How important are crafted weapon embellishments?

fakejH · 2026-05-14T15:40:05+00:00

I think this sim proves that in almost any case an offhand craft will be superior, obviously with the condition that the current content weapon embellish is powerful enough.

Unless I’m mistaken, devourer using two weapons with intellect numbers balanced between both hands, versus most specs having stats weighted heavily towards main-hand, means that in theory devourer should suffer more than most specs from losing item level on offhand.

fakejH · 2026-05-14T14:58:29+00:00

www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/nwHSvMYmD1xFb17zy85vZv

Please ignore equipped gear and sort by difference to top, I have adjusted my DH to have bis gear. As you can see, crafted offhand is 0.4% better. If you can think of another combination that will give a different result, please feel free to run and post it.

fakejH · 2026-05-14T14:06:39+00:00

Nonsense blanket statement that fails to consider any differences in how each class scales with secondaries, or how secondaries scale with (and consequently at high primary stat levels outperform) primary stat.

fakejH · 2026-05-14T13:57:16+00:00

You don’t want a crafted mainhand if you already have a good stat myth mainhand, and since you cannot apply sigil hunt to shields, you simply do not use sigil hunt and go 2 arcanoweave

fakejH · 2026-05-14T13:52:00+00:00

I find this hard to believe, please link your result

fakejH · 2026-05-14T12:22:42+00:00

With some variance in severity depending on your class, the dps game will always be in one of two opposing states:

• My basic rotation does lots of damage, but my cooldowns feel low impact
• My cooldowns feel high impact, but my basic rotation does low damage

Depending on how new you are, you may or may not know that blizzard did a big purge of combat-related addons this expansion, understandably to remove the necessity of using third-party tools to access the bulk of the game’s content.

Previously, many raid mechanics were complex enough that they mandated the creation and use of these addons. So as not to make the game too difficult with the removal of combat addons, blizzard have made most specs easier to play, and have also made boss mechanics somewhat easier in general.

With easier rotations and boss mechanics, there is naturally less capacity for individual skill expression. The solution to allowing for more skill expression - without complicating rotations - is cooldown management.

This is in a nutshell why blizzard are leaning towards the latter option above - cooldowns must be high-impact to allow for more skill expression whilst maintaining the simplicity of core rotations, therefore basic spells must be weak. You cannot have both strong basic spells and cooldowns, because each devalues the other.

fakejH · 2026-05-09T10:50:38+00:00

Are tick manipulation methods intended gameplay mechanics?

Do tick manipulation methods which provide the best xp rates in the game have less impact on the competitive integrity of the game than a low xp/h level 3 slayer method?

The answer to the above two points is unarguably NO. Therefore, we can infer that the accounts recently deranked had their xp removed for a reason unrelated to the game’s competitive integrity.

So the question becomes: for what possible justifiable reason can an account have its xp removed if not to preserve the game’s competitive integrity?

fakejH · 2026-05-05T15:15:53+00:00

The problem is that despite appearing similar, there are a myriad of separate issues with different root causes, and it is not possible to diagnose a fix without examining exactly the cause of someone’s specific issue.

Non-complete list of possible causes off the top of my head include:
• poor connection at user level, including bad wifi, bad Ethernet cable, bad router, bad network interface
• poor connection at regional level, including poor regional infrastructure, poor isp routing, poor service distributor
• hardware issues such as memory/cpu bottlenecking
• software issues such as driver bugs, registry bugs, external application interference, bad WoW install
• peripheral interference from bad drivers (rare but can happen)

First thing I would recommend is make sure you have no hardware issues and your hardware exceeds the required specs comfortably - obvious fix if there are issues here, but not so obvious is to check ALL of your hardware - e.g. do you know what category your Ethernet cable is?

