Dual Wield DOK AOE damage output analysis - Comparison with other AOE dps classes

[leftayparxoun]

INTRO

As the title states, I tried to optimize the reworked Dual Wield DOK with the goal of it working as an AOE mdps for warband play.

First thing that came up is how the rework of Drowning in Blood (DiB) essentially left dwDOK with no Weapons Skill (WS) or armor penetration (arpen) bonuses from their kit (i.e. tactics + abilities). As a result, this makes WS and arpen% the main focus stats for any build we could consider. With that in mind I went ahead and optimized the builds with 2 distinct approaches in mind:

• 1. Crit Based Approach:
  https://builder.returnofreckoning.com/c ... ,585,32125
  This is how it seems like AOE dw DOK was designed to play; you have the Murderous Intent and Khaine's Imbuement tactics to boost your melee crit% and then pop DiB and boost your crit damage while spamming Essence lash.

There is another approach however:

• 2. Stat Based Approach:
  https://builder.returnofreckoning.com/c ... 32125,9590
  Since you are already stat-starved (WS, STR, WOU) and DOK has no Stat tactics to help there, and also because Crit is in general a stat that requires high investment, you opt to completely disregard crit (and ironically your Drowning in Blood buff too) and focus entirely on boosting your WS, STR and WOU (to an acceptable degree).
  This approach frees up 1 Mastery Point to use elsewhere and also allows you to use the Potent Covenants tactic.

You can find the builds themselves here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vHW ... sp=sharing

CALCULATIONS

After having in my opinion optimized the builds, masteries and RR point distributions I went ahead and calculated the output of all the relevant AOE dw DOK abilities and procs vs enemy BIS geared archetypes with my Damage Calculator

I also did the same for Mara using a regular BIS AOE wb build. You can find the expected damage for each ability/proc, for each build and vs each archetype in the "dwDOK vs Mara" sheet in this spreadsheet. I had also recently done a similar analysis for MSH and White Lion here

Finally, I went ahead and assumed a standard rotation for those classes, calculated the expected average proc rates and instances in those rotations, summed everything up and finally managed to find the collective output of each setup (class+build) in terms of Damage per second per target hit during their rotation.

You can find the dwDOK and Mara rotation analysis here and the previous MSH and WL rotation analysis here. In the MSH and WL files you will also find the rotation outputs when also affected by For The Witch King / Whispering Wind, but I didn't bother doing it for Mara. Could maybe add it later. In general FTWK/WW resulted in ~20% better average output for WL and ~50% for MSH so I'd also expect a ~20% increase for Mara and exactly 0% for dwDOK. Since it would make dw DOK results even more horrible (spoilers), I decided to not show that in the results comparison at the end.

For AOE dw DOK I assumed that Drowning in Blood is permanently active during your rotation, which is not a far fetched assumption for fights lasting under 15 seconds. For the analysis of Covenant of Celerity output, I assumed that the 2nd DPS in the party has the hitrate of Mara regarding the proc calculation.
You can find the rest of the details in the file(s) above.

RESULTS

Onto the results:

• Mara (MA) = Mara with Mutated Aggressor buff active

• WL (PF) = White Lion with Primal Fury buff active

In the first table you can see the damage that each rotation does on every target hit per second, on average. In the second table I just calculate how much better or worse each rotation is than the Crit-Based DW DOK AOE rotation output on the same archetype as a percentage.

Some remarks:

• The Stat Based DOK approach that essentially ignores the class design (around crit and crit dmg with DiB) ended up performing 5% better than the Crit-build on average.

• Mara, MSH and WL perform ~40%, ~45% and ~58% better than Crit dw DOK respectively

• Mara and WL perform ~70% and ~85% better than Crit dw DOK respectively, when Mutated Aggresor and Primal Fury are active

I also calculated what happens when the enemies hit are buffed by Absolute Preservation (Shaman/AM 8pc Sov bonus ability) that makes them crit immune:



Here:

• The Stat Based DOK approach that essentially ignores the class design (around crit and crit dmg with DiB) ended up performing 22% better than the Crit-build on average.

