Thanks Aldriana, that fixed the problem.

The first 5 points of weapon skill were better than hit; hence, this is a nerf to combat rogues. However, after the first 5 points, Hit was better than weapon skill, and, thus, expertise is also better than weapon skill after the first 5 points. Hence, items with weapon skill are more powerful now than before, but, assuming they haven't changed the base miss/dodge rate against level 73s, yes, rogues will experience a slight reduction of DPS. However, I do mean "slight". We're talking on the order of 10-20 DPS, I suspect.

Regarding Nyn'jah Tabi: Yes, blue gems suck for DPS. This is why you ignore the socket bonus and socket with your favorite combination of red and yellow gems. Hence, the comparison is 6 hit and 16 AP vs 7 sta. 6 hit, depending on your gear, is worth roughly 15 AP. 7 sta, according to the weighting in the sheet, is about 4 AP-equivalent. Hence, Nyn'jah Tabi is roughly a 27 AP upgrade relative to Edgewalker Longboots.

Now, is 27 AP an ultra-collosal mega-upgrade? No, it's not. But when the 2nd and 3rd place items differ by 27 AP, that's pretty significant. Consider: the 2nd-best and 7th-best necks are separated by only 25 AP. The 2nd-best and 6th-best shoulder are separated by 28 AP. The 2nd and 6th best cloaks are separated by 28 AP. The 2nd and 5th best bracers are separated by 28 AP. The 1st and 4th best belts are separated by only 14 AP. The 2nd and 6th best legs are separated by 24 AP. The 3rd and 9th best rings are separated by only 24 AP. So when the 2nd and 3rd items are more disparate in quality than the 2nd and 6th are for many slots, I would argue that that qualifies as "far better". If you want to mince words and say it's merely "clearly better" or "obviously better", so be it. The fact remains: it is a significant and obvious upgrade over everything else, and for me there are only a handful of available upgrades in the entire game that are a larger boost. Any rogue that doesn't have BT on farm (and even a lot of the ones that *do*) should be working on getting these boots. So, they're good. If you want to pick a different adjective for just how good, you're welcome to do so. But I stand by my choice .

Well, there's also the "two blue gems" thing - though as you get farther in gear, from what I can tell, that becomes far less of an issue.

Mace Spec is being changed to 1% extra damage on all crits per point. So at 5/5 it offers a 5% chance to stun blablabla and 5% extra damage on critical strikes.
I'm almost falling over my keyboard(wtb more sleep time) so my brain cannot figure yet how good is this or how much it sucks.

RED gives me about 25 dps. Adding and removing dexerity(12agi) from boots yields a 7dps decrease so I guess RED(red - 12agi) is worth about 18dps or 6dps per 1%crit damage. so 5% crit damage would net me about 30dps. Sword spec is worth about ~74dps and fist spec ~55dps. I guess none of these calculations are valid since crit damage increase is not linear but at least the new mace spec gives some dps increase the previous one didn't

Now I'm willing to bet that dragonstrike with new mace spec will beat S2 Fists and will be on par with S2 Swords. If this is true I might try to get the last 2 vortices I need :-)

Side note, weapon expertise talent has been changed to... you guessed it... give 10 weapon expertise. That's it.

With my Belt of One-Hundred Deaths, which gives 6 expertise, i have 16 total expertise which the tooltip shows as a 4.00% reduction to dodge and parry.

edit: Human sword spec has been changed to 1% crit with swords. Yay, why did I roll a human again? Shoulda been a gnome...

Did some rough hacks on the value of expertise, and it turns out the value of Expertise is a bit higher than I might have guessed; it turns out that it's, point-for-point, about 10% better than hit rating. The main implication of this? Vashj belt is now clearly the best belt in the game.

Additionally, I did some hacks regarding the value of new mace spec, and while it's certainly a little stronger than it was before, it's not strong enough to actually matter - Dragonstrike is still weaker than the Arena 2 MHs, and Rod of the Sun King/Syphon of the Nathrezim are weaker still.

Long story short? Sounds like everyone's going to want to use Arena 3 MHs, unless they have Warglaives. And if you're thinking that's a bit lame? I agree.

So what about the al'ar gloves. They only offered 16 wep skill, instead of 25, but that will still be better than before, correct?

Moreover, anyone have ss's of their talents/character sheet on the PTR? it's shutdown on my end and I'd like to see.

Another thing, I noticed that Season 3 items aren't technically in yet, they were all data-mined, at least the ones we can see, but I can't seem to find links with the MH/OH Fist or MH sword/mace...anyone know?

