Imagine posting this from a retail account that started getting Ulduar boss kills in 2009 and didn’t finish Ulduar until 2013:
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/stonemaul/slishslash/achievements/legacy/raids
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Lol is every thread you make just crying about class balance in a 15 year old game?
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I could go into a long winded explanation about how i know what im talking about when it comes to math and mechanics, but nobody would believe me.
Long story short, yes, DKs actually scale quite poorly. Strength is the only stat that scales all of their damage while nearly every other stat is only affecting ~50% of their damage or less. The problem is that unlike Vanilla WoW you can no longer find gear loaded to the brim with one single stat, so if you only scale well with one stat you dont scale well. It’s a bit along the lines of TBC shadow priests who gained something from crit and haste, but it was so little compared to other classes that their scaling lagged far behind when gear started getting loaded with haste & crit in BT->SWP.
Take Mages as a comparison; essentially 100% of mage damage scales with haste, crit, & spellpower (the only exception being Living Bomb ticks not scaling with haste). Apart from a Troll Mage potentially hitting the haste cap during a 10s window of cooldown stacking, not a single stat on mages gear is going to waste at any part of their rotation. With that in mind, consider that between 40-70% of DK dmg doesnt benefit from crit, haste, ArPen, expertise, or weapon damage… and what you get is exactly how a class finds itself scaling poorly towards the end of an expansion.
I made this graphic for my guild discord back in September specifically highlighting how DK scaling was going to become an issue long term:
https://imgur.com/xtRaDP7
- red = dmg affected by weapon damage
- green = dmg affected by haste
- yellow = dmg affected by crit
- X = dmg affected by strength but not AP
- (everything affected by strength)
Bear in mind, that pic was taken from a TBC log in prepatch SWP. The issue with DKs is obviously the gargoyle, which you’ll notice is rather modest in that SS. The haste stacking from new haste procs, tinkers, buffs, and potions accelerated the gargoyle’s scaling to the max, all at once. A lot has changed as far as raid buffs are concerned, however the core mechanics are the same. It has likely peaked with gear not getting a whole lot more haste in the next few phases, and no new haste enchants/buffs coming. Where DK scaling would have to come from is the remainder of their damage, and there lies the problem… the rest of their damage scales poorly, and haste is one of their worst stats.
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Seed is ridiculously OP right now just a spammable delayed burst mechanic that can stack on multiple targets.
If Shadow Priests were doing this AOE they would be nerfed into the ground!
It’s kind of ridiculous all the dks complaining about the nerf here, you’re still going to be among the top dpsers, if not the top. Maybe just shut up and enjoy the fact your class is still great?
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I love the huge explanation and i read it all.
You seem really smart but you didnt count on 1 thing.
Im hella stupid.
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Warlocks are not OP. They are strong yes. Affliction is strong on Yogg and we have very good execute with drain soul. I’m very biased as a lock main but I have no problem with them being strong. As an affliction Main I wouldn’t say they are hard but require a lot of focus maintaining dots. When I play my mage especially I could literally multitask and still do fine hitting basically 2 buttons. Locks are up there but not the best thing ever they just are pretty good at everything - good single target, good aoe damage, decent survivability with self healing, no mana issues with life tap, and a really good execute phase, demo also brings the juicy spell buff and forgot to mention COOKIES and SS. Affliction also does pretty well on fights with alot of mechanics where you can’t hard cast. I just think they bring more to the table than most casters atleast imo.
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You sure you know what youre talking about?
Math and mechanics also require the perspective of statvalues gained.
DK is not scaling well ?
DK has the highest STR scaling of all STR based classes, meaning its baseline ilvl scaling is the best of all STR classes.
Dk has a 2.7 ATP gain of 1 Str.
Ret has a 2.53 ATP gain of 1 Str.
Warrior has a 2.64 ATP gain of 1 Str.
Ferals have a 2.38 ATP gain of 1 Str.
