1500-1600 'paper' dps with any/all raid buffs? i can link a spreadsheet with those numbers

Spreadsheets also say +damage is more dps than crit. I held 2k sustained for the first time ever last night on Illidan for all of P1, til I pulled aggro at 68% and died. I did stay up for about 8 hits though, go go Pillar of Boom. (:

But to be honest I don't put much faith into paper dps, its all estimation in a perfect situation.

Here is last nights, Wow Web Stats

Illidan second to last try is where I held 2k, died, got brez'd then we pulled aggro again in P2.

On council, it was the best dps I've ever done 1400 sustained for the first 7 minutes or so, until I took a posion/flame in 3 seconds of each other.

Edit: Guess it was 4:20, seemed like it was longer, you lose track of time on that fight though. Oh and no shadow priest for either Council or Illidan.

Edit 2: Some simple changes.

I have been wondering what the MFx2 SFx11 rotation refers to. As it stands now I use MF SFx2 IS SFx2 with my 4 piece tier 5 to keep the bonus going smoothly but the spreadsheet says that the former is my highest dps. I apologize if this has been answered, I read through a few pages but 24 is a lot to look through.

Mf, Sfx5(ish), Mf, Sfx6(ish)
Depending on NG procs. The spell cycles are based around DoT duration and average cast times. You never actually get average... you either get faster or slower, depending on how your crits stack up.

EDIT: Lemme know if you discover the new FAQ is missing any repeat questions from this thread...

Are there any Itemslists for Balance like Toskks' calc lists?

No, but you could try lootzor.com - World of Warcraft search and rate items - profile your wow character

Theres some stat weighing earlier in this thread and that should give you a general idea.

My Dr. Boom tests showed a decrease in dps with idol swapping . I have pretty low latency and that didn't seem to help.

The largest problem I had, was that if I hit starfire too quickly, and the moonfire global cooldown had not finished, then starfire would not cast, but the idol swap would still occur, introducing another global cooldown, and screw me out of 1.5 seconds.

If you have higher latency it may work in your favor by not causing this problem.

For me, running under 100ms latency, it was clear that the increase in dps I was receiving from potential procs was offset by the time I was losing due to having to watch the global cooldown too closely between moonfire and starfire in a standard IS/MF/SF totation.

I suppose the ideal would be to have 2 starfire macros, and swap the idol on the 2nd starfire, insuring that you don't get a swap misfire and cause an extra global cooldown.

That's my experience anyway.

I've found an increase in DPS using idol swaps, however it's MUCH lower than it should be and if 2.3.2 doesn't fix it I will be putting my unseen moon idol in the bank.

I have 150-300 ms ping and I watch my gcd and cast time VERY closely so I don't swap in the idol without casting the spell but the idol swap can screw you over if your not carefull.

The idol swap seems to add double your ping to the GCD, (same as the red section on quartz.)

2.3.2 will add a cooldown of 30 seconds to the unseen moon idol, making it theoreticly a MINOR increase in dps with swaps compaired to the starfire idol and a MAJOR decrease without swaps. If they don't fix the extra GCD time using it will make you lose dps period.

You can fix this by changing the Starfire/Wrath macro:

Then the idol will only equip if you successfully started the spellcast.

Caliane and Saph/Neth did some calcs, but here are some simple numbers that can be used as a rough estimate:

With 140 spell damage, let's assume for each starfire you cast while this effect is active, your starfires will net you 300 more damage, on average including all crits and raid debuffs. It's less than 300, but this is a nice round number, and serves as an upper limit. For insect swarm, we'll assume 120 extra damage.

Let's further assume your rotation is MF, SFx2, IS, SF, for a 12 second rotation that allows you to get the most benefit from your 8.5 second proc. So currently, off of a proc, you will get 300 x2 and 120 x1 extra damage. Total of 720 damage for each proc. So on average, this is 360 damage per 12 second cycle increase using this idol in the current state. Yes, I am completely ignoring the fact that you lose the SF idol benefit for the last SF you cast. Easy math, and upper limit.

So to answer Kermit's quesiton, about if its worth swapping idols to increase damage:
In 2.3: Yes
In 2.3.2: No, bank that garbage and write an in game petition to the GM to report a bug where Geras is selling an item that clearly should be sold by Griftah.
However, either way, do NOT use the MF+MF idol swap. It only procs if your previous spell cast ended very close to the time you use the macro, and the extra incurred GCD is NOT worth the benefit even right now.

