Keep Asking Mr. Robot

So, now I am inclined to do a follow-up post. My last post was semi-scrutinized my Mr. Robot on some faults I made. Let's see if he is right :P

3. Mr. Robot does handle mastery right, and I believe the rounding issues with mastery have all be patched out of the game now.

This one had me scratching my head, did I miss a patch-note somewhere? Now I could try to find it, or I could just watch at the numbers of wrath when I was in solar, and reforge something to mastery, while staying in the 13.5-14% range.... oops, he is right. It seems the damage indeed in-/decreases, even with just a little more/less mastery in the 0.5% range.

2. Mr. Robot does not favor, or disfavor socket bonuses, it all comes down to math for him

Well, I actually knew this, I just...rrrmm... seem to forgot it when I made the post, because I actually put that under the 'use-brain'-catagory... But let's get to this a bit better then. You can actually set how important each stat is. Default gives intellect a 2.97-rating, while spirit is on 2.4. That is not a big difference, and with these numbers 30 spirit will be better then 20 intellect, hence why it seems Mr. Robot favors gem-bonuses.

Now, as a Boomkin, I know my most important stat is intellect, the priority goes something like 'Intellect > Spirit/Hit (till 17%) > Haste >>> Mastery >>>>>>> Crit >>>>>>>>>everything else'. with that notion, all guides say; gem intellect and reforge to hit. Don't gem for hit, unless the socket-bonus is 20 intellect per non-red gem. This is also important, because you can't reforge to intellect, the only way to get more intellect is getting higher Ilvl-gear, or red gems.

Each class has his own very important stat. Melee-plate has Strength, Hunters/Enhance-shammies/Rogues have Agility, and all caster-dps has intellect. So to make this stat more important, you should give it a higher rating in Mr. Robot. I just set the number for intellect on 5 (twice as high as spirit), so that he will always favor red gems, unless of course the gem-bonus is 20 int/non-red socket. You can do the same for you premium-stat.

I now only have one little problem, it is called spellpower. Now SP only sits on weapons and trinkets these days. On weapons it doesn't matter, but with the trinket-slots it becomes more important. Do you want a trinket w/o intellect, but with more spellpower, or one with intellect, with a mastery-proc.

My personal favor always goes to having at least one Intellect-trinket, because, you can not reforge to intellect. And it seems that with putting the number on 5, Mr. Robot agrees.... but maybe I should also put a higher number on spellpower, because of the same reasoning. Use your brain...

1. Mr. Robot does actually account for set bonuses. When it comes to druids, resto/boomkin often do trade off - it's all a stats game

I already said that the stats on the resto-pieces seem to be better then the balance-pieces, the difference is the bonus. 2pT11 gives a 5%-crit bonus to your Moonfire and Insect Swarm. So I found it hard to believe that the resto-pieces where better. So I digged a little deeper, and found that Mr. Robot favors the chest and legs over the resto-pieces, so you do get the bonus. (I concur that the current 4pT11-bonus is not worth taking). Also, if you put the filter on T11-gear only, the whole thing shifts again, and indeed goes towards the balance-set. So the problem lies with T12.

Current theorycrafting says that you should go for 2pT11+2pT12, which seems ok. The problem lies that the 2pT11 bonus probably is not worth taking on a single target, but increases with more targets. My guts tells me that the difference on single-target is probably only about 100dps, so unless you are in a Hardcore-raiding guild, it is probably not that high of a difference.

TL;DR
1. They are right with their corrections.
2. I am still right with my hit-comment, but that's another discussion.
3. It is an excellent tool. Mr. Robot gives you a setup with your current gear which min/maxes you. It tidies up your reforges, which will get out of control, if you don't do a total-reforge once in a while, and it also does the little things, like reforging mastery->hit on one piece, while doing hit->mastery on another to get you closer to hit-cap. But do set your premium-stat high.

Ask Mr. Robot

Because of the recent FL-raid, I looked again at my gear, and where I maybe could improve even more. Now I had been aware of a site for sometimes, but really never used it that much. The site is Mr. Robot.

This site does about the same thing the now abonded be.imba.hu did, except for the whole guild-scan. It shows you where you maybe should use other enchants/gems/reforges. And as extra, also has a nice list of BiS-items. Here's the link my character:

Mr. Robot breaking down Mardah

Now there are some things to remember. Most Importantly: Do Not Leave Your Own Brains At The Door. There are a few problems with Mr. Robot, not that bad though.

If you look at the BiS-slot of some of the tier-slots (head/shoulder/chest/hands/legs), Mr. Robot has the tendency to place the resto-kit higher then balance-kit for Balance-druids. So, it doesn't take into account the set-bonus. Let's look at the legs, according to Mr. Robot, the Resto-legs should give a potential dps-increase over the balance-legs by 90dps. Which I should remember, if I ever get flooded with Valorpoints... then I should probably purchase them.

Through some testing, it also seems Mr. Robot favors gem-bonuses, in my link, you see a red square around the 2 red gems in my chest. If I optimize, Mr. Robot puts two Purified Demonseyes in there, lowering my Intellect with 30, but gaining 40 spirit. I myself don't consider that a good trade-off, so I kept the reds, and didn't reforge my Off Hand away from hit. Which also presents another problem of Mr. Robot.

In some of the set-ups I tried, Mr. Robot lets me reforge/gem towards 1740/1741 hitrating, while I need 1742 to be capped. Now you can speculate a lot about whether a 0.01 or 0.02% chance to miss will actually matter, but I just can't live with that. Murphy's Law clearly states that 'If something can go wrong, it will go wrong', so here my brains took over, and edited the result of Mr. Robot. So I am now at 1750 hitrating, which means I loose 8 stat-points, but at the same time, I know I will not miss for sure.

