sword spec worthless?Follow

then what in hell's name does it do after the nerf? i already asked this in another thread, i'm stumped. from what i understand it still has the effects of reducing block, dodge, parry, miss. so it is a counter to defense skill. and it has lost the ability to reduce the severity of glancing blows. i'm pretty sure i saw a blue post about the latter, because they wanted to stop well-geared players from fighting mobs a lot above their level. but if they took away the first too, then weapon skill does nothing at all now. hard to believe.

very good calculation there, rp, thanks for writing it up. and also a good point about generating extra rage.

note: you could not reduce the number of glancing blows even before the patch, just the severity. with +10 sword skill it would still be a glancing in the table (40% chance), but it would hit for 100% dmg, effectively reducing damage lost to zero. but the table would still be the same.

Each %hit replaces one miss event (a PURE miss - not a dodge or parry, but an actual miss) with a hit event. This means that for 2H/Special Attacks you can reach your 'hit cap' quite quickly, since even against L63 mobs 6% hit assures that you won't miss with anything other than Dual Wield White Damage.



Weapon Skill adds .1% Crit per point against higher level mobs as per the patch notes. It no longer reduces their parry/dodge/block or increases your %hit/%crit slightly.

Yeah, you read the ".1% Crit" part accurately. It's almost 100% worthless.

From the patch notes;



Wooooo-hooooo!

I'll admit that I don't think real heavy parsing has been done on this yet (since, y'know, a .4% reduction in parry/dodge/block rates would be rather hard to measure) but it's quite observable that if you mouseover your crit rate adding weapon skill no longer increases your critical strike chance against equal-level players/mobs. Between that and the patch notes, the rest of the changes are, unfortunately, just implied.



True, but the multipliers would have been different. You're right, though.

Well, ignoring the glancing blow reduction for the moment... it was basically the inverse of +DEF.

Each point of +Skill granted you;

.04% Less Chance To Be Dodged
.04% Less Chance To Be Parried
.04% Less Chance To Be Blocked
.04% +Hit
.04% +Crit

Ignoring the Block chance for the moment, this would give you a combined 1% more damage for every 6.25 points of +Skill (combined .25% Hit/Crit/-Parry/-Dodge)... which was interesting, but not nearly as significant as the glancing blow reduction, which was huge.

You'd go from hitting for 70% damage on 40% of your attacks to hitting for 100% damage on those 40% attacks... to bring back Groucho;

.055 * 0 + .4 * 1 + .295 * 1 + .25 * 2 = 1.195, compared to 1.075 under the pre-Glancing reduction numbers. This is a ~14.5% increase in damage done and would greatly increase rage consistancy for Warriors, which is pretty huge.

*shrug* Removing the +Skill was a terrible idea IMO since the stat is now worthless (and the talents that include it, like Weapon Mastery and Weapon Expertise, are now basicially a wasted spot) but there's not much to be done. =/

ah ok. i thought that table was like that but without the + 0.04% crit. but it does make sense when you look at def.

i knew everything else (see the wording of my question), but thanks for the reply. =)

FTFY. if you approximate white damage as 50% of total damage, your total dps would increase by around 8-9% (because of the slight dodge/parry/etc. boni on your special attacks). and your threat would increase a tad more than that, because you would miss a bit less on your threat generating abilities. but now i'm nitpicking ;-)

qft.

again, it's great fun to theorycraft with you!