Battle Cry + Bloodthirst = No enrage?

[digimij 0]

How does Battle Cry actually work? Does the 100% crit chance guarantee a crit? I ask because I've been trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong to boost my DPS and noticed today, multiple times, while working on the Raid dummy I was not enraging when I expected to due to Battle Cry being up. 

 

I created a short clip that shows this happening:  

 

 

Is this normal or a bug?

[Sajakain 104]

Good morning, Digimij:

First off: Battle Cry: "Lets loose a battle cry, granting 100% increased critical strike chance for 5 sec." The point I want to emphasize here to you is the duration: five (5) seconds. That time goes by very quickly and it's quite easy to miss the fact that you actually lost the buff.

For general purposes, here is how it affects my personal Critical Strike chance. (It increases it by 100%, as intended, but I'm in a very thorough mood this morning.)

As you can see, prior to the buff I have a Critical Strike chance of 16.40% and when I use Battle Cry, it goes up to a comfortable 116.40% chance.

I watched your video quite a few times actually and eventually took it frame by frame (second by second) and watched your buffs and your ability use. Here's the breakdown:

• Your first use of Battle Cry (around the 8 second mark): It does appear that you pop BC and immediately follow it up with BT that doesn't refresh your Enrage buff. I watched this multiple times and not quite sure why it didn't do that. Your second cast of BT, however, literally at the last second of the BC buff, did Enrage you as expected.
• Your second use of Battle Cry (around the 40 second mark): Your first use of BT does Enrage you as expected. However by the time you use BT again you had lost the BC buff. (Again, that 5 seconds goes really quick)
• Your last use of Battle Cry (around the 1:20 mark): You used BC but waited 3 GCDs before using BT so you only got one use in this window and it, too, doesn't Enrage you.

As of this posting, I'm not 100% sure why Bloodthirst didn't give or refresh your Enrage buff. I am talking with someone who is more experienced than me in all the mathematical aspects of this game and theorycrafting; when he gets back to me I'll let you know what he says.

In the meantime, however, I also made a video for testing purposes. During my testing, I used Battle Cry 5 times and, in each buff window, was able to use Bloodthirst twice. (I specifically tested this combination out; no other abilities were used during each window). All 10 uses of BT gave me Enrage and refreshed the buff on the second cast. For reference, here is my video (make sure it's full screen and you're watching it with the HD setting, lol)

Within each cast of Battle Cry (visible buff thanks to Tell Me When addon), you can see I cast BT twice. The first use gives me Enrage and the second use refreshes the buff. During the downtime of Battle Cry, I speed the video up to move it along. There are 5 uses of Battle Cry in this video:

I hope this helps you out a little. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'll update with any new information as I get it. To my understanding / knowledge, using BT during your BC window should Enrage you / refresh Enrage. Why it didn't in your video is, as of this posting, unknown to me.

==================================

Edit: Answer obtained!

Watching your video again and talking with Warriorsarri on the Warrior Discord, it's actually quite easy to explain why your BT uses didn't Enrage you, lol.

You're standing in front of the Lesser Sparring Partner.

By standing in front of the dummy, you're giving it the chance to block your BT. If BT is blocked it won't give Enrage even if it does crit.

Check your video at the observed times that BT didn't Enrage you as noted above:

• 8 second mark: "Your Bloodthirst hit Lesser Sparring Partner 96,220 Physical. (41,237 Blocked)"
• 1:24 mark: "Your Bloodthirst hit Lesser Sparring Partner 70,274 Phsyical. (30,118 Blocked)"

As a melee DPS, you always want to prioritize standing behind your target. I think if you try this again you'll find your BT (when you actually have the BC buff) will Enrage you as it should when you're properly behind your target.

[digimij 0]

Thanks for the very thorough response! I did note in the description on the video (but failed to mention here, sorry) that I noticed attacks were being blocked, including the BT. I was initially under the impression (before this testing and your response) that 100% crit chance was a guaranteed critical strike, I didn't think a 100% crit chance could be blocked and I couldn't find anything on the googles to verify if this was possible (searching anything with the words critical and block in the same search brings up critical block...). It made sense to me that the critical strike could be blocked to mitigate damage, but I thought it would/should still be considered a critical strike (minus some damage) to trigger enrage. 

