No, this is not what DR means. For avoidance, every point gives you less flat value than the previous point. It is a fluent curve based on a maximum value.

Crit does not have diminishing returns. Every point of crit has the same flat value as the previous point. It has "soft caps". Obviously, the hard cap is 100%. The first soft cap is 50% for FB (with RnT). The second soft cap is at ~76.6% for glancing blows on white attacks. Note, all of these values are actually 4.8% higher due to boss crit suppression (54.8%, 81.4%, 104.8%).

But this is technically true of EVERY SINGLE STAT. When you have enough AP to one-shot every boss in the game, AP suffers from your definition of "diminishing returns". The fact is that you get a roughly constant value per point of crit rating or agi at all levels of attainable gear. Even if you are technically correct, stating that crit suffers from DR is misleading.

Avoidance suffers from DR at every level of avoidance. Hit and expertise suffer from DR because soft capping is so easy to do with current levels of gear. Crit, for all intents and purposes, does not suffer from DR because no gear in the game will ever allow you to hit the point at which its value diminishes. I suppose it is a matter of semantics, but I still believe that your definition of DR -- decreasing in value at some theoretical, unobtainable value -- is not useful.

It is common sense that every stat has "diminishing returns" because when you get an additional point of attack power, the relative value of attack power will go down. And by contrast, every other stat, such as crit, hit, armor pen, and haste will rise in value in relative to attack power. This is entirely different from avoidance's artificial implanted diminishing return, where each additional point of dodge rating will give less dodge percentage in relative to the point before, past a certain point.

In terms of actual avoidance versus damage taken (this is talking about TBC, without DR in place), avoidance actually had increasing return because for each percentage you gain in avoidance, the loss in damage taken increases dramatically. I do believe the DR on avoidance brought scaling down to almost the exponential increase down to close to linear level, but I am not sure.

So, semantics regarding diminishing returns aside, come 3.1 will there be a realistic point at which AGI is no longer the preferred stat? 76% crit seems to me to be an unrealistic goal to reach, but I am new to the feral life (resto since birth). So, is there a point at which STR or some other stat benefits us more than stacking ever increasing amounts of AGI?

Regardless of your interpretation of what diminishing returns means to you, the fact is that crit does not have the same type of DR that avoidance does. It's not semantics. Hit rating does not have soft caps, only a hard cap. It has value before the cap and none after it. Expertise only has a soft cap if you are attacking from the front.

Perhaps you can argue that any reduction in value is "diminished" in terms of strict definition, but it really serves no purpose to refer to it that way in relation to WoW. Soft cap, hard cap, and diminishing returns all refer to different game mechanics. Getting these terms mixed up only serves to confuse and frustrate people who actually understand what they mean.

Crit has soft caps at 54.8% (if you FB) and ~81.4% (for white damage). Even with these soft caps, the amount of damage we get from these attacks pretty small in relation to our total damage so the reduced value is still high.

So I need some advice on my situation. I did this test on the heroic training dummy for 5 mins and got this result:



I used mangle, mangle for 2 combo points. SR, rake, shred to 5 cp and rip. From then on I shred on any cc procs, used mangle, rake and FFF whenever they were about to fall off, TF and berserk when their cooldown came off and shred any other time. After 2 cp I used SR then after 5 rip, 2 sr, 5 rip etc.

If anyone can suggest how I can pull more DPS, I have a feeling Im not doing as much as I should be.

Edit: Shit I covered the recount window, but it was basically at about 2700 for 5 mins.

You used Ferocious Bite only once.
You've got 48,55% Critchance. That should generate much more Combo Points, than you can spend in Rip and Savage Roar alone.
Try to fit in some more FB's.

Apart from this, your gear does not look like best in slot, although I can't identify all your items. 2700 DPS selfbuffed with your gear seems very satisfying imho.

How much DPS does your RAWR suggest?

I probably don't have best in slot in all slots, but you can look me up on armory to find out (I find what counts as BIS depends on who you ask).

RAWR says I should be hitting about 3200 DPS.

BiS really isn't that subjective, and there's quite a few upgrades for you to get, drop randomness being what it is however, my advice for the moment is primarily to increase your Rip uptime (89%) and especially Rake uptime (83%). It also looks like you did an extra mangle somewhere in there (18x18=324 seconds). Not that it would help you reach your Rawr maximum, but Icewalker and Precision enchants are superior DPS, and could help you smooth your cycle.

I am assuming this is on live, and not on PTR.

I'd also like to add that you shouldn't clip rakes - you say "whenever they were about to fall off", implying you are "refreshing" it. Don't do that, wait for it to tick full duration and then apply a new one.

Also 2cps SR seems very conservative, I do at least 3cps testing self buffed, or even 5, though 5 is harder without raid buffs for me, resulting in lower uptime overall.

Your relative Shred damage seems too low (percentage of overall damage), granted I cant really say with 100% certainty how low is that for that gear level.

One more thing: make Snapper hit food, 205 hit rating is way to low even for testing purposes, while you have more expertise than needed (i am guessing those are Concealment shoulderpads and Trollwoven girdle?) - but this issue will be rectified by further upgrades you get.

This is an old and, it seems, futile discussion. I personally go for the target of 263 hit rating, and i will gem/food around it if necessary - and I might slip a tiny bit below (say, 253) but never more than that.

The point you are making that there is no amount you must have is moot, since the results stemming from any randomly chosen number between 0 and the hard cap can not be statistically relevant, since they would either be derived from a purely personal/ subjective experience ("it didnt feel like I was missing much") or from pure theorycrafting, neither of which would produce irrefutable numbers.

Ie: 205 hit rating might in some individual situations produce very distinctive and mutually incomparable "overall damage/dps" results, very circumstantially dependent on many RNG factors during a relatively short time frames of any single boss fight currently in the game; add to that all the differences in raid buffs, gear, playstyle, etc and you just cannot get any stable "cut-off" number... Make numbers for lets say, 100x5 minutes dummy hitting tests (with full "rotation", not just auto attacks) with 205 and 263 hit rating each and maybe we can talk some more beyond personal beliefs. But because that would be a colossal waste of time, we turn to Rawr and other theorycrafting utilities.

Rawr puts 202 hit rating + 83 expertise (closest I could get with acceptable highly wanted gear) to a theoretical 1.839% chance to miss + 1.468% to dodge and 3334 dps with optimal rotation. With just putting +hit and +expertise gems instead of strength (easiest way to not change the gear pieces) i get 256 hit rating + 110 expertise (0.6453% to dodge and 0.1927% to miss) and 3331 dps optimal rotation - which does not seem like a cataclysmic dps loss to me.

You make out of it what you like; I prefer not to have that 1.839%.