Link, please, as I can't find any posting regarding +skiil changes. The EU blue post on +skill is in regards to the existing version of it, and the only recent change is a planned change to glancing, which at this point has nothing to do with +skill.

He is referring to the blue post about +skill you posted a few weeks back.... Thats why i was also suprized as he called it the change to + skill.

In response to Hanos;

My cycles are good. I started out each Magtheridon add with garrote(initial only)/shiv/shiv/snd/feint(initial only). From then I'd SS and get a cycle going and use rupture, as the spreadsheet showed for me was best. Of course my job was kicking the heal. I have slicewatcher and it helps me keep my snd going. My cooldowns are all blown on the second add with a cast sequence macro. My trinket is actually Bloodlust Brooch. I am still beating that rogue, but the margin is about as small as you suggest. It just has felt like something is missing when sword spec hardly procs for just having the mainhand to warrant it's use at all and I may as well jump back to my big bad and go fist again.

If I plan on sticking with swords I'll most likely be one of the first to get an 88 dps one. It seems that it would be intelligent to get the Latro's regardless of how big or small of an actual upgrade it is over gladiator's shiv. The gap in dps doesn't deminish going to the gladiator's slicer or Talon of Azshara by much if any so if I am going to be sticking with swords there's absolutely no reason not to get Latro's.
going from shiv to latro's 857dps-864dps unbuffed
going from shiv to latro's 1059dps-1071 buffed with agi/onslaught pots.
I meant to show that before.

Using the ss or shiv model ss is best of course. and it's showing my best cycle as 4s/5r, and i'd just like to agree that cycles get ruined alot with swords, but I always prioritize keeping snd up.

As far as Socrethar's is concerned;. yeah I leveled to 70 after expansion in about 5 days of playing and I overlooked that little gem. So I'm really just hoping for a Gruul's belt or Chess event belt cause I don't wanna item restore that.( that was my big screw up of the xpac).

Andeh you're gear is too much like mine. =) Opening AQ is not a blessing it's a curse of seeing endless moron tells every day. I'm thinking about retiring my title into hiding and throwing it in my bank.

I'd like to make a comment on this. The cycle sheet designed by kalman does not do the best job at converting slack energy -> real dps. It simply assumes that you waste combo points. This is a good model when things remain constant, but with things like nb-2piece and combat potency, its harder for this model to be as accurate as it could be. Some cycles like 4s/5r end up showing higher dps than 5s/5r despite both having 100% uptime because 4s/5r has more ruptures. In reality, 5s/5r with wasted snd uptime would be the superior choice. To fix this, it would require a bit of effort because of the addition of combat potency to the cycle sheet. There are 3 solutions that I can think of offhand.

Solution 1) Create a way that will waste snd uptime instead of combo points as an option. Problem with this method is that one would have to be careful to remove extra energy from CP procs as well.

Solution 2) Add more cycles that have decreased snd time. This solution would be easier than option 1, but would cause some extra bloat. The idea behind this is that you waste the snd-uptime by manually changing from 30.45 snd -> (30.45-3). To understand how this example would work, take the sheet in its current form (with bleedo's gear), and use talon of azshara as your MH weapon. Going from 2/3 snd -> 3/3 snd causes a loss of DPS, not because it actually makes you lose dps, but because you lose finisher damage.

Solution 3) Create some new cycles that are more built to take advantage of cp procs. (and possibly NB 2piece) 5s/5r/5s/5r/5r is an example that would work with a 1.3 offhand, nb-2piece. The problems with this is that the less slack energy you have, the more in-game adjustments need to be made when you run dry on cp-procs. Of course, the more slack energy you have, you might have to worry about using extra finishers. Like once on patchwerk with 11/40, I performed 5s/5e/5e/5s without any snd downtime because of some fortunate cp procs. This is the easiest solution and probably the best, but one would have to be wary of the 10-second energy buffer when creating such cycles as you cannot always turn slack energy into extra dps. Remember combat dagger pre-cp, you could create a cycle like 5s/5s/5s/5s/5e that would show more dps than 5s, but in reality, one could not perform that cycle because the slack energy can not be saved mroe than 10 seconds at a time.


If anyone wants to put forth some of these

I've certainly experienced what you refer to from time to time, where eventually I'll have too much extra energy and nothing necessarily worth spending it on my rupture's still up there and I've SS'd enough to be back close to 5 again mid rupture. Maybe throw in a random 3-5e into the cycle adjusting based on how much extra one has.

Any thoughts on how to add the Dragonspine Trophy? I have one, and for sustained fights, my gut tells me it's the best trinket I have, but I don't know exactly how good it really is. I figured if it proc'd at least once a minute it would probably beat my abacus.

I tried the search feature, but I dunno if it's working, because I know there's a thread about the Dragonspine Trophy (gruul), and I got no results. I could swear it was mentioned in this thread somewhere too...