DK also has the best baseline ability scaling of all STR based classes, meaning a naked DK with grey weapons outperfoms the other classes.
The issue of not scaling well with certain secondary stats is plaguing every class in Wotlk, and its somewhat moreso with meele classes than it is with casters, due to their multifarious nature of how they deal dmg.
Warriors scale exceptional with ARP good with crit and subpar with Haste, since haste is not affecting a lot of their toolkit, at least not in a very impactful way. Also their good scaling stats have a lot of interactive potential.
Due to their exceptional ARP scaling, especially on fury, it is expected that they will rise and shine in high ilvl tiers.
Ferals scale mediocre on basically all of their secondary stats, with crit being the best one. Their bleed dmg reliance reduces the value of ARP, haste is not related to much of their dmg aswell.
Ret is basically bend over by scaling, being blessed by the worst baseline ability scalings, combined with good scaling on crit, mediocre scaling on haste (even with t10 2piece it only reaches the realm of good at best), and bad arp scaling.
DK, outside the realm of blood, which was nerfed as a dps spec in the current state of the game, is also having a rather bad scaling with ARP, a good scaling with haste, a decent scaling with crit.
So basically the classes are on a journey from their starting point, which is somewhere in the realm of
DK=>Feral=>Warrior=>Pally
to their ending point, which is ICC tier fullbis.
On their journey the slow starting Warriors will gain momentum, since with every infusion of scenic vistas, food and beverages along they way, they will become stronger and faster at a higher pace than the others, untill they might be the strongest and fastest at the end.
The DK, which started already decently strong and fast, will become stronger and faster at atleast the same rate as the feral, and time will tell if his lesser growth combined with his starting advantage will be enough to stand above the warrior at the end.
The paladin will be grumpy about the scenic vistas, and he will get digestive problems from the food. He will grow at an abysmally pace, untill somewhere close to the finishing line he will suddenly find his true love, and due to this his perspecitve of life changes, and it gives him a second wind, albeit not enough to become stronger and faster than either the warrior or the deathknight. Its yet to be seen if he becomes better than the feral, but atleast due to finding his true love he is expected to be really good if he faces multiple enemies, since its always better if you got someone to fight at your side while facing multiple enemys.
So after this long and unnecessary story:
When it comes to scaling, its not enough to analyse a warcraftlog and look at the distribution of dmg sources.
-You also need to compare it with the baseline, meaning the general power that is caked into the basic scalings of AP due to multiplyers etc
-You need to compare it to the other participants
-You need to see the limits, both in hard limits, such as statcaps, and in the soft limits, such as the maximum of achievable stats.
That being said i used the same method to breake down to an unholy DK why from an individual gain standpoint a weapon is better for a tankpally than it is for an unholy dk.
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This is a statement of recency bias. Only DK damage that scales with haste is gargoyle and autoattack. With Ulduar hardmode bosses being 3-5+ minutes long instead of the 1-2m fights in Naxx, gary dmg will become a smaller and smaller % of total damage, so haste is going to fall off terribly.
That’s a textbook sign of a class that scales poorly; requiring high baseline damage to compensate for poor stat scaling.
Again, DK’s problem is having too many hands in too many pots; Spell hits, spell dots, spell aoes, permanent pets, temp pets, physical auto, and physical abilities… and few of them scale on the same stats, with STR the lone exception but there’s no such thing as gearsets with nothing but strength.
- Expertise is great for wars/rogues, but not DKs bc too much dmg is spell & pet based
- ArPen is great for wars, but not DKs for same reason
- Crit is great for wars bc nearly all damage scales with crit, but only ~50% of DK damage does
- Wars/rogues/ret get a new weapon with much higher weapon damage? Their damage scales extremely well with that … while DKs are lucky if 30% of their dmg is increased by higher weapon dmg.
- yes haste is generally a bad stat for melee bc it usually only affects autoattack, its no different for DKs. They may get an ability that scales with haste, but get significantly less damage from autoattacks.
