Originally Posted by Krollin
The figure of 5% more DPS for Swords over Daggers hasn't been substantiated.
Any of these comparisons are only meangingful in ideal circumstances and that means never take the results literally.
|
Let me tell you my 'realcraft' experiences, then.
On my old server, in my old guild, we ran with 2 rogues for 25 man raids. Both of us started out as daggers. Our gear was very close. So was our position on the meters; we took the top 2 slots on most fights and it was a tossup which one of us took #1 on any particular day.
When Arena Season 2 came around, we decided to test swords vs. daggers by having me stay daggers and my guildmate go swords, in part because he was in a better arena team situation and could buy a set of S2 swords right away.
Result: I started losing the damage meter battles by a wide margin. Even after I completed my S2 dagger set (bringing our gear back to near parity) it still wasn't close. The only times I ever beat him were on low-armor bosses during the short period of time when I had Warp-Spring Coil and he didn't.
I'm on a different server now, so I can no longer compare to him, but I did recently get a Talon of Azshara and a S2 OH to replace my S2 MH/OH daggers. The Rogue DPS Spreadsheet predicted about 150 raidbuffed DPS gain from doing this without any other changes to my gear. I can report that it doesn't seem to be horribly wrong in practice; I'm not actually getting quite that much but the set of buffs I have enabled in the spreadsheet is probably a bit optimistic. It's certainly worth at least 100 DPS, which is substantially
more than 5% gain for me.
So yes, sword spec really is that good.
Stupidly enough it is the Arena OH weapons which bring Swords up, the only other OH sword available before Mount Hyjal, Latros, hardly compares.
I suspect Blizzard were balancing things via itemisation but screwed up royally with Arena PvP items. In more ways than one as well.
|
Both specializations benefit a great deal from Arena items. The S2 OH dagger is vastly superior to anything you can get before Hyjal, and there's nothing to compete with the S2 MH dagger until Vashj.
I think you may be overestimating the impact of the availability of the Arena OH on swords, too. Consider a thought experiment: All else equal, what is the DPS due to weapon specialization for sword and dagger when changing between a 1 DPS OH and a 1000 DPS OH? Sword spec's contribution stays constant, because SS procs from your OH result in MH swings; changing OH DPS doesn't change sword spec DPS at all. The DPS from dagger spec, on the other hand, changes considerably since the 5% crit scales the DPS of the OH weapon.
So the point of my thought experiment is that sword spec is quite insensitive to OH weapon DPS. If you have to use a Latro's instead of a S2 OH, you only lose out on the raw autoattack OH DPS -- about 26 * 0.75, modified by crit etc. Latro's happens to have excellent DPS stats, probably better overall than the DPS stats on the S2 OH sword. It's also 0.1 faster than the Arena OH, and that means even more for sword spec than it would for dagger spec. Thus, Latro's is surprisingly competitive with the Arena S2 OH. Not as good, but not a disaster either.
Originally Posted by Krollin
Hey, I am not disputing that Swords is better than Daggers.
I see the results in reality, where the metal meets the meat, to be different. If I were doing less dmg with my gear (Malchazeen, Heroic Dagger) than a Vindicator/Latros equipped Rogue I would be tearing my hair out.
If I were not doing significantly more dmg I would be looking for what I was doing wrong.
The spreadsheet, any spreadsheet, gives approximate results under ideal conditions.
While it is a guide it is not a reflection of what happens in practice.
As you said about my ideal group, it is not what happens in practice.
I would be horrified if the state of play in the game was actually that shown by the spreadsheet. I don't think it is either, mainly because my own experience tells me that it isn't.
|
I'm afraid, then, that you are going to have to be horrified. If you're beating a Vindicator/Latro's rogue, it's because that rogue isn't up to your standard in some regard (gearing choices, talent choices, player skill). Like I said above, I've seen two of the best real world scenarios to verify what the theorycraft says: both comparison between two closely matched rogues and personal experience switching from daggers to swords.
I think nobody would disagree that the Rogue DPS spreadsheet can't predict exact outcomes. (At one time pre-TBC it came close, but it really ought to be a Monte Carlo simulator these days to accurately model the interactions between haste procs, combat potency, cycles, etc. The game's too complicated now to model in a straightforward way with a spreadsheet.) But you seem to want to have it both ways: anything that's useful as a guide obviously
does reflect what happens in practice to some extent, no?
Personally, I've had great success using it as a relative ranking tool. That is, if you set up your gear, talents, race, and buffs, save the DPS you get from that setup, then start playing with the options available to you, it's quite good at predicting whether your dps will go up or down, and even at predicting the relative value of different gear upgrade options. Do I rely on it as much to tell me whether spec A is better than spec B? No, but it's at least close, and when it predicts a huge difference between one spec and another, I'd take it seriously if I were you. People have done a lot of work on it to make it reflect reality as closely as possible.