I'm pretty sure no cycle containing a 1 point eviscerate can be optimal, just looking at the energy-to-damage conversion efficiency. You're better off throwing an extra SS or BS and wasting the combo point than throwing a 1 point eviscerate.

Analysis: We're going to compare SS to Evis for the moment. Since they both have the same crit damage multiplier, we can ignore crit% and armor and just look at the raw base damage.

Assume for the moment that one has 2800 AP and are wielding Spiteblade. A sinister strike costs 40 energy and has a base damage of roughly 1.16 * (200 * 2.4 + 219 + 98) = 924.5 damage, or about 23.1 base damage per energy.

Meanwhile, with 2800 AP the base damage of a 1-point eviscerate is going to be 1.21*(245 + 2800 * .03) = 398, and it costs 30 energy on average, meaning you only do about 13.3 base damage per energy - far lower than for SS.

Running a similar analysis for backstab, we have to consider crit rate as well (since BS and Evis have different crit rates), so lets assume a 30% crit rate, 4/5 Lethality (as is standard for 15/41/5), Malchazeen, and the same 2800 AP as before. Well, the backstab is going to do 1.1*1.2*(1.5*(154.5 + 1.7*200) + 255) * (1 + 1.3 * .6) = 2342 unmitigated damage, at a cost of 60 energy for an average of 39 unmitigated damage per energy. Factoring crits into the eviscerate analysis, it's average unmitigated damage should be (1 + 1.3*.3) = 1.39 times the base damage above, so it's going to be doing about 553 unmitigated damage on average, or about 18.4 unmitigated damage per energy - again, far lower.

So, what we conclude here is: 1 point eviscerates are terribly inefficient from an energy-to-damage perspective, and thus have no reasonable place in cycles. If you don't have time for at least a 2-point eviscerate, you're better off just throwing Sinister Strikes or backstabs.

What this means is: 1s/5r/1e is never going to be a viable cycle. You'd have to get to at least 1s/5r/2e before it made sense, and the energy requirements on that are sufficiently absurd that i don't think we need to worry about them just yet. My instinct would be that after 1s/5r you start wasting combo points and/or SnD uptime, but I'll have to think about that.

2.3 is not 2.

Oh, oops, forgot that Evis isn't on Lethality. Stupid me. That botches up the backstab numbers as well.

Oh, and it looks like I accidentally used 5/5 Leth for daggers instead of 4/5 like I said. I really shouldn't be doing math while half-asleep. Blah.

Anyway:

Assuming 25% crit rate for swords, the new numbers are:

SS: 1225 unmitigated damage per 40 energy = 30.6 dam/energy
1pt Evis (Swords): 498 unmitigated damage per 30 energy = 16.6 dam/energy

BS: 2295 unmitigated damage per 60 energy = 38.2 dam/energy
1 pt Evis (Daggers) = 518 unmitigated damage per 30 energy = 17.3

Point remains: 1 pt evis is useless in cycles.

I have been here a few different times and being in college I am really interested in some of this math and what you guys are able to do. What I don't have is the time to go over all of this information. I would really like to try this out but don't have a link. There is the one at the beginning but I know bugs and such have been discovered and taken care of. Can someone please throw me a quick link to the exact damage spread sheet we are using in the latest version.

Thanks in advance!

O, and I have a link to my armory if you click my name. Any pointers would be appreciated as far as what gems to use for best outcome.

The link in the first post is to a site that hosts the latest version of the sheet.

Thanks, but i messed this up and found something else that may help everyone out.
If you are looking for a variable Definition:
Insert->Name->Define

That will give you a list of all the variables on the sheet, i think i didn't cross reference everything but at first glance it looked okay, Go to the variable you are looking for and it will tell you where it is defined.

So using that, i found out skhit is == .2, i guess i forgot to uncheck the "New Blue +skill", but that is besides the point. I Hope this helps anyone out.

I'll look over that tomorrow and see if there are any problems with it. I know its not simple, and thats a reason I never did it as I preferred to work on other parts of the sheet when I had time.

Right now.
I'm well aware that at the moment a /1e cycle is going to be hopeless compared to simply throwing in an extra spam move.
As I was saying though, the point is that the trend is always in one direction - that of reduced enrgy costs for the same effects. A year ago, we were saying you couldn't stabilise a cycle without using a 5s - now it appears 1s/5r is perfectly stable thanks to Combat Potency combined with 2 pc Netherblade.

Who's to say at some point in the future we don't get a talent 'Excessive Pain - Whilst you have S&D buff and mob has a Rupture Debuff from you, your other finishers cost 25 energy less' or T7 2 pc is 'Your finishers reduce the energy cost of your spam move by 10 energy for 6s'.

All kinds of stuff could be thrown in by Blizzard, but in general it's towards cycle compression. And if that's the case where do you go after 1s/5r?

Also...
The 'no slack' cycle stuff appears to make sense. A lot simpler than solutions I was envisaging. Well done Siq for a rather elegant solution, I can't see any problems with it.
Not sure why though, but row 32 of the unbuffed cycles is incorrect in cells b,c,d,e,f. They reference X5+x16 when it should be x7+x18

I would actually like to see a rupture-cycle for mutilate specs

my current cycle is always 4 CP+ finishers, I keep SnD running and use Rupture as my main-finisher. Evis only, if rupture is still running (depending on relentless/crits).

Since we mostly got the mangle buff, a 5cp rupture ticks for 280 every 2 seconds (for a total of 2300), which i think is clearly superior compared to average evis-dmg

Just a quick question while i'm at work : how many ticks does a full 5cp rupture ?

