Post by Kamesh on Mar 1, 2015 7:34:29 GMT
Wall of druid text incoming. I'm not really trying to convince anyone of anything with this post - nobody has ever asked me to defend my choice of LI over BT. But I spent a bit of time today thinking about it, and typing it up was a good way to organize my thoughts. So why not post it? Worst that could happen is someone smarter than me points out a glaringly obvious mistake in my logic.
So for the level 100 feral talent, you have your choice of Lunar Inspiration or Bloodtalons. Almost every serious PvE feral goes Bloodtalons because the sims have declared it superior, even post 20% boost. My issue with the simulator on this one is that Bloodtalons is much harder to play than LI, and suffers a lot if you screw it up. So how do we tell if it's really better?
Lets look at my log from our last H-Gruul kill. You can see I did 1390K via moonfire - but how much would I have done if I had picked BT instead? Well, the energy I used to cast 22 moonfires I cast would have become 16.5 shreds (since I already prioritize rake>rip>FB>moonfire>shred), or 425K damage. Of course, that's 5.5 fewer combo point generating attacks, or 7.4 combo points at my crit rate. Given a 58K difference between shred and FB for every 5 combo points, and the loss of an extra 1/4 shred per FB due to the energy cost difference, that's a 76K downward adjustment. So 349K damage + whatever we get from the actual BT buff.
But how much damage could I have gotten from the BT buff? I had 25 finishers, so that's a maximum of 50 BT charges. But remember we lost 1.48 finishers by doing the more expensive shred instead of LI, so that's -3 charges. In a perfect world, your crits would work out perfectly such that you can always use your BT charges on rips, rakes, bites and then dump whatever is left over into shred. As it happens, I cast 47 rakes, rips and FBs! 30% of that damage is is 1144K damage, for a total of 1493K damage. That means I'd have done 10.333M damage on Gruul with BT; 103K more than with LI. A whopping 1%. In a perfect world.
But what about in the real world? Sure, I could wait until next week and see how I do with BT. Or I could find someone I know with a 97th percentile BT parse and look at that today! I mean, that's the totally how well *I* would do, right?
Turns out it's a lot tougher to go from BT --> LI than the other way around, since the world isn't perfect. Awesomely, warcraftlogs lets you filter based on auras, so I could see exactly when Pete used his BT charges. He had 36: 10 shred, 12 rake, 10 FB and 4 rip. The BT damage from shred and bite was easy to work out with a little algebra: 93.7K and 289.3K extra from shred and bite respectively. But BT snapshotting combined with the Pandemic and BitW effects (rip renewed by FB when target hp < 20%) makes the dots way harder. Luckily, rip only had 8 casts, so I could look through the stop and end times for each and see if BT was affecting them. I won't retype the whole thing here, but the result was that BT affected 118 seconds of rip vs 79 not affected (since 198 seconds of ticks are recorded, I might have missed one due to rounding, but YOLO). So with 59.9% of his rip boosted, that meant BT gave him an extra 193.8K rip damage. Now at this point, I'm almost done with my beer(s), and I'm staring down his 16 rakes casts, so I make the assumption since there is no BitW effect to distort that, I'll just assume he was as likely to refresh a BT rake as a non-BT rake. He's probably keeping track of that and playing smarter than that, but it's small potatoes, so I assume that his ticks are boosted in the same ratio as his hits, or 75%. So that's 295.2K extra from rake. And with that, we know that he got 872K extra damage from BT.
So how much would LI have benefited him? Well, LI scales from all secondary stats except mastery, the same as melee attacks. So by taking the ratio of my white dps (not damage, dps, since the fight lengths are different), to his white dps, and multiplying it by my LI dps, you get his potential LI dps. Multiply by fight length and you get his LI damage: 1076.3K. Now based on fight length, and his rake uptime, we can figure he'd have cast it 15 times to do that damage. Which means 11.25 fewer shreds (-356.8K) but an extra bite (+64.7K), for a total of 784.2 extra damage from LI. Damn. Lower than BT. By nearly the same 1% as in the best case. Guess that's how you get a 97th percentile parse.
And since it was a short fight, he was bloodlusted a larger percentage than most fights, which helps LI more than BT. And he's wearing more +haste than +mastery than the BiS list. So clearly, if you're Pete, bloodtalons is the better talent. But what about our hypothetical average druid? Not me of course, but someone not super 1337. After all, if I had been dumping all BT charges into shred instead of holding NS and weaving them in later in the rotation, I'd have done 637K *less* than LI. So the difference ranges with execution from -6% (terribad BT execution) to +1% (excellent BT execution). Therefore, I think there is enough space in the theoretical to still say a lot of PERFECTLY RAIDWORTHY ferals would benefit from using LI over BT on single target fights.
-Kamesh
PS~ Last note before I call it a night. If you look at healing done, you'll notice my HPS for HT is 1.56Kps, vs 1.40Kps for Pete despite him casting it a lot more frequently. Now a lot of things are going to affect this, but one of the big benefits of LI in the healing department is that your HT becomes untethered from your dps rotation and you can use it whenever you need to. Which is why my overhealing is substantially less - I get to use it whenever I think either the tank or I need a 50K heal. So even though it is low throughput, it's very useful healing - akin to an extra 12 healthstones on the MTs (controlled by someone who is only sorta paying attention).
