There is not enough talk of eating babies in this.

If you scroll all the way down (without scrolling to the right), there should be a link in the lower right that says "edit this page"--I've opened the document up to editing completely so anyone with a gmail account can modify it if they notice something horribly wrong. Clicking on that link will allow you to export the file after logging into google docs with gmail account (or google docs account).

I noted this post got an infraction, and I'm probably setting myself up for the same, but before the "ditch STR for more AGI" post got merged into this thread, it was its own thread. That thread included "A Modest Proposal" in its title, and Skellum, like many others, is probably tired of the use of "A Modest Proposal" in earnest. Jonathan Swift's book was a political satire involving the notion of solving hunger problems by eating babies.

I imagine Skellum's response would have been perfectly appropriate had the original thread been shit-heaped, but instead the merge left him looking inappropriate.

To perhaps add some relevance to this thread: I think it's best when a class can benefit from multiple stats. The strength-agility equivalence in Cat DPS allows for an item with 25 strength and 25 agility, for a total of 50 "DPS Stats" rather than just flat 40 agility with no strength, for only 40 "DPS Stats".

Alot of people want that to happen, having gear that is specifically good for some form, or function, but it just won't happen, beyond the sets we already have, for so many reasons I can't remember them all. One of the foremost among them is that "It wouldn't be as fun" - which is paraphrasing a blue on the WoW forums - and alot less harder to obtain "The Perfect Gear". It just won't happen.

Feorthas, would it be too much to ask for you to clean up the spreadsheet a bit? I've banged my head against it, but numbers tend to swim quite alot in front of me in spreadsheets that aren't "Clear Cut"

On the agility/strength issue on the tier sets I'd personally favour a very simple option - just swap the values for the two round. Definitely still want some of both for both roles, the itemisation formula making it inefficient to dump everything into one stat obviously, but agility's generally the more hybrid of the two stats so would seem reasonable to have as the higher of the two.

I would agree with this. Removing Str outright and putting all the points toward Agi is a complete waste of iValue. As Floria pointed out, 25/25 > 0/40 as far as catform DPS goes. And dramatic increases in avoidance with a simultaneous loss of several hundred attack power would cause our effective TPS to plummet from being rage starved. Critting is very nice for druids because of Primal Fury, but removing a large chunk of your scalable AP (Kings/SotF/HotW). I remember seeing a comparison back in the day by Stein for Balance arguments between +dmg and +crit, using the same ivalues you can crit a lot more, but your crit damage is only slightly higher than the +dmg build's base hit.

On the other hand, simply 'favoring' agility over strength, but with ample amounts of both (and enough +hit) is going to give more of what you want, without losing as much potency.

As mentionned Agi does appear HIGHLY overvalued. At just below 2800 AP and 33% crit im getting values of 4.2 for Agi which seems way off. The cycle you are using doesnt appear to be the best way to determine the dps. Lolaan (on the wow forums) has a decent spreadsheet out there based more on determining how many attacks are required for 5 combo points and using that energy cost/time to determine your dps.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=1

Might help if you are going to remodel any of your sheet.

Actually, it's the 100% most optimal DPS cycle for someone with 25% crit, it's 88 seconds long, and it's the shortest true 'cycle' that exists for a feral druid (where a cycle has you starting at State X with Status Y and ending at State X + Status Y, or as close to it as possible). Now, what is incorrect, and I admit this earlier :P, is that I don't incorporate a dynamic cycle for the baseline--it's hardcoded because I'm lazy and I never planned to really release this--nor did I do anything but dynamically scale the count of abilities as critrate changed; basically, if your crit goes up, you try to Rip more at the expense of Shredding because you can't possible mangle less and keep the debuff up (note that you WILL mangle/shred additional times if the energy is free is available to do so at the end!).

Here's the basic 'code' for the cycle, if you're interested:
You just keep looping through that until Mangle has been refreshed (debuff @ 12s) and you have 0 Energy remaining. You never perform extra mangles, you will almost always have the mangle debuff up during rip (I think that I actually lucked out and never had it drop during a rip on paper, although a mangle may have replaced ~one~ shred), and you will shred as frequently as possible.

As far as getting the correct value of Agi, just add one point into the 'custom' table and it should return a correct value; I probably messed up somewhere in the +1 Agi calculations and I just need to fix that *shrug*.

The code does show a good procedure for DPSing (waiting for >81 energy before mangling to get the most uptime from the debuff for shreds CAN be better but the micromanagement gets annoying and generally isnt worth it).

The dynamic changing of the amount of mangles/shreds/rips with crit rate appears to be broken too since they are all fixed numbers in there and no formulas. That said the 88 second cycle also does not take into account misses/dodges which affects the value of hit/weapon skill gear as well.

I've been working on a feral spreadsheet for a few days now. I figured I'd let everyone here see it since you guys are the experts.

URL: http://druidshed.com/spreadsheets

If you want to play around with what I have so far, I have opened the ability to add items in the upper right.

Anyhow... I want to assign a 'bear' and 'cat' rating to each item.

Do we have a 'accepted' formula to calculate how much dps an item adds based on the wearers current AP/Crit/Hit?

I know there is Feorthas spreadsheet, but I just want a simple formula to make the calculation.

Here is what I assume to be true:

1 Point of Weapon DPS = 14 AP (except rip)
AP can be a fixed value
Crit and Hit will scale based on AP.

So I need a function that looks like this (cur=what you are wearing, item=item being calculated):


How does this look:

CalcDPS would do something like:

This seems like it would be relatively close at least for calculating white damage. I really don't want to run a simulated dps cycle for every item when a user inputs their values, so any thoughts on approximating the addition of yellow damage?