Thus i gave it a good rating, since they still scale better on haste then all the other classes i mentioned, besides ret after 2pcs t10 (assumably)
But they still scale better than any of the aforementioned competitors outside of warriors, dont they ?
You´re blatant denial of the scaling factor of STR by the influence of AP=>DMG coefficients is refreshing.
I totally see the problem of overflowing secondary stats, and its increasing influence later in expansions, this has been an issue in wow since forever. But the baseline ability scaling is not to be underestimated.
If you would have a theoretical class that would gain 5 times as much dmg then everyone else from each point of ATP due to having ridiculous modifiers baked into their abilitys, even if they had the most horrendous secondary stat scalings, they would still outdps them forever.
Just a fun fact: an Unholy DK without any usage of gargoyle whatsoever (because he can only use gargoyle while pressing a hotkey, and this key broke. dont question it, its a dumb dk) will deal more damage than a retpaladin throughout all of the expansion up to 2P ICC. And more damage than every warrior until halfway ulduar bisgear, which is actually halfway Trial gear without ILVL changes.
And to make it more clear by mentioning it once again: im aware that DK is not the best scaling class. I never even claimed that.
But not being the best scaling =/= scaling poor.
Poor scaling would be Rets, would be Eleshamans (gosh , those guys scale reaaaally bad, imagine having only one stat that you scale really well with, and this stat being the one stat with both a soft and a hardcap attached to. story of elemental shaman for several expansions, only being refreshed by adding another stat with the same issue called mastery for some expansions)
They dont scale with haste better than others, its about the same because DK autoattack damage is way lower. What warriors gain from AA with haste, DKs gain about half as much from AA + half from gary.
No they dont, because while they scale better with one stat they scale equal or worse with all other stats. DKs scale worse with crit and scale horribly with arpen, expertise, and weapon damage. You cant just say ‘but they scale better with strength so that means they scale better’ as if gear is only going to have strength on it.
Pretty much every other melee class gets about 50% scaling from haste and 70%+ scaling from arpen, expertise, weapon dmg, & crit… while DK gets 30-50% scaling from those stats. The lone exception being enhance which also gets a weird combo of spells/melee (and also scales poorly).
I took one of our guilds recent 2m Patchwerk kills where a Combat Rogue, DK, and Fury Warrior all parsed 97+ and broke down the % of their damage that scales with each stat. Here are the results:
Combat Rogue
Crit - 90%
ArPen - 60%
WeapDmg - 60%
Expertise - 78%
Haste - 49%
Fury Warrior
Crit - 100%
ArPen - 83%
WeapDmg - 78%
Expertise - 100%
Haste - 52%
Unholy DK
Crit - 45%
ArPen - 29%
WeapDmg - 29%
Expertise - 29%
Haste - 51%
Now consider that this is a phase 1 two minute Naxx boss where things are optimal for an Unholy DK to be top DPS… not a 4-5 minute phase2+ boss.
The scaling isn’t just worse, it’s cripplingly worse. A slight scaling advantage with strength cannot overcome the amount of item value wasted on every other stat on their gear. Unholy peaked with phase1, it was always doomed to scale down out of the top spot because the haste buffs, cds, tinkers, and pots to pump gary damage are already being maximized… a new phase doesnt add new ones.
Locks absolutely own Yogg which looks to be probably the hardest fight in Ulduar now that they nerfed XT. It was possibly bugged for most of the PTR but so far I don’t think anyone has killed Yogg 0. Stacking locks makes it significantly easier however.
Yup and it’s not because locks themselves are head and shoulders above everyone else, it’s because they can abuse the insanity mechanic…on top of already being good.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I know warlocks are really good and affliction will only get better so we will see how scaling amongst classes plays out for the rest of the expansion, but other classes like mages, rogues, and warriors are supposed to continue to get better and better with us. I’m not convinced warlocks are going to stay mega stacked for the rest of WOTLK because other raids (TMK) don’t have any fight specific reason why you’d want to stack them specifically.
