I was considering the flexibility, but really there is no need. I have boots socketed with blue and could switch my second blue to head or shoulders without much change. Case closed.

I'm a bit confused why the spreadsheet values [Rod of the Sun King] relatively high with a hemo/deadliness (or any other hemo and no weapon specialization) spec, right after MH warglaive to be exact. Would the proc really be that powerful, given that it only changes my approximate cycle from 5s5r to 4.8s5r?

On my sheet I have it fourth, behind Warglaive and Muramasa and just a hair behind Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality, but I suppose that doesn't change the underlying question of "is it really that good" to which my answer would be, in a word, yes.

First, from a pure dps perspective, the only weapons with higher DPS (other than those already listed) are the Arena 3 weapons. Additionally, Blade of Infamy and Syphon of the Nathrezim are roughly equal. So there's only about 5 other weapons that you could reasonably have any expectation of being in the same ballpark.

Second, Rod of the Sun King is slower than all of those weapons except Syphon. The Arena 3 weapons and Blade of Infamy are 2.6 speed; Sun King is 2.7. Thus, based on weapon speed and raw damage, you'd expect the Arena 3 weapons to be slightly ahead, then Syphon, then Rod, then Infamy. Also note that the spacing between these isn't particularly large (from a damage and speed perspective) - first to last is maybe 30 AP. So it doesn't require the stat bonuses being particularly abnormal in order to change the order.

Looking at the stat bonuses of each in a bit more detail: Blade of Infamy only has two stats, which tends to give less bang for your buck; thus, there's no real expectation of it being high in quality relative to the damage of the weapon. Syphon is just terrible; the proc is mostly useless, and the other stats of the weapon are uninspiring. The Arena 3 weapons have some good stats on them, but with dropping a lot of the itemization budget in Sta and Resilience, and a lot of the damage stat allocation in crit with relatively less in AP and only a bit in ArPen and Hit - which is basically the reverse order of the quality of the mods - means that the stat allocation on them isn't particularly exceptional either.

Thus, looking things over: the proc on Rod of the Sun King doesn't even need to be that impressive for it's ilvl in order for it to pass these; and, as it turns out, the proc is pretty decent. With my gear I make it to be around 85 AP in damage contribution, which proves to be enough to nudge it into the lead. But the proc isn't really that extraordinarily powerful for it's ilvl; consider the comparison with Vanir's. Vanir's is 3 DPS higher but .2 faster; this more or less averages out in terms of real damage. Thus, it really comes down to stats, and we find that Vanir's - which is itemized fairly well (if not as well as, like, Warglaive) is comparable if not slightly superior to Rod of the Sun King - the takeaway from which is that the power of the Rod of the Sun King proc is basically exactly where it's supposed to be given the item budget - hence, it scores exactly where any other 100 DPS 2.7 speed reasonably-well-allocated weapon would - ahead of the poorly-allocated 100-103 dps weapons.

Is this true? I was always under the impression that anything % wise (blade flurry, heroism) did stack with eachother? Or do you only mean haste from PROCS like DST or warglaive (which you can't reliably time to coincide anyway)?

He's saying that when you're hasted you'll be getting a bunch of extra attacks due to the swing timer reduction. It is more beneficial to use a burst AP item such as Berserker's Call at this time because it will benefit a larger number of attacks while you are hasted.

They stack, yes.

What he means is that there isn't any inherent benefit to stacking them all at once. The benefit comes from stacking them all at once AND adding an additional buff (or boss debuff). Then, all the haste stacking allows you to get maximum use out of the increased damage capability of the other buff/debuff.

Intelligent itemization of Blade of Infamy in the first place is what we should have gotten, but they decided to buff Talon of Azshara, and ignore the now underwhelming Blade of Infamy. As for wanting another MH option it is not going to happen until 2.4 and Sunwell. Until then I suggest you start saving points for a Vengeful Gladiator's Slicer.

The problem with Syphon is basically that it dumps a lot of itemization points into the proc... which is amazingly bad. So while it does gain some benefit from being slower, that's compensated by the fact that Infamy has 28 agility and Syphon has the world's worst proc.

