I just tried opening the spreadsheet on my new computer and I got the circular reference error that someone else had mentioned earlier. How odd--it kept working fine on my old machine when I upgraded from Excel 2004 to 2008, but on this new one with Excel 2008 I get the error. It's in the data tables only--the DPS computation works fine if you click through the errors. Not sure why only some of the tables are being weird though.

Hi there. This is my first post, but I've been an avid reader of the forums. So please be gentle.

I play Moonkin in PvE, but my situation is a tiny bit different than the norm. I play over a sattelite internet connection, so I run with a static 1.9 second latency. While it makes raiding much harder, I still manage to eek out enough DPS to be competitive, and I've learned to adapt to survive through fights like Mimiron, Hodir, or General Vezax where a lot of movement is required.

However, when it comes to DPS, I find that a lot of the common sense rules no longer seem to work for me, and I wondered if I could get some confirmation, or maybe even advice, that I'm doing the right thing.

Latency seems to affect instants a lot more than they do cast-time spells. I can que up instants, but I can't really figure out what's happening exactly. My best guess is I hit the instant (+1.9 seconds later it casts), and after the GCD of the first instant is down (+1.3ish seconds), it let's me input another instant (which casts at +1.9s after I hit the button). So it seems like I pay a hefty latency tax on each instant. To the point where each instant is eating up ~3 seconds to cast. It seems like the DPET (hope that's the right term) of the instants would drop a lot given that it takes so much time to get them up.

However, with cast time spells (ie Wrath and Starfire), I only have downtime on the very first cast. I move, and when I stop to cast again, I hit Starfire (it begins to cast 1.9 seconds later), and then I can chain cast with very little time lost by spamming the correct nuke button. I find cast time spells to be much, much higher DPS than instants.

So, my current strategy is to use instants only during movement, spell locks, etc. (where I generally have more time than instants to blow), and focus on chaining Eclipse procs at other times. For my situation and limitations, am I doing the best that I can given my high latency? Minimizing movement and raiding constantly has really improved my DPS, to the point where I feel very competitive, but if I can do anything to improve, I'm willing to give it a go.

I currently glyph for IS, Starfall and Focus, and I do blow Starfall on CD. From lots of test dummy results (dozens and dozens of sessions) it seems like this is my highest DPS setup.

Also, given my situation and playstyle, does this heavily impact the values on different stats such as spellpower, crit, and haste? Someone mentioned it before, but haste seems to be negatively impacted by latency more than crit, because every gap in casts leaves room for more time to be lost.

One final point is that I did check RAWR and the spreadsheet at the begginning of this thread, but it seems like a lot of my choices and decisions aren't modeled (seems like none of them have Starfall and Focus glyphs), and I'm not sure that they're handling latency correctly for instants vs. cast time spells. In my case, it seems like it would vary so much depending on the movement in each fight, as I only pay the latency cost for the very first cast-time spell I use after moving. Everything after that has a minimal cost in comparison (on the order of 100-150ms, maybe).

I'll throw it in, but it's pretty terrible.

e: it's up.

Quick issue with the new idol, Rawr is telling me that it is a downgrade over the old starfire one, but everyone here is telling people to go out and buy it straight away. I've been unable to make much difference between the two to be honest, as I've made a lot of changes to my gear recently.