Well, I found that I usually end up doing more harm than good when trying to shiv people out of MC. Often end up dmging 40-50% of their hp just trying to break the mc and plenty of other people are using the dagger, so as long as you aren't responsible for keeping up the dagger debuff, I'd say sword offhand is pretty easily the superior choice for any sword rogue.

The thing is: You need it to execute the fight properly. Now, if you're fighting for a raid spot, that's another story...

It would be a bit foolosh to ruin your dps for a few stabs to de-MC someone.
Anyway, I guess you all agree with my feeling that a fast OH sword is better then a slow legendary dagger with ~20% more dps. Guess that will be what I'll be nuking with from now on.

And yes the dagger is needed for de-MC'ing.. but you want to do that with ONLY the dagger anyway so you'll need to macro it anyway. Just using dagger OH or MH with another legendary is way to risky if they get unlucky and resets a few stabs

Aye. Is there any prospect of changing your calculations of gemming to make them worth something? When I'm trying to decide between rigid dawnstones and glinting topaz in my yellow sockets, it is no use whatsoever to tell me that rigid dawnstone is better if you ignore the fact that hit is capped. Heck, it will even tell me to socket more rigid dawnstones when I'm already over the hit cap. Right now I'm sitting at 307 hit rating, and it's telling me to rip out my +12 crit stone and put in a +8 hit stone.

It's simply not fit for purpose with regard to gemming - you might as well rip out that whole subsection of the sheet, because none of it is believable. And if it applies to gems - surely it applies to all other gear recommendations also? If it naively thinks that hit is always better even when you're past the hit cap, it will recommend distinctly suboptimal gear based on the (useless) hit rating.

It's simple to test this: I took my current gear set and just put +8 hit in all gem sockets. That brings my to (capped) 308 hit rating with one empty trinket slot. For that trinket slot, it recommends Romulo's poison vial over Bloodlust Brooch, despote the fact that the only thing I'd actually get from the vial is the weak poison proc.

In summary: Most raiding rogues operate at or nearly at the hit cap. Your spreadsheet does not take the hit cap into account when recommending gems or gear, thus severely limiting its utility when used to analyse actual gear choices.

The recommendations aren't supposed to be taken that seriously. All they do is narrow down your choices for certain slots or sockets.
To find out what's best, you select one item after another and look at the DPS cell (B4) after every change as the DPS calculations factor in the Hit limit. The items and gems that yield the highest amount of DPS are the ones you want to equip.

The issue is, I'm not trying to make a sheet that will tell you what to do. I am trying to make a sheet to tell you what is good. And whether you are at the hit cap or not, an item with a lot of hit on it is good. You may or may not be able to make use of the fact that it's good at this particular moment in time, but it is, in an abstract sense, good.

For instance, lets say the sheet set the value of hit to zero and thereby stopped recommending it the instant you got to the hit cap. Lets also suppose that Blizzard then released a trinket with 100 hit rating on it.

Now, how good is this item in an abstract sense? Well, really damn good, obviously; it means you can stop socketing for hit at all and dump all that itemization into other stats, and still be hit capped. The actual long-term benefit you get from having such a trinket is large. So clearly, this item can reasonably be defined as "good", and we want the spreadsheet to let us know that this is an item worth getting.

But, under the assumption that the sheet would stop recommending hit the moment you were hit capped, if you were hit capped at the time, the sheet would never tell you about this item. And for as long as you were hit capped, you would think that this 100 hit item is crap, purely because you can't currently make use of it.

Stated briefly: the purpose of this sheet is not to replace independent thought. The purpose of this sheet is not to tell you exactly what you should equip. And even if that was the purpose of the sheet, it would not be reasonable to expect that all upgrades suggested by the sheet can be made in any order without running into trouble. The purpose of the sheet is to provide you, the user, with information about what is good... and not. Armed with the knowledge that certain items are good, and certain items are not, it is left to you, the user, to decide how best to realize the benefit of the good items.

