The 25th Person
Groups of Words used a term about a month ago, the 25th person:
The Nth person is someone the rest of the raid plays around in order to make sure the common jobs get done. Good healers cover for the bad healer, strong dps makes up for weak dps, everyone covers for the tank who can’t remember to use their cooldowns, etc. This person, for whatever reason, just doesn’t help in raids that much.
And a lot of people have been writing about issues with progression, problems recruiting, guilds falling apart or going back to struggling on farm content. None of these issues are new or limited only to World of Warcraft.
While perusing the items in my feed reader today, I ended up reading a post on the TankSpot forums about meters and some perspective on them. A snippet from Horacio:
There can only be one best in any subset or group. Sometimes the players are evenly matched and compete head to head. Sometimes one is a clear leader. There are things that go into playing each class that are somewhat impossible to explain …. The point is, do your best but if you do not equal the elite player you know or hear of, don’t get down on yourself. The only meter that really counts is the “Boss Dead” meter.
I think there is a lot to be said for that view: that at the end of the day, the Boss Dead meter is the one that counts. Did you, as a raid, get the job done? If yes, can you get the next one? If no, why? Other tools for analysis need to be used at that point.
Sometimes, it’s an issue of gear. Perhaps more farm raiding needs to be done for newer members. Sometimes it’s an issues of skill and training needs to be done.
But sometimes, it comes down to the 25th person.
Every raid has to accomplish a certain number of tasks within a certain time limit to get that Boss Dead meter to tick. Sometimes the constraint is a hard enrage timer, sometimes it is when the healers are out of mana and the tank drops. Sometimes it comes down to how hard the tank is going to get hit (as on Gruul or trying to eat Netherspite’s red beam).
To use Gruul as an example (as that is something the StormSeeker’s are trying to overcome), the mechanics of the fight mean that any normal tank is going to get killed in one blow at some point. The damage output will become larger than can be mitigated. Most guilds aim for 13-17 growths, as I understand things. A number that I have both seen and done the math on, is needing average raid dps for a typical raid setup to be about 500 dps. Note, this is average. Average means for everyone in the raid doing even one point over that, someone else can do less. This basically is the secret to the 25th person, someone else does their work for them and picks up the slack.
This is perhaps okay on farm content, when the average is considerably below what you can do. But on progression content, there isn’t necessarily room for someone to be that far below the average for the raid. In the realm of wishful thinking, your lowest dps, constrained by class and specific mechanics of the encounter, is above the needed average and not far below the group’s real average.
This is why I like to use tools like Recount or WWS. Where am I on the needed and actual averages? Am I carrying or being carried? Who in my raids is falling into those categories? For the people being carried (with regards to needed averages, not actual), is improvement possible or are they incapable or unwilling to move out of the 25th person spot. Given the choice, I would never invite the 25th person, but so many times we are bound by factors of attendance or the nature of the guild to make choices that can almost inevitably lead to failure.
Casual raiding, to me, is the notion that this is okay, that you carry people as much as you can, and then no one gets farther because you are tied more to the 25th person than the Boss Dead meter. Hardcore raiding is saying getting the job done is more important than the 25th person. One being better than the other is a personal choice and tied to what you value.
What really matters is, when you make that commitment to raid, to using 24 other people’s time to accomplish a common goal, are you helping keep the actual average above the needed average. Are you helping get the Boss Dead meter up.
I think the 25th person is the reason so many people and guilds are having problems these days. The edge of progression has cut away the cream of raiders, and as you move down the tiers of raiding, the 25th persons get shuffled down. At some point there is no room for anyone to be carried, so they get dropped, picked up somewhere below and maybe they can function at that level. But then you get out of the hardcore raiding mentality and into the casual mentality and those people don’t get dropped anymore.
Lassirra of The Hunter’s Mark has written two pieces recently about that situation: Casual by Circumstance and a follow-up, More Casual / Hardcore Musings. Both address that issue where personal and guild progression cannot keep ahead of the 25th person and how you should handle those situations.
Know what you want, and know how far you’re willing to go to get it. Always make sure that “the juice is worth the squeeze”. - Lassirra
Gruul’s on Friday REDUX!
It’s been almost a month since I mentioned the Stormseekers were going to be trying to move into 25 man raiding in another post. I thought I would update all of you on how things have been going.
On the personal end, I had a few goals:
- Get a Belt of Natural Power. Done! Pricey to buy the Nether Vortexes and I’ll probably regem it later on, but for now, it is mine.
