I'm not sure where to go to find the most updated stats as Wowhead and the armory are still out of date, but I was under the impression that only the hard mode weapons were getting upgraded to 3.6. Not that it matters for overall BIS sets, but I'm not including 10 or 25 man hardmodes in my gear set personally.

But really, shouldn't the top end weapon DPS be the only number that matters due to normalization? The 3.6 switch will change that number, of course, but it isn't actually the speed itself that is important.

Weapon speed *does* matter. Just not as much as it used to long ago before normalization.

For instant strikes only (not auto-attacks), the damage bonus from AP is calculated as follows:

normalized_damage = base_weapon_damage + (X * Attack Power / 14)

where X is:

* 1.7 for daggers
* 2.4 for other one-handed weapons
* 3.3 for two-handed weapons
* 2.8 for ranged weapons

(taken from wowwiki - Normalization - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft - yeah yeah it's wowwiki, I know, but the formula is correct)

So let's say you have two 2H weapons with a DPS of 250, and you have 5000 AP:

Weapon A: 250 DPS, 4.0 speed, 1000 average damage.
Weapon B: 250 DPS, 3.0 speed, 750 average damage.

The damage bonus from AP, for both weapons, is (3.3 * 5000 / 14) = 1178.57. Let's call it 1200 for ease on the eyes.

The effective damage for Weapon A is then 2200, and for Weapon B it's 1950.

The slower weapon will be getting roughly 250 more damage per instant strike, even though their white DPS is the same because it's not normalized. Of course when you factor in all the instant strike damage % modifiers and additions, the numbers change a bit either up or down, but it's quite clear that slower weapon = better, when their DPS is the same.

There may be other factors such as talents/procs that benefit from a faster weapon, but I'll leave that out of these very simple calculations.

Resolved

This is exactly what I meant. It's not the weapon speed itself that matters, but the average damage that results from the combination of weapon DPS + weapon speed. There isn't any need for the actual weapon speed to be added into calculations, but it seems it would be useful to look at average damage. I thought top end damage was the one relevant for calculations, though. My mistake.

People often get confused with terminology, speed, top end, average damage, etc. I just thought I'd try and clarify it for all involved. Hope it helped!

*edit: and yeah, the speed itself doesn't matter for instants, except as it's a component of the DPS & average damage calculations, as you pointed out.

One thing I would like to point out of people havent said this already. Frost Strike or SS are effected by SPELL hit. Being so you should really make sure you are getting to the spell hit cap as best as possible ( all depending on your spec + class debuffs ).

For me, I need 289 hit in order to get the spell hit cap ( thats with virulence + 3% hit from a spriest or boomkin ). If you are horde and play frost.

EDIT: got the exact hit number

Yeah I thought so too, but you aren't thinking like a caster like I was ( I sadly never knew being under the spell hit cap as a caster caused bosses to partly resist your spells ). Spell hit works differently from melee hit, if you are over the melee hit cap you wont miss a FS but if you are under the spell hit cap then you will see partly resisted FS attacks consistantly in a boss fight. Partial resists can take a big chunk of damage throughout a fight, and it really sucks.

Example: Frost Strike crits [BOSS] for 10004 ( 500 resisted ).

So my point is even though you are at the melee hit cap, you are still hurting your DPS being under the spell hit cap if you play frost with partial resists ( other things partly resist to, but FS is a big chunk of your DPS ).

If you want to read more about spell hit, Spell hit - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

Within the article is a statement specifically pertaining to your dilemma.

Unless you have any data from people that shows them at your proposed cap and that their partial resists are removed at that point then this is your answer.

EDIT: Placed actual quotes within the quote. Redundancy sucks.

I'll post some later.

Taken from the DW Unholy Thread

4) What determines partial resists?

Answer: Originally Posted by Zyrm
As an additional note, what is *actually* responsible for partial resists on bosses is weapon skill. For example, if you tried to scourge strike a level 80 mob with 1 weapon skill, aside from parries/dodges, the strikes you DID land would be mitigated in half (which is actually the most a SS can resist, it will always hit for at least half damage)... until you're weapon skill was at or near max. Since Raid bosses count as your level +3, and there is currently no way to raise weapon skill beside the level max, you will always see partial resists in raids.

Another side note, when you see a strike that says, say "Your SS hits X for 4000 (200 resisted)", you wouldn't have originally done 4200 damage, but actually quite a bit more. The (X resisted) is actually before modifiers/buffs/talents/crits, so in reality, if half a strike was resisted, you might actually see something like "Your SS hits for 2.5k (1.9k resisted)". Just some food for thought. I can't tell you how many time's I've seen 5500(900 resisted) when my SS crits that don't resist always break 8k.

Yeah after some more reading you are correct, damn my newbie self with being a melee class for 4 years :[

Yeah I'm tweaking the Blood section atm so some of it might be a bit weird. I think the set in question should actually have 28 expertise IIRC.

