Forgive the noob question, I'm trying to follow the thread...so in your spreadsheet if I'm attempting to fully rebalance my gems you put the un-gemmed values of your gear in "current ratings" slots are start experimenting up from there, one gem at a time? How do we pick between epic and rare?

Aye, that's what you'd want to do. To pick which gem you're comparing, use the gem selector. It will always compare to Runed gem of the same quality, so if you pick Noble Topaz it will compare to [Runed Living Ruby], and if you pick Pyrestone it will compare to [Runed Crimson Spinel]. If you need to compare across quality levels, select a gem of the quality level of the red gem you want to compare to, write down the given for Spell Damage in the gem category, then switch to the gem you actually want to compare, and divide its by the number you wrote down.

would anyone happen to know a mac compatible version of this software?

Not that im volunteering, i wouldn't have the time for it, but the item IDs can be easily looked up on wowhead. The Wowhead item url always has the id in it, e.g. htp://www.wowhead.com/?item=19852 is ID 19852.

The problem is not finding them but doing a script to insert them in the item name lists automatically. Doing it by hand would be...

first post in this thread, but been following it quite a while. I've recently specced balance with my druid, currently working on m'uru in SW. Was just wondering if druids that are stacking haste are still using an idol swapping macro. I used one before i had any haste and it worked wonders, but i'm starting to notice more problems with it now that i'm on around 200 haste without drums up.

I tried doing an idol swap macro last week on Gorefiend, and had some real issues. The problem I've noticed is that you lose the spell haste improvement on your GCD. Switching idols gives you a 1.5 GCD regardless of your spell haste, so you actually lose some of the advantages of spell haste over the course of the fight (Assuming that you use the macro which switches the moonfire idol in with the moonfire cast).

I'm not sure how that mod works off hand, and whether it can get around that limitation. It seems to me that the more haste you have, the more you have to lose from idol switching in that manner.

Also, if you switch at your last cast before your next moonfire, you're then losing one starfires' worth of the Starfire idol. That really minimizes the benefit you gain from the idol switching in the first place.

The optimal idol usage is starfire idol on all but the starfire before moonfire. Equip the unseen moon idol during your final starfire then equip the starfire idol on your first starfire after the moonfire.

If you equip the unseen moon idol in a macro with the moonfire spell you get 1.5 sec PLUS YOUR LATENCY in cooldown. This is due to a bug introduced when the /stopcasting system was removed.

You lose more by the bugged duplicate cooldown than you gain by having the starfire idol equipped for the final cast. This is presuming 0 haste. The more haste you get the worse this problem gets.

The problem with this system of equipping the unseen moon on the previous starfire is paying enough attention mid battle to know your next cast will be a moonfire. This is impossible for a mod to know as far as I can figure out. The documentation on the mod that was linked says it equips the idols based on the spell you cast. So it would equip the unseen moon idol on the moonfire cast and the starfire idol on the starfire cast, causing the duplicate cooldown bug and lowering your dps.

Personally I don't keep good enough track of my moonfire duration so I use the unseen moon all the time when I'm soloing and idol of the raven goddess when raiding.

So I finally got my Moonkin dps simulator to the point where I'm happy to let other people play with it and point out all the stuff that I need to fix and add.

Please read the readme!

You may need to install the .NET 2.0 Redistributable to get it to run:
Download details: .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)

Download it here:
DrBoom_v10a.zip - FileFront.com

This simulator is absolutely incredible. Clears up a lot of my questions about ashtongue trinket for the most part.

P.S: I'd like to see a feature that will calculate the DPS loss from actually being the person using the drums (gcd cast).

Interesting concept but what about crit? say you wish to maintain the 1:1 ratio after you're above 1077 spell damage and swap out some crit/dmg gems to do so. Whats the baseline crit you want to aim for? Is it like destruction locks and 25 percent?

What's funny is, the new version of Rawr was released with newly updated Moonkin support. I fully realize that the code isn't perfect yet, but I was wondering if any of you guys wanted to try it out and see if it gave results anything like you'd expect.

In other news, has anyone done any work on finding a closed-form solution to modeling haste? Currently Rawr tries to implement a second-order approximation for trinket haste effects, and while it should be "good enough" for the moment (I hope), it definitely makes things internally much more ugly than they should be. If it's already been done, though, I don't want to be duplicating someone else's work.

I glanced at it briefly when I saw the download. The ratios for hit:damage:crit:haste look much more correct now at the very least. The damage and raw damage comparisons are good, unfortunately both bars always show in the same order regardless of which method you are sorting by. Minor issue since they should be equal if you're gearing correctly.

I haven't finished writing up the numbers and formulae yet, but from a very general standpoint, crit is never as good as any other stat you could be adding, even with Nature's Grace. You're going to get a bunch of incidental crit on your gear, and I wouldn't suggest actively avoiding it, but you'd never want to use crit gems. Given Hit-cap and the normal crit talents, you'd need almost 2000 spell damage before Crit's effective spell damage ratio hits 1. Everything else becomes useful soooo much more quickly.

