Team Waffle – Music Contest

2
April 17, 2011
by

Cross posting from the Team Wafflecast blog:

 

Hello Everybody,

I’ve mentioned a “music contest” in the last two episodes, but the rules have been kind of vague. I’ll lay them out here.

  1. Send us a musical piece to use for intro/outtro music on the podcast!
  2. It will be at least 15 seconds long. It can be longer if you want, but we may not use all of it.
  3. It will be “druidy.”
  4. You will send it, or a link to it (preferably in mp3 format) to info@teamwafflecast.com.
  5. The winner will receive a Moonkin Hatchling, and something from the Blizzard Pet store.
  6. If you want a tangible item from the store, you must give us somewhere to deliver it to.
  7. We need to have it by May 31st, 2011.

If you have any questions about it, please send them to info@teamwafflecast.com, or comment below!

Thanks,

Arielle

_______________

P.S.  I have no idea what he means by “Druidy”.  I’d be happy with “Waffley”.

: Uncategorized

PSA – 4T11

21
April 8, 2011
by

I figure I’ll do a short post on why I’m wearing 4T11.  Maybe it’ll spare Arielle from pulling his hair out.

 

It’s not magically better.  It’s really not.  4T11 is a highly situational bonus that is entirely dependent upon the damage of the encounter (and how healers are handling it) and how often you use Survival Instincts.  If used on CD (which normally isn’t the case), then it’s only a slight loss of survivability from the loss of Mastery.

 

Most of the fights where it’s beneficial are the end bosses of each zone (in the case of Heroic Twilight Bastion, 2 end bosses).  Their damage output is usually incomparable to anything else this tier throws at us.  I used it for Sinestra (with 359 gloves… yuck) because the additional time on SI was absolutely invaluable for when I needed it.

 

Now, why am I wearing it?  My guild is decked.  The Healers in my guild are as geared as I am (minus 1 or 2 pieces), so the slight loss in mitigation isn’t a problem.  All but 3 bosses are farm content, so for all but 3 of those bosses, I am able to gear how I want.  Obviously not going to forsake dodge at all, but you get the idea.

 

That’s not the only reason.  If you recall my Bear r 4 Fite post, I also often switch to cat to DPS when I’m not tanking.  The 4pc bonus is an upgrade in that regard.

 

I like the expertise it gives me(yay chest!).  Quite frankly, I’m tired of seeing parries left and right when I pull and though I still get them, it’s not nearly as bad.

 

And last but not least… It’s pretty.  BiS gear looks like I was assaulted by a gaggle of children covered in finger paint.  Being the girl that I am, I appreciate pretty things and to me, T11 is quite pretty.  Matching gear is awesome. :)

 

Really, I’m trying to convey that there are reasons for it.  It doesn’t hurt to eventually get 4pc (just don’t get gloves; those suck) and use it as you see fit.  Just don’t think that because I’m using it, it’s suddenly better than what we’ve been saying.  There’s a time and place for everything, and that includes how tanks gear.  Just know that offset gearing this tier is a better form of survivability 90% of the time.  Use your noggin.

: Feral - Bear, Gearing, Raiding

Bear Spreadsheet Updates and Mew

14
April 7, 2011
by

I’ve been updating my Bear Spreadsheet periodically since I first posted it up. Mainly bug fixes and updating with newly available information, but very little new features. Well, I’ve recently added a couple of new features, they are not quite polished yet and are not absolutely accurate, but good enough to give us some insight.

The first item is a basic model for Vengeance decay. This is pretty tricky because Vengeance decays in two ways. Basically, the first time you receive Vengeance, it will tick every 2 seconds. If within the last 2 seconds you were never attacked at all, then Vengeance decays by 10% of the highest value of Vengeance achieved. If you were attacked (whether successfully or not), Vengeance decays by 5% of current Vengeance, and adds 5% of total damage received during the 2 seconds.

