Leech being mandatory.

Is there something radically different we're doing than from what your internal numbers show you?

Another thing I noticed was the first tier talent Double Time. Reading it, I was under the impression that I could charge someone, they immediately use an escape (blink/disengage etc), then I can immediately charge again, and after the second charge the cooldown is incurred. However, at this point in time I charge something, and it is not available for use for another 10-12 seconds as it 'recharges'. This goes against what the talent reads "You can use charge twice before incurring it's cooldown". Is this intended?

Is there a reason why Healing tide doesn't scale with mastery and is there a reason why healing stream doesn't scale with haste or crit ?

IT just seem's strange that Healing tide works with haste and crit but not mastery and healing stream works with mastery but not haste and crit .Looking for any insight

For the sake of clarification, does this mean you would examine the functionality of Blood Tap and Plague Leech? Or re-examine abilities which cost a Death Rune cost?

Is it really meaningful to compare Rage to Runes? Because they aren't the same...at all.

Current:
Raid/Dungeon: DPS cooldown, sometimes used in emergencies to prevent wipes since they can take 2-3 hits each (6-9 swings)

This is the total opposite of how Death Knights have been played since Wrath.

The mathematical rune regen difference is minuscule, sure. That is not why Blood Tap is the default option: Death Rune costs are. So long as they exist, and such a huge part of our DPS depends on abilities that use them, we will naturally default towards talents/regen mechanics that provide them.

Is there any word on what exactly the outcome for Dark Apotheosis is going to be? All we've heard is that it is not meant to be a viable tank spec and that it is supposed to be more in line with an dps warrior slapping on a shield and taking a few hits. However recent raid testing and logs have shown otherwise, right now DA warlocks are very viable tanks.

* How much AP/SP do Feral Spirits, Fire Elementals and Earth Elementals get from the owner?
* What is the coefficient on a Shadowfiend's/Mindbender's attack?

Currently they don't appear to scale with temporary percentage-wise haste buffs on the owner, such as Dark Soul: Misery. Is this intended, or will that change over the next few builds? Whatever the answer, is the same true for temporary crit buffs?

On a related note, we've been told before that pets should not benefit from any buffs on their own anymore, but in Cataclysm they still gained certain things like Bloodlust/Heroism. Will this still be true in MoP? If so, do you have a comprehensive list of which buffs can affect pets?

I hope you like enhancement, GC, because I have 45 more parses for you to sift through

My newest source of confusion is Archimonde's Vengeance, the behavior of this spell when you don't use it's active ability at all is very inconsistent when tanking and I don't think it's worth testing it's active behavior until I understand it's current and intended mechanics. From what I can tell the ability is only "reflecting" boss special attacks and not "white" hits.

What about dual-wielding pets like the Wrathguard and the Shivarra? Does the fact that their models display them as having weapons in both hands mean the game actually treats them as dual-wielders, meaning they will miss even if their master is spell hit capped?

Will Echo be able to proc from Elemental's mastery? I would assume not, but the wording on the talent doesn't make it clear one way or the other.

Also, does the effect have any type of internal cool down?

Because as an additional note, as I've been viewing streams, DPS charts, and watching some raid testing videos as well as analyzing there parses, hunters are severely undertuned right now. Some of them aren't even able to out DPS the tank (and yes, I'm aware of marking on WoL to show pets, and even then they are dealing minimal damage).

How does the Affliction passive Nightfall work?

I ask because I've noticed some curious behavior with the procs (ignoring the fact that it's bugged and not currently granting a shard).

The tooltip says it has a 10% chance per tick of Corruption to generate a Soul Shard, which would mean that on average you'd get a shard every 10 ticks. Nightfall seems to be doing almost exactly that, on average I saw a shard about every 10-11 ticks, and the majority of my shards were generated between 8 and 13 ticks and the spread created a rough bell curve between about 3 and 18 ticks.

The thing is, if Nightfall were truly a flat 10% chance then that wouldn't happen. If you graphed out the number of ticks per proc at a 10% chance, you'd get a logarithmic curve with 10% of your procs happening at 1 tick, and slightly less than that every tick afterwards stretching on to infinity. You definitely wouldn't get a bell curve.

However, a stacking 5% chance per Corruption tick would fit the bill exactly. On average you'd get a shard every 10.5 Corruption ticks, with a standard deviation of nearly 2.5. You'd have a guaranteed shard at tick 20, and a possibility for a shard at tick one, but both aren't going to happen very frequently.

Additionally, as far as I can tell it appears that this effect uses all Corruption ticks from all sources, which has some interesting implications for mulit-target situations.

If this is what's happening, then you've gone a long way towards allowing for consistent shard generation for single targets, without nerfing multi-target shard generation (and vice-versa), which was a problem with ICDs and PPMs on multi-target, and low proc chances for single-target.

Quick question reguarding death knight Bloodworm guardians, they seem to completely ignore the new hit / exp pet rules. It seems like the recieve no benefit from their master's hit / exp. They constantly sit at about a 15-16% total miss rate, which is pretty easily seen by looking at their damage breakdown.

Is this intentional, or are Bloodworms simply bugged?

Wait wait, hold on. That's not how Roll works so I'm really confused.

Roll has 2 charges naturally, 20 second cooldown.

I use Roll once, 20 second timer starts.
I have another charge of Roll, so I use that in the next second, just like your example warrior.
After 20 seconds, I gain one charge and can use Roll again.
I have to wait another 20 seconds for the next Roll.

There aren't any A or B Rolls because each Roll charge regenerates one at a time. This means that outside of the first Roll, you've essentially got 1 Roll every 20 seconds. You're describing Double Time as 2 Charges every 20 seconds that only regenerate after both have been spent.

Agreed on all accounts. Blood Tap may not be a huge dps increase, but it is still an increase and players will gravitate towards using BT. Removing Death Rune costs fixes the problem and allows players to freely choose whichever tier 75 talent they want without feeling penalized.

Im a little confused as to how bloodbath is supposed to work. The tooltip leads me to think that I pop bloodbath, and 30% of the damage I did at the very beginning of bloodbath is distributed as a bleed over 6 seconds. After 6 seconds, the next attack triggers another set of bleeds based on 30% of that attack.

My guess is that it's like that because of how they changed mastery from being x points like in cata for everyone to actually displaying the percent from conversion for each spec.

Was the 12% haste Holy pallies lost via removing Judgements of the Pure (9%) and Speed of Light (3%) intended or was it something you guys didn't notice? Also, are Holy Pallies supposed to have 2.4s cast times on HL/DL?

I have a question concerning Divine Hymm, why exactly was it removed from all specs except Holy? The holy version was far more powerful at a 3 minute cooldown whereas disc/shadow had it on an 8 minute cooldown.

Can you please comment on Monk hates levels.. in this patched the base energy regen went from 8/sec to 13/sec (and brewmasters getting 30% bonus)

Charge's Charge A starts recharging when Charge B is discharged, but Charge B doesn't recharge until Charge A's charge has recharged, making it so that after discharging Charge A, Charge's Charge B won't recharge a second charge for 40 seconds.

Does your data support the conclusion that Fervor is significantly better than Thrill of the Hunt, or is my experiment flawed? An indication of which statement is correct is sufficient for my purposes. I am willing to return to the drawing board and test these talents again.

Currently on the MoP Beta servers (and in fact it seems ever since Flurry was implemented for Enhancement), if you can sync your auto attacks to happen at the same time, you are consuming only a single charge of Flurry for most of the synced mainhand/offhand swing combos.

Is this very short ICD intended to prevent situations like Normal Cast/Echo Proc/Overload/Overload Echo Proc, or will these continue to occur?

Glyph of Mirror Image may be a bit problematic for a minor glyph. Problem is that if the Mage is Arcane, the Mirror Images benefit from the Arcane Blast debuff; this results in nearly a 40% increase to their damage, which is a pretty hefty improvement. Fire and Frost both seem to get (in 463 blues plus crafted epics) about 200,000 damage out of a Mirror Image cast, while Arcane gets about 280,000 damage.

Was the Flash of Light proc removed from Infusion of Light because of Selfless Healer? I'm sure you have read it countless times but that while not so important in PVE was EXTREMELY(emphasis) important in PVP.

On top of that, paladins really don't need a 4th throughput cooldown. They already have Avenging Wrath, Guardian of Ancient Kings, and the level 75 talent.

Why isnt Runic Corruption becoming baseline for Death Knights like it was intended to become during the Wrath Beta?
Why do we have a talent tier with three talents that do numerically the same thing?
Your post proved there is no difference what-so-ever between the three and having played with all three on the beta myself I have no change in playstyle.

With my guardian demons, I have been noticing that they have a tendency to stand around and not attack on fights where the boss either changes forms, or in council fights.

Is this part of the pet AI overhaul coming, or are they just being stubborn?

If it is the later, is there a chance that we could get that by applying/reapply a curse to a target causes them to favor that target above doing nothing?

Is it intended that lower levels can now become unhittable through avoidance since the strength to parry conversion change?

Don't get me wrong, I see the DK issue and agree with it, but there's always going to be a theoretical gain of a few percent somewhere on something.

GC, is it intended that paladins can't see their Seals as a buff icon anymore?
It's kinda confusing without it.

While numbers are part of the argument, they take a big back seat to the fun argument.

If pushback protection is for all healers this will definitely help because for example a good mage could shut out a paladin for 5 seconds enough to completely gut a paladin, die or let the burst down of another team member.

White attacks are still ‘one roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block Glance Crit Hit), and yellow attacks are still ‘two roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block, Crit). The only change to that is that Block against players is an additional separate roll now.

Continuing on from this post: is Runic Corruption bugged? Some DKs are noticing that multiple procs of Runic Corruption in a row are leading to the buff getting a full 3 seconds added to it. Take an instance of 3 RC procs in a row with a 2.5 second duration. 3 RC procs in a row should grant 7.5 seconds, but in actuality, is giving us 8.5 seconds (2.5 + 3 + 3).

Could this bug possibly explain why Runic Corruption is doing so well for the devs and not the players?

Is it intentional that Bloodbath does not proc off Dragon's Roar?

From the calculator I'm assuming this [healer pushback] is 70 percent right?

Have you guys done the low level pvp pass that Zarhym mentioned in this thread many months back?

Is there a chance that it could be tied to both Critical Block chance and Shield Barrier potency so Mastery is relevant to both our AM Buttons, like paladins got with their Bastion of Glory talent? (You could also bring back the "Hold the Line" name this way.)

In Fury related news, is there any chance that Raging Blow could be looked at? It's still not very powerful or integral to Fury's rotation and only accounts for a small portion of Fury's overall DPS.

Is it intended that Rime proc Howling blast doesn't produce 10 Runic power? Also, using conversion while in frost spec/pres causes the RP generation to go from 20% to 100%.

