Usual disclaimer: the following information is as of the Mist of Pandaria Beta build 16004, released on August 17, 2012, and may not be accurate once future patches are released.

For a primer on this post, please see the original post from July 30, 2012. To see the previous set of changes, please see this post from Tuesday.

Two builds were released at the tail end of this past week, each containing significant buffs to abilities that were previously nerfed. Mind Blast was buffed first by 25% and then by 10%, equaling out to a 16.875% buff if the initial nerfs never occurred, while Mind Flay and Devouring Plague are still down from their peaks a few builds ago.

Lets see how this changes things:

We’re back over 100k DPS in most cases, and we’re even over 110k DPS in some Patchwerk sims! [i]The sky [u]is not[/u] falling! Hallelujah![/i]

From Darkness, Comes Light is still on top of all sims not named Heavy Movement. The delta between the highest and lowest DPS for each fight type continues to stay close (or shrink in some cases), only being a few thousand DPS apart in most cases (Heavy Movement not withstanding):

As you can see, as raid events get introduced the viability of certain talent combinations drops significantly. We can see this from the data in the table above. No movement causes the DPS to vary by 2.47% when there is no movement (Patchwerk), then it jumps a bit when you introduce a little bit of movement (Light Movement) or predictable periods when casting will be limited (Ultraxion). When more raid events are occurring the gap widens by over 2% (Helter Skelter) while it jumps by extreme amounts when you have very little time to stand still and cast (Heavy Movement).

It isn’t surprising to see certain ability combinations shine in different environments, but the large delta on Heavy Movement fights has not closed at all since I started doing my detailed analysis. Blizzard has stated that they want to make the various talent combinations roughly equal and have done a fairly good job for the most part for all talents not called (or paired with) Shadow Word: Insanity. If there is any movement involved in a fight (and, as always, there isn’t a strongly compelling reason to take it), stay away from Shadow Word: Insanity like the plague.

Averaging all of the sims together we end up with (roughly) a 9.4k DPS increase averaging just above a 9.5% DPS increase. The biggest winner (on average) for raw DPS amount were Patchwerk (10112 DPS) followed by a near tie with Light Movement (9833 DPS) and Ultraxion (9823 DPS). The largest gains from a percentage increase point of view was for Heavy Movement (9.68%), while all others were hovering a few tenths of a percent behind (around 9.5%).

Crit is pulling ahead slightly once you’ve surpassed 8085 Haste. I attribute this change mostly to the large amount of buffs to Mind Blast in the two most recent builds. The value of Hit/Spirit has also risen because, again, missing a big nuke is going to hurt your DPS.

In other news, I’ve been busy adding items to my Best in Slot list database in preparation for posting a “pre-raid” BiS list over at HowToPriest.com which will go live hopefully sometime next week. The major limiting factor on completing this has been the generation and simming of a T14 normal modes “best in slot” gear set that is below the SWP+2 and DP+2 Haste Breakpoints to give accurate stat weights for not only my main Best in Slot but also for this new pre-raid list. Expect to see a post about this soon.

Raw SimulationCraft Data
Heavy Movement
Helterskelter
Light Movement
Patchwerk
Ultraxion

The SimulationCraft profiles changed slightly from the last post to this one.

Each of these SimulationCraft sims were run with 25,000 iterations rather than the usual 100,000 iterations in an effort to provide data as quickly as possible (e.g.: before yet another beta build was released).

These sims were for fights that are single-target. Multi target fights may (will) have different results.

These sims are as of Mists of Pandaria Beta build 16004, released on August 17, 2012. Once a new build comes out, these values will no longer be 100% valid!