8.29.2006

BC Talent Preview: Surprise Attacks

Suprise Attacks
Requires 1 point in Adrenaline Rush
Requires 40 points in Combat Talents
Your Sinister Strike, Backstab, and Gouge can no longer be dodged.

Melee attack ruleset explained here
Energy regen explained here

Assuming a typical melee attack table of a well equiped rogue and a backstab damage of B. Energy loss for miss/dodge/parried backstab is 11.

00-04 Dodge (5%)
05-09 Parry (5%)
10-44 Crit (35%)
45-99 Hit (55%)

Damage WITHOUT Surprise Attacks

Total damage = 1.355B
Total Energy Cost = 55.1
Total CP gain (without SF) = 0.9

DPE = 0.0246B
CP per Energy = 0.01633

With Surprise Attacks, it effectively move Dodge out of the melee roll table, so now the table will look like:

00-04 Parry (5%)
05-39 Crit (35%)
40-99 Hit (60%)

Damage WITH Surprise Attacks

Total damage = 1.405B
Total Energy Cost = 57.55
Total CP gain (without SF) = 0.95

DPE = 0.0244 B
CP per Energy = 0.01652

Surprise Attacks thus in decrease your DPE by 0.8% and increase your CPE by 1.1%. The slight decrease in DPE will be offset by the slight increase in CPE. In other words, your white DPS will be flat.

The only time it will be useful is when you are fighting at the Crit cap. Consider an target with 90% dodge (a rogue with evasion).

Before -> Target
00-04 Dodge (5%) -> 00-89 Dodge (90%)
05-09 Parry (5%) -> 90-94 Parry (5%)
10-44 Crit (35%) -> 95-99 Crit (5%)
45-99 Hit (55%) -> 99-99 Hit (0%)

Your Crit is capped by the high dodge andd parry of your target. Now if we are to remove dodge from the table, it will look like:

00-89 Dodge (90%) -> 00-00 Dodge (0%)
90-94 Parry (5%) -> 00-04 Parry (5%)
95-99 Crit (5%) -> 05-39 Crit (35%)
99-99 Hit (0%) -> 40-99 Hit (60%)

Surprise Attacks will be extremely benefitial at this situation.


To find out for how much dodge, crit, etc will Surprise Attacks actually increase DPS, we have to solve some fucking nasty equation:

Assuming special attack damage of SAD, crit rate of C, dodge rate of D, parry rate of P, miss rate of M.

No SA:
Crit damage = MIN [(100 - M - D - P), C] * 2.3 SAD
Non Crit damage = MAX [(100 - M - D - P - C), 0] * SAD
Energy Cost = 100 * 60 + (M+D+P)*11

SA:
Crit damage = MIN [(100 - M - P), C] * 2.3 SAD
Non Crit damage = MAX [(100 - M - P - C), 0] * SAD
Energy Cost = 100 * 60 + (M+P) * 11

DPE WITH SA > DPE WITHOUT SA
(MIN [(100 - M - D - P), C] * 2.3+ MAX [(100 - M - D - P - C), 0] ) / [100 * 60 + (M+D+P) * 11] > (MIN [(100 - M - P), C] * 2.3 + MAX [(100 - M - P - C), 0] ) / [100 * 60 + (M+P) * 11]

Yay for a massive 4 variable inequality equation. Take out block and parry if you believe Blizzard fixed the bloc/parry from behind bug.

Simplifying by assuming you won't miss or parry:
(MIN [(100 - D), C] * 2.3+ MAX [(100 - D - C), 0] ) / [100 * 60 + 11D] > (MIN [100, C] * 2.3 + MAX [(100 - C), 0] ) / (100 * 60)
(MIN [(100 - D), C] * 2.3+ MAX [(100 - D - C), 0] ) > (2.3C + 100 - C) / (6000) * (6000 + 11D)
(MIN [(100 - D), C] * 2.3+ MAX [(100 - D - C), 0] ) > (1.3C + 100) * (6000+ 11D) / (6000)

(MIN [(100 - D), C] * 2.3+ MAX [(100 - D - C), 0] ) > 1.3C + 100 + 14.3CD/6000 + 1100D/6000

Alright. I gave up here. Something is wrong here. There is no way in hell for me to crunch through this and I probably made thousands of errors up to this point, but if anyone could please plot this simple 2D piece of shit on Excel or Matlab, I would helluva appreciate it.

EDIT: fucking bloggers killed my work, but I have simplified the equation into 3 cases and done some math.

Summary:
SA will increase your DPS only at the shaded region of the below graph, with Dodge being the y-axis and Crit being the x-axis. The boundry condition will be dodge + crit = 100. What does it all mean? SA is FUCKING USELESS under most conditions.
EDIT 2: Disregard the above graph. Somehow my brute force calculation is just a brain fart. Need to do something on Excel once I figure out how do. The equations are true.

More to come: BC Talent Preview: Mutilate

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn, that's a sick equation. Maybe by them time I hit 70, my head'll wrap around it. Until then, I'll just enjoy my revamped Combat Daggers build.

Rock out, VitC.

Anonymous said...

"SA:
Crit damage = MIN [(100 - M - D - P), C] * 2.3 SAD
Non Crit damage = MAX [(100 - M - D - P - C), 0] * SAD
Energy Cost = 100 * 60 + (M+D+P)*11
"
How it is come that SA uses dodge in formulas, and "No Sa" is not?

