Stat Weights: Vers vs Mastery. Why Mastery is the Top Stat

Community General Discussion
1

Hello everyone, Shaanis here with a deeply thought out post.

So I was looking into some gearing options on hunter and shaman as I was hopping back into playing them for this expansion and then decided to look up some guides, I noticed how in PvP players were beginning to stack versatility because of the new trinket and stuff but then… I wondered what PvE was looking like.

I had noticed ALOT of builds were having a very heavy emphasis on Versatility over Mastery and decided to take a look into why before I dove in to start gearing, seeing the stat weights at ilevel 188 and higher though. I started to wonder if things could be done differently and here is what I found.

Using covenant armor and PvP trinkets, weapons, and rings. I came to a Versatility rating of 20.70% with 828 Versatility.

After assessing how high my Versatility was versus my Mastery being at 220 or so with 26.4% mastery. I started realizing that honestly, it’s being done all wrong.

While Versatility does have its merits for healers, it’s bonus to damage is severely overwritten on literally every class’s DPS spec regardless of the traits implications. The damage reduction is also nice… but that was only about 9.3% and that to me was not enough to be notable.

Mastery Stacks with lower values to greater results, leaving room for further stacking of stats such as Haste and Crit.

Here is a list of traits for Mastery to consider and think about how much more weight Mastery carries over Versatility currently:

DEATH KNIGHT
Mastery: Blood Shield. X% of Death Strike healing is also applied as a shield and increases attack power.
Mastery: Frozen Heart. Increases frost damage by X%
Mastery: Dreadblade. Increases shadow damage and minion damage by X%.

DEMON HUNTER
Mastery: Demonic Presence. Increases Chaos damage by X% and movement speed by Y%.
Mastery: Fel Blood. Increases the armor bonus granted by Demonic Spikes by an additional X% of Agility. Also increases attack power by Y%.

DRUID
Mastery: Total Eclipse. Solar Eclipse increases nature spell damage by X%, Lunar Eclipse increases arcane spell damage by X%
Mastery: Razor Claws. Increases bleed damage and finishing moves damage by X%.
Mastery: Natures Guardian. Increases maximum health and healing received by X%, and increases Attack Power by Y%.
Mastery: Harmony. Increases healing by X% for each Restoration heal over time effects on the target.

HUNTER
Mastery: Master of Beasts. Increases pet damage by X%.
Mastery: Sniper Training. Range of all ranged abilities is increased by X% and damage of all abilities increased by Y%.
Mastery: Spirit Bond. Damage done by Focus spending abilities increased by X% for both the Hunter and pet. While a pet is active, both Hunter and pet regenerate Y% of max health per 5 seconds.

The list just goes on and on, check the Wiki for the rest of them. While looking into all of this I have considered multiple different stat priorities but Mastery is always the one I would put above the rest.

Consider this, with Mastery having such a good stat weight? Haste and Crit can stack significantly higher if you ignore Versatility.

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Because simulations by a computer put its flat damage increase above the variable increase of mastery for most specs. Obviously some specs love to stack mastery like unholy dk even despite this fact. Most classes don’t consider vers one of their best stats.

3

If the Versatility stat weight was increased the tables would flip no doubt.

4

Don’t be silly it’s not “because a computer says so”. Simulations are a tool.

The reason why versatility might be better than mastery is because mastery may only affect a single source of damage within your damage profile, whereas versatility or critical strike increase all of the damage sources in the damage profile.

So the question becomes, even though mastery may boost damage of one or two abilities by a lot, does that add up to more damage than a small increase to all of your abilities? In most cases no. A small increase to all of your abilities will typically outweigh a large increase to a single ability.

Mastery stacking classes usually have a double dipping effect, such as fire mage, where their combustion cooldown contributes double the effect of mastery. Likewise, with mistweaver monks, essence font causes their mastery to proc twice, and weapons of order causes you to gain from this benefit twice as well.

4 Likes
5

Well yeah, because thats how stat weights work lol. It would be more valuable then. ???

6

This is exactly what I said. Your mocking first sentence is irritating.

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7

I mean, as a resto shaman, I prefer Versatility AND mastery. Icy Veins says Mastery is low on priority, but I can’t bring myself to understand (although crit is pretty awesome too.)

The sheer stat value gained from mastery is a huge part of it as well.

8

I dunno. I play Marksman, I have never once heard or seen any Marksman hunter who does pve content, attempt to purposely stack versatility… Not sure where you got your figures from…

maybe you’re accidently looking at survival hunter, but then I got to ask, who’s foolish enough to play survival hunter for pve content in shadowlands? Are you sure you aren’t accidently looking at pvp builds instead of pvp builds?

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Me, survival hunter is bae

10

The top stat is whatever the sims tell you is the top stat. Math > your feelings.

5 Likes
11

The resto sham has a pretty interesting mastery that really goes up in value the harder content you do. But I can see the argument about its poor scaling and already starting with a high base mastery default.

12

then there’s your problem. you shouldn’t be playing sv for pve… you have bigger problems than worrying about stat balance as survival… the bigger problem being that No matter if you have 100% full bis gear, had perfect stats, and played your rotation 100% perfect min/max on the level of a world first raider… you’ll still be at the bottom or middle of the damage meters.

While on the otherhand, bob, who’s only been playing MM hunter for a week, doesn’t do his rotation right, and has a mishmash of non-optimal gear, will likely do the same dps as you or maybe even out dps you.

Unfortunately SV is shafted for Shadowlands:

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Weights are not the same across specs.

I have 293 mastery rating or 8.19%

You have 208 rating at 34%

I’d need dramatically more mastery per rating to offset the gains across the board from stacking Vers. While mastery is the second best defensive stat for a bear - Vers tops it due to more linear scaling, affecting the entire damage profile, affecting healing and reducing incoming damage (which scales with how often damage happens).

14

You can take all the mastery from me, all I want is haste/verse

15

My most recent sim of my (BM) hunter shows versatility as my top stat. Seem weird at the moment.

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Condescending attitude aside, Survival’s mastery only buffs part of their toolkit. Wildfire Bomb (and the associated dots), Kill Command, their Covenant ability, trinket/enchant effects, Soulforge Embers, their auto-attacks, and their pet’s auto-attacks aren’t boosted by Mastery AFAIK. That’s a significant chunk of their damage that Versatility could be boosting.

17

I like all the stats. Each one does something I want. Thank goodness for sims to help me wrap my head around stat weights and spell priority.

18

Those are definitely factors, and it isn’t very high value if your base healing is low, but main stat is great in SL so I feel it’s still good.

The way I see it, is…people who aren’t hurt enough to benefit from mastery don’t need it as much. Naturally, there are mechanics where being below 80% can insta-gib you, but it’s the healing up from 20% to over 80% that I would look at.

I’ve only been doing M+, but would like to test it in raids soonish.

19

And here I am, going ham on Crit and Haste.
I need to exchange some of it for vers, probably, for Veng.

20

The rankings on warcraft logs aren’t quite perfect tho, while certainly not tuned properly or maybe not suitable for fight mechanics etc., If initially everyone decides that sv is “trash” then less 99% and higher percentile players will even bother gearing the spec. We simply dont know the real value of a spec that hasn’t been exhaustively min-maxed by as many players as say… aff or boomy.