If you think this is a troll, you’re a troll. Read all the way to the end.
This was a short project that I said would be helpful quite a while ago but I never got around to doing. It’s general knowledge that sims are predominantly single target and hence relic suggestions are heavily skewed towards single target output. This isn’t necessarily bad – there will always be damage to a main target required, but looking at sims in isolation has a flaw when the way you deal damage to the main target is incorrectly assumed. This report aims to enhance your knowledge using
In the real world, it is extremely rare for a pure single target encounter to exist, and if it does it is unlikely to be an important end boss (unless you want to count The Butcher as the end boss instead of Mar’gok from Highmaul).
So our analysis starts with the current Rank 1 All Stars Feral in Tomb of Sargeras – Quasy (r1) from Overtake (~r222). It’s Rank 1 so you know it’s good. Rather than selecting the best possible log for each encounter, I selected the best rated player and their best log – I think this methodology should be fine for now.
Obtaining the raw data from Warcraft Logs and splitting the .csv using Excel is fairly straight forward, giving you the following:
Now at this stage if you were only looking at the totals, some of you may call Quasy a dirty padder who, with a guild rank of 222 is clearly only able to rank highly because they use pad strats and its big boy Quasy’s week to rank.
Stop bullying Quasy you meanies. Fortunately there is a way to look at the data differently, on a boss-per-boss method and weight each boss accordingly. This is the next step. As you can see in the next image, Swipe and Thrash have zero value on 2 and 3 fights respectively. This is a fair approximation of a typical raid tier.
That’s great, we have the values for each ability – now how do we calculate the trait value? Well we have to make a few assumptions to generate the implied return per trait. Typically high end raiding Ferals are Rake/Rip heavy and Swipe/Thrash trait light. I played with the assumed traits and they don’t end up affecting the end result later on. The formula in general is Implied Gain = Per Trait / (1+Per Trait x Assumed Trait).
So for example if you already have 4 Traits in Swipe, the Implied Gain = 7% / (1+28%) = 5.47%.
Now there are special calculations for Shred and Feral Instinct.
For Shred, I extracted the amount of damage dealt outside of Incarnation (which typically has guaranteed crits) and the crit% of Shred outside of Incarnation and did the following calculation.
Shred Trait = [Shred No Incarn Damage / Total Damage] x [(1.05+crit%)/(1+crit%) – 1]
For Feral Instinct I grabbed all damage dealt while Feral Instinct was active, and did the following calculation:
Feral Trait = Implied Trait x [Damage During FI / Total Damage]
After compiling all of these cool items together, you get the following (in table and graph format):
As expected Feral Instinct out performs on Goroth, and Maiden due to the short fight duration and double damage phase respectively. Swipe and Thrash are excellent on Harjatan, Mistress and Desolate Host.
To conclude, if we were to weight each boss equally (1/9th weighting), we would obtain the following results:
Hence a good recommendation going into Antorus is to ensure you do not undervalue Swipe and FI – on the other hand you don’t want to over-commit to a full AoE build. The real-world data has the following weights:
FI [1.45] > Swipe[1.38] > Thrash[1.02] > Rake[1] > Rip[0.8] > FB[0.5] > Shred[0.41]
This is compared to the current weighting on the Feral Discord:
Rip[1] > Rake[1] > FI[0.8] > Shred [0.7] > Swipe[0.6] > Tiger’s Fury [0.4] > FB[0.3] > Thrash [0.1]
Hence with this data, I recommend the following that you take the following: 2xFI (Best Overall Relic) > 2xSwipe (Best non-ST Relic) > 2xRake (Best non Burst ST Relic)
I believe the Swipe is significantly undervalued, and Shred is significantly overvalued per current recommendations.
Hope this helps. Bless.
Robosaurus was here 