As seen in the posts Feorthas has made there is no "simple" way to model the yellow damage. This is mainly due to the way combo point generation is linked with crit chance (due to primal fury) and with the need to keep mangle up to improve shred damage. Determining a cycle and using that to model the damage is one way. Another would be to determine on average how long it takes to build up 5 combo points and determine what ratio of those attacks would be mangle/shreds.

On another note, has anyone determined the value of the 2 set Malorne bonus? Here's my reasoning on it: Thottbot says its a 4% static chance on hit and I know there is no internal cooldown on it. Spamming mangle you get approximately 5 hits every 4 seconds (4 white and 1 mangle). Every 25 hits should average one proc thus every 20 seconds you should get another 20 energy which brings this to an extra 1 energy every second, on average. Energy regens at 10 energy per second. Thus this is a 10% increase in energy generation. For the most part my dps is about 35% white and 65% yellow. A 10% increase in energy generation is essentially a 10% increase in yellow dps and thus this set bonus could be on the range of a 6.5% dps increase (less when using shred but only by a very minor amount due to the slightly increased energy cost) that never stops scaling. If this is correct, it seems that it is almost impossible to replace this set bonus for raid dps unless you have a full 4 set T5 bonus or better. Further since the T5 set bonus is near useless for solo grinding this set bonus seems almost completely irreplaceable for that. Have I made an error here or does this seem correct?

It most definitely does--check custom cycles 1 & 2. The "Actual Cycle" is the only fixed value, which I do admit to above, and I intend to correct that.... when I get to it -.-.

Basically, when in doubt, trust the custom values over the raw numbers (but the raw numbers should provide a sane baseline).

Sure it does, sorta--the damage values of everything but rip are scaled based on your chance to miss. Only the combo point generation, and rip (which is noted), is unaffected by miss/dodge/etc. and I could factor that in pretty quickly... I think.

Addendum: Actually, I'd probably have to play with it on paper to see what happens when you start missing in order to decide how to model the combo point penalty. Modeling how it affects the cycle will be even more interesting but I don't think I quite want to go there... yet. In all honesty, since the goal here more to provide a sheet that tells you "Gear X is better than Gear Y" rather than a sheet that indicates "You're going to do X DPS", I don't really think that this matters except to make Hit and Skill even more valuable than they already are, until cap.

I would actually say Tier 6 4pc is when you replace it, due to the 4pc T4 being so strong. I don't see breaking 4pc T4 for dps until I hit 3pc T6.

To throw this into the model, does anyone have the values for energy lost on yellow attacks that miss?

For example, you'll see when grinding that a missed (or a dodge/parry) mangle only costs you 8 energy. I have just recently been trying to get the exact values, so I haven't checked shred, rip, or ferocious bite.

That would change the value of CalcDPS, and would require further modeling.

Hmm you may be correct. After running some numbers that 75 damage to shred only seems to be worth around 85 AP in my current gear whereas a 6.5% increase in dps is more like 333AP.

That said, which 2 pieces of malorne would be the best to keep? Currently Im using Helm and Shoulders though I do want to replace the helm with the engineering goggles. It seems to me that keeping the T4 Chest and T4 Shoulders or Gloves (now that they have Agi) are the best compromise since the major upgrades for these pieces are not tiered and thus probably work better for other classes anyways.

Keep the two pieces of T4 that correspond to the worst two pieces of T5 (or whatever applicable DPS/Tanking upgrades are available at the time). That will PROBABLY be gloves/shoulders, as Pants/Chest/Hat are usually very strong pieces in any set, but that also depends on less tangible benefits gained such as sockets & whatnot.

And therein lies the problem: I have no clue how to do this in excel a few thousand times either ;D.

I think I'm just gonna have to write a Java or C# app to get rid of all of the annoying bits & pieces but that takes time :P.

Yeah I have no idea how to do that in any spreadsheet program...and its been a while since I broke out C to try and code something, but that would likely be the most accurate method of doing it with the difficulty in modeling primal fury/misses/dodges and such. With a C program you could pretty easily add in things like the Malorne set bonus, various trinkets even OOC and as long as the run size was large enough it should give relatively accurate results.

I did something similar to this in Excel a while back (Battletech mech battle simulation). Took something like 12 minutes to run on a P100 at the time...anyway...

What I did was model a single run on one worksheet with stats in each row depicting the state at that time and one cell in the row selecting the next action based on those stats. Copying the row down the page as far as needed to reach steady state gave me the complete battle.

To do multiple iterations I wrote a macro that would pick up the last line from that worksheet, copy it to the bottom line of a new worksheet, then rerun the whole thing 1000 times. In the end I was left with the results of 1000 simulated runs and could run stats on those.

I'd assume the +Shred damage is before multipliers and that should be worth more than 85AP. It doesn't change the fact that this bonus is still horrible though. An idol gives better returns than a 4 set, and the Lacerate bonus is just shit. Did they forget they changed Lacerate to apply most of it's threat on the hit and not on the DoT?

The 4pc Nordrassil Set Bonus is after the Shred modifier (as can be seen at http://www.thottbot.com/s37333 - 33 Damage bonus to Shred - here before modifier).

It's still a very nice bonus. It's about an 467 attackpower upgrade to shred (75/2.25*14). Considering Shred does about 33 % of my total damage, it's an 156 AP upgrade for me.

You can stick to Malorne if you like but Nordrassil brings more than just the set bonus.

Was just looking at this for a sheet I'm working on - Energy Regeneration Oddities by VitaminC suggests 17.5-18%, and that corresponds to what I get in game - a parried mangle cost me 7 energy. Only tested once.