Whats WoW doing when you swing your weapon?

When you attack someone and swing your weapon, a lot of things can happen. In most cases you'll just land a normal hit, but sometimes you'll crit. Or you miss. Or maybe the opponent dodges or parries. If you want to decide what gear is best in a given situation, it helps if you know how WoW decides what's gonna happen to a swing.

While I have no insight to the actual implementation, the result comes down to this: The game is rolling a virtual dice and using the result to identify one of the entries in a big table (which is usually called the hit-table). And there it will be able to read what's gonna happen with this swing.

To say it a bit more technical: There is a random number generated. The range of possible numbers is devided into "areas" that map to one of the possible results of the roll like miss, crit, dodge, hit etc.

To keep it simple let's say we roll with a 100 sided dice. (/random 100)
If you have a 20% crit chance, 20 possible rolls will be a crit. If you have a 5% miss chance, 5 of the possible rolls will be a miss. The same is done for dodge, parry and block. The remaining possible rolls will map to a normal hit.
As hit-chance is not really a fixed chance, the line "Improves your chance to hit by X%" actually means "Reduces your chance to miss by X%".

Example:

These are the parameters:
Your miss chance = 5%
Your crit chance = 20%
The enemy's chance to dodge = 5%
The enemy's chance to parry = 5%
The enemy's chance to block = 10%

For every attack the server generates ONE SINGLE roll to see if the attack lands or not. As I said, to keep it simple let's just say the roll is random from 1 to 100.
If the roll lands between:
1 to 20 you crit
21 to 25 the foe dodges
26 to 30 the foe parrys
31 to 40 the foe blocks
41 to 45 you miss
46 to 100 you score a normal hit

This means that unlike common believe WoW does not determine first if you hit and then if the hit is a crit. If you have a 20% crit chance this means an average of 20 out of 100 swings (attacks) will crit and not only 20 out of 100 hits.
That does mean that crits can't miss, which in turn means that the amount of crits you do out of an amount of swings does NOT depend on your miss rate or any other variable except your crit rate.

This above rule of thumb suffices for everything except the most exotic situations: Situations where so many special things (meaning everything else than a normal hit) can happen that the chances add up to more than 100% which means they can't be placed in the hit table all at once. In that case certain things take priority over others and sadly all disadvantages take priority over the nice stuff like crit and hit.

If you have trouble to understand that, let me depict it like this: Imagine the dice the game is gonna roll for you. On each of its sides is written what's gonna happen to your swing. When the game sets up the hit table, its like preparing the dice by writing possible outcomes of a swing on its sides. At first on every side you can read "HIT". Then the game will start to fill in the other stuff: If you have 10% miss chance, then 10% of the dice's sides will get the "HIT" removed and "MISS" written on them (if it's a dice with 20 sides like pen&paper roleplayers use them, then "MISS" would be writen to two of the 20 sides). After filling in your miss chance the game will continue with other things that can happen: Dodge, Block, Glancing maybe... and in the very end it will come to your crit rate. If there are not enough sides left with the initial word "HIT" written on it, the game can't add "CRIT" tags anymore. In that case (and only in that case) you'll end up with less sides reading "CRIT" than you should get and that means you crit less than you deserve. Luckily for us rogues only in the most exotic situations (like when fighting Loatheb) there won't be enough free sides on the dice (or entries in the hit table if you want to be more technical), so you end up losing crit chance.

I hope this information helps!

Combat Dagger builds and Adrenaline Rush

With patch 1.12 rogues got their revamp and most of us will have a new spec by now. Being in raids most of my time, I opted for a combat dagger build with Adrenaline Rush (15/31/5).

It was not much of a question for me to take Adrenaline Rush now that I could. But I hear a lot of rogues wonder if it's really worth to take or if they should not just go only 28 points deep into the combat tree and put the remaining points elsewhere.


Is AR worth it or not?