Frankly, I don't see buffing Telluric Currents to be the right approach for Shaman mana regeneration

Do the stats of temporary pets like Feral Spirits (ones that don't have a pet stats page) adjust dynamically according to thier master's stats? Or do they still take a "snap shot" of thier master's stats?

Ouch, I was already fairly resource starved on the beta and figured this was (part) of the cause. If Rime no longer gives RP from it's HB, that's going to be super painful.

Hi, I'd like to know what your stance on Vengeance affecting defensive abilities is. I remember Word of Glory during Cata specifically not being affected by Vengeance. Currently in MoP Expel Harm can go upwards of 120k~ non-crit, as well as other defensive abilities which are affected by Vengeance (Death Siphon, Lichborne Death Coil healing, Zen Sphere healing component, Shield Barrier). There are also others which are not (Anti-Magic Zone). Where doyou draw the line? (list non exhaustive).

Basically ,is it a bug that some only scale with AP from gear while others scale with Vengeace AP as well? If not, are there any that are scaling differently with Vengeance AP than they are with AP from gear? Eg. 1:1 scaling with gear from AP but 1:4 scaling with Vengeance AP?

Is it intended that the stacks of Mana Tea a Mistweaver Monk can gain from doing DPS in Stance of the Fierce Tiger will persist through stance changes, and is it intended that in periods of downtime Mistweaver Monks are to use this fact in order to build up a reserve of Mana Tea at no cost other than what it takes to consume the stacks when later needed?

The majority of people feel it should be 10/sec regen rate as a base. Though, the developers fully intend to bring it down to 8/sec, despite us all agreeing how starved we feel.

I heard that several new builds are coming for testing. Good, and I really hope judgement of the pure will be back in any form. This is NOT about we need a buff, and I don't care how you spin your balancing, this is about the character of Paladin class. I hope that judgement to be back into holy paladin rotation and giving an effect called judgement of the pure.

Revenge - 4.5 sec cooldown. Instantly attack an enemy and two additional enemies for X damage. If Revenge is on cooldown, a successful dodge or parry refreshes Revenge. Generates 10 Rage in Defensive Stance.

"Why does Holy Word: Sanctuary not benefit from haste like healing rain and Efflorescence. Is it intended?"

Issue #1. Guardian dps seems to be EXTREMELY skewed towards mangle.

Issue #2. Guardian dps is pretty overpowered.

ust looking to ask on your stance (no pun intended.. kinda) on prot warriors and Heroic Strike / Cleave.

On live, I like where they stand, I use them frequently and am happy with that
On beta, they just arent worth using. Cleave itself hits for an astonishingly low amount, as with heroic strike. My main question is, are these abilities going to get buffed? Because even with the free heroic strike/cleave proc, It's just not worth using it over devastate. I know that it's not exactly on the gcd, but to me it's just not worth hitting the button for the extremely poor output. You could argue 'free damage is free damage' and i'd be okay with that, but i'm sure there's something else you could say :)

The rage cost on both the abilities on beta is SIGNIFICANTLY too high if the damage values are to stay the same.
It would be nice to get back to actually using those abilities instead of blindly spamming devastate until my fingers break :)

- Right now several Classes/Specs have extremely complicated AoE rotations, but do SIGNIFICANTLY LESS AoE damage than classes/specs that simply spam 1 or 2 abilities.

Rune tap, and Death Pact (Possibly the whole level 60 tier of talents) are generating healing AE threat similar to that of regular healing. Is this intended? Seems rather odd, since the threat generated by the healing portion of death strike was removed. Both these healing abilities do generate AE threat on live as well, but they aren't modified by the thread modifier provided by blood presence like it does on beta.

Call of the Elements and the ability to reset the cooldowns of SLT/MTT/HTT potentially twice in one fight is far too good for either of the other talents to match up with it.

TANKING AVOIDANCE STATS

- Theck over at Sacred Duty mapped out avoidance stats and DR's.

Is it intended that the DR curve for dodge is 2-3x as punishing as for parry?

In other words, is it intended that tanks are going to be stacking parry over dodge by a 3:1 ratio?

That talent is the only thing keeping Rshamans wanted due to our lack of spread healing(Double HTT helps with that). If you remove that ability you might as well leave us how we were in T11/T12 due to lack of such healing. It also doesn't help the other two choices are not even a choice due to how bad they are. You can make Cote a 30 minute cd and we would still take it.

From the logs I have seen so far we are either behind other healers or barely equal in select cases with regards to healing numbers and I pray hardmodes will solve this due to our mastery. Not to mention our mana regen is nothing to brag about

A simple quick glance at this list clearly shows the cheapest spell for shaman being more expensive than ANY priest spell in either spec.

Is it intended for Elemental Blast to give a random buff instead of your increasing your highest stat?

Is it intended for Glyph of Riptide to not proc Resurgence?

If this is the prefered design why do Guardians have to spend rage for Maul? It has been stated a few times that Maul would never be used except to solo things (an only if the damage comes up).

Right now, the specs with the spammiest AoE are doing a lot more damage. I'm harping on Destro's AoE as an example of a stupidly complex AoE rotation that does very weak damage.

- Pyroclasm -
Is it intended for it to be a dps loss to use the Backdraft charges on CB?

- Dark Soul -
Are you happy with the benefit that each spec is deriving from this cooldown? Right now, Destro yet again feels like it falls behind because RNG can significantly negate the benefits of its cooldown (i.e. - you may not crit any more than you would normally; it's even possible to crit less frequently during its duration!

This honestly bothers me a hell of a lot, because when you nerf energy regen for monks, you're making their best tanking stat haste.

Based on my testing so far with the snake trap formula, it looks like snake trap is going to be doing enough damage (at least for SV) that we would want to include it in our rotation (assuming I calculated the scaling right).

I don't understand why the 30s reduction in the outbreak CD was removed in contradiction to this portion in the article. Was it to make the first tier of talents more viable?

It's especially bad if they keep this constant, quick nerf method that DS experienced. As Enhancement, I have rampup AoE, which means my numbers on fights like Yor'sajh and Madness have gone down as the nerfs have gone up because I no longer have sufficient time to get my AoE going before everything's dead.

Like I said earlier, it felt like the guys designing the classes' AoE never coordinated with the guys designing fights. It doesn't really matter if my AoE 20 seconds in is OMGWOWAWESOME if there's never a fight where AoE lasts for 20 seconds.

In the current beta build, survival's damge is being hindered by explosive shot ticking for almost less than a serpent sting tick.

Of course it affects our regen, and of course we are going to use it. However, the problem is that it also gives the same amount of mana to every other healer in the raid. Because every other healer gets Mana Tide plus Divine Plea/Shadowfiend/Innervate, Shaman regen will naturally feel lower than that of other classes (and probably output will also be lower because of not having a personal regen cooldown).

It feels extremely weak while PvPing, have you played survival in a bg recently? You can barely make a difference without spamming cobra shot.

90% of your playerbase lives outside of truly cutting edge content. Most of them have damage meters. Whether you like it or not, a large part of the fun of DPSing is getting to see your name at or near the top of the meter every now an then. When there are certain phases (namely AoE here) where by default you know you have ZERO chance to see your name there, it's a little depressing.

Ultimately that's why all of this matters. You may feel it's shallow, and that's certainly your right to feel that way. It doesn't change that it's a huge part of how players get valued, and value their own experience.

Because it was the only time where it was really controversial?

Can we have some on demand burst with survival's LnL talent? for example, while LnL is active, all explosive shot damage is increased by a certain amount, or has a 100% chance to crit? Otherwise, even with LnL Tripple explosive shot, it barely manages to reach the damage of a regular chimera shot...

If that's the case, can we look into removing Ember decay?

It's not about the QQ. Yeah, other tanks get it free. So what? Classes are different.

What we need to focus on is the consequences of this change. To put it briefly, blood DKs will ignore diseases beyond using the free outbreak to maintain 50% uptime.

I don't know if it's something new to level 86+ players but to me it seems like there is a new, unforeseen formula when calculating the Agility to Dodge variable. On my level 85 Worgen Druid on the beta, I can easily get the 243.58281085 Agility to Dodge conversion working. It does appear that Base Agility is now being affected by the Agility to Dodge (whereas on live it is not).

Glyph of Chaining is incredibly weak, such that Shaman would be better off electing to handle AOE raid damage on a spread raid as we have since Ulduar--through single-target healing.

Glyph of Riptide. Points about the lack of AA and Resurgence procs aside (because they were addressed earlier), what concerns me most about this glyph is the usage that it's seeing by shaman in the Beta, who are recording parses where RT is their primary or secondary heal because of its Rejuv-spam-like application. This practice essentially devalues Tidal Waves management and spell weaving in favor of RT blanketing.

Agree 100%, I think GC is too stuck on balencing for pve right now, not really looking into how sirvival feels in pvp, rather just saying "dots are powerful in pvp", not really, especially when the enemy has heals. And survival has no burst even with the current LnL. Not to mention dispell protection, but dispells are on a 6 second cd now..

Explosive Shot is scaling exactly as the coefficient described. The problem is that, its scaling modifiers were admitted to by Ghostcrawler himself to be very much flawed but it was never addressed in the actual game design.

Question regarding Soul Reaper: assuming it costs Runic Power

I would IMAGINE it would be additional ticks/akin to Efflor, but am just looking for clarity. (I ask also, so we can start calculating how Haste will affect HW: Sanc from a breakpoint perspective...)

Also, CS seems to hit like a wet noodle currently in beta vis a vis HotR

Awesome. Basically it was the tooltip applying the diminishing returns on Agility and not on Dodge that was throwing everything off. With that, we should have better evaluations from the Guardian community.

GC -- if you dont mind me asking -- what is the armor value for lvl 93 raiding dummies?

Theck needs that data for some of his calculations.

I'm not GC, so this isn't official, but the armor number I've gotten from other sources is 24835 for the 93 dummies.

When he says 3 Explosive Shots adding to 80k, he's referring to the individual ticks.

Weapon modifier scaling is simply more fluid and linear. It benefits from both weapon upgrades and from additional AP as more AP boosts that +WDPS% that gets calculated in our shot coefficients.

I understand and agree with your reasoning but if embers, rage, demonic, runic and holy power decay and, if you stretch the definition a little, combo points do too, why doesn't chi? Is it intended?

Essentially, is smart healing based on absolute heath values or on relative health percentage. Further, does smart healing have an inherent 'priority', preferring to heal say, Tanks over healers over DPS?

But I don't need them to be equal when I've cleared all the content, I need them to be equal when I actually getting the gear and I need my abilities to scale.

In regards to the Explosive Shot ticks vs shots, why in the world are we comparing 3 individual shot casts to a single shot? That's just a simple curiousity in order to understand your PoV on the topic Ghostcrawler.

Is the splash heal from Daybreak Holy Shocks intended to not apply mastery?

