Hi Everyone,
I’m hoping for a bit of help. I’m confused by the rules for auto-attacking. From reading forums, I had thought that the basic idea was you have a weapon with a certain dps (technically a max and a min damage with weaponspeed and there’s a random number rolled from a uniform distribution between the min and max damage), and an attack power (AP). And that for plate wearers, 1 str => 1 AP, and the damage done by auto attack should be:
Damage= (Weapon_DPS + AP/3.5)*Weapon_Speed
So I tested this out using my level 111 Blood Elf Ret Pally on a level 110 training dummy, and I looked at the average value of a normal hit as a function of my strength. This is a value unaffected by mastery or haste or crit, and I used gear without versatility to avoid complications.
I used a Grunt’s Warmace (115-148 Damage, Speed=3.6, DPS =36.5, str=+49)
With no other gear, I had 582 str and I hit for an average of 356 dmg with my normal attacks. According to the above formula, I should have been hitting for ~730. Clearly something was off, so I tested my normal hit vs strength and I got numbers that follow at the end of this post, but effectively it looked like each value of strength was providing 0.48 dps instead of the 0.97 predicted by the formula if 1 str == 1 AP. Is there an obvious reason why I would be off by a factor of 2 here? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Landos
Str Average Normal Hit
582 356
626 376
659 394
684 400
703 412
734 431
765 450
I don’t know the exact calculations, but here’s some quotes I found:
“Weapon dps is merely the average of the damage range divided by the attack speed of the weapon, as shown in the tooltip. It’s the dps the weapon would do if your character had zero stats.”
" The general formula for your weapon’s DPS is:
((Min Weapon Damage + Max Weapon Damage) / 2) / Weapon Speed"
" Changes in Battle for Azeroth
In Alpha, Frostscythe deals 16.2% attack power, but also still benefits from your equipped weapon damage. Keeping in mind that all numbers are squished, it will use the new formula:
(Attack Power + Weapon DPS * 6) * AP Coefficient * Damage Multiplier"
My understanding is that training dummies don’t have armor. Is that wrong?
It depends on which dummies your testing on… some have armor, some don’t… be sure to use the small dummies and not a boss dummy or any other specialty dummy to test your DPS… the engineering g spawnable dummy or punching bag toys are also good for testing with zero armor…
Thanks. I was doing it on a level 110 “Damage Dummy”, so not a boss dummy or raid dummy for sure, but now I’m questioning whether he had armor or not. Hmm. Thanks for the idea Nutts
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Good luck in your research!
it’s easy - autoattack in retail doesn’t matter and you can’t do anything with it. You just pick highest ilvl weapon and you’re done.
I appreciate that from a game play prospective, but I’m trying to check the best way to sim somethings on WoW and would like to understand the underlying rules appropriately.
with no gear on you loose 5% main stat because you gain 5% for having the correct armor type equipped. and then there is armor value. you physical attacks will always hit for less than the show value because the target’s armor will reduce the attack.
Sure, but the 5% main stat is already taken into account on the stat sheet, so I get that. Does anyone know how much armor / damage reduction a damage training dummy has?
idk… hit it with an ability. if it has 0 armor the ability itself should deal the same damage (unless it crits but that would be noticeably more)
if the hit is less from the ability note the amount that it did then do math to find out how much less it did.
then to test your math you can use a second ability and it should do the same % less. (unless any ability used is magic damage which ignores armor.)