Thanks Boevis. I keep running 10 man Maly trying to get the Surge Needle Ring but it won't drop sadly. My choice of rings at the moment is very limited. But I will start to make a more concerted effort at getting those replaced. I will be getting the badge ring as soon as I can afford it (I can't remember what I bought, but it was a waste sadly).

Anyway, thank you for the constructive words sir. Oh, I use Quartz right now for debuffs, but I should probably switch to Dot timer anwyay. I just looked voer NeedToKnow and Power Auras and that seems to be exactly what I need. Thanks again for the help.

Well I don't know If I have understand.

Are you saying that eating a food or things like that changes a lot the relative stats weight because rawr uses rounding and adding for example 1 agility after the rounding will result in an "effective" 0.5 agility so it value it as half?

It seems buggy... I understand the problem, the way to avoid it is simple. Take a 100-200 stats up/down step.

I think what Allev means is that the stats on rawr is accurate, but only accurate if you follow the rotation and abilities which it indicates as your optimal rotation. If you have a lower percentage damage on shred and higher damage percentage on rip, then to you personally Strength is going to be better than the "normal value" since dot's can't crit, and Agility will be better "than normal value" on the opposite case because shred can crit.

That's one of the things I'm saying, yes. The other thing I was trying to say is what he was confused about, though, so let me give some examples.

The misunderstanding is, simply, stat rounding errors. Say you have 0 expertise and it takes 41 expertise rating for a point of expertise. In-game, it rounds down, so points 0-40 are worthless until you get the 41st point. If you eat 40 expertise rating food (in this example), that's weighted as 0 in Rawr because it's worth 0 in the game.

These kind of errors lead to strength-less-than-AP errors. Imagine you have 0 strength. You add a 14 Str gem, which gets multiplied by 1.03(SotF), then 1.10(BoK). That's 15.862 post-buff. But the game rounds it to 15, so it adds 30 AP. That gets multiplied by 1.1 (HotW), which gives you 33 AP. If you skip rounding in the first step, you actually get 34.8964 AP. Not a big difference-- only about 6%-- but this is one simple rounding of one stat. More rounding will cause more error.

Yes, the correction is to take X points of stats and figure it out. But, adding sufficient stats to eliminate the rounding errors can also cause other problems, like going over soft-caps or hard-caps of stats. Which is why lots of theorycraft tools, like Toskk's, skip the rounding steps to tell you average-case what those points will be worth. Which can differ from what the game actually gives you.

It's a design choice of Rawr to mirror the game world, but it makes it hard to say "stat X is better than stat Y". Which is why you should rarely if ever take Rawr's stat estimations as accurate except for exactly what they're measuring-- 1 point, 20 points, or 100 points.

The worst part about all this is, the rounding approximations are worst in Rawr when doing comparisons of small values of individual stats, because it only happens collectively at the end after all the stats have been added up. Only the last points have rounding error. So every time you look at a specific slot in Rawr, you get all the rounding errors, even though you don't get them when you look collectively. So, for instance, you can overlook 2 pieces of gear which the game would collectively add up as 6 <statpoints> each individually, but end up being worth 7 <statpoints> collectively, which makes the difference between both being best-in-slot and being in second place. (Not that this is ACTUALLY the case anywhere, it's just hypothetically possible.)

Finally-- every theorycrafting program/spreadsheet/webpage will have to make the decision to follow the rounding, or average out the rounding error to all of your gear. Comparing stat values from the rounding theory is a weak point; similarly, comparing exact combinations of items will never be exactly accurate if you average out stat values.

As an aside, I have no idea what Rawr is actually using to generate the average stats, which is one reason I don't use or dispute Rawr's relative values unless I see something orders of magnitude different from what I'm expecting.

On a side note, does anyone know if the Idol of Rip is now functioning properly?

Yes it's been fixed.

Well, that's not exactly how the rounding works. It doesn't take the individual stat itself, it takes the difference between having 1 more of the stat and having 1 less of the stat.

The rounding error is that when you add 1 Strength point, it actually adds 1 * 1.03 * 1.1 Strength, which for any given point will add either 1 or 2 strength to your final stat point total. With kings for instance-- for the first 9 points of a stat, you get 1 point; at the 10th point, you get 2. If it adds 1, then it's worth approximately twice your AP. If it adds 2, it's worth 4 times a point of AP.

The actual value is 2.7 times AP in your first example, which means it's taking a value greater than 1 and averaging stats together. My guess is that it's taking the average of 3 stat points. In your first example, the 3 strength points round up to be worth 4, which produce 8 or so AP from 3 stat points, which makes it valued at 8/3rds, or 2.66 AP per strength. Or perhaps it's 4 stat points, and it's rounding both strength (4 to 5) and AP (10 to 11), which is 11/4 = 2.75.

Either crit and AP aren't rounding differently in the examples you gave, or Rawr uses their exact values instead of rounding them (because the game doesn't). I'm not sure which is the case.

Does this make sense?

And does it make sense now to NOT use Rawr's relative stat weights unless you know what you're doing?

Edit: So you know this whole discussion? It looks like it's resolved in 2.1.9-- Rawr looks to be reliably and precisely calculating accurate averaged-out stat values now (probably as part of the generic rollout for all classes). So just update to the newest version.

Sorry if this has been brought up before (looked, couldnt find it) - but i was wondering which of the rip and shred idols is a greater dps boost? I'm currently using the rip idol - mainly because i know its 1050 dmg every rip, and i'm not sure how the dmg boost from the shred idol is applied.

So now, [Idol of Worship] beats out [Idol of the Ravenous Beast] ... Assuming you arent going nuts with strength for stronger shreds?

I think stacking strength would just make Rip and Idol of the Ravenous Beast - Item - World of Warcraft much better.

Does anyone know if there is a crit cap? or at what point does crit gets heavily hit by diminishing returns?

Strength doesn't scale the damage from either idol. Idol of Worship will generally win.