I've got some concerns about the damage of Arcane Shot versus Cobra Shot. GC has said regarding Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn that it doesn't feel very good for the builder to do more than the spender, and I think this applies here too. I'm in the vendor pvp gear fully gemmed except the meta and my Arcanes are hitting for 15-20k (so we'll say an avg 17.5k for calculating purposes) and my Cobras are hitting for 22-27k (24.5k for calculating). I went ahead and reforged for the raid levels of hit and expertise and then crit, leaving me with 5.36% haste, which brings my Cobras to a 1.9 second cast.

Can you clarify on what you mean by losing some of the Revenge kit?

Also, are you able to elaborate on your previous comments about Dire Beast's tier move and Thrill of the Hunt's redesign? Like are there any thoughts on this that you would be willing to share? Both potential changes actually have pretty substantial impact on the playstyle of the Beast Mastery Hunter, far more than the other two specs.

I did some extensive mathematics on warrior tankiing, more precisely, Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier.

Short Version: There is currently nearly no reason for any warrior to use Shield Block. The amount of physical damage done by a boss melee swing to be high enough that the 30%/60% block outshines the absorb puts it out of reach of the vast majority of the playerbase. Obviously, this is even more true with non-blockable or magic damage, but even with the kind of attacks that can be blocked, Shield Barrier is just plain better for everything other than non-nerfed 25H bosses who use debuffs on the tank.

Hey GC, I'm fairly positive there's some crunching or something weird going on with Bloodbath for both Arms and Fury (and likely Prot as well). I noticed its damage seemed a bit low when I was testing it, but never really got around to seeing if it was truly bugged or something until today.

Is it still intended for block to have diminishing returns? I'm looking at some data this evening, and as far as I can tell we're getting exactly 1% block for every 1% mastery all the way up to around 38% block (which is as high as my data set goes). If there were any meaningful DR on block (i.e., a cap lower than 1000 or so), I should have seen some nonlinearity by that point. But it's perfectly linear.

The data set is gathered from the character sheet, so it's possible (though unlikely, in my mind) that the character sheet block percentage just isn't updating properly.

I haven't tested this myself, but I had read somewhere that the new weapon chain (Living Steel Weapon Chain) is designed to also be applied to ranged weapons. The spell description says "Requires One-Handed Axes, Two-Handed Axes, Bows, Guns, One-Handed Maces, Two-Handed Maces, Polearms, One-Handed Swords, Two-Handed Swords, Staves, Fist Weapons, Daggers, Crossbows"

Is this intentional or has aimed shot just not been tweaked yet to use a more straightforward formula?

Hey GC, sorry to ask/bother you again -- but is Divine Purpose supposed to have synergy with Hammer of Wrath, that the tooltips are not telling us? Also asking because it also affects how valuable the talent is with this extra synergy -- since it affects gameplay in an execute phase.

I am also wondering if we will see any Compensation for this nerf to our mana and our throughput as from what I seen we are not the top of the pile in healing or mana for beta. And like you pointed out it cuts out about 8% of our total healing and a big chunk of mana

As it stands now there are no useful glyphs for Holy PvE since Ascetic was removed, Blessed Life nerfed and, while Battle Healer was buffed, it's still weak.

So the question is, was blood tap meant to have a gcd and what was the thought process in adding one to the ability if it was meant to be added?

Hey GC, did you all do something intentional to rage generation? It was 5 rage per second for MH strikes and 2.5 rage for OH strikes (full report here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5978458015?page=7#129). Now it seems to have been reduced to 2.5 rage per second for MH strikes and 1.25 rage per second for OH strikes. Is this intentional or a bug of some kind?

Is Sacred Shield limited to one target still? The talent would be tremendously better if it had a small target cap.

Also just to confirm EF does not longer have a target cap? It's still pretty limited without one but just wanting to confirm.

Do we still need to wait another build before testing pet scaling, or can we get started once we drag ourselves away from pet battles?

1. Lightning Shield does not appear to be able to proc Echo of the Elements. Intended?

2. With Unleashed Fury, it appears that synchronized weapon swings might be suffering from a hidden cooldown on Static Shock.

I thought it would have been fixed in this build, but Drain Soul is doing too much damage out of Execute.

Is it intended for Eternal Flame not to consume Bastion of Glory because its not consuming it (while WoG still is)?

Can you tell us a bit about the changes to Stormlash Totem? Pre-patch i was getting 1mil dmg single target from two Stormlashes on a 10min test, Post-patch I got 220k on the same test.

I just tested the new Army of the Dead with pet scaling fixes. At level 90 in full 483 PvP gear it dealt 297k damage. AoTD lasts 40s, so that's 7.43k DPS. It does not seem to be scaling any better than before.

How are the devs feeling about Fae Empowerment?

The intended design is that we never fill all our GCDs, except maybe while Avatar and/or Bloodlust are up. So we'll never get close to where we were.

Slam is the rage dump, which only works if you have the ability to use Slam when you need to dump rage. This means you need empty GCDs. Always. At every gear level.

Last Build, Feral Spirits had a minimum (character un-geared) damage range of ~555 to ~833 at level 85. In the latest build, their base damage is now 516-517. Is there a reason their damage was nerfed and the range reduced to Base+1?

We also calculated their attack power scaling to be 31%, is this the intended value?

The tooltip damage for Spirit Bite is 96-144, but in practice it seems closer to 158-206. Is there a tooltip error at work here?

Both normal Elementals and Empowered Elementals benefit from the Orc Racial Command (+5% damage). Why don't Feral Spirits also get this benefit? Is it a bug that the Elementals get the racial bonus?

Normal Fire Elementals benefit from the Enhancement Mastery for ALL attacks, but the Feral Sprit's Spirit Bite (nature spell) does not. Is this intended?

I'm curious about how pets inherit Mastery. Is this just in cases like where Frostburn increases Water Elemental damage directly via Mastery? Or does the pet gain some kind of bonus of its own from mastery. And if so, what kind of bonus? In many cases, the Master's own mastery bonus may not make sense for the pet (e.g., a Water Elemental has no way to gain or benefit from Fingers of Frost, a Succubus summoned by an Affliction Warlock has no use for Potent Afflictions, etc).

Ghostcrawler: I don't believe this was ever specified in your posts, but our initial tests after this patch seem to indicate that melee pets inherit our melee haste rather than the maximum of our melee haste and our spell haste. We had assumed it would work similarly to crit, where you said it would use the maximum of our spell crit and our melee crit. Is this discrepancy intentional?

Is it intended that Increased Critical Damage Meta gems don't apply to crits done by pets?

Assuming they don't already and I just missed it, should pets inherit damage multiplier buffs? This is an issue for Frost and the Mage L90 talents -- the Water Elemental is worth about 20% of our total damage, and if Incanter's Ward is the only L90 talent that benefits the Water Elemental, it's got a big leg up on the other two options; a Frost Mage will pretty much always choose it over Invocation or Rune of Power, even if all three talents are comparable for the other two specs.

Necrotic Strike doesn't seem worth it, and heres the math that agrees with me.

The Totemic Restoration talent does not appear to be working as the spell description indicates on totems with longer than a 1 minute CD.

GC, in an earlier post you said pets would inherit the highest % of our crit (between melee/spell/ranged) and use it for all of their abilities; however, the fire elemental appears to be using spell crit for its fire blast casts. As an enhancement shaman, I have virtually no spell crit to speak of (in these solo tests I'm doing, I only have 8.26% on my character sheet => 5.26% chance to crit with spells against level 93 boss mobs).

Is the Gargoyle still bugged or has the guardian fix build not been released yet? It does not appear to be getting any of our spell haste. With 0 gear on, it casts 11 times while up. With gear on and roughly 10-11% haste, it still only casts 11 times.

Echo of the Elements gains no benefit from Healing Storm glyph.

Enhancement currently gets the Burning Wrath +10% spell power buff. Spell power buffs do not work on enhancement at all, so is it supposed to be the +10% AP buff?

Now that FR has been reworked, I have some new numbers. Nothing has changed.

So there hasn't been much commentary from Blues lately about Monks compared to the other classes. Does that mean we're perfect already or just that we're still under so much work there isn't much to tell us about? :)

I noticed earlier today while beating on dummies that Xuen seems to be triggering Eminence now. This was as a WW too (which I assume is bugged), so I'm not sure how much healing he would do for a Mistweaver, but it might be something to test out.

Is Shuffle intended to be capped at 12 seconds? Even if it is, Shuffle needs to refresh to that cap if Blackout Kick is used with >= 6 seconds left on Shuffle rather than just wasting the Chi as it does currently.

At present it seems that Retribution and Protection Paladins get some sort of extra passive mana regen every couple of seconds that isn't accounted for by mp5.

Unlike mp5 regen which is constantly ticking this unknown regen only ticks every few seconds and adds somewhere between 1k and 2k mana.

There's no hint of this extra regen in the spellbook or the character sheet that I can see.

Is this extra regen intended? And if so, what are the details of it? i.e. how often does it tick and how much for?

It appears that elemental's primal fire elemental can't glance its auto-attacks, but enhancement's can.

What's the intended interaction between Combo breaker mastery procs and Tigereye Brew? Currently Tiger Palm procs do not contribute to generating brew, but Blackout Kick procs do. Which is bugged? Ideally, they should both add stacks.

Ghostcrawler, you probably have the best resources to do this: Can test Gargoyle with extreme levels of haste (100-200%?) just to see if he's getting GCD capped. If not it's an AI issue severely limiting his dps time.

Currently the Shivarra doesn't seem to actually do any off hand swings, but I'm assuming this is a known bug that will be fixed. More importantly, there seem to be weird things going on with the AP scaling of these dual-wielding pets. Both the Shivarra and the Wrathguard appear to get the exact same amount of AP per owner SP (2.9), which is odd given that the Succubus and the Felguard get such different amounts (1.67 and 3.5, respectively). Is this intended?

Also, is it intended that the dual-wielders have a different base weapon damage than all the other warlock pets?

Currently unholy death knights are facing an issue regarding gnaw and leap in pvp. Unholy death knights are the only pet owning spec to have to toggle their pets resource in pvp. The ghouls main ability claw currently drains the ghoul of all his energy making it impossible to case gnaw and leap because of their energy cost.

The ret paladin Glyph of Mass Exorcism also increases the Exorcism cooldown by 5 seconds. The cooldown increase is not in the tooltip. Is this intended behavior?

In this last build, Fel Energy has stoped regenerating when the pet is out of combat, is this an intended change?

Is this intended or will we see a cooldown on SW:I in an upcoming patch?

The amount of downtime Blood dks have to deal with in beta, is way too much, and it isn't fun at all. In some setups it is almost double of that what it is on live.

Another issue I'd like to bring up using these sims is that, Blood dks still feel like we are lacking behind dps wise (and threat, in terms of ST, compared to other tanks, pre execute phase.), especially in lower levels of gear.