• Mara, MSH and WL perform ~22%, ~70% and ~65% better than Crit dw DOK respectively

• Mara and WL perform ~48% and ~92% better than Crit dw DOK respectively, when Mutated Aggresor and Primal Fury are active

CONCLUSIONS

Before I get to the actual conclusions, let me mention a few things that were/weren't factored in and could change how we view the results:

• Devour Essence was not factored in the dw DOK rotations for 3 reasons; it can only hit 4 targets at best, it's damage was significantly nerfed in the 19/03 patch and finally it drains your Soul Essence quite fast, effectively limiting how long you can keep DiB up. The latter is not an issue for the Stat based build, however, since you pretty much ignore DiB there.

• Dw DOK will probably be able to hit more targets than Mara due to their Essence Lash being a 40 ft cone (compared to Mara's 25 ft for Wrecking Ball and Demolition). If they position themselves properly they might be able to hit as many as WL or MSH with their 360 AOE.

• While I factored in Fell Sacrifice (DOK's AOE dot) in the rotations, it has 2 big drawbacks:
  • It is a 25ft 360 AOE compared to Essence Lash that is a 40ft cone. This makes it harder to hit the targets you want as it requires you to position yourself differently to use it optimally.
  • It is a 1s cast ability. People who played MSH before the ability rework should especially know exactly how horrible this is for a mdps. Under any AOE focus you can expect the ability to go off anytime between 1 or 5 seconds after you use it (or get interrupted along the way to completion). I ignored this in the calculations, but if you want to use it optimally (range-wise) you will have to get in there and suffer.

Overall, there are tons of issues here:

• If you want to optimize your damage, you are incentivized to ignore the class design (DiB, Crit tactics) and build purely for stats (STR, WS). This is bad design imo.

• Even when going for the optimal Stat-based build, your damage output will be 40%-55% worse than other BIS Mdps that contend with you for the same role. Not only that, but Mara can pump his damage to about 65% higher than yours for 10 seconds with Mutated Aggressor. You are basically competing with other PvE-BIS geared classes damage-wise while also having spent 16838 War Crests in off-spec gear and an Onyx Annulus just to get there.

• Unlike other utility dps picks like MSH you are not bringing much in terms of buffs/debuffs to the table:
  • A bit more reliable AOE slow with 40ft Essence Lash and CoC
  • Devour Essence for, effectively, a 5s decent ST heal on 1 target
  • A decent party shield (774) every 40 seconds
  • A strong ST armor debuff on a target every 10 seconds
  These cannot justify a 40%-60% damage output loss.

• Your Wounds are also quite low compared to other mdps (~760 for the crit build and ~780 for the raw stat build)

• If we examine AOE burst numbers, dw DOK should perform even worse. All other mdps showcased here have at least 1 AOE channel to increase their burst in a short time window. dw DOK just spams Essence Lash. You can find the AOE channel ticks in the calculation files as well as DOK's Essence Lash damage. Each of the mdps gets 4 channel ticks per target while DOK gets 2 Essence Lash hits over 3 seconds. Just a rough number comparison will showcase how bad the comparison is.

With all that in mind, if there the will to make dw DOK an actually viable AOE dps for warbands exists, here are some suggestions on how to improve their performance without messing with the rest of dw DOK's ST toolkit for other game modes:

• Buffing the Base Damage of Essence Lash should help both with the overall damage output increase and with making the Crit-based build variant perform better than the Stat-based one:
  If you were to buff the Damage Bonus scaling of the ability, the raw Stat build would still outperform the crit one.
  I am unsure about the extent of the buff needed, but I'd recommend at least a 75% damage increase (e.g. 112 --> 200 base damage). If there is a specific target for the rotation output (e.g. 10% less than Mara's outside Mutated Aggressor) then I could calculate what the base damage should be in reverse. Feel free to request it if needed.

• Adding 10%-20% armor penetration to Essence Lash via the Essence Shatter tactic.:
  This would mirror Mara's, SW's and WL's design and actually allow the class to invest to certain stats without having the absolute necessity of investing as much into WS and pen% as possible. As it stands the BIS for the Crit approach reaches 65.7% arpen and the BIS for the raw Stat approach reaches 67.9% arpen.

One of them or a combination of those 2 buff approaches would do wonders for the dps output of the class, without really affecting anything else in the dw DOK ST toolkit.

Personally I believe that dw DOK AOE damage output, for what additional things they bring to the table should be around the same rest of the dps to really be considered viable; they would still be lacking in short term burst, but would have consistent AOE pressure and the ability to swap to ST for some extra focus and also have some utility stuff one the side. Plus they would be less tanky but play from further range than other mdps to balance that out.


