World of Warcraft®

After over an hour of testing in all specs after turning 85 two separate addons are saying the same thing. Base/non crit dmg numbers have not gone up whatsoever even though blue/green cata gear has more int/spellpower than the ICC 277 gear had. Clearly combat ratings will tank but we are talking apples to apples non crit values of bread and butter spells going down per tick or average damage.

I knew we were going "down" but simcraft is saying we gained a bit in even blue preraid gear vs 277 yet I'm seeing about 9K and change vs 16K'ish at lvl 80 single target on a self buffed test dummy. That could just be the haste/crit deflation BUT when I look at back non crit the numbers are lower.

Anyone else seeing this? I tried wiping out my bars, no macros, etc vs using the macros I had. Since you can't downrank I don't see how that could be an issue. Its like coef didn't change (it houldn't) but the base values of the spells didn't seem to go up. They should have gone up since I have vastly more int than I did at 80.

The base damage on all my abilities is going up every time I level. You must be bugged.

Base damage means very little when compared to how hard the combat ratings tanked. I knew I was going to lose output as I leveled, but I didn't think it would be by as much as it has been.

At 80 I had 40% haste, at 82 I had 22% haste. Now I'm 83 and to be honest I haven't looked at my haste since I hit 84, but I'd guess that it would be somewhere around 15%. My crit did the same style drop so... even if the base damage goes up per level, the combat ratings tanked harder than the base damage went up.

I'm sure come level 85 + level 84-85 blues will yield a DPS increase. But at 82 I did notice my damage was pretty lack luster compared to what it was just a few hours beforehand at 80.


DK

12/08/2010 9:44 AMPosted by Deathkoilz

Now I'm 83 and to be honest I haven't looked at my haste since I hit 84

Wait, what

12/08/2010 9:48 AMPosted by Kulasti

12/08/2010 9:44 AMPosted by Deathkoilz

Now I'm 83 and to be honest I haven't looked at my haste since I hit 84

Wait, what

Sorry about that. I'm 83 now and to be honest I haven't look at my haste since I hit 83.

12/08/2010 9:48 AMPosted by Kulasti

12/08/2010 9:44 AMPosted by Deathkoilz

Now I'm 83 and to be honest I haven't looked at my haste since I hit 84

Wait, what

That pretty much summed up the whole thread for me. Well done OP, well done...

Casters are not going to scale as well as melee. If you expected gigantic leaps and bounds in your damage you are mistaken.
Remember how casters have been out damaging every melee class for the past few months? Yep, its cause you don't scale as well.

12/08/2010 9:44 AMPosted by Deathkoilz

Base damage means very little when compared to how hard the combat ratings tanked. I knew I was going to lose output as I leveled, but I didn't think it would be by as much as it has been.

At 80 I had 40% haste, at 82 I had 22% haste. Now I'm 83 and to be honest I haven't looked at my haste since I hit 84, but I'd guess that it would be somewhere around 15%. My crit did the same style drop so... even if the base damage goes up per level, the combat ratings tanked harder than the base damage went up.

I'm sure come level 85 + level 84-85 blues will yield a DPS increase. But at 82 I did notice my damage was pretty lack luster compared to what it was just a few hours beforehand at 80.


DK

You said "Base/non crit dmg numbers have not gone up ".

I said that's false. I didn't say your DPS didn't go down. It very well may have. But you said that the base damage numbers have not gone up when in fact they have.

12/08/2010 11:09 AMPosted by Dekkar

You said "Base/non crit dmg numbers have not gone up ".

I said that's false. I didn't say your DPS didn't go down. It very well may have. But you said that the base damage numbers have not gone up when in fact they have.

I don't think you got my point, which is fine. I could have explained it better, and not made a rather important typo. Let me try again.

Base damage has done up, thus each individual spell hits harder or ticks harder than it did a level ago or several levels ago. However because the combat ratings have tanked, we cannot cast spells as quickly / our DoTs don't tick as often, and nothing crits as often as it used to. Therefore DPS has gone down.

So... Spells are indeed hitting harder. They are just not hitting / ticking as quickly and not critting as much, which results in a DPS loss for most geared player for the first few levels.


DK

Base damage goes up, but stat scaling drops rapidly. Crit and haste in particular go really low. As said above, each spell hits harder, but in general, dps is lower because we're casting slower and hitting and critting less frequently as our stats drop.

Base goes up, but stats go down because stats are going to go up again over the next two years.

It's been forewarned numerous times that the damage jump from 80 to 85 is not going to be dramatic, at least not at first.

In case it hasn't quite been beaten to death yet already:
1. Base damage per spellcast goes up as you head to 85
2. Overall DPS (or total value of each spellcast) goes down as you head to 85
3. Overall DPS is going to climb past what it was at 80 as your gear improves (although the actual percentages may never get to where they once were)

12/08/2010 12:55 PMPosted by Deathkoilz

12/08/2010 11:09 AMPosted by Dekkar

You said "Base/non crit dmg numbers have not gone up ".

I said that's false. I didn't say your DPS didn't go down. It very well may have. But you said that the base damage numbers have not gone up when in fact they have.

I don't think you got my point, which is fine. I could have explained it better, and not made a rather important typo. Let me try again.

