Hunters and Sharpening StonesFollow

Maybe I'm missing something... but is there any reason at all why 50 AP (300 AP for 10s every 60s) would be considered superior to ~4.8 DPS on your weapon plus 14 crit rating? Adamantite Weight/Sharpening Stones effect ranged attacks, and yet I never see any Hunters using them (or talking about using them); instead, they're all cranking the Blessed oil from the Sunwell daily.

What gives?

true.
It only effects the damage done with that particular weapon.


edit: sharpening your axe to deal more damage with your gun also doesnt make sense.... a magical weapon oil does... kind of... a bit....

Edited, Jun 4th 2008 6:34pm by Aethien

Yes, because item and effect descriptions are never incorrect. Or logical, for that matter, which this certainly isn't... but it works.

Sharpening an offhand weapon effects your mainhand, offhand, and ranged attacks as well as your global crit rate. Doing it to the mainhand as well doubles the bonus for everything. This is somewhat new behavior, but it's been showing up in the character sheet since at least 2.4... and it's been tested too, with those nifty level 5 grey weapons. Give it a whirl.

So anyway, the short answer would be "people don't know about it still"? All right then.

Well, it was more for SWP but it'd apply to other areas as well. Besides, effectively 70 AP and 14 Crit is going to be more valuable than 14 Mp5 for a Hunter.

This is a new thing since 2.4? I know prior to this I tested putting sharpening stones on my weapons, and not only did my tooltip crit for ranged not go up, there was no noticeable effect on prolonged Dr. Boom tests. There was nothing to back up your claim prior to 2.4, I'll have to look into it again. And yes, if this were an option I would go for it. I'm highly skeptical that this is the case.

They did change these to be effective for feral druids in 2.4, so that may have been the change that made them work for hunters. Maybe it's time to start dual wielding, Although if they did start all of a sudden working, I wouldn't be surprised if it were fixed, as the tooltip does specify melee.

Edited, Jun 4th 2008 4:51pm by Xsarus

I always look at the dual wield options, because I prefer the looks, but the badge axe is really really good for a BM hunter.

In the interest of moving this discussion past the "no, you're wrong" phase;




The sharpening stones were not displaying this in the character sheet pre-2.4; it's not known if that was an update to the character sheet or their functionality, but they certainly do so now. They've also been shown to work on the ranged attacks. If you don't believe me, test it.

The damage is showing up, that's cool, although my tooltip ranged crit did not change. hmm

Hmm... Now I'm just waiting for the word to get around, and for rogues and warriors to complain about the +28 crit scope not adding to melee crit.

But I think I'll stick to Mana Oil. That +damage only applies to Autoshot, and I use a 3:2 shot rotation, so it would only effect 2 out of 5 shots. Not worth losing the mana regen, IMO.

For a BM hunter with an attack speed of 2.0 and a 3:2 shot rotation, the average auto shot frequency is 2.44 seconds (over 50 shots). If my math is correct, that's ~24.5 Auto Shots in 1 minute. So over an 8 minute boss fight, that should be around 2,360 extra damage at the cost of ~1340 mana. That's 13 extra steady shots! If you average 780 on your steady shots, that's 10,600 damage- and even more, since I didn't factor in how much bigger Steady's are with raid buffs or crits.

Edited, Jun 5th 2008 3:27am by ProjectMidnight

Um, I would not argue that way. You must run oom during a boss fight to compare the extra damage with the extra steadies you might fire. That is not a valid assumption at all. You won't run oom on most boss fights and thus the sharpening stone will add more damage than the extra mana that you won't need.

It would be more interesting to see if sharpening stones really add to the ranged damage (perhaps only the paper doll is buggy) and if this extra damage is also applied to steady shot (as weapon damage obviously is).
If it is autoshot only one might argue that the 50AP from a weapon coating are better than a sharpening stone. Especially with a 3:2 shot rotation sharpening stones would not be very good (since you clip auto shots a lot).

Lets assume my toon with a 3:2 rotation in Sunwell. My autoshot frequenzy is 2.52 before any haste effects. I clip a bit due to the 3:2 rotation, but I run a lot of haste effects also. All in all I will fire an autoshot every 2.5 seconds I guess. A sharpening stone adds 12damage for every autoshot (before counting in crit).
Lets assume a 45% crit rate. A sharpening stone then would add on average 12*0.55 + 12*2.33*0.45 = 6.6 + 12.6 = 19.2 damage per auto shot.
With a shot every 2.5 seconds that would mean a DPS increase of 19.2/2.5 = 7.7 dps

Weapon coating yields 50AP on average. Hunters total DPS increases by ~0.3dps per AP as a rule of thumb. 50AP thus would yield a dps increase of 50*0.3 = 15dps

So if sharpening stones only add damage (and not the crit rating) and only affect autoshot damage, then the weapon coating would be a lot better.

