jtalaimo, you're looking at the wrong number. Each point in OF increases your chance to proc it by 5%, so one point gives you 5% chance to proc it, 2 points gives 10%, and 3 points gives 15%. The damage increase is 10%, wether it's one point or 3.

Partial resists are due to the level difference between you and bosses, no amount of spell pen or debuffs that reduce resistance can overcome it.

I have noticed that with increasing amounts of haste, IS seems to be losing ground DPS-wise, even glyphed and with the 2T8 bonus. I plugged the numbers into WC, and it shows the convergence a bit more slowly than does Rawr, but it appears that it may actually be possible, at extremely high levels of gear, for even a glyphed+2T8 Insect Swarm to be technically a DPS loss to cast. That being said, it's still a very potent spell and Rawr also doesn't model the need to move during a fight, so I wouldn't worry too much about whether to cast or not to cast. As for Rawr and haste - haste is still a decent enough stat, even post-cap. I have noticed post-cap moonkin where haste is more valuable than crit because they have so much of the latter on their gear.

I think you might be getting the tier bonuses confused. The 2T8 bonus is the eclipse bonus. The 2T7 bonus is the 10% to IS bonus. Also IS scales fine with haste, it just doesn't scale with crit. Maybe it's possible at high levels of crit, than IS becomes a dps loss to cast, but that's probably an extreme example.

At an effective spell coefficient of 182% (with Nature's Splendor and IS Glyph), IS is highly unlikely to be outscaled by any other spell. Even Wrath in a Solar eclipse (by pure math our strongest dps cast) would have a cumulative coefficient of 107% (2T8 assumed). So you would have to have a crit chance of around 70% to outscale IS (and mind you, that's only during its eclipse).

As for its base value, Wrath already starts out weak with an average of 974 non-crit Damage during eclipse (any effect on the target that likewise influences IS damage ignored) compared to 1957 of a glyphed IS. So even at the break even crit chance of around 70%, 2T8-eclipsed Wrath still falls 300 damage sort which it has to make up through even higher crit (somewhere around 77.5%).

Despite its high crit rate during its 2T8 eclipse, Starfire's base damage and coefficient are hardly a match for IS at all, eclipsed or not. If halfed down to 1.5 seconds for viable comparison, Starfire's base damage is 616 which will lack short of IS even at 100% crit. It's effective coefficient during that 1.5 seconds is 60%. So you'd have to invent a crit chance of around 200% to have it scale with spellpower the same as IS.

The only arguable reason not to renew IS immediately is during a lunar eclipse, if it can make a difference of one extra Starfire under eclipse - and only if that means not skipping more than two IS ticks during that eclipse.

The problem with you analysis is that IS doesn't benefit at all from either crit, haste or Nature's Grace procs. Looking at base damage is also misleading since all three spells scale differently with SP so we can't just assume X SP and then look at base damage and expect an accurate comparison. Also it's impossible to just stack SP and ignore haste and crit so leaving them out of the analysis isn't very useful. Not that I think your conclusion is wrong or anything, glyphed IS is worth it at almost any achievable gear level.

I think his analysis is more or less correct. It's a comparison of DPET's presented in a unique way. IS scales with haste/NG the same way that Wrath does -- only SF benefits from haste after the soft cap. I think realistically the only time IS isn't worth casting in general is during a bloodlust lunar eclipse phase.

I apologize if my way of making numbers comparable to each other seems a little confusing (I sure have driven a few math teachers mad in my time), but it's after a all a forementioned napkin calculation, certainly omitting a few factors such as IS not being able to proc NG or GCD-casts suffering more dps-loss by lag than longer casts - but if I were going into all that, I'd have to continue scribbling on the table cloth

As for lunar eclipse: it's true that it is practically and proven by experience the stronger DPS sequence than solar eclipse, but I personally attribute this not so much to the higher NG uptime. After all, each Wrath can profit from a critical hit among two preceding Wraths and if you're caught with a non-NG spell. In my opionion it's due to the fact, that spells closer or equal to the GCD duration are stronger affected by lag, because you're technically unable to chain them effectively at GCD-intervals.

This, I assume, is probably due to the WoW client not sending player input to the server during GCD as a spam-protection (interrupts such as Kick excluded since LK). Unfortunately, the client activates GCD only after the server confirmed a SPELL_CAST_START event back to the client. And if your lag causes 200ms delay between the time your client sent the action to the server and the confirmation of that action is returned, then this also means, that you can trigger the next Wrath 200ms later than its effective cast time - losing a considerable portion of your mathematically possible DPS.

Starfire has the advantage, that the client will release GCD lock sooner than the cast finishes, so you're able to trigger the next spell by keypress a few miliseconds earlier than your cast bar completes (I'm sure everyone here has a mentally projected "button push point" on their cast bar displays). Hence - with a little bit of good reaction and luck, you're able to chain Starfire with almost no loss to lag - unlike Wrath. And hence, lunar eclipse has always done more DPS than its solar counterpart, although the dry math of those spells would imply otherwise.

Nice points there. I imagine you're quite correct about the inability to perfectly chain Wraiths contributing to higher Lunar dps. My apologies for over-indulging in nitpicking with my previous reply to you.

It's really all about latency, I personally see 80-120ms most times, couple that with AutoHotKey/G15 it's pretty easy to chain Wrath off GCD. Even with Heroism I finish 10 Wrath cast in 10s w/ NG up, and I have the unoptimal over haste soft cap. I feel that arguing which eclipse is better is kind've wasted time though since you want to use both.

Which Eclipse to start with is the good debate, though I think Lunar is the one you want to open with because it edges out a lot during early Heroism, Wrath stacks trinkets faster and it auto-procs Solar with WiseEclipse/well-timed Macro.

Since the latency measured by the client is probably the time it takes a data packet to be sent to the server, wait in its queue for processing and the reply to return the client, I would presume that it is exactly the amount of time that needs to be added to the spell's cast time (=GCD) for realistic DPET calculations.

So if your latency is 200ms in a raid and your Wrath is hasted down to 1.0s cast time during NG, the actual minimum time it requires to cast the next Wrath is 1.2s after, effectively reducing the DPS of Wrath spam by 17%, eating up all its mathematical superiority over Starfire spam.

For comparison, without haste and NG and a cast time of 1.5s, the actual chaining-interval would be 1.7 and the DPS loss only 12%. So you might say that lag causes a diminishing return on haste for Wrath.

It's interesting to note that this means that the last 1-2 points of Starlight Wrath are only returning half their value - but then again, seeing that the only alternative is to put them into much weaker Genesis, it doesn't really change a thing for us.