 

While working on my DPS issues I did read that standing in front would cause blocks and parries, so I've modified that which has helped quit a lot, but I guess I need to continue to work on figuring out hit boxes and what is considered the "front" of a character. This has been an area of concern for my prot spec as well; I'm never 100% sure who is in range of my revenge, etc.. I thought I was far enough to the side of the dummy in the vid to not be considered in front.

 

I guess this is perfect confirmation for a question brought up during a raid about melee no longer needing to be behind a boss to dps, someone thought you could be in front now due to changes, but I wasn't sure (I quit after BC, came back for legion, lots changed...).

 

Thanks again!

 

 

Edited December 4, 2016 by digimij

[Sajakain 104]

41 minutes ago, digimij said:

I guess I need to continue to work on figuring out hit boxes and what is considered the "front" of a character.

I can help you out with that, too!

Today we'll call on Bob. He's a pretty friendly male vykrul. We disturbed his beauty sleep so he sort of came to class without clothes but, hey, he'll still serve his purpose.

Here is Bob and an imaginary hitbox drawn around him:

So, in his little hitbox here, anything in the RED part would be considered Bob's "front". Anything in the GREEN part would be considered Bob's "back". The black line that separates these two is a very fine line and you can, if you stand on it, very rapidly change from being in front of Bob to being behind Bob and vice versa.

Today Bob was beaten up by two warriors. (This would be you and me). Let's look at the positioning of us in relation to Bob when we were beating him up:

As an estimated guess by our respective videos, the YELLOW dot is your position in relation to Bob and the BLUE dot is my position in relation to Bob. You can see that you are clearly in front of him while I am behind him.

The next issue would be determining which way a creature is facing if it's not as easy to tell such as Bob here. Since your return, Legion has added a tiny indicator to show players which way a mob is facing. You can see it pointed out here. (For this demonstration we went to see Bob while he was at work so, obviously, he was fully dressed.)

The size of this little indicator changes based on the size of your target's hitbox. It can be tiny or it can be rather large; you just have to look for it.

=============================================

Disclaimer: My sarcasm here is purely for comedy; I am not insulting your intelligence or talking down to you (or anyone else who reads this). I'm in a really good mood today so I figured I'd have fun with this thread while helping you (or anyone else who reads this).

[digimij 0]

perfect! Thank you very much! I had no idea it was a straight line through, there goes my theory of being able to stand to their side. I'll just start stabbing them in the butt again when possible :}

[digimij 0]

Me again...wasn't sure if I should post this as a separate forum post, or keep this here as it's relevant to the previous discussions above.

I've been doing my best to follow the guidance above, trying to keep behind my target, and so far it has helped quite a bit as I'm now not seeing any issues with battlecry + bloodthirst not triggering, but I'm still not getting anywhere near where I should be for my stats/iLvl. One major issue I can see is I have poor overall enrage uptime, which is naturally tied to crits with bloodthirst as we've been talking about above (which is why I thought this maybe belonged here).

I've been looking at logs and comparing to other fury warriors who are drastically out DPSing me and I'm having a hard time figuring out why I'm having so few bloodthirst crits outside of battle cry compared to the other warriors. My first thought was I simply need more crit, but when comparing logs I see that I actually have more crit, in some instances, considerably more, which leads me back here.

I guess my general question is, how is critical chance calculated? Is it simply a value based off Crit alone? This doesn't seem correct to me due to my lack of crits with a higher crit value. Is there some RNG variable also tied to this? If so, is it static? Tied to location relative to boss? Unfortunately, I can't find a way to determine the direction a boss is facing on warcraft logs, but in many of the Fury POV videos I've watched they aren't sitting right on the butt the whole time, bouncing around to the front, side, as needed and they still have considerably higher DPS than myself.