To be perfectly honest, the very earliest versions of this sheet did detect the hit cap. When one's miss rate reached zero, the value of hit promptly dropped to zero. And every time it happened, it confused the heck out of me. I'd be trying out equipment options, fiddling things around - and it would abruptly inform me that everything I was wearing was crap, and that just about anything I could get my hands on would be an upgrade for every slot. I found this incredibly confusing every time it happened, and figure, at that point, that if I, who *wrote* the stupid thing was getting confused by the behavior, there was no real chance of anyone else being able to make sense of it. As such, I decided on the current approach, namely, continuing to inform you that items with a lot of hit on them are good, whether or not you can make use of the hit at the current time.

With regard to socketing in particular: yes, it could stop recommending hit gems when you're at the hit cap. But lets consider the implications of this.

Say you have 260 hit on your gear, neglecting sockets, 10 available sockets, and none of the socket bonuses are worth getting. Now, clearly socketing all 10 sockets with +8 hit gems is incorrect; this puts you at 340 hit.

Well, the first solution to this would be to just not recommend hit if it puts you over the cap, and thus recommend all +8 agi gems. But this isn't really the right answer; what we want it to do is recommend hit until you get to the cap, and then agi for the rest of the slots. What we want it to do is socket 6 of the sockets with +8 hit (for a total of 308 hit) and the other 4 with 8 agi.

Well, the first question with this is: how is the sheet supposed to decide which slots get 8 agi, and which get 8 hit? Clearly, if there's socket bonuses on the line, you socket in accordance with those. But, if there's not, which do you choose? What goes where? And, for the matter, why use 6 rigid and 4 delicate instead of 2 rigid and 8 glinting? or 4 rigid, 4 glinting, and 2 delicate? Or any other such combination?

Clearly, there exist circumstances where there are multiple different equivalent ways of socketing stuff, without any particular reason to favor one over the other. In this situation, the spreadsheet would have to define some convention by which it decided where to put them. So, lets say the rule is, it starts from the top of the sheet, fills hit till it hits the hit cap, and then sockets the rest with agi.

But this means, for instance, that the value of the sockets in your boots is going to change based on which helm your wearing, *EVEN IF* your overall stats wind up the same. And I, for one, would find that horribly confusing.

Hence, I went the other route. When comparing the value of items, it assumes that each is socketed optimally. The value of a socket does not depend on what order the sockets are filled; the sockets are always valued assuming the best possible contents. This what the middle column tells you: "I believe that this is the best theoretically possible socketing of this item, and thus, to accurately assess the full potential of this item, I am going to compare it to other options based on this socketing".

So, long story short: this sheet scores items off the maximal potential of each item. Not all the potential can be realized by every rogue at every time; however, there are complications and confusions that make it more sensible to put the burden on the user to figure out the best solution to that, rather than trying to do it in the sheet. The sheet is not the ultimate authority on all things; it is simply a tool to help you make good decisions. But in the end, you are the one that must make the decisions.

So, as it turns out, parsing combat logs of actual raids is as bit harder than I thought. I think I've worked out all the details of it, but I'm not going to swear I haven't made a mistake. But, assuming I didn't...

I count 6128 attacks and 137 procs. Hence, if it's a fixed-percent proc, it's proc rate is between 1.87% and 2.61%. If, on the other hand, it's PPM, it's about .73 PPM, as a 1 PPM enchant would expect to proc 188 times with a variance of 13 procs.

Now, by itself this doesn't help us a whole lot, but, given enough data sets of this sort, we should be able to pin it down by showing that one or the other theories of the mechanic is improbable given the data.

Hmm, fair enough - that's just a design philosophy difference. Thing is, by making it "recommend" stuff, you're implying that those items (whether gems or actual items) really do offer an upgrade over existing kit.

