For any DPS class, the only meta of any value is [Chaotic Skyflare Diamond]. In fact, it's so valuable that it's essentially not worth grabbing any helm without a meta slot, due to the strange ways in which the crit bonus is added. For gems, yeah, just use the weights given on the sheet for whatever stats they happen to have on them.

Unless I'm messing something up, the spreadsheet is giving me a weight of 2.01 for Crit, which seems REALLY high. I keep going back over stuff to see if I've missed anything, but I can't seem to find it...unless Crit really IS that good, which seems unlikely (51/0/20 diseaseless blood).

For completeness' sake, you might consider [Relentless Earthsiege Diamond] if you're not a jewelcrafter, as it requires one fewer blue gem. Depending on your particular weight for agility and socket bonuses from blue gems, it is conceivable that you would lose less by trading out a blue gem than you would gain by replacing the 21 agi with 21 crit. I also ran RED instead of CSD in my Titansteel helm for a week or so after hitting 80, due to a general lack of socketed gear.

AP	1.00
Crit	1.13
Hit	0.78
Expertise	0.78
Haste	0.56
DPS (Weapon)	4.91
Strength	2.52
Agility	0.18

These are the values I got for an 0/32/39 DW build. I Input it into a gear ranking site too just to see how it would rank things:

Death Knight Gear Rankings.

Looks pretty good for the most part. Crit does seem a little high to me though. Then again that may be because I have practically none on my gear...

However you're spell hit capped, while the majority of DKs are not. So hit should actually be quite a bit more for most DKs. Try those weights at a melee hit cap instead.

I should have mentioned this earlier, but are you manually inputing the crit percentages for IT/HB? Due to Killing Machine, I can't directly calculate them, so you just have to copy them over from a parse. Should be around 50-60%, for a standard set of gear.

I didn't manually input skill crit rates, but it/hb were at 51/67% respectively without any modification. I don't have a parse to take values from but that seems accurate enough.

Also lowering hit rating to 290 (from 394) raises the hit weighting to 1.8.

I should also probably mention that I did not turn on all buffs because I rarely have misery/impff, unleashed rage/abom's might or blood frenzy/blood poisoning.

So with 290 hit and all buffs turned on it looks like:

AP	1.00
Crit	1.25
Hit	1.92
Expertise	0.83
Haste	0.63
DPS (Weapon)	4.91
Strength	2.66
Agility	0.25

Death Knight Gear Rankings.

which seems a bit more accurate, from what I can tell anyways

Deep Unholy specs are hard to calculate correctly. Not only does it have the Ghoul which scales with Strength and Haste, but it also has talents like Desecration, Bone Shield, Blood Caked Blade, and Necrosis.

Haste doesn't just increase white damage. It also increases Necrosis, Blood Caked Blade and all pet damage. It also lowers spell GCD which is a big deal for the Duel Wield builds as an extra move every 10 seconds can add a lot of DPS.

The problem I see is a spec like 0/13/58 that has so many multipliers and all of the above things:

Example: A 1000 damage white damage melee hit with 0/13/58 produces this:

1000 * 1.15 * 1.05 * 1.02 = 1231.65 which rounds down to 1231. Necrosis takes that 1231 as it's base.

1231 * 1.15 * 1.13 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 1.02 * 0.2 = 376.917 which rounds down to 376.

Because of modifers, Necrosis actually deals roughly 30% of the white hits that 0/13/58 produces. Modifiers cause white hits to be roughly 23% more effective (versus 15% with just blood presence).

One other thing I just noticed: I am not getting the 3% strength bonus from Ravenous Dead. I stripped my character of all gear and my base strength is 180 and my modified strength is 183 which is what you would expect with only a 2% bonus. I should have 189 strength.

Various talents that modify overall damage (Bone Armor, Desecration etc.) or even the overall damage of a particular spell (Glyph of Obliterate, Black Ice) don't affect stat weightings. Only the modifiers that affect the individual components of damage (AP, Crit, Haste etc.) do. This is easily seen if you refer to the original post. If you multiply the entire left side of the general damage equation by a flat multiplier, the term will fall out of the expression when you compute the weighting formula.

Since the damage calculation for Necrosis from Death Knight stat values is the same as it is for white damage (scaled down by a constant), my current assumption is that you can simply add the percentage of your damage from Necrosis into the the percentage of damage that resulted from white hits. If anyone thinks otherwise, please let me know.

I haven't yet done stat weights for BCB, though they should be similar to those for white damage and Necrosis.

Expertise and Hit Rating have a weight > 0 after reaching both melee/spell hit caps and expertise dodge/parry caps if the portion of white damage/melee swings is > 0%. I think this is because of a missing check if melee swings can miss or get dodged (parried) in field J33 and K33 of the weights page. Adding after the "=" seems to fix it, though i have no idea what it means (excel noob here).


edit: Furthermore you should add the Bladed Armor talent and Armor as a weighted stat. Agility, since it also grants armor, will be affected too.

Haste seems quite undervalued for that DW number crunch. I don't see in the initial formulas any way to model:
A. increased DPS due to smaller GCD on spellcasts from Haste.
B. increased Killing Machine Procs due to more white hits from Haste.

I too find the haste ratings very low. IIRC it was established that haste offers more procs due to the ppm mechanic of killing machine.

Ret Paladin's special attacks are on a two-roll system, and they are similar to DK (both have melee and spell attacks).


Once someone had useful stat weights, they could be used with Pawn to give your tooltips a gear rating.

Including a Pawn string into the Excel file is pretty simple (once you have figured out all the subtle quirks):

Not sure about CHAR and REPLACE though, this was a more or less direct translation from German Excel. If you want to make sure, just check the excel sheet linked to in my signature, this should automatically translate to each localized Excel version.