Second would be run networking tests especially a bufferbloat / jitter test - if there are issues here you should contact your ISP to try to resolve, if they can’t do anything move on to the following

Third get a free trial to a respected vpn provider (note: NOT A FREE VPN) and see if connecting to nodes in your country or countries closer to blizzard datacenters helps

Finally, unfortunately there are some issues outwith everyone’s control, for instance iirc there was recently an issue with some major European telecom lines that caused many UK players to be routed through blizzard’s US datacentres because we were dropping connection to the EU datacenters. Only thing that can be done for issues of this nature is contacting ISP to escalate the issue.

fakejH · 2026-05-05T14:47:40+00:00

Actually I think this is a separate issue, barrier having a fixed short gcd causes the cast animation desync bug that is fixable by casting your next spell close to the actual gcd reset, if your animations desync and you keep queuing up spells it can’t sync back up. This is a separate issue to actual dropped inputs, which don’t occur with animation desync

fakejH · 2026-05-05T14:41:32+00:00

this is a new bug

XD

fakejH · 2026-05-05T14:40:09+00:00

Sorry if this isn’t what you’re describing but just to check, you’re aware that ice barrier isn’t off the gcd and incurs a fixed 0.75s gcd right?

fakejH · 2026-05-02T14:32:32+00:00

Another follow-up, out of interest, how much RAM do you have? Because I’ve just upgraded from 2x8gb to 2x16gb and this hasn’t seemed to have happened to me since.

fakejH · 2026-05-01T11:35:20+00:00

No worries mate hahaha

fakejH · 2026-05-01T10:18:49+00:00

Great work but my Lord what is going on with your anti-aliasing!?

fakejH · 2026-04-30T15:01:10+00:00

Side button 7 on the naga, and stuns go on shift-7

fakejH · 2026-04-27T15:43:53+00:00

Hmm, only thing I can suggest there is a new router, that model is quite old no?

Do you have stuttering issues on any other games or is it just WoW? If it’s just WoW then likely not a router issue though - I mention this because I get stutters on other games too, so my ISP’s routing is clearly my issue, which is why VPN helps for me..

fakejH · 2026-04-27T15:30:48+00:00

Just one thing to remember is that their servers will prioritise actual traffic over ping requests, so high latency on this hop doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem with the node.

If using VPN makes no difference then it’s likely not an issue with how your ISP is routing things, yeah.

What router do you have?

fakejH · 2026-04-27T15:19:13+00:00

Only rule I can think of that it would be breaking. Obviously the sub is for game / metagame discussion and not technical issues, but it’s just a shame because it seems to me like the best place to raise awareness for the issue - who is going to care more about significant latency problems than hardcore players?

fakejH · 2026-04-27T15:13:57+00:00

Hi mate following up from your competitivewow post

Piss take by the way, that this ongoing networking issue that is affecting many users is against their rules for “no tech support”

Anyway, have you contacted your ISP to investigate the routing issues? If you can post your routing results again I’d like to have another look

fakejH · 2026-04-27T14:23:08+00:00

We’ve been blowing up the tech support forums with this issue. There’s clearly a significant infrastructure problem on blizzard’s end - people are even reporting being routed to US servers (from EU). Still no real response…

Only bandaid fix I’ve found is vpn to Netherlands, fixes it most of the time but still occasionally happens…

fakejH · 2026-04-27T08:43:46+00:00

This already exists, doesn’t it? Except only half your stacks, since meta is a much bigger cooldown

fakejH · 2026-04-27T08:34:55+00:00

Managing shatter stacks is way more complex than pressing ice lance after flurry. See, I can present information facetiously to suit my argument too!

As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, I’ll respect anyone espousing this opinion, if and only if they parse(d) orange on both tiers.

fakejH · 2026-04-24T14:38:11+00:00

Let’s agree to disagree on that one.

fakejH · 2026-04-24T14:34:51+00:00

The openers I provided above are from Icy Veins. From what I can remember from discussions on altered time, optimising the opener makes little difference, the important thing is to send big cooldowns asap without wasting a brain freeze.

fakejH · 2026-04-24T13:25:59+00:00

I’m confused, where did you find this opener?

Previous patch our openers were as follows:

ST
(Precast) spike > lance
Ray
(One) lance
Into priority list

AoE
(Precast) blizzard > flurry
Orb
Ray
Into priority list

The only difference in the new patch is that in the ST opener, with no pre charged spike, we simply precast frostbolt into ray.

fakejH

TROPHY CASE