Off-hand swings with HS/Cleave queued don't suffer DW miss penalty

WoW Classic WoW Classic Bug Report
#1

There is a famous bug that was discovered in WotLK where if you’re dual-wielding and have an on-next-swing attack like Heroic Strike or Cleave queued, any off-hand swings that land during that time will not suffer the dual-wield miss penalty:

https://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/20036-warrior-dps-bugs/

Offhand swings that land while HS or Cleave is queued do not suffer the dual wield miss penalty. They’re treated as if you were single wielding when the swing lands.

We’ve been anecdotally hearing about people noticing reduced off-hand misses with HS queued for a while now, so we decided to test it properly. We performed two tests using the exact same gear and talents; one where we just auto-attacked the target without queuing HS or Cleave at all, and another test where we used Heroic Strike as much as possible. If the ‘bug’ exists, then we should see considerable reduction to miss chance in the second test.

Player: 305 weapon skill, +7% hit
Target: Servant of Razelikh (level 57)

Base miss chance: 5% + (57*5 - 305) * 0.1% = 3%
DW miss chance: 3% * 0.8 + 20% = 22.4%
Expected miss chance: 22.4% - 7% = 15.4%

White attacks (no HS queued)
Total: 3812

  • Hit: 60.55% ±1.55% (2308)
  • Crit: 18.47% ±1.23% (704)
  • Miss: 15.42% ±1.15% (588)
  • Parry: 1.23% ±0.35% (47)
  • Dodge: 3.36% ±0.57% (128)
  • Block: 0.97% ±0.31% (37)

White attacks (HS queued whenever possible)
Toal: 2339

  • Hit: 64.34% ±1.94% (1505)
  • Crit: 20.35% ±1.63% (476)
  • Miss: 9.28% ±1.18% (217)
  • Parry: 1.58% ±0.51% (37)
  • Dodge: 2.74% ±0.66% (64)
  • Block: 1.71% ±0.53% (40)

As can be seen by the results of the second test, the bug is clearly present.

-magey & the Fight Club team

9 Likes
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#2

This is an enormous bug, but the real question is, did vanilla wow have it?

#3

This existed in the game until Cataclysm. I’m not sure why it’s even posted in the “bug report” section.

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#4

it was discovered in cataclysm, it may or may not have existed in classic, would be up to blizzard to test it on their original 1.12 servers to see if it existed and if it did it would be upto them to patch it out or not. and they could just patch it out even if it did existed, 1.13 is full of changes

#5

“On next hit” attacks were removed in Cataclysm. It was “discovered” (widely known) in patch 3.3.5 of Wrath of the Lich King, which was the final patch. You can see it yourself in this vanilla video:


Look at the misses from his combat text in conjunction with his Heroic Strike queue status on his bars.

And for 3.3.5:


Just look at Saurfang and see if you can find a single OH miss while he has HS queued.
#6

Seeing as there’s proof of it existing & removing it would change expected power levels of warriors I can’t say I support changing this… even if it is a bit jank.

#7

In all likelihood it did exist since vanilla, it’s just that nobody knew about it back then and it’s not documented or tested anywhere. The first mention of it was near the end of WotLK.

The video provided (Decimator) is poor proof; you would need to go over countless old vanilla videos and manually count the hits/misses while HS was queued or not queued, corrected for the amount of hit gear the person was wearing at the time, to arrive at any statistically significant data set.

So as far as classic is concerned this is a bug until Blizzard compares it to the reference and finds that it did indeed exist back then and is just one of the many quirks of the old game, like the silly Arcane Missiles bug they decided to keep.

2 Likes
#8

Confirmed ‘not a bug’ - dw away.

5 Likes
#9

Well even if it was present in original vanilla, if nobody knew about it, it probably wasn’t a big deal because you wouldn’t utilize it much.

But now that everyone in the world knows about it… how long until the optimal DPS rotation for warriors is to constantly queue heroic strike/cleave then cancel it at the last instant before the swing so as to never miss with offhand and not only do way more white damage but generate hugely more rage?

#10

You would only do that to generate rage - hs spam is a huge dps increase, but it nerfs rage gen. I imagine the optimal part would be execute phase for mass rage gen. If blizz confirmed it’s not a bug, lets make it the meta. Dont feel bad for doing it.

Reminds me - i need to create a macro to cancel hs/cleave. im leveling as sword spec arms, and using dw swords (all those extra attacks go onto the main hand (thrash blade), and have a chance to proc thrash blade, which has its own chance to proc sword spec) with minimal hit penalty.

#11

I think we’re passed the point of ‘if it was in vanilla then it shouldnt be changed’.

Vanilla didn’t have

  • honorless debuff from AV spirit rezzers
  • group queueing for AV
  • 24 hour 30 instance cap
  • 10,000 player server sizes
  • 20+ black lotus spawn locations
  • 15m lotus spawn timers
  • Invisible herbs depending on your level
  • Valentine goblin fairy NPCs that sit around giving you buffs year-round.
  • Disabled BG portals
  • Reduced combat log range in world pvp

And on and on… The list grows by the week.

Warriors are clearly doing way more damage than they should be for a hybrid class. I dont want them to straight up nerf the class however, but fixing obvious bugs would be a fair way to help bring them back to earth.

#12

Reducing the power level of warriors in pve would actually make the game a lot better.

So for that reason I expect nothing will change.