mirrorbender
Grandfathered
I'm skeptical of this. Triple socket ilvl25 should still beat out an ilvl 26-27 weapon without sockets in theory, even if you go with +2/+2 gems.
Shadowlands F2P Warrior Guide
- Thread starter Chops
- Start date
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Chops
Soccer Dad
in general, sure. but the high vers numbers on the claymore and the runeblade scale with the +str gems. I havent had a chance to check instanced pvp on the ptr to see what the reduced secondaries do, but in open world the claymore > crow wing by a bit
mirrorbender
Grandfathered
Those darn secondary stats muddling up my theorycrafting! I'm intrigued now.
https://www.wowhead.com/item=27986/crow-wing-reaper?ilvl=25
4.6 WDPS (27.6 AP) + 15 Strength = 42.6 effective AP
12 Stamina
10 Crit
vs.
https://www.wowhead.com/item=2877/combatant-claymore?ilvl=27
5.0 WDPS (30 AP) + 7 Strength = 37 effective AP
7 Stamina
16 Vers
The tradeoff is essentially 16 vers for 5.6 AP and 10 crit.
If you ignore the crit, you need the versatility on claymore to make up for 5.6 AP. At level 20, 16 vers is 3.57%.
5.6/.0357=~157 AP (including the weapon contribution) to break even. The more you have beyond this, the better. Every warrior should be comfortably ahead of this, and with crusader it's not even remotely close.
At level 29, 16 vers is 2.70%. 5.6/.027=~207 AP to break even. Again, everyone should be hitting this, and with crusader up it's an easy win for the claymore.
However, just because crit doesn't show up on tooltips doesn't make it worthless. That 10 crit from CWR will also scale up with AP. On paper, 10 crit is 2.55% damage at 20 and 1.45% damage at 29 in PvP (175% damage on a crit). This raises the breakpoints to 550 AP @20 (good luck with that) and 448 AP @29 in PvP (which is around 2x crusader territory). CWR also gives extra stamina, which will be welcome with the lack of talasite going forwards, as well as the option to gem for even more if you want to be a chonky boi.
https://www.wowhead.com/item=13505/runeblade-of-baron-rivendare?ilvl=26 is a very slightly worse version of https://www.wowhead.com/item=2877/combatant-claymore?ilvl=27. But it does have the speed and healing (and a little bit more stamina). https://www.wowhead.com/item=9372/sulthraze-the-lasher?ilvl=26 is very similar as well, trading a little bit of vers for haste, and having a 2RPPM damage+DoT proc.
I'm surprised at how good the non socket weapons are, all options are fairly competitive with one another, and what is best depends on how you value secondary stats. At the end of the day, we're talking about closing a gap of about 6 attack power. But if you give crit its theory value, then:
TL;DR is that while https://www.wowhead.com/item=2877/combatant-claymore?ilvl=27 should give the biggest tooltips, https://www.wowhead.com/item=27986/crow-wing-reaper?ilvl=25 with 3x3 strength seems to edge it out.
OP
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Chops
Soccer Dad
i think this 'graph gets at the crux of it
if i have 35% crit (which i do) and swapping to claymore or runeblade give me better tooltips (which they do) at the cost of ~3% crit (which it is) then Im happy sitting at 31-32 crit for higher tooltips. esp when that higher tooltip comes with increased run speed (run speed that, its worth noting, actually works in wargames/arena).
Like i said, i need to look at instanced pvp numbers but i think given the run speed, runeblade makes a compelling choice for BIS, assuming you have the crit gear.
If youre relying on CWR for a lot of your crit though... that might be the run.
mirrorbender
Grandfathered
I agree, the run speed is likely worth way more than the damage difference between the weapons, but that's really getting into apples vs oranges territory.
OP
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Chops
Soccer Dad
yea, its very much "do you have the crit gear to not miss crow wing?"
short of it is, if youre gearing all str gems, all of a sudden vers heavy weapons are way more valuable
mirrorbender
Grandfathered
I mean all secondary stats are suddenly going to be more valuable, aren't they? The question is how much more valuable are they, and are there areas where it's worth trading off some strength for them? And I don't think it actually moves the needle all that much in terms of weapon selection.
