The glyph adds 1% on starfire regardless if maxed or not up at all. (Correct me if i am wrong)

If that's the case, the staff seems quite cool for the starfire/wrath spamming druid :P

Something I was thinking about today while revising the TTT article.

Our DoT's really have not scaled well. The 2T9 bonus has masked this effect for Moonfire for a while, but people are going to be upgrading away from that soon. In particular the DPET of unextended Moonfire will be very low, making it unclear if it's worth casting unextended Moonfire at all. Which is to say, casting it when Lunar is expiring and a long period of Wrath is coming up.

This is complicated by the fine interaction between DoT refreshing and Eclipse proccing that I've tried to describe in the new guide revision. But basically, if Moonfire falls of right as Solar is proccing, I'm not sure it's worth refreshing until after that Eclipse. If on the other hand you're casting a pre-Solar Starfire and Moonfire drops, I'd probably still refresh the Moonfire and use that GCD to see whether Solar procced. But it's very hard to math this out in detail.

This all also means that multi-dotting in multi-target situations will be nearly worthless.

One thing that we have going for us is that blizzard has stated that they don't want people behaving strangely just to try and set off procs. So far none of the testing indicates a necessity to change our fighting style or do strange things like stand in fire. So the real question will play out, "Is this staff too good for us?" That question will probably take a couple months to really find it... and honestly.. it should be better for us than ToC weapons.

I was actually discussing this with another doomkin, and the rough rule of thumb we came up with was once one obtains 4t10.264 and (h)toc25/icc25 gear, unextended moonfires are a dps loss. The loss of 2t9 and the addition of languish, along with the sp/crit increase combine to make our direct damage spells scale a lot nicer than our dots.

I don't have Nibelung, so I couldn't test if it procs with Starfall (both direct star damage and splash damage).
Assuming the stated above, since it seems to proc from anything; Wouldn't Nibelung increase the value of Glyph of Starfall giving extra spell landings?
I don't think it would overcome Glyph of Insect Swarm, but I think it's interesting to take a look (and very tricky to calculate).

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - PPM Behavior Nerf?

Will this have any effect on [Nibelung]? I know it's a 1% chance and not PPM, but better safe than sorry.

It is a shame that our Treant damage doesn't contribute to the proc at all. Maybe the E&M/NG extra procs will make up for this in the long run. It is probably not worth the effort to code the trees to proc the Valk'yrs or change the E&M/NG proc relationship, for the least played and lowest dps caster spec, using an item no one appears to want to use for raiding atm when put up against more conventional 264 weapons.

@Snoody

It is not just IS damage you should consider though, along with just IS damage by not taking iIS you lose out on 3% crit on Starfire and 3% damage on wrath. (As long as the respective DoTs are applied to get the extra dcrit/amage)

Using the calculations provided in Wrath Calcs 3/3 iIS is worth ~163 DPS in my gear, while 3/3 Brambles is worth ~16 DPS, leaving 1 point not spent on IS to any other ability, but there is no 1 talent point left to gain 100+ DPS to make up for the loss of iIS. Even if we take into account a generous ~30 DPS from the Starfall glyph, I am not seeing it being better.

I can't tell you why you saw a DPS increase without seeing logs, so if you have them I would be interested in seeing, since the numbers we do have to run contradict with your conclusions.

Also something to consider, 3% crit on Starfire is 137.7 crit rating we would lose by not having MF up on the mob. Unless you are geared that far over the soft crit cap to make up for it, I could imagine that impacting the time to proc solar eclipse as well.

I'm always keeping an eye out for changes in value of spells (reason I brought this up in the first place), but while DoT's keep steadily fading in value, I've still never seen a reason to drop IS, IIS, or Glyph of IS entirely. If there were something else worthwhile to do with those 3 talent points or that Glyph slot, maybe it would be different, but there isn't. And with the talent and Glyph casting IS still provides a moderate (~150 DPS) bump over not casting it, both by WrathCalcs' complex model and by a simple eyeballing of the DPET of the spell.

Basically, the small DPS gain from a Glyphed, talented IS, while pretty weak, still outweighs anything else you'd get from using those 3 talent points on Glyph slot on anything else.

And this is totally ignoring the effect of motion phases on dps - losing IS costs you a *lot* in any fight that has much movement. The lower relative dpct does change the length of time it's ok to leave your dots down for predictable movement though - I've been getting better results out of *only* casting dots when I have to move in most fights. That usually hits 50-75% uptime, instead of the previous 90+% target (though you get closer to 140% uptime on Putricide!)