All of the high ranking Fury warriors have a very high enrage uptime, and when looking at their logs I'm seeing this is due to a very high rate of off-battle cry bloodthirst crits. Is it all simply a placement issue? 

(The logs linked below have queries set up showing enrage in dark grey, with bloodthirst crits in the window as well)

To give an example, I've been comparing my logs to Hamborkers. In this set of logs, we are very close in Crit, with me having 125 more crit, but in ~2.5 minute window he had 19 bloodthirst crits to my 6... (this is including battle cry casts too). And comparing my same log to this log for hamborker, even though he died, while alive he had 15 crits to my 6 (same ~2.5 minute window) and I had nearly 1100 more crit. 

The only thing that makes any sense to me here is either the RNG gods hate me, or your crit chance drops to nothing if you are anywhere near what is considered the front even if you're not blocked (and I don't know what to do about that if tanks don't point the booty out/away from miasma, etc)

Thanks in advance for any insight!

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2016 by digimij

[Sajakain 104]

Unfortunately it is a bit RNG based whether or not you get a Crit despite your levels. If you assume a 25% crit chance then that naturally means 1/4 chances, if RNG is good to you, should crit. It doesn't mean it always will. This is also assuming that you're standing behind the boss to avoid blocked Bloodthirsts (and also assumes you're not counting Battle Cry). Also keep in mind this RNG does not have diminishing returns; there is no "bad luck protection" for this. Every single cast of Bloodthirst has a 1/4 chance of being a crit.

With this in mind, you'll want to try and weave your Enrage buffs if possible. If Bloodthrist procs and you get your Enrage AND you have enough rage to cast Rampage - hold off for a GCD or two before you cast it (unless you're rage capped then you want to cast it regardless). If the unique situation presents itself, you can extend that Enrage buff to 6 or 7 seconds instead of overwriting it and only having it 5 - 6 seconds. With Battle Cry and appropriate haste, you can get two BT casts in; one at the beginning and one at the end which will give you up to 7 or 8 seconds... which if you can keep in mind the points above and extend it with Rampage... can mean 10 - 11 seconds of straight Enrage (not counting your chances at BT procs as well). The best way to practice this is, again, dummy work.

Lastly - Fury seems to be built around the Execute ring. That, tied with Massacre, can add substantial time to your Enrage uptime and it has great synergy with the +10 rage on Enrage helm.

While I hate to be the bearer of bad news, you may want to consider Arms. Even the best performing Fury Warriors in mind, Fury is at the bottom of the polls in performance in both Heroic and Mythic content. This is progressively improving in Mythic ToV and may even be better in Nighthold but, for the time being, Arms is the shining spec for Warriors:

With the 80th percentile in mind, check the following charts:

• Mythic ToV
• Heroic ToV
• Mythic EN
• Heroic EN

I personally enjoy Fury but I also recognize the difference between it and Arms. Keep working at Fury, however, if it's your enjoyed spec. Practice and dummy time will help improve muscle memory. Legendaries also help if you have them and, as noted above, the Fury rotation seems to be heavily built around Ayala's Stone Heart. Outside of this, it's just practice, Enrage uptime, and avoiding overwriting your Enrage buff if at all possible.

For general purpose, I'll run combat log on a test dummy with my gear (I have the two worst Legendaries) and I'll see what my Enrage uptime is.

[Sajakain 104]

Alright. . . so I ran two parses against the Raider's Training Dummy in Skyhold. I did not use any food, flask, runes, or potions. I simply managed the rotation standing behind the dummy (including the use of CDs). You can see the logs in the respective links below and, in addition, you can see the RNG difference.

Both of these runs I maintained the same rotation as close to possible. There are probably mistakes here and there and, without using a stop watch, I tried getting them to as close to the same time frame as possible.

