Bryntroll

I recently was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the more powerful (and cooler looking) weapons out of ICC, namely Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter.  The theorycrafting on this potent weapon is still rather sparse, so I spent several hours testing the limits of the proc and it's dps contribution.  First off, the basics:

• The 264 version proc has an average damage of 2250, while the 277 version has an average of 2538.
• The damage does not scale with any character stats (though the dps does, more on that below).
• The damage does scale with any percentage damage increases that affect spell damage, such as Avenging Wrath, Curse of Elements, Blood Presence, etc.
  
• The drain can proc off of any weapon attack, as well as some odd events such as applying or refreshing effects such as deathknight diseases or the paladin talent Righteous Vengeance.  However, any of the odd events that can proc it require you to be in melee range and facing the target (in other word, in a position such that your character would swing the axe at the target if you turned on auto-attack) in order for the drain to be able to proc.
  
• The drain has a base proc rate of 2 procs-per-minute, or 11.3333% chance per swing, and has no internal cooldown.
• The drain can proc multiple times per attack, provided there's are more than one weapon event for the attack.  For example, the drain can multi-proc off the following:
• On any or all of the multiple targets of Cleave, Whirlwind, Divine Storm, Heart Strike, or Sweeping Strikes.
  
• From a melee (or special) and it's subsequent seal proc, Blood-Caked Blade proc, or Windfury proc (though why a shaman would be using it...).
• From both the physical and shadow portions of Scourge Strike.
• The drain can not proc from any spells, excluding the odd events mentioned above.
• The drain is incapable of critting, functions on the spell hit table, and can be partially resisted.
  

Now, with a 2 PPM baseline, the weapon will deal 2 procs a minute before any waste or special attacks or talents are factored in, giving it a minimum dps of 75.  The wonderful thing about the proc rate, though, is that it scales linearly with haste buffs.  The more haste your character has, the more dps the proc provides and the higher it's equivalent AP value.  In practice, the proc will usually provide between 200 and 400 dps, depending on the character's haste rating, spec and rotation (and therefore number of procable attacks per second), spell hit chance, and +damage buffs present.  A good estimate is that it will provide approximately 4-8% of a character's dps.

For many classes, this means the proc is worth the equivalent of between 400 and 800 additional attack power, though it's place on the best-in-slot list is strongly dependent class, spec, haste rating, and rotation.  In general is can be assumed to be near the top of the list, however, as the proc itself provides a fairly respectable amount of dps while also making it easier for the healers to keep you alive through miscellaneous raid damage.


References
Melee/BCB Doubleproc
Scourge Strike Doubleproc
Heart Strike Doubleproc
PPM Recount Parse
Bryntroll on DK Forums

3.3: Area Damage Caps

Patch 3.3 is changing the way Area Damage Caps function, but AoE Caps are a fairly poorly understood mechanic to begin with for most players.  Thus I will explain how the current capping mechanics works, how the new 3.3 mechanics works, and the advantages and disadvantages of the new system.

Currently, the cap on an AoE spell is set by and only by the spell's rank.  3 spells with known caps are Arcane Explosion, Howling Blast, and Blood Boil, all three of which have a cap at max rank (rank 10 for AE, rank 4 for HB and BB) of 37500 damage.  Each spell has a designation for how much damage it does per target, and this is the maximum damage per target it can do, but not the minimum.  The AoE cap comes into play when the total damage being done reaches said cap.  At that point, instead of doing the damage stated by the spell per target, it does damage to each target equal to the damage cap divided by the number of targets.  Thus once you are at the cap, adding more targets reduces the amount of damage per target done, keeping the total damage done constant.  Note that this damage cap applies before critical effect damage is factored in, so an AoE spell can in fact to more damage than the cap if some of the strikes crit.

For example, at approximately 305 spell power, Arcane Explosion does 625 damage per target.  On up to 60 targets, the spell will continue to deal 625 damage per target (before resists and crits).  After 60 targets, however, the damage per target begins to drop as the cap of 37500 damage has been hit.  In this mage upgraded their gear to approximately 3250 spell power, their AE would then be doing 1250 damage per target.  On up to 30 targets, this would continue to hold true, but beyond 30 targets, the damage per target would again begin to diminish, and once at or past 60 targets, both mages would be doing the exact same damage per target.

The new system radically changes the manner in which this cap is calculated.  Instead of there being a static cap imposed by the spell rank, the cap on any AoE spell is equal to ten times the non-crit single target damage it deals.  In the above example, the first mage would have a cap of 6250 damage, while the second would have a cap of 12500 damage.  If up against 20 targets, the first mage would be dealing 312-313 damage per target, while the second would be dealing 625.  Both of these caps are significantly lower than the prior 37500 cap, but there are advantages to the system as well.

One of the largest advantages is scaling.  Currently, improving your gear will improve your AoE output only while below the damage cap, and increasing that output means that it takes less and less targets to reach that cap as you get better and better gear.  In the above example, the mage improved his spell power from 305 to 3250.  In doing so, his damage per cast below the cap doubled below the cap, but the number of targets necessary to cap out his AE also halved.  In the 3.3 system, this is no longer the case.  All AoE spells by definition now cap out at 10 targets.  However, since the cap itself is based on the scaling damage done by the spell, the damage a spell does even beyond that cap is proportion to the damage done under the cap.  In the above example, the first mage will do half the damage of the second while under the cap...and continue to do half the damage of the second mage while over the cap.  In other words, you are no longer penalized on AoE damage for improving your gear.

The other thing to note about these new mechanics is that they only apply when you are damaging more than 10 targets.  On 10 or fewer targets, all spells, regardless of their potency, will deal full damage to all targets (again, before crits and resists are factored in).  This is especially relevant for higher damage abilities such as Howling Blast which can easily reach the AoE cap in as few as 4 targets in a raid setting (at very high gear levels, of course).  In my current gear in a 10-man raid (and this is against targets without the spell damage debuff), my Howling Blasts average a bit over 5000 damage, and can cap out at almost 10000 damage due to AP procs (and these are non-crits).  This means that it takes between 4 and 8 targets to cap out the damage on HB, much much less than the 20-30 it takes for a mage to cap out AE in similar gear.  With the new 3.3 mechanics, HB will guaranteed full damage against up to 10 targets, giving me a potential cap of up to 100000 damage, a nearly 3-fold increase in maximum damage.

An easy way to illustrate the advantages of this change is to relate it to the testing I did to determine the HB cap.  Against the 33 Converted Heroes gathered up by Frostbound, my HB was dealing 1136 damage a piece, for a total of ~37500 damage done.  Given the new system, and assuming maximum procs in a raid setting, I would be dealing a touch over 3000 damage per target, almost 3 times as much damage per cast as before.

There is a minimum in which this change is valuable, though, and it varies per spell.  In the case of Howling Blast, it takes a touch over 8000 AP for HB to have a cap more than 37500 damage on 10 targets (in other words, for the change to be a buff), which is relatively easy to achieve with a single of the many procs available in a raid setting in high-end raiding gear, but otherwise fairly out-of-reach.  For AE, the necessary spell power is absolutely ludicrous, requiring 12595 spell power to reach a cap of 37500 damage against 10 target, and that's for a mage with full points in Arcane Instability, Spell Impact, and World in Flames, a net 16% increase in damage to AE.

Still, on the whole this change is a good thing as it allows one of the few true damage caps in game to scale with gear.  I'm especially pleased as it means I'll no longer be seeing crits down around the 4-5k mark from HB against packs like the Exploding Lashlings on Freya.