This is what I got when I opened your sheet in excel:
So CHAR and SUBSTITUTE are the commands in English localization.

That is a neat sheet.

Thanks for the nifty tool. Got some hit rating and agility related issues at least. I put my stats and raidbuffs into sheet and got following result:

AP 1.00
Crit 1.43
Hit 2.12
Expertise 0.86
Haste 0.66
DPS (Weapon) 4.91
Strength 2.68
Agility 0.24

Important Values
Attack Power 6272.68
Crit Chance (Melee) 32%
Crit Chance (Spells) 22%
Hit Chance (Melee) 98.00%
Hit Chance (DW) 80.27%
Hit Chance (Spells) 98%
Haste (Melee) 29%
Base Weapon Damage 1685.50
2 Hand 1
Dual Wield 0

With hit rating 304 my hit chance for melee should be 100% and with raid buffs added spell hit 97.5ish% so 2.12 rating for hit is way too high (or is expertise included in this value? if it is then it's ok). Propably capping issue. Also majority of damage comes from melee + strikes, since crit rating is rated quite high agility can't be as low as 0.24

Other than that looks quite promising sheet.

-> You can fix this error on your own.

Excel is whining about the 08 value on string... been too long since I have played with excel formulas. Anyways not big deal. What comes to agility weighting if I remember right at 80 45.91 crit rating is 1% crit and for DK's 62.5 agi is 1% crit + armor from agi giving AP via bladed armor.

With my stat weights agi value should be bit over 1. Well not really that high since agi only affects to melee crit which is around 60% of my total damage agi value should be around 0.5 + - something.

Hello, I've been reading these forums for about two years now, primarily in the Priest forums (I played a shadow priest in BC). This is my first post as a forum user, and I will admit it is a bit intimidating posting here. That aside, I chose to play a death knight in WotLK because I enjoy the complexity of the class. I hope that I can contribute where it is appropriate, and receive assistance when my questions aren't dumb

The math in the OP isn't completely foreign to me, but it is a little bit out of my league. Thankfully, I think I somewhat understand how the spreadsheet works and where the numbers are coming from. This is actually the first spreadsheet I've used and one of my prime concerns (everyone's concern really) is that they are choosing the best gear they can. The author of the OP listed some tips a few posts down on how to use the spreadsheet correctly, and that really helped in my understanding of it (please put those in the OP if you can, they were helpful).

I picked up Awareness (finally, I was super pumped) a few nights ago and ran to the Ebon Hold dummy. As always, it was at 1hp but did not have EP on it if I remember correctly. I could hit about 3200 dps popping only Blood Fury and with HoW. This seems about right with my current gear.

I wanted to post here because I just wanted to double check to make sure the stat values I got were the correct ones. I changed the 'Outside Raid' stats to my own, as well as the MH stats. Currently, my build is a 17/54/0 Frost 2H build with the IT-OB-BS-OB-FS rotation. I'm using a Death's Bite with 4piece T7. I assumed I was supposed to leave the OH stats alone, and just set '2 hand' to '1' and 'Dual Wield' to '0' on the weights page.

Here are the stats I got from the spreadsheet:

AP	1.00
Crit	1.83
Hit	0.54
Expertise	1.20
Haste	0.40
DPS (Weapon)	2.84
Strength	2.53
Agility	0.34

I was wondering if these stats sound about right for my spec and gear. Any sort of criticism or help is much appreciated. I feel like this spreadsheet is amazing for helping all of us chose the proper gear and if I am using it correctly, I will be a happy camper. Thanks for reading and yay for my first forum post :P

I'm new to using this, so I may be doing something wrong but I noticed my Frost Strike % to crit was 0% and it says to manually enter it. my base was 16% melee crit and I estimated 5% more for deathchill and KM procs. SO... I put in 21% for Frost Strike crit and I notice that crit rating scale sits as .68 still, shouldn't this be affected?

Also, with 2H set to 1, why do I get divide by zero errors when deleting the OH weapon data entries? Shouldn't all OH stuff be ignored when telling the spreadsheet that you use a 2 hander?

Would someone mind giving me a ballpark figure on what my hit rating value should really be VERSUS SAME LEVEL MOBS if this spreadsheet tells me its 0.99? (I would guess between 0.33-0.5 or so since I'm not raiding yet)

At what point should I switch from a 2hander to DW? For example my current 2hander is 60dps and I have a 53 dps 1hander. Stats and base weapon damage aside, how much dps will my OH need to be to DW?

I've just looked through the spreadsheet: It looks quite OK but there's a quite big mistake with IT/HB/FS. Because of the Nature of KM (granting a 100% crit chance) it lowers the absolute average crit chance increase through crit rating. A small example:
You have 50% crit on IT without KM and KM up 50% of the time, so you're having 50% guaranteed crits and of the remaining 50% another 50% are crits through your normal crit chance, resulting in a 75% chance.
If you increase your crit chance by 1% through crit rating, your spreadsheet assumes the 75% chance you input increases to 76%, in reality it's only 50%+50%*51%=75.5%.

I'm also not quite sure why there is the DW miss chance in the Oblit formula, no miss chance in the PS formula and the spell miss chances in the BS/HS formulas used.

Meh... the elite wow community seems to be dying, this isn't the only theorycrafting thread not being serviced very often. Even WoWhead seems to have far less constructive posts these days. My question is, where is everyone going? A new game? A new website? RL? Reminds me of when thottbot started to suck and I discovered all the smart, active people snuck off to wowhead/elitistjerks.