Thoughts on melee dps in TBC

It’s not the warglaives though. It’s the armor penetration that comes with t6 and za. Executioner enchant as well

Executioner is worse than Mongoose. Percentage based haste effects stack multiplicatively with other percentage based sources, such as Haste Rating, Bloodlust/Heroism, and Flurry/Slice and Dice. 120 Agility is also really good for any class that uses Mongoose, particularly Rogues.

This was mathed out back in TBC.

The Armor Penetration is a nice boost, but remember that is coming at the expense of other stats, be it Crit, Expertise, Haste, or Hit. The best items aren’t necessarily going to be items with Armor Pen. Armor Pen also has a VERY easy to reach hard cap that greatly diminishes the value of Executioner procs.

Honestly, it is just the Warglaives. They are leagues ahead in terms of DPS, especially for Rogues, because of their speeds and the haste proc.

1 Like

Yeah I do… but I had some real life problems happen and had to step away from the game… I really don’t know why you care what I do so much. Does it make you feel better? I don’t care what you think. I do. I will in TBC. Life happens sometimes. The guilds that matter did… or they wouldn’t be on top. My guild was number one for a week. WClogs stopped logging before they said they were going to. Where are yours? Or do you hate just to hate?

Again. I don’t care what you think I do or do not do. I don’t know why you are so hellbent on tryin to prove that I don’t. Just because I haven’t been successful yet, and ive been close, doesn’t mean I dont try. You have issues if you care so much about what I do. I begin to wonder if your own shortcomings make you feel the need to pull others down.

Holy crap I finally figured out how to just block you. Go take your eternal sadness elsewhere.

1 Like

This.

Armor Penetration is absolutely fantastic and scales exceedingly well as you reduce Armor more and more down to zero… and then immediately zeroes out to no value whatsoever. So while Executioner might have a sweet spot in gearing where you can rely upon the procs to not be entirely wasted and you lack enough other gear for Mongoose to really overtake it, I’m not sure that sweet spot lasts.

I’ll know better when I have all the actual numbers to play with since TBC p-server stuff is a tad hit/miss with coefficients, boss damage, etc.

Wasn’t it possible for armor pen to reduce armor below 0 before WoTLK?

[Patch 3.1.2] (2009-05-19): Capped to 100% (or 1232 armor penetration rating)

I don’t think so, the change in Wrath was making it a rating that had some weird scaling they had to literally spell out to us in some Ghostcrawler post.

It is NOT super easy to reach. Go look up the armor values of the bosses in bt/swp. It’s like 6200-7700 armor depending on the boss.

After raid debuffs (sunder, fairie fire, etc) you still need like 3-4K arp to hit 0. You’re not getting there without a proc, wether it’s exe, warpspring, madness or w/e

Probably because you felt it was necessary to bring up in the first place, bud. If you don’t want people scrutinizing your accomplishments, don’t laud them around.

I’m not really. I made one quick comment about something you said, and was otherwise talking about the subject: melee DPS in TBC.

As you might recall:

Then that was followed by what I found to be a funny comment you made immediately afterwards saying that you min/max, aren’t casual, push for world firsts, and have a top 10 speed kill.

“Who cares if you aren’t in Progress?”
“I push for world firsts!”

The second part was amusing to me because… you don’t. You can’t even clear the raid, regardless of whatever reasons you may have for that.

Pull? Bud, you should take a look at my logs if you think I have to pull you down to make myself feel better. LOL

Don’t get full of yourself, pup.

No. Armor Pen wasn’t a percentage in TBC, so it worked differently. You can’t have negative armor, so anything beyond the actual armor value does nothing.

In WotLK, Armor Pen was changed to be percentage based, and functioned differently as far as calculations go, such that you could remove over 100% of the damage reduction that armor was giving. If armor was giving you 25% damage reduction, 200% ArP would give you 25% bonus damage.

You’re not very good at math.

6,200
-2,600 (Sunder Armor)
-610 (Faerie Fire)
-810 (Curse of Recklessness)
= 2,180
-840 ArP from an Executioner proc.
-1000 from Warp-Spring Coil or -1200 from Badge of the Swarmguard
= 340 or 140.

