Alright, well then I've been horribly misinformed and will correct these people swiftly..lol

Another thing, I'm using the spiteblade now (I get the first ToA that drops..when it finally drops), but i've gone against two rogues, both with comparable stats, one using S1 MH and one using S2 MH and beat them both, usually handily, of course they still think evisc is a better finisher >.>. Wouldn't the S1 be an upgrade over the spiteblade since it has a higher avg and higher dps?

Also, is the Blade of Infamy a considerable upgrade over ToA, not that hit is valued slightly lower than agi? Just wondering, because we're about to kill kael hopefully, and I'd rather take the first BoA if I know its a considerable upgrade or if it's only slight, I'll stick with ToA.

Dragonstrike is better than Rod of the Sun King even after the Haste nerf and the T5 Weapons buff?
Btw, does any1 know the proc rate on that Rod?

Arena 1 Slicer is a bit better than Spiteblade. for most people, yes.

It's a fairly small upgrade on the whole; on the other hand, it's the best there is until Warglaives. So while I wouldn't take it from someone who still has a MH from a T4 instance, it's certainly a nice upgrade to pick up at some point.

Rod of the Sun King is 1 PPM; see [Rogue] Mechanics Testing Thread. Post 26 has the raw data in it.

Regarding the value of it versus Dragonstrike: it depends on your current gear. They're pretty close on the whole, but my experience with this is that Dragonstrike is a bit ahead for most people.

...Although, upon taking a second look at it, I just realized that I neglected to update Rod of the Sun King for the new PPM findings, so it's actually a bit overvalued right now. As usual, will be fixed in the next revision.

Aldriana:

First let me thank you for all of your hard work and care in putting together and maintaining this spreadsheet during your free time. I think that I can speak for many players when I say that your sheet has been an invaluable tool in helping us to make gear decisions.

My question is in regard to the DPS estimate on your spreadsheet. In practice, my DPS in raids varies quite a bit around your estimate depending on the particular fight: tank threat generation, being incapacitated, etc. I am wondering if your DPS estimate includes energy use for feint and, if so, how often? I find that on some bosses my threat total easily nears that of our main tank and I spend considerable time feinting or delaying special attacks (sometimes wasting energy ticks). Thus, my DPS for these fights according to our WWS parses comes out a bit lower than projected on your spreadsheet. If you do not currently include feint do you have plans to include it? I realize that the use of this ability is both situational and personal and therefore difficult to model.

I apologize if this topic has been previously discussed, but I did not find much information regarding feint in this thread (the search tool provided two posts). In case this information is of use for your answer, our raid uses Omen to estimate threat and I generally save Vanish for ~80% boss health, after using major cooldowns. I also use the cycle suggestion on your sheet and in fights without threat (e.g. Akama, Gurtogg phase 2, RoS phase 1) my DPS is much higher than your estimate. I want to maximise my performance in our raids, which in turn helps to maximise raid performance, but I get worried when my DPS on our WWS parses is lower than your theoretical estimate. I am looking for reasons why this may occur.

To summarize:
1) Does your spreadsheet account for the use of feint?
2) If not, should our practical DPS in a raid be less than your estimate?
3) Does my tank need greater threat generation?
4) Is the problem on my end and, if so, is there any advice for this situation?

Lastly, I realize that the purpose of your spreadsheet is to compare gear and not necessarily make a DPS estimate for the whole character. However, I am more confident in your Gear spreadsheet than the alternative DPS spreadsheet and, thus, am seeking your advice.

To answer in brief:

1) No
2) No
3) Probably
4) Hard to say

To answer in a bit more depth:

I would expect damage to vary quite a bit from the number in the sheet in practice, as the variance on rogue DPS is fairly high. Even if you execute the perfect cycle with the same gear every single fight, your DPS will probably vary by as much as 100 DPS either way.

The sheet makes absolutely no allowance for threat reduction; I have actually considered adding that option, but I haven't felt a huge demand for it so I have not included it yet.