I've picked up Rawr14 (using the optimizer right now), I'll let you know how things turn out. So far the number seem a bit more agreeable than they were before.

What do you mean about the closed-form model? Defining its affects on casting rotations?

[edit] Okay, wow. Rawr reeeeeally speeded up. Used to take upwards of an hour for a full-optimization run with the amount of gear I usually select. This was on the order of a couple minutes. Results: Before, Rawr would overvalue Crit, especially if I had lightning capacitor selected as available. It seemed to choose randomly between Potent and Reckless orange gems. Now, however, it seems to come up with very believable numbers. All gems are the same, it's not gearing me for Crit, etc. Seems a lot more correct. Only thing I'm worried about is that, given a selection of gear available (or soon-to-be) to my guild (3/4, 6/6, 1/5, 1/9), it doesn't select 4T5, and that seems odd. Might just be that the badge cloth is just that good, though/

Sure, that'd be easy to add. I'll put it on the list.

Yeah, I noticed I wasn't seeing the returns I was expecting out of haste, but obviously it's not based on Adorele's calculations at all, it's just simulating things as I believe them to be. So either something's impacting the value of haste, or I have a bug somewhere. I'll probably just release the source code after I clean it up a bit so people can "check my math".

Essentially, yes. What I would like to do is make it so that instead of going through an ugly implementation of a second-order approximation for haste trinkets and for Nature's Grace procs, as it is now, I can implement an equation that is essentially a lim(x->inf) f(x), where f(x) is some function that defines the behavior of haste procs in relation to cast time. It is my belief, though not yet demonstrated through rigorous math, that the iterative formula of proc-based haste effects is convergent.

I know that 1392 is the theoretical point where gemming for haste is better than gemming for damage, but do we know exactly how much better it is?

It depends on how much damage and how much haste you have. Hence the spreadsheet. On the other hand, Drums and Heroism are straight buffs, not a trade-off, so they're pretty much always gonna increase your DPS.

The way I was viewing haste procs, which is how I came to the assumption that they are convergent, is as follows: Begin with some arbitrary amount of static haste. Each cast in a given cast cycle will thus have a fixed cast time, therefore, the rotation will last seconds and have casts during that time. Adding in a proc effect will cause an average reduction of seconds, giving us casts during . This, obviously, will give us some additional chance to proc, which introduces an additional reduction, and so on to infinity. If I can factor in all the variables and derive the limit of this equation for even one proc-based haste trinket, it should be possible to derive an exact static haste value for such an effect without resorting to the clumsy iterative model I have in Rawr.Moonkin.

As far as the spreadsheet goes, I think its pretty good but i have a few questions.

Since I'm using spellfire and spellstrike I have to ask if the set bonuses for either of those sets are in the sheet, because im trying to figure out the next step in gear using the sheet and I would like to know if they are. In particular spellstrike, since the set bonus on that is more complicated.

Trinkets. I know ur getting sick of people asking for an activatable trinket fix but I have to add my voice simply because the spreadsheet is so good otherwise, it's a shame to see it become difficult to use in trinket-comparision. Also I have to ask for non-activatable trinkets to be added, like Shiffar's Nexus-Horn (Is it really as good as I think?) and Darkmoon Card:Crusade (prolly pretty hard to add but im sorry).

Basically I'm very happy to have the spreadsheet but in using it to decide among gear in the extremely complicated world of moonkin math I would really appreciate a slightly better one

So I played with this a bit at lunch, and here's what I'm seeing:

Haste isn't THAT much better than straight damage after the tipping point. Take someone with 1500 damage and 10 open sockets: either they can go 1620dmg and 0 haste, or 1500dmg and 100 haste. That translates to 2796 average starfires every 3 seconds or 2638 average starfires every 2.82 seconds. Or 932dps vs 936dps.

Obviously that assumes no crits and nature's grace procs, but I can't think of a reason why that would affect the results -- haste affect is proportional to the spell cast time. Same with resists -- over time their impact should be the same in either case. So yes haste is better, but it's not a TON better, from what I can tell.

One downside to haste in my simulator is that haste makes you cast more, so you hit the latency more often. Which means haste doesn't help quite as much as it would under a theoretical zero-latency situation.

You might want to try my dps simulator for seeing the difference between trinkets. I have all the common ones simulated, and one of the advantages of running a simulation is that trinkets are trivial to simulate, whereas they can be tricky to theorycraft into a single formula for use in a spreadsheet.

Also, it's "you're", not "ur".

Is that really how it is even with the spell queue system? Higher latency makes haste worse? I'm still skeptical about a lot of the latency=worse dps theories. according to the simulator i'd gain 100+ dps from improving my ping from 100ms to 45ms.