Ok, that's what I thought, was mostly asking because the old formula didn't take that into account so I figured I may have been wrong.

Here's what I currently have for the Bloodfang 8pc cell, if you're interested:

[top]IF(B69

TRUE();((1/60*N2*($'Unbuffed DPS'.Q12+$'Unbuffed DPS'.Q14))+(1/60*N5*$'Unbuffed DPS'.Q13))*(600*($'Unbuffed DPS'.I15-0.3)*$'Unbuffed DPS'.M3+300*($'Unbuffed DPS'.I16+0.3)*$'Unbuffed DPS'.M3);0)

Which in non-excel is:

((1/60 * mhspeed * (mh hits per second+bs hits per second))+(1/60 * ohspeed * oh hits per second)) * bloodfang damage calc (unchanged)

v1.06 - 6/16/2006
-Added Cloak of the Scourge
-Fixed damage range on Keris of Zul'Serak
-Added Renataki's Charm of Trickery
-Fixed issue with Kiss of the Spider haste detection in the 2nd trinket slot not working (whoops)
-Additional haste effects such as Blade Flurry and Kiss of the Spider show up as "Other DPS" now, instead of being in "Finisher DPS"
-Updated Veiled Shadows stats to 1.11 amounts
-Added 3-piece Veiled Shadows bonus

http://www.savefile.com/projects/299694

I realized on the way home that I sorta messed up the Veiled Shadows bonus. It's adding 10 energy every 2 min when it should be closer to 40, whoops.

am i seeing right, that even for combat swords.... blessed qiraji pugio is the best offhand? (except death's sting, but you are going to get killed if you offhand it)
even better than maladath due to poison procs.

With my gear Maladath is still better than Pugio in RC2 swords spreadsheet. No idea what gear you are using.

You must be doing something wrong, cause it definitely is not that way :P.

Small update:

v1.07 - 6/19/2006
-Fixed 3-piece Veiled Shadows bonus to be 40 energy every 2 minutes, as opposed to only 10

according to this spreadsheet talisman of conivery(sp?) the drop off nerfarian is better than barbed choker and about equal to the 2% crit one from naxx i dont see how 30 agi and 1hit out weighs all that AP and crit from a purely dps perspective

If you take a look, the ony tooth pendant, barbed choker, prestors and the kel thuzad neck are all within 2 dps of each other. :S

You're basically seeing the effects of 1hit passing 14AP, and the converse effect of -1hit -AP +1%crit not being able to make up a DPS difference. It's similar to the reason that the original version of Bonescythe was disliked - it traded too much AP for crit by stacking agility, and thus lost ground in the actual race.

At some point we're going to have to create the formal system of equations and do the calculus, but most of the math rogues have been too busy and/or too rusty to try it.

The main reason why someone would want to know these equations is to determine which of several items will be better for the DPS given the current gear. And this question is already answered by Chalon's and Valar's spreadsheets.

Also I do not believe that the actual formulas will be significantly less complicated than the math behind these spreadsheets. After all for a simple crit <-> AP conversion formula you would have to consider your current AP, crit, hit, +skill and the opponents level.

On another topic: Has anyone found a good way to mathematically model the DPS of a seal-fate dagger build? Considering some of the rumors floating around about 1.12. I see the distinct (and frightening) possibility of this beeing the only viable raiding dagger build left after the 1.12. patch.

You can argue this about any build, though. While I do agree that Combat Daggers probably wasn't envisioned originally; I certainly hope that isn't a reasoning to eliminate the possibility of the spec.

I know some people have said "oh make Opportunity just automatically tied into Backstab," but I think that would be a poor solution since it favors a dagger build, and gives even less value towards the Subtlety tree.

I don't want to derail the thread, as I'll probably be making a long post with my thoughts on the Rogue forums later this week...but what if 5/5 Dual Wield Spec was an innate rogue ability?

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: assuming that daggers are acknowledged as a valid choice of weapon for a combat build, which it seems to be, given the presence of a functionally-equivalent dagger spec alongside sword and fist spec, opportunity should really be the dagger-equivalent of aggression in combat.