I've been running with a rupture->snd cycle as well. It seems with mangle and the high-armor mobs in TBC rupture is a better damage finisher than eviserate.

Is there anyway to calculate the difference of a rupture vs evis.. with and without mangle?

damn, that was my test row were i edited all the things to get it working as a snd time wasting cycle, later i coppied it to the bottom and coppied the lines from the old version over row 32, somehow I made a mistake there, sry ^^

new version:
http://www.savefile.com/files/657273

- fixed the row 32 mistakes
- changed the gladiator weapon stats (took stats from tb testhttp://www.thottbot.com/test/?f=w&na...=&c3=gt&v3=&e=)
- standard buffed pots I set to the 120 ap elixir, because with 2.1 flask/elixir get nerved pretty hard

chosen equip you can see in the new version (somehow "speed equip" -> abacus, dragonspine)
results:
with handgrips of assassination:
unbuffed -> 3s/5r with 923,6 dps
buffed -> 4s/5r no slack with 1302,2
with nb gloves -> 2nb bonus:
unbuffed -> 1s/5r no slack with 930,1
buffed -> 1s/5r no slack with 1304,9

well, my conclusion:
2nb is quite nice, difficult to get better dps without, with the new engi goggles you should be able to make more buffed dps for example
but well, i only tested this equip, feel free to test some sets yourself ^^


and another little thing:
latro's is still quite good if the numbers are correct
obviosly the quickblade takes more profit out of haste items like dragonspine trophy
without abacus+dragonspine latro's is somehow still able to do more dmg buffed (blue post turned off)

ticks every 2 secs for 16 seconds, so 8 ticks

ofc. I won't include it by myself, since I think the spreadsheet won't work afterwards
so i hope PF takes a look at it.

there are several factors to take care of:
-rupture can't crit
-rupture not affected by find weakness (?)
-rupture 25energy, evis 35 energy

Ok, looked over your solution and there is a pretty big problem with it. The more SnD time you waste, the more dps you do (try forcing the snd value to 100 and see what I mean). The dps should remain the same for any amount of time that has "slack energy". Fixing this problem is a lot simpler than I first thought. On the Cycle time cell, you used EEC to determine the cycle time. Unfortunately, EEC only counts non-snd cpot procs. The easiest solution is to include make a 2nd EEC cell next to the first one for SND EEC(just multiply L1 by 1.3 from the previous formula). Using this fix, I was able to see constant dps on the cycle as long as I had slack energy which is exactly the way it should be. Also, you should work with Bleedo to get this into the main version of the sheet.

I will say this however, I would test out the 1s/5r rotation a bit before I used it in practice. I would guess that you would have a fair amount of SnD downtime due to unlucky procs. 2s/5r might be a better in-game solution. Anyway, from your practice determine the lowest snd value required to keep up the cycle and I would suggest that, that cycles that cannot be sustained in practice due to unlucky procs be left out of the sheet.

Edit: Just noticed that KoTS modeling does not give it extra CP procs since its tied into BF and uses a flat .26 value. Someone should put an if statement into M5 on the cycle sheets to make it .5526 with KoTS instead of .26

well. somehow it doesn't seem to work, I think i missunderstood something

what exactly is "ueec"/"eec", is it combat potency energy per sec without snd, or is it something else?

L1*1,3 decreases the dps with rising snd time o.o

so I basically understand the problem with no snd eec and snd eec, without knowing what eec exactly respresents I have my trouble understanding what could bei the problem with L1*1,3

greez siq

*edit*
well seems to be combat potency energy per sec without snd
gonna look at the whole thing again, later

Fel Strength has been knocked down to 90 AP/-10 Sta. Major Agility is probably the best elixir to be using.

Ok, so I've been doing some work with AEP and such... partially to help myself learn the crazy thing that is function writing in excel, and partially cause I'd always wished this functionality was already in the spreadsheet.

The file is hosted here: http://putstuff.putfile.com/71012/3332335

Check the Helm spreadsheet to see what I've been doing, mostly. (Short description: an in-spreadsheet version of Sp00n's AEP site where it takes the calculated AEP values from the gear you have on and applies them to all the gear available for easy piece comparison. Handy little graph to go along with it too. :] )

Few things though: how does the VLOOKUP work in the Gear_Buffs sheet? I tried copying the formula and just changing the column number to get the buffed AEP and unbuffed AEP to show up in the left hand columns, but no luck... what have I done wrong?

I may just use my first little project instead of a direct lookup if I can't get it working: http://putstuff.putfile.com/71015/3721013

This just puts the AEP in the left columns, no modification to the item tables.

Even before this nerf, the 120 AP is not as good as 35agi and 20 crit, if you look at it from an AEP stand point.

With the default gear, and buffs, 120AP = 44.39 AEP and 35agi and 20crit = 50.85. (Combat Daggers)

Link doesn't work, but most likely you forgot to expand the array VLOOKUP searches to include the AEP column.

AEP doesn't matter to me. I'd rather see some data from the spreadsheet and with my build and gear, the current fel strength is about 5dps better.

After the nerf, agil is better by 4 dps.

For some people that might be the case - in general, I've found that an Elixir of Major Agi gives between 110 and 115 AP of benefit for most of the gear setups I've tried. However, the fact that Fel Str decreases survivability and Major Agi increases it made me prefer it slightly anyway. While this is somewhat moot for Major Agi vs Fel Str, it is somewhat interesting in terms of what's going to happen with flasks in the next patch. Seems to me that using Major Agi + a defense pot is generally going to put you in better shape than flasking in the expansion, which forces me to wonder how often it will be worth using flasks at all... seems to my that Flasks would be more appropriately balanced if they were up around 160 AP.