WHAT ABOUT 2H WP?

Regarding AOE 2h Warrior Priest, even without calculating their side of things, I believe they are suffering from similar issues, but perhaps are at a better state than AOE dw DOK:

• Their Guilty Soul procs are stronger, stack up to 3 times and are guarranteed to proc on crit (unlike DOK's 33% on any hit)

• The above condition for Guilty Soul necessitates a Crit Focused build: https://builder.returnofreckoning.com/c ... 32111,8293

• But, unlike dw DOK, they have ways of boosting their armor penetration by slotting either "The Comet's Gift" or (most likely) "Blessing of Sigmar"
  
  in place of "Fanaticism" to boost their arpen.
  
  This would enable them to also grab Sigmar's Shield too and allow them to make 1 person basically unkillable for 10 seconds while they spam Smite to keep the buff up (https://builder.returnofreckoning.com/c ... 8295,32111

• On top of what AOE dw DOK brings to the table, they also have access to a 68 WOU party buff (that helps with their itemization too) and a ST heal debuff

All in all, 2h WP seems at a much better place compared to dw DOK regarding AOE output. I'd have to perform detailed calculations again to quantify it, but in theory it seems like their kit is slightly better designed for that role and perhaps shows the direction that AOE dw DOK should take.

Thanks for reading!

[kleinbuchstabe]

Thanks for this work, very revealing!

Another possibility for improvement would be a "back-nerf" of Devour Essence. That ability has become too weak to really be worth it, in regards of the extreme drain of soul essence that it costs. Maybe put it to 6 targets, or push the damage, or decrease the essence cost or cooldown time, just in a way of finetuning like that, to make it worth it again.

It also would lead to a more interesting gameplay to have a second worthy aoe dmg ability, instead of only spaming the lash and become a 1 button heroe...

[Illuminati]

Great post and analysis!

This core identity of our classes are getting reduced down to simply AOE dmg potential and some utility. The core identity of DPS DoK was AOE Heal Debuff. None had a better heal debuff.

Without these core identity/utilities, the off-spec DPS classes would never compete with DPS classes.

Bring back the core identity for each class and the game can go back to its roots of unique roleplay vs 'who can do the most AOE dmg spam in 10 secs'. This, and reducing the AOE cap would create a much better game.

PS. I think you're also catching on to the fact that Order mysteriously still gets 6-man build superiority if you run a certain comp. Look at the WP changes under the lens of 6-man play... e.g. Grieve of Sigmar is a tactic, so it stacks with abilities to reduce Str/Toughness by 120. That, coupled with a KOTBS aura will reduce a targets Str/Toughness by 240 and increase their players' stats by 240!

[geezereur]

I want my old dps dok and wp back it feelt so much better both damage and rotation.

[leftayparxoun]

Another possibility for improvement would be a "back-nerf" of Devour Essence. That ability has become too weak to really be worth it, in regards of the extreme drain of soul essence that it costs. Maybe put it to 6 targets, or push the damage, or decrease the essence cost or cooldown time, just in a way of finetuning like that, to make it worth it again.

It also would lead to a more interesting gameplay to have a second worthy aoe dmg ability, instead of only spaming the lash and become a 1 button heroe...

While I like this idea in a vacuum, I'm worried that it will affect the balance of the ability for SnB and ST dw builds. After this patch, Devour Essense does exactly 50% of the damage it would have done before and 25% more healing. I think it's a nice design for the Shield tree and I would rather see the Dual Wield tree be able to work independently of that.

I know that making non-mirrored changes (such as buffing Essence Lash and not Smite or Essence Shatter and not Empowered Smite) is not really elegant, but I don't think there is another way of only buffing dw DOKs AOE potential and not its ST or another DOK spec.
There is the option of completely reworking one of the tactics, but the patch pretty much fixed all the non-racial "useless" ones. The only non-racial and non-resist tactic candidate to rework would be Transfusion, but even that will be important for certain builds/players now.

So, yeah. There is not an easy solution unfortunately.

[leftayparxoun]

This core identity of our classes are getting reduced down to simply AOE dmg potential and some utility. The core identity of DPS DoK was AOE Heal Debuff. None had a better heal debuff.

Without these core identity/utilities, the off-spec DPS classes would never compete with DPS classes.

Bring back the core identity for each class and the game can go back to its roots of unique roleplay vs 'who can do the most AOE dmg spam in 10 secs'. This, and reducing the AOE cap would create a much better game.