• 1st Pull: (4:16 in duration): 61.01% Enrage: WCL Link
• 2nd Pull: (3:54 in duration): 70.48% Enrage: WCL Link

I do not have my legendary ring nor helm. Unfortunately I have the 1% healing wrists and the absorb shield neck piece (lol). As such, though, my stats are as follows:

• Haste: 23.13%
• Mastery: 45.40%
• Crit: 13.62%

============================

Keep in mind this is me standing still. Obviously we do not get to do this while raiding, lol. Mobility and awareness takes precedence while fighting a boss. This is where muscle memory and rotation knowledge comes into play. You need to have it down in memory; your thought process needs to be focused on what to do; not your rotation. Most often times I find warriors (and players, in general), struggling because their focus is on their rotation instead of the encounter. Being ready for add switches, standing out of fire, getting across the room, etc... all those can affect downtime on important buffs and damage done if 50% of your focus is on your rotation.

Keep at it, though. If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask.

 

[digimij 0]

Thanks for the response. I have realized it would probably just be best if I swapped to arms as I can get nearly the same DPS output on dummies/mobs with Arms, just by smashing buttons without too much thought, as I do with my current 100% focused on trying to do everything right Fury numbers, which is really depressing. 

 

I also do know that Fury is super execute dependent and the Legendary ring would be (in theory) a huge boost, but taking that into account I've been trying to only really compare against other Fury warriors who don't have the ring, and really focusing more on rotation/casts differences between them and me.

 

At the moment though, I'm more concerned with figuring out why things aren't working than I am about the actual DPS numbers, if that makes sense. Even though everything I'm saying essentially starts with my DPS is low, the actual concern here is I can't figure out a logical reason for it. I've read everything I can find, I obsess over logs, watch all the POV vids I can for placement, etc. and with all that I just don't see a glaring logical explanation. Well, with the pretty big exception being bloodthirst criticals.

 

Also I do want to stress that I do know I need to try and not overwrite enrages, the issue here I'm trying to figure out isn't overwrites, it's the lack of procs. 

 

*responding to your latest post here that I cross-posted after*

I didn't know you could log dummy sessions! That would be pretty helpful to see what I see there vs real world. 

 

Just to reiterate, I'm not too worried about rotation, etc. Just trying to figure out why I only see 6 criticals when another person sees 19 (and comparing to another user, same timeframe, they had 15 to my 6)

 

Thanks again!

Edited December 13, 2016 by digimij

[digimij 0]

Rereading your first response to this new question line I just realized you may have answered the basic question there. Are you saying crit chance is a static 25% for everyone regardless of crit level? Or was that just a made up number? Maybe I'm looking at crit incorrectly assuming it affects chance, but instead only modifies damage of a crit?

[digimij 0]

*also want to make a quick note that this isn't just one fight I'm referring to. Every fight compared between the two of us has a very drastic difference in the number of bloodthirst criticals (this is easy to see in the manual queries I have applied/displayed in the linked logs). I didn't realize until today, after figuring out how to do that, just how infrequent it was happening for me (relative to others). 

[Sajakain 104]

8 minutes ago, digimij said:

Are you saying crit chance is a static 25% for everyone regardless of crit level? Or was that just a made up number?

It was a made up number.

The bottom line is it's RNG based. If you're doing everything right that you can possibly do and you're not getting your procs off BT then it's just bad RNG.

[digimij 0]

39 minutes ago, Sajakain said:

The bottom line is it's RNG based. If you're doing everything right that you can possibly do and you're not getting your procs off BT then it's just bad RNG.

Ugg that makes me so sad :} WoW RNG has been specifically written to make me cry myself to sleep, I'm sure of it...

 

I'm very glad you linked your target dummy parses! I had no idea you could do that before: if loggerhead didn't automatically do it for me i was lost...it's been really frustrating not being able to compare perfect conditions to reality which has made this whole "debug" process incredibly difficult. Now that I know and figured out how...ran 3 parses.

After these first two parses (with no food/pot buffs) WCL1 & WCL2, I was sure my problem was just a placement issue and not really RNG hating me as I was seeing constant BT crits, but then the third parse (fully buffed) WCL3, had the awful huge gaps of no BT crits confirming RNG sucks.

I can't express how happy I am about learning I can log dummy work. I never would have believed RNG would have such a huge impact on crit like this without seeing it for myself.

Thanks again for all your help!