The issue is that certain buffs like PI can’t be cleanly filtered out because their impacts can change how I play my spec when it’s up. Something like mark of the wild doesn’t change my rotation, so I would make the same decision regardless whether I had it, my numbers are just inflated by 3%.
But increased haste changes how quickly I can cycle through my spenders with increased energy generation. It also increases the amount of Apex procs I get which shifts my globals since I’ll get more bites in. Both of these change how many cycles I need before I hit rip. Mark, mystic touch, and battle shout can all be safely reduced from my DPS since they don’t change the buttons I press, PI does.
This is entirely incorrect for many specs, feral being one of them.
Feral gets two combo points for every builder that crits. This reduces the number of builders I spend each cycle by one per crit in the cycle. Adding more crit will increase my chances to get additionally ferocious bite casts before I need to reapply my rip.
Haste affects how quickly energy regenerates. This means I get more builders per minute which like crit, also means I can get more ferocious bite casts before I need to reapply rip. Haste also increases the rate of rip ticks; each rip tick has a 4% chance to grant a free ferocious bite cast with the talent Apex Predator’s Craving, meaning haste will result in more free ferocious bite procs.
So yes, what buttons you press is influenced by these two secondary stats for feral. The raw influence of crit and haste on our abilities could be approximated out for sure, but the rotational impact and the resulting DPS cannot.
Doesnt change how you play. The entire play style is based on build combo points as effectively as possible to spend on spenders.
How many you can do doesnt change how you do it.
Again, doesnt change how you play. Apex procs remain a priority. Then it goes back to your typical build CP then use a spender. How fast doesnt change how you do it.
I never said it didnt increase DPS. I said it doesnt change how you play your spec.
Maintain Bleeds (regardless of how often)
Use fillers to get to 5 CP ('only having to press Shred twice opposed to 3 times doesnt change this)
Spend CP on FB/Rip (when you have to refresh Rip doesnt change this
Nothing changes. Again, things like BloodTalons that requires an AoE ability thst you normally wouldnt use in a ST scenario, to be used in ST. That changes how you play
The reason I talked about how you play was in relation to filtering out external buffs when trying to calculate DPS that is free from external buffs others may not have. I didn’t say the priority of what you hit under each circumstance changed, but that what you hit is different based on some external buffs. In terms of skill expression that doesn’t affect anything, but it does affect the DPS gain resulting from the external buff.
With a static buff that doesn’t change the correct button to press, like mark of the wild, you can just divide by 1.03 to get an accurate picture. But it’s much more complicated to figure out what a feral druid’s DPS would have been when they picked up 2 extra ferocious bites from Apex over the course of a minute due to getting PI. The system couldn’t even confirm whether those procs wouldn’t have still happened without PI. And while those bites cost zero energy and CP, they do cost a GCD and affect your energy pooling and bloodtalons which can then alter what buttons you press immediately following the Apex bite.
In other words, it would be basically impossible to estimate what the DPS of a feral would be if you removed certain external buffs because you will have different combinations of ideal actions based on random effects which are impacted by crit and haste.
And the reason i mentionrd excluding external buffs is because WCL has a fancy filter that does it for you.
You can watch a bunch of those UHDKs drop many many spots because of it. There wasnt really a reason to go on a tangent about it when thr filter exists.
But its not. WCL already does it for you. You change the filter to with and without and watch the top 100 lineup change amongst ferals
And that filter is better for some specs than the others. Many specs scale linearly with many buffs while others do not. The system to remove external buffs will not be a good representation of what would happen were they not there for the specs that don’t scale linearly; it will do fine to remove the direct impacts but will not be able to account for the change in rotation that happens.
Yes, and it will be more effective for some specs than others. For many specs, more haste just gives them more abilities in the same amount of time, but the abilities pressed will be the same. It’s a simple arithmetic exercise to calculate what the damage should have been without that speed.
Other specs, like feral druid, will have different abilities used in that same period of time due to both direct effects (having an extra proc of Apex) and then knock on effects as a result of the direct effect (like how consuming a GCD for that Apex bite can result in more energy pooling than I would have had without the free bite). The direct effects can probably be reasonably accounted for, but the knock on effects would be impossible to account for. Me having an extra 30 energy during a cycle, especially if I have tiger’s fury or incarn going, will significantly change how many finishers I get to use. Any algorithm trying to remove external buffs will either leave the knock on effects alone which would leave their DPS inflated (which would be very different than someone with different buffs) or have to make up what the rotation would have been were it not for the external buff.
Pretty sure that same algorithm simply reduces everything into PPM and then takes the allotted time and increase in haste and reduces it accordingly.
Its not going to be perfect, but it’ll be fairly close. Just like having 35% crit. Its random what and when things will crit. But after 5 minutes, I’ll be damned if not everything is sitting around the 35% mark for critting
Im sure minds greater than ours have taken this all into account and applied it accordingly without F’ing things up beyond reason
Which is reasonable for the Apex proc itself. The issue is that it proccing then directly changes the place in my priority I fall for subsequent actions. What might have been a 1 more builder then pool without the proc can become a full cycle without pooling. That full cycle can’t be cleanly undone without making massive assumptions about how I would have played. It basically has to create an alternate set of actions for that window. Or it leaves that extra cycle in.
Example : Simulating around Balance Druid, BM Hunter, and Sub Rogues as low B- tier dps.
Simply put, there are better DPS classes, with more utility, and better overall damage.
Lets keep going and double it. 750th ranked Feral. Half way down all of the mythic logged Ferals. Beating a rogue, 3 UH DKs, another BM hunter and a couple evokers.