This whole agility versus crit rating is superfluous.

One side is arguing AEP values - the other side is arguing survivability. It's two separate arguments.

Nowhere in this thread are armor, agility, stamina or resistances given any weighting in the AEP system. I think this is fine, we're determining how to maximize raid-level, against-bosses-only DPS.

Why is Rapparee going to take the skyshatter legs over the bow-stitched leggings?

They have 40 freaking more stamina. (the bow-stitched have 2 more sockets one of which i'd put 7 stamina+5str in... still that gives the t6 33 stam. bonus) In my particular raiding circumstances, I need more life than a shaman in a perfect raid with ulitmate healers. I like my healers they're good people, but they aren't perfect. Some people do have perfect healers, which makes me every so slightly jealous.

Why does Rapparee not care about agility vs. crit rating? Because I personally don't care about dying to BT trash, oh well i'll have to use the repair-guy after next wipe. No single trash monster in Hyjal can kill me in under 4 seconds. My healers may not be perfection but they aren't 4seconds slow either.

Also any of my healers reading this. I'm not perfection either, otherwise I'd never fall for that sneaky doomfire's tricks.

Also to reply to Skiace.... My values indicate that at my current gearing agility is worth more than strength... just barely. It's all dependant on the gear you are currently wearing and the buffs you can expect while raiding.

I know it's gear dependent, that's not my point. My point is, I've seen a lot of people's stat weightings, and they all seem to trend between the "entry level" listed in the OP and the BT/hyjal level where crit/agi etc are all 2+. My gear is a full tier above the entry level, yet my crit/agi numbers are significantly lower than the entry level ones. This confuses me.

That is entirely the point of the AEP system.

The gear you currently wear, the buffs you currently expect to have influence just how important crit rating and agility are.

If you want to know why your values are different from someone else, then look at the gear you wear and compare it to the gear they wear. If every single item is the same, enchanted the same, and you use the same talents and raid with the same buffs, but still get different AEP values, then one or both of you have mis-calculated your AEP values.


The best way to use the AEP system is to evaluate the next piece of gear that drops against the one you wear in that slot.

Does the shoulder that just dropped have a higher AEP than my current shoulder? (for example)

Once you get one or two new pieces, you need to recalculate all of your AEP values.

I feel like you're either completely missing what I'm trying to say, or just disregarding it. It is not enough for me to simply say "well, I plugged my gear into the sim and it gave me these AEP, so that's that." I want to understand why it spit out values that seem so different from the trend. "Your gear is different, so your aep values are different," isn't an explanation.

As a small test, I ran the sim with my gear -5% hit, because I have a lot of hit for my level and wanted to see if that was the culprit. The results were higher values for crit/agi, which seems to imply that my increased hit actually devalues further crit. This doesn't make sense to me either, particularly if yellow attacks are a two-roll system as (i think) the current theory claims. It also means that were I to follow the aep values every time i get a gear upgrade, agi/crit would continue to go down relative to hit/ap, and I'd end up stacking hit, which doesn't jive at all with the experiences of everyone else in this thread.

edit: running it some more with my current gear, I'm now getting more reasonable values. I have no clue what's different, perhaps the sim has changed since I last ran all these test.

Make sure you're inputting the values that the sim expects:

AP should be without any buffs other than kings.
I forget off the top of my head if hit should or shouldn't have the contribution from talents added in (I believe it does).

I know I got wonky results when I put in my raidbuffed AP rather than my unbuffed tooltip AP.

If you want to know why one value goes down when another value goes up, then read every page in this thread. All the formulas are derived from theorized systems of how the game calculates your damage.

Let me ask you, what will you do with the information?
If I said to you, that AP and crit follow an inverse relationship where every 10 AP increase results in a -0.04 AEP valuation of crit, what would you do differently?


Edit: name of boot, AEP using entry level, AEP using Skiace's numbers.
Boots of Utter Darkness 159.86 150.78
Cobra-Lash Boots 155.42 149.15
Star-Strider Boots 155.42 149.15
Boots of the Crimson Hawk 144.15 131.8
Boots of Effortless Striking 131.08 123.1
Boots of Natural Grace 130 126.74

If you look at the numbers both sets of AEP rank the best boots for you in the same order. The last 3 boots are ones you shouldn't even bother getting, while any of the first 3 are pretty good for you.
So even if you think your numbers are goofball values, it ended up not mattering when it comes time to choose your boots in SSC/Eye.