Also, while mace/sword is better than previously modeled, it's still inferior to sword/sword, which further works against it.

Really, the alternative MH is either the Arena 3 weapons (for those with the time, ability, and inclination to get them) or [Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality] which is badge loot available in 2.4. I do agree, though, that the lack of nonlengendary MH weapons for rogues has been a bit disappointing; in 2.3, the gap in quality between Warglaive and the 2nd best MH is a bit ridiculous (and has been for quite a while). Muramasa will fix this to some extent, though I really think Infamy should have already been that good, and Muramasa about halfway between there and Warglaive.

Also note that Dragonscale-Encrusted Longblade is very underwhelming as well.

I think has been said before but Fist/Sword is almost = to Sword/Sword right? So get [Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality] and go to a Fist/Sword spec? Just wanted to be clear... Also, is there any sort of rep requirement to the Sunwell badge vendor, or can you walk up with your 105 badges on the day of the patch and walk out with a new MH?

I don't think the badge vendor shows up until the first gate is down for SP. Depending on your server this could take several weeks.

Very accurate expectation. As a rogue who has been killing Illidan since September I have seen 1 BoSavagery which I had already told another rogue he could have, and zero Warglaives, so I will very likely be in the boat of rogues that DEL is an upgrade for. I'll likely enter 2.4 using Veng MH/OH which is probably why I wish the stamina on this sword was agility more than the next guy does. Same thing goes for the stamina on the Muramasa. I can understand tanks desiring the off-hand sword, and why stamina could be argued as a valid stat, but Muramasa has the same boat load of stamina when all of the daggers in Sunwell seem to have their stats almost all allocated to DPS. I wonder why they thought these swords should have so much stamina on them?

Yes, just to clarify a bit here..

Using multiple effects which decrease your attack speed (increase number of attacks per time) at the same time does not negate any of the benefit of either cooldown. In fact, those effects do scale with each other, *sometimes*. Since all non-rating attack-speed modifying effects are stacked multiplicatively, they will benefit from each other. Haste ratings however do not benefit from each other, but only from %-based effects.

Below is a table which I just made in a spreadsheet quickly. It models a rogue using some CDs over a 30 second period. This rogue has 2 Haste Rating buffs which are both 473.1 HR (enough for 30% haste, given the level of accuracy I was using) for 15 seconds. He also has 2 % buffs of 30% for 15 seconds each. The first column is the row-label, the 2nd column represents the attack speed for the first 15 seconds (ie the first CD, or both CDs if he chooses to stack them). 3rd column is the attack speed for the 2nd 15 seconds (2nd CD or base speed). The next bit is just calculating total number of attacks in those time periods. As you can see, stacking Haste Rating only buffs provides no benefit. However, stacking %-based buffs at the same time does provide a benefit (eg. Blade Flurry + Bloodlust). Also notice, that stacking Haste Rating with %-based buffs still nets you an increase equal to stacking multiple %-based CDs, since the sum of all your haste rating (just 1 rating in this case) is converted to its own %-base multiplier.



Granted, all of this is essentially useless given that you'll want to stack your haste cooldowns regardless so that you can then apply an AP/Crit/ArmPen type buff at the same time and have that buff benefit a greater number of attacks. Poping a Beserkers Call while under no haste effects is certainly losing dps potential, given that you are applying the 360 extra attack power to a fewer-than-average number of attacks.

To extract this to another level, I'm sure some people will wonder "Should I wait for a proc to occur before poping CD xyz?". Well, the answer is maybe. It generally depends on the fight and the time in which your guild takes to kill that boss. For instance, if you have a fight which is exactly 2 minutes long.. there is no reason to pop a CD at the start or end or any point really. All that matters is poping those CD's when the most other buffs are up at the same time. This means waiting for Sunder (or imp EA) to be up, waiting for the Shaman to Bloodlust and then hoping for a Mongoose / Exec / AToL / WSC proc.