- Collect the last few badges to get the Embrace of Everlasting Prowess. One daily heroic and a freakishly slow kill-run to Watchkeeper Gargolmar in Heroic ramparts and that was finished up.
- Work on Fishing to get the Eye of the Sea. I think I got my fishing to ten or so. Won’t be pulling a Lurker Below up anytime soon.
- Replace the Gladiators Dragonhide Helm and Spaulders with the Merciless versions. Also done! It took an extra day because I spent 8k honor on the trinket for arenas. The Merciless Gladiator’s Maul and other assorted pieces for my druid are mostly on hold. The shadow priest could use some pvp loving; I’ve been doing arenas on both my feral druid and frost mage, both of whom could benefit from the S2 gear. That’s a lot of PvP and not a lot of time to do it in.
On the whole, not too bad, I think. Now back to the raiding.
That Friday run was interesting. I think we had probably half the raid from our guild, and some friends from other guilds, and some pickups, but we filled it and not too much after start time. We spent two hours on attempts on High King Maulgar and called it. It was a good learning experience and while we had an awesome mage as the mage-tank, he didn’t have gear awesome enough to do the job without super-awesome healers which we had too few of. And I’m not sure if the hunters were meleeing Kiggler, because they dropped super fast.
The Sunday following, however, we went with another guild, Royal Steel, and cleaned out that silly gronn’s cave. The StormSeekers got some valuable raiding experience and walked away with a disproportionate amount of tier pieces. We went back the next week to return some of the favor on that.
We also gave SSC a shot. Had a really easy time clearing trash (sadly no Wildfury Greatstaff) and had a couple of attempts on Lurker. This was not good. Spout killed a lot of people. The melee tanks were slaughtered by the adds without healing or dps. We needed more CC to handle the ranged adds on the island. Ah well, we gave it a go if not our best. We plan on heading back in this weekend and trying to make sushi (and if not, maybe we’ll find a staff on a body somewhere).
This Friday the StormSeekers are again venturing in Gruul’s Lair in fabulous Blade’s Edge Mountains. We plan on spending up to two hours killing ogres and maybe a Gronn or two. If anyone on argent Dawn wants to join, let me know here or in game where you can send a mail or tell to Lushere. We will probably be looking for healers and talented DPSers (by which I mean no 0/0/0 specs, kkthxbai). Good times will be had by some.
Introducing Asaluce
Once upon a time, in the lands to the east of the human city of Stormwind, a young girl staggered under the weight of the heavy mail and the shield she carried as she approached Northshire Abbey. Her father, a member of the Stormwind guard had sent there. She was blessed by the light, he said, and her training would begin at that small hamlet. Someday she would be a great hero standing against the forces of darkness. But today it was hot, she was unused to the weight of armor, and she wanted nothing more than to go home and play with her kitten, Tux.
I am by no means a roleplayer even though I play on Argent Dawn, yet sometimes I think of stories or vignettes for my characters. They never really get expressed and just fade into the mist of memory.
Asaluce has been around for a very long time. After I got my first level 60 character, a hunter, I decided I would roll a priest to be a healer and be able to go on more runs. (Apparently, Part Time Druid had a similar thought. Different outcome.) The priest went shadow, which I love, but that still meant I needed a healer in my stable. Oh, I know, let me try a Paladin!
I have a habit of leveling alts outside of a guild. Sometimes it’s nice to avoid drama or sometimes those people you don’t like or whatever. So I leveled Asaluce until around 35 without a guild tag, then just before I started running Scarlet Monastery, I grabbed a guild invite and one of the first comments was “Welcome, Applesauce.” Quickly followed by “Oh! Sorry Asaluce, I thought that said applesauce.” (Like the RP vignettes, the actual comments have been lost, but that’s the gist.) So I became known as Applesauce the Raladin.
Let me briefly interject here about the name: My first character was Raleena. I made the name up. After joining the Silver Lions someone asked if I was a fan of anime. I said that I enjoyed it and brief discussion ensued and it was suggested I named Raleena after a character from one of the Gundam series. I have never seen that series. After Raleena, moving to Serasong, I decided to start mixing languages. Serasong (evening song - Italian and English) was one of the first, and that was followed by Asaluce (morning light - Japanese and English).
I spent most of my leveling time as protection until 45 or so, then I tried retribution for a bit. It was amazing to me how slowly both of those specs killed anything. Perhaps I comepletely failed at retadin, but something was not working. At 50, I decided to try Holy Shock spec and I quite enjoyed that. It was a lot like Enhancement Shaman with melee and spells interjected. At 60 I thought to try prot again and I Love It. I haven’t done any real tanking yet as I’m still collecting real protection gear but the AoE grinding is so crazy and fun, I have spent a lot of time doing that.
