Simulationcraft - Feral rotation discussion and script

[ShmooDude]

@ShmooDude
I'll try to test some of these changes in Catus soon.

I went ahead and switched rake back to largely be how it was before. It was having bad interactions with soul charm due to its constantly buffing nature and seeing as it was largely DPS neutral I just went ahead and moved back to the simpler logic rather than trying to specifically fix the soul charm logic (the whole point of the change was to merge the ratio and > mangle lines together, if I'm then going to have to resplit everything to account for a trinket there's no point, lol).

Code: Select all

    actions.doc+=/rake,if=action.rake.tick_damage>action.mangle_cat.hit_damage&$(rake_ratio)>=0.99&buff.king_of_the_jungle.down
    actions.doc+=/rake,if=action.rake.tick_damage*(1+action.rake.crit_pct_current)>action.ravage.hit_damage*(1+action.ravage.crit_pct_current)&$(rake_ratio)>=0.99&buff.king_of_the_jungle.up
    actions.doc+=/rake,if=target.time_to_die-dot.rake.remains>3&dot.rake.remains<6&buff.dream_of_cenarius.up&$(rake_ratio)>=0.99
    actions.doc+=/rake,if=target.time_to_die-dot.rake.remains>3&$(rake_ratio)>1.12
    actions.doc+=/rake,if=target.time_to_die-dot.rake.remains>3&dot.rake.remains<3
    actions.doc+=/rake,if=buff.rune_of_reorigination.up&dot.rake.remains<9&(buff.rune_of_reorigination.remains<=1.5)

Same for non-doc except you don't need the specific DoC line. I changed the ratios to 0.99 instead of 1 to account for rounding issues (more of an issue in my ovale script than simcraft but I wanted to make sure that the 1% difference wouldn't change anything and it didn't make a measurable difference as expected). Also no longer adjust for DPE on ravage since the difference is well within the margin of error. Everything else is the same.

[aggixx]

While many people seem to claim the "Rune is OP", it is significantly different for Feral than it is/was for WW. Clicking a single off-gcd, 0-resource ability (TeB) once during a 10sec proc is completely different trying to get multiple, powerful bleeds snapshot during the proc.

Right, the only thing strong about it as feral is its scaling, nothing else. The proc is essentially handled identically to any other (decent) trinket in the tier.

[Grondmaster]

Has anyone countered a problem with simcraft when simming their feral, where for whatever reason, melee damage is not counted into your overall damage? Just simmed my feral:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/v ... r/advanced

And on Patchwerk fight, simcraft suggested 95k dps with fully raidbuffed, which is way too low. When I started to look at the damage spread, I noticed, there is no recollection of melee damage. Is that a bug in simcraft or is there something wrong with my armory (which I doubt).

Also Simcraft gave me stat weight of wep dmg of 1.8, while agility was 4.16 and mastery 2.02. Knowing how much our damage depends on good weapon, I can not believe, that those are accurate numbers.

I wonder, is there is a connection to all the random gear from hc scenarios...

[aggixx]

Probably some error on my part. I know at one point there was a missing /auto_attack line but I thought I had fixed that.

A lot of weapon damage's value comes from autoattack damage, so that's to be expected.

Edit: Looks fine to me. Are you sure you're using the latest version? I believe I fixed that issue a while ago.

[aggixx]

While the generated actions in the latest build of SimC should work great, if for some reason you want a full action list that includes all the talents, here it is:
http://pastebin.com/46032VTm

[aggixx]

I found a pretty huge bug (caused by myself =P) that was causing DoC to perform far from as was intended. DoC is now showing to be 3% ahead of HotW on PTR and I've reconciled things with raffy and he is getting the same numbers.


After fixing that, here's some Set Bonuses:
==== No AoC ==| HotW =|= DoC =
Tier 15 4-piece: 1.692% | 2.278%
Tier 16 4-piece: 1.795% | 3.648%
===== AoC ===| HotW =||= DoC =
Tier 15 2-piece: 1.778% | 2.746%
Tier 15 4-piece: 2.182% | 2.782%
Tier 16 2-piece: 2.059% | 2.185%
Tier 16 4-piece: 2.616% | 4.545%

And yes, this is post-nerf to the 4 piece (to 3 CP down from 5 CP). AoC is short for Assurance of Consequence, a 5.4 trinket that reduces the cooldown of Tiger's Fury and Berserk.

[aggixx]

Found and committed a 1,750 DPS gain out of letting strong Rakes expire before reapplying. Props to raffy for trying it in Catus, and Stenhaldi and a bunch of other people that have thought of this before, just haven't got around to trying until now (didn't think it would be so big! ).

Code: Select all

actions.advanced+=/rake,if=target.time_to_die-dot.rake.remains>3&(action.rake.tick_damage>dot.rake.tick_dmg|(dot.rake.remains<3&action.rake.tick_damage%dot.rake.tick_dmg>=0.75))

[Grondmaster]

Probably some error on my part. I know at one point there was a missing /auto_attack line but I thought I had fixed that.

