Glancing Blows, +Weapons, and Bosses

[Quark]

So one of the reasons I hated to upgrade from my Distracting Dagger and Aged Core Leather Gloves is that I had some observations about my glancing blows against bosses that just seemed to say "+daggers is really helping." I never had a solid dataset as backing, it just felt like a big deal.

The first night Arleas used Maladath in MC, he noticed a difference (especially on bosses) and couldn't explain it; I conjectured that the +4 Swords really was the key to this.

Now I spotted a great thread in the Rogue Forums, with some math and a mod to back this up. Original Poster (and his second post) pasted below for preservation reasons:

I've been looking for hard data on glancing blows and the benefit of +skill mods, but never could find any. So, I collected some of my own, and I thought people might be interested to see the results.

Testing methodology: I wrote a simple UI mod to count the number of glancing blows inflicted, and calculate the average damage done by each, along with the average damage done by non-glancing blows. I got a couple of guildies to install this, and we collected data during one fight against Onyxia. One of us wore no +skill gear, one wore +5, one wore +10. Here are the results. (N.B.: the "estimated percentage of damage lost" figure is off by a factor of 100 in the first two screenshots.) Only white damage is included in the calculations depicted below.

+0 skill:
http://userfs.cec.wustl.edu/~wbk1/Images/WoW/skill0.jpg

+5 skill:
http://userfs.cec.wustl.edu/~wbk1/Images/WoW/skill5.jpg

+10 skill:
http://userfs.cec.wustl.edu/~wbk1/Images...kill10.jpg


So, a few things are readily apparent:
- There's no such thing as a crit glancing blow (I guess this should have been obvious)
- Glancing blows are incredibly frequent in raid situations
- The primary benefit of +skill is to reduce the severity, not frequency, of glancing blows (although it seems to do both). Note that with +0 skill, glancing blows were doing about 2/3 normal damage to Onyxia, whereas with +10, there was no damage reduction at all.

It's interesting to note that adding +10 skill, with all other things being equal, will increase white damage by about 13% (in this particular fight).


It remains to be seen how these figures vary between bosses. We didn't do any real controlled testing elsewhere, but playing around with the mod suggests that glancing blows have a negligible effect against trash, and may be much more severe against other bosses. (In particular, two of us ran the mod against Skeram -- with no +skill -- and were seeing something like 70% damage reduction on glancing blows.) Hopefully we'll be able to gather some data against Nefarian in a couple days, and see how it compares.



(If this is all old news, and I'm months behind, etc., I would very much appreciate links to more data on the subject. Like I said, I've looked around, but haven't found anything solid.)

The mod can be downloaded at http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~wbk1/Glancing.zip

Be warned, it's pretty barebones.
Commands:
/glancing reset -- reset data
/glancing report -- report data to chat frame
/glancing report w [name] -- whisper data to specified player
/glancing report c [number] -- report data to specified chat channel

I'm so running this mod on the next few MCs, and I'll be sure to compare Aged Core Leather Gloves (+5 daggers) to Bloodfang Gloves (better overall stats) in particular.