360 damage per 12 second cycle is 30 dps. Let's use a decently geared Kara moonkin, who can pull in 800 dps. You must have a 37.5 ms ping in order to even BREAK EVEN. Even at 300 dps, which I'm sure a moonkin in a full of the owl green armor set could pull, your ping would have to be less than 100 ms to even gain benefit from this macro.

Maax's [casting] method does not seem to work for me, and as such, the benefit from swapping is minimal. If you can do 800 dps, spending more than 40 ms due to safe idol swapping only lowers your damage.

In a perfect 0 latency connection where you hit your GCDs right on the mark and have 0 ms delay in between spells, you'd get a 30 dps increase right now, and about a 15 dps increase in 2.3.2. However, if like me, your connection is greater than 0, by a substantial amount like say, 50 ms(which I would kill for), then it becomes far harder to advocate idol swapping at all due to the threat of eating a double GCD period for hitting a macro too fast.

I normally play in Taiwan with 500ms+ delay as my previous tests state, and for Christmas break I have about 30 ms delay(yay west coast). After testing it out here, and crunching out the numbers some more, I've completely removed all idol swapping macros from my bar. It's simply not worth the amount of effort and risk for the tiny DPS reward as it stands, and in 2.3.2 it's basically pure garbage.

That's too bad, I had hoped I found a solution for it. Any idea why it doesn't work? Logically it should.

I am new to Moonkin DPS.

The spreadsheet says MFx2, SFx11 is the best DPS rotation. Why would you Moonfire twice in a row right after first one?

A simple search of this thread for "MFx2, SFx11" would get you this post that answers your question.

Simply reading the last page of the thread would have answered that as well. I know because I asked it.

Now that the useless portion of my post is done I do have a serious question.

Has anyone done a theorycraft for the Lightning Capacitor trinket compared to Quagmirran's Eye? Most people who I have talked to have said that Quagmirran's is superior but every time that I attempt to compare the two I get a calculation saying that the Lightning Capacitor gives me more DPS with my current gear.

Is there a point where the crit percentage is high enough to warrant the use of the Lightning Capacitor over Quagmirran's or am I simply forgetting something in my calculations?

First - since we seems to have concluded that idol swapping is currently a big no-no, what idols are you using? Unseen moon all the time? SF idol all the time? Wrath idol on trash mobs with a swap to SF idol on bosses?

Anyway, regarding this:

I got the Capacitor just a few days ago, and looked around for calculations about how good it actually is. I came across these calculations on wowhead. I have no idea how correct they are, but they calculate the average damage boost you get from the trinket. I'll cut'n paste the calculations here:

Inserting my own numbers in this formula resulted in about +65 dmg for me. A trinket that adds an equivalent of +65 spelldam on average (and a lot more with higher crit %) sure seems like a good deal to me. Can anyone more familiar with it comment on the math above?

The problem with the equation is it does not take into account the casting time of your spells. I actually use it when I equip my moonfire idol, aka heroics or lower, or raid trash. Here's my rough calculation method. It's not great, but just to give you an idea:

My char sheet says my crit rate is 25%, so W and SF have 29% crit, MF has 35% crit. Each crit gives 1 charge, worth 250 damage on average. Given a 50% damage bonus on a crit(the proc does not gain benefit from our talents) and the afforementioned 25% crit rate, this is about 281.25 damage per charge.

Heroics, raid trash rotation: MF, Wx7.
This is a 12 second rotation, and the average charges gained from it are:
0.35*1 + 0.29*7 = 2.38. This is 2.38 * 281.25 / 12 = 55.78 dps. However, you can only get a charge every 2.5 seconds, and statistics class was so long ago, so I don't quite remember how to deal with this fact in math terms.

Raid rotation: MF, SFx4
13.5 second rotation, average charges gained is:
0.35*1 + 0.29*4 = 1.51
1.51 * 281.25 / 13.5 = 31.48 dps.

Using the moonkin spreadsheet, each +1 damage converts to roughly 0.7 dps, so:
Heroic rotation: 55.78/.7 = ~80 + damage
Raid rotation: 31.48/.7 = ~45 + damage

The heroic rotation is of course an overestimate, so it's somewhere between the raid and heroic numbers. For trash I like to use Icon of the Silver Crescent + Lit Cap, and for raid bosses, I use Icon of the Silver Crescent + Battlemaster's or Alchemist stone, depending. (The health clicky can be very useful!)

Of course if I ever get the Hex Shrunken Head, I'll most likely stop using the Lightning Capacitor completely. I'd rate it just a little below the Icon of the Silver Crescent in terms of a DPS trinket.

