Necessary change, to make mastery less worthless for us. Where it lands on the buff/nerf scale depends on your talent allocation and stat distribution, however.
MMO-C is garbage at annotating these, though.
- The Mastery change is from (baseline) 12% to 14%, so a 16.67% increase in potency.
- Chaos Strike hits with both main hand and offhand, and MMO-C simply adds those percentages together (despite the offhand doing half damage). It currently hits for 36.153% MH + 57.564% OH, and will now hit for 35% MH + 55% OH. This represents a very small but non-zero increase in the proportion of its damage that comes from your main hand. Shouldn’t affect much, though, even if you have a very large difference in itemlevel between the two.
- Both Chaos Strike and Trail of Ruin are seeing a ~4% DPS reduction (specifically, it’s a 3.75% reduction to CS and a 4.29% reduction to Trail).
Using SimC’s Havoc profile:
- Roughly 0.25% more of our total damage is Chaos.
- The adjustments to baseline coefficients slightly reduces (by ~1.2%) the percentage of our total damage before mastery that is affected by mastery, meaning that 1% mastery is about 3.25% less potent than it was previously.
- The net effect of the above two is that mastery is not going to be precisely 16.67% better than it was, but slightly less (napkin math says closer to 16.15% better instead). 1 Mastery rating provides 16.67% more mastery percentage than it did previously, but each mastery percentage is only ~96.75% as effective as it was before, reducing that benefit slightly.
At the 862 rating present in the SimC profile, which grants 29.96% Chaos damage on live and 34.95% with these changes, this represents a net change of +0.22% damage. Playing with my spreadsheet, it appears that the crossover point where this becomes a net buff is approximately 650 mastery rating. It takes at least 1800 mastery rating for this to reach a 1% buff, however, so this can effectively be regarded as a wash or very minor buff.
Overall, this is a good change. Null change to negligible increase in overall output, but a substantial bump to mastery’s scaling. Running my DH through Raidbots, I see current stat weights of:
Crit | 2.60
Vers | 2.56
Agility | 2.30
Haste | 2.13
Mastery | 2.03
If we assume the change to mastery won’t have a significant impact on the other stat weights (it’ll definitely have some impact, but it’s unlikely to be significant compared to the change to mastery), this would suggest my new stat weights would be roughly:
Crit | 2.60
Vers | 2.56
Mastery | 2.36
Agility | 2.30
Haste | 2.13
Total secondary spread (the percentage difference in value between my best and my worst secondary stat) has been reduced from 21.9% to 18.1%, a positive change. Mastery has moved to middle-of-the-pack, avoiding it drastically upending our stat priorities while simply making mastery-containing gear less detrimental compared to alternatives.
Xaedys gives +2 upward thumbs.
Edit: made a boo-boo in the calcs, the above has been updated.
Also, as a brief aside, this very slightly decreases the proportion of our damage that comes from CS and Trail, while increasing the proportion that comes from Eye Beam (since it’s the only Chaos source in our dominant build that did not see a coefficient nerf).
That said, AoE does not appear to significant alter the character of the changes. Using the DungeonSlice report on SimC instead, the net change is +0.26% (compared to the 0.22% for ST above).