Clearing up misconceptions

[Lord BEEF]

This is just a random list of corrections to some things I've heard people say. Feel free to add.

Agility does not effect your chance to hit your enemy. Agility effects your chance to land a critical hit with weapons, your chance to dodge, and slightly increases your armor. If you want to hit more often you need to max out your weapon skill and not fight enemies of a much higher level than you. Racial traits that boost a weapon skill also increase your chance to hit.

Intelligence does not effect your chance at getting a skill up from tradeskills. Intelligence does effect the amount of swings required to raise your weapon skill.

All abilities and spells have the same chance of being resisted or missing. Any time anyone complains about a skill by saying "It's resisted a lot", they're full of crap. All abilities have the same chance of landing, though melee attacks also have to pass the dodge/parry/block checks, and spells have to pass the resistances checks. The exception to this is talents that reduce your enemy's chance of resisting, or increase your chance to hit.

[Artega]

What about Spirit affecting the chance of getting a proc from a weapon? I recall the tooltip saying this in the first stress test.

[Ruvanal]

What about Spirit affecting the chance of getting a proc from a weapon?  I recall the tooltip saying this in the first stress test.
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That was changed in one of the patches after the first stress test. The proc from weapon attacks is supposed to be changed to a flat chance over a period of time. The speed of the players attacks adjust what the chance of getting a proc are. For example say the game was set to have a proc that goes off about once a minute. If you had two attacks that took 15 seconds and 30 seconds respectively (not real attacks, these are big what if ones); then you would expect the 15 second attack to generate the proc 15/60=25% of the time and the 30 second attack to generate the proc 30/60=50% of the time.

Unfortuantely at this point, we do not know what type of base time frame the game is using for adjusting the rates. Nor in most cases is there a useful display of what the real chance is of most of the proc attacks to go off.

[Rinnhart]

It's Orgrimmar, not Ogrimar. :D

[Treesh]

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I have one! Pick me teacher! I'm ever so smart!

On the FAQ of Blizzard's, it claims a character limit of 8 characters per realm. After testing to make sure it was the 10 that Caydiem was saying in the forums, by creating 10 characters on a server and then taking a screenshot, I sent an email off to have them correct it. Their response? "I'm pretty sure it's 8." That's it. That's all they said. So I sent back the screenshot showing the 10 on a single server and told him (with a smile at the end) that if he doesn't believe the screenshot, he can make 10 characters himself.

So, my misconception that I'm trying to clear up (even if it does seem to be only a misconception on the webmasters' part) is that you can make 10 characters on a server!

Yeah, this was mostly just a rant, but it did have a point! :D

Edit: And by the time I was finished typing up this post, he sent back an email saying I was right. I figured it would take another 2 days before hearing anything back. :)

[Tal]

If you have a GM ticket open any subsequent tickets will be overwritten until the GM closes the first one.

[vor_lord]

About attack-based procing:

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I'd like to see a bit of discussion--

Procs are triggered with a frequency that adjusts based on weapon speed. This means that no matter what your attack rate, your number of procs going off will be the same (statistically) per minute.

This also means that the chance for a proc on an attack with a slow weapon is correspondingly greater than with a fast weapon.

There could be, however, a situation where the fast weapon is better. If the proc rate is really high (say 20 per minute), then your slow weapon may not have enough attacks to proc that many times. My Smite's Mighty Hammer attacks once every 3.5 seconds, giving 8 attacks in 30 seconds (the length of a seal). If the proc rate were 20, that would mean I should proc 10 times in 30 seconds, but I have a maximum of 8 due to my slow swing rate.

Not sure if any skill procs that much, but have read rumors about Seal of Light/Seal of Wisdom falling into that category.

It sure would be soooo useful to have a list of the proc rates. For example, I'm trying to figure out if improved Seal of Justice is worth it. The talent increases the proc rate by 5 per minute, but I don't know what the base is! And there are rumors about a 'cap', i.e., once you've proc'd 5 times for example that might be all you get for that minute. That doesn't sound likely to me (seems too annoying to code--I'd rather use weapon speed and proc rate in a simple formula that gets applied each attack than have to track time).

