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.

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.

It's not really just an issue of higher latency per say, its also human reaction time. Your cast times turn into <cast time>+<lag>+<reaction time>. Haste only affects cast time unfortunately, and does not make your reaction time or lag any better.

Let's say your starfire is 3 seconds cast. If your reaction time is 0.2 seconds, and lag is 0.2 seconds, the total time is 3.4 seconds. If you had enough haste to get 2.5 seconds per cast, your actual time would be 2.5+.2+.2 = 2.9 seconds instead.

Compare 2.5/3 = 0.8333333, without any lag/human reaction time
and 2.9/3.4 = 0.85294, with lag/human reaction time, and its easy to see that haste loses effectiveness when you add in any external casting delays.

With the old /stopcasting macros, and now the new so called "spell queue" in place, you should be able to reduce the lag to a minimal time. The total of lag+reaction time should be roughly 0.2 seconds if you're doing it right. Any latency or lag field in rawr/spreadsheets is basically just the combination of the two numbers.

The average human reaction time is about 0.2 seconds, in case you were wondering where I'm pulling the number from. If you have a constant ping, you can actually lower this even more with good timing. Keyboard presses in wow activate on negative edge(when you let go of the key), so if you know you will be casting a spell, you hold it down first, then right when you want to cast it, you let it go. Even if you don't do any anticipation, the simple act of not needing to hit the key will save at least another 20-30 miliseconds. Anticipation(which is only applicable with a constant ping) can help you shave off even more time, but the penalty for failure is you not casting the spell at all, so while you're learning the timing of this, I'd do a double tap to ensure a spell going off. (All of this is only really useful on very static fights since it requires a degree of attention to hold down the key in advance and let go of the key on time)

The short version is that yes, the 1392 spell damage:haste equivalency point is not totally applicable to us simple jesters. Haste is still useful, it's just harder to justify gemming for it.

That sounds a little unrealistic since average human reaction time ( Reaction time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) may be substantially higher, though there isn't a category for a periodic reaction to a single-variable stimuli with at least 1.5 sec of advance notice of the specific variability... If I recall correctly, someone had done pretty thorough analysis of WWS parses and felt that ~50 ms was reasonable reaction time, but a bit on the slow side? I'm afraid I don't recall where I read that, it very well could have been somewhere in this thread.

*D'oh* Apparently responses to this effect spilled onto the next page, and I missed seeing that I was repeating something already mentioned. Lemme see if I can find the WWS parse comment to add some value to this post...

I'm curious to know why people keep mentioning the human "reaction time" when you now just spam buttons for the queue system. Am I missing something here? Reaction time shouldn't really be considered when you're spamming a button. It would have made sense to me to consider the human reaction time when one uses stop casting macros, but I don't understand where "reaction time" comes into play for the new queue system where you spam one button. You aren't reacting to anything.

I have a simple question, I hvae been raiding bt / hyjal for 4+ months now as balance, I have 4/5 t5 and 4/5 t6 atm, no Sunwell pieces yet. So I can choose to wear a high damage 4/5 t5 set or a high haste 4/5 t6 set. I was wondering what kind of concensus there was to which option would be best for a fight like brutalis that requires maximizing dps.

in my haste gear (under ideal raid buffs / group which happens 80% of the time) i can roll with 175-200 haste and sit at about 1200~ damage unbuffed.

Does 4 set t5 bonus outweight t6 until I get more haste or can wear both 4/5 t5 and 4/5 t6 sunwell?

I've ran some of the numbers thru the spreadsheet but I'm having trouble finding real noticable results. The spreadsheet doesnt seem to be updated completely with 2.4 mechanics.

EDIT: I would also wonder about Treants added to the rotation. They seem to do a tremendous amount of damage done to my boss fights, and some fights require them to be thrown out at well timed moments. Are they a dependable source of DPS? meaning should I always try and use them or not. I've had our main tank question the overal effectiveness as the chance that the boss parries my treant and cause more spike damage to the tank.

Lorewanderer/spi: yeah, I don't think reaction time plays much of a role when you're chaincasting, I'm typically spamming my button pretty good when it's getting close to my current cast being done. It doesn't get around latency entirely (see my above example with wrath spam), but it helps.

Owlcapwn: From what I can see, 4pc t5 is a ~100 dps bonus. If you're not getting that with your additional t6/sunwell gear, I'd stick with the t5.

Treant safety would depend a good deal on how your tank transitions happen, and how you work around them. If Brut is being spun at all by taunts, the parry chances go up quite a bit. If there isn't much movement going on, dropping them in an intelligent spot behind the boss won't really risk additional parries.

As for t5 v. t6, are you being asked to keep IS up (if no, and if tank death is a serious concern, why not)? Since you'll have the dots going regardless, I'd stick with t5 to take advantage of that. If tank death is less of a concern, and debuff slots are an issue, I'd go t6 to avoid making that issue worse and ease up the timing issues--keeping a tight rotation on moonfire without clipping/letting it drop off can be difficult.

Treants and other pets will now automatically try to go behind the boss. Between the spot where you cast them and this new behavior, there shouldn't be any parry risk unless the mob spins around at times (to cast whatever on a raid member for example), and even then that risk wouldn't be higher than that created by other melee dps.
You can use combat logs to verify whether there's any pary on their melee swings.

They are really usefull if they can do their full 30s of dps and still OK even if they only last 50% (same +dmg, they did 3k for 15s against Kazrogal, for a GCD). If lower uptime, then don't bother.