Slowly getting it

[dippyllama 0]

So I switched to sub and had a good rant about it the other day, I feel better now I've got my fangs up to the same level as my dreadblades but I just wanna clear a few things up.

1. Can you take a look at my logs to see how I'm doing, I did a quick HC and this is the fight I feel I did best on. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Pnrc9WqNLtdb8Gxh/#type=summary

2. What happens if you cant get behind the boss, are you literally doing 30% less damage on backstab so fights like the new helya you're already at a disadvantage?

3. How much weight does each relic have, like in the outlaw theres "run through is worth 35 ilvls" so its better to take a 835 runthrough relic than an 865 between the eyes. What is the equivalent of demons kiss and gutripper etc?

4. I read somewhere that I'm supposed to hit backstab at 60 energy + just incase i need to refresh either nightblade or SoD.

5. Am I supposed to be waiting to evicerate at at 6 combos or 5+?

I have a hundred more questions but I'll delve into it later I suppose, thanks in advance

[Derby 15]

Hey dude,

1:  I don't know what you sim at, but this fight is about as close to Patchwerk as we are going to get so you should be able to approach your theoretical limits on it.  Wdps is very highly weighted for Subtlety, and the low ilvl of your weapon is hurting you a fair bit.  You have good Nightblade uptime, you have right at 4 SS per SD (one more, actually, which is good), you didn't pot because it's a heroic and who cares (the answer is *you* if you're trying to benchmark parse), and I get the feeling you did not go into this fight with full SD charges which would have also hurt your initial burst.  There may be more, but these things poke out at me.

2:  Yes.

3:  I don't know about relative relic weights when it comes to sacrificing ilvl for a certain power, but I do know that (on my sims at least), Agi is weighted 1.0 and Wdps is weighted 0.98 so the ilvl boosts are not trivial like they are for Assassination where a relic with Master Assassin or Gushing Wound is worth a 40 ilvl drop relative to other relics.  What I can tell you is the most-wanted relic for Sub right now is Energetic Stabbing; after that, it's Nightblade Damage, Eviscerate Crit, Shadow Techniques, Shadowstrike Damage (not necessarily in that order, but I'm pretty sure Nightblade dmg is second priority).

4:  I do 55, but yes.  If you are close to capping on CP, you don't want to run yourself out of energy and run the risk of getting a Shadow Techniques proc and having to sit around waiting for energy to regen before you can use a finisher.  You could waste additional ST procs in that waiting time.

5:  5+ is fine.  If you have Finality up and you're not in Shadow Dance, try for that 6th CP with a Backstab or ST proc.

Keep em coming!

[lipsinch 46]

A question on this Helya fight: you can stand @ her side? Back in WoD they made the sides "Backstab-able", as if we were behind the boss (i.e. Gorefiend).

This doesn't apply here (as in the bonus addition due to positioning)?

[Derby 15]

13 minutes ago, lipsinch said:

A question on this Helya fight: you can stand @ her side? Back in WoD they made the sides "Backstab-able", as if we were behind the boss (i.e. Gorefiend).

This doesn't apply here (as in the bonus addition due to positioning)?

It actually might, I do not know.  Legion is my first xpack since Sunwell, so I would be curious to know the answer to where the threshold for being "behind the enemy" lies.

Edited November 11, 2016 by Derby
I can't spell.

[lipsinch 46]

2 hours ago, Derby said:

It actually might, I do not know.  Legion is my first xpack since Sunwell, so I would be curious to know the answer to where the threshold for being "behind the enemy" lies.

I checked with guys @ Ravenholdt and they confirmed it works like that. Sidestabs take 30% into consideration.

[dippyllama 0]

Back for more :)

Any idea what sort of stat weights we'll be looking at for sub rogues in 7.1 ? My pawn string is saying mastery and vers are top dogs by quite a margin and I know thats personally tailored to my gear but I just wanted a bit of insight just incase. Also are there any tweaks or buffs/nerfs that have happened to sub as of late or is there anywhere someone could point me to find out this sort of info when the next patch drops ? 

Lastly I know outlaw is AoE king so he's the choice for mythics but how well is sub performing right now ? Since I don't want to be gearing two different specs and splitting my artifact power just so I can be viable in mythics and pursue my favorite spec.

[Carrn 284]

On 12/11/2016 at 5:26 PM, dippyllama said:

Back for more :)

Any idea what sort of stat weights we'll be looking at for sub rogues in 7.1 ? My pawn string is saying mastery and vers are top dogs by quite a margin and I know thats personally tailored to my gear but I just wanted a bit of insight just incase. Also are there any tweaks or buffs/nerfs that have happened to sub as of late or is there anywhere someone could point me to find out this sort of info when the next patch drops ? 