Your BiS gear in T5 will have that much passive ArP, I guarantee you. Any more than 340 on your gear, and you start to lose value on your Executioner proc or your trinket effects. You won’t have Shard of Contempt until SWP is released, so you’re probably going to be using DST + WSC, which means reaching the hard ArP cap is a very real possibility for a majority of fights.

That results in any extra being wasted. And by the time Executioner is out, you can reach passive ArP values in the 4 digit range. Even T5 level gear has more than enough ArP available to reach that cap, with T6 and SWP gear having enough passive ArP to push you over cap even on 7,700 armor bosses.

Yes. So you need 340 arp on gear to reach 0 armor on the lowest armor boss with exe and coil proc.

Now you need to come up with another 840 arp on gear to replace exe.

This is not very easy pre swp.

Soa which is it? You say private servers are unreliable but then go onto say they are?

Private servers change a lot of things.

This whole argument is absolutely stupid. The only “melee” class that will most likely be shunned in TBC is a fury warrior. With enhancement shaman and rogues, there’s just not enough room for them with a 25 man raid.

Whether you’re a rogue or enhancement shammy, if you play your class well you will have a spot and do well, providing you know how to play. Hell I’m sure even though I believe there won’t be many of them, you’ll still see fury and arms warriors raiding.

This whole sweaty BS argument is simply that. BS that reeks of sweaty Vanilla players trying to figure out which class does 1% more so they can feel good about themselves and flex their epeen.

Play what you enjoy, you’ll be alright.

I’m sorry, but why would I need to “replace” Executioner in this calculation? You were the one who brought it up as a reason for Rogues and Warriors picking up in DPS.

Do you not even remember what you said in the first place???

I corrected you in saying that Mongoose is better than Executioner (that is always the case for Rogue, by the way), and added by saying that the Armor Pen is good, but it comes at the expense of other stats.

You are not gaining a sudden MASSIVE increase in DPS from Executioner. Executioner is a DPS loss to Mongoose. Furthermore, the ArP is good, but it is functionally no different than more of any other stat. What makes it so good in T6 is not that ArP has an inherently high value, but that its rarity up to that point meant it was relatively behind in quantity to other stats.

In other words, you have so much AP, Crit, and Hit that ArP becomes more valuable. This leads many ill-informed individuals like yourself to think that ArP is a god tier stat for its own sake and leads to massive DPS gains in T6, and you should just stack all the ArP possible, which would actually result in a massive DPS loss.

The reason your DPS shoots up massively in T6 as a Rogue or Fury is painfully obvious. You have a mainhand with ~20 more DPS than any other weapon in the game at that point, at 2.8 speed, making your Sinister Strikes stupidly overpowered, as well as making your sword spec procs hit much harder, and you have a 1.4 speed off-hand sword and an absurd haste proc with tons of extra AP against demons. For Warriors, the weapons are just really high DPS, so they’re good regardless of the 1.4 speed OH.

My point about the cap being easy to reach is true… if you are going for ArP. Even a moderate focus on the stat will result in reaching the hard cap.

You should read carefully. I said “arguably” that is true, but… meaning one could argue that private servers are unreliable but the fact TBC is so much more well documented means they are more reliable than is being suggested by opponents of private server data.

That’s probably true, but only because most melee specs actually have some raidwide benefit to bringing them.

Their DPS is still objectively lower, and the mechanics undeniably favor range for a majority of fights.

It’s not just 1%. Even retail dreams of having DPS numbers that close, and Blizzard, for all their faults, does TREMENDOUSLY better at keeping the specs closer in terms of balance than they ever managed in TBC.

I am not exaggerating when I say up until Rogues get their Warglaives, they are 20-30% behind Hunters, and Rogues are the best melee DPS class in the game by a considerable margin.

What a shallow and useless summation.