This was the last quick run with current stats, (old belt) though the inputs are the same as the 5x10,000 that I did a week ago.



Procs:
MH-WF/dragonstrike
OH-WF/Mongoose
Hourglass
RED

Buffs:
Kings (but base stats are without unfortunately)
MotW
LotP
Major Agi elixer
SoE
Battle Shout
STR food

Thanks for the responses, that's helped me sort this out in my head a bit better.

Now another question. If you're a newb shaman who's just stumbled across this thread and you now see that all your weapon/stat choices to date are suboptimal, what would you do to correct the situation and in what order?

Of course I'm talking about myself:

1. I've valued hit % and crit % equally.
2. My off hand is the a Merciless Gladiator off hand with a 1.50 attack speed (which sounds like a waste of arena points now that I've read this thread).
3. I've three possible main hand weapons: 1.40, 1.50 and 2.40 speed (feltooh eviscerator, emerald ripper, and big bad wolf's paw, respectively).
4. I use rockbiter on my offhand (*gasp*).
5. I've focussed on Agility and hit rating for my gem slots rather than strength.

So, do these numbers/weights only really apply once I've gotten myself a decent 2.4-2.6 speed offhand weapon or is there an order to how I'd get myself back on the "right" path.

I'm not necessarily looking for specific advice that'd only be valuable to myself, but rather more general advice to any newb shaman who's doing things "wrong" but want's to do things "right".

I guess my thought process is sort of like this: Okay, I've fallen off the wagon. What's the 10-step process for getting back on again?

Absolute first thing to do: get appropriate speed weapons (2.6/2.6 greens if you need to) and put WF5/WF5 on both. This should be doable in 5 minutes of searching the auction house or a few days of heroic running/honor grinding.

Next thing to do, if you have the money: resocket all your gems. Consider this: a 6 strength gem is worth more AEP with the starting AEP values (without Kings) than an 8 hit gem, so if you've got 8 hit gems replace those with 6 strength gems at the -very- least.

Next thing to do: chances are, if you're gearing yourself improperly, you're not taking full advantage of all the revered+ rep rewards and crafted items. For example, there are some blue leather shoulders from Kurenai revered that are pretty freakin' amazing till you can upgrade them with t4/leather Kara shoulders, and I'd venture a guess that most "newbie" enhancement shamans don't know about them.

Edit: [Blackened Leather Spaulders]
They're an upgrade for you, too, now that I've checked out your armory. Also, Kaliban's Class Gear Planner is a useful site for finding gear though there is no option for having it choose leather gear.

Hit and Crit can be equally for personal aep values, you should just check Yo's sim (or another one, linked in the beginning post).

Steps:
1. Read through posting #1 over and over again, print it and learn to love it.
2. Get everything enchanted properly.
3. Regem your gear to [Bold Living Ruby] for red sockets, [Sovereign Nightseye] for blue sockets and [Inscribed Noble Topaz] for yellow sockets.
4. Farm mats for [Runic Hammer].
5. Get an arena 5on5 (leecher) team and run with it for 6-7 weeks and receive your [Merciless Gladiator's Cleaver] or [Merciless Gladiator's Pummeler].
6. Farm as much [Badge of Justice] (200 possible) for patch 2.3 and the new loot.
7. Get another MG Weapon.
8. Become #1 in epeen meters.
9. ????
10. You are beloved, rich and famous now.

Edit: You can buy 2 very (2.8 speed) slow weapons in Netherstorm (Stormspire or Eco-Dome.., can't remember exatly) and run some tests versus the blasted lands mobs and compare it to you gear, especially the offhand could be better for the moment. [Big Bad Wolf's Paw] isn't that bad and should do it for the moment.
Note: BBWP and [The Decapitator] will become one-hand weapons with the next patch, so don't throw them away!

It's hard to swallow that I should replace an epic with a rare, but I see what you mean. If I *really* want to do the most DPS that's what I gotta do. Is a 2.5 main hand good enough or is 2.6 a must have?