I've been trying to stay around 280-285 since I don't like the idea of wasting all that extra hit on 70-72 lvl trash. We're losing, what, 1%? Pop that up to 300 instead, not that big a deal I guess.

Kinda sad I was to cheap to spend dkp on the vashj belt now lol. Was a minor upgrade, now it'll be the belt that owns them all.
Btw.. If I look at [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] (wowhead 2.3: Belt of One-Hundred Deaths - Items - World of Warcraft) then the skill rating simply gets removed without anything else replacing it. Has anybody managed to get onto PTR to verify this? [Fang of Vashj] is the same, no stats changed other then the removal of the daggerskill.
That would mean [Don Alejandro's Money Belt] would become the undisputed best belt ingame.

I'm unsure though.. as a human rogue with 2/2WE I only needed 300 +hit to cap (308 for non-humans). Now I'll be needing 363 - (10expertise x 15.7) = 324 +hit. (I am correct in assuming that the mob having less dodge is the same as me having more hit right?)

However the WE talent now also gives 2.5% less parry which we had a static 5% before 2.3 which no ammount of +hit could change (very unsure off this so don't take this for truth and do correct/confirm me if you know).
If this 5% parry chance I have in my head for some reason is true.. isn't this -2.5% to parry worth as much as +2.5% +hit then? I doubt I'm right caus this would make expertise seriously better and bliz buffing rogues can't be right. Anyway, I'd realy appreciate it if somebody could explain the details where I'm wrong and what is right.

parry will only help us while farming..or if you're willing to get your tank killed and die from cleave/arcing smash (aka you can't get parried from behind).

EDIT: I suppose it'll help some on hyjal trash situations where we actually do a little tanking.

I just reentered by data when I got home and came to about 1358 dps, That fits better with my supposition, but losing like 75-90dps is horrid . I guess DST/TT really got the kick in the nuts.... :\

EDIT: Edited useless post, I'd like to apologize for this and previous useless posts in this thread. I've been building infractions and was unaware. Won't happen again.

I know right, its so freaking good...I love my spine of the dragon.

I know a mob can't parry or block attacks from behind but I thought it was negated to 5% chance instead of zero (don't ask me where I got that, i haven't got a clue). Guess the parry doesn't mean jack indeed then
Anyway, i'll stop polluting this topic till soembody that knows can give soem detailed info.

http://elitistjerks.com/509683-post30.html

Cross-posting this, did a quick model of it using my spreadsheet and my findings roughly coincidence with yours. In combination with [Dragonstrike], mace spec is now even more competitive with swords. However, it still suffers (like fist+sword) from limited itemization ([Syphon of the Nathrezim] makes a large DPS downgrade, and I doubt [Rod of the Sun King] is better, but I don't have any models for that energy proc).

*edited*

I saw where I was in error. And thus cleared my post.

Wellll I've looked at picking up Rod of Sunking + swiftsteel bludgeon to just be a little different, but if its STILL not gonna even be close... :\

I picked up Don Alejandro's two nights ago. I also have shadow-walkers cord (btw our guild has gotten 9+ of these now -- we hate them with a burning passion) and a belt of deep shadow. 0.8 puts deep shadow above Don Alejandro's (in the offensive category) and same with the DPS spreadsheet. So I would say it's quite disputed. Right now I have 2 +10 hit gems in the belt of deep shadows and 2 +5agi/5hit on Don Alenjandro's, so I can switch them about depending on my needs. I've heard multiple people refer to DA's as the second best belt in the game behind Vashj, but why is it? and why does it not show up in the sheets?

Don Alejandro's has a lot more sta/survivability on it, so if you value defensive stats, Don Alejandro's is worth considering. If not, you want to be wearing the Vashj belt. It's not that deep shadows is bad, per se; it's just that no case for it being best-in-slot can be made, whereas both Vashj and DA were plausible for that in this patch. Now, Vashj belt just plain wins.

EDIT: was useless post.

Hi Aldriana,

I have a couple of questions concerning the recently uploaded version of your spreadsheet. In the Xs5r tab, under the 'Actual Attack Counts' section, the 'MH Procs Per PPM' cells (row 276) refer to the 'MH Atts' cells (row 257). Should this be 'MH Hits' (row 260) instead? In the previous sections the 'MH Procs Per PPM' cells referenced the latter cells.

Also, in the iterative sections, is blade flurry taken into account? I did not notice a reference to it until the 'Actual Attack Accounts' section.

Edit for one additional thought: does the spreadsheet take into account ppm procs caused by rupture?

Promised logs of Hyjal ring parsing.
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