That's the difference. Thank you very much. There were some very minor gemming differences that I found and fixed, but the 20 from the SHT was where the huge discrepancy was.

Both are now showing 288 correctly.

Its porbably somewhere in here but the imp strength of earth is enhancing totem and imp windfury improved weapon totems ?

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

That was hard....

Tip: If you're with an enhancement shaman, they have both of those talents (and UR). If you're with a resto shaman, they have neither.

I was making sure didnt want to make assumptions and mark false numbers

I was considering these points last night during another mundane romp through farmed content. How large of a role does armor penetration play in influencing optimal energy use cycles? Certainly this falls under the "improving gear" umbrella for most pieces of gear (e.g. [Slayer's Shoulderpads], [Slayer's Handguards], [Signet of Primal Wrath], [Stormrage Signet Ring]); however, typical gear upgrades generally follow a corresponding increase in attack power that simultaneously buffs both sinister strikes and ruptures. Armor penetration, on the other hand, will not influence rupture damage but certainly will increase sinister strike damage. Although I'm sure this is all included in the spreadsheet cycle calculations, do you suppose that rogues with high passive armor penetration, MH executioner enchants, and [Warp-Spring Coil] should seek elongated cycles? Would the same apply to very high critical strike situtations (say, always having a feral druid + [Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality] + Mongoose enchants) where sinister strikes are increased in damage while rupture is not? In other words, if you use equipment and/or raid setups that benefit sinister strikes more than ruptures are you justified in going for cycles longer than what the spreadsheet recommends?

So, an answer in 2 parts:

1) Yes, Armor Penetration and Crit are the two mods that increase the value of SS relative to Rupture the most; meaning that if you have abnormally high Armor Pen/Crit, elongated cycles are more likely to be better. However, AP has a similar effect; at any reasonable Crit/AP level, SS scales faster with AP than Rupture. So, fundamentally, all 3 favor SS.

2) However, all this is considered in the spreadsheet; when you reach the gear level where longer cycles become better than shorter cycles, the spreadsheet will start recommending a longer cycle. So should you use cycles that are longer than the spreadsheet recommends? Generally not. There are exceptions (like using 5s5r to get better use out of Ashtongue Talisman) - but, fundamentally, when you get to the point where 5s5r passes the compressed 3.Xs5r cycles, the spreadsheet will let you know.

I don't think much beyond 5s/5r is really sustainable without a 2nd SnD in the cycle somewhere, and since eviscerate is pretty much universally worse than rupture (where rupture is usable), any 5s/5r/Xs/Xe cycle would be compressable into a Xs/5r cycle.

But I might be wrong.


I should also add that 5s/5r is pretty much your "max SS dmg" build, since you are spending ZERO energy on finishers, only using them to keep SnD up (necessary) and blow combo points that accumulate via use of SS on the highest damage finisher that takes 0 energy (rupture).

So you're really using as much energy as possible on SS, while keeping SnD up - the 5pt rupture is just free extra damage, costing 1 GCD (not an issue) and 0 energy.

So, the point is, 5s5r has the maximal number of Sinister Strikes; you're spending 0 energy on finishers and thus Sinister Striking as fast as you can based on your regular energy regen. Hence, going to a 5s5rXe cycle won't get your more Sinister strikes per unit time; it will actually get you less, as you're now spending 10 or more energy on the eviscerate.

Now, to be perfectly frank, I haven't done any analysis on 5s5rXe-type cycles myself; they were shown to be inferior with the Rogue DPS spreadsheet almost a year ago, and I haven't felt the need to revisit the topic since. My suspicion is that the energy efficiency advantage of a small Eviscerate relative to a Sinister Strike is insufficient to offset the loss of rupture uptime, but, again, I have not proved that.

It should be noted, however, that 5s5rXe cycles are really only doable with 2/5 Netherblade. Consider: for a typical non-2/5 rogue, the optimal cycle is roughly 3s5r. This means that you generate enough energy for 8 combo points in the duration of a 3-point SnD. Going to 5s5r generates 8.7 extra seconds of SnD uptime, but costs an extra 80 energy to get the combo points. Given that energy regen with combat potency is about 13 energy per second, this means you gain a net of 13 * 8.7 - 80 = 33 extra energy by switching to 5s5r. Now, a 1-point Eviscerate costs 20 energy, and provides .6 combo points; hence, we need to sinister strike an extra .4 times to get a 1-point Eviscerate in. .4 Sinister Strikes costs 16 energy; hence, we would need to have 16 + 20 = 36 slack energy to perform 5s5r1e... and we just said that we only had about 33. So 5s5r1e is only barely supportable - if at all... and a 1 point eviscerate is less energy efficient than a Sinister Strike. Hence, no cycle of this form can be optimal without 2/5 T4.

