The Case for Haste

T19 tests finished overnight, I don't have a lot of time to analyze them so I'll just post them here for now. Heroic = iLvl 755, Mythic = iLvl 770, boss = 731000 damage.

Mastery-heavy stock gear:


Heroic: https://www.dropbox.com/s/etlm7c1kthkjdqr/t19h_mastery_drd.html?dl=0
Mythic: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9wd6cyk3j00rcj/t19m_mastery_drd.html?dl=0

Balanced gear:


Heroic: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oyhgpx6he2wk4ro/t19h_balanced_drd.html?dl=0
Mythic: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dwptdgmt8ip82ty/t19m_balanced_drd.html?dl=0

Quick thoughts: the balanced gear looks alright, the mastery-heavy gear values haste almost as much as bonus armor towards the end of T19. Stamina loses a ton of value at high gear levels.

I'm going to run all 12 sims again while I'm at work today, but this time I'm changing the Paladin dodge factor from 2.259 to a flat 3.0. It's just a wild guess in an attempt to curb haste's strength at higher iLvls, but these are pretty easy to crank out with the new plot settings so we can try a bunch of different values.

I finished all of the sims with a Paladin Dodge Factor of 3.0 (instead of the live value of 2.259). As usual, the sims are for T17, 18 and 19 heroic and mythic, using the default mastery-heavy gear and the custom mastery/haste balanced sets. In total there are 12 of them.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/war5tvlyyratyn3/divine%20dodge%203.0%20factor.zip?dl=0

The mastery-heavy ones are largely the same as they are with the live dodge factor, haste is exceedingly powerful for every sim. I'm leaving them out of this post for brevity, but if you want to see them, feel free to grab the source above and examine to your heart's content. As a stat summary though, the mastery-heavy set is very slightly worse than the balanced set for all of the sims. The biggest difference is T19M, where the the balanced set beats the mastery set by 800 TMI.

Anyway, let's start out with T17.



The heroic set looks really nice, haste is just above mastery. In the mythic set, it actually gets stronger and almost matches stamina. It doesn't beat it though, so we're still good! I think it's interesting that all of the other stats get squished very close together in mythic sim.

T18:



Haste calms down a bit here and matches up with mastery in both sims. Stamina goes from being very strong to on par with the others once we get to mythic gear. I suppose technically stamina still beats haste in this configuration, so Divine Dodge is still winning.

T19:



Haste is still strong at heroic gear levels, but it falls down to mastery and versatility's level at +1750 rating. I kind of doubt that the boost from T19H to T19M will possibly have that much extra rating on it so I think we can really just stop this graph in the +1000 range, where haste is in-line with stamina. In mythic gear, stamina itself becomes one of the worst stats quite early on so all bets are off. Haste is on top (aside from bonus armor of course) but everything is relatively close in value here. Interestingly, mastery looks like it loses some ground to versatility.

Stat comparison:
T17H Mastery (Live): 21628 dps, 32207 dtps, 22468 hps (10081 aps), 109.9k TMI
T17H Balanced (DD=2.259): 20877 dps, 30584 dtps, 21670 hps (9818 aps), 108.5k TMI
T17H Balanced (DD=3.0): 20886 dps, 30665 dtps, 21695 hps (9847 aps), 108.6k TMI

T17M Mastery (Live): 25097 dps, 28279 dtps, 25589 hps (11376 aps), 97.8k TMI
T17M Balanced (DD=2.259): 24123 dps, 26539 dtps, 24577 hps (11026 aps), 96.1k TMI
T17M Balanced (DD=3.0): 24128 dps, 26658 dtps, 24545 hps (10987 aps), 96.2k TMI

T18H Mastery (Live): 31254 dps, 50014 dtps, 36348 hps (16686 aps), 127.6k TMI
T18H Balanced (DD=2.259): 30011 dps, 46203 dtps, 34886 hps (16250 aps), 124.9k TMI
T18H Balanced (DD=3.0): 30016 dps, 46467 dtps, 34912 hps (16263 aps), 125.1k TMI

