Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Caster weapons vs. Tanking weapons

This is a quote from a forum I frequent:

I've also found physical damage weapons to be better than spell damage weapons for threat generation and they have better tanking stats. 30 DPS is 30 TPS. If you compare to something like Mana Wrath, Seal/Judgement of the Righteous only equals that with 60% Righteous Fury and it doesn't use mana. If you have improved Righteous Fury or are constantly being topped off allowing you to spam JoR and Consecrate, a spell damage weapon is probably better for threat, but I haven't seen a spell damage weapon with tank stats yet.


My reply is this:
This one you're wrong about. I just worked out the math and barring that you're Ret specced, as long as you are using Righteous Fury at all, using a spell damage sword is a better use of your iLVL points in a weapon. As basics I'm using two pretty high level weapons... The Sun Eater and Blade of the Archmage. They are both iLVL 95 epic weapons, so they both are about the same "quality", thus with other weapons, the values should scale appropriately or at least closely.

Using just abilities available to all Paladins (that is SoR, JoR and Consecration), we can put out more threat over the course of a minute than the equal amount put out by pure sword DpS. Note: This is just the addition of spell damage from the BotA and additional DPS from the swords themselves. It does not take into acount basic damage from the spells or additional damage from gear outside fo the swords.

The Sun Eater's DpS = 78.8 x 60 = 4728 DpM (Damage per Minute) thus 4728 TpM (Threat per Minute).

Blade of the Archmage's DpS = 41.1 x 60 = 2466 DpM thus 2466 TpM.

From here we see how much BotA's 150 spell damage impacts the threat generation of the three universal tools Paladins have at their disposal.

First off I'll list the spell damage coefficents for those who don't know:
Seal of Righteousness: 9.2% per 1.0 weapon speed which translates to 16.56% for BotA with an estimated 12 Procs per Minute (PpM)
Judgement of Righteousness: 73% every 10 seconds.
Consecration: 76% every 8 seconds.

SoR:
150 spell damage
x 0.1656 percent of spell damage applied to SoR
= 24.84 Damage per strike
x 12 PpM
= 298.08 average DpM
x 0.6 Bonus threat modifier applied to holy damage from Righteous Fury
= 178.848 bonus threat generated by Righteous Fury
+ 298.08 average DpM
= 476.928 average TpM

JoR:
150 spell damage
x 0.73 percent of spell damage applied to JoR
= 109.5 Damage per Judgement
x 6 Judgements a minute
= 657 average DpM
x 0.6 Bonus threat modifier applied to holy damage from Righteous Fury
= 394.2 bonus threat generated by Righteous Fury
+ 657 average DpM
= 1051.2 average TpM

Consecration:
150 spell damage
x 0.76 percent of spell damage applied to Consecration
= 114 Damage per Consecration
x 7.5 Consecrations a minute
= 885 average DpM
x 0.6 Bonus threat modifier applied to holy damage from Righteous Fury
= 531 bonus threat generated by Righteous Fury
+ 885 average DpM
= 1416 average TpM

From here we add together all four values to come to a total of 5410.128 Threat generated a minute. This is obviously more than Sun Eater's TpM, and is even further lengthened when we remember that Holy Damage does not normally have resistance, and that all mobs will have some amount of armor.

Obviously there are two major flaws in my above example that I fully expected people to respond to, so I will preempt those responses here:

First off, who in their right mind would use Consecration constantly against a single target? It's insanely mana waste-y. As I said, this is an untalented Paladin. As you work your way up other trees new abilities would be unlocked that would replace (Holy Shield for example) or minimize the impact of it (Divine Illumination comes to mind). And also, if you have Imp. Righteous Fury and Imp. Judgements your TpM just from melee attacks and Seal and Judgement of Righteousness with BotA is almost on par with the TpM of The Sun Eater.

The other flaw is Retadins. Retadins, with their access to Seal of Command and Crusading Strike are in a slightly different position than other paladins, because the base damage of their two primary Holy Damage abilities are based upon the damage of the attack that procs it. Theoretically a Retadin could put out on-par or possibly better TpM with a combination of slow 1H and SoC + CS. Since I'm not overly familiar with the mechanics nor the damage coefficents of either of those spells, I won't state authoritatively that they are better or worse than other abilities, but the potential is there.

One final note: By not spending iLVL points on more melee DpS, and instead using it to boost your spell damage, you are freeing up spell damage in other gear slots to fix other deficiencies in Paladin tanking such as a lack of Stamina and Defense Rating.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*sigh* I really want to have a carefully reason mathematically back arguement to either compliment or refute this.. but I just don't have enough numbers.

Unfortunately I have to go with my gut which tells me that in WoW Pally's aren't meant to DPS so depending on white damage to increase your threat is betting on something the designers don't support. That leads me to believe that holy damage (and any +spell damage) will out-threat white damage in almost all cases.

The only cases I can see where it might not stand true is if you're facing a "dispell magic" mob.