With regard to the Ashtongue trinket: We currently suggest that rogues use a 5s/5r cycle upon getting this trinket in order to maximize its use. Separately, optimal cycles get longer as gear progresses. So, does this mean that the value of the Ashtongue trinket will also increase with gear in the sense that one is no longer "forcing" the long cycle because it is already optimal? Certainly there is some lost dps by going 5s/5r at relatively inferior gear setups (I vaguely remember Aldriana saying this difference was small) even though there is a net gain in dps due to the trinket.

So, cycle expansion to more fully realize the merit of Ashtongue Talisman is sort of one of those advanced concepts that it's hard to make a general rule for. Fundamentally, it's good to do if 5s5r is competitive with 3s5r anyway, but if you already have a gap between them, Ashtongue won't close it.

To clarify this, some napkinmath. Currently, Ashtongue Talisman tends to be modeled as ~70% uptime; however, by using 5s5r and energy queueing, you can effectively get about 90% Ashtongue uptime on yellow attacks (not 100%, as if Ruthlessness doesn't proc you have one SS outside of Ashtongue). So we're getting an increase of about 6.5% crit, on 20% of our yellow attacks, which comprise about 30% of our DPS; hence, the net DPS increase is about .065 * .2 * .3 = .0039 = .4% of one's total DPS. So a rogue doing 1500 DPS gains maybe 6 DPS from energy queuing with 5s5r.

To put this into real terms: the spreadsheet, with my current gear and typical buffs for my guild, recommends a 3.1s5r cycle, and asserts that it does 1800 DPS. The 5s5r cycle shows 1789 DPS, neglecting Ashtongue manipulation. If we increase the Ashtongue uptime for yellow attacks from the computed 72.7 percent by 20% to 92.7%, 5s5r dps shows as 1795 DPS. So, in general, it's probably not worth it for me to drop to 5s5r; I will usually do better with my regular cycle.

Now, this sort of subtlety is, of course, hard to make a hard and fast rule for, so, at the moment, every player must sort of make a judgement call about whether they think it's worth it for them. Ideally, the spreadsheet would handle this by keeping track of how much "slack" there is in your cycles to allow manipulations such as this. Unfortunately, handling "slack" would be extremely challenging for a spreadsheet format, so until we have a more sophisticated framework for DPS computations (such as a calculator written in a real programming language, which I have started some work on but am still several months away from having something usable) it's not really going to be feasible to measure the real benefit of Ashtongue in the spreadsheet. In the meantime, people will have to take their best guess - knowing that it's usually a small effect, accounting for roughly 5 DPS.

Quick question, why are all the reccomended gems 8agi when i'm only at 185 hit? wouldn't a hit increase give more overall dps than 8agi? also why not 10agi? am i missing something here?

Also can the list of reccomended gear be extended beyond 3? and are set bonus taken into account with those reccomendations?

For my druid i've fallen in love with The Druid Wiki � ToskksDPSGearMethod is there anything similar for rogues?

So, lets see here.

First, my suspicion is that you probably have it set on weighted total rather than Offense only, which is the default for the sheet. On Weighted Total, some benefit from the dodge gained via agility is scored (not much, but a little) which tends to bump Agi ahead of hit in overall quality. However, if you want raw damage numbers, set it to Offense only, and you will probably see hit pull ahead of agi.

Second, as for why 8 agi rather than 10 agi: presumably because you have elected to turn BT gems off on your sheet (on the Advanced Settings sheet). If you set "Use BT Gems" to yes, it should recommend socketing with 10 instead.

Third: just because your hit is low does not necessarily mean that hit is going to be better. Hit and Agi loosely synergize each other, but not as strongly as some stats; hence, it's entirely possible that, even in low hit situations, low-hit gear can still be good. It's be a bit surprising, mind you, but it's not impossible.

