Going for the high Ambush crits? Pick your weapon.

[Rayu]

With Ambush now being a central ability in 19 Rogue PvP I thought it might be good to do some math on it. First we'll compare the current best Ambush daggers, being Scout's Blade (or Sentinel's Blade, it's Alliance equivalent) and Impish Blade (not yet available). The standard dagger formula for Ambush is:

DMG = 2.75 * WDMG + 90.75 + ( 1.7 * AP / 14 )

DMG being the output damge before opponent's Armor and Resilience are calculated (don't use this formula to estimate your damage, it will be way too high), WDMG being the maximum weapon damage. For Scout's Blade/Sentinel's Blade this number is 34. For Impish Blade WDMG is 35. Now filling in these numbers would lead to the conclusion that Impish Blade is the better option, but we need to adjust the Ambush formula to show the difference in Agility. We'll also have to do two calculations, one for Combat and Assassination Rogues and one for Subtelty Rogues, who receive a 25% buff to Agility. Now for a Combat or Assassination Rogue, the formula is as follows:

2.75 * WDMG1 + 90.75 + ( 1.7 * ( AP + Agi1 * 2 ) / 14 ) = DMG = 2.75 * WDMG2 + 90.75 + ( 1.7 * ( AP + Agi2 * 2 ) / 14 )

With Agi being the added Agility, which is multiplied by 2 to convert it to AP. The numbers behind the terms are to show the difference between the terms on the left and right side of the equation. Now let's fill this one in. Left is Scout's Blade, right is Impish Blade.

2.75 * 34 + 90.75 + ( 1.7 * ( AP + 4 * 2 ) / 14 ) = 2.75 * 35 + 90.75 + ( 1.7 * ( AP + 3 * 2 ) / 14 )

0.33 * AP + 345.7 = 0.33 * AP + 347.8

345.7 < 347.8

Because Impish Blade's side is greater than Scout's Blade's side for every value of AP, we can conclude that it's simply always the better choice if you're going for the maximum Ambush damage.



Note that this does not necessarily mean Impish Blade is the way to go, because we're only talking about the potential opening damage here.



Tomorrow I'll have a look at the +5 Weapon Damage enchant vs. +15 Agility enchant, because it seems to me like it might change the numbers a bit.



EDIT: Thanks to Trespasser for pointing out the flaw in my calculations. I shouldn't do these things at 1am clearly.

 

[Pizza]

Sounds good, keep up the calculations.

 

[Trespasser]

Look good unfortunately your calculations are incorrect.

If you look at your very first calculation and assume we use Assassin's blade (still better then the 2 above) and lets say you have somewhere around 550AP.

That would mean ambush does a max hit (according to you) of 2.75 * 39 + 90.75 + ( 1.7 * 550 / 14 ) = 264.8 even a crit would only be slightly over 500 then against a target with 0 armor.

This of course is not what we are seeing ingame. (500*1.1*1.15*1.3=822 if you take MoS, imp ambush and shadowstep into consideration but that's still before armor)



The mistake you make is that it is a normalized attack but the damage increase from AP is still multiplied by the 275% weapon damage part.

So the correct formula would be:

2.75 * (WDMG + (1.7 * AP / 14 ) ) + 90.75 = ambush damage



If we use the same number as aboves we now get the following

2.75 * ( 39 + ( 1.7 * 550 / 14 ) ) + 90.75 = 381.7 damage or a ~760 crit (760*1.1*1.15*1.3 = 1249.8 damage with everything before armor)

Now that would be a more correct value. (as for armor, clothies have about 18-22% armor reduction some even more)



PS: For those waiting for the red whelp gloves calculation sorry for the wait but I am a bit busy the last few days.

 

[Fernald]

Word is AB isn't being nerfed.

 

[Pizza]

Word is AB isn't being nerfed.

[item]Assassin's Blade[/item] is being nerfed. Compare live with Cataclysm.



Impish Blade is for sure the best weapon followed by Scout's Blade in Cataclysm.

 

[Dodgeyou]

Yall did notice u can use weapons other then daggers with ambush now right?

 

[Soberlolz]

Yall did notice u can use weapons other then daggers with ambush now right?

Going for the high Ambush crits

Ambush does Higher dmg with Daggers bruh

 

[Dodgeyou]

Havent worked with it myself yet, was just making sure it was known.

 

[Bazookatooth]

So I apologize if I'm missing something important here, and I probably am. But on live, wouldn't the Tail Spike Tail Spike - Item - World of Warcraft be slightly better, at least from a high ambush point of view than the Scout's Blade Scout's Blade - Item - World of Warcraft ? As far as I can tell the Tail Spike would provide slightly more AP than the Scout's Blade, and also has the one point higher top end damage. But again, I'm probably missing something key...



Also, any thoughts on that +5 weapon damage vs. 15 agility thing yet? I'm just getting back into twinking and getting my rogue set up, and heaven forbid I have to figure these things out for myself!

 

[Agilitize]

Rayu doin work as usual