Lastly I know outlaw is AoE king so he's the choice for mythics but how well is sub performing right now ? Since I don't want to be gearing two different specs and splitting my artifact power just so I can be viable in mythics and pursue my favorite spec.

Any major changes will be listed here

As for M+, it really depends what your standard group comp is. Sub is generally viable, although Outlaw is certainly the more popular choice

[dippyllama 0]

Ok so I've hit a wall, I've read all the little bits of info in regards to maximizing dps and being the most efficient as a sub rogue but according to my sim I'm 80k dps under what I'm supposed to be doing with my gear. I saw that it had a flask on and food and prepots but I doubt it would have any more than a 20k dps impact realistically speaking over a 300 second sim.

I pool to 60 for the backstabs, I have 100% uptime on both SoD and Nightblade, I don't cap on CP or energy, I SD at 70 energy, I SS SS finish SoD SS when i have to refresh it. I pretty much follow the opener step for step and I'm just so confused. Halp.

[lipsinch 46]

Get logs for us.

[Derby 15]

14 hours ago, dippyllama said:

Ok so I've hit a wall, I've read all the little bits of info in regards to maximizing dps and being the most efficient as a sub rogue but according to my sim I'm 80k dps under what I'm supposed to be doing with my gear. I saw that it had a flask on and food and prepots but I doubt it would have any more than a 20k dps impact realistically speaking over a 300 second sim.

I pool to 60 for the backstabs, I have 100% uptime on both SoD and Nightblade, I don't cap on CP or energy, I SD at 70 energy, I SS SS finish SoD SS when i have to refresh it. I pretty much follow the opener step for step and I'm just so confused. Halp.

I will try to halp.

TL;DR:  Stop assuming you are playing properly.  I can pretty much guarantee you are not, based on inherent human imperfection.  Even with perfection, there would be variances.  Control for as many of them as you can, and use your damn consumables!

Are you saying you do not flask/food/prepot and second pot?  I guarantee it will have a massive effect on your output.  Double Old War pot will give somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-6m damage alone over the course of an encounter, which is equal to or more than what Insignia of Ravenholdt might be expected to provide (AOE notwithstanding).  You need to be doing that on any fight you intend to use as a measuring stick against sims or other players, or your results will be misleading and largely useless.  As you said, you doubt it would have more than an 20k impact but you really have no idea until you actually do it repeatedly and see for yourself.  Use the good consumables!

Also, one test case or even ten test cases are not sufficient to make a determination on whether the things you are *trying* to do are optimal.  In the case of sims, the computer is assuming perfect inputs (assuming "Elite" player skill option, as most people use this mode exclusively) and varies based solely on ability procs and other random factors.  As a human, you will never achieve this level of precision.  Sims also run thousands of iterations to come up with a sufficient sample size for making mean calculations with a high degree of confidence.  As a human player, coming up with 10,000 5-minute samples is completely infeasible.

Since it is unrealistic to believe you are actually performing perfect inputs, you are not using all optimal consumables in your parses, you don't have tens of thousands of encounter samples to smooth out your curve, and RNG is/will always be a factor in Rogue DPS (at least in the foreseeable future), you shouldn't expect to reliably parse at even the mean simulation value.

The exception to this is Assassination on longer-duration fights, where the primary damage source is largely static and unaffected by anything other than uptime and timely usage of intermittent cooldowns.  On shorter-duration fights such as Mythic+ bosses, even Assassination can see massive variances.  As an example, I did Court of Stars last night and finished with over 770k dps on the demon boss guy before Advisor Melandrus.  This is more than 200k over what I normally get, and I only got it because I had a double poison bomb proc and my Exsanguinated Rupture procced BotA.  I am sure I also had favorable mutilate crits in there as well, along with a higher-than-usual envenom crit rate.

Case-in-point:  With so many uncontrollable variables in play especially in the case of no-boots Subtlety, to not control for the predictable things like use of consumables and then say you don't understand why you can't hit a computer-simulated theoretical average level of output after a handful of iterations is naive.  The reasons are obvious, so make sure you are doing all the things you can do to bring your personal performances closer to sim-levels.

[dippyllama 0]

That's a damn solid response, really  appreciate the time and effort you put into that Derby. I will keep trying, I will use the proper consumables until I get that faultless fight or as close as my skill allows me to get to it. I have to quickly ask though the new 2500 stat prepot that lasts a minute, is that better than the old war one at the moment ?

[Derby 15]

It is not.  Old War is still the top DPS pot to use.  RIP bank account :(

[ef001730 6]

Just adding my two cents on the issue, using 2xOld Wars(One in pre pot, one lined up with my cds during bloodlust or in execute phase) gives me a solid 50k dps increase. Keep in mind im an assassination rogue so obviously this will vary for you but it is still ridiculous numbers.