Level 80 boss AP

[Deckard]

Since I haven't seen any studies done on level 80 boss AP yet, a hunter and myself did some demo shout tests on Maexxna tonight. The results were surprising!

The raw data:

Demo shout talent points  |  AP reduction  |  Damage range  |  Change from previous
0/5   410.0   17169-24450
1/5   442.8   16978-24259   -191
2/5   475.6   16787-24068   -191
3/5   508.4   16596-23877   -191
4/5   541.2   16405-23686   -191
5/5   574.0   16220-23501   -185

This indicates that Maexxna (and presumably other level 80 bosses) has 573 attack power, which a warrior would need a full 5/5 Improved Demo Shout to negate. It also suggests that the Warlock talent Frailty should be taken anytime Curse of Recklessness is being used.

[Kazeyonoma]

hrm interesting! thanks for the testing. guess 5/5 is optimal wonder if you can reduce it even further than that butt with the way they stacked buffs/debuffs now from various classes it's probably not likely.

[blackhand]

Interesting, I really would like to know the hard facts on this.

[Geostigma]

Interesting indeed, however I would love to know if this counts for all the new bosses. As having CoR up is a massive buff for our melee.

[Kavtor]

As having CoR up is a massive buff for our melee.

A druid's faerie fire will apply the same armour reduction, with out the attack power penalty.

Good info to know, thanks for checking it out!

[Nyidi]

For the curious, here's the screenshots.

I had to disable some tooltip addons to get Beast Lore to display, thus the odd conversation at the start.

http://affamu.org/pics/Maexxna0.png
http://affamu.org/pics/Maexxna1.png
http://affamu.org/pics/Maexxna2.png
http://affamu.org/pics/Maexxna3.png
http://affamu.org/pics/Maexxna4.png
http://affamu.org/pics/Maexxna5.png

[swelt]

Has anyone put any thought into who might be best placed in a raid to apply a talented AP reduction debuff?

Warrior:
Improved Demo Shout, 5 talent points in tier 2 fury. Likely requires a Fury/Arms warrior to sacrifice Commanding Presence (so possible loss of raid AP without a ret pally or raid hp). Harsh sacrifices for a prot warrior to take. Opportunity cost of upkeep is low for DPS warriors that will generally have spare GCDs and rage.

Feral Druid:
Feral Agression in tier 1 Feral tree, also increases ferocious bite damage. I don't know bear builds well enough to know what they would sacrifice to take 5/5. Opportunity cost of upkeep if tanking is low, but if not tanking I'd think they'd want to be in cat form and afaik there is no 'Demoralizing Mew'.

Warlock:
Frailty is 2pts in tier 2 Affliction. Again, I don't know warlock builds well enough to understand the talent sacrifices but a quick look at standard lock builds on EJ indicates that neither demo or destro locks tend to spend anything in affliction. Also worth noting that the Frailty talent is also the one that allows curse of recklessness without giving the boss an AP boost, so you'd need more than 1 or Faerie fire instead of CoR. Opportunity cost of upkeep I think is high, as the lock wouldn't be able to use a damage curse, or their talented curse of elements for example.


This probably isn't that important now, but assuming that Ulduar is harder, maybe it will be in the future. As I see it, looks like a good job for the DPS warrior, as it has the lowest opportunity cost and talent sacrifice. I originally thought it might be the Affliction Locks that looked best, given that it's only 2 talent points for them, but I don't think it works out like that... Anyone understand locks a bit better?

[Captain Fizz]

With respect to Feral Aggression, not many druids will take that.
(If they have taken it, they are gimping themselves - As the Ferocious Bite, even with 5/5 in this is still not as energy efficient in kitty as other moves - Tanking has other talents with a more pressing need/more benefit per talent point)

Affliction, at this stage in the game is currently the highest DPS spec.
Also the hardest to play. (So rarely you'll see an affy lock doing top DPS unless they are skilled - Luckily ours is and does come top3 every fight)
But - it looks like Frailty isn't taken...
The World of Warcraft Armory

Again at this stage in the game, mana is more of an issue. Once Imp Life-Tap isn't required (full Naxx-25 gear?) then Frailty may be taken... Don't know tho.

Our arms warrior doesn't have the imp shout either. :/

Um... looks like we just need to heal more at the moment :P

[blackhand]

A druid can get 3/5 Without losing any mitigation talents. Though really only Cat druids will ever see 5/5 Feral Aggression and they won't be putting that up.

[Nspirn]

Bump on this, anymore information available?

I'd like to know 25man patchwerks attack power.

[JackDanielz]

Imho, it's actually not worth it if it only recuces the damge by ~1k pre-mitigation... that's only about 350 with inspiration ( for a warrior :P)

I'd like to see maexxna's dmg range without demo shout at all, because I haven't seen any information about its effect without talents either

[Ceravantes]

Imho, it's actually not worth it if it only recuces the damge by ~1k pre-mitigation... that's only about 350 with inspiration ( for a warrior :P)

I'd like to see maexxna's dmg range without demo shout at all, because I haven't seen any information about its effect without talents either

The point is using CoR would increase the AP even more. So AP reduction becomes more important.

[Corbusier]

The point is using CoR would increase the AP even more. So AP reduction becomes more important.