OP
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Chops
Soccer Dad
I mean, if you think an extra ~15-20 dmg on tooltips (with crusader) is worth giving up for less than 2% crit... sure man. Nothing I can say is going to convince you that you might need to go farm a new weapon.
mirrorbender
Grandfathered
I think if you plug in the exact numbers, you'll find it's not as crazy as you seem to think it is. Either that or my math is wrong lmao.
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Chops
Soccer Dad
I think our disagreement here is between a theorycrafted spreadsheet over an extended imaginary fight and the real world application of short bursts of combat in both arena and wargames.
The difference between 32 and 34% crit is meaningless in a game where I touch a kill target for 3-4 globals at a time. I'll get more value out of hitting consistently harder than out of getting 2 extra crits every hundred swings.
But if we're talking a raid situation, 2% more crit starts being huge. There's a reason I ran the 3% more crit DMG meta gem when I raided. It was a massive DPS increase when I could guarantee a 90% up time on a raid boss. Same with a few more points of crit.
I'm not saying your math is wrong, rather that it may be inapplicable to the experience of 20 twinks. I am *always* gonna be wary of applying end game DPS calculations to 20 twinking
mirrorbender
Grandfathered
My problem with that position is that you're arguing 2.5% crit is meaningless but 1.5% base damage is somehow meaningful. The truth is neither one is really going to make a difference most of the time. But we delineate other pieces of gear as "BiS" or not over smaller margins than that all the time.
Personally, I think crit actually tends to overperform its numbers for arms compared to probabilistic expected damage, because if you crit something like CSmash, or the follow up Mortal Strike, you often just win on the spot because suddenly you're in Execute range.
Personally, I think crit actually tends to overperform its numbers for arms compared to probabilistic expected damage, because if you crit something like CSmash, or the follow up Mortal Strike, you often just win on the spot because suddenly you're in Execute range.
Ivo
Dedicated Guide Author
I read a bit about Claymore vs Crow Wing and one thing I don't understand is when you say Claymore is better with str gems, do you mean +3 str gems or +2+2 ones as well? I don't remember when talasites got nerfed and whether this was said with talasites in mind. Cheers!
OP
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Chops
Soccer Dad
As strength increases, so does the value of versatility as a dmg multiplier. So if all of a sudden, you've got 40-60 more str because you replaced stam gems with str gems then the % dmg versatility is increasing becomes a larger number, if not a larger %.
ie 20% of 150 is better than 20% of 100.
So the value of versatility increases the more str you have. Even if its 2/2s or 3s but obviously more so (in terms of just output) with 3s.
That said, I'm not sold on my own position here. Testing on target dummies on the PTR is (obviously) different than pvp on live. I think claymore has a place (it provides higher tooltip dmg than crow wing in some builds and almost always does so with crusader up) so it could be an exceptional choice for fury off hand stat stick with Rivendare in MH (i think, I forget which has higher weapon dmg) because that vers is pretty insane. But I do like my crit and I'm partial to favoring primary > secondary stats.
ymmv obviously, but i have both and never use the claymore in my arms build and always run SMF when Im fury. If thats worth anything.
Mnemonic
Veteran
mirrorbender
Grandfathered
It's kind of a wash damage wise between Crow Wing and Claymore, depends on your valuation of AP vs Crit vs Vers. Crow Wing gives a good chunk more stamina though even with pure strength gems, and that's probably the most valuable difference.
In terms of fury off hand stat stick, I haven't done any math but I assume Crow Wing is far superior. The extra weapon damage on claymore is worth much less in the off hand, and the 9 strength from crow wing gems applies to both your main hand and off hand attack power. If you are using claymore as fury, it should be in the main hand to maximize the effect of the higher WDPS
In terms of fury off hand stat stick, I haven't done any math but I assume Crow Wing is far superior. The extra weapon damage on claymore is worth much less in the off hand, and the 9 strength from crow wing gems applies to both your main hand and off hand attack power. If you are using claymore as fury, it should be in the main hand to maximize the effect of the higher WDPS
OP
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Chops
Soccer Dad
my thought here was you'd be using Rivendare OH and Claymore MH and you'd prefer that to Rivendare MH and crow wing OH given the higher likelihood of having at least one and often 2 crusader procs.
Im unsure of that math here and at least 90% SMF with cudgel is still better.
OP
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