GC on cookie cutter buildsFollow

I agree and disagree with the statement. That 1% extra damage could be the difference between the kill and a wipe, I've seen my fair share (a handful) of kills where we have 1 person left alive or that person dying at the same time as the boss (my fave is an spriest that SW:Deathed Leotheras in SSC to kill him and himself for our first kill).

While 1% is 'rounding' and that our combat log parses can differ by a large amount (amount of movement, latency, rng, group comp, just not playing well that day, etc) that 1% still is in effect, so instead of being 11% behind the previous week you are 10% behind. I will still spec cookie-cutter (or relative cookie-cutter, when you have a couple free points to spend) as it does give the highest theoretical damage, and I'm pretty sure most anyone else who is in a progression-oriented guild/raid will do the same.

I can see how sometimes it would come down to the skin of your teeth. GC even acknowledges that. But how often? I'm sure it doesn't matter how often to some guilds, because one time is too many, and for those people the cookie cutter will always be there.



Well, not really, assuming you had the same min-maxed build the week before. Whether you did 10,000 DPS week 1 and 9,000 week 2 or 10,100 week 1 and 9,090 week 2, there is still a 10% difference between the two. And in the scheme of things, 100 DPS either way doesn't seem like it would make much difference.

On the other hand, that's one person's DPS. In a 25 man raid how many DPSers do you bring? 17? 18? 1800 DPS starts to feel like a more meaningful number, I would think?

I can't get my head around the idea that the cookie cutter isn't necessary for the serious and the hardcore and the seriously hardcore. And I don't think they'll ever let go of it in any case, because seeing how close to perfect you can get is the whole point for that type of player. And while you can't control things like lag and luck, and you can only somewhat control things like whether you're having an off day or the dog puked on your foot in the middle of the fight, it's incredibly easy to control your spec. Honestly, for a lot of those people I think the DPS talents are the fun talents. Min-maxing isn't just how they play, it's why they play.

For a guild that is less focused on perfection and more on other factors, where the probability of error is higher (they're more likely to deviate by 5-10%, I would think, than the best of the best), and where one extra wipe isn't going to matter as much in the scheme of things (because one wipe is less statistically significant), spec flexibility probably comes more into play.

And I wonder how many of the sorta-kinda hardcore and medium-core guilds insist on the cookie cutter just because they're emulating what the extremely hardcore people do. And then the softcore guilds emulate what those guilds do. In the end it's similar to how I look at the PVP specs of ranked people on arena junkies even though copying their spec isn't going to make me like them. It's just the quickest route to a good starting point.

In other words, what I really think is happening here is not so much that min-maxing isn't necessary. It is necessary for a very small percentage of top guilds. It's that over time more people have started min-maxing than need to be. For everyone who isn't in one of those top guilds it's probably helping, but it's probably not helping as much as they think it is.



Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 10:43am by teacake

It does, thank you. So I guess my question to the regular raiders is, we all acknowledge that it happens sometimes, but what does sometimes mean? How often do you end a fight six seconds from a wipe?

Edit: another thought on those six seconds. GC seems to assume the goal is not wiping. Is it? Do you define success as downing the boss, or downing him faster than last week? For some people I imagine six seconds or even one second does mean something simply because it's six seconds or one second less than it was before.

Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 10:50am by teacake

I think there's a point missing in this discussion:

Min/Maxxing creates the potential for more output. Skill helps the toon reach toward that potential.

Stuff like that can matter. Occasionally.

We had a horrible raid setup one week and only managed to down BPC because one of our mages finished the last 300k HP on his own. It was incredibly close. To the point where we had already released spirit.


Of course, these situations are rare, but I'd rather have a kill than the 15th wipe at 0.2%.



Edit:

Filter, I somewhat agree, but I think there are a lot of people who are great players without understanding all of the maths behind their choices because they might not have gone to school long enough or whatever. They still learn about their class, and they are in quite a few cases the ones doing the datamining so that the maths geek theorycrafters don't have to spend all their life doing it.

Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 3:26pm by Kalivha

To be fair, it's all fairly relative. The thing is that you should spec for what works best for most raid bosses. Either that, or you respec for every boss, which is something I don't think even the most hardcore guilds do. Because this whole thing is so experience based is the reason you see people sometimes claiming that spec X works better than spec Y.

I personally have been running through Ulduar and TotGC without the holy priest's Test of Faith talent. Folks at EJ would probably cringe because I'm giving up SO MUCH THROUGHPUT!!! Fact of the matter is that I've never really wiped due to 'not having enough throughput' (not as holy, mind you, it's happened as disc), while I've had situations where Body & Soul literally saved the raid. In fact, if it wasn't for B&S in my spec, I wouldn't have gotten All You Can Eat. Obviously healing priests aren't exactly a class that depend on min-maxing as healers have a lot more variables per fight than DPS, but still. I personally cringe when I see people with specs that skip ALL utility talents for massive throughput. Yeah, sure, that's gonna be all good if you can stand there and heal like a zombie, but you've got absolutely NOTHING to fall back on when something goes wrong.

That said, even on DPS it doesn't matter as much as people like to think, which is where GC is right. I can count the amount of <1% wipes I've had in ALL tiers of WOTLK raid content together on one hand. Even the amount of <6% wipes could fit on a hand or two, if you want to argue that "if EVERY DPS in your raid would get that additional 1% damage...".

Well, I certainly didn't intend to prove Kalivha's, though I assume that's what you actually meant to communicate.

Firstly, most cookie cutter specs are theorycrafted with BiS or near BiS gear. If you don't have that gear (and even the best raiders rarely do) then you may not want to use that spec. Your crit rate may not be high enough to give you the up-time on a buff for example. It pains me to hear raiders say that "X" spec would give the the highest DPS for my gear, but I'm in "Y" spec because it's the BiS cookie cutter, and I can't get into a decent raid without it.

Secondly, there's a time and a place for max DPS. There are some bosses with harder enrage timers, where every ounce of damage matters more. I like it when people are doing their max DPS there, it's very helpful, essential and whatnot. Being in whatever RAWR/spreadsheet/etc told them is their highest DPS spec is a very good thing.

Thirdly, there are also a lot of bosses that are "survival" fights, where maxing DPS isn't important. If you want to take your max DPS spec to one of these fights that's fine. I have no problems with that, it's a good spec. However that max DPS spec usually has a couple of talent points in places the give you a very minor boost in DPS, and this comes at the expense of really exceptional survival talents. Now if you are living with your max DPS spec that's great. But if you are dying to stuff the survival talents would help you live through, then I have a problem. It's only a few gold to switch the talent points (for those who have their dual spec in another role or something). Heck the guild is sitting on a pile of cash, I'll give you 100g to respec twice, or buy you some frost resist gear, or whatever, if it means you'll live through what's killing you.

Fourthly, Min/Maxing for healing/tanking doesn't really work so well. The roles are too situational in my opinion. I cringe a little when I hear someone say this is the "best" healing spec.

In short, not that I can ever say anything succinctly. Be willing to do whatever you need to do to react to whatever the mechanics of the fight, your abilities, and the abilities of your group dictates. You should be maximizing your killing of raid bosses, not your DPS, stamina, spellpower, whatever.

Just because HM BiS spreadsheety person can use that spec, doesn't mean you are capable of using it, staying alive, and defeating the boss. He's probably a much better player than you anyway, and using his spec isn't going to make you like him. Using Tiger Woods' golf clubs doesn't make you any better at golf, it just means you hit the ball further into the lake, if you even hit the ball to begin with...



Seriously, rate ups and stuff.

However I'll add most people aren't in an environment that allows for it. WoW raiding can be a very caustic place that doesn't lend itself well to alternative opinions. Cookie cutter, moar dots, STFU, stop being a special snowflake and such...

Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 10:02am by someproteinguy

It wasn't just CC, it was also survivability. Frost's main problem, iirc, was that it just didn't scale until recently-ish. I want to say that it's relatively competitive now, or at least good enough to justify bringing into a raid. And I'd definitely love to see CC brought back more. I loved DPSing and CCing at the same time. It's not why I chose a mage, but it's certainly why I fell in love with the class.


As for the general discussion at hand, I personally favor cookie cutter builds. There's a point where in the hands of a good player, non-DPS talents will truly be a benefit over some smaller DPS ones, but not all players are good enough to know which ones and how to use them, so I'd personally rather that they pick up the talents that allow them to do what they can do with minimal complication.

Edit: BTW, math isn't as needed as one would think to make the best decisions in choosing talents. A good basic understanding of talents and a willingness to spend gold, play around and see what works best for oneself is really all you need.

Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 11:23am by Poldaran

This.

But then again, asking people to actually learn their class, investigate talents, and test, rather than mindlessly copy whatever build they click on while browsing EJ is asking a whole lot.

I just wanted to say that I completely agree with Ghostcrawler on everything he said on all that thread.

There are in fact extremely very few times I've read a post from GC containing an element I disagree with. I disagreed partially with one thing he said on a healer QQ thread, my disagreement was on how devs address a certain situation in the sense that I feel there's a better way and that their solution isn't going to play the way they think it will, but I'll give them credit in that it's still an improvement and that they have taken a "brave" stance by "daring" to make the game more fun for us instead of sticking to a rather dull style because of players who don't want to change the way they play.

Anecdote:

On my warlock on PvP spec (because I have dual spec and both specs are PvP) I tend to do about as much cummulative damage on raid bosses as people who have 20% to 30% more DPS than I do. On some fights it is less, but on some fights I'm really up there at the top above people with far more dummy dps than I have, and with less damage taken (so no, I wasn't standing on the fire to pew pew more). My warlock is on a warlock heavy server, any 10-man raid has 2 or 3 warlocks to compare with.

If they just learned to dps non-dummies the way I have learned it I estimate their damage contribution could increase 20% to 30% without having to increase their dummy DPS trough further stats upgrades.

I'm not saying their extra DPS does not work, I'm just saying they are losing a bigger chunk of their damage contribution from the way they deliver the DPS that they have than from the way they pick talents and gems.


Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 2:24pm by xorq

The basic math behind calculating DPS is fairly simple, but min/maxing taking into account DR and stat variances gets advanced fast. I actually enjoy crunching numbers from time to time but the exact calculations on some classes irk me.


Admittedly I just skimmed a few of the posts, but I think people are missing the message. Cookie cutter builds are not required for progression. If that 1% was required for people to progress, very few people would be at end game. While that minor adjustment may help, the content simply isn't designed to require it. If that minor adjustment to DPS is going to be the deciding factor for your raid, your raid is lacking somewhere else.

Think of it this way, how many runs have you done that have been absolutely perfect, I mean flawless. If the content required that 1%, those would be the only runs that were successful. Personally, I can count on one hand the number of times I have been in those runs.

Are people going to demand you have the cookie cutter build or GTFO, yea. Although those are probably the same people demanding 6KGS for Naxx 10.

While I am sure there are guilds and groups that will be picky about your talent build before they even give you a chance, most of the groups and guilds I have been involved with don't usually look at a person's talent choices unless they are doing poorly for their gear level in a raid. They do look at gear for pugs for ICC but I almost never hear comments in vent or on gchat about some pug's talents unless the person is really underperforming or unless they have strange gemming or gear choices.

I like utility talents though my builds tend to be close to the cookie cutter ideal ones. I do find that a person tends to do more damage and be of more use in a raid if they survive to the ends of the fights. We have a Mage in guild with really super dps but he also tends to require one or more battle rezzes and also calls out for Salv and ennervates because of his threat and mana issues. I prefer to use my own resources to ensure that I don't pull threat, I don't run out of mana and I stay alive even if it means using a global cooldown on a heal spell instead of a damage spell. I would love to see another one or two percent rise in my dps but not at the expense of giving up a big chunk of damage done by dying 1/4 of the way into the fight.