Diminishing Returns Confusion

Any input from anyone who knows for certain anything in regards to diminishing returns would be extremely helpful.

This is the most current info about diminishing returns and secondary stats, as quoted by Wowhead:

This penalty is as follows:

From 0 to 30%, there’s no penalty.
From 30% to 39%, there’s a 10% penalty.

However, when looking at my character in game and Mastery it reads 30% and when looking at the tooltip when mousing over it reads as follows:

Mastery: Grace
Passive
Your healing and absorption is increased by 30.4% on targets with Atonement.

Mastery: 507 [+19.56%].

Now, according to the tooltip there are two percentage numbers, one is 30.4% and the other is 19.56%.

Hence I am totally confused as to whether more mastery at this point will be the full value or there will be some kind of diminishing return because of these two different numbers. For one, Mastery on my character page already reads 30%. Second, the tooltip tells a different story: two numbers, 30.4% and 19.56%. In other words would another 10.44% put me at 30% or am I already at or above 30% by 0.4%?

Help!!

I believe you’re already above 30% by 0.4%.

I think this is how it works. Let’s say, below 30%, an increase of 5% mastery gives a 1% increase to the second number for healing/ atonements.

Above 30%, that same 5% increase to mastery will only yield 0.9% increase for healing/ atonements.

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But then what is this on the tooltip:

Is this number just there to confuse everyone?

I get your confusion. I personally don’t ever understand the tooltips in game. I do what the pros do and what the sims tell me to do rather than trying to decode what you’re trying to decode.

It sucks. I get it. But that’s WoW for you…

If that’s true, what about the classes with massive mastery scaling? My warlock had 78 or 80% mastery, and I’m not even stacking it that hard.

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I believe mastery works different for each class. Another layer of confusion.

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Yeah, you raise a good point. I don’t get why Blizzard has to confuse everyone. Is that just to make people mad or just because the devs get their kicks this way?

I get the feeling they are just on fire from a resource standpoint. They’re in too deep to get literally anything done. 8 launch dungeons? Eight?!?!?!. I can’t remember a time when they delivered so slowly or so poorly. The execs need to stop snorting golddust or whatever they’re doing with the literal billions in revenue and save their cash cow.

I don’t see why these guys have to create confusion. Like what is the rationale behind diminishing returns in the first place? In 8.4 they opened the floodgates to insane secondary stat stacking and it was great and fun and interesting. Now there are diminishing returns? And on top if it, the whole concept creates confusion and complication because there is a lack of clarity? Blah.

I have no idea but I wish they never brought it in this way, even though we did have it all long since bfa it’s nothing new and it barely noticeable. Mines at 25 % anything after doesn’t gave that much to the damage.

Diminishing returns only apply to stat ratings (the numbers of the stat you gain from gear and a few other effects)

and

Yes mastery scales differently for different specs, but diminishing returns on mastery apply to everyone in the exact same way.

Specifically for each stat:
Haste has no diminishing returns until 990 rating. It then loses 10% value, and 10% more for each extra 330 past that (so it’s at 100% value from 0-990, 90% value from 991-1320, 80% from 1321-1650, etc.*)

*This formula changes past 1980 rating (60%, or 54% post-diminishing returns), but this works for any reasonably stackable value right now.

Mastery and crit have no diminishing returns until 1050 rating. They then lose 10% value, and 10% more for each extra 350 past that.

Versatility has no diminishing returns until 1200 rating. It then loses 10% value, and 10% more for each extra 400 past that.

So while diminishing returns are a worthless mechanic added to “fix” a problem that was going away anyway and didn’t even get secondary stats nearly as high as they’d been in past expansions (corruption), we’re luckily in a position where we can mostly ignore that they exist and carry on with our lives. Outside of trinket procs/uses (mostly mastery) or some extreme stat-stacking, it has 0 impact on our characters.

E.g. in the OP, you say
Mastery: 507 [+19.56%]
Which is 507 rating, well below the 1050 you’d need to start seeing diminishing returns.

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All classes start with a certain percent of mastery. If you remove all your gear and look at your stats you’ll probably be at 10.84% mastery

The 19.54 is how much you’re gaining from the 507 mastery your gear has

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So you are saying that in this case another 543 Mastery points on gear are fine to add before any diminishing returns would kick in?

Yep. Though trinket uses like a bell or a lot of covenant abilities that give flat mastery (theotar/pelagos/niya) can all factor in as well while they’re active.

i can’t answer the diminishing returns thing but, the 19.56% is the mastery from gear and the 30.4% is your base mastery.

Just sim your gear for the variety of setups and look at logs. Losing hair over DR right now before we get to later tiers is just going to get you angry the whole expansion.

And the reason for DR is an upstream failsafe to prevent the domination of specs that scaled better with secondaries vs all other specs (thus lessening freedom of choice for players, cause why wouldn’t you play those specs?).

Just for the record I opened a ticket about this. The game master did not know either, and gave me a link to a page that no longer exists.

What a joke.

This information is excellent. Can you provide a source of this information? Thanks in advance.

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https://www.wowhead.com/guides/diminishing-returns-on-secondary-stats-in-world-of-warcraft

As well as just messing around with trinkets/procs in game to double-check, particularly with mastery.

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I’ve looked at that page a zillion times. Nowhere does it quote a number like 1050. How did you get that number?

That number (and the others) come from how much rating you need for 1% of a stat. If you don’t know the rating conversions, they’re on the page linked in that guide (the “learn how mastery works” link).

At level 60:

33 haste rating = 1% haste
35 crit/mastery rating = 1% crit/ 1"%" mastery (exactly how much this gives depends on the spec, but 35 is the value used for diminishing returns, and will give you 1/8th of your base mastery before gear).
40 versatility rating = 1% versatility.

Since diminishing returns start at 30% from rating, that leads to

30 * 33 = 990 haste rating
30 * 35 = 1050 crit/mastery rating
30 * 40 = 1200 versatility rating.

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