I was looking through the rogue spreadsheet thread(s) today, and it occurred to me that there's really two separate things occurring within them, and I think it's hurting the usability of them.

Specifically, there are comments about the spreadsheet itself (which certainly belong in such a thread), and questions of general rogue mechanics. The difficulty is that having both these topics within the same thread was causing the thread to grow very quickly (approaching 10 pages per week) which meant that a lot of questions were getting asked repeated due to the question and it's answer getting buried under 5 pages of new responses, making it challenging for people to find (or so I would assume, based on the number of "what does 1s/5r cut mean" posts in that thread).

So it seems to me that it makes sense to split out the mechanics testing into it's own thread, and let the spreadsheet threads be more spreadsheet specific, so as to try to make the information a bit more usable and accessible. Hence, I'm starting a new thread (this one) for the mechanics information.

In terms of mechanics I'd like to see tested: following are a list of things that have been discussed at one time or another in various other threads, but I'm not aware of any final determination of an answer for them. Hence, I would be interested to see additional testing/analysis for the following pieces of information:

2) Similarly, proc rate on Romulo's Poison Vial?
3) Thundering Skyfire Diamond?
5) How much armor does a typical sundered raid boss have?
6) What, exactly, can proc off a Sword Spec attack, anyway?
8) What about Siphon of the Nathrezim?
9) What about Drakefist Hammer/Dragonmaw/Dragonstrike?
10) Blackout Truncheon?
11) The Bladefist?
12) What's the proc rate on Deathmantle 4/5?
13) What's the proc rate on the Twin Blades of Azzinoth set bonus?
14) What's the proc rate on Band of the Eternal Champion?

If people have other things they'd like to see tested, or if you have answers to some of these questions, please post and I'll update the list.

Conclusions Reached:

New answers in bold.

1) What is the proc rate on Dragonspine Trophy, anyway?
Dragonspine Trophy is a 1 PPM proc.

4) In what order is the damage boost from Relentless Earthstorm Diamond applied?
A: RED appears to stack multiplicatively, causing regular critical strikes to do 2.06 times regular damage instead of 2.0, and crits with Lethality doing 2.369 times regular damage instead of 2.3.

7) What's the proc rate on Rod of the Sun King?
The proc rate appears to be 1 PPM, or 4.5%.

15) What's the proc rate on Madness of the Betrayer?
Madness of the Betrayer is a 1 PPM proc.

I'd like to see testing with weapon skill over 365 vs. glancing blow. I recall seeing a couple combat logs that were showing only about 20-21% glancing blows for someone with 369 weapon skill. Glancing damage reduction looked normal, but it did appear that there *might* be approximately 1% fewer glances per skill above 365.

Granted this wasn't based on much data (maybe 2000 swings) and could just be a fluke, but it would be nice to know if there is more to it. All evidence points to no reduction up to 365, but I don't think there has been much testing in the more extreme weapon skill ranges.

12) When I use Instant Poison instead of Deadly Poison What Offhand Speed I need to outdamage Deadly Poison?


I just thinking about that, when i see all the passive haste Items from Black Temple in conjunction with Dragonspine Trophy and other Items with haste proc effects.

Well, that one, at least, I can address right off. See Rogue Gear Spreadsheet post 74.

I did some testing back in april when I got it..

Single 1.3 speed dagger, white only:


Double 1.3 speed daggers, white only:


Might be somewhere around 0.6-0.7.

I think the screen with lurker at 7800ish and various people kicking in SSC was pretty accurate in putting it at around 5k sundered and a bit over 4k with FF, although if anyone has better info I'm all ears. :wink:

I wouldn't mind some rogues posting a combat log or two with WF totem buff (and weapon speeds) so we can determine if there is some cooldown mechanic, my own tests show it to be around half the weapon speed but I can't raid/play all that actively during summer so no extensive tests for me.

Right. My only gripe with those is the small sample size - at only 1k attacks, the variance is still pretty large. And we've seen proc rates reported ranging from .5 PPM up to 1.5 PPM or so, as I recall.

The secondary problem is that all attacks are performed at the same speed; to determine if it's a PPM or a % proc, I'd really like to see 5k+ attacks with two weapons of very different speeds.

Again: there's been research on it, but I don't recall any firm conclusion being reached.


I measured about 4.5k for sundered Tidewalker by kicking, but I've heard other people report other results. Also, it varies some from boss to boss; I wouldn't mind seeing values for 5 people kicking each raid boss in SSC and beyond, just to get a sense for what the numbers look like.

Seems to me with some basic testing to be around 3PPM. I'm going to grab Procwatch and check it out for real in the next couple of days.

I guess I could do some logs from SSC/TK Clearing next week. I got 371 weapon skill as we speak but havent really looked at the glancing % in a long time.

1) I did some testing a few months ago, but I don't have the raw number anymore. Here's what I recall though: At all time I was dual wielding, for the first twentyish minutes two fast daggers (1.3 each), and then again two swords (2.4 if I recall correctly) for roughly the same amount of time. In both cases I ended up with ProcWatch showing 2.3 ppm for "Haste". "You gain Haste." did not work for some reason, so anyway, that should actually be 1.15 ppm for DWing, which is pretty close to what Gogge has posted.

