AoM change - wand hit rates in gutter

Discussion in 'Mages' started by Twisty, Jan 2, 2015.

  1. Twisty Well-Known Member

    TL;DR - I believe wand hit-rates were changed to be determined by CRUSHING instead of FOCUS skills by accident

    To be precise, I believe the change actually happened 1 patch prior to the AoM patch. That's when I started seeing Crushing skill-ups from simply auto-attacking. It was odd, i had a dagger in main-hand, but just in case I double-checked that I had forced-ranged selected.

    Go thru your AoM parses and check your hit rates. All mages' auto-dmg in my guild has horrible hit rates. Pre AoM i was routinely in 93-97% hit range in raids. Now 80% is 'pretty-good' and on AE fights (not fully debuffed mobs) it often drops into 50-60% range. Not all zones created equal either - hit rates in Pools are abysmal, pretty good in High Hold, medium-bad in Pirates. Variation might be in part due to raid-slacking on debuffs on some fights who knows, but overall hit-rates are very visibly and undenyably down for wand dmg. Scout hit rates do not appear to have suffered the same fate.

    These 2 observations lead me to conclude that wand hit-rates are now controlled by Crushing skill instead of Focus, which would explain the significant drop in hit rates. My Crushing is about 300 less than Focus.

    I was temporarily excited by a Eureka about the AoM-introduced feature to change weapon damage types with a crafted doohickey. Figuring they changed this on the sly but put in the game mechanics to fix it on our own. But the doohickey is an expensive experiment and doesn't work on my 95 wand that's better than AoM crafted. So instead I got me a poison-damage wand from HKC. And it appears to have the same bad hit-rates as the crushing-dmg wand, so that theory is probably bust.

    I would be real curious to see what skill-ups would happen from using the poison-dmg wand. Unfrotunately that's sort of hard to test for me - need a 96+ mage to level up with a non-crushing wand to see. If anyone has the toon + non-crushing wand to test it, please chime in with the results.

    Also if you've gone ahead and changed your wand dmg via the doohickey, please also chime in on your hit rates. On the rather unlikely chance that the natively-poison wand would work internally different from a natively-crushing wand that was doohickeyed to poison.
  2. Veta Well-Known Member

    After looking a your profile Twistyd there is an easy way to check this. Get some magical skill adorns, because of the focus skill, and see if your wand auto damage changes that will give you an idea. I do not think wands have changed as my wand dps has not done anything but increase since AoM release and is usually at 97% hit rate and up. It is usually a little lower on ae fights around low 90s to upper 80s.

    I am not sure why changing the damage type would change the hit rates though, if anything it would change the amount of damage because of the checks versus resist instead of mitigation.
  3. Twisty Well-Known Member

    Veta (or anyone else willing), can you humor me pls. Find me your wand hit rates on these fights. I'll update my post as I get more o_O-worthy rates
    Here's mine:

    4 Grimlings: #1 - 57%, #2 - 60% (only 1 or 2 block/parry, rest misses)
  4. Veta Well-Known Member

    So I played around with some white adorns last night out of curiosity to your post. An incandescent adornment of magical skill greater (34 focus etc) increased my wands base damage by ~800. So wands are still affected by focus. When I get on tonight, if I remember, I will post hit rates and accuracy/skill stats.
  5. Veta Well-Known Member

    For the gremlins fight specifically, I cleared my logs recently and only had the 1 most recent pull. My hit rate for my wand was 99.18%. This was without the necro in raid or a lock in my group so my accuracy was at 15% and my focus is at 1.4k unbuffed.
  6. Twisty Well-Known Member

    This is driving me bananacrazy. I'm missing close to a million dps on some AE fights to this poo. i'm at 1.3k Focus, 19accuracy solo, nothing really changed from last xpac gear-choice/reforge-wise. We have usually 1 or 2 brigs in raid. Any wild guesses on what we can be missing? All the mage hit-rates in raid are as awful as mine or worse. This is mostly the same raid members/toons as last xpac where we most definitely did not have this problem - i was hovering around 98-99% rates on single target.

