Simple question beyond the scope of any of my own guildmates and would probably erupt in furious idiotic debates by level 20 rogues played by 12 year olds with no grasp of game mechanics on other forums (oh hey it may anyways):

Is average damage (for attacks that hit and don't crit and etc. etc.) for a normalized instant attack with a weapon given by (weapon DPS)*(weapon speed) + (attack power/14)*(normalized speed) + static damage, as I expect and seems intuitive?

Or is it something ridiculously convoluted? 'Cause I heard it was something ridiculously convoluted but I'm like "no way meatskeet" but they're like "yeah huh dungbum" and I've never gotten any confirmation since 1.8 but I am very lazy so I figure maybe some other people regardless of laziness have gathered the information to diffuse amongst lazy people.

HUH WHAT

To my knowledge, you are right, and it is not, in fact, ridiculously convoluted.

I did not mean to imply that the 1.8 system is ridiculously convoluted, but that I heard it was something ridiculously convoluted (and different from what I stated).

Right, I know. It's pretty simple, especially post-normalization. When comparing two weapons you can ignore AP entirely and just look at one weapon's average damage versus the other's.

Then see how much DPS you gain/lose on your specials, and compare to how much DPS you gain/lose on autoattack. Whichever comes out ahead when you add the two is the better weapon.

I find it interesting that slow weapons are still favored for specials due to the weaponDPS term. What are the relative magnitudes of the two terms?

Always thought it was a bit odd that they went with 3.3 for the normalized two-hander bonus, considering a good chunk of the high end weapons are 3.4, but a calculator could care less i suppose. O_O

Depends entirely on class, spec, and individual player. DamageMeters' Event parsing is good for this -- you can see what % of your damage is coming from what sources. Then just weight things accordingly when comparing weapons. Autoattack ignores weapon speed entirely, as it always has, and specials are now somewhat less dependant on weapon speed. Slower is still generally better, but not to the extent it used to be.

Or a Mage.

</cynical>

A polite, well-worded post asking a question to which he already knows the answer - will wonders never cease?

I wrote up a "how to choose weapons in 1.8" pseudocode snippet at one point, but everyone was scared of it and I can't find it right now since I'm tired.

Because slower weapons usually have higher damage ranges. One exception (probably the poster child for 1.7 speed exploitation, rogue style) is the Barman Shanker. Hilariousness of stabbing some guy with a broken bottle aside (actually, it probably dies quick), it has a stupid proc and a 2.00 attack speed. However, it has a damage range of 51-95. Not very good for such a slow speed. Personally, I never had one, since by the time I was running BRD 1.8 hd been out several weeks or so.

As I'm a literature student, my math skills has been dribbling out of my ears lately, so I don't grasp these formulae too intuitively, but apparently the 2.00 attack speed made the thing stupidly potent. I assume things like Perdition's, and Gutgore beat it, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like the CHT lost the mainhand slot to one.

I imagine High Warlord/Grand Marshalls were the happiest kids on the playground, though.

No, CHT still beat it in practice, but the point was that you couldn't answer the question "Which is better, X or Y" without first asking "How much attack power do I have?"

The amount of damage AP added to an instant special used to be (AP/14)*(WeaponSpeed). If you had 840 AP and a 2.1 speed sword, your AP would add 126 to your base Sin Strike damage. If you had a 2.8 speed sword, that figure would instead be 168.

So, assuming you SS every 4 seconds in the long run, you're looking at a difference in 10.5 DPS solely due to weapon speed. A 47 DPS 2.1 speed sword would thus be strictly inferior to a 40 DPS 2.8 speed sword.

As for Barman's vs. Gutgore, if you got up to ~1350 AP (easily possible with buffs) the Barman would backstab just as hard as the Gutgore. Now, Gutgore still did more overall damage because of autoattack, but in theory if you'd gotten up to 1900ish AP, Barman would have been strictly superior to Gutgore. That was silly, and it's what the weapon speed normalization aimed to fix.

When comparing two weapons of similar quality, slower is still better. But weapon quality is now the more important factor. A Barman's will never surpass an epic dagger now.