Fourth, regarding extending the recommendations table: in theory, yes. In practice, it'd be a lot of work. Adding and removing lines to front page UI is... somewhat challenging. There's a lot of references that break when you try to rearrange cells. So don't expect such a feature to be added to a major release anytime soon.

However, if you'd like to make some extra cells elsewhere for more gear recommendations, it's easy enough to do; just find someplace where you have the space to make cells, and copy the formulas over. For instance, consider the helm rankings; the 3 suggested upgrade cells currently read as follows:

[top]INDIRECT("'Armor'.A"&MATCH(VLOOKUP(HelmEQ;ArmorStats;2;FALSE())&" "&1;ArmorRanked;0))

INDIRECT("'Armor'.A"&MATCH(VLOOKUP(HelmEQ;ArmorStats;2;FALSE())&" "&2;ArmorRanked;0))

[top]INDIRECT("'Armor'.A"&MATCH(VLOOKUP(HelmEQ;ArmorStats;2;FALSE())&" "&3;ArmorRanked;0))

IF you simply copy this into a cell somewhere else and increment the ranking, you can get the 4th, 5th, and 6th helms with these formulas:

INDIRECT("'Armor'.A"&MATCH(VLOOKUP(HelmEQ;ArmorStats;2;FALSE())&" "&4;ArmorRanked;0))

[top]INDIRECT("'Armor'.A"&MATCH(VLOOKUP(HelmEQ;ArmorStats;2;FALSE())&" "&5;ArmorRanked;0))

INDIRECT("'Armor'.A"&MATCH(VLOOKUP(HelmEQ;ArmorStats;2;FALSE())&" "&6;ArmorRanked;0))

If you additionally want the upgrade margin, you can copy the cells in column H as well; for instance, cell H9 reads

[top]ROUND(VLOOKUP(G9;ArmorStats;5+ValueTypeInt;FALSE())-D8;2)

If you replace the G9 with whatever cell you used in part 1, you'll get the upgraded value.

Or, if you're feeling lazy: just unhide the Armor sheet, and look at Column H; it gives the rankings for each slot. For weapons this information is in column F; for Trinkets it is in column D.

Fifth, regarding that link: it appears that that page primarily exists due to a fluke of druiddom that causes maximal DPS to happen to lie along the agi

str line. I'm not aware of anything analagous for rogues, if for no other reason because there are 7 different stats that regularly appear on our gear that help DPS in a reasonable item-budget efficient way; Agi, AP, Crit, Hit, Haste, Armor Pen, and Expertise are all perfectly good mods (some are better than others, of course, but they're all reasonably effective). Hence, making a chart of the balance lines between them is, well, hard - and, moreover, staying on the X=Y lines is unlikely to maximize DPS. So I don't really see a good way of making a chart analagous to that for rogues.

First, thankyou for such a detailed reply, the interesting part of that druid page is further down where a model has been made for the standard attack rotation, and yea, its possible because feral dps is a single spec, and most variables are easy to condense to a % increase in dps or at least an easy to model value when only one rotation is considered

I must say, i am suprised agi rates higher than hit, but my gear is mostly welfare epics and i'm mace spec as alts dont get into many raids and i enjoy PvP, i had it on offensive but apparenty my agi was still too low ^^

I found the bt gem option after i went poking around for the armor sheet, thanks though. and yea, i can see the complication with including so many specs/trinkets/stats etc

P.S. one last question, why was the gladiator chest included, but not the shoulders or legs? simply number of available items for the different slots?

Likely it wasn't considered due to other easily obtainable items of equal or better stats pre-Kara. Not sure what those items might be, but that is the general theme on the spreedsheet.

If you want to add an item yourself you can. There is a detailed post somewhere in this thread explaining it, but basically you:
unhide the Armor sheet
find the section with the type of armor you wish to add
insert a new row WITHIN that section (not above/below.. in the middle so ranges expand properly and still get everything)
Copy and existing row and paste it into the newly created row. I'd suggest something that wasn't part of a set so you don't grab the flags which count the item towards a set bonus
edit the stats to match your item (mostly in the first few columns)
done.

Yeah, to be honest, I couldn't tell you what the exact reasoning was anymore. If I had to guess, I'd say it has something to do with the fact that there's a shortage of good preraid chests relative to the number of shoulders and legs, but, frankly, it's been so long that I can't say for certain that it wasn't just a simple oversight.