T18M Mastery (Live): 36807 dps, 42490 dtps, 41732 hps (19000 aps), 109.4k TMI
T18M Balanced (DD=2.259): 35348 dps, 38533 dtps, 40060 hps (18386 aps), 106.2k TMI
T18M Balanced (DD=3.0): 35365 dps, 38816 dtps, 40165 hps (18490 aps), 106.5k TMI

T19H Mastery (Live): 48236 dps, 72155 dtps, 58451 hps (27966 aps), 143.2k TMI
T19H Balanced (DD=2.259): 46055 dps, 64002 dtps, 56253 hps (27002 aps), 137.4k TMI
T19H Balanced (DD=3.0): 46079 dps, 64715 dtps, 56300 hps (27034 aps), 138.0k TMI

T19M Mastery (Live): 58214 dps, 58519 dtps, 68320 hps (31997 aps), 117.9k TMI
T19M Balanced (DD=2.259): 55459 dps, 50209 dtps, 65230 hps (30642 aps), 111.6k TMI
T19M Balanced (DD=3.0): 55497 dps, 50940 dtps, 65395 hps (30752 aps), 112.3k TMI

It's obvious from these stats that tuning the Dodge Factor has an impact on DTPS and TMI while leaving DPS and HPS alone (within error bars anyway). Setting it higher decreases our survivability, setting it lower increases it. Since it has absolutely no impact on any other part of the game, as Theck pointed out, it's a perfect tuning knob to make haste desirable without making us overpowered. In all of the sims so far, haste has been on top while our TMI has been very close to the live sim's values. I'm interested to see what we'd have to set the Dodge Factor at in order to match live's TMI, and take a look at how haste ranks in that situation. Right now, though, it's looking like Divine Dodge (with the proper dodge factor tuning) is an excellent candidate for saving haste.

I'm running another round of sims with the Dodge Factor set to 5.0, all 12 should be done within the hour. I'll try to post them with some analysis before my raid starts tonight.

Here are the sims for Divine Dodge with a dodge rating of 5.0. I have to go do Highmaul so I can't analyze them right now but I'll try and get it done afterwards. Until then, take a look at the source files and some of the graphs. As before, this includes 12 sims - 6 for the mastery-heavy gear and 6 for the balanced gear.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0hng738w299nxti/divine%20dodge%205.0%20factor.zip?dl=0

T17:



T18:



T19:



Pretty much what you'd expect, haste is worse with a larger factor. It's still good, but not as good as we want it to be. After a quick first glance I think a factor of 3.0 looks better than this, maybe somewhere between 3 and 4 would be the correct balance.

Just skimmed these, but a few comments:

(a) Mastery makes haste stronger (a LOT stronger), so it isn't surprising at all that haste is doing great in a mastery-heavy gear set. However, this is completely unrealistic, because if you liked haste you wouldn't be stacking mastery in the first place. You'd be stacking haste! (Note also that the balanced gear set produces lower TMI results for this exact reason).

Thus, the balanced gear set is a much better barometer for what we'd expect a real gear set to look like. Especially given non-ideal loot drops/distribution and so on. So this is the plot we should be focusing on.

I would actually be interested in seeing a third plot, which is a haste-heavy gear set. I suspect I already know what the answer is (haste drops in value), but it would still be interesting to see and confirm that intuition.

So haste being way ahead in a mastery gear set is fine (hooray synergy). Haste being ahead, but not massively ahead, in a balanced gear set is really our target. Together, along with what I suspect we'll see in the haste-heavy gear set, those results give us exactly what we want: a situation in which haste is our strongest secondary, but not so far ahead that it is dominant regardless of gear set. There should be a magic balance of haste and mastery we'll end up maintaining to get the most out of both stats, which is exactly what the devs were aiming for in the first place.

As such, I really feel Divine Dodge is the right solution, and furthermore I think it works almost perfectly with the current DodgeFactor, so no adjustment to the DR parameter seems to be needed. I'd still like to see the haste plot (and have time to re-read these more carefully), but I think that's what I'll be recommending.

