Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Anything mage specific not covered by any of the other subforums, like raid instance guides for mages.
Katsumi
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Joined: Fri Nov 25, 2016 11:21 am

Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Mon Mar 13, 2017 4:37 pm

DPS rankings, pp95, all ilvl, heroic.jpg
DPS rankings, pp95, all ilvl, heroic
Y-Axis cut off. Fire DPS is highly inflated for Skorpyron because of the interaction between chaos pulls and living bomb.
DPS rankings, pp95, all ilvl, mythic.jpg
DPS rankings, pp95, all ilvl, mythic
Keep in mind that there are still very few parses for Elisande and Gul'Dan on Mythic difficulty.


Balancing the specs across all fights requires taking interactions between spec-specific skills and fight-specific mechanics into account, which makes it amazing to see how relatively close the specs are, all things considered. There seems to be a range of roughly 200K DPS between the respective best and worse specs for each boss, with specs moving around the ranks between the fights. The range widens a bit for fights with specific mechanics.

Considering fire in particular, ST DPS is consistently on the low side. However, a nerf to living bomb would also be more than warranted.
Last edited by Katsumi on Mon Mar 13, 2017 5:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Mage
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Mage Mon Mar 13, 2017 5:11 pm

Beautiful.
nickseng
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby nickseng Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:30 am

Looking at all this though, Frost doesn't seem as OP as some people paint it.
Katsumi
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Joined: Fri Nov 25, 2016 11:21 am

Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Tue Mar 14, 2017 12:22 pm

The conclusion seems to be that you might want to switch specs between fights, not only talents.
maynord
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby maynord Wed Mar 15, 2017 10:46 am

Frost doesn't seem OP because the gap between the lines isn't massive (the scale is a bit misleading because of Skorpyron's inflated numbers), but it is by far the most consistent spec, which is what makes it strong IMO. When you jump from Spellblade to Krosus, Fire/Arcane plummets while Frost drops by less than half as much. When you then move from Krosus to Augur, Frost shoots up relative to the other specs, and then Augur to Botanist the other two also drop. In an expac where spec swapping is a PITA and talents are annoying to change on the fly, it's easy to see why everyone is starting to jump on the Frost bandwagon.

I personally believe that AoE is very important on Tich/Spellblade and shouldn't be regarded as padding, and those two fights are a big reason Fire/Arcane are still staying afloat, but a minor balance pass to push Frost towards ST/Cleave or to simply close the AoE/ST gap between the specs would help. The former would be healthier for the game (giving each spec a niche), but the latter would be healthier for the playerbase's sanity so they don't feel pressure to farm AP/legendaries for a new weapon.
Katsumi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Wed Mar 15, 2017 5:37 pm

I've done a statistical round-up of everything, but since this is a forum for mages I've published it elsewhere. Just in case you're interested.
Haruichi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Haruichi Wed Mar 15, 2017 8:42 pm

Katsumi, thanks for adding this valuable input to the thread. I've been away for a while and haven't had a chance to catch up. I'll look it over shortly and comment. Thanks again.
Haruichi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Haruichi Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:42 am

The conclusion seems to be that you might want to switch specs between fights, not only talents.
Indeed. As far as Nighthold goes, the statistical evidence emphatically underlines that Fire and Aracane are only worthwhile on Skorpyron, Spellblade and Tichondrius. In all other fights, they have to be considered among the worst performing dps specs in the game. Frost is by far the better mage spec on everything else and middle to lower-middle pack across classes. And as pointed out elsewhere, a few fights where Frost slides a bit down the meters, it's heavily impacted by a non-damage event phase messing with IV uptimes and not directly because the spec mechanically, in and of itself, can't perform.
Someone with gfx skill should make the 1st post into an infographic image.
I thought that to myself quite a few times when I put the post together; unfortunately, my ability to produce graphical displays in such a way is often dwarfed by that of a toddler. The best I could come up with was to create a table with the raw stats, but it was a hurried post so I didn't and, also, it'd still leave out the take-aways which is where infographics would really be warranted.
Katsumi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Tue Mar 21, 2017 2:09 pm

Just a quick addition: Mage specs by fight, with DPS ranges. The full breakdown is available elsewhere.

Since I haven't included it in the picture, what you're seeing here is

Lower black whisker: p10-p25
Grey area: p25-Median
Colored area: Median-p75
Upper black whisker: p75-p90
Upper red whisker: p90-Max

Image

Data used here was extracted from warcraftlogs.com on March 14th 2017. The settings were:

- Player Damage Statistics For
- Each boss
- Heroic
- Mage
- For ilvl 899-901
- By percentiles, p10, p25, p50, p75, p90, max
- Over A Range Of 2 Weeks
- Current Standings
pleblius
Posts: 42
Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2015 2:12 am

Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby pleblius Thu Mar 30, 2017 7:09 pm

Something to keep in mind with Mythic Tichondrius:
Fire mages get free useless pad damage. On Tichondrius, with the six-blood strat that almost everybody does, you have three adds that have infinite health on the boss for basically the entire fight, meaning three adds taking AoE trinket damage, ignite cleave, cinderstorm damage, etc. that contributes absolutely nothing to the fight, because the health is immediately regenerated until the adds are pulled out. Khira has considered removing damage done this way, but at the moment I don't expect it to change.

There is useful add damage on Tichondrius, don't get me wrong. But without the pad, on my pulls when we did three-blood strat, our fire mages were generally bottom half, even losing in overall DPS to people who were just single target.

