I am trying to get an idea where the pvp/arena gear (specifically the swords) fit in. In every gear combination I try at around the t4/badge level gladiators slicer comes out on top, yet so many rogues stick to spiteblade, why? Using the default gear set which comes with the sheet (presumably Aldriana's gear?) if I switch out BoI for the Arena 3 sword I see an increase in DPS (of about 6) yet often people will stick to BoI. Am I missing something? Is BoI worn as a trophy?

S3 main hand is best ingame atm (non legendary) but pretyt hard to get.. weapons need 1850 rating now remember.

I think it's safe to assume that there won't be another dps neck so... the question is "Is there a better melee dps ring that the JC boe one!?"

Still even with 10 points behind HKC on offense, if you consider that JC also gives 12hit gem,
12hit is ~~5ap better than 10hit, so a total 15 offensive ap upgrade.
They should really add 12agi and 6agi/6hit gems though, would tip the balance well to JC's favor.

Personally I'm thinking of getting the boe JC ring, enchanting it with 4all stats and then rerolling for JC, gold is hardly a issue and it's a save dkp wise as well.
Afterall as JC/LW You get to skip 2 pieces of lewt and get your t6 boots first!

Off to farming/buying mats for JC 1-375!

Hey guys, I think I figured out a bug in the spreadsheet, otherwise I am just doing something very wrong.

I filled in all my gear, enchants, and gems correctly and the sheet says my current hit is 338....however wow says my current hit is 308 (and so does my calculator when I do it manually).

So...wheres this 30 coming from?

Thanks guys!

1) The JC ring is BoE. You don't need JC to wear it.

2) There is no 12 hit gem.

I am going to assume that 20 is from the sheet using Spicy Hot Talbuk food, and that the other 10 is perhaps user error. Double check what you put in.

Kinda like Ozz noted, DPS-wise, Blizz had made the PvP swords king across the board really for each step of progression until you have Warglaives, yet there is a very strong sentiment of "OMG I can't wait to throw these damn things away" almost direct BECAUSE everyone knows they are better and relatively easy to acquire, so you see them everywhere.

There are no clearer examples of this than the Spiteblade from Kara being chosen over S1, and the twin blades from ZA being chosen over S2. In both cases, DPS is better w/ the Slicers, but you'd be hard pressed to find a rogue who got both ZA swords and VT'd them and kept his S2 cause his spreadsheet told him to. There's just something about having actual PVE weapons (hard to get, rare, 'trophy') for those who like to raid that's hard to put down. That is, as long as the DPS gap isn't too glaring. Some people (stubbornly) try to gear out totally avoiding Blizz's attempt to force PvP itemization into raiding progression. I find that amazingly painful, but I understand the sentiment.

3) Just Get rid of it Ald. It causes more confusion than help TBH.

All of your other suggestions make perfect sense. At some point the spreadsheet just needs to move on, and can't hold everyones hand forever.

Oh i was reading over the thread in the last few days and Ald you were talking about getting to close to the hit cap in SW loot. You basically came to the conclusion that you would have so much hit that hit food would be pointless. But at that point, wouldn't it better to just move to AGI food? Because if you drop, hit for AGI aren't you pretty much doing the same thing? Thus leaving Red gems for casters.

Edit: Yes, Maurice2u is correct in assuming some people refuse to pvp for pve gear. I am one of them and kept a really hard stance against pvping since TBC came out on this character.

Read what I wrote. If it's still unclear then let me reiterate.
Step 1: Get BoE JC ring.
Step 2: Enchant it with +4 all stats.
Step 3: Drop Enchanting.
Step 4: Take Up Jewelcrafting.
Step 5: Get to 375.
Step 6: Craft the mad Neck.
Step 7: ???
Step 8: Profit from mad 0.x% dps upgrade!

Simple 8 step guide on how to blow 1.5k+ gold.

Ah, my bad, I assumed that it would be ingame since it showed up on wowhead.
Hopefully they might add it in 2.4 since it's in the database. Oh well.

A couple of reasons, I think:

1) Arena 3 MH isn't really that much better than Blade of Infamy. I mean, I'm not disparaging 6 DPS nor advocating that you shouldn't worry about it, but the point is it's not a lot of DPS, so people don't worry about it as much as they otherwise might.

2) Arena 3 MHs are sort of a pain to get. Not everyone likes to PvP, and thus, particularly for sort of a small upgrade, not everyone is willing to go to the time to get this. And amongst the people that *do* PvP, I suspect a lot of them get the Arena 3 Maces before the swords, as my understanding is that maces are better for PvP.

3) Most rogues with Blade of Infamy fall in one of two catagories: people that already have a MH Warglaive as well, and people who hope to get one soonish. Which further decreases the impetus to worry about intermediate upgrades.

So, fundamentally: it's quite a bit of work for not a whole lot of benefit, and most rogues are hoping that the little benefit that it gives will be reasonable shortlived. The fact that BoI also comes with some bragging rights, and Arena 3 is ugly as heck, probably also contributes.