(b) There are some additional things we should investigate, one of which is how Divine Dodge affects other talent choices (mostly L75 and L100). I assume you're running Holy Shield and Sanctified Wrath? I'd be curious to see how it changes with Seraphim especially, but Divine Purpose and Holy Avenger would also be good to check. For these, we can probably just check T17 gear; I don't think it's worth worrying too much about T18 or T19 yet, since those are a long way off and there doesn't appear to be a significant super-linear scaling problem going on in this data set. We can always check them later at our leisure.

(c) Were there other solid ideas we wanted to test and haven't yet?

theckhd wrote:...
Thus, the balanced gear set is a much better barometer for what we'd expect a real gear set to look like. Especially given non-ideal loot drops/distribution and so on. So this is the plot we should be focusing on.

Agree, that's why I stopped posting the mastery-heavy set and just went with the balanced one. It paints a much more realistic picture in a world where haste is a good thing. I still simmed the mastery set just for comparison, it's not really going out of my way at this point.

theckhd wrote:I would actually be interested in seeing a third plot, which is a haste-heavy gear set. I suspect I already know what the answer is (haste drops in value), but it would still be interesting to see and confirm that intuition.
...
As such, I really feel Divine Dodge is the right solution, and furthermore I think it works almost perfectly with the current DodgeFactor, so no adjustment to the DR parameter seems to be needed. I'd still like to see the haste plot (and have time to re-read these more carefully), but I think that's what I'll be recommending.

I'll make a haste set up tomorrow after work and crunch the numbers, for science!

theckhd wrote:(b) There are some additional things we should investigate, one of which is how Divine Dodge affects other talent choices (mostly L75 and L100). I assume you're running Holy Shield and Sanctified Wrath? I'd be curious to see how it changes with Seraphim especially, but Divine Purpose and Holy Avenger would also be good to check.

I'm using the default choices for the stock T17H and T17M profiles, so yes. I'll run them for comparison as well. I'll revert the Dodge Factor back to 2.259 for all further sims unless you think it looks too good in one configuration.

theckhd wrote:(c) Were there other solid ideas we wanted to test and haven't yet?

Kind of, there is this nebulous notion of a special on-melee-hit proc that only benefits haste and nothing else. I've asked for suggestions, but so far no one's provided me with any ideas. I can't come up with anything cool by myself so I didn't really explore this option much. Mostly, I've shied away from the idea because it might involve lots of mechanics changes and balancing problems - you said in your blog that we'd effectively be creating a new version of SoI - and these things just don't happen in the middle of a raid tier. We'd have to wait until the next one for this idea to see any play.

Other than that, I've tested everything I wanted to. Some stuff's overpowered (SotR), some stuff's underpowered (Sacred Duty), Divine Dodge is in that Goldilocks zone.

Well, here's something that just occurred to me - in the Call to Arms thread, you said that Riposte is bugged and doesn't impact crit from procs or other buffs; it only works on gear. If we saw the same behavior for haste with Divine Dodge, I think that would have a significant impact on things like haste trinkets, which would be rather disappointing because those are usually a lot of fun (for me, anyway). Not sure what we could really do about that, but it's worth bringing up nonetheless.

Have we done any simulations where the attunement has been switched to mastery? If we're going to make a case for haste, we might as well make a note of the "opponent's camp" so to speak.

It really depends on how it's coded. We could see the same behavior with Divine Dodge, which would indeed make haste proc trinkets less attractive. But that's a minor issue (and one we can work/theorycraft around). I'm more concerned with the steady-state haste from gear.

So I made a mistake when making the balanced gear set. Turns out I misread the shield (Heart of the Clefthoof), which is actually an Intellect only shield - not Strength. The only real choice we have in BRF is Kromog's Protecting Palm. I'm sure that throws off the sim results a little bit, but hopefully it doesn't totally invalidate them. Since I'm going to re-run the T17 sims anyway with a haste set, I'll fix this in the balanced profile and update accordingly. It will obviously widen the gap between the mastery-heavy and the balanced set.

