wow Parry, Dodge, Miss, Block and Crit Issues in Classic Beta

[Starym 3,800]

 

After all the "not a bug" issues that have been reported on the Classic beta, we thought it would be nice to take a look at a more serious report that actually takes some time to take a look at the issues discussed and present some proper evidence and data. Mirayne over on the official forums took time to detail some possible major discrepancies for parry, dodge, block, miss and crit values when facing higher level enemies.

Quote

Conventional wisdom about vanilla hit table mechanics includes the following:

1. Mobs and players of equal level (more precisely, equal weapon skill and defense) have a base 5% chance to dodge, parry, block, miss (non- dual wielding).

2. Mobs have (5 * Level) weapon skill and defense values.

3. Each point of difference between defense and weapon skill changes those percentages by 0.04% per point (except miss, see below). For example, a player hitting a +3 mob (such as a raid boss) from the front without dual wielding will experience 5.6% chance for their attacks to be dodged, parried, and blocked by the mob. For the purposes of this discussion let’s stick to white attacks.

A guide on the old Evil Empire site claimed the source of the knowledge about 0.04% per point of difference between weapon skill and defense, and other information, came from the following three blue posts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070105001622/http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-blizzard-archive-en&t=7

https://web.archive.org/web/20070105001622/http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-blizzard-archive-en&t=15

https://web.archive.org/web/20070105001622/http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-bugs&ThreadID=62388

Unfortunately these are no longer accessible, at least not that I could find so I can’t see the wording.

A few of us from one of the classic warrior discords have been doing some testing on beta to verify the hit tables and other mechanics work the way we think. The testing is slow going but we have some preliminary results. Good news is certain things like glancing blow chance and penalties seem to be consistent with previous understanding, at least for +5 wep skill and +0 wep skill. Some testing will need to wait until later beta stages (presuming level cap is raised).

However we have found some strange results for other parts of the hit tables. For each result we also report 95% confidence intervals. Admittedly sample size is lower than we would like but testing is tedious and time consuming to do manually. However, even at these sample sizes some important information can be gleaned.

1. Parry appears to be much too high (13.61% +/- 1.18%) for +3 mobs (no extra weapon skill) and is more consistent with parry values from later expansions. This conflicts with the 0.04% from old blue posts.

2. Dodge (6.73% +/- 0.86%) appears to match later expansion values (wrath, see below). This conflicts with the 0.04% from old blue posts.

3. Block (4.52% +/- 0.71%) appears slightly lower than expected. This conflicts with the 0.04% from old blue posts.

4. Miss (8.41% +/- 0.95%) unfortunately isn’t enough samples to resolve between three prevailing theories on base miss chance for +3 mobs (8%, 8.6%, and 9%), but it’s encouraging that there isn’t a huge surprise here.

5. Based on the base crit (4.49%) for the “Antlered Courser” test, there appears to be an additional crit suppression happening for +3 mobs beyond the expected 0.04% factor. For that test we are seeing a crit of 1.34% +/- 0.6%. Similar results were obtained for the Giant Yeti test, though slightly different due to different paper doll crit. ~3% crit suppression for +3 I believe was a feature of later expansions but was apparently not seen in vanilla according to any old sources.

Combat logs and summaries can be found here:

https://github.com/magey/classic-warrior/issues/5

Additional references:

This site claimed parry was changed to 14% for +3 in cata pre-patch:

https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Attack_table?diff=2413116&oldid=2412483

This site claimed dodge of 6.5% for +3 mobs (wrath):

https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Expertise?diff=1923754&oldid=1918454

This site claimed 5.6% for dodge/parry/block/miss for +3 (5% for +0), perhaps based on the blue posts linked above

http://web.archive.org/web/20061115223930/http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14381707&sid=1

All of this leads us to the following questions:

Is it possible that the creation of the 1.13 client led to some accidental setting of parameters from later expansions?

Would it be possible to verify that the beta is behaving as intended, or misbehaving, by devs comparing to their 1.12 reference client?

Blizzard responded, but still don't have a direct answer:

Parry, Dodge, Miss, etc. (source)

Hi Mirayne,

First off, the QA team wanted to thank you for the exceptionally detailed report. This is a great example of a professional report that utilizes data to support a hypothesis. Well done!

Regarding the potential issue itself, the team is going to take a look at this tomorrow in the reference client and verify that the current functionality is consistent with 1.12. Thanks again for the diligent, detailed analysis!

So, will this one make it to the "not a bug" list or is there really something fishy going on with those combat stats? Place your bets!

[GBeast 33]

well I can definitely say that dodges, parries, misses, blocks, glancing blows, spell resists and partial resists definitely happened hell of a lot more in classic than they do in modern WoW but it is entirely possible that the values are too high pending what the dev team finds.

[ByeIcyVeins 45]

I think it's amazing that a Classic player is taking the time and putting in the effort to glean these numbers from such tedious work. Someone give that human a medal, or a hug, or a medal with a hug on it. Something. Give them something.