Modeling Vengeance decay is easy enough if the boss is attacking you every 2s or faster, and if we assume that each hit will take you to the Vengeance Cap. Vengeance should average out to .95 ^ (mean_time_between_successful_attacks / 2)  It gets trickier when the boss attacks slower than 2s where there is a possibility that the 2s window may pass without a boss attack. Assuming the boss always hits, the average vengeance is 1 – .1 * (boss_atttack_speed – 2)

Of course, the boss doesn’t always hit, so the two equations have to be combined, and I do not have any idea on how to do that correctly. Currently, I simply add the two decays together, which will inflate the decay quite a bit because of double counting. Until I know of a better solution, this will have to do for now. If there are any mathematics experts out there that can solve this, I would really appreciate your help.

The other new feature is the addition of a Threat Per Second model. There’s been some interest in this, especially with the changes in 4.1, and I got quite a bit of help from Arielle on this. The rotation modeling is not perfect – it assumes a fixed 18s rotation and doesn’t quite take into account misses messing with the rotation, but I think it’s sufficiently good enough to get good insight out of the resulting stat values. And wow, does Hit and Expertise Rating really pwnfase. I hope you find it useful. I’ve been tempted to collect another set of feral gear for the purpose of maximizing DPS in farmed content and heroic dungeons… well, someone has to do the DPS in those random heroics while carrying scrub ‘damage dealers’.

Of course, the obvious solution to the two problems above is to Simulate instead of Formulate. This has always been the goal eventually, using Mew as the framework to perform Simulations to discover our best TPS priority system and expected TPS, and can easily model our vengeance decay too. I just haven’t found the time to work on that myself… but guess what? Yawning!

Apparently Yawning has been bored lately, so it was pretty easy for Arielle and myself to con tempt Yawning (with the promise of Qtpis) to do some work on Mew’s Bear Model, and boy, did he take up the challenge with renewed vigor! There’s been quite some work on it, all of it is in SVN, if any of you are so inclined to check it out and build it yourself. It may be a couple of weeks before we are ready to update the UI to support it, with the help of Ceridan who has joined the Mew team to help out on UI. If you are interested in helping to develop for Mew, please let me know, we could certainly use some help!

Meanwhile, we owe Yawning a Qtpi or two… if any of you are a Qtpi and would like to volunteer, please drop a message in comment, thanks!

: Feral - Bear, Feral - General, Mathiness, Mew

4.1 – What in the fu-changes?

29
March 31, 2011
by

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, there are some new and exciting changes.  Both in terms of the Bear blog-o-sphere, and in terms of Bears themselves.

Regarding the former, ever since Reesi launched her new (and very, very, very purrrrrrty site) I’ve realized that I don’t maintain mine enough.  I’ve also noticed that I spend a lot of time hopping between 3 different sites (5 counting the offical and MMO-Champ forums, I’ve stopped going to Tankspot).  To make my life so much easier, I’ve decided to join Reesi and Tangedyn (who are obviously huge pillars of the community in their own right) here.  This will allow us to collaborate on new projects together with ease, and provide the Bear community with one easy-to-access site to meet all of their needs.

It’ll take me a while to fully migrate all of my information currently on Death Kitty over here, so don’t be surprised if everything isn’t up immediately.  I do have a life you know :)

Onto the second thing!  Holy shittake Bear changes batman!

I’ll admit the changes to Swipe, Lacerate, and Thrash all caught me off guard.  I was completely and utterly confused.  At first they appeared to be completely and totally unneccesarry buffs, but once we dug deeper (and later confirmed by the official patch notes) we found that while still awesome, they aren’t as awesome as they appear.  Here they are in abbreviated format:

  • Swipe: Base damage and AP modifier increased by 50%
  • Thrash: Base damage and AP modifer increased by 50%
  • Lacerate: Base damage increased to 2088

Swipe and Thrash are simply the removal of the threat modifier, or rather the conversion of the threat modifier into Damage instead of just bonus threat.  Nothing changes in terms of TPS since the threat bonus was multiplicitive instead of additive.  Lacerate however appears to have not only the additive modiifer reduced (which effectively results in a TPS nerf for normal hits), however it now benefits from crit bonuses.  That means it will double the “bonus” which is now pure damage, whereas before if you crit with a Lacerate, the threat modifier would not be affected by crit.

“But Arielle” you say, “WTF DOES IT MEAN!!!?!?”

