Tyrne

The WF change that was hotfixed has defiantly made swords and daggers damage a lot closer from what i've experienced.

 

Harkonnen

I would like to continue in the haste rating matter. As the change is a more or less a sure thing, I would like to get suggestions on how to change the items, therefore not having to put them into the trashcan.

I currently own 4 haste items (not counting the crafted two ones). I would like to start with the Gloves:

Grips of Damnation
Binds when picked upHands Leather
277 Armor
+27 Agility
+38 Stamina
Durability 40 / 40
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves haste rating by 37.
Equip: Increases attack power by 76.

As a warrior you are getting this loot as a comparable one:
Pillager's Gauntlets
Binds when picked upHands Plate
1103 Armor
+38 Strength
+45 Stamina
Durability 55 / 55
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves hit rating by 18.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 38.

As in high-end raiding hit rating still remains a highly, if not the most important stat for a rogue, I would like to suggest a change to Grips of Damnation. Give them 18 hit Rating as the Plate Version and either reduce Agility or Attack Power on them accordingly. After collecting four BT Haste Rating Items this the one that I would see the one that now (after the Haste nerf for Melee) would need a change for High-End Raiders.

Shadow-Walker's Cord is from my point very well balanced even after 2.2

After acquiring two Bands of Devastation I don't see now any point of continuing to wear them after 2.2. Before the haste rating change they were well balanced even considering their waste of iLvL in favor of stamina. They are at most now an alternative for fights as Reliquary of Souls where you basically always end up tanking.

So what do other Black Temple experienced people or Rogues well experienced with calculating dps think of changing those items and how?

Hárkonnen
Origin

 

• Aldriana

That would be another way to balance. However, I think it's somewhat less likely to actually be done. Setting aside for the moment the way *I* think things should be balanced, I think it's just a lot more likely that blizzard will solve this by nerfing sword spec than buffing dagger spec.

It's 2.5%, but also some as-yet undetermined quanitity of crit and -dodge. Of course, I'm not sure how much I'd trust the other spreadsheet on the details. One of these days I'll have to come up with a good model for Mutilate and try to work it in. Problem is, both Mutilate and Seal Fate complicate calculations by a significant amount, which is why it hasn't happened yet.

 

• Wodin

I don't think we'll see tweaks to any of the items, to be honest. The only place where the nerf really seems to break the intended progression implied by the item levels involved is Band of Devestation, as it's inferior to multiple items of lower ilvl. You could make a case that Shadow-Walker's Cord is in the same boat due to both Don Rodrigo's Money Belt and the Vashj belt being superior(an even-level and a -3). If they were going to tweak them, the easiest way to fix them is subtracting stats and adding yellow/red sockets + bonuses.

My bet is that while doing Zul'aman internal testing they ended up finding some sort of degenerate interaction between existing haste gear and new items that caused them to renerf it.

I wouldn't stress too much. I raided as Mutilate for a couple of weeks, and while I was able to keep pace thanks to the nice MH weapon, it becomes pretty obvious that all of the nifty Assassination toys still don't end up beating out the Combat Potency / Surprise Attacks boosts.

 

Cybelirrae

I agree with you on the gloves. They are now such a small upgrade for me over Deathmantle (less than 10 AP according to Aldriana's spreadsheet here) that I will save my DKP for t6 and its set bonuses.

We have had terrible luck with the haste rings (which I am now grateful for) so I will not bother to pick up them at all and they will be void crystals from here on out.

As to the belt, I disagree. I was quite unhappy to read this nerf the day after I spent DKP on it. It went from the best in slot item to being worse than my crafted belt. As soon as the change goes likve the shadow-walker's cord goes into the bank until such time as Blizzard re-itemizes in light of this nerf (unlikely).

PS. I should clarify that we use zero-sum dkp so its not like we can pick stuff up "on the cheap" now that they are less desirable.

 

Grunge

Well I've been playing mutilate since the 2.0 with some forays into swords from time to time. I can agree that Mutilate won't probably beat swords (at least at the moment, before the haste nerf) it offers a very viable spec for high-end raiding that provides a challenge to play. (Not that xs/5r is easy to play or anything.)
However for mutilate to work you really need to itemize your gear (and if possible group setup) for it.
Also 4 pieces of T5, Ashtongue Trinket.
Agility over hit (I value Agility > Hit > Crit >= AP myself)
You gain little by pushing very high hit with mutilate (although 4pc T5 gains some increase in proc frequency from the extra hit)

Feral Druid. Being without one really hurts. (even though with raidbuffs and Ashtongue trinket I'm avg 38% crit according to swstats
These things really add quite a bit to mutilate dps.

And above all I have fun playing mutilate. And as serious business as WoW might be I still play it to have Fun.

I hope Aldriana will someday integrate Mutilate support for this spreadsheet. But seeing how the combat part still needs some tweaking... Well let's just say I won't hold my breath for too long.