Regarding your specific examples of sustained DPS situations: it should be noted that RoS Phase 1 has 0 armor and, as such, tends to generate much larger DPS numbers than you get elsewhere. And my concerns with the other two examples is that you're dealing with combat segments less than one minute long, which colors your DPS number. Even neglecting cooldowns for the moment (and I, for one, tend to blow AR, Blade Flurry, Haste Pots, Heroism, etc. during non-aggro-limited sections of fights), the simple fact that you start with 100 energy increases your DPS by a good 50 or so; plus, the variance on such short sections of combat is even higher. I've seen rogues average 20% crit on Akama one week and 50% the next week without changing any gear or buffs.

So, the benchmarking fights I'd use are things like Tidewalker (if you can get an un-graved attempt), Teron Gorefiend, or (depending on your strategy), Azgalor; with a good tank, these should not be threat-limited enough that you need to feint - vanish should be plenty, and even that may not be necessary depending on your tank. If you are having serious aggro issues on these fights, your tank is probably not generating as much aggro as is possible, either due to lacking proper aggro-generation itemization (hit, expertise, shield block, etc.), not mashing hard enough, or not using the correct aggro cycle. For reference: most of the rogues in my guild don't even have feint on their bars.

Regarding specific DPS comparisons to the sheet: make sure your buffs and the bosses armor are entered correctly; for instance, the "Number of Heroisms" parameter is number per 10 minutes, so if you get one in a 3 min fight like Akama, you may want to enter 3 instead of 1. But, you should also remember that there's a lot of variance in this. Personally, I've found it to be fairly accurate for me, but if you're finding it inaccurate, I would look through a WWS or two and figure out where the disagreement is between theory and practice.

Thank you for your quick reply.

Teron Gorefiend is one of the fights that I also have threat issues with. Typically our melee group does not use any cooldowns until about 70% and our shaman twists Windfury and Tranquil Air to help us keep threat low until that point. Still, I generally have to throw a feint into roughly every other cycle; after cooldowns are blown at 70% I'll drop my vanish and threat really isn't an issue after that.

So, I suspect that the problem mostly lies in my tank's threat generation. We no longer step foot into Serpentshrine and our strat for Azgalor has melee running out of combat when hit by a rain of fire. Buff differences between the sheet and what actually occurs in my raid is probably the next major culprit in my discrepancy and I'll look into that more deeply -- thanks again.

Sounds like tank issue, I for example tend to vanish at 85-90% HP and never getting even near the threat after that.

I'm pretty sure that Salvation and Tranquil Air actually DO stack, meaning you end up generating 56% of your normal, unbuffed threat.

Regardless, nelalas if you're aggro capping on Teron then your tank has some serious threat issues (or if you don't have Salv then your raid leaders have some serious group composition issues).

Yes, they do stack, back in the TK days we usually did that on Void Reaver. And worked fine.

I have Rod of the Sun King since it dropped on our first Kael kill and at that time I was daggers and went for it since the other rogues did not want it.

Since then we only had one talon and lots of blade of infamy but I never wanted to change infamy for the rod.
After the ssc/tk weapon buff its very close when it comes to swords and I am always on top with the other rogue who is swords.

As regarding the proc I would say its 2-3ppm and this is not a conclusion after testing that I did but I watch randomly during boss fights. Then again I might be missing the sword spec from the MH but as regarding dps and ppm I would say that the Rod is very good.
Since yesterday I got the savagery blade from mother and I will run some more tests with the Rod and post my findings.

Would you mind testing it again for us? I mean with WWS/ProcWatch reports? Cuz on our last Kael 1 of the rogues got it and for him, the proc rate is somewhat insane (27% of chance, he said)
So if is that true, I'd really get it if we ever get a chance hehe : )

edit: i'm dumb

edited, thx haha

Sorry I don't have a combat log for the raid, but this should show the proc rate as much under 27%

Takkara - WWS

Edit: I know the numbers are already run on this fact, this is merely a reinforcement of that.

