Monday, January 10, 2011

Death Strike Base Hits

Sthenno posted a comment asking about how often Death Strike lands for just the base heal. I assumed 50% in my analysis on how good stamina and mastery were but that was mostly just a guess. I decided to parse through our last raid and break it down by fight to see how close that guess was. (It's important to do it by fight since Chimaeron was one of the fights we did that night and it is certainly not typical.)

FightOverheal Base HealPartial Base HealFull Base HealOverheal Big HealPartial Big HealFull Big HealTotal
Argaloth41400615
Trash9315694587
Omnitron13111383167
Maloriak411200421
Chimaeron7015125782
Atramedes1120105
Total387591020143277

FightOverheal Base HealPartial Base HealFull Base HealOverheal Big HealPartial Big HealFull Big Heal
Argaloth27%7%27%0%0%40%
Trash10%3%17%7%10%52%
Omnitron19%1%16%4%12%46%
Maloriak19%5%57%0%0%19%
Chimaeron9%0%18%1%2%70%
Atramedes20%20%40%0%20%0%
Total14%3%21%4%7%52%

There are 6 possible outcomes here. The first is terrible and likely indicates I hit the button at full without having taken much damage in the last 5 seconds. The second is semi-reasonable. It's a base heal with some overheal in it, but at least it wasn't a fully wasted button. It also doesn't happen much at all. The third category is very reasonable. I get a full base heal and shield out of it and it's probably better to get 25k now when I need the healing than to wait and risk death or wasting healer mana in the hopes of getting more. The 4th is a little weird and rarely happened except on trash. It indicates I'm taking a real beating but got healed to full by other sources. This shows bored healers or excessively hard hitting trash than anything on my end I think. The 5th is a lot like the 4th except I snuck in for some healing. The last, and thankfully biggest, category is when I snag all of a large heal. Chimaeron skews these numbers a little (and would be worse if not for a lot of weak Death Strikes during phase 3) but you can argue Maloriak skews the numbers in the other direction.

I find it interesting that trash provides the biggest non-Chimaeron Death Strikes and even then is very close. I guess trash just hits really hard compared to bosses who do more raid damage. Base heals actually only make up 40% of all my heals, and even that is stretching it since the overheal ones don't get any extra benefit from more stamina and the full overheals don't get anything from mastery either. Really it's more like a quarter of relevant Death Strikes are for the base amount. I think this is because my first look into things was on Argaloth and has skewed the way I look at things a little. Real bosses hit way harder than Argaloth. In the context of my last post this makes stamina worse but it makes mastery better.

All this makes me think I need to get or build a rune mod. I saw reference to one on EJ that showed your current Death Strike heal that I may download and check out.

4 comments:

Sthenno said...

Full health base heals aren't totally useless, and stamina still makes them better. You still get the full blood shield amount. Still, all of this does seem to suggest that mastery is a significantly better choice than stamina.

Of course I gear my DK for soloing Black Temple bosses, so stamina is king in terms of survivability.

I do think trash just hits harder than bosses. Trash pulls are short and they expect healers to just stand there and spam powerful heals the whole time. The same is true with heroics. You heal harder on heroic bosses than on raid bosses a lot of the time because heroic bosses are only supposed to take two minutes.

Ziggyny said...

I could have sworn overheal didn't put up a shield but I looked at the log from Thursday and it sure did. Huh. I also still get the damage and the runic power, of course, so at times it's right to hit the button without having taken any damage. At the start of the fight I need to rune strike and the best way to get the runic power to do that is to blindly hit death strike.

Sthenno said...

So far I haven't paid any attention to death strike timing to try to maximize effect. I've only tanked heroics, of course, but it seems like a difficult thing to do. A mod that shows your current death strike heal would be helpful.

For rune mods I tried a couple and settled on Rune-it-All because it let me have something that was basically just like the default interface but movable.

Ziggyny said...

I downloaded DDR last night and it put some information in a better spot (runes, diseases, and a death strike current heal meter) but didn't put my demo shout or current health in the area so it wasn't as much help as I want. I also want to work outbreak and my cooldowns into one spot so I'm not looking all over the place to see what's up or not. I may just try editing DDR to see if I can make it do what I want.