*phew* that was quite a wall of text. I must sound like a Mutilate Fanatic.

Fans glory to the Gladiators,
Gods glory to the Heroes.

 

• Aldriana

I'm actually pretty happy with the underlying computations for combat at this stage - they certainly have a few quirks in places, but on the whole I think they're pretty close. The next round of improvements I want to make are mostly UI changes plus assorted bug fixes.

Regarding Mutilate specifically, there are multiple issues that make it challenging:

1) Mutilate cycles just plain work totally differently from SS, BS, and Hemo cycles, due to the "chunkiness" of Mutilate; with SS, BS, and Hemo, you can control exactly how big an SnD or Rupture you're using. With Mutilate, this doesn't work; you launch mutilates until you have 'enough' combo points (conventional wisdom is that "enough" means 4), and then launch a finisher. Moreover, once you launch a finisher, you don't have a neat rotation like XsYr; rather, you just sort of check and see what ability is in need of using (i.e., do I need to refresh SnD? No? Okay, what about Rupture? No? Okay, then Envenom). While I do have some idea how to go about modeling this, my concern is that it's going to smooth things out too much. My experience with Mutilate is that there's a fair amount of slop in the cycles - lots of wasted SnD uptime and/or SnD gaps, and so on. The sheet, on the other hand, would have a tendency to model the ideal cycle - no SnD downtime, but no SnD gaps, either - which is hard to do in practice.

2) Seal Fate makes cycle computation messy. For those of you that have looked at the calculation pages, you'll have seen that I manually iterate a cycle-selection calculation 3 times to get the right cycle before doing the damage calculations. With seal fate, this calculation block would need to be significantly longer, as 1) you have to compute crit chance in each cycle, and 2) SF tends to have a fairly large effect on cycles so you may need to iterate it more times to get accurate results. As such, the calculations page for Mutilate could easily be twice the length of the calculations page for any of the existing cycles.

3) Weapon speed. The method I'm using for estimating the damage contribution of weapon speed sort of relies on the fact that we're operating in a fairly narrow range of speeds; regardless of what OH weapon you're using, all other reasonable OH options are within at most .2 speed of what you're using. With Mutilate, on the other hand, your OH can be up to .6 speed different, which is going to exacerbate the nonlinearities that are already present at .2. As such, the OH Weapon Speed calculation would need to work totally differently.

So, long story short: there are some fairly fundamental issues with Mutilate that are holding back development, not the least of which is the fact that I have very little raid experience as Mutilate. I'm not averse to adding it to the sheet at some future date, but I'm not going to add it until I figure out how to do it right, and certainly not until I get the (smaller and easier) UI changes up and running as well.

 

Balkoth

The only two things I can think of off the top of my head that would be affected are Combat Potency and Deadly Poison. You can't have Combat Potency as Mutilate, so that's not an issue. Is Deadly Poison falling off really such a big issue (ie is that actually likely to happen with a slow offhand dagger)?

 

• Aldriana

Conventional wisdom is that the typical Mutilate build makes use of Envenom, such that you're repeatedly dumping all your DP stack and need to get them back as quickly as possible. That's the selection pressure keeping weapon speed down. The selection pressure keeping weapon speed up is the fact that you're making instant attacks with your OH makes slow weapons a good thing, both in terms of increased damage and in terms of increased proc chance of PPM procs. Neither of these selection effects is probably as strong as combat potency, but the point remains that you have two selection forces pushing in opposite directions, so figuring out what is optimal is a bit harder than in the SS/BS/Hemo case where all selection effects are trying to push weapon speed down.

 

Andeh

So, I finally got around to downloading and playing with this spreadsheet (v.0.7.4 - OO), after being a long time "DPS Spreadsheet" user. There seems to be something very strange going on with Optimal Hit. You say:
Putting in my current gear (see armory) with a standard raiding swords build has it saying my Optimal Hit is 247 (current 295). This is very strange, since the Optimal gem recommendations actually include MORE gems with +hit than I currently have. How can it calculate an Optimal Hit rating being 48 less than it currently is, while calculating having more hit gems as being Optimal?

The only thing I can think of is that Optimal Hit means "if you use the optimal gear given chosen parameters with optimal gems," since some of the pieces of armor it recommends have less hit.

Also, I have a question regarding Offense/Defense Weighting. I've skimmed through all 21 pages, and haven't seem it clearly answered. If I want to completely ignore stamina, dodge, etc., I set that box to 0, correct?

 

• Aldriana

See posts 469 through 475 - there's currently a bug with optimal hit, which I haven't gotten around to fixing yet.

That will work. Or see posts 299 through 301 for the easy way to look at just offense.

 

OnTheHissay

I'm wondering what you used when you valued the 4-set bonus of Deathmantle: Coup de Grace. I'm using Mantle of Darkness, but I recently got my fourth DM piece and thus wondering if the bonus is worth loosing MoD's superior hit.. taking me from 279 hit rating to 257 (crit will be about the same, about 10 more AP with DM). The spreadsheet is giving me a extra 20 dps with the DM shoulders, but I'm not sure what to trust as the hit bit isn't working properly atm.