Base damage has done up, thus each individual spell hits harder or ticks harder than it did a level ago or several levels ago. However because the combat ratings have tanked, we cannot cast spells as quickly / our DoTs don't tick as often, and nothing crits as often as it used to. Therefore DPS has gone down.

So... Spells are indeed hitting harder. They are just not hitting / ticking as quickly and not critting as much, which results in a DPS loss for most geared player for the first few levels.


DK

This is by design you realize, right? Ratings (and therefore damage) scaled to well.

12/09/2010 5:25 AMPosted by Loathing

Rating decay is fine and quite necessary, but actual dps going down isn't fine.

Blizzard is screwing with the most basic reward system of their game at their peril imo. A skinner box only works for as long as the rat still believes it'll get a reward when it pulls the lever.

It is a temporary correction, at worst. Others are seeing a dps increase in level appropriate gear, so I don't know what's happening with the OP. His testing conditions weren't clear. For example, if the level 80 dps numbers were from the pre-4.03a raid dummy, and the level 85 test is on the Cata dummy, then that would skew things because the actual level is higher.

To clarify: numbers were from lvl 80 dummy, self buffed, no consumables, patch 4.0.3a (post nerf). Numbers now are lvl 85 dummy, self buffed, no consumables. Testing spans are 5 minute pulls repeated many times. I do my best to be very consistent in output so I toss numbers if I get a lag spike or something. Check out my ach and wol parses (ranked plenty of times) I'm not new to locks and can play the class solidly.

Testing in full blues 333/346 in all 3 specs is showing non crit ticks, hits, etc to be for about the same as they were at lvl 80. IE my corruption ticked for the same at 80 than it does now. I also added a ton of int along the way. Naturally my haste/crit/mastery went down about 80% but that would only impact spells like conflag that have a haste:dmg scaling due to immolate.

Of course dps has gone down drastically....about 16K solo dummy vs about 9-10K depnding on spec. My FG hits significantly harder but it feels like base damage didn't scale for my spells. Overall a 45% dps loss seems kind of steep. Sims suggest lock specs would go from about 18K in bis at 80 to about 20K in dungeon gear.

This is pulling off near perfect ISF uptime, dot uptime, cd usage, etc.....which is a bit annoying to play regardless of numbers. The devs really managed to make a class unfun via ISF being mandatory. Especially now cast times take forever AND we are super busy doing interupts, fears, banishes, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like tougher content, just not having to do so much crazy stuff (esp soulfire in affliction) just to do the same thing as most other dps specs do w' 1/6th the buttons/keybinds.

12/08/2010 12:55 PMPosted by Deathkoilz

I don't think you got my point, which is fine. I could have explained it better, and not made a rather important typo. Let me try again.

The confusion is because the person you were quoting originally was addressing the OP, who said something completely different than you did (i.e., that the actual spell values hadn't changed on a per tick/spell basis).

12/09/2010 5:48 AMPosted by Werst

Testing in full blues 333/346 in all 3 specs is showing non crit ticks, hits, etc to be for about the same as they were at lvl 80. IE my corruption ticked for the same at 80 than it does now. I also added a ton of int along the way. Naturally my haste/crit/mastery went down about 80% but that would only impact spells like conflag that have a haste:dmg scaling due to immolate.

If you reforged your level 80 gear into mastery, then that would affect per-tick values. At level 80, mastery might have boosted periodic spell ticks by 30% (using affliction as an example), but by level 85 you're only getting a boost of 10% or whatever because of the ratings conversion.

Obviously those are just random numbers. The point is that mastery might have been inflated at level 80 along with the other stats, and that affects the actual spell damage for some specs.

Level 80 gear was 17% (446) hit, haste to 1406 (1408 was as close as I could get), the rest was crit forged into mastery but 1406 required stacking haste so there wasn't as much to reforge. Mastery was never nearly as high as haste or crit values were even at 80. Though its remotely possible some of the gap might be made up by mastery it certainly doesn't cover all of it.

12/09/2010 6:14 AMPosted by Werst

Level 80 gear was 17% (446) hit, haste to 1406 (1408 was as close as I could get), the rest was crit forged into mastery but 1406 required stacking haste so there wasn't as much to reforge. Mastery was never nearly as high as haste or crit values were even at 80. Though its remotely possible some of the gap might be made up by mastery it certainly doesn't cover all of it.

I'm not sure how you can say what mastery "certainly" did or didn't do without talking about the numbers. I also don't see what difference it makes whether your mastery was as high as your haste or crit. If you're talking about a per-tick discrepancy, then mastery is a likely culprit. For example:

If you had 500 mastery at 80, this might have boosted periodic spell damage by 30%.

But, 700 mastery at 85 might only boost periodic spell damage by 10%.

A spell could uprank to hit 20% harder than an unmodified level 80 spell, but still hit the same because 20% was lost in the mastery level conversion.

Again, those numbers are totally made up. They illustrate that it's possible for spells to uprank but not actually hit harder because they aren't being boosted by mastery as much. We can't tell what your current mastery is (armory doesn't seem to show it) and we certainly have no idea what it was at 80, so if you really want help trying to figure out what's happening, we'll need more information -- specifically, the percentage boost you got from mastery at 80 and the percentage boost you're getting from it now.