This is the hardest thing about a new game--having so little authoritative knowledge about game mechanics.

Anyone know?

[stabby]

About attack-based procing:

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I'd like to see a bit of discussion--

Procs are triggered with a frequency that adjusts based on weapon speed.  This means that no matter what your attack rate, your number of procs going off will be the same (statistically) per minute.

This also means that the chance for a proc on an attack with a slow weapon is correspondingly greater than with a fast weapon.

There could be, however, a situation where the fast weapon is better.  If the proc rate is really high (say 20 per minute), then your slow weapon may not have enough attacks to proc that many times.  My Smite's Mighty Hammer attacks once every 3.5 seconds, giving 8 attacks in 30 seconds (the length of a seal).  If the proc rate were 20, that would mean I should proc 10 times in 30 seconds, but I have a maximum of 8 due to my slow swing rate.

Not sure if any skill procs that much, but have read rumors about Seal of Light/Seal of Wisdom falling into that category.

It sure would be soooo useful to have a list of the proc rates.  For example, I'm trying to figure out if improved Seal of Justice is worth it.  The talent increases the proc rate by 5 per minute, but I don't know what the base is!  And there are rumors about a 'cap', i.e., once you've proc'd 5 times for example that might be all you get for that minute.  That doesn't sound likely to me (seems too annoying to code--I'd rather use weapon speed and proc rate in a simple formula that gets applied each attack than have to track time).

This is the hardest thing about a new game--having so little authoritative knowledge about game mechanics.

Anyone know?
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Unfortunately, as far as I know, there hasn't been any organized research into the topic. It doesn't seem like it would be hard to establish at least fuzzy number ranges, given suitable scientific rigor and enough data. I'm personally still trying to figure out if there's a decent log parser around, honestly. That would aid data collection immensely.

[vor_lord]

What logs do you want to parse? I don't know much about the way the game is structured but I'm pretty handy at whacking out simple regex based parsers.

edit: Grr, meant to reply to stabby

[MongoJerry]

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there hasn't been any organized research into the topic.  It doesn't seem like it would be hard to establish at least fuzzy number ranges, given suitable scientific rigor and enough data.  I'm personally still trying to figure out if there's a decent log parser around, honestly.  That would aid data collection immensely.

Hmmm... there must be something around. I'm pretty sure Cosmos uses some kind of log parcer to figure out a person's dps on the fly.

[vor_lord]

Hmmm... there must be something around.  I'm pretty sure Cosmos uses some kind of log parcer to figure out a person's dps on the fly.
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I just took a look at the code for DPSPLUS. It does very quick and dirty parsing for just the things it needs, such as:

Code:

    -- Player Processing
    if (DPSPLUS_Player_OnOff == 1) then
 if ( (type == "COMBAT_SELF_HITS") or (type == "SPELL_SELF_DAMAGE") or (type == "COMBAT_PET_HITS") or (type == "SPELL_PET_DAMAGE") ) then
     _, _, d = string.find(arg1, ".* for (%d+).*");
 elseif ( (type == "SPELL_PERIODIC_HOSTILEPLAYER_DAMAGE") or (type == "SPELL_PERIODIC_CREATURE_DAMAGE") ) then
     _, _, d = string.find(arg1, ".* (%d+) .* from your .*");
 end
 
 -- Matched, Record this Entry
 if ( d ~= nil ) then
     dpsplus_addentry("Your", d);
     return DPSPLUS_Player_Eat;
 end
    end

I'm just barely starting to learn about how this fits together, so I am not sure where the caller is, but it looks like chat watching (log watching) has some stuff that is common among several Cosmos add-ons:

Code:

    Cosmos_RegisterChatWatch(
     "DPSPLUS_WATCHES",
     {"COMBAT_SELF_HITS", "SPELL_SELF_DAMAGE",
   "COMBAT_PET_HITS", "SPELL_PET_DAMAGE",
   "SPELL_PERIODIC_HOSTILEPLAYER_DAMAGE", "SPELL_PERIODIC_CREATURE_DAMAGE",
   "COMBAT_PARTY_HITS", "SPELL_PARTY_DAMAGE"},
     DPSPLUS_Watch
     );  

Have to look up that code later...