To the guys at arenajunkies.com
Axe vs Sword, Talents, patch 2.3 November 19th, 2007To anwser doubts in this topic:
You will notice that the only skills he models are autoattack, ms, and whirlwind. ($whiteDPS, $MSDPS, and $WWDPS)
Obviously, there are a lot of other things he didn’t account for, like armor, global cooldown conflicts, etc, but only the factors that affect axe and sword differently are relevant. One such factor that would be interesting to see modeled would be rage, because right now he is assuming you have enough rage to cast ww+ms every time they are up. Axe and Sword spec will have different rates of rage generation, and the more rage you generate, the more you can dump it into other things, like sunders, heroic strikes, etc, which is huge. I could see how all this would be very difficult to model though.
You are right, and you are wrong at the same time :). There is no point in modeling hamstring or pummel for axe spec. In sword formula there is a magic variable $hitspersecond which is an estimation (there are way too many things that affect that number to make it constant) which includes auto attacks (with flurry if you have it, and flurry uptime is ruled by simulator for that case), MS and WW every GCD but also Hamstring. The number I put on hamstring is once every 20 seconds, which is LOW, and I know it. Calculator is not accurate, because it’s not possible to make one that’s accurate. Somewhere in comments someone asked me if I can do same thing for hamstring every 8 or 10 seconds and pummel every 20 (don’t remember exactly) and in that test axe went a bit below swords for targets that can’t parry (difference was negligible), and above swords for targets that can parry, so even if axe is not going to be uber superior for some encounters even for an orc warrior, it’s still not worse then Sword. There will be situations where axe is clearly superior, there will be situations where sword is clearly superior, no matter what. In other words: 5% crit + 2.5% avoidance reduction > 5% extra attack, 5% crit + 1.25% avoidance reduction = or > 5% extra attack.
Terhix
November 28th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Terhix, are you completely for an orc getting an axe to maximize dps potency? I’ve been using a sword for quite some time, and im just skeptical about going for axes, since the rage generation and spikey damage is something nice for sword. just seeing your opinion on this, if you end up reading
November 29th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I always thought of the benefit of axespec diffrently than just the 5% chance to crit compared to 5% chance to gain a extra hit of sword math, You get 5% chance to crit for free going axe spec, thats a free 5% chance to crit without gear playing any part of it, sword spec you wanna get up an nice crit chance or else resilence will screw you, and the same thing goes for mace. If you go Axe and stacked your ap gear, you would still have a roughly a 35% chance to crit and lets say anywhere from 200-400(very possible, maybe more) more ap than sword or axe spec with the same crit chance. And a greater chance to hit the target being an Orc. Which in my opinion is greater than sword spec in the DPS department. Am i wrong for thinking this way, if i am please explain it better for me because im really thinking of going axes with possbily sav enchant, stacking all the AP i can get my hands on.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
1% crit is supposed to be 22.1 crit rating at level 70, so 5% crit from axe can be translated to 110.5 crit rating. In itemization 1 crit rating = 2 attack power, thus you could technically get same iLevel gear as someone geared for crit, get same crit he has with mace/sword and manage to get 221 attack power more, which is 15.7 dps more. So If a guy with sword/mace would have f.e. 260 dps an axe guy with same crit would have 275.7 dps, which is roughly 6% more damage done.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
And yea, I have axe and I’m gemming everything I can for AP :).
November 30th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Hey Terhix, do you think you could crunch some numbers to see the variance in rage generation for two specs (including orc racial). I know that’s something that may be rather difficult, but if its not too much trouble, I would greatly appreciate it