Also, I've noticed when using the spreadsheet, that the dps does not update when changing the socket bonus from yes/no. Something I'm doing wrong?

 

Tosa

The socket bonus on the sheet is not a indication of whether or not it is on. It is an indication of whether or not it's worth getting.

 

OnTheHissay

So it doesn't add in the extra stats of said bonus if you gem accordingly then?

 

• Aldriana

Well, I've never seen any actual testing of the proc rate on Coup De Grace, so I am unable to make any guarantee of it's accuracy. It's currently coded to 2%, which I believe to be in the right ballpark. If someone would like to test to verify this, that would be great.

 

• Aldriana

It automatically detects the socket bonus. If you put the right gems in, it's active. If not, it's not. Simple.

 

Complete

So there still has not been a blue post on the haste rating change?

From the looks of it, Haste will not really be viable end-game instance play. Yes it will be a nice stat to stack, but not number 1 anymore. Well.. number 1 once you rear hit cap.

Debate?

 

zYx

I noticed one thing as well. I currently have T4 helm and gloves, giving me 2 pc T4 bonus. However in suggested upgrades for helm there is T5 head with 30 dps upgrade. If I put T5 helm in the gear sheet i get 14 dps DECREASE in rough dps estimate. Therefore how can sheet recommend T5 head as a dps upgrade?
Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Same thing happens with gloves enchant. It says optimal is 26 AP, but if I put 15 agi on them, I get 2 dps increase.

 

Karmon

Actual there is one
WoW -> Test Realm Patch Notes

 

Melnor

When you don't have the 2 pc set bonus, the tier 5 helm is an upgrade over your t4 helm, but if it breaks the set bonus then it's actually a downgrade.

 

zYx

Yes, I am aware of that, but if I put T5 helm I will lose 2pc T4 bonus so it cannot possibly be an upgrade for my gear at the moment, but yet spreadsheet suggests it.

This is all in regards to DPS spreadsheet which can take this options into consideration when it proposes an upgrade. And still the problem with gloves enchant remains.

Regards.

 

• Aldriana

Yes. The spreadsheet suggests it, as it should. Deathmantle helm is an upgrade over Netherblade. The fact that you can't realize that upgrade right now notwithstanding, it *is* an upgrade. Eventually you do want to switch to it - you just need to get an upgrade for the other slot as well.

The spreadsheet does not factor in set bonuses when recommending upgrades; this is why there's a separate page to tell you exactly how much each set bonus is worth, so you can figure out for yourself which gear upgrades are actually sensible at the given time.

As an example of why the set bonuses are *not* included in the recommendations: if they were, and you were wearing 4/5 T5, you would never be allowed to break it, as no one piece of T6 is sufficient to make up for the 4/5 set bonus. However, in reality, T6 is better, both because each piece is significantly better than it's T5 counterpart, and because both set bonuses are very good as well. Hence, you want the sheet to tell you that T6 is good, even if you do need 2 pieces of it before you break the 4/5 T5 bonus.

Again: the spreadsheet computes upgrades on a slot-by-slot basis. It does not and cannot look at interactions between them. It is a tool to help you make decisions. It is not a replacement for independant thought.

Which has been mentioned at least twice in the last few pages. It is a bug of some sort. Excel is failing to do the lookup correctly. I have no idea why. When I do, I'll fix it.

 

Dampfbrumsel

I am wearing the Grips of Damnation. The spreadsheets recommends T5 gloves as an upgrade equivalent to 0.73 AP. If I equip T5 gloves, the DPS goes down by about 0.2 and the upgrade list now shows the Grips of Damnation as an 1.6 AP upgrade.

Here's a possible interpretation: When calculating the upgrades, the spreadsheet does not substract the item bonuses of the currently equipped item and thus comes up with these wrong recommendations.

If you care to reenact these exact values, they occured with my currently equipped gear (Armory Link), active PTR Haste nerf + value type set to offensive.

I think some earlier posters tried to adress this peculiarity before, but the point never got across.

 

• Aldriana

Here's another interpretation:

All calculations are based off of your current stats. Hence, when you change gear, the value of stats changes. As such, items can change in relative value by a few AP in either direction. Hence, differences of less than 5 AP should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

Karmon

Well I filled in your values from the above armoy link and I do not see this behaviour.
Deathmantel Gloves is shown as a 3.23 AEP upgrade.
Actual using the T5 gloves increases the DPS by about 0.59 DPS and now Grips of Damnation
are shown as a 0.69 AEP downgrade.

I used the 0.7.4_OO (OpenOffice) version of the sheet.
Maybe something is broken in the Excel version.

EDIT: I used a different set of buffs than the stock sheet