BM hunters also have a similar issue with their pets outside of raids. Special attacks that require focus (i.e., Horn Toss, Froststorm Breath, Burrow Attack) never go off (unless you spec Fervor or have Rapid Fire up) because our pets are very focus starved. You have to manually turn off their basic attack (Smack/Bite/Claw) to cast those specials. Any chance of upping pet focus regen or removing/reducing (or pooling) focus cost for those specials?

I am curious as to what happened with the Thrill of the Hunt talent for Hunters.

now given the current model with my gearing on beta its 60k ap at vengeance cap so thats about a 64k shield at 20 rage this model came with the udnerstand that it was also nearly double at about 40-45 rage and 250 percent at 60 rage usage.

Changing the ghoul to have that behavior will make macroing "Claw" into all of our abilities mandatory, much the same way the Blood Tap macro was nearly mandatory. Why not just make Gnaw and Leap free?

Edit: Also, regarding Unholy's AoE rotation, is it intended for Unholy DKs to have orphaned Frost runes? Currently when we do our normal AoE rotation, we can Scourge Strike and Blood Boil...but the left over Frost rune either goes unused or we use Icy Touch.

Would it be possible to have Blood Boil attached to Reaping? Or have a cost change to 1 Blood/1 Frost rune, with a damage increase as well (100% more damage for Unholy?) Having to use Icy Touch to fill out our rotation does not feel like it is intended at all.

1) DRW is currently completely bugged and dealing weird damage. Maths regarding this below.

What is the formula for Rune Strike? The datamined tooltip from Wowhead says 140% weapon damage + 10% of AP. The in-game tooltip suggests 140% weapon damage + 14% of AP. This second value seems closer to the reality, but it still doesn't really adds up to the numbers we're seeing when fighting. It seems to be very slightly higher in reality.

Soul Reaper, when used as Blood spec, is not refunding its rune if parried. I'm not sure about dodges or misses, or about Soul Reaper (Frost) or Soul Reaper (Unholy).

Scourge Strike's tooltip is incorrect. It states that it deals 18% additional Shadow damage per disease, but the reality in-game is that it deals 25% additional Shadow damage per disease (before any bonus through the Dreadblade mastery). What version should we use for our simulations?

The tooltips for Blood Plague and Frost Fever seem incorrect as well, and the reality damage values differ from the in-game tooltips in our spellbook. This is a very minor difference (talking about two-number digits), but a clarification would still be appreciated.

It looks as if the damage of Pyroblast is so much higher than Fireball that a Fire Mage can theoretically drop Fireball from rotation; the higher DPET if Pyroblast almost exactly balances the reduced number of Hot Streaks:

Simulationcraft #'s are up for all 3 Warlock Specs @ Level 90 (Pre-raid gear)

It's not like Ret or Prot needed damage nerfs, either.

Are there any plans of restoring Greater Healing Wave at all to the Resto Shaman toolkit? I haven't seen any acknowledgement from the developers of this issue thus far.

Currently Healing Surge without Tidal Waves is barely less HPM than Greater Healing Wave, but with the availability of Tidal Waves, Healing Surge soars past it. Due to the massive HPS gains of Healing Surge and the nearly imperceptible difference of HPM outside of Tidal Waves, Greater Healing Wave becomes practically obsolete except for the occasional Natures Swiftness if you chose the talent.

I'm still worried with the new change that FR will not be used as often as it once was before. I understand the 2500% of AP formula was a little overpowered but this new formula is only SLIGHTLY buffing what was previously supplied. My main problem is the fact that low level Frenzied regen is just not providing that much healing when you compare it to your total health. At top end Heroic DS level gear, the heal will only provide ~10% of our total health. At heroic 90 dungeon level gear your looking at 10-12% of the total health. Even if you estimate 60,000 Vengence AP and 500k health, you are only looking at 13% of the total health. Is it your intent to have FR that low in comparison to the total health? I can see it being useful at 15% to 20% but 10 just seems low even in top-end current content.

Reaping - Whenever you hit with Blood Strike, Pestilence, or Festering Strike, or Blood Boil, the Runes spent will become Death Runes when they activate.

Currently this change doesn't work as I imagine it's intended because of a long standing bug involving Death Runes. When an ability that triggers Reaping is used the rune that is made into a Death Rune is based the cost of that ability, not the rune used to pay for it.

On the subject of the effect formerly known as wild hunt, when I last tested this effect on beta (quite awhile ago at this point), it was doing 120% more damage for 100% more focus. This is consistent with how it works on live, although the tooltip stated (and still does) that it does 100% more damage for 120% more focus.

General Question: Have there been any changes in DoT mechanics in Mists, compared with Cataclysm? More specifically, how additional ticks are added with additional haste, and how recasting a dot while it's already up (which currently allows the next tick of the current dot then starts the new dot from that point)?

Theres already enuff proof and parses out there showings rets damage is barely middle of the pack on the beta currently. I really wish we could see gregs proof or parses whatever you wish to call it and really see ret paladin numbers.

Ghost, I can't recall if you mentioned or wrote about this during the Cataclysm Beta (in which case, my apologies for asking again), but: Could you please explain the logic behind Death Knight diseases not benefitting from Haste?

Is Frost being a competitive PvE spec possible, or am I getting my hopes up a little too soon?

Honestly maybe we are just better players and look op to the average war/dk.

as i said i will continue to await ghostcrawlers answer as to why it was soo brutally assaulted like this and to his joyous prayer answering response

We’re making another adjustment to this in a future build: It uses that formula, or 2.5x your Stamina, whichever is higher.

269s of combat, ghoul cast 69 claws. At 40 energy per, that's 2760 total spent. figuring 10 regen per second, the expected number of claws in that time span with 0 haste scaling on Energy is 69.75. So i'd say the ghoul is not currently getting energy regen from haste. Is this intended?

Also, reaping is not currently functioning as you described. DDDDUU when used on 4 blood boils becomes dbdfUU.

Is it intended that Sacred Shield not scale with haste while the other options on the tier do? It behaves (more or less) like a proactive HoT, so it'd make sense.

Maybe you don't have to actually debug the simulations, but take a look at this comment made by the warlock developer of simcraft.... Maybe you guys could just take a look at the actions lists for all 3 specs that he uses and see if maybe something could be learned from there:

Well, not really about ret, but prot, but does proof that Shield of the Righteous falling behind Judgement and Holy Wrath (against single targets) count?

It almost feels like Glyph of the Alabaster Shield is going to be mandatory.

Currently Rushing Jade Wind is causing 6sec shuffle for each target it hits. (given the cap on shuffle is 12sec, it basically means you get 12 sec shuffle if you cast on more than 1 mob).

07/21/2012 02:23 PMPosted by Eflow

Still on lvl 90 talents for monks, whats the intent on Xuen tiger?

07/21/2012 10:30 PMPosted by Requîtal

Is it intended for Judgment to no longer apply/refresh Censure anymore? If so why was that change made?

07/23/2012 04:38 AMPosted by Canibehealz

Windwalk Totem currently does not prevent warlocks from becoming snared via KJ Cunning. Is this intended or bugged?

07/23/2012 04:38 AMPosted by Canibehealz

Is it intended for Healing Tide Totem to act as healing done by the shaman, or as a separate entity to avoid being split by Ascendance(Resto) as its currently not being duplicated and divided.

07/23/2012 04:38 AMPosted by Canibehealz

Pets are currently not taking bonus health from Ancestral Vigor from what I can see. They're receiving the buff but not gaining any maximum health.

Back in the Black Wing Decent and Bastion of Twilight myself and a few friends of mine discovered that dots already on the target don't actually get re-evaluated when their caster receives a large haste boosts such as heroism and time-warp. This forces you to reapply your dots so that their period of ticking is shortened by the haste gain.
As you can probably tell this is quite a hassle. Especially as an Aff lock with mucho spell haste procs.

Is this still the case?

GC, just a quick clarification. The new Armor Damage Reduction formula used for 86+ characters:
Armor / (Armor + 4,037.5 * Level - 31,7117.5)
Does this continue on to level 93, similarly how the current Cata formula worked to 88 until this expansion? or is there another formula for level 91 and beyond?

07/23/2012 02:16 PMPosted by Boomerang

Since everyone is thinking it, I'll ask . . . what should we read into the fact that you, and not GC, is now responding to posts in this forum?

07/23/2012 01:44 PMPosted by Crithto

Alternatively, there’s a new mechanic coming for Affliction where Haunt adds 1 tick to each of your DoTs when it hits; that does not recalculate damage.

Since everyone is thinking it, I'll ask...

07/24/2012 08:59 AMPosted by Aedilhild

Is there an ICD for Strikes of Opportunity? I don't believe players ever confirmed or defined one (if they did, I'm open to the answer/verbal abuse).

There's only a 0.1sec ICD.

Is this about the general size of "tiny ICDs" used to prevent things from chain-proc'ing off of the same attack/ability? (for example, is there also a 0.1 sec ICD on static shock and echo of the elements? perhaps even flametongue weapon?)

07/24/2012 07:43 PMPosted by Cozmo

While GC is gone, someone take the opportunity to fix healing priests please!

07/24/2012 06:28 PMPosted by Elysian

Is it intended that, while stealthed, if the priest takes ANY damage (including any dots on the priest when spectral guised is used), knocks the priest back out of stealth and ends the ability? It makes the spell basically a momentary target drop, since most class specs now have access to dots.

07/23/2012 04:17 PMPosted by Strawberry

If you switch targets while he's tanking something, he'll provoke the new target off you when his cooldown ends - so in essence, he can only "tank" something you're attacking.

07/24/2012 10:58 PMPosted by Keleshara

Not sure if this has been addressed but it seems like I am now generating a burning ember when out of combat. Is this intended or a bug? I am running the glyph of burning embers. I do have to say if it is intended it made QOL for a destro lock so much better.

07/25/2012 09:04 AMPosted by Hyjinx

Wait, are you sure about that Zar? I remember previous Flametongue testing showing that it had around a ~0.15 ICD. This was to help prevent using double Flametongue imbues and weapon syncing for Enhancement.

Explosive Shot mechanics
Some time ago, GC announced that explosive shot would join other effects in having "ignite" mechanics. We have been testing it recently to model it in Simc and FemaleDwarf. The mechanics have clearly been changed, but don't match the typical ignite model. For example individual ticks to crit and debuff changes on the target affect the damage of future ticks. Further, some damage appears not to get rolled into the ignite-style debuff. We have looked at a few models (e.g., the ES under LnL don't do ignite but other do, crit dmg is subtracted from the dot pool, etc.). So far the models don't correctly model crits. Can you please explain the actual and/or planned future mechanics here?

07/25/2012 06:30 PMPosted by Fluttërshy

Colossus is not proccing of auto-attacks -- is this a bug?

07/25/2012 09:06 PMPosted by Delmortis

Currently, the Gargoyle's Gargoyle Strike scales with a mechanism that does not seem to compare with any other pet ability mechanisms. We know you do not want to share specific values, but an explanation on what exactly affects the scaling of the spell would be helpful in modelling it.

