Opening with SS vs. Garrote - A (bad) analysisFollow

the only way SS is a better opener is if it crits.

garrote is a guaranteed 1187.7 damage, whereas SS could be more depending on a roll

Edited, Aug 4th 2008 10:44pm by pythonesc

Does your SS calculation take into account the average damage on a crit?

Supposing your non-crit SS is 700, you have 5 points in Lethality, and a 25% crit rate:

SS average: 700 + (700 x 2.3 x .25) = 700 + 402.5 = 1102.5 average

SSx2 = 2205 damage, as opposed to 1881.7 with garotte. Not to mention SS is 10 energy cheaper.

(This is assuming Lethality works like I think it does. Your mileage obviously varies with AP, etc.)

Oh, and garotte also obviously catches up if mangle is applied before the first tick (i.e. druid tank, probably). 1181.7 x 1.3 = 1536.21, for an average of 2638.71 damage total from Garotte + SSx1. That's ~29.3 DPE, as opposed to ~27.6 DPE for SSx2. Garotte seems better with a druid tank, but SS is a clear winner without, and gets better as your crit rate improves (I don't know the average crit rate for a 2k AP rogue).

I don't even want to try to calculate it, but what about a weapon swap ambush?

Ambush is 275% weapon damage + 290. Also a whopping 60 energy.

Then lastly 2% often from murder, 5% critical chance from malice and +30% critical damage from lethality.





See, to me, the *real* advantage of opening with garrote is that you don't get gacked by the mob for causing a huge amount of threat at the very start of the fight.



Edited, Aug 5th 2008 1:54pm by digitalcraft

Sorry but your lvl 53 experience is irrelevant, not to say misleading:

1) As a rule of thumb, DO NOT open with CS in an instance. It annoys most tanks as hell, so until you've figured out out which tanks don't mind, don't do it. Go with Garrote. There are a few exceptions which are situational, like if you pull multiple mobs and some of them are casters and you know that you can solo one in order to prevent annoying casts (like heals): then you can solo one and open with CS.

2) Getting into position is not an issue: most of the time, you're supposed to let your tank hit first and it buys you plenty of time to get into position. Not to mention that, when the tank has pulled, you have 0 chance of being discovered so you can walk on the mob in stealth and you'll never get discovered.

nostra

Edited, Aug 6th 2008 10:15am by nostraaa

I'll try to calculate the numbers for raid enviroment, no buff will be directly counted for, just the numbers used so far (IE if you get a buff to attack power, it's already considered in your 2000), Mangle will be counted in for, as in most raids you'll get it, I'll use 2 different values, both reasonable in my humble opinion:
1) Mangle will be used only after your first tick, meaning you get only 25% bonus from it to Garrote.
2) Mangle will be used immediatly, meaning you get the full buff to Garrote, 30%.
Both are reasonable as it's a Druid's first attack both when DPSing (right after his opener) and when tanking, but a cat Druid might come a second after you.

No armor reduction abilities will be counted for, as we are talking about the opening of the fight, so there is no time yet for any, but if you think there is a chance for some to be applied already, just add that to your armor penetration.

I'll ignore Dodges because I'm not sure how they work on attacks from stealth.
I'll ignore Parries and Blocks because I assume you attack from behind, and misses will be out of the equation as I assume you are hit capped for special attacks.

Windfury Totem will NOT be counted for, assuming it isn't up yet (and it's really hard to calculate anything with Windfury totem, because of the innate 3 second cooldown, you might get it to proc on your first Sinister Strike, but it would prevent your next autoattacks from proccing it, whereas Garrote doesn't).

I'll use the numbers TherionSaysWhat and Prikker calculated (thank you for that), and try it for crit rates of 30%, 35%, 40% and 45%.






Let's factor a partial Mangle debuff in -
Garrote's DPE with partial Mangle=1187.5*1.25/50=29.69 this'll be denoted as partial Mangle.

With full Mangle debuff in -
Garrpte's DPE with full Mangle=1187.5*1.3/50=30.88 this'll be denoted as full Mangle.









Boss armor reduction will be noted as X, where X is a number between 0 and 1, represinting how much damage the armor mitigataion on the boss, after applying your damage reduction. I'll assume bosses have 6000 armor and we'll see how much armor penetration is needed for Sinister Strike to bypass Garrote DPE-wies.



