New shoulders found from the twins, seem to be almost on par with the feral druid shoulders aep wise. Interesting note is it's a piece of mail with 0 intellect on it.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...ldenforest.jpg

Pretty decent itemization. 279 ep compared to:

[Demontooth Shoulderpads] 286
[Shoulderpads of Vehemence] 261

Post 2.3 wDPS ep.


I have calculated these values from Yo's sim using 15shock/2minute.
I used 2*2.6 weapons.

Mh wDPS ep: 7.4
Oh wDPS ep: 3.6


Edit: These numbers slighly scale with gear -+ 1%.

@ Pitbuller: I like your sig


Oh, and to people who are curious, the issue I posted about a few posts ago persists when I try using Safari instead of Firefox...I'll try IE tomorrow at work. I refuse to put such an evil browser on this computer.

On Malan's statweight crisis:
It's really to be expected. There are a set number of items that drop in T5 and T6 instances, and for the most part can very clearly be split into "hunter stuff," "decent stuff" (generally lacking sockets and so on), and "good stuff." Changing stat weights is not going to make a hunter item suddenly good, nor a good item suddenly only decent. There are too few items with large enough differences between them (both ilvl wise and just how the points are spent) that it's fairly clear which items are best and which aren't.

Where this system really picks apart items is while still gearing up. Many people are or will be at the gear level that they must choose between Kara gear, badges gear, ZA gear, and possibly early T5 gear. There are so many items available at that level, often not so clearly identifiable as "best" or "decent," because people's gear itself is so different at that level.

Take cloaks, for a very clear example: Vengeance Wrap, Cloak of Fiends, Dory's Embrace, Cloak of Darkness, and Black-Iron Battlecloak are all available in post-Kara raiding, and none are clearly better or worse than another. With personal EP weights, it's much easier to determine which is the best cloak. However, it's not logical to expect that, with the limited number of T6-level cloaks (one), that any of them would compete. It's always going to be polarized with SMDestroyer's at the top, and others on down, no matter how much you mess with the numbers.

The other day I was thinking about the fact that our item budget gets messed up by having STA + INT on items, and what Blizzard might do to stop us from preferring rogue items. The new Skyshatter pieces are fairly well itemized, but still some of them end up devoting excessive amounts of budget to non-DPS stats ([Skyshatter Greaves] has 43 sta and 20 int, for example.) I figured that we will see more items like the one you posted (which I consider analogous to [Shoulders of the Hidden Predator]) and more items with just INT and no STA (which I would consider analogous to [Softstep Boots of Tracking]). It will be interesting to see if that prediction comes true.

Looking at the Tier 4/5/6 values on the front page and comparing them (a bit off because Tier 4 apparently doesn't include BoK, so I took the strength and agility values without agility and for the Tier 6 agility value subtracted 10% which should be close to its value without BoK):
Lets look at the percentage difference between them (using Tier 4 value as a base line):
Looking at the difference we can see the following:
Comparing Tier 4 and 5: Relatively small difference in haste rating (+15%), big difference in armor penetration (+27%)
Comparing Tier 4 and 6: Relatively small difference in Agility and crit rating (-13% and -12 %), big differences between hit rating (+26%), haste rating (+42%), and armor penetration (+59%).
I can't compare Expertise Rating because there aren't any values for Tier 4 and 5 in the opening post.

So from that we can gather the following: The EP of AP, Strength, Agility and crit rating stay relatively close to each other. Hit rating and haste rating only change in a significant way when you reach the Tier 6 EP. Armor Penetration sees the biggest difference in EP.

It would be nice to see what values were entered to get the Tier 4/5/6 EP in order to check the following:
Why do those EP that change signigicantly doso, is it because of all the values or only because of one or two values (for example the change in Armor Penetration could quite possibly be because more armor penetration was being worn when getting the Tier 6 EP in comparison to Tier 4/5).

What I'm trying to get at is the following: Would it be possible to assign a fixed EP for those stats that stay relatively unchanged, while only checking a few stats for those that change significantly. For example saying (arbitrary numbers): " Armor Penetration has a value of 0.22 EP. For every 100 Armor Penetration you are wearing add 0.05 to its EP." And so on.

