With all the animosity between the end gamers potentially being nerfed and the players that aren’t the best at ac & weaving/or are still struggling to achieve higher dps, I would like to point out a few common inaccuracies I’ve seen in some posts.
1. Perfect LA weaving and the subsequent cancellation of the La animation does not lead to more than 25% of one’s dps coming from LAs. On a parse on the iron atro, let’s say 80k total, one could expect LA damage to account for 20k dps. That is on live. On the pts with the LA nerf, the highest parse I’ve heard of was around 72k. And I believe that was from someone that on live is hitting 90+. That is because 25% of their damage was nerfed by 78%. They changed their roto for pts, so it’s not a perfect correlation. For someone who’s LA damage only accounts for let’s say 15% of their dps, and who hits 20k on a 3mil, one can expect their new dps to be around 17-8k.
2. Without increasing skill damage, this change will absolutely be a nerf to everyone’s damage. I’ve seen several comments addressing changing one’s enchantments and gear to account for the increased sustain. To be clear, this will NOT offset the damage reduction for end game players, and more than likely will not help all but the lowest dps players. Most end game players do not have to run sustain glyphs, and they already build around max damage sets and enchants. Synergies in good trial groups will allow the dps to sustain adequately without sacrificing any dps with enchants or sets.
3. Heavy attack rotos will not suddenly be viable.
@t3hasiangod has tested this, amongst others, and LA rotos still generate higher dps, due to the amount of APM you can generate using LAs instead of HAs. Someone already using xynodes old HA build wouldn’t see a reduction, and would probably see an increase in dps, but even that build changed months ago to include light attack damage in the roto.
4. Parses on the iron atro (21mil) and target skeleton (3mil) are not comparable. The 21mil provides some of the buffs an optimized trial group would provide, while the 3mil doesn’t provide any buffs. I know I presented an example where 21mil and 3 mil parses were mentioned, but that was only because end gamers tend to use the 21mil while new players often use the precursor or 3mil dummy. The highest parses on a 3mil are around 50-60k, while most end game builds will hit in the 40s or 50s on a 3mil. So if you hit 30k on a 3mil dummy, you are not 60k behind the best players, but more likely 10-15k less dps than what they would hit on a 3mil.
I hope this will help to clear up any misunderstandings people may have had, and that it doesn’t come across as too condescending.
I’ll step off the soap box now...