2 Things you can do. (yes I'm a PC tech IRL)

You can dump the crappy mac and get a PC

Or run boot camp (built in to leopard), partition off a 20g spot on your hd, install windows xp pro and run it on there.

Sorry bout dumping on macs, but as a PC tech I see the truth of those thigns every day >.<

1 in 10 Hardware failure rates, no recalls (bad PR), probably the most pita machines ever made to work on and twice as expensive (or more) for their parts as a PC is.

for example - DVD/CD burner replacement on a mac desktop - $200 - Laptop $250+

PC Desktop - $50 - Laptop - $100ish if not cheaper.

I go off on macs cause at my repair shop I work on them all the frigging time, and its just horrible how much is going wrong with them and apple does nothing about it, the new IMacs literally have a 1/10 hardware failure rate (90% of the time its the logic board) but apple would rather pay me to fix it than recall them because its bad PR.

Ok that was less than helpful.

After some calculations (again) after Rob's explanation of expertise rounding I came up with another formula that should give the aep value of expertise that actually increases our dps (not calculating for the rest)

Explanation for the formula: By dividing the rating by 3.95 and taking it's floor you get the number of expertise points that will decrease your dodge and parry rate. Multiplying this with 0.25 will give you percentage by what they will reduce the rate. Multiplying it by 15.8 you'll get that how many hit rating would reduce the missrate by equal amount and if you multiply this by hit aep you got it converted to it. The rest will deal with the increased value of expertise over hitrating but that was discussed before.

What I'm thinking about is that we should divide the result of this by then number of expertise rating that actually increases dps to get aep value for each point.

Because leaving out the rest rating that doesn't increase dps this should be recalculated once you get a new item with expertise as the value changes with that because of rounding.

Link to the post with rounding's explanation (also included in the OP) for those who aren't familiar with the search button: Enhance Shaman: The Collected Works of Theorycraft, Vol I

Going back to my WWS parse of the twilight serpents, it looked to me like crits / (crits + hits) on yellow attacks remains constant (because of the 2 roll system). I didn't examine the white attacks portion closely enough to comment.

Also, I'm really sorry if this has been rehashed and/or proven, but are we sure that the "floor" function isn't just a display truncation function, much like "time left" on buffs is for blizzard built-in buff timers? If it really is a floor function, that stinks.

Late reply to the "why do people ask these questions" post...

As one who has asked such a stupid question, I will just say it is because I, and possibly others, had or have not consciously realized the use for a tool presented. While I had used Yo's sim to calculate AEPs as per the first post, it had not occurred to me to use the tool to compare DPS outputs of different weapons... a use which is obvious once you think about it. However, as obvious it is, it isn't mentioned in the OP. So, I think it may just get overlooked or unrealized by new readers until they ask the "silly" question and then get told to utilize the tool for an obvious application.

if that makes sense

Its entirely possible quite a few of the questions could be avoided by putting in section VIII.5 or VIII.7.1 just a little snippet pointing out the use of Yo's to compare weapons, as obvious as it may be.

I'll do that now in fact.

Malan, I'll test on Leopard for you in a couple of hours when I get a break from work and can break out my laptop.

I think this would be expected, because of two-roll, as you said. This is required to make the (Yellow+White)/White portion of the equation hold.

Now, here is where my mental gymnastics are failing me. I would say that the other thing required to make that hold is white crits/(crits+hits) remain constant. If they don't, then we get the implication that hits are increasing and crits aren't... so the white portion is not increasing by the full amount that we'd expect. But then, I realize that hit rating doesn't increase crits either. So I would say that white crits/(crits+hits) must actually decrease, to make our AEP derivation hold true. For what it's worth, this is expected behavior as far as I'm concerned -- I believe that Blizzard subtracts a percentage of "dodge" and assigns it to the "hit" column rather than making no assignment.

Of course, the best way to get an AEP valuation would be if expertise rating were just coded into Yo's sim (depending on how he deals with the discontinuites I expect). This is all just kind of hacked together based on what I think makes sense.
I do not believe it has been conclusively proven. However, we do know that the weapon skill rating worked like a "floor" (recall the 1.2% jump with that last point of weapon skill/weapon skill rating). I also think there are not partial points of defense resulting from defense rating. The Blizzard UI also displays "2 expertise...reduces target enemy's chance to dodge/parry by 0.50%" with 2.5 expertise, rather than 2.5*0.25 = "reduces...by 0.62%". All this leads me to believe that there is a truncation going on in the calculations and not just the display.