Thread for people testing it out can be found here: Dragonspine Trophy Analysis

This is what I posted in a seperate topic I made earlier concerning Shaman buffage. I'm a bit at loss to what exactly is the -best- combo I can bring to a melee group with this kind of setup (look above).
I understand that Mutilate rogues will surely hate me dropping Windfury, but we don't have any mutilate rogues. All our Rogues are PvE specced so please don't take Mutilate into account.
I have no idea what is best, so I come to ask the experts . Would it be better for me to drop GoA or does WF reign supreme?
Does dropping GoA and thus buffing the hunter too equal to more DPS (also allowing rogues to use poisons, ofcourse) than dropping WF would? Or does buffing 3 people with WF equal to less DPS than buffing 4 people (allowing rogues to use poisons)?

I'm a bit new to all of this, after all I'm an Alliance reroller - heck, I used to be a Warlock so I didn't care whatsoever about melee :P
Any forms of answer are greatly appreciated - although I'd love to see actual numbers and theorycrafting supporting your answer


Ashiya

switching mainhand windfury to mainhand instant poison + agi totem -> -50dps for me you can find my gear in the profile (click on my chars name to the left)

Thanks! I added the Trophy in as a constant 130 haste, and it is obscenely good. I wonder if 40% uptime is a little generous. Even so, I backed down the numbers until it was giving me about the same DPS as the abacus, and that happened at around 15% uptime, which is definitely less than what I get. I think I'll log some fights and try to find out how much uptime I'm getting.

A rogue with full Vile Poisons and Mutilate spec will benefit more from Grace of Air and Instant Poison a bit more than from Windfury. Most every other rogue will get a bigger boost from windfury. Personally, while I fall into that first group of wanting GoA, it's not so big a difference that I'll cry when I get windfury.

A rogue with full vile/mute might benefit more from a shadow priest being in the raid than windfury... Since misery affects our poison damage

Those shadowpriests.. so hot right now!

Gear Info is not 100% up to date, there is a faq on how to update them on the sheet, you unhide it and put in your own numbers.

Ah thanks man...the GM/HW weapons average hits were not calculated correctly and were listed as 229 avg instead of their proper values. Seem's to have fixed everything once I fixed them.

The speadsheet says The Night Blade(1.8 speed dagger with 78.9DPS) is better then Malchazeen(1.8 speed dagger with 85.8DPS) because of it's chance on hit... It is Also better then the Gladiator SHanker(1.8 speed dagger with 88.3DPS)

Are these calculations accurate? If so that is just ridiculous.


WTB The Night Blade.

Yes, they are accurate. If you had read this thread entirely you wouldn't have posted this.

Consortium Blaster gives 36 AP in the sheet. It should be 28 AP.

I was just wondering about the cycles used for combat daggers (15/41/5). It selects the highest DPS cycle as being 3s/5s/5r, but how can that be. Waiting for 3 backstabs before doing your first SnD surely loses you lots of white damage.. and then you have a slight downtime between the 3s and 5s of about 5 seconds on average with no SnD active. Also throwing in a 5pt rupture with combat daggers? Does it assume you use AR right at the start?

Thanks for any guidance

First time i see that. ><

Pretty dumb design if you ask me. That favours SS at so many levels.

well more dumb is, it doesnt seem to work on CP generators, just saw procs on snd, bladeflurry etc. i posted a logged somewhere here in the thread. 13 procs in 2 hours of magtheridons lair.

The cycles listed in the sheet are sustained rotations, not an indication of the best way to start or end the fight. Your best bet is probably a 1-2pt SnD at first, and then move into more of a sustained pattern, but there's some amount of judgement needed for adjusting your SnD use and other finishers depending on fight length and combat potency procs.

Has anyone found a good way to model The Night Blade, especially in concert w/ the spreadsheet? I picked it up last night in a KZ run and tried it out. The proc is pretty much up constantly, since each new proc refreshes the duration. On bosses I ramped up to -1305 armor piercing within ten seconds and stayed there for as long as I could continually melee.

Since armor is geometric (right?), even if I assumed 100% uptime for TNB's proc, how could I model it? It will mean more damage on Aran than on Curator because of inherent armor differences. I could see the difference with a parser, but ideally I'd like a mathematical way of modelling the proc when it's up. Any ideas?

The spreadsheet currently assumes an average value of -armor based on your hit rating and spec. The value used assumes the proc is a 21-22% proc (I forgot what i left it at) which is based off testing. It also assumes that the proc follows a poisson distribution (not 100% accurate, but close enough). From all of this, it determines the average uptime of the proc assuming 100% on target time. IE, the TNB proc is already accounted for in the spreadsheet.

The trinket could have been a hidden gem like TNB, but if you look at my analysis of the proc on the previous page, the trinket is probably green quality at best.

Bleedo set up a bug tracker for exactly this.