@Gogge:

I say your ProcWatch for Dragonspine Trophy is wrong, because it doesn't count selfrefreshing procs, looking here

So the best way to model the Dragonspine Trophy is, to parse the combatlog. I will do this today and post the results here.

I came up with this for DST in two old post. Conclusion is, that it has 1.7 PPM:

I think we need to reexamine hit/skill and boss misschance again.

What I have atm is only annecdotical evidence but nevertheless:
When we started SSC I was 15/41/5 combat dagger. I usual watch my performance with Recap (the hawksy version that uses Parserlib from ACE2 plus the FixLogstings addon; I use a german client).
For the autoattack my missrate against bosses varied around the expected 1.17% with 297 hitrating.

Out of curisoity last week I repeced to 41/20/0 mutilate build (I was trying to show that in realworld raids
it can hold up against combat dagger)
When I looked at my missrate against Hydross (we needed 4 attempts that night :/) for all 4 trys my
hitrate for autoattacks hoverd around 3.8%, the worst try was 4.2% the best 3.6% (Yes it is only hits.
No doges/parries; I looked into the detaile breakdown page)
All trys had around 800ish total swings.
That is way lower I'd expected ; around 2.17% because of the loss of Weapons Expertise.

Now if I assume bossmiss scales with 0.8% per level and hit/skill is 0.2% the observations can be explaind.
(well yes I know 800 swings is a too small samplesize but still my gut feeling says there is something fishy).

Are you sure that isn't including dodges and parries? If the way your guild does Hydross is anything like mine there is a decent chance he is turned towards you atleast occationally.

Personally, I am really curious about this because I am wondering how Gloves of the Searing Grip Compare to Deathmantle (as well as Netherblade vs Grips of Deftness). Right now the numbers suggest that in most situations the set pieces would be better.

Over the past week or so I have been intentionally running below the hit cap just to see if playing the odds would increase my DPS. Unfortunately there isn't a lv 73 mob that you can easily test this on to determine exactly how much Weapon Skill increases your hit/crit rate or how much it decreases your targets chance to dodge/parry/block.

Regarding dodge/parry/block I think the best thing would be to get some long WWS Reports from a tank with a decent amount of +weapon skill.

However I will try tracking the results that myself and one of our rogues (human) using Spiteblade/Latros has vs the 2 rogues without the additional 3+ weaponskill on boss fights to see what the affect on dodge is, as far as parry and block we can't reliably test that without going suicidal, but then again it doesn't affect our DPS calculations anyway, since we should assume that we are always behind the boss anyway.

Even with combat log parsing it is sometimes not possible to accurately determine the number of procs for items such as Dragonspine Trophy. For example a triple-proc may appear to be a double-proc. You can alleviate these problems by automatically cancelling the Haste buff, eg with the following macro:

I obtained the following data by dual wield autoattacking Servants of Razelikh.

Unless I have made a calculation error somewhere, this seems reasonably significant evidence that DST is not ppm-based. From the first set of data, with 95% certainty we can say that the proc rate is within [2.1 - 3.4] ppm, or [2.6 - 4.3]%. From the second set of data we have [1.4 - 2.3] ppm, or [3.0 - 4.9]%.

Given the small overlap between possible ppm values, it appears that DST is % based, with a proc rate between 3.0% and 4.3%.

I did some testing on High Priest Venoxis the other day. With +25 weapon skill I had 622 glancing blows from 2585 swings, or 24.1%.

As I mentioned I am 100% sure that it is only miss. In Recap if you hover over the row with your DPS
you will get a popup with detailed breakdown of all skills you use with individual block,dodge,parry,miss
values.

I dont think that is a valid test.
I am wondering if +weaponskill rating on items behaves different from the talent "Weapons Expertise"
My gear does not have any item or racial +skillrating items. The only difference was the spec.
One setup without Weapons Expertise and the other with.

That seems to be the problem.

Dragonspine Trophy Test

Location: Blasted Lands
Object: Servant of Razelikh

Start: 7/17 11:47:07.658
End: 7/17 12:45:10.341

Spec: 16/13/0

Weapons: Merciless Gladiator's Slicer and Merciless Gladiator's Quickblade (both enchanted with Formula: Enchant Weapon - Mongoose)

Styles: Sinister Strike and Slice and Dice

Duration: 58 minutes 2,683 seconds

procwatch shows:

104 "You gain Haste"
104 "Haste fades from you"

Hits: ~ 5.000

ppm: ~ 1,7

Only gain/fades from Dragonspine Trophy

CombatLog (complete)

So I've expecting a complete duration of 104 * 10 seconds = 1.040 seconds.


combatlog shows:

104 "You gain Haste"
104 "Haste fades from you"


0 procs with a Haste Duration under 9,829 seconds

79 procs with a Haste Duration between 9,829 seconds and 10,344 seconds

25 procs with a Haste Duration over 10,344 seconds with a runtime:


15,564 seconds
19,580 seconds
13,360 seconds
13,360 seconds
17,595 seconds
16,736 seconds
12,969 seconds
17,408 seconds
55,598 seconds (at least 6 procs in a row)
23,721 seconds
26,329 seconds
13,157 seconds
20,954 seconds
12,001 seconds
19,673 seconds
18,660 seconds
17,798 seconds
17,376 seconds
31,408 seconds (at least 4 procs in a row)
12,563 seconds
16,407 seconds
14,329 seconds
18,032 seconds
19,110 seconds
17,860 seconds

[top] 468,188 seconds

So the 79 procs are 10 second procs and all above 10,344 seconds are selfrefreshing procs.