A lot of weapon damage's value comes from autoattack damage, so that's to be expected.

Edit: Looks fine to me. Are you sure you're using the latest version? I believe I fixed that issue a while ago.

Yep, downloaded the newest version and now its all good. Thnx Aggixx.

[ShmooDude]

I've tweaked the Thrash line a bit:

Code: Select all

    actions.doc+=/thrash_cat,if=target.time_to_die>=6&dot.thrash_cat.remains<3&($(rip_remains)>=8&buff.savage_roar.remains>=12|buff.berserk.up)&dot.rip.ticking

Rip Remains >= 6, 8 and 10 were all roughly the same so I'm guessing 8 is the peak for that particular setting. This was ~200 dps in DoC or ~250 in HotW
Also added a check on savage roar remaining (10 and 12 were pretty close but 12 seemed a bit better). This was ~350 DPS in DoC or ~100 in HotW (way better in DoC due to the increased chance to proc PS with higher CP savage roars)
This also makes the filler Thrash line non-useless (before it would basically never fire, every 1 in 100 attempts, now its one in every 5 attempts and results in ~100 DPS)

This all drops Thrash uptime ~10% (in my current gear) but raises Rip uptime, average Savage Roar duration and PS procs. Is a little more reliant on the player to react properly to OOC, however even if you never react to OOC with Thrash its still DPS neutral (or slight up; ~100 DPS).

All done with my gear but pretty sure it should work well in other gear as well.

[Stenhaldi]

Realistically when deciding whether to ferocious bite or thrash, the remaining cooldown on Tiger's Fury factors heavily (it being worth ~5 seconds of energy regeneration, or ~7-8 with T15 4-piece).

Edit: also, obviously, current stored energy (since you can hold up to ~4 seconds' worth above the energy cost of these abilities).

[scorpio0920]

Why Feral Druid use skull_bash_cat?

未命名.jpg (27.17 KiB) Viewed 5320 times

[aggixx]

You must have the sim setup to have the mob cast spells, that's the only time that line should trigger. It has no impact on the sim, at least not in the damage you deal.

[scorpio0920]

http://www.simulationcraft.org/530/Raid_T15H.html

SimulationCraft 530-6 (r16981)

I checked the others class, the mob casting in SIM-C r6.

[ShmooDude]

Big changes to RPPM coming. Anything that benefits from haste (pretty much anything that's not just flat damage) no longer increases proc rate based on haste. Also, the time since last proc will be set to 90 seconds on pull and not based on how long since you zoned in (or died if you got rezed). They recognize that this is a nerf for pretty much everyone and say that they are "adjusting damage/healing/tanking performance with these changes in mind." Of note for us:

No longer scale with haste:
- Rune's base proc rate got buffed 10%
- Renataki's Soul Charm base proc rate got buffed ~13%.
- Bad Juju's base proc rate didn't change.
- Dancing Steel's base proc rate got buffed by 10%
Still scales with haste:
- Legendary meta's base proc rate got nerfed by ~9%

Given that raid buffed I have 29% haste (assuming the attack speed buff applies which I believe it does) its a fairly decent proc rate nerf.

[Tinderhoof]

It is a bigger nerf the more gear you have. Ferals with less gear will notice a less of a difference. Still kinda rough. There has been a lot of "We will fix it" talk with not enough fixes yet. Fingers crossed.

[baver]

Would this maby change bis trinket later on so we will go allout mastery and try to skip all haste items?

[aggixx]

Yes this has the potential to change everything, more or less. Honestly it's pretty fucking dumb that they're changing RoR to not scale with haste for no reason, considering by the definition they gave the only thing it actually double dips with is Bloodlust.

[ShmooDude]

Yes this has the potential to change everything, more or less. Honestly it's pretty fucking dumb that they're changing RoR to not scale with haste for no reason, considering by the definition they gave the only thing it actually double dips with is Bloodlust.

Rune is kinda in the middle, it scales with haste but not haste rating. Even if they gave its haste scaling back, based on all the other procs they'd still nerf its proc rate by 10% or so. I think that would be slightly better at higher gear though and a wash at lower.

[raffy]

It's a good change overall IMO. Enhance was definitely having haste-scaling woes (Haste-all-the-things, Lifeblood being BiS...) and Caster meta multi-dipping on haste was broken. I've been skeptical of the haste-scaling since 5.2 PTR, and I'm glad Blizz addressed this issue again. I don't think anyone should be upset that Blizzard has changed the RPPM stuff multiple times -- they're trying to get it right. It's easy to balance DPS for one ilvl snapshot, but it's nearly impossible to get proper scaling across different classes, specs, ilvls, gear, reforging, trinkets, and encounters with super synergistic effects. Fixing scaling issues at their core, ie. DK RPPM regen/haste stuff and the recent RPPM changes is the right move.

Unfortunately for me, since Juju and Charm are close on live, the Charm will probably be ahead after the recent buff -- what the heck am I going to do with all this damn Expertise

I've made all of these changes to Catus and expect to get some trinket comparisons done later tonight. I hope the Rune stays BiS next tier since we weren't given an Amplify trinket, although it will be interesting to see if this ends up giving us more gearing flexibility.