07/26/2012 11:53 AMPosted by Vishiz

In it's current state Zen sphere went from OP to useless, leaving tier30 practically useless for the windwalker monk, any plans to change this in a future build?

06/19/2012 09:12 PMPosted by Ghostcrawler

Just a reminder that we really want to focus here on damage, healing and tanking numbers. We don't want this to be a catch all "ask the blues." Ideally we'd like to see more "How does this work?" and less "Why did you change this?"

Speaking of ICDs and Enhancement, could you clarify how Windfury is working for MoP?

Historically, Windfury has had a 3 second ICD between procs with a shared lockout between hands. It would also proc from white hits along with Stormstrike and Lava Lash. So my questions are this:

1) Is the 3 second ICD still the plan for MoP. I just did some initial testing against a training dummy, and that still seems to be the case.
2) Is the ICD still supposed to be shared between both hands for MoP?
3) Is this ICD a fixed 3 second ICD for MoP, or is it effected by Haste at all?
4) Is Windfury supposed to proc from Stormstrike and Lava Lash? From my testing, I didn't see a single proc when just isolating Stormstrike and Lava Lash attacks. On Live, I'm seeing both yellow attacks proc Windfury. I'm assuming this is just a bug, but I want to confirm if this is by design for MoP

07/26/2012 11:25 PMPosted by Zeherah

While doing hunter ability testing I noticed that Wild Quiver looks to be doing only about half the damage of an autoshot (possibly a bit less). Historically Wild Quiver has been roughly the same damage as autoshot. Was this changed deliberately or is it a bug?

1. Survive the maximum burst damage of the encounter (aka Effective Health)
2. Minimize healing needed (aka Damage Reduction + Self Healing)
3. Hold aggro on whatever you’re needed to hold aggro on (aka TPS)
4. Maximize damage dealt (aka DPS)

I was looking at the warlock changes in the upcoming beta build and noticed a few things. Why are you nerfing affliction so much? I agree it needed a nerf, but so much that it will go below the other 2 specs by a large amount?

Not to mention destroying a glyph and adding a new ability that kills clipping. People will just ignore the glyph and Pandemic and just refresh dots right after they fall off to do max dps. Clipping with or without the glyph is useless now, but with the glyph it's like nerfing yourself. Drain Soul is barley better than MG under 20% today, now with it getting a HUGE nerf it will be completely useless as an execute.

07/26/2012 02:32 PMPosted by Sensations

Is it intended for Healing Stream and Healing Tide to not benefit from mastery on the first ticks or is it just a technical limitation from totems? If so does this mean that crit does not benefit on first tick either for HTT(Have yet to see it but didn't do extensive testing on it).

My question is, how is this talent intended to work? How much is the heal supposed to be? 25% of base maximum (which would be 20% of new maximum)? 25% of new maximum? Are health percentages supposed to remain constant through its effect? Where does this 15% come from?

Not really.

- Do you meet #1?
- If yes, then any further value in this category is 0.
- If no, then get more stuff that increases your #1 value (primarily Stamina).

07/27/2012 04:33 PMPosted by Musunoki

Now onto what some others have brought up. Does the MG/DS under 20% effect count as the dots themselves ticking? Considering how that would nerf shard regen if not, I personally believe it does. Since I can't test it yet, some clarification would be wonderful.

Is it intended that secondary stats now have twice the itemization budget of primary stats in terms of gems

My personal testing on target dummies and every sim i've seen is now hoping Affliction at the bottom of the warlock heap

Any changes expected for priests? I don't think Blizzard even knows what to do with the class. 

Let me throw some numbers at you

This point is directed the blues (and no one else)

Haste scaling was nerfed significantly through this.
- Under the old model, the scaling of the extra dots was linear with the scaling of haste on additional dot ticks during the duration. In other words, as I go from six to seven ticks of my corruption, for a full MG channel I go from 12, to 14 ticks total.
- Under the new model, as I go from 9 to 10 ticks on my corruption, malefic grasp isn't giving me any extra ticks on the MG channel, and I'm therefore not getting any extra ticks on corruption. I do realize MG will eventually gain another tick, but not nearly as fast as my dots will...in other words the linear scaling will no longer apply.

The spec is now bound to MG's ticks rather than MG's channel.
- Under the new model, the haste effect of the Dot is tied to a discreet amount of MG channeling, i.e. 1 second. .9 secs of channeling gives me nothing. 1.9 secs of channeling isn't any better than 1 second of channeling. This brings latency and the need to move into the spec in a way that's hugely detrimental to a huge chunk of our damage. The old MG didn't have this issue, every instant spent channeling was beneficial to our DPS. This is hard to model in a simulation and easy to ignore, but this will matter and makes the spec significantly harder to manage for the average player. It's true that not waiting for a tick of MG before "hurt" your dps, but the effect was miniscule compared to the effect under the new design.

Affliction's best stat is now mastery, by far, with haste being down where crit is, but our dark soul grants haste. Point for point we gain the least from our dark soul. Now the numbers are very okay at the moment, so it would be iffy to cause Dark Soul to grant the "highest" stat rather than the stat favored by the spec that you decide on, it just really bothers me that our main cd is worth (stat weights included) 33% less than the other two.

The tooltip for Nightfall says that it's now a 5% chance instead of the previous 10% chance. Since Nightfall was actually a stacking 2% chance, is there any change to it's internal mechanics? Do extra ticks caused by Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul cause Nightfall procs? Finally, is the Soul Shard generation component of Soul Harvest actually removed, or was it just moved off of the tooltip?

edit: Also, the tooltip for Malefic Grasp is a bit confusing. It says that it causes your DoTs to instantly do 50% normal periodic damage every 1 second when MG does damage. Does that instant damage count as periodic damage for related effects (Nightfall for Corruption, trinket effects related to DoT ticks, etc)? Does that instant damage happen every 1 second regardless of haste or does it happen when MG does damage?

Mannoroth's Fury

Is it intended that Bonus Armor is affected by Guardian Mastery? For example the Mantid Elixir which provides +2250 Armor is multiplied by the Guardian Mastery for a bonus of 2475 armor (before gear and buffs).

Sanctity of Battle and Spell Haste

One concern about the latest changes to marksmanship hunters- the new mastery proc rate seems problematic to me. If I'm doing the math correctly, this puts a 7200 mastery rating hard cap on MM hunters, since that seems to be the amount of mastery rating at which you have a 100% proc rate on wild quiver.

Bloom's nerf now puts its mastery buffed healing per Shroom at 9.25k (LvL 90, full PvP gear, no gems/enchants/buffs).

For a 25man that number is somewhat acceptable if you manage to heal 10+ people with all 3 Shrooms for a total of only 277.5k healing done (without DR or AoE cap). After at least 3 GCDs of set up that just does not make it that attractive of a spell.

Purification + Water Totem Healing

07/31/2012 12:53 PMPosted by Lumineus

I'm starting to think something sinister must be going on if things are actually going well for Ret. In any case, this is a good change. Being a spell was just bad for all sorts of reasons.

It's a PvP nerf. Now it'll trigger Frost Armor and Nature's Grasp again.

07/31/2012 12:57 PMPosted by Synchrony

As a result of the change to Malefic Grasp's mechanics, Agony now takes twice as long to ramp up, since the ticks are no longer faster under MG's channel. Is this additional nerf intended?

it's[healer dps] ignored for the sake of game balancing.

As an Enhancement Shaman, I'm much more concerned about -

1) Whether Windfury is supposed to activate off special attacks or not (far as I can tell we haven't gotten an answer about that yet).

We’ve just fixed it for the next build to proc off Primal Strike, Stormstrike, and Lava Lash.

Is it intended that stormblast isn't included in that list? Please tell me it was simply an oversight :<.

08/02/2012 01:31 PMPosted by Kennyloggins

After some discussion with a fellow hunter, I have been questioning the worth of Focus Fire. In its current state, it seems that casting Focus Fire could actually result in a net DPS loss, based on information gained using Zeherah's sim and personal observations.

08/02/2012 01:54 PMPosted by Urgfelstorm

Pretty much this...for some reason devs think most progression guilds are quite happy to bring an underperforming player to a progression fight (Obviously none of them are in progression oriented guilds).

Actually, several designers have been farming Heroic Madness of Deathwing (some on 25, some on 10), for over 6 months. Some of them are in very performance-intensive guilds too, that definitely adjust raid comp based on individual performance above all else. In any event, you don't make a stronger case for yourself by arguing that the designers must lack your experience. And, as has been stated multiple times, this thread is for discussing numbers and mechanics, not making anecdotal accusations.

The point is this: Would your raiding developers ever bring the MoP Affliction Warlock to a unnerfed Heroic Spine-like fight? Desto and Affliction locks did not have competitive burst. Demo lock was there as the buff bot and actually did pretty decent damage as long as the lifts were no often than every 2 minutes.

Current Affliction damage is fairly stable until execute, with no real spikes or troughs. We still cannot bring competitive burst, unless my sims are incorrect. We will be sat for these encounters or respec, just like we were in Cata. Oh and we will be sat for AoE fights as well since things will be dead before we even get going.

Spine left some pretty deep scars I must admit.

Hunter level 90 talents (glaive shot, etc.) appear not to be triggering Marksman mastery. Is that intended?

Murder of crows benefits from BM mastery, but Dire Beast does not. What's the intent here (e.g., presumably Lynx Rush benefits from it)?

Latest finds from doing hitting dummies for an hour.

* Judgment can be dodge/parried from 30 yds away
* Hammer of the Righteous is really bugged.
---- Nova is doing only 1-2 damage at several AP levels
---- It really only hits for 0 yds.

So, blues might want to check this... if that's ok with you... that is...

08/03/2012 11:56 AMPosted by Folgan

In the current beta build when an unholy death knight uses blood boil (speced into Rolling Blood), blood runes don't turn into death runes (Reaping effect). Just an obvious bug which we can hopefully see fixed in a later build.

Another bug which may confuse Affliction warlocks in the current beta build is Malefic Grasp’s interaction with spell haste. It is appropriately getting its period reduced by haste, but the channel bar is incorrectly still 4 seconds long. The debuff it applies is the accurate duration. It should not gain additional ticks with additional haste. The channel bar will be fixed in the next build.

Sorry but I am confused. Can you please explain this a little better?
Are you saying that the MG ticks benefit from haste but the extra dot damage is still every 1 second? Or are you saying something else?

08/03/2012 03:07 PMPosted by Derevka

It seems that Halo and Divine Star have a DR now... is it at "beyond 6", similar to Sanct/Healing Rain?

Before I start pulling my hair out over inconsistent trials and seriously consider creating a Rube-Goldberg-like contraption to cast Healing Rain every 10sec for like 5 days ...

... Is there any chance the developers could enlighten us as to Healing Rain's chance to proc Earthliving Weapon? It seems as though Chain Heal's is 0.2 x 0.25 = 0.05 (i.e. the chance is reduced by the maximum number of targets).