With regards to the haste set, there's really only two pieces that we can change (three if we swap a trinket). Here's what I propose for it:

Head - Helmet of Guiding Light
Neck - Choker of Bestial Force
Shoulders - Pauldrons of Guiding Light
Chest - Battleplate of Guiding Light
Waist - Uktar's Belt of Chiming Rings
*Legs - Firestorm Legplates
Feet - Iron Bellow Sabatons
Wrists - Bracers of Visceral Force
*Hands - Gauntlets of Guiding Light
Finger1 - Seal of Unquenchable Flame
Finger2 - Spellbound Solium Band of Sorcerous Invincibility
Trinket1 - Blast Furnace Door
*Trinket2 - Battering Talisman
Back - Ravenous Greatcloak
Main Hand - Kromog's Brutal Fist
Off Hand - Kromog's Protecting Palm
* = different from the balanced set

I'll run T17 against all three sets in heroic and mythic configs and see how they compare. With that as a baseline I'll start switching talents around and repeat the tests.

Baseline sims are done. Recap - Tier 17 only (heroic and mythic), Divine Dodge with the live Dodge Factor of 2.259, Holy Shield and Sanctified Wrath, 3 gear sets: stock mastery-heavy, balanced (now with the proper shield), and haste-heavy.

Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sm17d9t3qtf2hsj/t17_sw_hs.zip?dl=0

Heroic stuff (Mastery, then Balanced, then Haste)




Mythic stuff (Mastery, then Balanced, then Haste)




Heroic:
Mastery gear: 21590 dps, 30873 dtps, 22364 hps (10004 aps), 108.4k TMI
Balanced gear: 21508 dps, 30191 dtps, 22312 hps (10041 aps), 107.8k TMI
Haste gear: 20117 dps, 30895 dtps, 21171 hps (9615 aps), 105.2k TMI

Mythic:
Mastery gear: 25035 dps, 26859 dtps, 25480 hps (11306 aps), 96.2k TMI
Balanced gear: 24858 dps, 26116 dtps, 25267 hps (11289 aps), 95.3k TMI
Haste gear: 22773 dps, 27195 dtps, 23659 hps (10677 aps), 93.9k TMI

As Theck predicted, haste is less valuable in the haste-heavy gear but it's still above the other stats. I'm curious though, because the haste gear has the lowest TMI but actually has the highest DTPS, the lowest DPS, the lowest HPS and the lowest APS. Not sure how that works, I'd have to take an in-depth look at the differences between the sims.

Next up I'm simming the same stuff but with Seraphim instead of Holy Shield. It's current 2/6 done so I should have results in 2 hours or so.

Seraphim sims are done, but I'm going to be honest - I have absolutely no idea what's going on in them. The haste curves for all 6 sims are... well, look for yourselves. Same config as last time, but with Seraphim instead of Holy Shield (so we're still using Sanctified Wrath here).

Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yn43lbcx6a236jc/t17_sw_sera.zip?dl=0

Heroic gear (mastery, then balanced, then haste)




Mythic gear (mastery, then balanced, then haste)




Heroic gear
-----------
Mastery: 23728 dps, 28487 dtps, 27745 hps (11885 aps), 108.8k TMI
Balanced: 24067 dps, 27410 dtps, 27848 hps (12015 aps), 106.9k TMI
Haste: 22718 dps, 28114 dtps, 26604 hps (11582 aps), 104.5k TMI

Mythic gear
-----------
Mastery: 27117 dps, 24705 dtps, 30925 hps (13264 aps), 96.8k TMI
Balanced: 27517 dps, 23417 dtps, 31023 hps (13426 aps), 94.2k TMI
Haste: 25581 dps, 24294 dtps, 29468 hps (12848 aps), 91.2k TMI

Compared to Holy Shield, the mastery gear does worse but the balanced and haste gear do better with Seraphim. Take it with a grain of salt thought because look at these curves... what is going on? I suspect there are a ton of breakpoints and I'd need to crank up the fidelity of the plot to see what's really happening, because every data point is wildly different from the next. I'm not even going to try to interpret this, it's way out of my league.

Next up is Divine Purpose + Holy Shield, ETA 3 hours.