The sum of all durations gives:

79 * 10 seconds + 468,188 seconds ~ 1.258 seconds



The Test goes 58 minutes and 2,683 seconds

So the Dragonspine Trophy haste gain per minute is:

1258 seconds / (58 * 60 seconds + 2,683 seconds)

1258 seconds / 3482,683 seconds

[top] 0,36

Dragonspine Trophy proc gives 325 Haste Rating per proc.


So the real benefit is per minute:

325 * 0,36

117 Haste rating



Taking 1.040 seconds you'll get

1040 seconds / (58 * 60 seconds + 2,683 seconds)

[top] 1040 seconds / 3482,683 seconds

0,2986

Dragonspine Trophy proc gives 325 Haste Rating per proc.


So the procwatch benefit is per minute:

325 * 0,2986 = 97,045 Haste rating

MH: Vindicator's Brand (2.6)
OH: Latro's Shifting Sword (1.4)
Miss (based on RogueDPS 2.2.0.1): 1% versus Boss else 0.33%.
Armory: The Armory - Ashran

Total: 25% of solo farming or pvp (only snd and mongoose procs) - 85% raid conditions (see last fight conditions, detailed below)


Shot at 2007-07-17

For info, Last fight conditions: The Lurker Below, Bloodlust, 1 Haste potion & 1 Drum of Battle, snd, blade flurry, AR, Troll Berserker, 2x Mongoose for speed increase. But not enough data I think to make conclusions about the 2.2 ppm

Edit: the 1.5 ppm may be low because in raids There is not a 100% uptime fight (Bosses were Kazzak, Void Reaver, Doomwalker, Hydross, The lurker below and Magtheridon), I remeber after 1 hour of farm on lvl 68-70 it was 1.6ppm maybe close to 1.7 ppm, with snd up and mongoose only)

Thundering Skyfire Diamond was determined to be 1.1PPM in the thread about it a while back.

I one of the major issues is the variance in STYLE of testing that's being done. Many of us aren't really as good at statistics, so getting a pre-defined test that we can then just go and run (if we have the gear to meet the test's conditions) might be helpful.

For example:

"DST Proc Test: Servant of Raz, 250+ hit rating (for 0 misses), any 350+ weaponskill, no weapon specs, auto attacks only, at least 5000 swings with a single 2.6 speed weapon, another 5000 swings with a single 1.3 speed weapon" (This is an EXAMPLE - I'm not that great at making these up) ...

I think if we had a few defined tests, and people could just post combat logs from them, it'd get a LOT more swings in, in what's hopefully a controlled environment. At least for proc rates on items that would seem to help the most.

Recommended test methodology:

1) Go to Blasted Lands. Locate an area with no mobs near a Servant. Clear any trash mobs that are in the way.
2) Remove your OH
3) Type /combatlog.
4) Pull the Servant. Kite it to your empty area.
5) Attack it for a while. SS spam, keep SnD up, etc. I wouldn't recommend using other finishers (Eviscerate/Rupture/etc.) as I've had the perception that they have sort of unusual proc behavior, so probably just do SS spam + SnD.
6) At some point you will need to stop and heal. This can be done by blind + bandage, vanish + eat + repull, finding some really bored healer to sit there and dump heals on you, or whatever.
7) When you're done (for best results, you'd want to get a good hour or so of attacks on the mob), type /combatlog again.
8) After you log out the next time, go to your World of Warcraft/Logs directory, grab the WoWCombatLog.txt file, and post it to your favorite file hosting site (Savefile or whatever).
9) Post the link to it in this thread, and let the theorycrafters go to town.

Yeah, weapon skill is still an open question. I avoided including it here since it already has 2 threads of it's own, but if people want to test it here that would be great.

What I'd really like to see is a repeat of the pally/Venoxis experiment with 2 rogues dual-wielding, with the rogues standing on top of each other so as to remove any positional effects. With dual-wielded 1.3 speed weapons rogues should be able to get a pretty large data set without requiring excessive time.


Under the best known model of weapon skill, the set bonuses score better. But there is certainly still stuff going on with weapon skill that we may not understand.

That's very interesting. I'd be curious to see numbers for a larger data set to tighten up those ranges. Definitely seems like the correct way to go about testing it.

TSD was determined to average about 1.1 PPM; the exact mechanic was never determined to my knowledge. As I recall it has a hidden cooldown of about 40 sec, but it was never determined if, outside that proc rate, it was a fixed % proc or a PPM.