Newly Discovered Rage Ghost Nerf Unveiled!

#0 - May 27, 2009, 12:59 p.m.

Hello again fellow warrior comrades and brave fighters!

While working on my spreadsheet I started to wonder why its heroic strike representation was so high compared to actual results in the game, so naturally I and many others questioned the rage formula that was being used, which was expressed exactly by Kalgan (a developer) some while back in an announcement on the forums.

Now we are familiar with this formula for rage generation:

rage = 1/2 * (fs + 7.5d/c)

f is called a hit factor something or other and is
7 for main hand crit
3.5 for main hand hit and off hand crit
1.75 for off hand hit.
s is your base weapon speed
d is the damage done
c is 320.6 for a level 80 player

But I did some testing and recorded lots of data, and fit a new formula to the data that I collected, and I arrived at

rage = 3/8 * (fs + 7.5d/c)

Now if you are bad at math, basically rage generation is 75% as effective as what you are known to believe! I had lots of fun testing out my new stealth nerf that I (or anyone else in the community for that matter) never knew about or was told about by any patch note or community manager!

Bornakk

#79 - May 27, 2009, 8:34 p.m.

We are taking a look at this as we didn't make any intended changes recently to rage generation.

Bornakk

#250 - May 29, 2009, 6:20 p.m.

We investigated this issue and found it was not true – the rage generation formula has not changed anytime recently. So we looked into it further to figure out why this was being brought up and here are some of the problems we came across:

In the formulas people are using, there is a constant value which is labeled as ‘c’. At some point in the past, someone calculated a formula for determining c based on their level and that formula is not correct past level 70 as this value needs retuning from time to time like when a new expansion comes out. The value listed for c is 320.6 when it is actually 453.3.
We modified the system for displaying power bars in Wrath of the Lich King to have the client display its best guess of how much power they have, which is very deterministic for mana or energy, but not so much for rage. This most likely results in the displayed rage being off slightly at times, making the data collection more difficult. The client displays its best guess and the server validates the power usage against the value it knows they actually have - the two can be out of synch occasionally which throws the data off.
Some of the testing was done with ungeared characters hitting for very small amounts. There is a component to the calculation we haven’t previously mentioned that will make the rage gained from those attacks sometimes not match the formula. Basically, the normal formula is Rage = (7.5d/c+f*s)/2. However, that result can never be larger than (7.5d/c)*2. This essentially means that very low damage attacks have a limit on how much they can be averaged up by the f*s component of the equation.

To try and clarify things for the number crunchers, conceptually, here is the formula for rage generation:

1) Determine rage based on damage done divided by a level constant (7.5*d/c)
2) Determine how much rage would be 3.5 rage per second when factoring in the hit made and the weapon’s speed (f*s)
3) Average the two of them together (the divided by 2 part).

Ghostcrawler

#362 - May 31, 2009, 6:20 a.m.

Two salient points:

We change a lot of numbers every expansion. You should not assume that everything stays the same when we raise the level cap. Some formulae will still work with accepted numbers, but you may want to re-test others.

We generally support the players working to figure out exactly how everything works. That has been a big part of the WoW community since the inception. We think it takes some of the magic out of the game when everything is completely laid bare. However, sometimes the formulae we use are so arcane that we feel like it is appropriate to give the theorycrafters a peek behind the curtain. We did so with armor penetration and the new Arena reating calculations recently, and now with rage. In this case some players were assuming that rage generation was stealth nerfed recently so we wanted to clearly set the record straight.