30% Critical strike chance -

Sinister Strike's DPE=(1872.85*0.3+814.28*0.7)*X/40=28.29X

Let's ask oursevles what X must be for Garrote to be equal to Sinister Strike DPE-wise:

For partial mangle - 29.69=28.29X -> X=1.05
This is obviously unattainable, X<1.

For full Mangle there is no need to calculate of course, as the DPE of Garrote will be even higher.

So, for this numbers, in said situation, Garrote is better than Sinister Strike no matter what the armor penetration you have.



35% Critical strike chance -

Sinister Strike's DPE=(1872.85*0.35+814.28*0.65)*X/40=29.62X

Let's ask oursevles what X must be for Garrote to be equal to Sinister Strike DPE-wise:

For partial - 29.69=29.62X -> X=1.002
This is obviously unattainable, X<1.

For full Mangle there is no need to calculate of course, as the DPE of Garrote will be even higher.

So, for this numbers, in said situation, Garrote is better than Sinister Strike no matter what the armor penetration you have.



40% Critical strike chance -

Sinister Strike's DPE=(1872.85*0.4+814.28*0.6)*X/40=30.94X

Let's ask oursevles what X must be for Garrote to be equal to Sinister Strike DPE-wise:

For partial mangle - 29.69=30.94X -> X=0.96

To have 4% armor reduction the boss needs ~440 armor, meaning 5560 penetration on your part. Maybe fully raid debuffed it's possible, not otherwise.


For full Mangle - 30.39=30.94X -> X=0.98

Even less likely, I won't even bother calculating this with all due respect.





45% Critical strike chance -

Sinister Strike's DPE=(1872.85*0.45+814.28*0.55)*X/40=32.27X

Let's ask oursevles what X must be for Garrote to be equal to Sinister Strike DPE-wise:

For partial mangle - 29.69=32.27X -> X=0.92

To reduce the boss armor so it only absorbs 8% will require you to have 5223 armor penetration, which is not really achieveable.


For full Mangle - 30.39=32.27X -> X=0.94

I'll take the lazy rout and not calculate the number here, safe to say it's around 5400 armor penetration.




As a conclusion to this long number crunching, you can see that Garrote is superior to Sinister Strike in all real occasions (assuming Mangle is up and attack power is a fixed 2000, more on that later), I can do the calculations again if you want without Mangle, but don't ask it if it's not important, it'll take me a long while to do it :).


I would also like to compare the scaling of Garrote and Sinister strike with AP (as a sort of an anti conclusion here):
Using the method of calculating from above, Garrote gets 0.18 damage per attack power or 0.0047 damage per attack power and per energy.

Using the method of calculating from above, Sinister Strike gets 2.4/14*1.06*1.1=0.2 damage per attack power
before counting armor and critical hits. With 30% armor mitigation and 30% crit(no Dodges), it's (0.2*0.7+0.2*2.3*0.3)*0.7/40=0.0049 damage per attack power and per energy.

So even with no armor penetration and only 30% crit rate they both scale the same way, the more crit/armor penetration you have, the better Sinister Strike gets in comparison.



Some last things I wanted to add/emphasize:

1) I ignored Dodge chances on the boss, can someone tell me if there are any for opening attacks from stealth? (IE for both Sinister Strike and Garrote).

2) The method Pikker calculated the bonus to Sinister Strike from Aggression and Surprise Attacks is wierd in my opinion, if I recall correctly, such bonus usually stack additively and not multiplicatively, can someone shed light on it please?
It does not change anything drastically, and that's why (as a way to honor someone who worked on something) I used Pikker's numbers.

3) All the calculations are for the begining of fights, if you Vanish midfight and want to make use of your stealthed status for another Garrote, numbers might be off wildly (more debuffs are on boss for example).

4) I ignored threat issues, this must be taken into consideration each fight seperatly.

5) That is for raid enviroment, when Garrote will not last to it's full duration all bets are off, then again, it doesn't REALLY matter in said situations.


Thank you for reading this, and hope I helped (more than it confused :) ),
Yuval.


Edit 1: minor corrections, spacing, typos and a slight clarification on the conclusion.

Edited, Aug 6th 2008 12:27pm by YuvalR

350 detection vs 350 stealth

355 detection with goggles (+5)

385 if you add a felhunter too. (+30)

435 if you add perception too. (+50)

____

356 detection vs 365 (both sub)

361 with goggles

391 with fel too

441 with percep to