I found that this is most of the time due to not having Windfury selected as your MH temporary buff.
If you dont have WF the sheet (well for a large variation of gear and specs) weights Agi ~ hit with agi a very small margin over hit.

Question: is a cycle always the optimal solution?

Let's assume that I'm at a gear level where 3s/5r is the optimal cycle.

If I get a lot of CP procs back to back, it may well let me do something like 5s/5r/3e, even if that is not sustainable in the long run. Conversely, if I have a long streak of no CP procs, then if I don't have any "saved" energy, I won't able to compress my cycle down to 3s/5r, and I'll have to go for 4s/5r or even 5s/5r.

Now, what is my optimal strategy? Should I stick to a fixed cycle of 3s/5r, saving the energy from CP proc streaks to tide me over for long non-proc streaks? Or would I be better off using 5s/5r, and then tossing in an occasional Eviscerate once I've accumulated enough energy? In the latter case, what I'm essentially doing is trading in a little bit of rupture uptime for a higher percentage of Sinister Strike and the occasional Eviscerate.

So, those are for estimating the relative value of defensive stats; in particular, they're needed to know how "good" dodge and armor are relative to armor. "Fraction of incoming attacks where armor value conceivably matters" refers to what fraction of the damage done to you is mitigated by armor in a useful way. For instance, mitigation is utterly useless on Archimonde, as if he hits you at all, it'll be for 20k+ damage, and you're gonna die no matter what your mitigation is - and the rest of his damage is all elemental. On the other hand, for, say, Hyjal trash, mitigation does matter, since you're mostly taking physical hits that are small enough that mitigation reduces your incoming damage in a useful way. Similarly, the dodge/parry cell is what fraction of incoming damage can be dodged or parried; hence, situations like "pulling aggro on Archimonde" or "getting bounced into a cleave on Magtheridon" are covered. Neither of these cells are used for offense calculations at all; they're purely for estimating how good stamina is versus agi, dodge, armor, etc.

It's an interesting idea, to be sure, and, again, I haven't run the numbers to see, but my instinct is to say that the answer is no, for two reasons.

First, doing such a non-cycle in practice is actually quite hard. After you do your 5 point rupture and accumulate 3 more CPs, at that point you need to decide whether you have enough energy/time to use those 3 CPs towards an Eviscerate and still have enough time to get 5 more for the SnD. The problem is, you're making this decision 10-15 seconds before the end of the cycle, and you don't know what your combat potency luck is going to look like for that time. Hence, I suspect doing such a rotation would be very error prone in practice, and you'd end up misjudging fairly regularly and needing to improvise something to get back into your cycle.

It might be a little better to plan something like 5s5r5e3s5s5r - that is, build up to 5 CPs, see how much time you have left, and the either do the regular SnD a full Eviscerate and a small SnD after before building back up to the usual cycle... but even this seems unlikely to be a clear winner.

Second, it's not clear to me that the better use of such surges in energy regen isn't to gain higher rupture uptime; with 3s5r, no matter how lucky you get, you can always rupture pretty much as soon as you need to; your previous rupture will always have ticked of. So if I did get lucky with procs, I'd be inclined to use it to complete a cycle in 17 seconds instead of 22 to get higher Rupture uptime.

Fundamentally, though, it is something we should probably investigate at some point. It's sort of hard to model due to all the decisionmaking that needs to occur, but I'm sure we can whip something up.

While we are whimsical what ifs, I recently ran a Kara with one tank, a pally. During the run I was thinking about the proper finisher to use. Since there was no warrior in the raid I could use Expose armor, or I could evis/rupture on the bosses that let me rupture. I believe I ended up using Expose armor on the bosses that I couldn't rupture on and Rupture otherwise. Though that was mostly because I noticed that I was not as far ahead on damage while I was using Expose Armor. In that situation does that seem reasonable? I would imagine that the extra armor pen would help me, the other rogue, and the hunter more than me using evis/rupture... but I'm not sure.

I did some calculations some time ago at that gear level, and the conclusion was pretty much that in the case of no warriors in the raid, expose armor is viable if 2 additional dps'ers are in the raid, while only 1 additional is required if you have improved expose armor. It was done pretty roughly in the dps sheet by removing the finisher damage while reducing the boss armor, but I don't have any hard math at hand at the moment sorry.

