How good would Darkmoon Card: crusade be when compared to other trinkets say the ones suggested in the first post?

Heya,

I was just curious into what meta gem would be the best choice for us atm.
the old +24 ap/crit rating one or one of the new haste increasing / agil+crit dmg increasing gems.

No, any genuine instant on a paladin or shaman won't reset the timer. However 'fake' instants, meaning spells which normally have a cast bar but are instant due to some other effect generally will reset it. All spells reset it for other classes as far as I know.

I have the same weapons, when I went out and beat on those same mobs, I found that Netherbane (in offhand) was taking like 75% of my windfury procs, you didn't find this the case? I assumed that over time this would be lower dmg/dps overall.

That really shouldn't be happening.

How long were you testing for, and what method did you use to distinguish between MH and OH procs?

Is there a mod available to distinguish between MH and OH hits?

I was testing for about 300k worth of damage, I ran a /combatlog and went over it once I was done and counted the procs and found the trend. It was pretty easy to distinguish the off hand procs and main hand procs simply by the damage.

When I do testing, I use the above method. It works pretty well, especially since my tests usually involve a high dps weapon in MH, and a super-low one in the OH. I then put everything into excel and let it populate the "WhichHand" column.

Also, to Morelis's point - what's the concern/purpose of waiting for WF CD to be up before storm striking? I know I've heard the explanation before and though "heh, that's neat", but I don't remember it at the moment.

Could you explane this a bit more perhaps? The way i read it you predict a strong decline in dps when attacks are hasted between 1.5 and 1.4. But what if the weapon is hasted below that level, do you see a further dps-increase then or is it worse then a speed over 1.5?
Becouse with my current itemization I can get my attacks hasted even below 1.0 attackspeed, question is if thats a good thing. The drops below 1.51 hasted AS occur when flurry is combined with 2 times a Mongoose proc and a proc of one of my various haste accelerating items (dragonspine trophy, dragonstrike), coupled with the inevitable Bloodlust used in an encounter.

Right, the 1.5 and 1.4 decrease is (according to theory, we haven't seen a test of it yet) an abnormality. Once below 1.4 hasted speed the DPS increases with more haste, The only area we think you need to worry about is between 1.5 and 1.4.

Hmm, I don't really get where this "abnormality" comes from, or even who and why it was suggested given that you say there is no testing on it.

The only problem I could see or I could think of was that dropping below 1.5 speed means that WF has to swing 3 times for your main hand to have a chance of it proccing again.

This to me is not a concern, as I've stated before my white damage is way way above all of my other damage combined, hitting at 1.4 or 1.3 (which occurs alot of the time) will always have a net increase, your WF damage goes down slightly, but would your white damage would go up by the same amount or more than the loss of WF? I think so.

From what I understand, its to try to force your MH to proc WF more often than your OH. Whether or not its better to just SS every CD I don't know =/

Waiting on WF cooldown to use SS is much more important when using a two hander then with DW I imagine. I would carefully count the seconds when using my two hander and it made a noticeable difference. I haven't bothered so much with DW, as I figured I'd shave a second off my WF cooldowns at most. I didn't take into account that a stormstrike WF forces a MH proc though.

It's worth modelling to see exactly what the differential is in the long term I'd imagine.

Disquette did some math on it and so did some EU guys on their official board, the discussion is back around page 4 or so of this thread. It has been modeled but not tested, because in practice you need a LOT of passive haste rating in order to keep the weapon permanently between 1.5 and 1.4 speed in order to actually observe the DPS decrease. So in theory its bad, in practice... probably will never be seen except in a few rare cases where you have bloodlust + drums + double mongoose + flurry + other crap going off all in the same instant.

I can reach 1.47 speed when flurry is up along with DST and double mongoose procs, but that occurs so rarely that it doesn't really matter.

One thing I'm wondering though is if the 4 piece T5 will hurt my dps or not with my current gear setup, I'd be at 1.48 speed then with flurry and trinket proc up. Time will tell I suppose, since we're not close to beating Vashj or Kael yet.

Your example is, despite your attempt to avoid it, based on rounding errors and bad math.
Firstly 3.7 -> 3.44 is 1.07559% more attacks (the relevant number here, your '% speed increase' is meaningless) and 2.85 -> 2.65 is 1.07547%, the two numbers are only different due to character sheet rounding, as shown below.

1 haste rating = ~0.0951% haste. So drums = 7.608% haste.

3.70/1.07608 = 3.4384 converting to swings per minute we get -> 16.2162 -> 17.44997 = 7.608% more swings per minute (hey, that ones a shocker, right?)

3.7/1.3 = 2.84615/1.07608 = 2.64493, once again the % swings per minute change here is 7.608%.

As you can hopefully see here the drums have the same increase in number of attacks as they would at any other time.