If those stones affect steady shot damage as well (or the crit rating would also carry over to the ranged attacks), then the situation would be different (then you could assume ~1 shot per second, each shot gets ~19.2 damage extra, that is a overall dps increase of 19.2 which makes sharpening stones a little better than a weapon coating).

=> We need to test some things. I try to test it when I'm home, but I raid this evening, so I can promise nothing.
We need to no if sharpening stones affect ranged damage, and we need to know which shots are affected.
It would also be interesting to know whether the crit rating also affects ranged attacks, buf that might be hard to test for me (as I'm running a SV spec with already a lot of crit).

Methodology: I used before/after tests on Dr. Boom in Netherstorm. 3 trials each. I pretty much just sat there and autoshot 100 times, using Recount to measure the damage, dps, and individual aspects of my auto-shot. (Which were then recorded) I took off most of my gear, although I stayed hit capped. I took off any "on chance" procs (Such as the Hourglass and Hyjal rep ring), and had NO aspects up. The sharpening stones were applied to both weapons (Dual Wielding).

Results: It appears that a sharpening stone DOES seem to increase damage done, and overall DPS. HOWEVER, the increase was more substantial than it should be. For example, assume that the sharpening stones did work. This means that we should gain 28 crit, and 24 weapon damage. This translates roughly into 1.27% additional crit. The increase in crit % is much greater than simply 1.27%.

The weapon damage increased *should* be around 24. The average increase in weapon damage is around 12-16. This *could* be attributed to armor reduction, but I could not find any listing of Dr. Boom's armor count. However, assuming he has around 30% reduction from armor, these numbers would make sense.

When using the sharpening stones, I noticed that while the tooltip damage increased the crit % tooltip did NOT increase. Could this be a bug with the char screen?

Possible ErrorsThere were also trials that simply didn't fit in with the others. (Take, for example, trial 1 and 6) These trials underperformed by a large standard, possibly lowering the averages here and there. On the other hand, maybe the other trials overperformed, which would also skew the average. In other words: Random number generator is, wait for it, RANDOM!

Another problem that could've appeared was that my Hunter was specced Survival, which included Expose Weakness. Being a "on chance" proc, this could've also skewed the data a bit.

Conclusion What could it hurt to use these? Chug your filthy mana pots and you won't OOM, unless you're spending a year or two to kill a boss. Also, more testing is needed to verify my results, I'd like to do around 10 tests each, but I'm much too lazy. I've also not tested this with Steady Shot, which would make a big difference.

If the stones didn't affect steady shot, then by using a 3:2 rotation, as stated by a previous poster, they'd be next to useless.

I tested the damage aspect of the sharpening stone (tested with a 5-10 damage bow; no +AP procs against Dr. Bumm).
Autoshot is affected (with a damage spread of 5 from the bow, one can see nicely that damage goes up after using a sharpening stone on my melee weapon).
Steadyshot is not! affected (damage range stays the same after applying the sharpening stone)
I also tested canceling the buff and reapplying the sharpening stone, the results are consistent.

When I have the time I might do some >3k shota against Mr. Bumm to determine if there is a change in crit rate, but I doubt there is one (as the sharping stone states that it increases melee crit rate). For the meantime I assume crit rate is not being changed as the paperdoll crit rate does not change.

So, a sharpening stone yields me 7.7dps. Weapon coating gives 50AP or ~15dps, which makes it superior to a sharpening stone (this might change if it is determined that crit rate is also affected).
As I'm only using one melee weapon, I will use sharpening stones from now on for all fights which are not in Sunwell and where mana is not an issue (basically everything except Kaz'Rogal).

Thanks alot RPZip for pointing this out to us.

It's odd that Steadyshot wasn't getting the effect, although I guess it could be one of those obnoxious inconsistencies (like... Sharpening Stones working at all, I suppose). It effects all of my melee attacks, even ones that aren't weapon-based... even Hamstring (fixed low damage) and Bloodthirst (...which you can even use without a weapon), which is kind of neat.

Still, I have my answer now.