I'd guess that as haste allows another GCD to fit in the seraphim window, its value wiggles. As well, since Seraphim adds a lot of haste rating, its easier to hit the 50% cap when Seraphim is up, so the value of haste goes down after this point.

Seraphim creates a bunch of haste breakpoints because of the fixed 15-second on, 15-second off nature of the buff. It's probably not worth trying to analyze in too much detail since there are so many different things baked in there (ex: fitting an extra GCD in within the Seraphim uptime/downtime, changing how much hp you generate during the 5-second Seraphim lockout, changing the exact timing of the SotR coverage outside of Seraphim, etc). You just have to mentally average the haste line. If it oscillates around the others it's in good shape.

(This is another case where player skill / world lag options might allow for some smoothing).

I don't know, the only place it looks good in the heroic sets is the mastery-heavy one. In the mythic sets it looks alright for the balanced set but it flattens out awfully quickly. I'll leave it to you to decide what to do with Divine Dodge and Seraphim.

Anyway, the Divine Purpose sims finished early! Same old same old, DP + Holy Shield this time.
Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hz169z6vapy6b37/t17_dp_hs.zip?dl=0

Heroic (Mastery, Balanced, Haste)




Mythic (Mastery, Balanced, Haste)




Heroic comparison
-----------------
Mastery: 21145 dps, 28886 dtps, 22964 hps (10116 aps), 105.2k TMI
Balanced: 21053 dps, 28171 dtps, 22794 hps (10100 aps), 104.3k TMI
Haste: 19695 dps, 28869 dtps, 21696 hps (9718 aps), 101.7k TMI

Mythic comparison
-----------------
Mastery: 24541 dps, 24886 dtps, 26122 hps (11415 aps), 93.3k TMI
Balanced: 24341 dps, 24120 dtps, 25902 hps (11398 aps), 91.9k TMI
Haste: 22303 dps, 25202 dtps, 24266 hps (10793 aps), 90.5k TMI

Haste is a total animal through all of these sims. It starts on top and it stays on top in everything but T17H haste-heavy gear, in some cases even surpassing stamina - a result we don't usually see until T18M and T19M. Divine Purpose with haste gear trumps the TMI for all of the other sims so far. To illustrate, let's compare the best gear ratings from the past few trials:

Heroic
------
Mastery set (Live, SW, HS): 109.9k
Haste set (DD, SW, HS): 105.2k
Haste set (DD, SW, Sera): 104.5k
Haste set (DD, DP, HS): 101.7k

Mythic
------
Mastery set (Live, SW, HS): 97.8k
Haste set (DD, SW, HS): 93.9k
Haste set (DD, SW, Sera): 91.2k
Haste set (DD, DP, HS): 90.5k

Obviously Divine Dodge is a buff regardless of what talents we choose once we get some haste gear, and Divine Purpose + Holy Shield is currently the undisputed champion. I'm working on Holy Avenger + Holy Shield next, ETA another 3 hours.

Hearthstone's new spectator mode is awesome but incredibly distracting, I have to say. I've been sitting on these results all afternoon because of it! Oh well, you know the drill by now, this set is Holy Avenger + Holy Shield.

Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0nauqpqf679bw2s/t17_ha_hs.zip?dl=0

Heroic (Mastery / Balanced / Haste)




Mythic (Mastery / Balanced / Haste)





Heroic Comparison
-----------------
Mastery: 21775 dps, 28899 dtps, 22778 hps (10101 aps), 106.8k TMI
Balanced: 21615 dps, 28287 dtps, 22649 hps (10127 aps), 105.8k TMI
Haste: 20212 dps, 28958 dtps, 21523 hps (9711 aps), 102.9k TMI

Mythic Comparison
-----------------
Mastery: 25223 dps, 24999 dtps, 25897 hps (11400 aps), 94.7k TMI
Balanced: 24961 dps, 24307 dtps, 25701 hps (11389 aps), 93.3k TMI
Haste: 22916 dps, 25244 dtps, 24073 hps (10792 aps), 91.3k TMI

This set is par for the course. Balanced is better than mastery, haste is better than balanced. For heroic gear, haste is just underneath stamina for each gear option. For mythic, it's always the best. Holy Avenger is better than Sanctified Wrath but it's worse than Divine Purpose.