That is, of course, what you end up doing. My point was that from a purely abstract optimization perspective, you'd rather have 20 more agi and 20 less hit on gear, and make up the difference on food. Why? Because on sustained fights where hit is better your stats are the same either way; but on interrupted fights where agi conceivably takes the lead, the ability to use agi food *and* have 20 more agi on gear is better. Is this a big deal? No. But, as long as we're optimizing to a ridiculous extent anyway, one might as well go all the way. Of course, in practice, the availability of gems will govern what you can get away with, but knowing in the abstract what the best option is is still worthwhile.

I agree with this but for a completely different reason. Im a big advocate of using hit food and gemming the new gear with agil instead of gemming hit and buffing agil for a couple reasons. First off I tend to grind/pvp (bg) in my raiding gear, so for the random time that im either doing trash or the surreal occaision that im not attacking a raid boss im wasting all that extra hit rating.

Lets also not forget the passive herds of talbuk are just begging to be slaughtered, while the other choice is flying around looking for dissappearing mobs that hunters have a tendancy to ninja tag or the appropriate fishing puddle.

Man, I fit that characterization perfectly. I have the exact 2 weaps you mention, Spiteblade MH and Talonblade OH. I love the unique-ness of the swords crossing on the back versus the blandness of the Glad weaps 90% of the rogues on my server sport.

Anyway, I put S1 Slicer and S2 Quickblade into my spreadsheet in place of my Spiteblade and Talonblade. The "upgrade" to boring conformity would net me a whole .3% increase in damage: +4.39 dps raid-buffed, 1,279 to 1,284 dps. S1 + S1 is actually 4.51 LESS dps. In the end, with the 1,000 other factors in any given fight, a negligible difference.

.3% more damage isn't enough to make me spend precious paid playing time doing something I hate, PvP, to get the exact same welfare swords as every other mid-level rogue on the server. I'd rather have fun raiding towards a Talon and finish levelling enchanting for ring enchants to get my min/max mojo.

(For those who think S3 is better than anything but the Glaives, S3/S3 to Blade of Infamy/Blade of Savagery is +12.45dps with my T4.5 build.)

The MH S3 is better, the offhand is actualy worse. Try S3MH/Blade of Savagery and you'll notice

I got into the habit of using the DPS spreadsheet to find the optimal gear/enchant/gem mix, just by swapping in things until i got the highest resultant buffed dps.

Is this going to be more accurate than using the recommendations from the gear spreadsheet?

Would one of you fine people like to do me a favor? I'm in the process of updating the sheet for the next release, and it occurred to me that while I do have all the new epic gear that's known in, I don't have any new blues. Would someone mind taking a pass through the new Sunwell blue items and making a list of the ones that are potentially interesting to rogues, and then sending it to me and/or posting it in this forum? Thanks.

So, there might be a bit of personal bias in this next statement, given that I'm the other of this sheet and not the other one, but, this is the way I see it:

This sheet is, on the whole, somewhat more accurate; however, for many if not most purposes, the other is accurate enough to give the right answer.

To expand on that in a little more detail: this sheet takes a somewhat different approach to doing the relevant calculations which I believe to be more accurate. However, there is some reasonable room to debate whether it's better or not. However, what is not debatable is that this sheet has a much more robust and accurate model of certain effects, and, in particular, procs. For instance, if one is seeking to compare high-end trinkets, I don't think there's a lot of room to argue that this sheet isn't better. It is, however, also true that the DPS sheet has been steadily improving in this respect.

However, for the vast majority of questions - with the possible exception of very precise trinket-related questions like "which is better, Ashtongue Talisman or Madness of the Betrayer" - the level of accuracy in the DPS sheet is sufficient to correctly decide which item is better.

As a final point of clarification: the above comments refer most specifically to the damage estimate from this sheet; the recommendations, by their fundamental nature, can't be quite as accurate as swapping out gear and checking DPS. So for purposes of finding the best gear, I would recommend using the gear recommendations to resolve most things, but after you have everything in place there may be some slots (particularly trinkets) where you need to swap them in and out to check DPS to be absolutely sure of your answer.

And of course, as a final clarification: no spreadsheet can tell you the right answer with accuracy of more than a couple DPS. While this sheet gives you two decimal places on your DPS, I don't pretend that it's accurate on that granularity. So keep in mind that regardless of which you prefer, the DPS estimates are probably only good to +/- .1% or so.

A couple of things are going on here.

1. s3 sword is a minimal upgrade to Infamy. If you have s2 swords for PvP and Infamy/s2 sword for PvE, you are probably better off spending arena points elsewhere.

2. Infamy/Savagery > s3/s3 for PvE DPS. Ideally s3/Savagery is the best combo if you can't get Warglavies, but is 6 DPS worth all that time and effort?

