Math: Hemo and Daggers 3.3.3 Style

Just over a year ago I took a look at how Hemorrhage worked with daggers to express why Hemo was being used with daggers in my Subtlety Leveling Guide, written a few days before.  With patch 3.3.3, the changes to Hemo (and Ghostly Strike) using daggers with Hemo is no longer questionable.  In fact, based on the numbers I’ve crunched, daggers are finally working with all of the subtlety tree, instead of being used mainly for Ambush.  It appears that daggers are producing similar results to all other weapons with Hemo.

Fair Warning, I’m about to launch into some math here.  If you’re a TL;DR fan, take the jump and check out the conclusion at the end.

 

- Hemo and Daggers 3.3.3 Style -

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Hemo is calculated as follows for swords/axes/maces/fists:

[Weapon Damage + (Attack Power/14 * 2.4)] * 1.1

And as of today, the formula for daggers:

[Weapon Damage + (Attack Power/14 * 1.7)] * 1.6

I’m going to use these two formulas to get the Hemo damage range of four current level weapons:  The Bloodsipper (251 dagger), Frost Giant’s Cleaver (251 axe), Heartpierce (264 dagger), Bloodvenom Blade (264 Sword).  For today’s purposes, I’ll round numbers up and down and use 4200 as the base attack power, because it’s a nice round number that’s close to what Rogues would be seeing unbuffed these days.  Obviously, the amount of attack power you have changes during a fight due to procs and buffs, but I’m just looking at baseline data.

For a dagger, the normalized attack power value (Attack Power/14*1.7) would be 510 (4200/14 *1.7), and for all other weaponry (Attack Power/14*2.4) the value would be 720 (4200/14 * 2.4).  These two values are constants, so I’ll be using these values in the following examples instead of the whole formula.  The following Analysis is baseline damage before any extra bonuses from talents are considered, but it should show a basic comparison between weapon types.

Weapon Analysis – Hemo Baseline (Non Crit)

251 Dagger – Bloodsipper

Min. Damage (259 + 510) * 1.6 = 1,230

Max. Damage (481 + 510) * 1.6 = 1,586

Average Damage:  1,408

251 Axe – Frost Giant’s Cleaver

Min. Damage (374 + 720) * 1.1 = 1,203

Max. Damage (695 + 720) * 1.1 = 1,557

Average Damage: 1,380

264 Dagger – Heartpierce

Min. Damage (326 + 510) * 1.6 =1,338

Max. Damage (490 + 510)* 1.6 = 1,600

Average Damage: 1,469

264 Sword – Bloodvenom Blade

Min. Damage (412 + 720) *1.1 = 1,245

Max. Damage (766 + 720) *1.1 = 1635

Average Damage: 1,440

 

Conclusions

Based solely on these numbers, it would appear that Hemo is just as effective with a Dagger as it is with other weapons.  Please note that these numbers were not talent or crit enhanced; however, those calculations would be applied after the ones I did in this post, so they would not be relative to the point I was making.  It is true that they would increase the damage gap between daggers and other weapons, but not considerably.  In the end all weapons perform very similarly, with daggers just a hair above the others.  I’ll look at Ghostly Strike later, but I’m going to guess that if Blizzard got the math right on this one, they probably were close on the other one too.  It’s nice to see some love for those of us that would prefer to use daggers with Subtlety.

- Sam