Just for the sake of being thorough, I ran Divine Purpose + Empowered Seals. This one's weird because it makes stamina really, really good. Like, it rivals bonus armor good.

Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qv54yn6c9mqbeqg/t17_dp_es.zip?dl=0

Heroic (Mastery / Balanced / Haste)




Mythic (Mastery / Balanced / Haste)




Heroic Comparison
-----------------
Mastery: 21966 dps, 30105 dtps, 22214 hps (10703 aps), 107.9k TMI
Balanced: 22156 dps, 29678 dtps, 21955 hps (10582 aps), 107.7k TMI
Haste: 20855 dps, 30361 dtps, 21291 hps (10137 aps), 104.2k TMI

Mythic Comparison
-----------------
Mastery: 25591 dps, 25713 dtps, 25296 hps (12165 aps), 96.0k TMI
Balanced: 25777 dps, 25177 dtps, 25524 hps (12115 aps), 94.9k TMI
Haste: 23754 dps, 26348 dtps, 23989 hps (11430 aps), 93.0k TMI

No surprises in the comparison department, the usual order still holds. Haste wins all the time. DP + ES is actually a little bit better than SW + HS but worse than DP + HS (which is still the winner by a lot).

So that's a ton of new data to look through. Are there any other configurations you guys would like me to sim that would help evaluate Divine Dodge? Or perhaps a different solution to fix haste? I'm happy to do it - running through every talent permutation just for the sake of it probably isn't as helpful as targeted analysis.

I need to think through this data for a bit, but I think that about covers what I wanted to know about Divine Dodge.

Out of curiosity, when you sim for stat weights, does it take these stat weights before or after Sacred Duty's bonus?

For example, if the stat weights add 100 (I'm not sure what their current value is), does this mean that Sacred Duty effectively makes it at 105 haste? Or will it add 100 haste regardless. I assume 105, but just wanting to make sure.

It adds the 100 stat just as if it were 100 from a piece of gear (think of it as adding shirt=100stat to the gear profile). So Sacred Duty would properly convert that to 105.

I think my gear is in a terribly weird place, according to a sim I ran, haste will be better for me than strength.

Lastwolf wrote:I think my gear is in a terribly weird place, according to a sim I ran, haste will be better for me than strength.

This. A week ago most of my stat weights for TMI sims were around the general consensus (BA>Mas>Vers>Crit>Mult>Haste), but now Haste has quadrupled in value with only a few pieces being upgraded.

Unfortunately, I do not have any saves from a week or two ago, but here are two from today (before and after a trinket upgrade) showing Haste essentially tied with Str in both:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7sblt5ymfkhjfeh/651%20boots.html?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2mnl0tohyl0cwyc/645%20BA-Crit%20Trinket.html?dl=0

I was debating whether I should invest the apexis crystals on upgrading the cloak (BA + Haste) or holding off until an upgrade from HM that does not have Haste, but after seeing this... I'm torn..

Is anyone else having the same experience with Haste recently coming back into the forefront in their current setup? For quick reference, I am using SW and HS as my 75/100 talents.

Do not trust Scale Factors for haste. Run scaling plots. Especially if you're taking SW+HS, haste should be in last place.

theckhd wrote:Do not trust Scale Factors for haste. Run scaling plots. Especially if you're taking SW+HS, haste should be in last place.

Well that was an interesting exercise:

According to this, I need to lose about 100 Haste like.. yesterday. Those are some "interesting" haste breakpoints...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jmhayllsmnblxis/645%20BA-Crit%20Trinket%20%28Stat%20Scaling%29.html?dl=0

You can't really lose haste though, cause what's on gear is on gear, not until Blackrock anyway, in some slots there is only one item 665+, so you take what you can get.

I barely understand Scale Factors, does this plot not indicate that haster is better than crit, or do I not understand it right?