I decided it wasn't worth the effort for me and if I was still doing arena I'd probably spend my points on the s3 armor instead of weapons, especially since I have s2 swords already and just about every single BT/Hyjal upgrade is a larger PvE upgrade for me than the s3 swords are combined. When it boils down to time spent vs. reward gained, the s3 swords just don't appeal to me.

My apologies if a recent answer to this question is buried somewhere in this 84 page thread, but is modeling Mutilate anywhere on the radar at this point? I know it doesn't quite keep up with the combat builds, but it seems like there are quite a few people that are interested in it. I'm sure you've got plenty to work on, but it would be much appreciated if you found time to work on it

So with the current version of the sheet, Executioner is modeled with a proc of "840 armor pen and 2% haste"? Or rather, everyone had 2% static haste and Mongoose was just a 120-agi proc? I can't quite figure out what you mean by "counting the haste benefit on Mongoose towards your DPS whether you have Mongoose or not" and "Mongoose was being undervalued".. was Executioner overvalued or Mongoose undervalued? Doesn't make a difference in terms of what is better, just something to note.

Either way, at least this fixes my current itemization / debuff problems on Teron. 6200 armor - 3075 (imp EA) - 800 (CoR) - 610 (FF) - 777 (2x T6, Rings, S3 MH, ZA bow) = 938 armor. This makes Executioner extremely powerful as it is taking off nearly the very last 840 armor, however it made WSC pretty useless, resulting in using AToL. Now I'll be able to switch over to Mongoose and WSC. Wooo! 400g later..

Anyways, good pickup, thanks for alerting people, Ald. Too bad asking "Are they any other [similar] bugs?" really isn't a fair question :P

While this might indeed be a bad news to some people (well cash isn't that much a problem nowadays), I think it's also a relieving fact. No more painfull thinking which one to use because mongoose is better on arena and executioner slightly better in pve...Now the answer is clear :P

The problem with Mutilate is that there is no known accurate modeling for it. There are some which are decent estimates, but nothing anywhere near the accuracy of the Combat modeling. Combine this with the known fact that Mutilate is generally accepted as ~10% less dps than Combat Swords, and as such isn't a "competitive" build, there hasn't been much effort put into modeling it. Also, for the die-hard Dagger fans.. Combat Daggers is generally accepted as higher dps than Mutilate. Thus, from a PvE standpoint, Mutilates only purpose is "because its more fun".

So in short: Mutilate doesn't have a good dps model from which to base gear/spec choices on. As it is not in close contention with other builds for top-dps, those who are capable of modeling it just haven't bothered putting in the time.

That said, someone had written a fairly rigid Mutilate-only DPS Simulator (forget his name.. I tested it though) but that was never publicly released. Aldrianna is, I think, working on something. I had written a base / core to a Rogue DPS Simulator that would handle all talent specs, but haven't put any effort into it in the past month or so. I may choose to return to that at some point.

Short answer: No.
Long answer: While I fully admit that modeling Mutilate would be nice, the format of this sheet makes it difficult to do so, and spending that amount of time and effort for something that is clearly inferior anyways just doesn't strike me as a productive use of time. So it's pretty darn far down my list at this point, though if someone else wants to take a crack at adding it I'd be happy to talk them through what's going to be necessary.

Personally, though, I'm of the opinion that the right way to model Mutilate is to write the entire DPS calculator in a real programming language, as such a thing would be better able to handle all these wierd subtleties. This is something I've been working on, and it's actually starting to approach the point where you can get some useful information out of it (although there's absolutely no UI attached, at least it calculates damage). However, even that I have for the moment ignored SF and Mutilate; I do plan to add it eventually, so it will probably show up there before it shows up here; but as that particular project is a few months out in it's own right, I wouldn't hold my breath about that, either.

So, what was happening is that everyone using those cycles was given the benefit of a 1 PPM proc that increases haste by 2% on both hands; thus, the DPS estimate for everyone *not* using Mongoose was too high, and thus the marginal value of Mongoose was lower than it should have been.

It might also be noted that, with the recent information on Mongoose proc rate, both Mongoose and Executioner had been underestimated in all sheets (though by the same amount so their relative value was not effected by that). I have since fixed this as well. So what you'll find with the actual sheet is:

If you were using neither Mongoose nor Executioner, your damage will go down.
If you were using Executioner, your damage will stay about the same.
If you were using Mongoose, your damage will go up.

If you're curious about whether there are other bugs, I would recommend picking through the sheet and checking. I mean, I realize it's a lot of work to do so, and I totally understand why people haven't, but... fundamentally, I don't believe for an instant that I've found all the bugs in this sheet, and I do think the best way to find them would be to get another set of eyes (or 5 more sets of eyes) looking for problems. So if anyone has a couple (dozen) hours to spare and feels like doing a service to the community, I think we'd all appreciate some proofreading/bugfinding on the sheet.

Ald for the items that might be worth adding

Nightstrike - Items - World of Warcraft