Judging from these stats: Frost is more consistently good across all fights, and even fights where it doesn't out-parse other classes you can be sure that its damage is all effective (except maybe on Botanist, although logs currently correct for this). Arcane struggles with straight ST fights a bit more than I expected it would, but then it also does much better on AoE.
Arcane demonstrably has the best useful AoE for Nighthold.
Frost demonstrably has the best ST and cleave for Nighthold.
Fire is the worst across every fight except for Tichondrius. When Tich is corrected for, Arcane and Frost are both significantly more useful. Frost even has more effective add damage than Fire when corrected.

Fire is the least useful spec on every fight in Mythic Nighthold. It parses higher on Skorp, Tich, and Spellblade (Fel Soul Add), but those parses are meaningless, and logs correct most of them anyway.
maynord
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby maynord Fri Mar 31, 2017 11:57 am

Thank you again for the graph Katsumi, always interesting to see. Would it be possible to show a graph for just fixed percentiles though, like the ones you did before? The problem with the box-plot graph is that the scale is massively stretched by the big outliers in Tich. Qualitatively it would appear the specs pull similar DPS on many fights, but a statistically significant difference of 50-100k DPS (which is what you can see with Frost vs. other spces for most bosses) is very large in practice.
Katsumi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Fri Mar 31, 2017 5:26 pm

As long as you're trying to think in terms of Skada DPS rankings you need to pick a fixed point from which to draw your conclusions. That's problematic even if you know the shape of the underlying distributions (which we don't) and greatly influences the results of your ranking. If I had to give a recommendation for that approach I'd suggest to take a look at any percentile lower or equal than p90, with constant ilvl, for fights with all specs having at least a few hundred data points, for each fight, for each difficulty. You could then reach a conclusion such as

"Under the assumption of a combination of RNG and skill resulting in (pick percentile) relative performance, the DPS of spec X is A and the DPS of spec Y is B for this particular fight on this particular difficulty, given that both players work with a set of gear in a comparable range."

Fixed percentile rankings are available on warcraftlogs.com, but the assumptions are incredibly impactful. Just play around with the settings to see what I mean. The idea behind the boxplot is to get away from this, if only a little.

Rankings are insufficient to draw balancing conclusions.


I'm attaching more details.* If this isn't news to you just ignore it.

Image
The distributions are configured to fit the percentiles of the boxplots as well as possible. The shape of the distributions can differ substantially.**


To take your main point, I agree that showing the maximum values could be misleading and it does affect the scale. Since they should not be considered anything else besides a theoretical possibility, I excluded them and rescaled the graph. For now I'm leaving this here, but I'm planning to do a general update as soon as we have more 7.2 data.

Image
My personal take on this would be to play Arcane on Spellblade and Tichondrius, play Frost on everything else and pay attention to what happens to Fire in the near future. But as I've said above, with 7.2 this conclusion is somewhat up in the air until we have more reliable data.

* I have to apologize, this was all done without a second revision. Unfortunately I somewhat forgot to label the axes. X is DPS, Y(lower), not marked, is density, Y(upper) is cumulative density. I also somewhat mislabeled the right X axis - the scale is the same, but the ticks are smaller. Also keep in mind that I've slightly altered the boxplot from what's the standard because the data didn't allow for more details. Typically you'd show outliers as dots outside of the whiskers, which provides a much better impression of their weight in the data set.

** That's somewhat reflected in the boxplots, and although difficult to see you can draw some conclusions from the distances between the percentiles. For example, an asymmetric plot corresponds to a skewed distribution. It's probably also what's going to drive the in-house balancing discussions. Since you want to maximize player happiness (~ time spent in the game), left-side RNG-based outliers are problematic. I'd really be curious to see their data, because you could very clearly disentangle RNG and player ability (analysis of apm, time played, reaction time etc.).
Teamaker
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Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2017 12:12 pm

Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Teamaker Sat Apr 08, 2017 7:58 am

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/11" target="_blank

Seems like 7.2 is the final nail in the coffin for fire.
sawbossnl
Posts: 81
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2016 8:00 pm

Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby sawbossnl Sat Apr 08, 2017 2:08 pm

Maby something to thunk about but the more gear your guild get the less fire mage will be needed as the other classes will be doing enouf aoe dammage so you might want to focus on just doing main dammage to boss and atleast be number one on boss dammage and somewhere at the middle on adds :) blizzard and frozen orb and icelance split does actualy alot of aoe specially wen the adds arent up that long :)
Katsumi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:24 am

Retracted.
Last edited by Katsumi on Mon Apr 10, 2017 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Katsumi
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Re: Current State of Mages: Statistical Round-Up

Unread postby Katsumi Mon Apr 10, 2017 7:26 pm

Data is from today, warcraftlogs.com, patch 7.2 only. I can't praise Kihra's work there enough.

What you're seeing here is data for Mythic only, ilvl 908-910, sorted by p90. This is done under the assumption that we're interested in a comparison between people who know what they're doing and have decent RNG. For Skorpyron and Tichondrius I excluded the maxima.

Skorpyron
Image

Anomaly
Image

Trilliax
Image

Spellblade
Image

Krosus
Image

Botanist
Image

Augur
Image

Tichondrius
Image

Elisande
Image

GulDan
Image


Mage Specs Across Fights
Image

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