Healing Rain is 0.2 x ??? = ???.

Either number will help me immensely! I am getting anywhere from 5.3 - 8% chance when testing it myself, and I just can't make these numbers reconcile with anything logical like "number of targets in the healing rain" or "number of targets at which the DR cap begins to apply".

Edit: I'm interested in the proc chance when we are *above* 35% health. From there I can work out the rest. Thanks! :)

There is some major bug going on with Fel Flame and Corruption & UA. Tagging a target with Fel Flame seems to cause Corruption & UA to over double in damage.

This was just posted on the MMO Champion Warlock forums:

Just tried the usage of Felflame, for this i even used Bottled Wishes--> It worked fine, UA/Corruption even did more dmg then Agony

But i found a CRAZY bug, which could be the reason Affli sucks so much atm

The extra ticks from MG (50% of the actuall dmg) appeared to not benefit from spellpower buffs !

So the lowest extra tick did exactly 50% of the dmg the lowest "normal" tick did
But when u look at the hightest real tick (with all spellpower buffs up), the hightest extra tick (caused from MG) only did 25% of its dmg

Thus the extra ticks overall only did 25% of the dmg the normal ticks did (only had a few ticks without spellpowerbuffs)

Here are 2 screenshot to back me up: (again sorry, cant post links yet)

Normal corruption dmg:
http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=wowscrnshot_080412_11emc17.jpg

Max corruption tick ~21k

Extra ticks from MG:
http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=wowscrnshot_080412_11bldlw.jpg

You can see max tick of Corruption is only around 5k

Could a blue poster please confirm/deny this bug, or if it's intended? It looks like the 50% extra damage DOTs aren't benefiting from Spell Power buffs. It says 50% of normal periodic damage in the tool tip, so if this is intended, it's a pretty hard nerf from the original MG effect.

08/04/2012 12:06 PMPosted by Pamelytha

Doing LFR I realized that my bloodworms were doing about 35% of my healing done (compared to live, where it does less than ~5%.). I was also competing against healers on healing done. (I was averaging out to 40k HPS on the stone guards, compared to other healers who are just a bit higher.) Is this intended?

08/04/2012 12:43 PMPosted by Kennyloggins

Glaive Toss incurs a 1.5s global cooldown, unlike the 1s incurred by any other direct damage hunter ability. Is this intended?

So, if I am reading this correctly, on targets below 35% HP, each Chain Heal jump should have a 50% change to proc Earthliving, and each Healing Rain tick should have a 30% chance to proc Earthliving?

Is this correct, or was the datamined change to Earhliving Weapon actually the removal of the 80% increased proc chance on Chain Heal and Healing Rain?

I am posting this as a courtesy for my dear beloved friend Mione;

***Spreadsheet is here : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmRoE63oMua-dFAxQ2hmR01NNWlXWU9IWTdFOV9XUGc#gid=0 ***

Disclaimer: This is not representative of overall tank balance! This doesn’t take into account survivability to melee hits on a larger scale, this is just about one particular scenario, which is the survivability to tank spikes in one particular encounter. In this example, I’ve decided to try to model Sha of Fear (Heroic), which has been updated on the dungeon journal with a new tank mechanic, and seems like the best example to apply the new active mitigation model and see its results.

(If anyone thinks the stats used for each class are grossly different than reality or that a formula is wrong, please tell me! Mionee on Mekkatorque)

I've been trying to get accurate pet focus regen numbers but it's difficult to test accurately in game given the limits of the display and the fact that none of it ends up in the log. Currently it looks like the base pet focus regen is around 5 fps, but is it possible a blue poster could confirm if that's the correct number?

It would also be extremely helpful if pet focus regen (and crit chance for that matter) were added to the pet display.

Also if I'm testing correctly, it looks like spiked collar does not increase pet focus regen (even though it is called haste and not attack speed). Which haste and attack speed bonuses increase regen for pets has never been incredibly clear or consistent. The terminology doesn't seem to be a reliable clue and measuring pet focus regen precisely is difficult. Is there a chance of this getting clarified at some point?

Question about the Guardian 4pc bonus.

Does the 10% to Savage Defense mean:

0.45 * 1.1 = 0.495
or
0.45 + .1 = 0.55

08/04/2012 09:21 PMPosted by Shriekmaw

I dont know if its intended but the last spell cast in ether Eclipse is not buffed when fully cast. For example, when casting wrath with 15 or less solar energy the spell says its buffed however when the cast completes it uses the unbuffed damage. The same for starsurge and starfire in lunar. Its very misleading.

Any there any plans to change the way Shuffle refresh is managed for Brewmasters?

What I mean in regard to this is how Shuffle is unable to refresh to the full 12 sec duration unless it is 6.0 seconds or below. At the beginning of a Shuffle application you can get it to 12 seconds. However at any point above 6.1 seconds Shuffle will never refresh to 12 seconds. This makes it very frustrating because you have to watch the time on Shuffle to be below the 6.0 mark to reapply it. I understand a Brewmaster wouldn't want to waste Chi by reapplying Shuffle too early or often but even at 6.1 seconds it will just waste 2 Chi without increasing duration to 12 seconds.

I wouldn't even mind if you say had Shuffle at 7 seconds and did a BoK that it went only to 12 seconds (the cap right now of time) than simply eating our 2 Chi and that's that. However, I think it'd be best if any reapplication of Shuffle above 6 seconds should automatically refresh it to 12 seconds.

Renew seems to be benefiting from 15% bonus when in Chakra: Serenity-- akin to it being considered a Single Target Heal. Additionally, it also seems to be auto-refreshing (and thus, gaining an additional tick).

Is this intended performance? If so, it dramatically affects the value of Renew and its corresponding Chakra: States as well as the Glyph of Renew when running Sims and Spreadsheeting haste values.

Can you confirm or debunk this performance?

Got a quick question about the 3% crit chance reduction against +3 level targets: is it calculated before or after crit multipliers?

Fire: would it be, e.g., 25% * 1.5 - 3% = 34.5%, or (25% - 3%) * 1.5 = 33%?

Frost w/Shatter: 25% * 2 + 50% - 3% = 97%, or (25% - 3%) * 2 + 50% = 94%?

My assumption is that it's subtracted after the other calculations, but as this could have a meaningful impact on simulation numbers, it'd be good to know for sure.

First, this is a great thread. Thank you for both the moderation and responses. I hope you have similar threads even after MoP gets released. A few hunter comments and issues:

- Dire beast based damage scaling was reduced from 0.5715 to 0.3572. That wasn't documented, so I wanted to confirm that it was intentional.

- The pet focus regen appears to be 5* the hunter's focus regen multiplier. Is that correct?

- The new explosive shot damage mechanics are great.

- Kill Command doesn't refund focus on a miss/dodge. Because of the same massive dodge issue, it seems like it should (just like other focus-costing shots). What's your plan here?

- Focus fire didn't used to cost a GCD. With a GCD, it interferes with a smooth rotation in BM and is simming as a very poor value CD (~1%). Is the GCD intentional?

- The CD for Devilsaur's monstrous bite interferes with casting Bite. The next result is that exotic beasts have noticeably lower stampede damage because they miss out on casting one Bite during the period they are up. Since the special abilities have their own CDs (e.g., monstrous bite has an 8 second CD), can the casting GCD be removed? The GCD interaction seems to add no useful constraint and just reduces the dps value of devilsaurs (and possibly a few other pets) below non-exotic pets.
- Similarly, there remains a (latency) delay between when a pet could do something and when it does. Thus even though the CD for Bite is 3 seconds, pets only Bite every 3.3 seconds.
- The above two issues combine to strongly impact the value of the devilsaur buff (and possibly other similar buffs). The pets often do not reapply the buffs until they notice that the buff has dropped. This leaves a gap in the uptime. Because of GCD interaction, that gap may be expanded by casting other abilities. In dummy tests, it was not uncommon to get a 5 second gap between castings of the 8 second Monstrous Bite buff. If you were counting on reducing Warlord Zon’ozz's heal, this would not suffice (a similar issue appeared with hyene's though their buff has been changed in MoP). The net result is that my poor DinoMight both fails to bring a real buff and has lower damage than otherm more pedestrian pets. This makes Dino unhappy :)

- Powershot was simming fairly low compared to just not using it at all in most specs. This seems partly because it suppresses autoattack so the opportunity cost is high. Are there any plans to change Powershot?

Currently Simc implements all the single-target hunter mechanics as we understand them. Thanks again for the communication on this thread!

Is enrages while enraged not proc'ing more charges of Raging Blows intended?

Currently is seems like, unless cleaving is part of a bosses mechanics Arms falls well blow Fury. My current theory is simply because Arms doesn't benefit from Haste buffs at all(*). Hero gives 30% Haste for 40 seconds, Swiftblade's Cunning gives 10% Attack Speed buff.

They have already talked about this and their stance is tanks don't get Vengeance from Players. They also said tanks are viable in PVP as flag carriers and defenders as long as their DPS is not the same or higher than a DPSer. Healer DPS will also be lower than Tanks if they chose to DPS as a healer.

Just a quick clarification - what about passives like Blood Presence, defensive cooldowns etc? Or is this list exhaustive?

Is there a design purpose in why aimed shot, powershot and barrage all suppress autoshot? It seems strange to me that the 2.0 cast time shots do not and the 2.9 and 3.0 ones do. For MM in particular, it seems to conflict with the design of the mastery, since suppressing autoshot will reduce wild quiver procs and long cast time shots mean less chances for wild quiver procs as well. It also potentially creates a micromanagement benefit that I thought was intended to be removed when autoshot was changed to work while moving.

Also on the question of design intent, I'm noticing that in my sims pet damage for BM is extremely high relative to hunter damage (in the realm of almost 60% with stampede included). Historically I thought the goal was always to keep pet damage at minimum lower than the hunter's. Is the current situation just because you guys are still tweaking things or do you think it's acceptable for such a high percentage of the damage to come from a pet?

In terms of unlimited target AOE heals like Divine Star, Halo, Sanctuary, Holy Radiance, Healing Rain, Healing Mushrooms, how do you calculate the fall off in stacked situations?

Divine Star for example has an average base heal of 3369 and a scaling factor of 32.5% SP.
Is this the figure for upto 6 targets?
When there is a 7th target, does the base heal go down, the scaling factor, or a bit of both?
If so by how much? If it goes down by say, 10% on both the base and the scaling factor, will that same reduction occur for each extra person?

In terms of Divine Star in particular. As it runs out and then returns to you, does its target of 6 still apply? Or would it be a base target of 12 (hit same people out and on its return) before it gets diminishing AOE cap returns?

Basically, what is the diminishing returns formula for each of the uncapped AOE heals?

Two the changes to Eternal Flame was this fixing the bug? If so that is a pretty significant bug. A lot of recent logs showed EF being ahead of every other spell or at the very top of usage. As some suggested this isn't exactly a gamebreaking nerf to the class but it raises a good question I think is that are people going to go back to Selfless Healer?