Really everything was very well min-maxed in TBC, the only thing we really did not min-max was the group comps because it was just too much trouble to reorganize our guilds for that… Although there were those guilds who thought “Hey lets min-max comp for sunwell” hence the term “Getting Sunwelled”, but that was less common than the forums would promote you to believe.

Can we stop using pservers as relevant points of data? They didn’t even have values/stats correct. No way in hell will a warlock/hunter do 20-30% more dmg than a rogue in equal gear and equal skill. Bring the player, not the class. Don’t stack any 1 class unless your entire game plan is to break speedrunning records.

Just screwed. Accept it

Trash melee are trash in TBC. Might as well not even play.

Yes, I’m aware. That’s why people are so keenly aware of how bad melee is in TBC.

That may have been uncommon back then (since the number of groups actually capable of progressing in SWP was pretty low to begin with, and even fewer still would force rerolls or replace teammates to optimize), but it will not be uncommon going into TBC Classic. There’s one reason why:

We know what to expect. In TBC, no one knew ahead of time. They figured it out eventually, and things obviously changed leading up to 2.4.3, but no one could’ve predicted exactly what was going to happen like we can now.

You’re talking about vanilla private servers, and the majority of the things they got wrong were mechanical issues like Heroic Strike queuing removing the dual wield hit penalty that no play would ever possibly formulate exactly even if they noticed, – or just didn’t actually exist in vanilla, since it’s really strange no one EVER noticed that’s how it worked and was not changed until “Next Melee” abilities were removed – or PPM rates that people could only really guess at due to the RNG nature and lack of datamining.

For all their faults, private servers actually got most of it right, and either deliberately made things harder or approximated difficulty based on the lack of information. Then Naxx comes around and suddenly it all seems more accurate… almost as if Classic was actually not accurate during most of the raid content due to itemization, talent, and class changes.

But none of that matters for TBC, because towards the tail end of vanilla and throughout all of TBC, data mining was a thing; theorycrafting had an avid community, and players were thoroughly documenting EVERYTHING. Where vanilla private servers had to guess, TBC private servers largely do not.

Haha, prepare to be surprised.

A T4 geared Hunter will do ~2,300 DPS without cooldowns.
A T5 geared Rogue will do ~1,900 without cooldowns.

Rapid Fire is a notably weaker cooldown than Blade Flurry + Adrenaline Rush, but you can tell the obvious gap they have to make up.

Good thing no one suggested that, then.

Maybe on your server, but it was not by any means uncommon or “low” volume. I suspect that SWP as end goal will actually attract some raiders from Retail and because the TBC raids are a actually fun to do and aren’t overly punishing. I just hope they give us pre-nerf T5 and T6 rather than the kiddie version that it devolved into. (yes I know that SW is technically kinda still T6, even though its not exactly)

Bingo. I have brought this up before and have people have rightly pointed out that the talents are worth only a few % here and there, and the gear is “only 10% more stats” and I just died laughing because any rogue / warrior would give his first born for 10% more stats statically like that. 10% here, a few % there, and then tack on world buffs and consumes, its like packing 80 raiders into a 40 man team. Round comes Naxx and people start to wipe because hey what do ya know, its correctly tuned for the gear / talents.

Thanks for the gold on the herbs and pots.

You suggested in your previous post that it was…

More than that, the content was tuned to how people were starting to play the game. They needed content designed to be a challenge even for the best of players at the time, and the best of players at the time knew what stat weights were and were min/maxing their DPS… even if the popular guides at the time still actually valued things like Stamina and Dodge as DPS stats because “you can’t do damage if you’re dead.”

The balancing changes throughout vanilla made a difference, particularly the talents, but even if those were undone, the fact players would drop 200 Stamina for 150 more Spell Power would be unheard of back in vanilla. People wouldn’t chug potions on cooldown, let alone use Flasks of Distilled Wisdom as mana potions.

Even vanilla discussions about Naxx reveal just how… noobish even the best players were back then.

1 Like

Comparing Shaman tank to mage tanking, nice!

Both are equally useless.

Wait, I take that back. Mage is actually good at tanking Krosh Firehand.

1 Like