A recent post on the WoW druid forum has caught my attention:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=292130609&sid=1

Tarskin of Renedar and Nightcrowler of Quel’thalas posted their cat dps ‘simulators’ that allow gear or attribute checks. Since C++ is more familiar to me, I’ve taken Nightcrowler’s code, rewritten it in python (with some minor modifications to the logic), and created a plot to illustrate attack power and crit rate scaling.

The code is on the Code page.

You will need the python packages ‘matplotlib’ and ‘gnuplot’ to run this script.

Interpretation

The plot on the upper left shows how dps scales with AP and crit. Not surprisingly, the slope goes up towards more AP/crit.

Having the model begged to use it to answer the question every cat druid is asking him or herself: What’s better, strength or agility?

Basically, if you are on a certain point in the AP-crit-grid, adding strength will move you along the AP grid line, while adding agility will move you both along the AP and the crit line, effectively moving you diagonally up towards that sweet corner of high AP and high crit where dps is highest. But does it move you fast enough?

For example, say we add 50 agility at a certain point. Properly specced, that means we add 2.06% crit chance and 51.5 AP. If we do the same for strength, we add 123.6 AP. The following figure illustrates the movement along the graph:

The question now is, which path takes you to a higher elevation on the surface? It pretty much looks like a draw but it’s hard to tell from this picture.

Therefore, to get a better view, I made another plot: For every point on the AP-crit-grid I’ve run the model for a 10 million second fight (to reduce the error on the dps) and computed both the dps with 50 extra agility and 50 extra strength. Instead of putting the resulting dps on the grid point, I’ve put the difference of the agility increased dps and the strength increased dps there. That means that in regions where the difference is larger than zero agility yields a better return than strength point for point and vice versa for regions where the difference is less than zero:

Even though there is a noticeable slope in the resulting diagram, you have to keep in mind what dps difference we’re talking about: The absolute dps values are 700 to 900 dps. An increase of strength or agility of 50 points gives you about 25-30 dps and the difference between these dps increases is at the level of a few dps. In other words, the argument of “22 strength is better than 20 agility” is meaningless since the resulting difference will be absolutely unnoticeable in any real-world scenario. Also, since stat distribution favors multi stats over single stat (you find items with 15 str, 15 agi of the same item level as, say, an item with 22 agi) it is always better to aim for the item with the largest sum of strength and agility combined.

Point for point there is no noticeable difference between strength and agility with respect to dps for a Cat druid with all dps increasing talents.

As an aside, that’s hardly a coincidence. Blizzard surely has balanced the two stats on purpose to make druids not heavily favor one over the other.

Feedback is welcome, you can reach me at anubereth@mac.com.