Can resto plz get Elemental Blast added to spiritual insight ?

To me it's weak to have a lvl 90 talent that resto cant even use for fear of missing .

So, with regards to moonkin dots and our new nuke-crit refresh mechanic, I'm assuming that's not an "indefinite refresh" model, so there's no recalculation. What I'm wondering is, when we get 2s, are we getting 2s of hasted dot, or are we merely getting one more tick, no matter our haste? Again, assuming it's 2s of whatever haste you had, so it could potentially be 2 extra ticks at high enough haste ratings.

Related to that, the moonkin 4pc adds 4s to our dots. For the sake of calculating break points, do we add 4s/2 ticks to the dot duration, or is that calculated in a funny way? In other words, will we have to calculate new breakpoints for 4pc versus no 4pc, or will the 4pc dots be calculated something like 14s + 4s (7 ticks + 2 ticks) for the sake of breakpoints?

You were supposed to nerf Dream of Cenarius not the base spells. Nerfing mastery and the base spell damage coefficents., for Balance, just favors the continuing problem.

This recent change also makes Soul of the Forest a no brainer over Incarnation for the same reason. The reduction from 18 second moonfire and sunfire, to 14 second DoTs makes it so you can not transition in one set of dots to a new eclipse. Because of this you will have to choose Soul of the Forest to keep dps in pace.

P.S. Why are treants even there?

What would you 'expect' a prot warriors vengenace to be sitting around whilst tanking.. Oh let's say Two of the Three stone guards in a 10 player raid. Hypothetical situation, I've been tanking them for 20 seconds.

Would you expect it be higher than our current vengeance cap? Or lower? Or approximately the same?

Ret took it to the face this build. Was it 'doing more damage than intended'?

What Zelix was getting at is that Haste is a low-value stat for DPS warriors, particularly Arms. During Cataclysm, it was worth about 1/2 as much as Mastery and 1/3 as much as Crit; we avoided gear with it. My own beta observation is that for Arms it's up to about 1/2 of Crit's value and 3/5s of Mastery's. Subject to someone telling me my numbers are wrong, that appears to be better, though not great (and it could also be because the removal of Impale and old Deep Wounds has devalued Crit, resulting in a relative increase only).

Our concern is scaling, really.

I don't follow. The tank in question should be taking at least 50k damage per second if he's tanking one boss, and 100k per second if he's tanking two of them (Rend Flesh).

That's not counting the melee autoattacks, the possible abilities, etc.

I was assuming that (roughly), the new vengeance plateau was something along the lines of the damage per second the tank wasreceiving. We could also say it as MeleeSwing/Swing Timer. I've been working on some values assuming this, but maybe I'm wrong then?

Curious about this statement. Given that Brewmasters' damage taken (and therefore Vengeance under the new model as I understand it) is highly correlated to their Purifying Brew use, what is it that their damage is going to be tuned around? As is, I can tweak my damage taken by around +/- 30% by just varying my PB usage. How frequently will you assume PB is used when tuning our (Brewmasters') damage?

While on the topic of PB, can it be documented somewhere what the colors (green, yellow, red) of the Stagger stack mean, exactly?

Malefic Grasp is currently not causing extra 50% ticks from the Seed of Corruption DoT effect, is this intended? The Tooltip for MG reads "all your other affliction periodic damage effects", and the dot component of SOC should surely fall under that description.

Does this mean mechanics are done and it's all just numbers tuning now?

I just wanted to quote what's so to be the most quoted quote of QQ ;)

From the simulations I've done, t14h shadow was sitting very middle of the pack post DP nerf. It was really quite acceptable at 109k dps in T14h (Even with some other classes up around the 120k mark)

Is it your intent that WW monks use Fists of Fury as a part of their single target dps rotation? I'm sure you have read the issues that the majority of monks have with a channeled melee ability in raids. Perhaps a glyph that allowed you to channel it while moving but would also remove the stun would make the move itself more viable?

Feral PvP on the other hand, needs some help. Our defense is almost non existent and the SR situation is just awkward at best. Feral PvP HP looks like a roller coaster... falling and rising fast, it's stressful and isn't very fun to be honest.

What is the motivation behind taking away Spirit -> Hit conversion for all healing spex except Mistweaver? It's a perk I really appreciated in Cata.

You have bandaided the issue in PvE by kitchen-sinking the abilities healers are expected to use, but the spell-specific bonuses don't help PvP or more specialized PvE situations, where heals need to use their entire control toolkit, not just spam Smite.

I checked a few dps calculators, and it seems that while Seal of Truth is indeed scaling with AP, Seal of Justice isn't. It's only scaling with Base Weapon Damage. Is that intended as well?

Also, Haste was horrible even before the Enrage changed. 7101 Haste Rating gave you an extra 14 swings over a 5 minute fight. Then it was based PURELY on crit if those 14 extra swings even mattered in the end.

Also, does the +10% Attack Speed count as "melee/range haste", or just attack speed?
I asked this because I didn't include it in my calculations above, because I'm confused as to how it works. (Lowers the Cast Time of Steady/Cobra Shot on my Hunter.)

In the same vein as Elemental Blast for Resto Shamans, can Holy Prism be added to the Holy Insight passive for Holy Paladins? Testing it on a Raiding Target Dummy, it misses just enough to be an annoyance, if I wanted to use it as an AoE heal for the tanks and melee.

What is the vision and role of Hammer of Wrath? Like many of my fellow Paladins in this thread we are confused as to the direction this spell is going. The spell has previously been an execute and like all the other executes in the game, it was a fun hard hitting ability when we were fortunate to get the chance to use it. My concern is with the relationship with Sanctified Wrath and it being an execute ability. Is SW causing the nerfs to this ability?

Prot Paladin DPS (that phrase alone caused me to lol) seems to have taken a hit as a result of Ret tuning. Judgement and Censure feel overly weak now. SotR has always felt weak (but is a bit more spammable and has a defensive buff).

Eternal Flame is now really hurting compared to Selfless Healer.

What actions will be taken to ensure that deadly clam doesn't fall victim to being bound to heroic strike and forgotten?

Healing Stream Totem is a button you have to use every 30 seconds, and Searing Totem is a button you have to use every 60 seconds. No need to target anybody or do anything other than hit these buttons when the cooldowns are up. Are these abilities OK?

Against a level 85 dummy, I do significantly less dps (4-5k) with a level 87 BM hunter than I do on live with a level 85 hunter - using an inferior weapon, no less.

i've noticed the Demonic Gateway transports you slowly if going from the purple one to the green one. is it indended?

Is there a reason why Chi Wave has a cooldown?

To add to this: Is it possible to let Crimson Scourge build up charges (I was thinking of up to 2) to carry over between packs?
And does CS reset DnD's CD as well?

Also, can we assume DnD/BB's cast with Crimson Scourge will not generate RP so it doesn't mess with the current tank balance?

Is the Healing Rain mana cost decrease a second one in addition to the one that went live today?

I'm noticing that the damage on improved serpent sting seems to not match a logical formula since the patch hit. The best fit I can find to explain it is that it may be using the old serpent sting formula (9.7% RAP + 2030.22) instead of the new one (8% RAP + 1620.19). Applying that and the 100% bonus from the ability description gets me within a few damage of the expected amount, but it's still slightly off. 

I can't imagine this is correct, but I was hoping you could clarify if it's a bug or if the mechanics have changed and the tooltip wasn't updated. I'm getting 12615 damage from imp sting with 18528 RAP and 9.84% mastery (and no debuffs on the target).

Is wild quiver proc'd when ranged attacks cast? or when they impact the target? (on cast)

Can wild quiver proc from an attack that misses or is dodged? (yes)

Does a wild quiver shot qualify as a ranged attach that could recursively proc another wild quiver shot? (I would think so from the tooltip)

Do non-bow attacks (e.g., trinket procs) trigger wild quiver? (no)

Is murder of crows supposed to trigger wild quiver? (I thought yes but it doesn't)

So what's going on with Shadow Bolt? The damage it's doing isn't meshing with the spell's tooltip, or what I should be seeing when I math it all out based on my stats, and the damage it's doing is oddly consistent (26,723 to 26,724 with my current stats).

Is enrages while enraged not proc'ing more charges of Raging Blows intended?

It is for the moment at least, but we're not crazy about it. Specifically, using Berserker Rage while Enrage is up doesn't give you more rage or Raging Blow charges. The concern was that Fury would just macro Berserker Rage into every attack. With the previous design, this wasn't worth doing because once you were enraged being more enraged wasn't valuable. Now it is. It's more intuitive (and probably fun) if Berserker Rage always grants a charge, but we want Berserker Rage to be a button warriors actually use, not macro. Another option would be to put Berseker Rage on the GCD, but we thought this would feel even worse. If we become convinced warriors won't macro Berserker Rage, we'll happily revert the change.

Could we get Sacred Shield to stack?

Ghostcrawler look at these numbers http://www.simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_T14H.html
I think you guys kinda overshot hunter nerfs a lil don't you think?

We went from being up top with Boomies and Demo locks before the nerf/patch to dead last now.

Recuperate does not seem to be benefiting from PvP power.

Is there a possibility you can look at giving the same treatment to Earth Shield? If you are going to allow multiple Sacred Shields on a single target, (in addition to much earlier making a similar change for Beacon and Lifebloom, etc) what is the reason Earth Shield is still limited?

Earlier, you mentioned that swing speeds slow down dynamically if an attack speed buff expires mid-swing. Does this also apply to temporary haste rating effects (say, a trinket proc or the elemental blast buff)? Do swings also speed up dynamically if you gain an appropriate buff mid-swing?

Can Sanctity of Battle affect Avenger Shield?

I am 99% sure healing stream and Healing tide in some way or bugged .
Can you comment on this ?

Before the bug where they where not geting the + 50% to water totem's they were healing for more then they are now after it was fixed. Seem's like either only geting 25% of the water totem buff or not geting the 25% to shaman heal's buff..

Destruction Warlocks are once again non competitive and it seems every expansion you try and bandage fix their dps later on and it still doesn't work out. Simulationcraft has they WAY behind not other lock specs but other classes in general. Now you would think hey not every fight is standstill perhaps they will do more on multitarget or aoe fights but.......WAY behind demo and other classes there too. We've had to deal with rain of fire (aka rain of fail) for our aoe now and there still isn't a good aoe option competitively.

Now before you say: hey on single target what if you move your spec might be better there but NOPE; destro is a nuke class and benefits least from moving around. Thus this spec has no use for ANY situation over ANY lock spec.

It needs a serious fix now.

Elemental Blast tooltip and intention claims 3,500 yet the buff and actual gain is still 3,000 Haste/Mastery or Crit.