  1. Maul now falls behind Thrash in terms of damage.  If you had Maul macroed to Thrash previously, you don’t want to now.
  2. While Lacerate’s DPS has gone up, its TPS has actually gone down (unless we had an incorrect threat modifier before).
  3. Swipe now overtakes Lacerate a tiny bit earlier (~34,000 AP instead of the previous ~46,000 AP).
  4. Blizzard failed at thinking this through.  But then again it is only a PTR change.

This means your single-target TPS priority system in a raid environment will now be:

  1. Mangle
  2. Thrash
  3. FFF 
  4. Lacerate

FFF is now just straight up better than Lacerate right out of the gate.  This makes Pulverize a bit of a gimmicky mechanic since it’s very clearly a DPS/TPS loss to get it up and running and keep it there.  I don’t think we’re at the point yet where the benefits of Pulverize are not greater than the cost.  I don’t think we ever will reach that point, but only time will tell.

Now lets see what happens when we apply these new damage values to an existing Bear in a 10m normal mode raid environment.  For the purposes of these calculations I used this log of me tanking Double Dragon.

Maul Damage: 976973 (unchanged)
Melee: 958976 (unchanged)
Mangle: 904807 (unchanged)
Lacerate: 253462 impact damage before, 431216 impact damage after.
Thrash: 166131 damage before, 249196 danage after.
Fury Swipes: 194338 (unchanged)
Pulverize: 125088 (unchanged)
FFF: 7425

Total Before: 3652709
Total After: 3913528

DPS Before: 11136
DPS After: 11931

An overall increase of 800 DPS.  Just from these buffs.  Nevermind the armor mitigation fix on Thrash.  Or that people will now be using Swipe instead of Lacerate where they can.  Or that people will be using Thrash wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more often.

Maybe I’m just confused, but wasn’t our single-target DPS massively overpowered as little as a month and a half ago?  Does Blizzard even realize what the result of these changes will be?  I’m beginning to think not.

Hello everyone, you better start welcoming the return of your Feral Bear overlords.

By the way, here’s the link to my new spreadsheet that is 4.1 PTR updated.

Arielle Edit:

The FFF change is just a shift of the threat modifier to straight up damage.  This is a huge buff.  This change, plus the Enrage fix, will likely lead me to advocating for 3/3 KoTJ instead of 2/2 FA.  Since you will be using FFF anyways, it’s kind of irrelevant how much stacks you get from one application.  It also means you can very effectively Tank and DPS using the exact same talent spec, the only difference being glyphs.

Our burst threat is going to go through the freaking roof.  I can guarantee you that something will get nerfed after this goes live.  If nothing else there will be a change to KotJ after people start going Bear, and using Enrage + Berserk to annihilate everything.

: Cataclysm, Feral - Bear, Feral Changes, Mathiness, Raiding
: ,

New Author – Arielle

10
March 30, 2011
by

The Inconspicuous Bear(s) is happy to announce the addition of a new author… Arielle!

 

Arielle is the author of Death Kitty – a feral druid blog, has done a very lengthy threat spreadsheet(because those tooltips are tricksy! and often wrong), and is the host of the Team Waffle Podcast.  I’m very happy to have him make a new home here, and very happy that this blog is expanding beyond my expectations.

 

In light of the recent patch notes (one of which is currently undocumented; blizzard blog update could change that) on the newest PTR build, he plans to make a post detailing what’s going on with Thrash and Swipe and how it will impact our threat generation, both in AoE and Single Target.  Or maybe it will be a whole bunch of math.  I don’t know.

 

Some interesting changes, to be sure.

 

And, of course, as soon as I posted this, the blog updated:  Patch 4.1 Public Test Realm Notes – March 30

Most notable changes:

  • Lacerate bonus threat has been removed and replaced with increased initial damage done.
  • Savage Defense has been redesigned slightly. Instead of a single charge absorption, it now places an absorption effect on the druid absorbing up to 35% of the druid’s attack power (modified by mastery, if applicable) in damage and lasting 10 seconds. There are no longer any charges on the effect.
  • Swipe (Bear) cooldown has been reduced to 3 seconds, down from 6, and is now trainable at level 18 (training cost has been reduced). In addition, the bonus threat from this ability has been removed and replaced with increased damage done.
  • Thrash bonus threat has been removed and replaced with increased damage done.
: Uncategorized
Albizia Theme designed by itx