WoW Forums -> Compilation of General and SPEC Sham issues!

Wow, finally, some blue paying attention to our concerns. Come on guys, lets put some construtive information into that post before its flooded with rants and spam.

Rob, thanks a lot for the explanation of the expertise situation. That's really nasty.

And about the white damage aspect of expertise, I would agree that (outside of the floor/rounding) issue, it functions exactly the same as hit.

sorry about the mac hating, but if you are having problems getting it to run on Leopard run it on the windows side with dual boot until a fix comes out for it.

Its very easy if you have never done it before, in your utilities folder is a program called Boot Camp.

If you have a copy of windows XP home/pro or Windows Vista then you can set it up (windows xp home/pro disk needs to be SP2)

Run boot Camp, install windows on a partition (size determined by you, I would make it 32G or less and use FAT 32 so you can xfer files from PC side to mac side)

Just follow directions. Just about anybody can get a hold of an XP disk now days, I would suggest pro.

It's a temporary fix until you get a permanent one to use on the mac side, but if there are other programs you would like to use that only run on windows, it's a good thing to do.

I'm not a Mac user or a developer of any kind, but could the problems with Leopard and Java 6 be to blame? I seem to remember Yo! saying at some point that Java 6 was required for the sim.

leopard java 6 - Google Search

you are obviously missing what i pointed out. It's a temporary fix until leopard comes out with a fix for it's java 6 problems (yes leopard is having issues with java 6).

You dont have to go out and spend $150 and buy windows, theres untold amounts of keys floating around for xp pro and xp home that are very usable, all you need is a disk and about 20 minutes of searching for a key.

If you need a key, and can't seem to find one, just ask me, I have a few kicking around somewhere.

I obviously don't like macs, I am just throwing a relatively easy quick fix.

If you don't want to wait for apple to get off their lazy butts and fix the issues with leopard and java 6 (not a priority issue with them) then this is a temporary fix to get it working until they do.

And I doubt you have upgraded to 10.5 yet and if you have then you would obviously know that it does not come with java 6, nor does it work with java 6.

@ Java complaints:
Well, Yo! said he was on vacation until Nov 1, so I hope he pops in sometime in the next few days to update the sim -- or at least open the source so somebody else can take it over if he will not be working on it anymore.

@ Malan:
OP now says:
This is a bit confusing/incorrect. I'd rewrite it as:

In order to convert your Expertise Rating into AEP for purposes of comparison, you first need to sum up the expertise rating across all your items, divide by 15.8, take the floor, and multiply by 15.8 again. This gives you a "hit rating" equivalency.

But expertise, unlike hit rating, also effects the yellow damage from special attacks in addition to the white damage from auto-attacks. To correct for this, you need to multiply by the ratio of melee damage to white damage, or (Yellow % of damage + White % of damage)/(White % of damage). If we assume that shocks/searing totem are 10% of damage and white damage is 50% of damage, then this ratio is (40+50)/50 = 1.8.

Finally, we must multiply by the AEP of 1 hit rating, to convert our "hit rating" equivalency into AEP.

As an example of these calculations, if I have 47 Expertise Rating on all my items, and a hit AEP of 1.6, that equals Floor(47/15.8) * 15.8 * 1.8 * 1.6 AEP = Floor(2.97) * 15.8 * 1.8 * 1.6 AEP = 2 * 15.8 * 1.8 * 1.6 AEP = 91.008 AEP.

Edit: deleted post as I re-read... much too snippy. Will just use PM's til I get a result.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the sim is broken on Leopard until the issues with 6 are fixed. I at least have nowhere near the know-how to get it going.

In version 7521 of 2.3 (dated 11/1), the one-hand arena weapons now require 1850 rating like the rest of the weapons

Just committed rewrites of Main Hand Weapons, Weapon Expertise, and Stat Weights sections. Credit to Rob for providing the new text for those sections.

Blizzard doesn't care... they haven't cared for a long time.
EDIT: Sorry, frustrated... we continue to post valid solutions to the Shaman issues and the responses from Blue dry right up.

On Main Hands, using Yo!'s sim and adjusting the appropriate stats [Talon of the Phoenix] beats out both RT and syphon. Since it's more obtainable for many players it might be worth letting them know they don't need to worry about upgrading it till Sunwell.

Can anyone else back this claim up? I see you have that equipped with Syphon OH, so I assume that combo is working well for you in-game...

Really? I ran the sim against my Gladiator Cleaver awhile back and only saw the Talon giving a very slight upgrade.