I just wish I'd have read this last week, we ran Kara over the weekend and I passed on both [Fool's Bane] ( to a rogue) *and* [The Decapitator] (to a fury warrior). *slap head*

Skiace - you need to run the sim more than once. Shaman DPS is streaky and prone to silly luck driven RNG inflation/deflation of numbers. Run it 5-6 times. See if any of the AEP are outliers. Discard the outliers, average the ones that are pretty close in value, and use those.

As an example I did exactly this today. (While at work... supposedly while doing "work") I ran the sim 5 times at 1000 hours and got some pretty crazy outliers for a few values. Then I ran it 5 more times at 5000 hours each and got 4 sets that were very close to the 1000 hours numbers, so I took those 4 and averaged them. My very first run of the sim was a huge outlier though, it had some really wonky values.

Ok, bad. Don't do that. Yo added a Q/A that addresses this issue - if you put kings, the sim expects your crit and AP values to already include the extra 10%, the sim has no way to do that for you. Your values may look odd because of this.

I'd also add that you really need to keep in mind that the "baseline" AEP stats were generated from a model that had around 2500 AP, 30% Crit, some value of Hit that I can't remember. Your stats aren't exactly there, so you're going to differ.

Sigh, you're right about that, I forgot to account for misses and dodges. The actual equation should be:

And once you have your OriginalDPS, instead of just multiplying by CritRate, you use the equation:

Then:

The less crit you have, relative to hit and expertise, the less DPS contribution from RED. My earlier calculations show the value of RED if you never get a miss, dodge, or parry, making the values calculated for 1000 physical DPS with 30% crit rate (7 or 13.5 DPS) the minimum value of a RED.

As I mentioned in the first post, the "oddball" values came from an average of 5 tests at 10,000 each. The screenshot is just to show what I was inputing.

I know the kings issue is bad, so that could be the issue (though it would surprise me).

As for the baseline stats compared to mine, I have a around 2700ap/32% crit raid buffed; I was under the impression that the sim values are to be unbuffed (except kings).


edit: Running another 5 tests at 4000 without kings. If I get more typical numbers I'll just forget about it.

edit2: Results below

You forgot:

Block
Glancing Blow

And it is in a specific order, namely:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Glancing Blow (only players and pets versus mobs)
Block
Critical
ordinary hit

This of course is for white damage, as the aforementioned 2 roll system may or may not exist for yellow damage.

Why just 200? Based on what I see, it's 315 for me for ENH upgrades, not to mention close to the same amount in Resto and Elemental upgrades as well.

200 is the current cap for badges per stack. I assume it's the global cap

i DO understand that "you can not crit when you miss" is FALSE (atack table)

but i DO NOT understand why WF does not suffer the miss rate. You can get WF when you miss ?
I doubt that , when i was at 62lvl i start to skill 2h axe (blood furnace drop). I had about 170 2h axe rating so i had a LOT of misses , i didnt get any WF proc at the miss hit.

This was answered somewhere on the last page or 2... Sigh.

Anyway, no Windfury can't proc off a miss. But due to the Windfury mechanics and procrate you'll never have Windfury on cooldown for longer than a few seconds. That's why Hit isn't THAT important.

He means the following (I think)

I know it won't happen due to talents, but lets say you have less than +9% hit. Since you aren't hit capped for special attacks it is possible the WF swings will miss eventhough the white swing that procced it hit. So he is saying is that WF is a special (yellow) attack and therefore only has a 9% hit cap instead of the 28% dualwield white miss chance.

First you never miss with stormstrike even with 0 +hit, which is a significant part of your total hits (around 16% with 2.6 weapons).

Next, as it has been said many times, you spend a lot of time inside the WF cooldown, and so most of your miss happen during the cooldown. Increasing your hit rate will have an effect to your windfury procs indeed, but it will be a minimal one, in fact you will mostly increase your number of hits inside the cooldown without increasing your number of windfury procs.

You may even say that increasing your hit decreases your WF proc rate but i personnally dislike this because it tends to confuse people when they see it, you don't reduce your number of windfury procs, but instead you increase your white hits (which leads to a smaller proc rate).