VitaminC said...

got them reversed :p
fixed.

Anonymous said...

I think you are ignoring the white dmg, that incredibly increases with Suprise Attacks (as you don't "lose" energy to a non crit.). The difference between a white hit oder dodge is 100%.

VitaminC said...

surprise attack doesn't effect white damage (only SS, BS, Gouge).

Anonymous said...

you might also want to consider the fact that this just might be a pvp talent.. i'd like to see a rogue hitting evasion against this baby, or a hunter using monyeyism

Anonymous said...

I have a couple of small criticisms of your line of thought here. Assuming that this isn't intended to be a talent useful alone in PVP (I do not think that it is), Then the other situations we're talking about are PvE raids at the level cap. Rogues in raids do not often have to worry about parry given that a target can not parry from behind so I think it's worth considering what happens when a target can not Dodge or Parry your Backstabs or SS's attacks any longer. It would seem that it would increase the effectiveness of %to hit related stats, compensating for the DPS you lose to glancing blows and dodges in your normal attacks. Also consider the unknown variables in the expansion at lvl 70 (a ridiculously far ways away); What if mobs become incredibly talented at dodging? What if the end game calls you to battle mobs much higher relatively than the ones we are used to now? It also seems to me that this talent favors Backstab rogues greatly, given the higher energy and DPS invested into each attack. Given Multilate, I do not think that as many sword rogues will remain deep in combat any longer. I think it's a little early to pronounce this talent "worthless in most situations".

Anonymous said...

we can make it more simple.
i consider only backstabbing and ignore bugs

From behind for our backstab:
Miss chance of special attack = 0
Parry and block = 0
glancing = 0

so with Suprise Attacks the hit table became:
CRIT (C%)
HIT (100-C%)

without the talent is
dodge (5%)
Crit (c%)
Hit (100-c-5%)

as you can see you are doing always more damage with Suprise Attacks.

what we have to discover is how much ?

lets translate oue backstab Damage (BD) into BDps

with Suprise Attacks BDps = (2BD*C/100 + BD*(100-C)/100)/6 = (2BD*C + 100BD - BD*C)/600 = BD * (C + 100) / 600

without Suprise Attacks BDps = (2BD*C/100 + BD*(100-C)/100)/ SECONDS FOR EVERY BACKSTAB

SECONDS FOR EVERY BACKSTAB = EFFECTIVE BACKSTAB ENERGY COST / ENERGY PER SECOND

assume that a dodged backstab = 11 energy lost

not make a perfect calc but approx it, i think it can be enough if we not consider that sometime we can have dodge more that one backstab in a row
EFFECTIVE BACKSTAB ENERGY COST = (95 * 60 + 5 * 71) / 100 = 60,55

SFEB = (2BD*C/100 + BD*(100-C)/100) / 6,055 = BD * (C + 100) / 605,5

so difference is:

BD * (C + 100) / 600 - BD * (C + 100) / 605,5 =
BD * (C + 100) * (1/600 - 1/605,5) =
BD * (C + 100) * (0.001666667 - 0.001651527) =
BD * (C + 100) * 0,00001514

assuming current not so good values:
crit rate of 35%
non crit backstab of 750

the difference is = 135*750*0,00001514 = 1.532925 DPS (mmm not so good)

with crit rate 50%
non cri backstab of 1200

the difference is = 150*1200*0,00001514 = 2.7252

it does not seem too good for pve.
it does seem really powerfull for pvp

Anonymous said...

i'm so stupid i know...
i did not read well your post.

Anonymous said...

why are you assuming that the Dodge is being purely converted to hit. Wouldn't it make more sense for a fraction of it to also become crit chance and thus allow the talent PVE utility?

VitaminC said...

Because WoW (and most other RPG out there) operates on a single roll system. Your crit rate will remain the same regardless of how frequently you are hitting.

**In other words, your crit rate is based on the total number of swings, not based on the number of landed hits.**

You can observe your crit rate during long PvP sessions and 40men PvE raids, and they will be similar to each other despite the dodge/parry/block profile of your target varies from rogues w/ evasion to casters with no parry.

Anonymous said...

This looks like a really sucky skill.
sword rogues mostly use SS to build CPs, and then get that lovely dodge on evis. All this skill will do is remove the 1sec lost when there is a dodged SS
Why is Hemo not getting this love too? It too is used to build CPs
The gain for BS is even worse, since per 30 sec cycle you have even less dodges that are mitigated, but at least ur finisher can't be dodged.

Anonymous said...

The skill has been updated with +8%? damage. and the new %chance to regain energy from the new skills should also change the result. planning an updated analysis any time soon?

slyness said...

There seems to be a decrease in dps for a combat dagger rogue or a combat fist rogue at lv 60 when you give up lethality and such to get the talent.
This is with the high crit rate due to both skills. Combat swords are another story. I crit around 20 or so percent and the benefits from lethality are about .2(crit%)*.3(lethality)= 6% damage increase. Surprise attacks adds 8% damage to sinister strikes right off the bat as well as reducing energy loss due to dodges. That's 5 pts in assasination-lethality vs 1 pt in combat. Helluva 41 pt talent. For combat swords especially this skill is awesome. As for at level 70 i don't know what the combat tables are and how much agility will equal 1% crit at that level so i have no idea.