Hopefully I don't receive another warning for trying to be helpful.

Rawr extremely undervalues the 2T10 set bonus. With 20-22% uptime, which is the norm, you should expect about 3% dps from the set bonus. This is roughly equal to the dps gain from 4T9 so moving from 4T9 to 2T10 should only be a dps boost unless you're very unlucky.




On the topic of our DoT's awful scaling, it is rather unfortunate because it was 100% foreseeable. Eclipse was buffed time and again. Blizzard has encouraged us to use our DoTs through the use of set bonuses (IS for instant starfire, moonfire dot can now crit), Idols, and 3!! glyph slots. There are so many ingenious ways to buff our DoTs, which would consequently buff our dps as well.

1. 2T9 could be made a baseline talent
2. Insect Swarm glyph boosts its damage by 40-50%
3. Glyph of Moonfire co-efficient could be buffed from 90% to 110%
4. Glyph of Starfire could be renamed to Glyph of Starlight Wrath or something. In addition to its current effect, it would also cause wrath to increase the duration of Insect Swarm by 2 seconds, max of 4 seconds

These suggestions are pretty simple. It's just number tweaking and coding reuse. But SIGH! Blizzard is a mysterious force that does things its own way.

First of all, thanks for the answers.

Secondly, I don't have any logs laying around, this was probably two months ago I did these tests, if not more. Sorry about that, I agree that it's kinda stupid to claim something like "don't use Insect Swarm" and then don't show any math.

This week is slammed at work so can't promise that I can do some testing at this time. Hopefully I will make it.

But just a thought:

In one minute you have to refresh IS five times, that is five global cooldowns.

For three minutes you have to do it 15 times, thereby 15 gcd's.

One of those 15 gcd's is used for another Starfall, and the 14 that's left is used for Wrath's and Starfire's. 14 of those is about 150k-200k dmg or something, in addition you get another 20k from you additional Starfall. Yea, this math is just taken out of nowhere, but you get the point. Now consider that the Starfall would do alot more dmg if there would be more than one target (huge chance in ICC) and have in mind that Wrath and Starfire benefit from both haste, crit and spellpower when IS only benefit from spellpower.

This is how we came up with the idea. Those 14 wrath's and starfire's can be worth alot, especially if they are blown during Eclipse (then the dmg would be even higher). I have high eclipse uptime, it's not very often I stand still and wait for it to proc. So when the Eclipse overlaps perfectly then I feel that I don't have the time (or the will) to refresh the dot when I instead can crit a Wrath for 15k.

Hope you understand the point, even if the math is out of control. Now I really need to work again!


Edit: Searched for some logs here in the thread, and here is a moonkin with a log. This moonkin did 130k dmg with his Insect Swarm in a 2 min and 30 sec fight.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

If this is correct, "my idea" have a great chance of doing more dmg than that. Just an idea.

Edit 2: Think the company have lost a billion on me today, just sitting here writing about the most fantastic thing in the world (teh owl), but I must say one more thing:

Of course I have to take in mind that fights aren't always Patchwerk-like, at perfect circumstances. With alot of moving I use Typhoon instead of using IS (if MF is up, Starfall and Treants are on cd and so on) wich of course is a dps loss. But how often is that? Normally you can expect to move and thereby save an instant for that time. The dps loss don't have to be crucial if you just use the right spell at the right time.

Something you seem to have overlooked is that casting a Wrath (Non-NG) or a Starfire takes longer than a GCD. You're not gaining 14 Wrath/Starfires instead of 14 ISs. You're only gaining ~10-11 Wraths, ~6-7 Starfires or some combination of them, depending on your haste and NG uptime.

You're accurate (assuming your numbers have merit) regarding Damage per Cast. However, the more important measure is Damage per Effective Time.

Right--or more generally, the DPS of my overall rotation in the spreadsheet is 8800, and the DPET of IS is 9700. The latter is easy to compute, and makes me skeptical that dropping IS can work. But the interesting thing is how small the difference is. For reference, in the same stats, unextended Moonfire without 2T9 is 8000.

2T10: I think WrathCalcs models 2T10 pretty conservatively. For example, for Starfire, it only buffs two Starfires per Clearcast, giving only 11% uptime. And that still makes it around a 2.5% bump overall.

WrathCalcs: does anyone happen to remember whether it ever worked in OpenOffice? Like, back when Adoriele was maintaining it?

Does anybody have some information about whether the ppm change effected nieblung? I have some dkp burning a hole in my wallet for tonight's raid.