Note: this is relatively unpolished and not entirely thought through and there are probably many things wrong with it. However, I first want to see if this approach is even worth pursuing before sticking a lot of work into it.

The goal of this approach would be to make it easier to get your EP values (since they do change to a certain amount accordingto your equipment). Because from experience (and reading this thread) it is quite obvious that many people have problems getting their own EP values. In addition they make a relatively small difference in item selection (as Malan noted, except for a few items, changing the EP values doesn't change the sorting of the items effectiveness too much). Using this approach could yield something along the lines of only having to check/enter a few numbers/values/stats in order to sort items correctly (for example only checking how much Armor Penetration I have in order to correctly wigh Armor Penetration).

Feel free to tear this post apart.

Is it me or is Yo!'s website currently down?

He appears to be suggesting just creating a lookup table for Flurry uptime/etc. by just running the sim for enough weapon speed/crit combinations that you can easily interpolate the rest. With a large enough data set this would work -- even if you can't find an equation that matches the entire set of data, sufficient data points would let you get an accurate enough result anyway. With a simulator that can run batches and a lot of cpu time, it'd be pretty easy to build a closed-form model, but Yo!'s sim can't be automated and to the best of my knowledge all of the other sims have problems with thier models. If one of the open source sims is usable (or if Yo! adds automation support), the only problem remaining is that my napkin math says it'd take ~100 days of CPU time to build the dataset. It's an inheriently parallelizable task, so even that might be doable.

we all know that the Bold living ruby is the best answer for our gem needs BUT shouldnt the Ornate (20AP) and the Crimson Sun (24AP for us JCers) be accounted for as well?

I wanted to get an idea of the EP values as well and, realizing that the 2.6 EP values for DPS would calculate unfairly in favor of the Vanir's Fists, I did a linear, algebraeic adjustment to the speed. I used:

MH – ((9.03 / 2.6) = (x / 2.5)) = 8.68 MH EP;
OH – ((3.7 / 2.6) = (x / 2.5)) = 3.56 OH EP

I know this isn't 100% on the mark, but I was hoping to get a slightly closer understanding of the value of the badge weapons versus some of the other weapons that are currently out there. My final result was 1489.24 EP (Vanir Right Fist - 1015.12 MH; Vanir Left Fist - 474.12 OH). My initial reaction to this is that the values would have to be whittled down a little beyond this, as this would technically place it higher than dual-wielding the Syphons from BT. But then again, a majority of the badge loot is quite impressive anyway.

By this estimation, the Vengeful Gladiator's Cleaver would still be a better weapon.

EDIT: Clarification and a little grammar, plus I typed a number wrong. Durr.

Duh? I mean, obviously those are going to be better than something which gives 16 AP without Kings and 17.6 AP with Kings.

Report from the PTR is that all the stamina has been removed from the new T6 items and they've been replaced with pure damage stats, making that much more attractive now.

And holy shit at the buffs to it.

That makes me happy

finally there's a better belt than the vashj one ...

Whoah holy smokes, expertise on set items?

With just those 3 items plus the shard, puts us at 112 expertise rating, where as we only need 90 to be capped for dodge and parry.

I think I just creamed my pants...all 3 pieces have expertise....Wow
these are too good to pass, time to start saving dkp for sunwell :P

Woah... If only they'd do that for some of our other gear.

The expertise cap is 103 unless Roguecraft 101 is a dirty liar.

I have a bad feeling these new awesome set items will be nerfed one way or another before they go live... with my EP values the belt will be a ~60EP upgrade, the bracers a ~77.5EP upgrade and the boots a ~115EP upgrade from the current best-in-game slots.

But then again I guess that's what happens when we get proper itemized loot?

It seems, that finally Blizzard learned to create Items that fit perfectly to an enhancment shaman. Also the elemental parts are currently very well itemized -> pure caster stats without any mp5 which eats from the item level.

I really hope that we will see some more nice enhancement loot on the prt soon, perhaps some more items to trade at the transmuter npc, who knows.