Beastlord GoD Offensive AA skill comparison

[Tastian]

I've been wanting to make this post for awhile, but just got too busy after the first couple weeks of GoD.  This post is basically just a summary of the parsings I've done of GoD AA's.  This isn't quite finished yet as I still have a few things to add, but since I actually have a little bit of time atm I figured I'd put the bulk of it up now and then edit in stuff as needed.  As always note that that I am trying to give an overall picture of things.  Look at your situation and decide what does/doesn't work for you personally please.

-  Sinister strikes
-  1 Level, 15 points
-  Passive
-  Requires Ambi

Skill gives a damage bonus to your off-hand that scales based on weapon delay.  Overall Sinister strikes comes out to being ~3.5dps boost.  
-   ~.23 for dps gain to cost ratio

-  Weapon affinity
-  5 levels, 2*N per rank
-  Passive
-  No previous requirements and can start to train at 55th level

Skill raises your proc rate by 10% per rank.  The actually gain you see will vary a lot on weapons you wield and the procs you have.  Someone with an eth destoryer will get a nice gain to both damage and aggro.  8P  Basically you can just look at your proc damage and compute the gain and divide by cost. Say for example 30% gain from Weapon affinity 3 divided by the 12 point cost for that rank.  If you don't parse or know your proc damage then here's an example showing a pretty standard way to estimate it by using the damage on your main hand procs and damage on off-hand procs...

ex.  150 dd perma aug main, 75dd proc off hand on weapon and 125 dd ruj aug proc.  150 * 2 = 300,  + 200 (off hand proc damage) = 500 damage.  This is your expected proc damage per minute (assuming ~250 dex) with this setup Weapon affinity 1 would be ~.42 ratio of dps boost to cost, with the same setup Weapon affinity 5 would be ~.13  

**SPECIAL NOTE** There are several weapons beastlords can use (such as eth destoryer, zha's and GoT4W) that have a non-standard proc rate.  

-  Feral Swipe
-  1 Rank, 9 points
-  Activated
Feral swipe is a special attack much like kick.  Unlike kick though feral swipe has a 1 minute refresh time, so you don't have to spam it nearly as often.  Overall, feral swipe comes out to ~1.5dps like other skills this will vary some and because of the one minute refresh feral swipe can be extremely streaky.  
-  ~.167 for dps gain to cost ratio
**SPECIAL NOTE**  Feral swipe recently had its range increased from 20 to 50.  From what I've seen so far this is sufficent to allow it to be used on most mobs, but I'm still going to leave this note here well I test a bit more on various mobs.  If you come across any mobs that you still can't hit with feral swipe well melee'n please let me know.

-  Warder's Fury
-  5 ranks, 3 points per rank
-  Passive
Warder's fury grants your pet the chance to perform critical attacks.  These critical hit messages will be visible to other players that have other crits turned on.  Crits boost the pets hit by ~65%.  A 64 DPoC focused pet will max at 130 on crit.  Each rank of WF adds ~1% chance to crit.
-  Overall ~.13  dps to AA cost ratio
**SPECIAL NOTE**  The figure assumes ~60 dps from pet as base.  This will vary based on focus item and how much pet is tanking/rogueing and what you are fighting.

-  Warder's Alacrity
-  5 ranks, 3*N per rank
-  Passive
Warder's Alacrity grants your pet the chance to perform flurry attacks.  These attack messages cannot be seen by other players, but are visible on your screen.  A "flurry" grants your warder a chance to perform between 0 and 2 extra attacks.  
-  Rank 1:   ~.32 dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 2:   ~.21 dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 3:   ~.16 dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 4:   ~.13 dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 5:   ~.106 dps to AA ratio
**SPECIAL NOTE**  Again this assumes 60 dps for base pet damage.  