No I don't think they ever did. I have never tried a copy that worked, and I tried a couple of times back when Adoriele maintained it.

I knew that someone should comment it when I read what I've written but I didn't wanna change it. I was first going to write only Wrath's, that with all raidbuffs and the haste we have (way more than soft cap) is in general about the gcd. But I wrote Starfire's too, cause I thought that someone should comment if I didn't

Anyhow, the exact amount of Wrath's is hard to say, but the NG uptime is high nowadays, and even higher now when I have Starfall for 10 sec's every minute. Used between lunar eclipse's I get 40 sec with 100% NG uptime (more or less), and the other 20 sec's it will probably be up for 70-75%.

So I think, with raidbuffs and so on, that Wrath would be cast 12-14 times instead of IS. Or something. But to level with you, let's say that it's 11 Wraths instead of the 14 IS, and additional NG uptime, FoS dmg and Starfall dmg - it's not outrageous if the system would work.

I use openoffice calc for viewing WrathCalcs and it seems just fine, I don't have Excel to compare it with though. There seem to be no errors or too much difference between say Rawr/Simcraft and Wrathcalcs numbers wise..

Open Office doesn't support the data table feature from Excel. Since that stuff went in, the scaling entries stopped working in open office, but raw DPS values were still working. Is the spreadsheet using data tables anywhere in the base calculations now?

I think WrathCalcs is a bit too kind to IS (at least compared to Wrath). It ignores the fact that IS is likely to cause a spell or two lose NG.

SF SF IS SFx SFx

If SF is 50% crit, and 2.4s without NG, the SFx casts have a 75% chance of having NG if IS is not cast, but only a 50% chance of NG with the IS cast. Losing the NG is a 0.4s penalty. In this situation the IS costs, on average, 0.2s more than "expected.'

Of course this was a worst-case scenario. At higher crit rates (Lunar Eclipse) you are less likely to lose NG. When you're casting Wrath, you are less likely to lose NG, and the impact is smaller. Still, in an environment where an extra 0.1s is 900 lost damage, the impact is noticeable.

SimulationCraft is probaby a better tool for calculating the relative value of including IS in your rotation.

Snoody

the one thing your failing to look at is that where in any of the new content do u get to stand still to cast those wrath\starfires that ur replacing your IS with.

WrathCalcs only uses data tables for scaling factors. Maybe I'll try uploading one with the tables deleted just to test. I'd really like a way to provide a user-selectable option to turn data table scaling on or off, since they take forever to calculate anyway and make the sheet annoying to work with.

------------

The NG issue is very tricky. As you know, WrathCalcs computes steady-state uptime of NG for SF and W, and ignores edge effects when you change spells. Now, there's good reason to think that the error introduced by this is very small, since the individual effects will cancel almost entirely.

What I mean is, imagine 15s of chaincasting Starfire. The sheet computes the NG uptime in an infinite Starfire chain and applies that to the whole 15s. In reality, the first two Starfires have lower NG uptime (because they inherit the NG chance of whatever spell you were casting previously), so the sheet underestimates their cast time. But, the two spells you cast after the Starfires are done will have a higher NG uptime than the sheet would predict, since they get the benefit of the high Starfire NG uptime. So the sheet overestimates the cast time of those casts. The net error will be small, because the sheet has used 15s of "Starfire NG uptime" and the real world also got 15s of "Starfire NG uptime" (NG's procced by Starfire). The sheet just applies those 15s slightly earlier (during the Starfires exactly, instead of shifting them ~2 spells forward in time).

How to work DoT's into all this? Well, Moonfire can crit (at roughly the same chance as Wrath) and has the same cast time as Wrath. For Moonfire, I just steal the mean NG uptime from Wrath and leave it at that.

But Insect Swarm can't proc NG. This is why I'm glad you made this post. It made me check the sheet, where I found that I've also imported the Wrath NG uptime to Insect Swarm, and that's an error. For the reasons both of us are describing, the best way to model IS is to always use the non-NG cast time. This will very closely reflect the actual IS cast time, plus the lost NG time that you describe in your post. I don't remember when or why I changed this, just a mental slip at some point.

I'll upload a fixed sheet when I get home. But for a preview, the value of IS rotations drops to only ~90 DPS over non-IS rotations. That's a good starting point for the general discussion about what to make of our weak DoT's.

This is the sort of question that SimCraft would be suited for, yes. But math is very powerful when you use it carefully! . I've always been pleased with the agreement between WC and SimCraft--the spreadsheet can overcome even complex issues like this surprisingly well.