I'd say its definetly more than 1 PPM, probably between 2-3.

Would it be possible to show the difference between these weapons say at different benchmarks of maybe 2000ap 35% crit, 1800ap 30% crit etc etc, just to see the difference.

It would be interesting to see how much you lose in PvE dps using a mace over sword because it gives you the added bonus of great PvP utility.

Keep in mind than when I say 1 PPM, I don't mean it only procs once per minute; I mean it's a 1 PPM effect and thus, with instant attacks, will actually be observed proccing closer to twice a minute. For instance:

Looking at this data set: we have 3894 melee attacks; typically about 1/3 of those are MH attacks. Thus, we have something like 1300 MH white hits. If it were a 1 PPM effect as postulated, we would expect 1300 MH hits to generate roughly 40 procs.

Additionally, we have 934 Sinister Strikes; assuming 1 PPM, we would expect to see about 40 procs from this as well.

Finally, we have 65 kicks and eviscerates, which I believe can proc, which would make for a couple more procs.

Thus, if it were a 1 PPM effect as postulated, we'd expect to see about 85 procs. In reality, there were 104. So while it might be a bit over 1 PPM, it's certainly a lot less than 2.

With my gear, which is a mix of T5/T6 and full raid buffs, the optimal DPS spec for each yields the following DPS values:

[Warglaive of Azzinoth]: 1779.14
[Vengeful Gladiator's Slicer]: 1726.78
[Blade of Infamy]: 1719.68
[Talon of Azshara]: 1716.94
[Talon of the Phoenix]: 1711.3
[Merciless Gladiator's Slicer]: 1703.07
[Dragonstrike]: 1681.6
[Rod of the Sun King]: 1680.33
[Syphon of the Nathrezim]: 1677.58

Rogar, from what it sounds like the sheet is actually reccomending you socket away from hit rating and put in, I would assume, agi gems. This seems a little odd to be because the value of hit rating seems to dramatically increase when you have powerful procs like DST, part of this might be the DST nerf or it could also be an odd selection of buffs. One other thought about the seemingly low value of hit for you is that hit will increase in value if you have two epic weapons, so if you plugged your gear in with the s2 OH and then compared to the blue your armory shows, or latro's even Hit will be better with better weapons.

Agi, Hit and Crit will never break down into a x Agi = y Hit, because they change in effectiveness depending on your buffs and gear, for example if you check/uncheck the kings buff the value of agi changes greatly. Also various procs increase the value of different stats, take your Tsunami Talisman having that equiped will make crit and also agi more valuable.

Ultimatly the answer is that it depends, because gear will not have the same amounts of stats on them, so while hit might be more valuable point for point than agi if something has twice the agi it will be better.

Hey ald. Nice 3 pieces. Only one more for another fun bonus.

Just curious if you were coming out with a new version of the sheet with the new Arena swords any time soon? I am debating whether to bother with season 3 sword (b/c I'd frankly rather blow my accumulated points on new armor and a new main hand mace (assuming they don't buff BT/Hyjal weapons, which they really need to go ahead and do already ).

Thanks for the response.

As the sheet doesnt have a spot for the Revenger, I changed the data for the Latros... so your thought about 2 epic weapons could still be part of the equation. As a test though, I created a spreadsheet from a guild mate that has the S2 Swords, and even took the time to input all of his gear, gems, and enchants... 206 ends up being his optimal hit, way lower than I had ever believed made sense.

Still Puzzled...

Wouldn't the changes to mace spec now change how much damage it will do? Basically it's the fist/sword spec but this has a bit higher damage?

It its 5% more damage on criticals, not 5% critical damage.

Yah i made that mistake initially also and after recovering from my initial rogueasm I realized that it is nice but not as game breaking for pvp as I originally thought. lol.