zYN wrote:Partially off-topic, but I think Mastery was a tad misunderstood by many in the current patch.
You're not going to be on target 24/7, but your diseases will still be ticking there. Often times there will be multiple targets during the fight. It's also why mastery is so "bad" right now - if it was just a bit better, it could easily make way too much damage. Fights like Nefarian, Theralion & Valiona, Magmaw, Atramedes, Halfus, Maloriak and Omnitron (Conclave of Four winds potentially as well) work in such a way that diseases will do proportionally significantly more damage than they would in a single target (vacuum) fight. There might be others, but those are just off the top of my head. I'm talking about roughly 2x increase in the minimum (T&V) to 3x (Omnitron) to 5x (Magmaw) to 10x (Halfus) to just ridiculous (Nefarian).
If mastery would've been close to as good as crit in single, it would have absolutely broken a lot of fights. Uninterrupted single target fights without encounter specific buffs/debuffs is pretty much everything that the sims are ever good for. It's a good tool, but I just see way too many people misusing the data they get. Or random forum posters quoting EJ DK compendium, which says that crit has a value of x, mastery has a value of y, therefore crit is always better than mastery. Or that haste is always better than crit. It's like Satan reading a bible.
It'll be interesting to see how they plan to implement the new one or still going to come up with a hybrid of sorts.
Well, that's exactly the issue. Sim data is only reliable for fights with zero outside variables like target-switching, AoE, etc etc. The list goes on and on. Furthermore, many of the sims that people had reliably used throughout Wrath have had some pretty glaring bugs and continue to have seemingly sketchy results. Stat priorities only give you a general outline on how to gear your character. Your own modifications need to be made based on what is asked of you in a given encounter. For example, Unholy mastery is terrible in its given state. However, for extensively-long and heavy AoE periods, it’s much stronger than Crit and even arguably stronger than Haste.
For Frost, the answer is a bit more straightforward because haste just isn’t very valuable at all given our GCD-locked rotation. Crit is a very average, linear stat that although slightly better than Haste, is still behind Mastery in every situation imaginable. Like Synti said, Mastery is evermore-dominant in AoE situations as well.
The problem with Frost now lies in the fact that its AoE was extremely unbalanced, while its single target capabilities were very average. 4.0.6 changes will not help, as there were no baseline changes made to the spec to produce better strike damage. 2H got a buff, and though it will be in line with DW, it will still be behind, and virtually every other melee class/spec in theoretical DPS. Top parses for Frost DKs typically reflect several things in common: perfectly alignment of STR buffs (aligning STR pot, PoF, trinket, and FC proc for example) to maximize burst damage at the start and end of the fight, TotT from rogues, fast kill times, and high amounts of KM procs for OB. While you can say that many of these things are similar for other classes and controllable (aligning proper buffs through burst phases), there is more RNG with KM, FC, and RE procs than that experienced by other classes. You can execute a rotation perfectly one day, end up with 16k DPS, and the next make mistakes and still wind up with higher throughput.
I think Frost will improve in later tiers with higher amounts of passive haste and mastery, but with Blizz insisting on preventing stat inflation, it won’t change much in its current state. I love playing Frost because of the playstyle and can provide excellent output most of the time, but in general it is very lackluster compared to other melee classes. The fact that fury warriors are already getting buffs makes absolutely no sense considering Frost DKs already pay the same hybrid tax and across the board show lower output. I imagine Frost will get a buff once it’s realized how skewed some of our results were with unbalanced HB spam.