However, while Bloodlust/Heroism gives 30% more attacks by itself, and the drums give 7.608% more attacks, the combination of the two gives 16.21621 -> 22.6849 which is 39.89% more attacks. This is why I said heroism/flurry/haste rating stack better than 1+1=2 with each other, while as haste ratings are all added together before being applied they stack exactly as 1+1=2.

I'm keeping my 9% hit from talents and then dumping hit rating to between 100-120. I'd say go get the Cat Swiftness.

Most people aren't too happy with the haste gem from what I understand. I use the crt dmg one myself.

Also, admitting that you haven't read over half the thread isn't a good way to start your post.

The purpose is to maximize the time spent under the wf cooldown. If you have 2 otherwise identical players and the first spends 75% of their time on cooldown and the second spends 85% of their time on cooldown, then I'm assuming the second would have done more damage due to the larger number of wf procs. On the other hand the second player also does fewer stormstrikes since they're waiting for the cooldown to come up. My gut says the gain in wf procs would out weigh stormstrike being delayed a second or two but it's really only speculation on my part.

I'm not aware of stormstrike giving any bias to MH procs but I guess if it's always checked the MH first it would. Might be something I could test if I get the time today.

I do believe it's the MH hits first when SS-ing that matters. You can verify this by seeing that a dodge/parry on the Stormstrike mainhand always results in the OH Stormstrike attack not landing.

I just didn't wanna look like a moron if someone else already asked the question a couple pages in, but I guess I failed lol.

First off I wanted to say thanks for all of the hard work you guys have done. You've corrected a lot of my personal misconceptions and I appreciate it.

I've read through the itemization thread and this one and restructured my gear appropriately with what I had. I'm DW'ing The Decapitator and Netherbane, both 2.6 speed weapons. I'm also at unbuffed: 1208 AP, 16.8% hit (7.8% from HR), and 30.59% crit. In a raid fully buffed with totems while in combat that jumps to about 2k AP and 39% crit. DW'ing Mongoose creates periods of 44% and 49% crit.

Now my question is this, following all of the advice here I can't seem to be able to consistently stay in the top 5 damage done for the raid. I understand that my role is not just to do damage, but to drop totems to keep my 3 rogue's dps up, etc... But I still feel that perhaps I might be doing something wrong. Our 3 rogues are consistently in the top 5, with usually a combination of locks (different specs) and/or Fire spec'd mages with them. And 2 of those 3 rogues are always in the top 5 whether I am there or not. This is working in SSC/The Eye.

I alternate Earth and Flame Shocks on every cooldown. I hit off SS every cycle unless a second delay could net me the dmg bonus for a Shock. I typically fire off Haste Pots when I pop Unleashed Rage to net more dps and more hits for mana regen at the same time. When there won't be a good time to use that combo, then I use mana pots. But even doing all of that and keeping myself Flasked up with Relentless Assault (I use Major Agility on some occasions where I know we won't be learning new content or dying) doesn't give me any kind of an edge over my guildmates.

Is there something else I can improve upon besides gearing myself out better than I already am? I lost a lot of my swstats info due to it auto nuking itself from past runs. But I can tell you in a Gruul run last evening that I upheld 604.8 effective dps for the entire run under that mod. And even with that and staying alive the entire run I only took number 10 for the raid. I typically rank between 6-10 on any given raid. I'd appreaciate any critiques, advice, or especially other posts to go read that I might have missed.

For picking my gear I use the APE equation listed in the OP. I added in a personal weight of 0.3 for Int however that did not change much for the items listed on Lootzor. Not all of my gear is the best even if they are epics, but that is mostly because I only read most of this info within the past 2 weeks when a fellow guild mate told me to come read the posts here. I was chasing down the wrong items and am just now getting guild approval to switch mains from my warrior to my shaman. Thanks for the time.

I'm a little confused on the phrase 'reset the swing timer'. I'm assuming it works like parry, where your parry causes an instant attack. Is this correct, or do you not get an extra swing but the swing timer is reset anyway?

On the subject of metagems, I'd say the agi+crit dmg is the clear choice due to the change that made it work on yellow damage. Now WF crits, shocks and totems all benefit from the gem. That might be worth mentioning in the OP.

Edit @ Everwatch:
I feel like I'm in the same spot you are. I haven't been able to break top5 on the meters since 2.1 hit. That being said, there are a few things I've done to help give myself an edge. I grabbed a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond, with that much crit you probably want to grab one yourself, along with a helm you can use it in. I'd suggest the cyclone helm, since it'll give your SoE totem an nice buff. Also, instead of flasking, I use fel strength potions and str V and agi V scrolls. It gets expensive sometimes, but fel str and mageblood are more useful to me than a flat 120ap.