Given that dagger spec is the only Tier 4 weapon spec (with swords, fists and maces at Tier 5), my guess is that the current combat daggers build -was- intended, by allowing us to spend 5 less points as pre-reqs in combat, and instead spend 5 more points in Tier 1 of subtlety to get opportunity.

Of course, since combat is the pve-centric tree, I still don't understand why the fact that I use daggers means that I have to waste 5 talent points in the pvp tree on pvp talents to get my pve scaling talent, when someone else using any other weapon is free to maximise his/her talent points in the pve tree to get a similar scaling talent.

My favorite analogy would be: what if aggression was changed and placed alongside opportunity in Tier 2 of subtlety?

Hemo rogues would rejoice (especially if the talent was changed to include hemo) in the same way dagger pvp rogues currently enjoy opportunity, but it would force sword/fist rogues to choose between AR and aggression, the same way dagger rogues are currently forced to choose between AR and opportunity.

How much sense would -that- make?

Deric: no one else *gets* a scaling talent as good as opportunity. Aggression doesn't even come close.

With 1.11, Grace of Air (with talents that aren't hard to reach) and the max rank, it's worth 88 agility. Strength of Earth is also 88 with the max talent (77*15%=11.55+77=88.55 (but we know Blizzard will round down)). And Improved WF totems (which are a bit deeper into Enhancement) give 409.5 AP bonus.

The SoE/GoA stuff I can slap in myself messily, but I have no idea to modify the WF bonus.

Huh. My sloppy method (literally, overwriting the value of 77 with 88) of slapping in new GoA/SoE values puts GoA/SoE and DPV/IPVI ahead of WF/SoE+IPVI ahead by about 22 DPS, buffed. I'm wondering if this would have fucked a code, of if the answer is still correct. This is also without the WF bonus.

Edit: Considering that those results require a fight in which it is possible to maintain a 5-stack of DP, I put it offhand for the WF setup. The difference is minimal, and still in favour of GoA/SoE.

Also, yes I am aware that I shouldn't be taking away WF from the warrior, however guildmates don't see to share this reservation.

RC2 Sword Spreadsheet

undead, full bloodfang, firemaw, prestors, strikers mark, master dragonslayer/accuria, hoj/drakefang

buffs (horde): Battleshout, MotW, Str totem, (+tranquil air and fort)

CTS (Crusader/Instant Poison) + Maladath (Crusader/Instant Poison)
Unbuffed DPS: 426.77
Buffed DPS: 502.76

CTS (Crusader/Instant Poison) + Pugio (Crusader/Instant Poison)
Unbuffed DPS: 429.30
Buffed DPS: 503.13


Using Windfury, Maladath comes out about 0.5 dps better, but thats just against 63+ mobs, so pugio comes out superior in my opinion

did i oversight something?

It may not, but taken as a whole, combat daggers only has a very slight dps edge against combat swords, and this edge goes away very quickly in any fight with multiple/semi-tanked targets (trash, Nef P1), memwipe targets (Sartura) and fights with strict positional requirements (C'thun P1)

This compareable dps from swords is also in spite of the terrible itemisation (a complete lack of both +skill gear other than Maladath, and swords compareable to daggers at the same stage of progression)

Now, my numbers may not be entirely accurate, but I'm fairly sure that when the quality of daggers and swords finally reaches parity at the end of Naxx (Kingsfall/Death's Sting against Gressil/Iblis), swords actually does come out ahead.

At that point, what reason could there possibly be to live with a restrictive combat daggers build?

None at all, IMHO, and I don't think combat daggers should be balanced with the assumption that it provides far superior dps (it doesn't), but rather as just another combat weapon option alongside swords and fists, with the same flexibility/pvp viability.

To add to deric's comment: There has been a little discussion about the scaling of Sinister Strike and Backstab in the speculation thread about the 1.12. rogue changes. The result of the math done there was that Backstab needs the enormous scaling of Opportunity to keep up with Sinister Strike as gear improves, since Sinister Strike without Aggression scales better than Backstab without Opprotunity.