I think I'm going to add more sets to the tables too so that each setup (normal; pre-Heroic hard mode; hit/exp capped) has a Horde version and an Alliance version.

A new plate belt just dropped from 10-man Algalon to consider for BIS:



Overall, a -11 str, -47 hit, -24 crit, +56 exp from Colossal Rage. There is also a red socket in place of a blue socket which will come in handy once JC gems are no longer pristmatic.

Those pants are definitely nice. For blood, you can swap Girdle of Embers for those, and then swap Sif's Promise for strength of the automaton and still get a solid amount of armor pen, more strength, and still stay right at the expertise cap.

Unholy and frost would be wise to use these too if you want to stay close to expertise capped through T8.5 chest, Bladebearer's Signet and this. It is fairly easy to get hit capped other places if you drop the Belt of Colossal Rage. Also like you said it is a red socket over blue. With JC's possibly leaning towards Eternal Earthsiege Diamond + Siren's Tear, this is a strong candidate for using that combo.

Ok for blood set , since new armor pen cap at 100% and it's hot fixed like a week ago. Our cap is at 90% with 10% from talents. Sunder armor and FF is not included in this cap because they add on top of 100% cap. According to warrior forums 443 armor pen is cap if you are using mjolnir runestone. Anything more will be wasted when the trinket procs. Now Do we wanna form a set around a trinket? or we want to try to get close to 1k armor pen from gear.

Edit: Well according to my gear when I put on 75% passive arp without the trinket I am better off with another trinket.

would the new JC gem changes effect the BiS?

Armor Penetration still is our best stat after Hit/Expertise and of course strength. So you will still want to maximize it, the trinket doesnt have by far 100% uptime.

I definitely would reconsider taking another trinket.

Armor Penetration continues to scale up to the cap when weighting our stats. It should be noted that there is a point where Armor Penetration is more valuable than Strength (around 6200 buffed AP), and is easily attained in full Ulduar gear.

Sorry for not posting these sooner. I've been fairly busy at work.

Blood and Frost set bonus weights:
(still not confident with my frost numbers)

Blood	APE
T7-2p	60
T7-4p	39
T8-2p	83
T8-4p	104

Frost	APE
T7-2p	73
T7-4p	97
T8-2p	150 (would go up with extra IT&glyph)
T8-4p	75 (would go down with extra IT)

Blood is pretty straight forward so I'm for the most part comfortable with those numbers. My Frost sim has a hard time doing extra IT's instead of OB's so the frost weights are based on a rotation/priority of:

PS IT BS BS OB - OB PS IT OB ...etc. with FS's and HB's according to RP levels and Rime procs.

Remember. Grain of salt.

As usual Frost is more complex to evaluate. Thanks for you data, I was gonna go through something similar to try and evaluate the difference in dps increase for the different rotations of frost.

The main problem is that at the moment Frost has 5 "viable" dps rotations:

1 for the HB glyph:

HB OB BS BS > OB OB (HB) OB

3 for the IT glyph setup

PS IT BS BS OB > OB IT IT OB

PS IT OB BS BS > OB PS IT OB

PS IT BS BS OB > OB PS IT IT IT

1 for the DRM IT machinegun setup:

OB OB BS BS > IT IT IT IT IT IT


While the IT machinegun is superior to everything else (both for ease of play and the broken-ness of the IT glyph), and the HB one is slightly inferior to the others, the dps difference between the various speccs is so thin and so tied to different gear setups that calculating stat weights is a pain for Frost.

I just tried forcing a IT machinegun spam rotation with FS/HB's at certain intervals and came up with this adjustment:

Frost IT spam	APE
T7-2p	49
T7-4p	190
T8-2p	230
T8-4p	30

Interesting but fits in with what we know already for T8. T7 4p on the other hand seems a bit high. I'll try to find errors in a bit. And yes, IT Machinegun seems to be the best by a slight degree in my simulations at the moment so this may be a better estimate of what people should expect (until changes are made).

Still... Grain of salt.

UPDATE: The reason for the change in value for T7 4P bonus is that the extra RP was not really adding to the other OB heavy rotation because in order to use the RP gained you would have to occasionally push the rotation back in Blood Presence. The IT spam rotation is obviously a Unholy Pres rotation and therefor can use the full potential of T7 4P bonus. That's my theory at least.

Is there a reason the Algalon quest reward cloak isn't being included on here? For Unholy, if you look at the "No restrictions w/Draenie Aura" set, adding the cloak will get you just slightly over Hit cap without needing a Draenie, and without having to roll against Agi classes for the Drape of the Faceless General. With Unholy stat weights the Algalon comes out very slightly ahead, but only because the Hit is actually usable. If the Hit is wasted, DotFG is still better.