    Pirates 1st boss: 78%
    Pirates 2nd boss: 91%

    Pools 1st boss: 92%, 95%
    Pools 2nd boss: 94%
    Pools 3rd boss: 80%
    Pools 4th boss: 94%

    I'll load up on skills adorns for next week raiding, to see if there is any noticeable difference a 100focus can do and will report back, but not really keeping my hopes up for that. Gotta be something else :(
    Kraeref likes this.
  7. Veta Well-Known Member

    Well your hot rate is lower specifically on fight where adds etc contribute to the fight. There adds alone can easily affect your hit rate. Lets use the forst pirate fight for example. Everyone does it differently, but in the script adds will spawn no matter how you do it. So lets say one of your tanks pick up the adds, pathing/placements can be an issue. Some of the adds could be facing in your direction meaning extra defense mechanics would take place and you would need stats like strikethrough in order to increase your hit rates. Its not necessarily you, as we can see on your single target fights. It seems to be the fight scripting itself.

    If you recall or see on the next pull that nothing is facing you then your group setup could have some affect although I would not expect a major difference. You are probably in a standard mage group setup, so I do not see where that could be an issue.
  8. Nezette Well-Known Member

    ^ This. Plus, also be aware of mob immunities. Like, I recall scouts freaking the crap out on Telk in Maw "zomg, brawler mobs... why?!" When really (for one, it wasn't a brawler mob...) it was an issue of mobs not being affected by certain damage types. Some are AE immune, too. You might want to pull up ACT to see if there are certain times or mobs (adds) that you're more regularly missing on-- that'll give you a better idea of what you're working with.

    It looks like your current stats have you around 94-95% and when you're lower it's due to outside contributing factors. 1300 could be a bit low with the new lvl cap; I know that would be low for my weapon skills.

    That said, what do I know?! But, Veta's comments seem completely on-point.
  9. Veta Well-Known Member

    Only mob that has AE immune adds is the Idol in Zavith'loa raid which are the fearling things that look like ro pet. If they are AE immune that would not or at least should not affect your hit rate as they cannot be hit by AE stuff, I could be wrong on that though. As for brawler mobs I do not recall any off the top of my head, but as a mage I dont particularly have to pay attention to what class a mob is as a melee class would.
  10. Twisty Well-Known Member

    Boys, i'm way smarter than u give me credit for, promise. You wouldn't see this post if frontals was the answer.

    Pirates 1st boss: 78%
    * 730 swings
    * 3 blocks, 9 parries
    * math says => 80% corrected for frontals

    Pools 3rd boss: 80%
    * 402 swings
    * 5 parries, no blocks
    * math says => 81% corrected for frontals


    Only hope for suggestion that mob level went up with xpac (what was it like 7 levels?), so perhaps need to raise focus by 7*20 or something?

    Will report back with another 160ish focus
  11. Twisty Well-Known Member

    added 12.3accuracy first before going Focus route

    67% on Grimlings. obviously this doesn't solve the whole problem, and might easily be just a statistical deviation of same avg. but had 6 block+parries in that, so encouraging at least partially.

    will try running with Focus adorns for a while now. will update
  12. Veta Well-Known Member

    This reminds me of your accuracy :D

  13. Mogrim Well-Known Member

    I'm willing to bet it is focus skill.
  14. Mogrim Well-Known Member

    That said, I largely reforged out of DPS etc so now I sit at 300dps/120ma/120attack speed self buffed instead of the nearly 600/150/150 that we used to run
  15. Azian Well-Known Member

    Pushing ever higher on the casting speed conversion to DC instead or did you have another target for the reforging?
  16. Mogrim Well-Known Member

    Mod. 70k or bust! :)
  17. Entropy Well-Known Member


    Heck yeah! I dropped the melee stats awhile ago, and don't regret it. Haste comes from group buffs on raid, MA is easy to soft cap, and DPS can sit around 300 without sacrificing much. Everything else goes to Mod. Everything.
  18. Veta Well-Known Member

    I wish i could make use of 70k mod. On that note, I wish I could make use of the 40k mod I have on more than 1 ability lol.
  19. Twisty Well-Known Member

    Ok, so it was +Focus skills after all, due to mob level increase and no corresponding +Focus increase on gear. Thanx for that chain of thought, Veta & Nez. Now just to zero in on exactly how much is needed.

    Will report back as I gather enough data points
  20. Twisty Well-Known Member

    Bumped +Focus by 200 to 1500.

    Pools 1st boss: 92%, 95% - > 98%
    Pools 2nd boss: 94% - > 100%
    Pools 3rd boss: 80% - > 98%, 100%
    Pools 4th boss: 94% - > 100%

    Pirates 1st boss: 78% - > 92%
    Pirates 2nd boss: 91% - > 98%

    Will hang around with 1500 for a bit until i have good datapoints for Temple & Cathedral before trying to scale down some.
    Ajjantis likes this.