And last hiccup has to do with mastery. Now mastery works in a strange way. You only get an increase in bonus at every half-point percentage. so 13.51% mastery will give the same bonus as 13.99%. That is something Mr. Robot doesn't see, he thinks mastery is better then crit (which is true), and will want to reforge you to highest percentage mastery as possible. So if you find yourself close to such a breakpoint after reforging, consider to actually lowering your mastery, for some extra crit probably.

Now, I didn't only spot little mistakes my Mr. Robot. I also had some little surprises. First off, according to the BiS-list, the Darkmoon Card: Volcano is listed as the best for even T12. Now I wasn't tempted to buy it pre-patch 4.2. My Dps was high enough, but with the min/maxing state I was in.... and it only costed me 4.5k.

The other strange thing was that Mr. Robot favored the Helm of the Blind Seer over my T11-head (and the resto-head even higher). Now I don't have 4pcT11, and to be honest, the bonus was nerfed that hard, that I actually don't consider taking it even (not that I have the shoulders, but alas). But at first sight, I would say the Seer-helmet is worse then the T11-piece, because the latter has a lot more haste. The problem lies in the fact that it also has no spirit. If I equip the T11-piece, I should reforge my haste away on the DMC:Volcano, and some mastery on other sets, resulting in a 0.24% haste loss, and 1% mastery-loss. So the seer-head is better in my current-gear setup.

I also considered buying the resto-head, but next week I will buy my T12-gloves, and then the T11-head comes back for the bonus. The result of two days min/maxing and theorycrafting, and the fact that I got my T12-chest last night, is an increase of around 60 intellect, 2,4% Haste, 2% Mastery, and a loss 1.75% crit. Now don't think that comes mainly due to the T12-chest. That one is mostly responsible for the int-increase. After replacing the Scorched Wormling Vest with the T12 last night, the net gain was 0.34% Haste and 1% Mastery, so most of the Haste-increase came to smarter reforging.

TL;DR
1. Mr. Robot doesn't see Set-Bonuses
2. Mr. Robot tends to favor gem-bonuses
3. Mr. Robot doesn't always put you over hit-cap
4. Mr. Robot doesn't understand Mastery
but most importantly off course, I tend to get a bit confused after reforging every time, and Mr. Robot will clear that up for you. First time I checked, almost all my reforges where red. This comes mainly due to getting new gear, and not reforging all your gear, but only some to get over the hitcap again. Leaving you with a sub-optimal setup.
5. Mr. Robot will clear up your reforges
6. Don't leave your brains at the door.

[RED: due to the response I had, I re-read my article, and should state that I indeed not counted for the statweight-option although 'use brain' accounts for that a little, read the response :p]

Going into Firelands: Shannox

And there is the wall again.

After two weeks farming trash, pulling some bosses just to see them (spider and steering giant). And also clearing BoT and BWD to get some more gear for people, last night we had our first real Firelands-Raid. Target:Shannox.

At the end of the night, some conclusions where made. First: we where making progress, but Second: to low dps from the raid, so we went over the 10-minutes mark.....ouch.

At the end someone threw the number of 23k dps average around, which made me and Gunho go into a little theorycrafting. First that number 23k is unreachable at the moment. At our last attempt, I think I made almost no mistake. Focusing on Rageface till second spear, then dotting all three up, with almost all the spells cast at the right time. I may get 500dps more if it was earlier on the evening (hey, I am human after all), but that would be it. I had 15.8k dps, and was the highest of the raid, with Gunho following closely, and 3/4 others also around that 15-16k dps-range.

But that 23k is way to high. I took my calculator, and came to a raid-average of 17k with 15 dps, and the 3 tanks doing 15k. Well, that number is reachable methinks. This week some people will probably get 2pT12 (not me though), and than 18k is doable. Problem is, 18k is the average.... and we still have some people with to low gear, because of some new recruits.

But, there are some problems we face now. The most important is players getting Iceblocked. On our last attempt, I turned around to DoT Shannox, and saw three, yes THREE iceblocks, that weren't there 5 seconds before. I don't know the exact hp of the blocks, but they will probably cost you 500dps-average methinks. So getting out of these traps should be a high priority, forget everything, run out of them.

And then there are the times Rageface jumps into an Icetrap, RNG happens. I saw that that Iceblock was also targeted for destruction. It shouldn't. He will get out of it, and all dps on that iceblock is wasted. Everyone should ignore rageface for those 5 seconds, and hit Shannox probably.

And third, the Immolation-traps. Now, let's be clear, I myself am not familiar enough yet to keep the two traps from each other, although I am almost there :p. But if Rageface is alive, he should be immolated as often as possible. First of, he will be damaged by them, which helps the raid-dps. But most importantly, immolation will place a 9-second debuff on the hound, which increase damage taken by 40% (iirc). That will help A LOT. It will potentially lower the dps-average needed by around 1.5k.

With all this in mind, I actually think that he is almost beatable at this moment, it requires no mistakes though, and a high uptime of immolation on the dogs.

And for the record. My average Ilvl at the moment is 360, Innovation hasn't done any heroics, so most people will be around that now. Also raid-dps-average goes 1k up/down with the amount of dps present, so 14dps should bring 18k, and 16dps should bring 16k, and this is with a little safety-factor build in.

Mathemathics:
Rageface:33.7M hp + Riplimb:33.7M hp + Shannox:81.6M hp = 159M hp
159M hp / 600 seconds = 265k dps
265k dps - 15k dps (tanks) = 250k dps
250k dps / 15 dps-players = 17k dps-average (rounded up)

TL;DR-version:
1. Get out of the Ice-Traps
2. Don't target the Iceblock containing Rageface/Riplimb, hit Shannox.
3. Immolate Rageface whenever possible.
4. Bring 17k dps on average. (with 15 dps-players that is)