-  Critical Affliction
-  3 levels, 5*N per rank
-  Passive
Critical affliction grants your dots a chance of doing critical damage.  Where a crit does double the base damage.  There is no special message for dot crits.  Each rank of Critical affliction adds ~3% chance for a dot to crit.  You can just take your dot damage and multiply it by .03, .06, .09 and then divide accordingly by 5, 15 or 30 to see what the effectiveness is for you.  For someone that just keeps scorpion venom running full time it's
-  Rank 1:  ~.146  dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 2:  ~.097  dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 3:  ~.073  dps to AA ratio
**SPECIAL NOTE**  A critical dot tick seem to critical the aggro on that tick as well currently.  

-  Pet Affinity
-  1 rank, 20 points
-  Passive
Pet Affinity allows your pet to be hit by group buffs, MGBs, bard songs, etc as though they were a player character.  Due to bard songs this AA can give a solid boost to pet dps.  This can be a very good AA for raiders and even those that group with a bard most of the time, however, it is almost impossible to even try to put a number to its value.  Basically if pet affinity is a good deal for you then you'll know it and won't really flinch at the 20AA cost.  If you are questioning its usefulness to you then likely you have several other things you can/should buy first.

-  Bestial allignment
-  3 ranks,  3*N per rank
-  Activated
Bestial alignment is a lot like pet affinity in that it's going to vary a lot based on the person buying it (even more so than some of the other AA's).  Bestial alignment grants you the illusion of your warder and increases your melee damage modifier by 50%, 75% and 100% per rank.  Also the skill grants an increased 20% to resist spell, but I have yet to see this happen so I cannot comment on it.  The AA lasts 5 ticks, but has a refresh time of 72 minutes.  This AA can be nice for boss mob fights to raise your damage, but see special notes.
**SPECIAL NOTES**  
1)  Besital alignment will wreck your shrink.  When you click this you will become illusioned like your pet, but unshrunk.
2)  Once Bestial alignment fades you remain unshrunk, this can be a minor to major problem on raids  
3)  The damage boost from Bestial alignment doesn't stack with the level 60 disc.  
4)  You cannot activate BA well already in an illusioned form.  That means having to click off wood elf illusion or whatever else you might have going at the time.  

That about sums it up.  Like I always say though this is my best attempt to normalize the results most people will see.  It's up to you to know your situation and only use this to give you a rough idea where some of the skills fall.  If you have an eth destoyer or dot heavily (/cringe aggro) or whatever then certain things will change.  One thing to note though is that several of the GoD AA's have increasing costs of X*N where N is the rank you are buying.  This results in diminishing returns per AA spent.  For example warder's alacrity 1,2 and 3 give a better return per AA than warder's fury does.  However, ranks 4 and 5 (with their 12 and 15 point costs for same return) fall below warder's fury in terms of dps to AA point ratio.  

I still have to test the effects of dex on warder's fury and alacrity as well as a few other things, but I've had very little time to parse of late.  Please feel free, as always, to send me corrections/logs/parses and I'll update this as needed.

[Argach]

Thanks for the write-up, I'll be using this when I plan my AAs .. if I can be bothered to grind some more. -__-

[Kylaz]

Critical affliction grants your dots a chance of doing critical damage.  Where a crit does double the base damage.  There is no special message for dot crits.  Each rank of Critical affliction adds ~3% chance for a dot to crit.  You can just take your dot damage and multiply it by .03, .06, .09 and then divide accordingly by 5, 15 or 30 to see what the effectiveness is for you.  For someone that just keeps scorpion venom running full time it's
-  Rank 1:  ~.146  dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 2:  ~.97  dps to AA ratio
-  Rank 3:  ~.73  dps to AA ratio

That seems strange. shouldn't be a inserted 0 for level 2 and 3 ? ( 0.097 and 0.073 ) ?

[Tastian]

Yup, I actually stopped at it, looked it over, went "boy that doesn't look right" and then posted it lol.  Guess I can't pull those 53 hour days as well as I used to.  Thanks for the catch Kyl.