Right now AOE dps Zealot can fulfill the niche of providing an "AOE heal debuff" with crits on their AOE direct damage. Giving that function also to DOK would devalue their identity. For better or for worse, this game is not WAR any more and DOK will probably have to settle on a new identity.

PS. I think you're also catching on to the fact that Order mysteriously still gets 6-man build superiority if you run a certain comp. Look at the WP changes under the lens of 6-man play... e.g. Grieve of Sigmar is a tactic, so it stacks with abilities to reduce Str/Toughness by 120. That, coupled with a KOTBS aura will reduce a targets Str/Toughness by 240 and increase their players' stats by 240!

Grieve of Sigmar is a tactic that affects an ability (Sigmar's Fist). As such, its buffs/debuffs should not stack with any other similar buffs/debuffs from abilities/procs such as KOTBS Aura. If it does, that's a bug and should be reported to the bugtracker.

[Illuminati]

This core identity of our classes are getting reduced down to simply AOE dmg potential and some utility. The core identity of DPS DoK was AOE Heal Debuff. None had a better heal debuff.

Without these core identity/utilities, the off-spec DPS classes would never compete with DPS classes.

Bring back the core identity for each class and the game can go back to its roots of unique roleplay vs 'who can do the most AOE dmg spam in 10 secs'. This, and reducing the AOE cap would create a much better game.

Right now AOE dps Zealot can fulfill the niche of providing an "AOE heal debuff" with crits on their AOE direct damage. Giving that function also to DOK would devalue their identity. For better or for worse, this game is not WAR any more and DOK will probably have to settle on a new identity.

PS. I think you're also catching on to the fact that Order mysteriously still gets 6-man build superiority if you run a certain comp. Look at the WP changes under the lens of 6-man play... e.g. Grieve of Sigmar is a tactic, so it stacks with abilities to reduce Str/Toughness by 120. That, coupled with a KOTBS aura will reduce a targets Str/Toughness by 240 and increase their players' stats by 240!

Grieve of Sigmar is a tactic that affects an ability (Sigmar's Fist). As such, its buffs/debuffs should not stack with any other similar buffs/debuffs from abilities/procs such as KOTBS Aura. If it does, that's a bug and should be reported to the bugtracker.

The Dok's heal debuff was 50% vs the 35% from Zealot correct?


True on the WP tactic, my bad. I'll always have some bias due to knowing the history of the server in more detail than most and my optics to that.

[leftayparxoun]

The Dok's heal debuff was 50% vs the 35% from Zealot correct?

Yeah it used to be 50% on a crit (https://web.archive.org/web/20090907124 ... aspx?id=23). 35% HD is more reasonable in the context of 24-target AOE cap.

[lastchar99]

Hahahaha its a joke? If u wanna aoe dps pressure, create one Slayer or White Lion... All the dps specs on healers are designed for sustain battles, u still live when the enemy downs, but dont expect to kill everyone like WL glass cannon does...
If we go on that way... i need a channeling attack with heals on my kotbs (sarcasm)

[Farrul]

WHAT ABOUT 2H WP?

Regarding AOE 2h Warrior Priest, even without calculating their side of things, I believe they are suffering from similar issues, but perhaps are at a better state than AOE dw DOK:

• On top of what AOE dw DOK brings to the table, they also have access to a 68 WOU party buff (that helps with their itemization too) and a ST heal debuff

All in all, 2h WP seems at a much better place compared to dw DOK regarding AOE output. I'd have to perform detailed calculations again to quantify it, but in theory it seems like their kit is slightly better designed for that role and perhaps shows the direction that AOE dw DOK should take.

Thanks for reading!

Well you analyzed the problem, the base damage of the skill is set too low, and the very same problem applies to the WP Smite, base dps is identical to the dok. Therefore 2HWP is not much better at all, it is more or less the same with a little better armor penetration, but still not in the same league as a real dps class.

P.S. and nobody in their right mind would replace fanatisiscm with a 80ws tactic. 10% crit 10% parry vs 80 WS/80 ini, that would be a noticeable downgrade in performance.

PPS. Sigmars Grace is decent as party buff for your backline casters but for melee(wp included) it won't stay active in combat for long, it just gets shattered/removed. Just a little extra fluff buff but not reliable in combat to plan a build around or replace real wounds.