In 5 minutes you get to spend 3000 energy, if you have no major downtimes (every downtime favors the AR though). With AR you get 15 seconds double energy or a total of 3150 energy over 5 minutes. Your overall damage through energy abilities increases by: 3150/3000 = 5%.
If you do 50% of your overall damage with backstabs thats 2,5% increase to your sustained dps.

Your dps boost through AR becomes even bigger the longer the phases are in which you don't fight but the cooldown is ticking.
There are countless examples where you get a lot more out of AR than the theoretical 2,5% damage buff.
- The typical PvP fight that you start with all cooldowns and that takes only a bunch of seconds.
- Hit and Run bosses like Firemaw, Chromaggus, Gluth or Heigan where you have large gaps within the bossfight where you can't melee, but your cooldowns will refresh.
- All fights that are shorter than multiples of the cooldown. For example killing Patchwerk takes at max 7 minutes, but I doubt any guild kills him in less than 5. That means you get to use AR 2 times in this fight and it boosts you dps by at atleast 3,7%.

And if you combine the use of AR with Blade Flurry (provided there are 2 mobs in range) or the effect of an Earthstrike trinket or Jom Gabbar, you again increase the theoretical boost.

Last but not least there's a more subtle buff to your dps. Now that Ruthlessness is not a prereq for Relentless Strikes anymore, putting 3 points into that talent looks like a waste. Take 3 points from Ruthlessness and put a 3rd point into Improved S&D instead as this is the only finisher you'll ever use in PvE and you safe 2 talent points but get the same effect: You can maintain a 100% S&D coverage with only 5 cp Slice&Dice finishers - in other words for 0 energy cost. (A 5cp S&D will hold 30 seconds now, and that's just as long as it takes you to get another 5cp with a combat dagger spec.)
The problem is to get to the first 5 combo-points though. Whatever you do... you will have a large initial gap in the S&D coverage (or many small ones) OR you have to do so many low-cp finishers that you waste 25 energy a couple of times due to Relentless Strikes not proccing. Adrenaline Rush however is the solution. Pop the first S&D after only two backstabs. With 4parts of Bonescythe that's most likely two energy ticks into the fight - otherwise you need three energy ticks. After that pop AR and spam Backstabs. Just when the S&D buff is about to run out, you can do a 5cp one already, thanks to AR, and keep it up for the rest of the nukage.

But don't think only about what damage meter will show in the end. The real big reason why you should spec AR if you go for a combat dagger build is burst damage. Be it Maexxna, C'Thun, Ouro, Huhuran, Gothik... there are plenty of situations where the key is to muster insane dps for just half a minute or so. About 3k more damage in these critical periods does help a lot!

Does it have no drawbacks at all?

Sure it has... one is aggro. Burst damage does always mean burst aggro. And when you want to make full use of AR, you need to use it early in the fight (for the reasons listed above), so you really need to be cautious with your aggro. A well timed Vanish solves all your problems in most cases though.

Then there is the problem that if you take all damage talents that make sense for dagger rogues from the combat tree, you end up with only 28 points in there. To get AR you need to spend another 2 points on talents that don't really increase your damage output. Well, I had no problem spending those. Improved Sprint is a great PvP talent that has its uses in PvE too. The same goes for Improved Kick. Endurance is nice too, especially if you also got Improved Sprint. And if you don't like these talents, buff your survivability and increase your dodge or parry rate. There are enough cleaving mobs in raid instances to make it worthwhile.

Another drawback - at least for me - is that I consider it my precious best cooldown skill I have and I don't want to waste it. Thats why I don't use it as often as I could... its really hard sometimes (for example in an instance where trash dies in a matter of seconds or when you grind easy mobs) to find a situation where it really makes sense to use it.
But the important thing is that you got a way to increase your damage output and cp generation by a large proportion once every 5 minutes which is a big help in countless situations.


Conclusion

Adrenaline Rush is not only a significant buff to your sustained damage, it's greatly increasing your flexibility and burst damage and thus might safe your life many many times. It's the best 31pt talent of all trees and a must for every combat dagger build imho.