[Coprolith]

Nice work T!

There was no way i could've done all this with my current AAXP rate and the ungodly cost of the new AAs (pun intended). Glad to see someone stepping up to the plate. Cheers mate

/hugs

[Tastian]

I was on a pretty good tear when GoD first hit, but that took a sizeable hit recently.  What I still want to do is test the effects of dex on fury/alacrity and maybe put the GoD AA's together with the pre-GoD ones from your work.  Most of the GoD aa's have crazy costs at the later levels though for the gain and things like weapon affinity, critical affliction and even the warder AA's will range a fair bit depending on the person's playstyle/gear.  *shrugs*  Always nice to have something to work on.

[Coprolith]

And speaking of something to work on.

In order to really be able to compare dps boosts or efficiency of each and every AA skill you would have to know the individual components of how your dps is made up, PC melee dps, PC DD dps (proc+spell), PC DoT dps, pet melee dps and pet proc dps. These numbers will vary for each person depending on gear and hunting habits. Moreover, their ratios will be different for each person and will prolly also change over time as you adjust your tactics, change your hunting grounds and upgrade gear. I've been thinking of making excel sheet very much like the dps calculator (or as an extension of the existing sheet) which takes as input parsed and/or calculated dps numbers, adjustable to fit everyone's profile, and calculate AA skill dps boost and efficiency from there.
But i suffer from the same prob as you, i can hardly find the time to squeeze in some play time lately so the project is on hold indefinately

/hugs

[Tastian]

Yeah one of the things I was working on was various "common" breaks for beastlords.  I ran some numbers based on various mana buffs and then spell choice.  ex. FT5, Kei, SD, MC2 = X mana per minute -  Y fero's  = A potential nuke dps  OR B potential dot dps  which would show boosts from SCF verse critical affliction etc.  Did some numbers are normal common dps distributions too.  Such as 50melee + 20 nonmelee (spells, procs)  55pet.  Then show how things would breakdown.  I hadn't really thought of putting it to spreadsheet, but that might be something to work on.  I've actually got one decent sort of idea in mind atm, but that's something that would take a good month and I can't even find a good weekend of late hehe.

[Dysz]

as far i have seen, BA1 does not cost me mana, as an iksar.  and i use it when frenzy freshens and bestial fury isn't up.

[Tastian]

"as far i have seen, BA1 does not cost me mana"

I went and tested this today several times, here's what I did...

1)  Have BA hot key ready
2)  Look at mana bar
3)  Click BA
4)  Note the ~14% drop in my mana bar

I don't know why your BA isn't costing you mana, but when I asked one other iksar bst about his BA taking mana he immediatly went off on "OMFG BA DOESNT COST BARBS MANA?!?!?" and proceeded to ask others lol.  I was going to test if being too low on mana kept BA from going off.  I could have sworn I got an insufficent mana message before but I couldn't find it and BA isn't exaclty the fastest skill to test hehe.

[Tipop]

On the test server, Feral Swipe has its range increased to 2.5 times what it was before.

[Tastian]

Yeah tip I mentioned that in another thread.  Also mana cost is gone from BA1&2 for iksars atm.  8)

[Vorph]

On the test server, Feral Swipe has its range increased to 2.5 times what it was before.

Still isn't enough imo, but it's a start.  Why can't they just make is the same as Kick range?  :P

[Tastian]

I dunno I'm going to test this on various mobs tonight.  Looks like BA lost it's mana cost so that's good.  Now if only it'd stick well illusioned and refresh in like 30 minutes lol.  Heck I'd even settle for rank 1 being 1 hour, rank 2 being 45, rank 3 being 30 minutes.

[Dysz]

i actually don't remember to use BA much, its in my third hotkey bank, heh.  but i havent used it in a while, and if it used to take away my mana i just never noticed... glad they fixed it so my ignorant ass doesn't get penalized  :twisted: