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.

[Mavfin]

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'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.
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Hmm, might be interesting for me, too. I tank with Maladath, which puts Keshi at 309 swords (+5 human, +4 Mala)

[Skandranon]

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.
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If I'm reading the data right (and adjusting the first two screenshots' numbers correctly) just going from 300 to 305 skill is reducing the damage loss due to glancing by 7%, making for a white damage gain of about 7.5%. Obviously this is a smaller percentage of your overall damage, but it still means that the human racial, for a sword rogue/warrior, is turning out to be at least as valuable as maxing the talent Precision.

Yikes.

[Mavfin]

If I'm reading the data right (and adjusting the first two screenshots' numbers correctly) just going from 300 to 305 skill is reducing the damage loss due to glancing by 7%, making for a white damage gain of about 7.5%.  Obviously this is a smaller percentage of your overall damage, but it still means that the human racial, for a sword rogue/warrior, is turning out to be at least as valuable as maxing the talent Precision.

Yikes.
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Or mace, as humans get that, too.

[castille]

Yeah, I was actually watching this thread, and thought it was really well done. I checked my own combat logs last night from MC.

...man, everything was glancing, but I am only 58 :)

[Concillian]

There has been speculation that +defense through the anticipation talent is different from the standpoint of crushing blows than +defense through gear (i.e. anticipation helps reduce crushing blows, but +def gear does NOT)

If that's the case I suspect a similar difference in +weapon skill from the human trait vs. on gear.

I don't know one way or the other, as I've done no testing on it, but it's another factor to consider.

[TheDragoon]

This is pretty interesting. I will have to go plug in the numbers, but this means that it might actually be better for my warrior to use something like Maladath (for +sword skill) than a seemingly better DPS weapon like the claw from Firemaw. If this ends up being the case, I'll probably be kicking myself a bit since I have passed on Maladath a couple times in favor of other weapons that I thought would be more DPS-oriented. Each time I was tempted to take it simply because it looked cool, but did not because I figured I could find something a bit better and someone else could use that sword. :)

[Legedi]

Someone Should grab a pair of Edgemaster's Handguards some time to test it out.

It would be interesting to see if +7 to swords could outway the lack of any other stats.

[Kevin]

I've actaully tested Obsidian Edged Blade (with Crusader Enchant) vs The Untamed Blade (with no enchant) and my overall damage was still a little bit higher with Untamed but the difference wasn't that much. I didn't look at the difference on crushing blows just DPS and overall damage over a similar set of mobs.

Could be interesting to see what an OEB + Edgemaster + human might do. 320 sword skill could be interesting, your sword skill would be like that of a L64 so you would effectively be a higher level than the mobs.

[Mavfin]

This is pretty interesting.  I will have to go plug in the numbers, but this means that it might actually be better for my warrior to use something like Maladath (for +sword skill) than a seemingly better DPS weapon like the claw from Firemaw.  If this ends up being the case, I'll probably be kicking myself a bit since I have passed on Maladath a couple times in favor of other weapons that I thought would be more DPS-oriented.  Each time I was tempted to take it simply because it looked cool, but did not because I figured I could find something a bit better and someone else could use that sword.  :)
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I picked it up for the +1 parry and the +swords, figuring it'd be good for tanking (and it is)..and it is dead sexy.....

[Lissa]

This is pretty interesting.  I will have to go plug in the numbers, but this means that it might actually be better for my warrior to use something like Maladath (for +sword skill) than a seemingly better DPS weapon like the claw from Firemaw.  If this ends up being the case, I'll probably be kicking myself a bit since I have passed on Maladath a couple times in favor of other weapons that I thought would be more DPS-oriented.  Each time I was tempted to take it simply because it looked cool, but did not because I figured I could find something a bit better and someone else could use that sword.  :)
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Warblades of the Hakkari...set bonus is +6 sword skill and they're prefectly setup for Fury warriors...

[Ruvanal]

Sounds like what I had already known of the weapon skill effects from before. Best sum up of it that I have seen is here.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Weapon_Skill

[MongoJerry]

Does this only affect normal "auto swing" attacks? Or does this also apply to special attacks like Mortal Strike and Backstab?

[Quark]

Does this only affect normal "auto swing" attacks?  Or does this also apply to special attacks like Mortal Strike and Backstab?
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Special attacks never "glance," so this only affects auto attacks. Even so, normal attacks are ~50% of my damage. A 13% increase on 50% of your damage is nothing to laugh at.

[MongoJerry]

Special attacks never "glance," so this only affects auto attacks.  Even so, normal attacks are ~50% of my damage.  A 13% increase on 50% of your damage is nothing to laugh at.

Absolutely, it would, but it matters when you're deciding between items -- like, say, weapon you're going to use, which could also make a dramatic difference in your damage output. So basically, a +10 weapon skill would add 6.5%ish damage, which is still quite a lot, but then one must then explore what items you would have to get and give up to get that +10 weapon skill.

[TheDragoon]

Special attacks never "glance," so this only affects auto attacks.  Even so, normal attacks are ~50% of my damage.  A 13% increase on 50% of your damage is nothing to laugh at.
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Similarly, the white damage for a Fury warrior is usually ~50% of the total damage output. A significant increase in white damage would be great for just such a warrior.

[NuurAbSaal]

Well, I am a nub with numbers and calculations.

I am wondering if this puts the OEB ahead for doing dps in MC compared to Zinh'rok or The Quiraji twohander. What my limited intellectual powers have been able to deduce is, it should.

Right?

...

guys?


:)

take care
Nuurabsaal/Tarabulus

[Olon97]

Sounds like what I had already known of the weapon skill effects from before.  Best sum up of it that I have seen is here.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Weapon_Skill

Actually the Wikki was updated based off of the information in the Blizz forum thread linked here (the Wikki authors & editors match up with the main poster names on the Blizz forums). That page was first created on April 10 (3 days after the original rogue forum thread), so it's not exactly "known before" evidence.

A couple other discussions on the topic:
Elitist Jerks
Blizz Warrior Forums thread
Data with +crit at crazy high buffs (but no recklessness/cold blood).

The other important deduction from these threads is the overwrite order against a raid mob when the possible combat result percentages add up to over 100%. After misses, mob avoidance, and glancing blows - it is quite possible to not have enough room left in the combat table for all of your natural crit % (at which point you should see no regular white hits at all). For example see that warrior thread where he has 48% naturally buffed crit, but only sees 26% of his swings result in crits. He also had a 29% natural crit rate result in 20% crits and has a couple normal hits, which is a bit unexpected. Under the high crit circumstances, +hit clearly helps to reduce some of the miss filler at the top, making room for more of his crit % range to fit on the table.

In other words, if your crit is getting bumped off, +hit % (up to your natural miss %) > + crit % until you start seeing normal hits on the mob again.

Also standing behind mobs is absolutely crucial, but we allready knew that.

I picked up a pair of edgemaster handguards the second I read the original rogue forum thread. :P Probably won't actually break it out until I have a compelling reason to break up my wonderful Hakkari Warblades combo.

[Ruvanal]

Actually the Wikki was updated based off of the information in the Blizz forum thread linked here (the Wikki authors & editors match up with the main poster names on the Blizz forums). That page was first created on April 10 (3 days after the original rogue forum thread), so it's not exactly "known before" evidence.
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As I said, it had matched up with what I had known before. The +weapon skills basically brought you up to a level that was more equivalent to mobs that were higher and due to that gave your character a very noticable decrease in the detrimental types of hit results. Most players would just not try it out in a useful way in testing to see those results.

This to me is similar to the value of the +defense mods on items too. I had advocated during closed beta that +defense items would be an 'awesome' effect on characters being able to take on mobs, especially the ones of higher level when player level was capped. At that time everyone was just 'poo-poo' on my statements and insisting that various stat bonuses were better and that the +defense items were trash. Finally after retail, some other players started seeing what I had seen months before, to the point that Blizzard needed to readjust (nerf) the +defense on items when they realised that players could get 'too much' of it and shift the overall way the game played.

As for items like the Edgemaster's Handguards, I have been there when see them drop, but at that level of the encounters they are not really showing that much value. The +weapon skills really does not give any great benefit when dealing with mobs that are +1 or less of the characters level. And when you are in your 40's to low 50's, it is just easier to level up to get rid of that detrimental effect of being a bit lower than some of the mobs. It really only pays when you cannot do anything practical to level up to match mobs that are functioning at higher levels than your character.