In the example you give, you want to choose whether to socket hit or agility. I can use my intelligence to know that I shouldn't socket hit past the cap. However with certain gear combinations, AP or crit might be better than agility. Your sheet doesn't help me with that: it's too busy recommending the hit I don't need, and not giving me the information I do need (i.e. when I drop hit, should I replace it with agi, AP or crit?)

And it's not just gem choices - especially as mudflation progresses, I wouldn't be surprised to see itemisation get to the point where +hit will be capped from your gear alone, without looking at gems. And yet your spreadsheet will still recommend further gear with yet more +hit on, which swamps out the top of the list and thus doesn't show you the gear that might be a real upgrade for you.

So finding upgrades becomes an immensely tedious process of swapping items in and out manually, and checking to see whether the calculated DPS goes up or down, while paying no attention to the actual recommendations. This is (I submit) deeply counterintuitive.

When we get to the point that the hit cap is a serious menace, I may need to reconsider my design philosophy. However, at the current stage of the game, I don't see that that's a particular issue.

As for what to socket with if you don't need hit: agility. Always.

I don't *have* Ruthlessness, only 2 pcs T4. I got gaps between my slice and dice uptime when I was testing it at our last Moro fight. Maybe it just needs practice though, and those small knockback thingies Morogrim does don't really help much.

-2 murder +2 ruthlessness would fix your problem

It's a question of gives and takes. 308 is the point you can't use more to hit, but when gear is stacked with loads of other useful stats (crit rating, agility, AP, etc) there comes a point that the hit rating-less gear is still overall better.

In other words, on a point-for-point basis, hit rating is better than agility, crit rating, or 2 AP, but item stats don't match up point-for-point.

I wouldn't be too fussed about getting right up to the hit barrier. You don't need hit whenever there is an item with less +hit than your current piece but better overall stats.

There seems to be a fair amount of such gear in the tier 5 and 6 instances. Deathmantle's 24 +hit is a large step down from the 81 +hit from Netherblade. It is not uncommon to drop down towards 200 hit rating, especially if you are progressing fast enough that your gear choices are limited by whatever drops. As long as you keep picking up net upgrades, don't worry about falling hit rating.

When I initially looked at T5, I was thinking "wow, where am I going to get enough hit", but as we progressed through SSC/TK, my hit rating still never dropped below 270. I picked up enough in nonset gear, and changed a couple red gems from my T4 level gear to orange or yellow. Items like [Belt of Deep Shadow], [Bloodsea Brigand's Vest], [Warp-Spring Coil], and [Arcanite Steam-Pistol] filled in the gaps nicely.

I don't usually pipe in to conversations or threads unless I feel it is totally necessary. This is one of those times.

Aldriana puts out a product for those of us with neither the time, the smarts, the expertise in statistics, or the inclination that simplifies the complicated process of gear itemization for rogues. Also, the effort put into determining how items work (i.e. DST, WSC and other proc items.) is invaluable.

To chime in with criticism of the hard work and dedication Aldriana gives to the rogue community is kind of, to use your words, deeply counterintuitive. If you feel the need to tell someone who puts in herculean time and effort to simplifying this process that they are wrong, come with more than "deeply counterintuitive". Put in some time, effort, testing and programming of your own and come up with an alternative that is a possible solution to your issues with the work he has produced. Don't just sit back and say, "I don't like this. It seems like you could do better. Fix it for me."

I want to say just the opposite. Aldriana, as always (and I think I speak for a lot of the rogue community) I am eternally in your debt for all the hard work and effort you put in.

Thanks for doing it.

Destructive criticism should be shunned, and constructive criticism should always be welcomed.

I am of the opinion that people could make serious mistakes by going over hit cap. Perhaps you could revert to the previous behaviour where you correctly accounted for hit cap in the rating system, but when you approach/exceed it, have a big bold warning message that activates? Yellow for ~10 close to hit cap, and Red if you exceed?

*edit: P.S. thank you for the lovely spreadsheet. Your hard work is most certainly welcome. I had created my own fairly extensive spreadsheet pre-BC for my guild's use, and hadn't the time to revamp it for post-BC, and I know how much work it can be.