Healing Rain is currently gaining the buff from Unleashed Elements. Is this a bug?

concerning "imortal' buffs (such as Guardian Angel, Ardent Defender) and cooldowns that allow the tank to soak an amount of dmg that would otherwise kill him (Zen Meditation, AMS) ..

how those would affect vengeance?

a) are the "entire dmg" used in the calculation? for example the boss skill does 999k dmg, but we are able to survive that with that kind of cooldown, does it account for that 999k dmg taken, skyrocketing vengeance to heavens ?

b) only the dmg taken is used on the calculation? for example, the tank with 500k hp will take 500k dmg, but the cd/buff prevents his death, and the extra dmg (that is absorbed by the cooldown) is not accounted on the vengeance?

c) while using that kind of cooldown any dmg taken will not account on vengeance?

Just wanted to point out that for guardians and blood dks that the vengeance tooltip was not updated with the removal of the 10% max health cap. The new model is in just need the tooltip update.

Fel flame is really expensive that it sometimes because a struggle to even weave it into our rotation. As many have said in the past, is there any possibility to bring down the cost of fel flame a little so it won't seem so painful to cast.... especially when we are low on manner.

Just confirming that with the new model, our starting jump up Vengeance (to prevent long ramp up) is:

(UnmitigatedHit/3.75) * 50%

Have you ever considered adding a buff to heal spec DPS that is only active while the healer is not in a group/raid? Probably the same could be asked for tank specs.

Then those players are not forced into a DPS spec or slower gameplay while out grinding and questing.

Is Elusive Brew on your radar? I haven't crunched the numbers but I just KNOW everyone's going to be surprised when they see how much more effective it is when you use each charge as you get them.

At first glance, everyone wants to use it like Tigereye Brew (wait till high/max stacks, use it for the burst damage), but I'm theorizing that sipping it like Mana Tea suddenly converts it into a Savage Defense clone given the rate of charges that we can gain. If we time it, we can spend the charges as we gain them (1 or 2 at a time depending on how many Elusive Brew procs) on individual melee swings, greatly improving its effectiveness in a way that probably wasn't counted on considering its previous version.

source: simulationcraft.org

*So blizz explain why any warlock would want to play destruction even if it's his favorite spec. He/she is just going to get sat.

I can't debug the Simulationcraft numbers. Those guys are working very hard from what we can tell to be as accurate as possible, but when they're not, I am unable to give you explanations without a lot more information.

It's being reported that the .5 ticks from Malefic Grasp & Drain Soul are benefiting from Grimoire of Sacrifice. Is this intended or a bug?

Confirmed that other abilities, like Light's Hammer is not affected by PVP Power -- but Eternal Flame is.

Still would like a confirmation on whether this is a bug or not.

Also, is it intended that Glyph of Protector of the Innocent (shouldn't it be Glyph of the Protector of the Innocent?) not work with Eternal Flame? Shouldn't it work with the initial heal at the very least?

Prot paladin DPS relative to other tanks should be examined. Most changes to ret, and some changes to holy, affect Protection Paladins directly. EDIT: The bugfix to Eternal Flame make it somewhat unattractive to Protection. I'm a little concerned prot is going to gravitate towards Sacred Shield exclusively, especially because we have better ways to spend our Holy Power.

I have been working on some modeling of my own for Hunters and I would like clarification something GC posted earlier. If I remember correctly, he stated that pets should always have 25% more Focus Regen than the Hunter due to scaling from the same effects and starting at 5 Fps rather than 4 Fps.

While my experience overall agrees with this, I will say that it is not completely accurate. Specifically, Focus Fire for the BM Hunter is a full 40% Haste, giving Focus Regen. It does not appear to affect the Pet however, particularly as the Pet's listed Swing speed goes back to its base value (2/1.1/(1+Hunter's Base Haste %age)). Is the design intention that Pets follow GC's earlier post, or should GC's earlier post be taken as a general design intent that specific abilities can break. I assume the latter, but I would ask the question.

For example, according to my sims using pre-raid gear, if I want to increase my dps by 3-5% (depending on the spec) I can simply race change to Orc

Is Sudden Death from the arms warrior talent tree working as intended?I did about 5 min worth of attacking on a target dummy and i was literally getting proc after proc after proc with maybe 2 or 3 seconds in between on attacking? not saying it needs a nerf but maybe the % proc chance is wrong atm?

Won't this end up dramatically reducing the vengeance gain from magic damage? In general it's probably not a big deal, except in the case of certain mobs (e.g. Gandling and Lei Shi) who do magic damage exclusively.

Will tanks be encouraged to get to the parry cap for expertise?

Unless there were changes to bosses, while melee DPS classes do not need to hit parry cap, as bosses can't parry from behind, tanks do not have that luxury. While I can appreciate needing hit and expertise (especially when I remember successfully running raids in Wrath of the Lich King with less than 1% hit rating), it seems like a lot of stats to ensure that our active mitigation abilities are able to hit.

Do you have an updated list of what you consider tuned or not? That post a few days ago was very useful and after the recent changes it would be nice to see what is considered tuned and what isn't.

It's kind of a tough situation, because the tool is useful for things, so we don't want to stop using it, and we can't improve it without people looking at the numbers it's putting out, and yet it's hard not to get discouraged that we're causing more trouble than it's worth sometimes with the way people misuse it.

Please don't get discouraged. It's been a valuable tool for me in figuring out gearing priorities. Even if it didn't exist, people would still find ways to complain about their DPS being too low.

Oh, I'm not seriously considering not working on it or anything -- just expressing some frustration.

Current simcraft of all classes.

http://simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_T14H.html

Currently maining a shadow priest, and don't see why further nerfs were needed considering we were still only at 108k before these recent nerfs. But that's just my little complaint of the day.

The latest sims don't look promising:

www.simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_T14H

First and foremost, as a ground rule let’s keep this one thread free of pleas about ability feedback, DPS being too low or other subjective declarations. This thread should be about information sharing. If you aren’t a theorycrafter, this thread may not be for you.

Quick question GC. The recent built that nerfed Light of Dawn. Was there a particular reason for that outside of the possibility you guys thought it was too strong? I'm just curious for that nerf to me seemed out of the blue considering it has a potential long ramp up time outside of cd's like Holy Avenger and if it has a faster ramp up time it usualyl costs a hefty amount of mana.

Wasn't Dire beast on a gcd before? I got on the beta and it seems to begin to trigger a gcd when I use it but It cancels the gcd and I am able to use other abilities immediately. Is this intended?

Anti-Magic Zone absorbs 20% less spell damage per attack power for Unholy. This multiplier was added back when Unholy got 25% attack power as a spec bonus.

That spec bonus was dropped to 15% in the last beta patch. Can the Unholy-specific Anti-magic Zone multiplier be reduced to compensate?

Can you please confirm this is intended/acceptable results, or otherwise address it? Or if I screwed up badly in my math somewhere I'd like to hear that as well.
Dual Wield Frost - Howling Blast Vs. Obliterate

Did something change with the Elusive Brew calculations this patch, specifically with 2h weapons?

The tooltip updated, and some people are reporting getting 3 stacks (consistently) with a 3.6 speed weapon (the PvP polearm), which should be impossible given the formula we were given, while others are still getting 2.

A.) Stormstrike was buffed to 300% weapon damage, but Stormblast still appears to be set at 200%

Is Feline Swiftness intended to stack with speed enchants?

Base damage for DK diseases were buffed this patch, but the numbers seem off a little bit. The base damage for Frost Fever is now 1390, while the base damage for Blood Plague is 172.

Was an extra 0 mistakenly added to Frost Fever (should be 139)? Or is Blood Plague missing a 0 (should be 1720)?

Did WoG and EF change and somehow those changes didn't make it to the Patch notes?

My values are down for it on just about every AP scale I've tested by between 3 and 7% (easily noticeable on the EF HoT tick)

You say that you are completely confident in your ability to balance the classes. What does that mean? I believe you when you say you can make a computer play a class on every spec on a patchwerk style fight and get the same numbers. Thats where my faith starts to drop off.

EF is behaving properly from its tooltip. However, the PvP power conversion factor has changed. In previous patches, it was ~265. This build it's ~530, nerfed by exactly a factor of 2.

The third point is also true, but that's why it surprises me so much that you've disregarded (actually you've specifically stated that you don't want to hear) feedback about certain classes and specs being very not fun.

The 10% melee/hunter attack speed buff from the dummies is stacking with Unleashed Rage(10% speed) from enhancement shaman.
Not intended I'm sure.

What's up with Chi Wave? I spent a while on the dummies and it's doing about 2.5x much per chi as BoK and 1.2x as much as RSK, but in actual raid testing it's very inconsistent. Sometimes it will hit bosses 4x and sometimes it will just hit once and then disappear. I remember reading a blue post saying that the second tier of monk talents weren't intended to be used rotationally - is this still the case?

Right now it's a required talent and provides a 15-20% increase in DPS on bosses on which it bounces multiple times and is worthless (except as a small extra heal, although expel harm + healing spheres may be better options) for bosses on which it bounces only once. How is this ability supposed to work, and can it please be adjusted to work consistently?

Is it intended that spells cast in cat or bear form via Predatory Swiftness or Nature's Swiftness interrupt the swing timer?

Oh, so PVP Power conversion percentage is still ~265 to 1%, but its effectiveness on healing spells has been reduced by half.

Although I don't do PVP, I do wonder if there's a chance that the tooltips for WoG and EF will reflect the expected value based on both SP and PVP Power?

I don't know if you've seen our spreadsheet, but even with EF there are tooltip differences between what's expected and what's actually happening.

Like for example, at 17630 AP, the EF tooltip indicates we should be expecting heals of 1024 from the HoT portion of EF -- however, due to PVP Power (16.05% in the character sheet in this case, and in reality much less since you have disclosed that PVP Power effectiveness for heals has been reduced), we're actually getting 1105 ticks.

Should Expertise convert to Spell Hit for pure casters? Or is that only supposed to work for melee classes that use weapon attacks that deal spell damage? (Pardon my ignorance here, I know nothing of melee stats.)

Basically, I'm wondering if every Human Mage and Warlock is going to be looking for swords now.

In other words, tooltips currently do not reflect how much a spell is actually supposed to heal for once the benefits of PVP Power are factored in.

13,20% Mastery
Increases the damage done by your demon servants by 13,20%
Increases the damage you deal in caster form by 13,20%
The damage you deal while using Metamorphosis increased by 39,60%

Is there a chance you might reduce the mana cost of Chain Lightning? We are running oom very fast on 2 targets and I honestly don't think it should be that way seeing as it is our spellcleave.

Execution Sentence is consuming Glyph of Flash of Light, but is seeing no increase in the healing done. Is it supposed to consume the effect and receive the increase or is it not supposed to interact with the glyph at all?

GC, is it the design intent that some classes can do 15% more single target damage than others? Currently the classes on the bottom of the DPS sims are that far off the top classes.

Can you clarify what is your target balancing spread between the best single target class and the worst single target class? It seems to me that 5%ish would be acceptable, but the current spread is close to 15% which is just outrageous.