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.

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.

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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.

This is the main point, I think. No matter what, with the amount of movement required on Festergut, Rotface and Putricide, there will be times when you are moving where you will not have any other spells to cast than Insect Swarm. Starfall and Typhoon both have cooldowns, and casting Moonfire twice in a row is certainly less DPS than throwing an Insect Swarm in there.

Insect Swarm may be terribly weak, but there are no better options for the talent points, and you quickly exhaust your alternative spells to cast on the move. In the end, Insect Swarm is better than not casting anything during a Global.

If you saw a DPS increase by dropping it from your rotation, that most likely means you were refreshing it at inappropriate times. If you keep your current rotation (that you use without IS) but refreshed IS only when you were on the move, you would lose out on 15% increase to Treant damage, but gain 3% damage to Wrath and 3% crit to Starfire while IS and MF, respectively are applied, in addition to Insect Swarm's inherent damage.

1) Attached here is a version of WC with all the tables and scaling factors deleted. The final DPS computation, the individual cycle outputs, anything on the individual spell/cycle pages, and anything else besides the scaling factors should still work. It will also run much faster. OO people can tell me if this works now. If it does, maybe I can find someone to help make a version where the scaling factors are optional, that can load in both programs.

2) The main spreadsheet has been updated on the TTT with the IS change I discussed two posts up. This is actually a slight underestimate of the value of IS. For example, if you're crit capped and in Lunar, an IS cast costs no NG uptime at all. But it's much closer to the real time cost of the spell in most cases.

3) Important consequences of IS change:
--IS is barely worth casting. You really want to interfere with the Eclipse cycle as little as possible while using it now. And in fights with movement, it might be worth reserving IS almost entirely to cast during movement.
--It's not worth multi-dotting IS on multiple targets (lack of IIS benefit and lost NG uptime make multi-dotting less efficient than dotting your main target).
--Haste is better now (so long as you're actually using IS while standing still), since a little NG uptime has been lost. It's more clearly worth going back to haste after the crit cap now.
--I want to re-examine the old question of refreshing DoTs after Eclipse only, now that they're so much weaker.

I'm glad that so many ppl are interested in the discussion, specially the one's that contribute with enormous calculations and such (I'm no big theorycrafter, but I love to read other ppl's maths!).

I was thinking of doing some cycles at a dummy, only using recount (is this good enough?), but what do you say about the time?

3 min's and 30 sec's should be great, cause then I can use FoN 2 times and Starfall 2 resp. 3 times with the different specs.

If I do this about 10 times with both of the specs at least me myself can get some out of it, hopefully everyone else too.

We can still spec IS, and IIS too, so that we get the crit to Starfire from Moonfire and that extra instant to cast while moving (Insect Swarm that is), but not be using it in the rotation (use the Glyph of Starfall instead of Glyph of Insect Swarm).

The 3 points in Brambles can probably be used better, the point with my spec is that I want to free gcd's that I "wasted" on Insect Swarm (cause I really felt that it was a waste) to use for Wrath (for example).

Well, saying that IS always costs you NG is perhaps a bit harsh. A Wr crit is more valuable to NG than a MF crit, which wastes the first second of NG on a GC. On the other hand, MF+idol increases your crit rate and thus your NG uptime. The errors related to all these factors are much smaller than the RNG associated with any particular fight. It is certainly possible to do the math and run down all of these effects. I'm not sure it is worth the trouble.

Obviously DoTs are great when moving. Does anyone have logs showing their movement patterns during combat? If not, that is another big guess thrown on top of guesses about latency.

When you reach the point that DoTs are adding less than 2% to your PW rotation, you've really got to take a look at them.

The alternatives are weak, but investing six talent points, three glyphs, an idol and a more complex rotation for just 2% DPS seems like a poor return on investment.

Even with IS in itself being slightly less powerful than originally modeled for, I would still contest the larger issue would be the loss of iIS. So, using the latest version of WrathCalcs these are the numbers I am getting for Wrath:

Not even including the (minimal) damage IS adds on it's own the damage added to wrath spam while IS is active still seems strong enough to outweigh anywhere else you could put the points (including starfall glyph added in). Cursory glance leads me to believe the extra damage for Wrath when IS is up makes it worth recasting during solar/attempting to proc lunar. Now, refreshing it during a Lunar eclipse with no movement is probably not going to be worth it, even with IS glyphed.

IS calcs is showing me 11.8k damage done for a 1.4 second cast for just the damage from IS alone.

Unbuffed Force of Nature deals an average of 28737 damage (All numbers from Arawethion's most recently uploaded WrathCalcs), which, when buffed with Brambles, climbs to 33048, the difference being 4311 damage.

Insect Swarm deals 11577 damage over 7 ticks. This means that if you cast Insect Swarm ONCE in 3 minutes, you get more damage than using Brambles.

Of course, the points for Brambles don't come directly out of Insect Swarm, but rather out of Improved Insect Swarm. IIS boosts Wrath's damage by 212 per Wrath when IS is up, on average, while it boosts Starfire's damage by 270 when MF is up, on average. This means that if you cast 16 Starfires with MF up, or 20 Wraths with IS up (or some combination thereof, obviously), over 3 minutes, you've made up the damage boost of Brambles.

As you have no problem with using Moonfire in your rotation, it seems exceedingly likely to me that you would be able to cast 16 Starfires with MF up, in which case you're hurting your DPS by speccing into Brambles.

I have to stress that if you cast IS while moving, you're not wasting a GCD that could be used for Wrath, and in a way, the damage boost is costless (if used only while moving).