DKs got lucky they didn’t put gary’s spell cast on the GCD like it should be.
Oh definitely. But they were S tier this phase, they’ll be S++ next phase and then they’ll start to lose out to phys dps classes as ARP starts to scale. And maybe mages depending on whether they ever fix “ignite munching.”
And that, my friend, is exactly not how scaling works.
And its also a prime example of people creating fake values, that seem somewhat relatable, but are pure BS.
Lets begin with the fact that i never mentioned combat rogue.
Putting that aside:
Lets see Fury Warrior. You just throw in a number of 96% scaling with weapondmg ?
What does that mean? Does that mean that 96% of the fury warriors damage is affected by their weapons´ dmg ?
Well, i hate to tell you that this would be impossible. Fury uses both Bloodthirst and execute, and whilst both do require a weapon to be used, they both do not scale on weapon dmg at all.
How did you reach ArPen 83% ? What does that number mean? You DO realize that arpen is the most complex of all secondary stats when it comes to scaling, right ? And that just seeing how much of your dmg will be influenced by arpen gives you no information on scaling at all, especially on a stat that is in itself non linear ?
You do realize that haste can not be put into a statvalue perspective by simply looking at a singular log and be like “oh, this % of dmg is influenced by haste, and this ist not” ?
For several reasons, the most easy to understand would be that maybe… haste is influencing procs, or ressource generation, or both ?
And that again, secondary stats are even on different values depending on overall gear, and their interaction with other sec stats ?
And that with your logic Crit would be nearly twice as good as haste on a combat rogue, when actually its not even close to being that ? And when it comes to scaling, especially with more gear, the statweigh of combat rogue would be ArP=>Haste=>Crit ?
And that 32,8 haste rating is 1% haste, but 46 critrating is 1% crit, thus making the comparisation even more theoretical and not solvable by your approach, since by raising the itemlevel and the number of secondary stats you get different values out of it compared to your “total values” that you are striving for ?
And on a more general level: the cripplingly worse scaling ?
You still forget about baseline ability scaling , right ?
Lets make it understandable once again:
You have:
“the basics” meaning : The way the abilitys you use, are scaling to your basic power.
For caster that would be the spellpower coeffiency of their spells.
For melee it would be either their attackpower coeffiency of their abiltys, the %of weapondps or weapondmg (for example a mortal strike deals weapondmg in normalized value+talent modificator+basic added dmg value, while a crusader strike deals 93,8% of weapondmg, talent modificator included, and no added dmg value)
If 100% of your abilitys scale on haste, crit and arp, would that make you automaticly the best scaling class ?
Nope. It would make you the class that scales best on secondary stats.
Oh and also:
The only meele CLASS that could gets 70%+ “scaling” from arpen would be warrior.
Probably a meele SPEC that also could get 70%+ “scaling” from arpen might be combat rogue.
(Im sticking to scaling in your wonky way of what you seem to believe scaling is, meaning analysing a warcraft log and look at how much % of dmg is done by what kinds of abilitys)
And even yourself, show us this:
So not even you believe that combat rogue, the hottest contestor for high arpen scaling outside of warriors is scaling as high as you claim
does.
Scaling is math. Scaling is not picking a warcraftlog, then produce some random numbers (even wrong numbers even in your own metric as explained with the warrior abilitys at the begining of this post)
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Weren’t we all kind of expecting a nerf to unholy? I’m not saying warlock isn’t going to be busted, but unholy DK only needed to be played for the first 15 seconds of the fight. You could literally walk away during some fights after our opener and beat people by a light-year.
To all of the people upset with the unholy nerf. Go back to playing frost, it was more engaging in the first place. I would wager a majority of the people upset and outraged were just riding the Garry bandwagon.
Just don’t expect balance in classic. Ride the bandwagon or enjoy your favorite class; no matter what, it’s your choice. Playing a class because it’s good only means you won’t enjoy it when it’s not.
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They are completely degenerate toxic parsers. Who cares. Ban them.