You can kite the mele adds with slow as well. It's far less mana efficient, but it works. Esp if you get a rogue with crip poison on your add too...really just need one slow then.

My mistake, it had been a while since I dug into the math and I mis-stated the effects. What 1% hit actually gives you is an increase in your average-damage-per-cast by 1% of your average non-crit, which is exactly what your math (and mine, now that I found it) shows.

I wouldn't characterize it as diminishing marginal returns though. In your example, adding another 1% would increase the average by another 20, i.e. constant marginal returns.

Would you consider adding an AB*X Fireball*2 rotation to your spreadsheet? Pretty please?

Now why didn't I think of that before....

Consider it done. But eventually you'll have to do scorch anyway to maintain debuff...

So I guess I could average the two to get a good estimate. A rotation of rotations! My god...

*grins wickedly* It's true, you have to refresh periodically....IF you don't have a fire mage to leech scorch debuffs from.

Holy crap this cycle is fucking sick. Does it actually work with improved fireball?

2x(ab/fbx2) + (ab/fb/scorchx2) would keep it refreshed.

This is how I'm doing it, but the distinction is not transparent. It actually has a noticeable decrease in overall dps.

Edit: Nevermind, I'm not going to model the second tier of cycling. Just going with fbx2, i'd have to make too many changes to the cycle tables.

Yea, it'd be simple enough to model 1xab cycles, but when you start trying to find the optimal cycle for fight duration, refreshing becomes tricky since the more abs you put in the cycle, the more you have to throw in the ab/scorch cycle to refresh.

Either way the main thing personally that would be interesting to see would be if an arc/fire build can out damage a deep fire build in normal circumstances without having to worry about refreshing scorch, but I'm still skeptical... especially since with high enough +dmg, only arcane blast spam can top fireball spam.

In practice, an 8k pyro crit semi-reliably off an AP burst, timed with arcane potency, can be a huge impact... more than should be possible from a single attack. Of course you're talking about nearly 12k damage from an instant cast, followed by 13 more seconds of increased dps. And my spell damage isn't even that high, geared out tailors might push 13-14k with that burst..

So I think that's the only way arcane/fire could come out on top in practice.

@Leto: The issue is more complex, I'm already auto-calculating the optimal number of arcane blasts, this makes a good estimate of how "mana stats" impact dps potential. Intellect looks like a pretty bitchin stat with this setup. Unforunately blizz decided now would be a good time make intellect stop scaling up with gear... (anyone remember the old Arcanist set? Haha).

Anyway, the tables are pretty massive and I'd have to shift the logic more than a tad to add cycles over cycles. Doesn't seem worth it..

I just sent Kalman the new version with the fireballx2 cycle.

And Kalman just uploaded it.

Alright time for some stupid questions on the spread sheet.... first are you always assuming that scorch debuff is up on the mob? there is an option for winters chill but not scorch... and molten fury isn't figured into the calculations is it? as there is no total dmg done field.

bah even stupid question - the two attachments in this thread are either of them them correct or is a completely seperate file?

See quote.

Enough spreadsheets and theorycraft. Who's going elementalist with me for this weekend's EOTS bonus honor?! Huh? Anyone?!

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=RZVgGzf0cRZVVGbobxsbo

I have been wondering if anyone has theorycrafted up some kind of crit/dam/stam rule of thumb. Something like:

1 stam = 2 +dam = 1.5 crit (<-- pulled out of thing air)

Eh it would change depending on the context. Stam is worth more in PvP than PvE, for example.

Yeah, i meant to say for pvp. (it's not a very interesting question for pve)

I imagine the formula might change based on whether you're getting heals or not; the number of people on your team (one (duel) to five); maybe whether the opponent(s) are getting heals or not....

Or whether you're fire, frost, or arcane, which spells you're using, your playstyle, strategy for a given encounter, the phase of the moon, value of Uganda's GDP, or whether or not I had pizza for lunch.

Which I did.

....

Way too many variables to consider based on what you want to do against who, etc. etc., and it's all subjective. as mentioned by others above, get lots of everything.

For pvp? Get resilience. And stamina. LOTS of resilience and stamina. PvP itemization is really simple now honestly, here's how it works. You go do pvp. The game will give you items. Those items, which you get from pvping, are the best possible pvp items for that slot.