Remember this sheet is used to compare one piece of gear v another piece of gear, thus the title GEAR SPREADSHEET. So if a pair of pants drop, you can see which pair of pants is going to give you more DPS. When you select a piece of gear, it shows you how to best optimize that piece of gear v that piece of gear. Nothing more nothing less.

The hit boxes are there just help us out, so we don't have to do the addition ourselfs and wonder what our hit rating is going to be. This sheet works perfectly, you just need a better understanding of how it is supposed to work. Plus if you don't like it, you could always go back to that other sheet. Once again Ald, thanks for everything you do.

First off, one more comment re: Songster. I'd just like to note that the sheet doesn't actually "recommend" anything. It "suggests" things. Now, it's a minor difference, perhaps, but the theory is that it provides you with a list of things that it believes to be good; you can listen to it's suggestions, or not.

First off: there's nothing fundamentally special about being at or near the hit cap; what matters is the total DPS granted by the stats on the items you have equipped. Getting to the hit cap isn't particularly more special than getting to 2k unbuffed AP or 30% unbuffed crit: in the end, it's just a number. So if it turns out that your DPS will be better with less hit because you pick up enough agi/AP/crit/etc. to justify the loss: well, then, you're somewhat under the hit cap.

Secondly: I personally prefer to keep my hit under 281, which is the hit cap for level 70s. There is enough level 70 trash (and boss adds) to be killed that not wasting hit on them seems potentially advantageous. Hence, while I don't actively dump hit to get below 281, nor do I specifically stack it to get above 281.

Thirdly: while hit is optimal for sustained fights, for interrupted fights it doesn't perform quite as well. Thus, there exists the school of thought that you might as well just socket for agility in the first place, and not worry as much about hit. As a general rule, when there are two items of comparable sustained DPS output, it is generally advantageous to select the one with less hit.

All in all: there are a number of good reasons why one might find oneself below the hit cap

Regarding criticism: I would encourage people to post any criticism or feedback they may have. If you don't like the way things work, say so. It's entirely possible that what's bugging you is something that can be fixed. And, if it's not, I will explain why it needs to be the way it is. If you're a dick about it, I might just ignore you, but that's hardly the end of the world either. Long story short? Feel free to speak your mind.

Oh, and thanks for the kind words regarding the sheet. It's always nice to hear that one's work is appreciated.

Your hard work is very appreciated by many of us.

With regard to your parse of the SSC clear, you mentioned that more data would help to narrow it down further. Would you like me to upload another raid log or do you think there's enough data now to add the set bonus to the spreadsheet within a reasonable degree of accuracy?

If you'd like to keep uploading parses, it certainly wouldn't hurt anything. As for adding it to the spreadsheet: I can certainly put in a reasonable estimate, under the theory of "if it's this hard to tell the difference, how much difference can it actually make?"

My take on the proc rate situation:

It appears that the proc rate is most likely either a fixed 2.2% or .75 PPM. Of those, it seems more plausible to me that it is .75 PPM, under both the "it's a nice round number" theory, and the "pretty much every proc in the game is a PPM" theory.

So, my inclination is at this point to add it to the spreadsheet as a .75 PPM effect, and call it good for the moment. If at some point down the road someone feels like doing the SS-only test in Blasted Lands (which, by my estimates, would take roughly 5 hours to be guaranteed to be able to distinguish between the options) it could be updated, but for the moment I'm inclined to say that .75 PPM is probably a good enough estimate.

Not sure if you still need this info, or even if you bother with info that has no combat logs to back it up, but I've definately seen the Dragonmaw proc refresh itself since 2.2

Quick thought:

If it's true that haste effects no longer scale ppm effects, we should be able to separate out parses with haste active and see if the azinoth proc rate goes up. If it does, it's % based, if not (given that we're outside of the standard error), it's ppm.