Has the PalAoEadin style corrupted the world of Mostly Kaldorei? Have I fled the ranks of the druid tanks to wear plate and a shield? No. Not at all. My druid Lushere is still my favorite, but she is pretty much done outside of raids. Outside of those requirements I’ve been working on many alts and I think Asaluce will be fun to raid with on our alt raids. I quite like tanking and my warrior will probably tank as well once she gets past 10. I can say that I would have prefered to roll a Night Elf paladin and I will probably roll a Night Elf Deathknight. (but Gnome is calling out to me as well. Something about pink pigtails of death. I dunno) If I had rolled after Burning Crusade I would have picked Draenei, but this was way before the first expansion.
The only problem now, is that I still have no healers! I’m okay with this, frankly I find healing to be tedious and unenjoyable. I will happily shoulder the higher repair costs of the person getting hit (over and over and over) or melt faces instead. I’m sure there will be more to come on the paladin front. Elune The light be with you!
Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part Two: Bear Druids
Hmm. Odd that Cat Form druids get to be kitties, but there is no charming diminutive for Bear druids. I suppose I could be all Alamo about it (Bare Durids!). Anyway, for the kitties, check out part one.
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Bear Form
For tanking druids, the application of Hit and Expertise generally fall into the category of Threat stats. Warriors and Druids generate threat by attacking. Druid threat is largely generated by scaling threat modifiers on damage done, and warrior threat is largely a static amount based on abilities. Different strokes and all that. Paladins have a weird thing going on with a lot of their threat being generated by reactive abilities.
For druids, attacks need to land for threat to be generated. Hit, obviously, is useful for that because it can counter some of the 9% miss chance. Expertise counters the 6% Dodge and 12% parry chance. The block chance cannot be reduced.
It’s a lot harder to quantify threat scaling due to these effects than it is for DPS. As a general statement average optimal TPS (threat per second) will increase by 1% per increase of 1% of Hit chance. It can only be said that that is reflective of optimal performance only. In situations where there are adds or rage issues or any of that, hit may be more or less important.
In terms of threat generation, Expertise is twice as beneficial as Hit because it increases your chance to hit by 2% by reducing both dodges and parries. If you want to stack one to improve threat, Expertise is the way to go until you reach the 6% mark. From the 6% point onward, you have pushed dodges off the attack table and are only reducing parries, so it is equal to Hit as a means of increasing TPS.
The real benefit of expertise is that it is also a mitigation stat. Due to parry mechanics, when a boss parries a blow, its next attack may be sped up:
Parry & Attack Speed Reduction
When you parry an attack, it reduces the time of your next main hand attack. This applies to both players and NPCs, so when an NPC parries an attack its next attack may occur more quickly than normal. Depending on how much time is left until your next attack, one of three things will happen to your main hand swing timer:
- If the next attack would normally occur within 20% of your weapon speed after the parry, there is no effect.
- If the next attack would normally occur between 20% and 60% of your weapon speed later, it happens 20% of your weapon speed later instead.
- If the next attack would normally occur more than 60% of your weapon speed later, the time until your next attack is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed.
For example, with a 2.0 speed weapon, if your next attack would normally occur .3 seconds after the parry, it will still happen at that time. If it would normally occur anywhere between .4 and 1.2 seconds after the parry, it instead happens .4 seconds later. And if it were to normally happen 1.5 seconds after the parry, this would be reduced by .8 seconds causing it to happen .7 seconds later.
The benefit of this is high. If you reached the soft cap on Expertise and reduced parries by 6%, that would reduce the number of incoming attacks and the amount of incoming damage. How much is an amount that is hard to quantify because it is highly situational.
Should you stack Expertise?
Personal preference: I wouldn’t be stacking it on my normal tanking set. I fall onto the Effective Health side of the fence rather than Avoidance right now. When I start building a more avoidance-centric set, I probably will stack Expertise in it. Why? Because the greater avoidance would mean I’d be taking less steady damage, meaning rage generation would be less stable. Being able to hit more reliably will offset some of that, the attacks would hit and the damage from them would help generate rage. Also, a heavy avoidance kit would be sacrificing survival stats and reducing damage by reducing parry gibs would be a good thing.
General Context: If you find survivability is not an issue and can either add Expertise or replace some items to add it, you can increase your threat generation. The more threat you as the tank can generate, the wider you are opening the window for raid DPS to shoot through.
Further Information:
Wanderlei - On Avoidance
Effective Health Theory
Finding the Expertise Hard Cap
Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part One: Kitty Druids
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Cat Form
For Cat form DPS I’ll assume you’d be Shredding and Ripping in a standard DPS rotation. Shred has to be done from behind the target and when attacked from behind a boss cannot parry or block (though nothing can reduce blocks anyway) so we only have to concern ourselves with Misses and Dodges. With no Hit and no Expertise you would miss 9% of the attacks, 6% would be dodged, 25% would be glancing blows (which also we cannot reduce), the remainder would be regular hits and crits.
Here is where the math starts to get fuzzy: Hit, Expertise, and Crit are all scaling effects. Depending on your stats they will all have different inherent values. As a general rule, removing one percent of misses (via Hit Rating) increases the Hit portion of the attack table by 1%, as does removing 1% of dodges (via Expertise Rating). Increasing your crit chance by 1% replaces 1% of your Hit.
Basically, Hit takes 1% that does no damage and lets it do normal damage. Expertise replaces 1% of no damage and makes it do normal damage. Crit replaces 1% of normal damage and makes it do double damage (before talents and meta gems, some of which increase the effect of critical hits and thus the value of Crit Rating). Without taking anything else into consideration, normal attacks on a normal attack table increase damage by 1% no matter which you choose.
Some special attacks, however, are resolved on different combat tables. For instance Rip cannot crit because it is a damage over time effect. Crit does not improve that ability at all, though Hit and Expertise do.
Attacks like Mangle and Shred seem to be on the two-roll system, so an attack has to hit before it can crit (normal attacks do not follow that rule). That increases the value of Hit and Expertise with the marginal increase in crit due to the special attack hitting in the first place.
Based on that, Hit and Expertise provide more benefit than Crit: they affect all attacks and on specials are increased by the marginal increase in crit chance the hit provides.
The talent Primal Fury, however, increases the benefit of Crit. Each time (if you have both points) a combo-point-generating-attack crits, you get not one combo point, but two. Given the time Energy takes to regen, it is not possible to have your four combo-point rip on a twelve-second cycle without having some of your special attacks crit. Even if you were to only Mangle, the 40 energy that costs would take four seconds to regen: the twelve seconds in between rips would only generate three combo points (assuming no misses, dodges, parries, blocks). A four CP Rip would be on a 16 second cycle using only Mangles. Using the higher DPS Shred you end up on an 18 second cycle! That is a 33% reduction in Rip damage (instead of total damage over 12 seconds it is over 18 seconds).
If we had a 33% crit rate, instead of four attacks to generate four combo points, we only need three attacks to do the same. Only using Mangle, generating four combo points would require 12 seconds, just in time to refresh Rip. Shred is improved to a 14 second cycle. At crit rates approaching 50%, mangle would generate those 4 CP in 8 seconds, far faster than Rip could be reapplied.
1% Crit, therefore, increases normal damage by 1%, special damage other than Rip by 1%, and rip damage (through faster CP generation) by up to 33%. 1% Hit or 1% expertise increases normal damage by 1%, special damage by 1% and a bit. In an effort to make this even more complicated, missed specials refund 80% of their cost and missed finishing moves do not. That weighs against the value of Hit/Expertise for specials because the energy cost of a miss is not 100% and Energy is a more scarce resource than global cooldowns (1 second in cat form).
None of that even takes relative values of AP into consideration!
Some people really like Hit and Expertise for keeping dps constant and not missing finishing moves, which is a valid argument. To the best of my knowledge, the dps benefits of any of them weighs out to very similar amounts in real world scenarios (hehe). Which you choose is going to have to be balanced against with the real items you would be equipping and the stat allocation. All of them are good to have.
My advice, is to not worry about Hit and Expertise. With the changes in 2.3 (I think it was 2.3) to Heart of the Wild made pure rogue leather much more attractive since it now operates off the derived stat of AP rather than strength. Most of the rogue gear is going to have some Hit or some Expertise on it, which is nice to have (rogues benefit so hugely from Hit that almost all of their gear should have it). I would never gem or enchant for it, however. And I would never chase pure crit. What comes on gear is nice, but I would focus on Agility. Point for point, the benefits of Agi providing both AP and Crit make it superior to every other stat for Cat DPS.
Additional resources:
ElitistJerks Feral Druid Megathread Check the first few posts for information.
Why is +hit good for DPS? A somewhat dated discussion, but the underlying math has not significantly changed.