Now say that was a 3-minute fight. You'll need to use all of your 2-minute CD's within the first 45 seconds, but after Sunder/EA is up. If you wait any longer, you'll lose the benefit of a 2nd usage of the CD.. which is generally much more important. However, you still only get 1 AR.. so use that whenever you have the most ArmPen/AP/Crit (which will hopefully be at one of the same times you have a lot of haste CDs going too..).

If the fight has phases, use your CDs to best match those phases. For instance, if you find yourself threat-capped on Bloodboil, use CDs strictly during Fel Rage. You can use each 2-minute CD once per "Human" phase on Illidan after P3, but be careful not to pop CDs close to 30%. Even fights like Morogrim.. you can time Blade Flurry to hit the adds (if your guild tanks the Murlocs near the melee), or even wait until right *after* a Watery Grave goes out to pop CDs, lowering the chance of spending your entire AR / Haste Pot / Blade Flurry / Beserker's Call in a watery grave.

If you have no idea how long the fight will be.. generally just pop stuff as soon as its up so you can use them as many times as possible.

After i hit exalted with SSO on the PTR (spare me the nerd comments please...) i went to Dire Maul and hit on the Spirits for some time. Ended up with 3 logs of each one hour.
2.6 dual wield, 2.79 passive haste (my mainhand broke somewhen in the last 10 minutes i think)
2.1 dual wield, 2.79 passive haste
Warglaives (Exe, Mongoose), MotB, DST, 2.79 passive haste

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I took the time to take a sample from your Glaive parse. Here's the sample I looked at.
Now I have concluded a few things from this sample.

1) There is an internal cooldown on the proc.
2) The internal cooldown is approximately 45 seconds.
3) The proc rate when the cooldown is up is significantly high.

Here is the time it took in between procs:
As you can see it was taking anywhere from just over 45 seconds to a minute for the next proc to happen with the average being 49.344 seconds for this sample. I hope the information I have presented is helpful.

Well, lets see. If it has a 45 second cool and procs fairly quickly, that would make in an average of, say, 50 seconds between attacks; thus, as a 10 second buff, it has ~20% uptime; thus the benefit is about 40 AP for Aldur and about 20 crit for Scryer's.

So, plugging this information in, we find it comes in in 4th place; Hard Khorium Choker, Clutch of Demise, and Choker of Endless Nightmares are clearly better, and everything else is clearly worse... which seems like a pretty reasonable balance point to me.

I'll work on a more detailed estimate at some point, but with the new combat log changes I'm going to need to rewrite my parsing program so it may be a few days.

If you'd like to write such a thing, by all means do so; but I still want to understand how to do it myself. As what you're looking for is a bit different every time I like having the flexibility of being able to bang out some code and learn exactly what I want to know. So what would be more interesting to me at least is an overview of what all the fields in the new format mean - a specification of the syntax, if you will. If you know where such a thing is located - or could write such a thing - I would find that to be rather valuable.

The combat log follows a strict formula now, so all you basically need to do is tokenize by commas, and substr the timestamp off of the first token. Then you'd have all of the information in tokens and you could just look for the SPELL_AURA_REMOVED or SPELL_AURA_APPLIED in the first token, then check the 3rd to last for "Light's Strength". Other than that just write a helper function to calculate the difference in seconds between 2 timestamps and you'd be good to go.

Guess you are looking for this:
WoW Forums -> Upcoming 2.4 Changes - Concise List

http://www.wowwiki.com/COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_Details
This is what I use for parsing combat log events.

Hey Aldriana, I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the glancing blow calculations are done for the spread sheet, and was wondering if you could point me toward them.

I've been working on an atrociously coded C++ simulator for the past couple weeks, and it's finally to the point where I'd like to compare some values to your sheet. However, I couldn't see your glancing calcs in my overview of the 5/5 cycle sheet. Any help would be appreciated.

It's kind of hidden away; in Xs5r, it's tucked into rows 316 and 317 - the -0.0625 term represents damage lost to glancing blows. In 5sXr the analogous rows are 323 and 324.