I've actually had some experience with Expose Armor recently and hopefully this helps...
Basically, my guild uses a druid MT on a lot of bosses. We have a single prot warrior in the raid, and he is less geared than the druid. Obviously the prot warrior tanks stuff like RoS and Illidan, but a bulk of the other bosses are druid-tanked. Because of this, and a fairly melee-heavy raid (6-7 melee and a hunter or 2) I figured I'd try out Imp Expose armor.

First, with EA you are REQUIRED to use a 5-point finisher. Using less than 5-point makes the EA reduce less damage, it doesn't affect the duration. EA is always 30 seconds long. So you have a few options.. 3s/5e, 5s/5e, 5s/5e/Xr. Doing 3s/5e doesn't actually help, since EA and SnD are up 100% of the time with 5s/5e anyways. All it does is make your SnD cost 10 energy (Effectively, long-term). Not to mention it is more suseptable to bad CP streaks resulting in one or the other falling off. 5s/5e/3r isn't sustainable. 5s lasts ~30 seconds (round down a bit since you refresh just BEFORE it falls). In 30 seconds you gain roughly 390 energy from Combat Potency (OH at an average of 1.0 speed, 15 energy per 5 seconds). The cycle requires 13 CP, minus 3 * 0.6 which you get from finishers. The SnD and EA are free, Rupture costs 10 energy (60% chance its free, 40% chance its 25 energy). This works out to ~11 finishers * 40 energy + 10 energy for finishers. 450 energy.. you gain 390. Not sustainable. Not to mention, a 3point rupture every 30 seconds just really isn't a huge dps increase.

Therefore, 5s/5e is the preferred rotation (unless someone can find something better?). Its super easy, can be done in BAD gear (1.5 spd OH, no haste, ~200 hit). With a 1.4spd OH, static haste and 2pc T6 and 350 hit.. I would have to be unconscious to fail at keeping both up 100% of the time.

Now, for DPS estimates. The current spreadsheet puts me at 1875 DPS with the set of buffs I had last week on Teron. Thats for 3s/5r. If I drop to 2/5 (instead of 4/5) Vile poisons, I get a 5s/5r dps of 1854. Of that, 83 dps is attributed to Rupture, so take that away and I'm at 1771 dps. I added a new buff, Imp Expose Armor and set it up, turned it on and turned Sunder x5 off. I now have a 5s/5r dps of 1944. Subtract the 83 dps I from rupture to get 1861 dps.

So, 1861 dps, compared to 1875 (if I was spec'd 4/5 vile and let the warrior sunder). 14 dps loss personally, but every melee in the raid goes up by ~75-80 dps. The prot warrior will go from dps'ing and sundering to just dps'ing.. I'm sure he'll gain back at least the 14 dps I lost by not having to use sunder.

On Teron this week I ended up at 1793 dps doing that. It was a loooong kill due to 23-manning it (don't ask), short 2 dps and getting mostly dps'ers ghosted. Aside from 1 BL in 6 min instead of 1 per 10 min.. nearly every CD was at approx the average uptime rate. Not sure what I did wrong, but 96% of my theoretical isn't *too* bad I guess.

So, this isn't conclusive, to be sure, but: I just whipped up some approximations for a nonsundered opponent. For the Rupture cycle, I'm using my regular optimal cycle, Xs5r. For the Expose cycle (which I will denote as 5s5a, as "e" is taken for Eviscerate/Envenom), I'm using the numbers from the 5s cycle, with the armor of the boss manually lowered by 2050. Since neither a 5 point SnD nor a 5 point Expose uses any energy, and 5s5a gives both 100% SnD uptime and 100% Expose uptime, so this should be a pretty valid approximation.

I also cut down the buff level to be more consistent with a 10 man raid with no warrior present (in particular, only one pally buff and no battle shout).

So, the numbers:

With 7700 base armor:
Xs5r: 1284 DPS
5s5a: 1329 DPS

With 6200 base armor:
Xs5r: 1391 DPS
5s5a: 1468 DPS

Now, admittedly, this is for only one set of gear, and it's not going to be 100% accurate, but: off the top of my head, Expose does seem to be generally better even for personal DPS and thus certainly better for raid DPS in unsundered situations.