[aggixx]

It's definitely not impossible that good things could come out of this change, Rune not being BiS would hardly be the end of the world. I'm just frustrated that all of my (and Raffy's) work theorycrafting up to this point is basically being flushed down the toilet.

[Alpheus]

Yes this has the potential to change everything, more or less. Honestly it's pretty fucking dumb that they're changing RoR to not scale with haste for no reason, considering by the definition they gave the only thing it actually double dips with is Bloodlust.

I disagree with Blizzard's perspective on "double-dipping" here. We mainly use our RPPM trinkets to buff our bleeds and our bleeds do not benefit from haste thus no feral-favored trinket should even be in this double-dipping nerf.

Edit: on top of that, what's the point of band-aiding RPPM trinket mechanics. The original ICD mechanic worked fine. If it wasn't for RoRo this entire tier would've been a disaster. It's only gonna get worse with people not being sure what trinket has what proc rate, legendary metas being changed every 0.5 patches and now there's the additional proc from legendary dps cloaks to worry about. Not to mention the ridiculous pull-RPPM enforcements coming in 5.4.

I wish they would just scrap all these silly trinket procs and make anything that works baseline for certain classes (I wouldn't mind a Renataki or RoRo-esque buff to watch out for instead of Savage Roar).

Trinkets have always been a game changer since vanilla but ever since MoP (Elegon trinket not dropping, RoRo issues...) they've mostly been a nuisance to babysit and adapt your play style around which in all honesty should be a task served by glyphs and talents.

[raffy]

Well before Blizzard had two procs, PPM and ICD.

PPM was horrible for us because it depended on APS. Any spec that was GCD-capped or had access to off-GCD abilities (Heroic Strike) or had mastery-based extra attacks (Wild Strike, Main Gauche) got a huge benefit from PPM because they had more chances to proc. Recall the uptime of Dancing Steel between most classes and Feral at start of MoP.

ICD is OK, except it doesn't really get any better, and while you never really get bad alignment (unless it triggers only on crits) it's impossible to get good alignment. Just look at any DPS chart for the current VP trinket, and you'll see there's basically no flexibility except for fight duration.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/298 ... _Histo.png (top-right plot)
"This fight is X minutes so I'm going to get either Y procs or Y+1 procs."


RPPM fixes the problem with PPM, so classes with higher APS don't get more benefit from their proc effects. RPPM also gives Blizzard extra knobs, so it can additionally scale with Haste, Crit, and/or item level.

RPPM decouples the rigid alignment offered by ICD. This is good and bad: no matter how well you DPS, if you don't get good procs, it will be difficult to rank. On the flip-side, maximizing your proc utilization becomes an interesting mini-game, much more so than it has even been, both in the number and power of procs available. Maybe the variance offered by RPPM is a bit too high -- like all those H Lei Shen attempts with 35%+ uptime on Rune and 40%+ uptime on Juju and then end up wiping in P2 transition :p -- but I much prefer this to the old item-level delineated rankings.

[Stenhaldi]

Eh, re-origination definitely does double-dip from haste, in that haste makes it proc more frequently and makes the proc more powerful. But of course due to the nature of the proc, this didn't change stat priorities at all.

[ShmooDude]

I disagree with Blizzard's perspective on "double-dipping" here. We mainly use our RPPM trinkets to buff our bleeds and our bleeds do not benefit from haste thus no feral-favored trinket should even be in this double-dipping nerf.

The double dipping comes from the fact that you get more resources from haste during the proc and thus can use more abilities during said proc. In our particular case, we have more energy (with the exception of rune of course) and thus are more likely to get off an empowered rip.

[Alpheus]

RPPM fixes the problem with PPM, so classes with higher APS don't get more benefit from their proc effects. RPPM also gives Blizzard extra knobs, so it can additionally scale with Haste, Crit, and/or item level.

I disagree, the original problem with PPM still persists: there are certain events which increase the proc chance to unintended levels. For PPM this was non-normalized instants which gave you a larger sample to proc from and for RPPM it's the fact that some classes favor haste and some classes don't. The only reason we didn't get hit by this in the face this patch was because we had RoRo which conveniently forced us into getting more haste. Once we get rid of RoRo, the original PPM problems re-emerge and new "fixes" will be necessary again, which is what is happening on PTR right now.

The double dipping comes from the fact that you get more resources from haste during the proc and thus can use more abilities during said proc. In our particular case, we have more energy (with the exception of rune of course) and thus are more likely to get off an empowered rip.

No, that's only the case if you actually go for a haste proc, which a feral doesn't. Double-dipping only applies if haste increases the proc chance AND the proc performance increase is also primarily affected by haste (ie. an RPPM proc which gives haste for Balance Druids/Warlocks). In our case the proc actually decreases crit and haste, which makes it kindof "underdip" in the sense that the more haste you stack for it to proc more often the worse off you are when it procs (were it not for mastery).