Hunters: Ranged Weapon Spec + Barrage : 20%, same as Opportunity, but it gives +5% damage to all attacks as well as 15% to the bursty specials.

Warlock: Shadow Mastery w/ sac'ed Succubus, or MD with Sac/Rezzed Succubus. 25%.

Mage: Imp Frostbolt + Piercing Ice: 17+6% damage increase.

Druid: Savage Fury, +20% damage to Claw, Rake, Maul, Swipe.

Priest: Darkness + Shadowform: 25% to shadow spells.

The problem isn't how well Opportunity scales, so much as how well backstab scales originally with a very high crit-rate.

Honestly, Kyt, I meant sword/mace/fist rogues, I wasn't really thinking of other classes.

SS(Aggression):

1.06*(WDPS*WS + AP/14*2.4 + 68)*(1+1.3*c)

SS(fixed) = 1.06*68 = 72
SS(weapon) = 1.06*WDPS*WS
SS(crit) = 1.06*68*1.3*c
SS(crit-weapon) = 1.06*WDPS*WS*1.3*c
SS(AP) = 1.06*AP14*2.4
SS(AP-crit) = 1.06*AP14*2.4*1.3*c

BS(Opportunity):
1.2*(1.5*WDPS*WS + 1.5*AP/14*1.7 + 225)*(1+1.3*(c+0.3))
1.2*(1.5*WDPS*WS + 1.5*AP/14*1.7 + 225)*(1.39+1.3*c)

BS(fixed) = 1.2*225*1.39 = 1.668*225
BS(weap) = 1.8*1.39*WDPS*WS = 2.5*WDPS*WS
BS(crit) = 1.2*1.39*225*1.3*c
BS(crit-weapon) = 1.5*WDPS*WS*1.2*1.3*c
BS(AP) = 1.2*1.5*1.39*AP/14*1.7
BS(AP-crit) = 1.2*1.5*1.39*AP/14*1.7*1.3*c

Now, given that weapon design philosophy seems to be sword DPS == dagger DPS, swords set at 2.6, daggers at 1.8, let's fix weapon DPS/speed and get new values for scaling.

SS(fixed) = 72 + 2.756*WDPS
SS(crit) = 93.7*c + 3.58*WDPS*c
SS(AP) = 0.1817*AP
SS(AP-crit) = 0.2362*AP*c

BS(fixed) = 375.3 + 4.5*WDPS
BS(crit) = 487.89*c + 4.21*WDPS*c
BS(AP) = 0.3038*AP
BS(AP-crit) = 0.3949*AP*c

That's the instant attack scaling - in all cases backstab scales better *per attack*.

We get 50% more SSes than backstabs, though, which is where the tricky part comes in. So, normalize by dividing by 1 and 1.5. What you find is that BS starts better and scales better in all aspects... except insofar as scaling weapon damage with crit, where SS is markedly superior.

Without Opportunity, Backstab doesn't scale as well as Aggressioned SS does, and although I haven't done numbers to prove it, I doubt that Backstab scales as well without talents as SS does without talents (or even just with Improved for each).

At any rate, the scaling is a lot closer between SS and BS than most people realize, it's just that the starting point for daggers is so much higher.

Ah, ok, I read that before I'd had my first coffee. But anyway, If Aggression was changed to be a 5pt talent, how would they scale in relation to one another (ie. Aggression is 26-30 instead of 26-28, for 10% damage increase)?

You're also not considering Riposte in how the combat sword/mace/fist specs scale (solo and pvp consideration primarily, but useful on some PvE encounters with heavy cleave action, and "individual add control", a la Phase 1 Nef.

Sokay. I doubt it was particularly clear on the point, honest mistake on both parts.

If aggression became 10%? Replace all those 1.06's with 1.1's and recalculate. :p

I'm also not considering AR, nor am I considering that daggers will have a large benefit over swords in taking advantage of the BS 5 energy back on crit bonus, nor am I considering that swords benefit from 5 piece DD more than daggers, nor... etc etc etc.

I was just comparing scaling of the abilities themselves.