So the 6.2 PTR dropped and with it came a plethora of goodies. One of which was the datamined versions of the Legendary Ring. As with all things datamined, take with horse-sized grain of salt. It's fun to speculate, though.
The rings come with extremely interesting procs, ones which at first blush I thought were screwing over small groups. But after more though, I think they're interesting and don't necessarily completely hose smaller groups.
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| The DPS Rings |
The Arcane powers of the ring empowers one <Strength|Agility|Intellect|Spirit> Band wearer in your group, transferring to a new wearer every 12 sec. When empowered, you gain 10% increase <Stuff> per <Strength|Agility|Intellect|Spirit> Band in your group.So, questions already:
- Does this have 100% uptime? By the text it doesn't seem like a proc, just an effect that bounces forever.
- Will it cycle through all members once and restart at random? Or does it only not repeat back-to-back bounces (ie: can't bounce to yourself)?
- If it has 100% uptime, can it bounce to yourself if nobody else is around (ie: you have a constant 12 second buff)?
- If it isn't 100% uptime, how is the proc determined?
- It mentions <Strength|Agility|Intellect|Spirit> Band. Does that mean people wearing the non-Legendary versions of this get the effect still, meaning you only need 1 ring of each type in your raid? Or does it really mean Legendary only?
- Text says "Group". For raids, is it raid-wide, or really only your group?
Another interesting piece of the puzzle is the buff goes up the more rings you have in your group. At first blush this sounds like it's hosing small raids. I mean, 3 Strength Band users, 30% buff. 6 Strength Band users, 60% buff. But since the buff jumps to a new person every 12 seconds and only 1 such buff exists across the group, it's in effect a 10% buff to your total DPS (assuming no repeats).
1 Player = 10% buff for 12 seconds.
2 Players = 20% buff for 12 seconds each, so +20% for 12s, +0% for 12s. 10% overall.
3 Players = 30% buff for 12 seconds each, so +30% for 12s, +0% for 24s. 10% overall.
...
8 Players = 80% buff for 12 seconds each, so +80% for 12s, +0% for 84s. 10% overall.
The trick, however, is that the bigger your 12 second buff, the more you can game it with cooldowns. But if you're not the first person picked for the buff, do you wait? The longer you wait, the less often you use your cooldowns. If you only have a couple people in the raid, you might as well wait. 12 seconds isn't that long a time. Heroism/Bloodlust will still be up. You might want that last 20 seconds of lust to line up though, so if you don't get it second, it might be better to damn the torpedoes and blow everything. But if you're the first or second player to get an 80% buff? Daaaaamn, your numbers are gonna look good.
The overlap with Heroism/Bloodlust might be sufficient to edge this proc in the favour of larger groups still, as you only have a limited Window, and the 10% overall estimate is dependent on a long period of time. Buffs in general tend to have a multiplicative effect; hence why it's so lucrative to blow them all at once in-line with Heroism, barring burst phase requirements.
However, this is going to screw up parsers so badly that comparisons across the tier is going to be difficult if/once these start proliferating. Which might be an added benefit to Blizzard. If parses are hosed, then people can't really complain, because they just don't know.
@lesliech0w Let's just say I'd avoid reading too much into PTR build #1 datamined stuff.
— Watcher (@WatcherDev) April 14, 2015
Of course, initial PTR and all that jazz. Is this the final form of the ring? Almost definitely not. As Watcher says, avoid reading too much into it. But it's fun to speculate. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves! #WoW, #Theorycraft, #Legendary