Except that you should just be using Imp FF, since the debuffs don't stack anymore.

[e9325681]

Any news on this topic?

[Morgo]

with dual spec coming up, any news?

[Kerg]

with dual spec coming up, any news?

/bump

Assuming the above data from Maexxna applies to all bosses, 5/5 Improved Demo would be about a 4.5% reduction in incoming damage. About equal to adding 1850 armor to someone with 24,000 armor.

Not bad.

Commanding Presence adds 564 hp.

With dual specs coming out, it might not be a bad idea to have one of your specs as a max survivability spec, something like this...

5/15/51

Put Last Stand and Shield Wall glyphs w/ the spec, for 2 min. cooldowns on each, and you'd max out your survivability... at the cost of quite a bit of threat, of course, from losing Impale/Deep Wounds and Improved HS, so it wouldn't be appropriate for every boss fight.

[Fenier]

I also posted this here

I ran two tests this evening, and while a small sample size the tests were consistent enough to lead me to seek verification that my math is correct.

Important Notes:

All values are verified using a hunter and Beast Lore.
Testing done on normal level 80 mob and an elite level 80 instance mob.
Same mob used for all 3 test sets in each case (hunter used freezing trap while I used dual spec to test different values)

Test Case 1:

Mob: Infesting Jormungar
Zone: Storm Peaks
Mob Type: Normal

Base Stats:

Melee Damage 421 - 587 Damage

Demoralizing Roar - Base Value of -411 AP

Melee Damage 362 - 528 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 14%
Variance in maximum hit - 10%

Demoralizing Roar - Talented Value of -575 AP

Melee Damage 339 - 505 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 19.5%
Variance in maximum hit - 14%

Test Case 2:

Mob: Azure Mage Slayer
Location: Heroic Violet Hold
Mob Type: Elite

Base Stats:

Melee Damage 569 - 792 Damage

Demoralizing Roar - Base Value of -411 AP

Melee Damage 489- 713 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 14%
Variance in maximum hit - 10%

Demoralizing Roar - Talented Value of -575 AP

Melee Damage 458 - 681 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 19.6%
Variance in maximum hit - 14%

Conclusion

I wasn't able to get Beast Lore values on Mexxena, which to my knowledge is the only raid boss capable of having their stats seen via Beast Lore. It stands to reason however that the same code functions on all given NPCs in WoW, and that the AP values are similar across all of Wrath of the Lich King.

Given that the minimum and maximum values scale slightly differently, it still appears to be at least a 12% averaged reduction per hit on the base line ability. This appears to increase to a 16.75% averaged reduction at a fully talented shout / roar.

This leads me to question that by sticking talents into improved shout / feral aggression you end up at a extra 1% damage reduction on incoming melee per talent point, which is what I believe this is suggesting. I'd liken this to mitigation by armor, but it functions differently so I feel the term damage reduction is more viable.

[Fenier]

I asked my girlfriend to get the stats off of Mexxena prior to pull in order to correctly calculate the data provided in the first post of this thread.

Her Base Values are:

19,547 - 26,828 Damage

With Full Roar I can confirm the values of

16,220 - 23,501 Damage

This shows a minimum hit difference of 17.1%
This also shows a maximum hit difference of 12.5%
This is an averaged decrease in melee damage of 14.8%

An important note here is the Raid Boss follows the same pattern as normal non-raid trash, but you don't see quite the same drop off in terms of Damage Reduced.

Trash showed a 14% variance in maximum hit and a 19.6% difference in minimum compared to the verified values above of 12.5% and 17.1%. Even as this seems to be the case in this test, your looking at a less then 2.5% difference between how -575 AP effects the Raid Boss compared to normal trash.

That said, I doubt any tank here would turn down shaving off an additional nearly 15% incoming damage off a raid boss.

Since the base values are now presented we can also determine the difference in Base Damage compared to non-talented shout.

Base Damage: 19,547-26,828
Base Shout: 17169-24450
Shout 1 / 5: 16978-24259

Simply by applying Shout at base rank you reduce the maximum hit of the Spider by 8.9% and the minimum hit by 12.2% or 10.55% averaged.

By adding a talent point to the Shout this changes the base reduction in maximum hit by a very small percentage, my math gets me .8% and the minimum by 1.2% or roughly 1% averaged. This average reduction continues all the way to 5/5 talented, there is a slight curve to the reduction which makes it just under 1% thus shown above which is why fully talented the reduction is 14.8% instead of 15.55% when speaking in context of this particular NPC.

[Radhja]

With the introduction of ToC raiding, is this talent worth going 5/5 for? Deep Wounds has proven effective for a long time, but I'm not farming heroics as much anymore and I want to mitigate those monstrous blows coming from the new raid bosses.

[Kazeyonoma]

I haven't spec'd 15/x/x since ulduar. hardmodes have proven to need survivability for MOST (i say most because I'm sure some guilds do fine without it) fights. If you have a fury warrior who specs it though then you don't need it, but we mostly run arms warriors nowadays and wasting their gcds is more important to me than me using a gcd to keep demo up. I haven't had any threat issues so long as you keep a tight rotation and put vig on smart targets. I even switch vig mid fight if i see the boss casting or something to the top threat person on omen.