End result of best cast cycle is:

macro #1 x3

#showtooltip Starfire
/cast Starfire
/equip [noequipped: Ivory Idol of the Moongoddess] Ivory Idol of the Moongoddess

Macro #2 x1

#showtooltip
/cast Starfire
/equip [noequipped: Idol of the Unseen Moon] Idol of the Unseen Moon

Moonfire x1


Results:

Before idol swapping w/ Starfire idol equipped - 750 dps
Before idol swapping w/ Moonfire idol equiped - 830 dps
Using Idol Swapping - 920 dps

These results were from the invulnerable mobs in blasted lands. I did not cast moonfire again if it did not proc, as it would be innacurate for long term results.

I tried IS and wrath in my rotation, but found that because of the GCD, i lost tons of DPS in the long run. Later that night, I tried this same rotation in kara, but did spam moonfire until lunar grace proc'd. My dps was near 1k on all boss fights. 6.6k starfire crits makes baby jesus happy.

Needless to say, I am very happy with my new "Idol of the Unseen Moon" and using idol swapping!

Ever consider using the Crusader deck on bosses instead?

I keep questioning the validity of this chart. For the sake of the TLC mostly.

Whenever I break down my log I always pay attention to my lightning bolts. I always have LB's that don't make any sense. I get several in the 840 to 900 region as hits, and my crits are never below 1160. Now my first thought was this is due to stormstrike being up, but then I see something like this:

01:38'34.351 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt crits Charming Courtesan for 1159 Nature damage
01:39'40.053 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt crits Enslaved Servant for 1222 Nature damage
01:40'19.764 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt hits Sister of Pleasure for 738 Nature damage
01:41'50.030 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt crits Temple Concubine for 1173 Nature damage
01:42'17.353 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt crits Enslaved Servant for 1190 Nature damage
01:42'55.949 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt hits Spellbound Attendant for 831 Nature damage
01:43'17.777 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt hits Charming Courtesan for 727 Nature damage
01:44'10.242 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt hits Temple Concubine for 740 Nature damage
01:45'21.714 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt hits Sister of Pleasure for 978 Nature damage
01:45'53.304 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt crits Vandiego for 893 Nature damage (192 resisted)
01:47'26.677 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt crits Temple Concubine for 1273 Nature damage
01:48'04.221 Vandiego's Lightning Bolt hits Sister of Pain for 764 Nature damage

Does one of our talents effect this trinket? Is it affected by spell damage? What is causing it to go above its natural numbers?

And just in case you're wondering, with SS is up TLC crit for 2100 w/ it. So I know its not due to Stormstrike.

Basically, I know there is a break even point where TLC will surpass a static damage/use trinket, I just need to know what % it is.

Using a 750 Hit / 1125 Crit its showing up as 48% crit, but this seems to be a bit higher than it should, based on the numbers I actually see in a raid environment. Any help, clarification, point in the right direction, or kick in the ass would be appreciated.

Edit: Yes I crit myself with a 5400 SF before I crit myself with the TLC.

So for simplicity sake, because I'm trying to understand what you're doing, lets say Macro 1 is A, Macro 2 is B, and Moonfire is MF.

Is your rotation now MF, A, A, A, B? MF, A, A, B?

Yep. I lose the last SF idol bonus, but dont get slowed down by the global cooldown on the moonfire idol swap.

Just to clarify more MF, A, A, A, B rinse and repeat, but sometimes in my kara run last night, I was doing MF, A, A, B on shorter trash fights. Before each trash pull, I would also hit the "B" macro to start off with the MF idol, which would give me an instant 140 spell damage.


Tach

insomniac2k1 :
I forgot about the Crusader deck. The guild I used to raid with basically exploded so I haven't raided anything for a while now. I guess if I start raiding again it'd be worthwhile to assemble that thing.

I'm wondering about your DPS calculations... getting a jump of 80 DPS is absurd if not swapping(it's actually absurd even if you are swapping). It's only adding 140 spell damage for 10 seconds. 140 spell damage is roughly a 98 DPS increase, and even for a 10second out a 12 second rotation, that's 81.666(repeating of course) DPS increase, maximum, and this is with a 100% proc rate, and this doesn't even consider the fact that you don't even get to use 1.5 seconds of it thanks to the GCD. Maybe the sample size is too small?

Vandiego:
A shadow priest would explain the higher than normal hits. High end LC is 806 damage, so it'd go up with 846 damage with a spriest. Also, don't forget about your meta gem, which adds 3% damage to crits, this explains the jump in LC damage for crits. Factor in stormstrike, and it explains the rest of those higher than normal hits/crits.