So for the level 100 feral talent, you have your choice of Lunar Inspiration or Bloodtalons. Almost every serious PvE feral goes Bloodtalons because the sims have declared it superior, even post 20% boost. My issue with the simulator on this one is that Bloodtalons is much harder to play than LI, and suffers a lot if you screw it up. So how do we tell if it's really better?
Lets look at my log from our last H-Gruul kill. You can see I did 1390K via moonfire - but how much would I have done if I had picked BT instead? Well, the energy I used to cast 22 moonfires I cast would have become 16.5 shreds (since I already prioritize rake>rip>FB>moonfire>shred), or 425K damage. Of course, that's 5.5 fewer combo point generating attacks, or 7.4 combo points at my crit rate. Given a 58K difference between shred and FB for every 5 combo points, and the loss of an extra 1/4 shred per FB due to the energy cost difference, that's a 76K downward adjustment. So 349K damage + whatever we get from the actual BT buff.
But how much damage could I have gotten from the BT buff? I had 25 finishers, so that's a maximum of 50 BT charges. But remember we lost 1.48 finishers by doing the more expensive shred instead of LI, so that's -3 charges. In a perfect world, your crits would work out perfectly such that you can always use your BT charges on rips, rakes, bites and then dump whatever is left over into shred. As it happens, I cast 47 rakes, rips and FBs! 30% of that damage is is 1144K damage, for a total of 1493K damage. That means I'd have done 10.333M damage on Gruul with BT; 103K more than with LI. A whopping 1%. In a perfect world.
But what about in the real world? Sure, I could wait until next week and see how I do with BT. Or I could find someone I know with a 97th percentile BT parse and look at that today! I mean, that's the totally how well *I* would do, right?
Turns out it's a lot tougher to go from BT --> LI than the other way around, since the world isn't perfect. Awesomely, warcraftlogs lets you filter based on auras, so I could see exactly when Pete used his BT charges. He had 36: 10 shred, 12 rake, 10 FB and 4 rip. The BT damage from shred and bite was easy to work out with a little algebra: 93.7K and 289.3K extra from shred and bite respectively. But BT snapshotting combined with the Pandemic and BitW effects (rip renewed by FB when target hp < 20%) makes the dots way harder. Luckily, rip only had 8 casts, so I could look through the stop and end times for each and see if BT was affecting them. I won't retype the whole thing here, but the result was that BT affected 118 seconds of rip vs 79 not affected (since 198 seconds of ticks are recorded, I might have missed one due to rounding, but YOLO). So with 59.9% of his rip boosted, that meant BT gave him an extra 193.8K rip damage. Now at this point, I'm almost done with my beer(s), and I'm staring down his 16 rakes casts, so I make the assumption since there is no BitW effect to distort that, I'll just assume he was as likely to refresh a BT rake as a non-BT rake. He's probably keeping track of that and playing smarter than that, but it's small potatoes, so I assume that his ticks are boosted in the same ratio as his hits, or 75%. So that's 295.2K extra from rake. And with that, we know that he got 872K extra damage from BT.
So how much would LI have benefited him? Well, LI scales from all secondary stats except mastery, the same as melee attacks. So by taking the ratio of my white dps (not damage, dps, since the fight lengths are different), to his white dps, and multiplying it by my LI dps, you get his potential LI dps. Multiply by fight length and you get his LI damage: 1076.3K. Now based on fight length, and his rake uptime, we can figure he'd have cast it 15 times to do that damage. Which means 11.25 fewer shreds (-356.8K) but an extra bite (+64.7K), for a total of 784.2 extra damage from LI. Damn. Lower than BT. By nearly the same 1% as in the best case. Guess that's how you get a 97th percentile parse.
And since it was a short fight, he was bloodlusted a larger percentage than most fights, which helps LI more than BT. And he's wearing more +haste than +mastery than the BiS list. So clearly, if you're Pete, bloodtalons is the better talent. But what about our hypothetical average druid? Not me of course, but someone not super 1337. After all, if I had been dumping all BT charges into shred instead of holding NS and weaving them in later in the rotation, I'd have done 637K *less* than LI. So the difference ranges with execution from -6% (terribad BT execution) to +1% (excellent BT execution). Therefore, I think there is enough space in the theoretical to still say a lot of PERFECTLY RAIDWORTHY ferals would benefit from using LI over BT on single target fights.
-Kamesh
PS~ Last note before I call it a night. If you look at healing done, you'll notice my HPS for HT is 1.56Kps, vs 1.40Kps for Pete despite him casting it a lot more frequently. Now a lot of things are going to affect this, but one of the big benefits of LI in the healing department is that your HT becomes untethered from your dps rotation and you can use it whenever you need to. Which is why my overhealing is substantially less - I get to use it whenever I think either the tank or I need a 50K heal. So even though it is low throughput, it's very useful healing - akin to an extra 12 healthstones on the MTs (controlled by someone who is only sorta paying attention).
