Hey,

Does anyone have any theorycrafting/math for these items. I'm wondering if since 2.1 Romulo's is worth using over Hourglass. I've heard it's better but I'm not totally sold.

Currently I'm using hourglass and dragonspine which I find to be a great combo but naturally I'd like to do as much dps as possible... ;o

If my math is right the Hourglass proc gives about 38 damage with a 1.8 speed dagger, so a bit less on instants like backstab. Now if Romulo's has a decent proc rate now the extra damage from that could be higher then the damage you receive from the AP proc. Also the passive 31 hit is quite nice; not that the 32 crit on hourglass is bad.

My unbuffed stats are currently roughly: 1600ap, 30crit, 20hit.

Does anyone have any math on this? Or any general thoughts/opinions?

Im not sure about the hourglass, but Romulus poison vial add 8.31 damage for each hit you make.

I'm assuming that's averaging out the damage from the proc over all hits?

You shouldnt wear the vial for the proc, more for the +hit you gain.

I picked up the poison vial the other day when it dropped for us, and I have to say that it very very very rarely procs. Probably less than 1 proc per minute. I wouldn't trade it out for the hourglass.

My biggest issue I'm trying to work through is that with all the changes in gear I can use a few radically different gear setups to get near the +hit cap, between having the +35hit 2pc Wastewalker set bonus from shoulders and gloves, to the 35 hit on the trinket to the 33 hit on my fel leather boots, etc etc. I have multiple good pieces of gear for all these slots, (save maybe boots where all I have are Rapscallion... which are not so hot) and I can shuffle my gear around to achieve 2 ways to get 302 hit and 1 for 307 hit. Most of this hinges on whether I want to use Romulo's Vial or Hourglass, but there is the fact that I can use my Bladed Shoulderpads of the Merciless and Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation instead of Wastewalker in those slots if I have the 35 hit from the Vial.

If you get hit capped regardless, it seems to me that Hourglass would be the better trinket. How much in stats would I have to gain to overcome the crit + the proc from Hourglass if I wanted to use the Vial and replace my Wastewalker?

In the other thread, someone parsed the vial as a base % proc, not a ppm. ~3% if I remember correctly.

edit:
Someone also said it was doing ~2% of their overall dmg in sustained scenarios. I'm not quite sure about that, but I see it go off every so often in raids.

As stated in the rogue spreadsheet thread it is not PPM based, it is a flat percent in the 2-3% chance of proc per hit range. This makes it a pretty good trinket when you figure in haste effects including SND, dragonspine, thundering skyfire, blade flurry etc.

Better than hourglass for sure, and probably right up there in the top 3 or 4 trinkets so far in the game.

This would be my thoughts on it as well. Especially with more offhand hits landing and potentially proccing Combat Potency the benefits become much more than just the proc.

Here's some math on the analysis. This is based on a formula posted by Aldriana (my statistics skills are extremely rusty, so I'm going to have to trust the formula atm).

Formula: Standard Deviation of an Event = sqrt(event * (samples - event) / samples) / samples

So for the 2.6 speed weapons case:
sqrt(28 * (946 - 28)/946) / 946

[top] 0.00551

0.551% Std Dev

Average is (28 / 946) = 2.960% proc rate

Since during independent event testing, we can be 95% confident that the sampled results will fall within 2 standard deviations of the mean, we can be 95% certain that the proc rate for 2.6 speed weapons is 2.960% +/- (2*0.551%) = 1.854% to 4.062%
(We can also be 68% certain that it falls within 1 Standard Deviation, namely 2.409% to 3.511%)

For the 1.5 speed weapons case:
sqrt(42 * (1375 - 42)/1375) / 1375

[top] 0.00464

0.464% Std Dev

Average is (42 / 1375) = 3.054% proc rate

95% certain that proc rate for 1.5 speed weapons is 3.054% +/- (2*0.464%) = 2.126% to
3.952%
68% certain the proc rate is 2.590% to 3.518%

If Romulo's was a PPM trinket, then we would expect the 2.6 speed weapon to proc more than the 1.5 speed weapon. Namely, we'd expect (2.6/1.5) = 1.73, or 73% more procs per swing.

Using the highest numbers from the 2.6 speed test and the lowest numbers from the 1.5 speed test we get...
95% confidence: 4.062% / 2.126% = 1.911 = 91.1% more procs
68% confidence: 3.511% / 2.590% = 1.356 = 35.5% more procs

So we can NOT be 95% sure that it's not a PPM, but we can be at least 68% sure. I don't have the time at the moment, but we can actually figure out exactly how sure we are (somewhere in the 80-90% range likely).

1 final calculation before I go, assuming that is NOT a PPM, then we can use all the data together to calc proc rate.

sqrt(70 * (2321 - 70)/2321) / 2321

[top] 0.00355

0.355% Std Dev

Average is (70 / 2321) = 3.016%

95% Likely proc rate for vial is between 3.016% +/- (2 * 0.355%) = 2.306% to 3.726%

There are actually statistics for figuring out the standard deviation of the ratio of two distributions, so you can come up with a more precise answer on whether this is plausibly a PPM enchant. Alas, I don't remember how to do so off the top of my head, so will need to wait until I get home and can look in a statistics book. Personally I'd be willing to wager that the answer comes out that it's not PPM, based on this data set - which is interesting, since when I tested on the Test Realm it looked very much like a PPM to me. Maybe they changed it when they took it live, or something.