Good idea. I'd limited it first because the rotation test was quite slow, but with all the speed ups I've done it should be ok to run it 1000 times.

There appears to be a bug in the beta sheet, but I'm not sure what's causing it. Gear planner lists Boots of the Great Construct as a 60+ dps upgrade from my Boots of the Living Scale, just for my Marks spec. The optimizer disagrees (more on that in a second) and actually swapping them in also disagrees. The only thing I can think of is that my yellow meta gem requirement is currently satisfied by my boots, so maybe it's somehow deactivating the meta before it compares the new boots.

Also played around with the optimizer. It's quite slick. However, it does exhibit some of the failure modes of a greedy algorithm in the optimization space. If I check 'start with current gear,' it doesn't find anything from where I'm at -- clearly my gear is already optimized to at least a local maximum. If I uncheck that option, it finds a setup for my marks spec that's 50 DPS better, and what it comes up with for my survival spec is 2-3 DPS below my current gear (and 33 rating over the hit cap). How does it decide that it's converging on the maximum? Could the speed of convergence be a tweakable option? I wouldn't mind letting it run for a few hours while I'm at work, for example, to get a greater degree of certainty that it's tried all the reasonable options (just as an occasional thing, of course; in general the current speed is great for interactive use).

Does the order of the items in the lists on the optimizer change anything? A couple times it seemed to be preferring things higher in the list, but it wasn't clear to me whether that's true or not.

I think it should also treat the enchants just like it treats items (or maybe gems), and find the optimal one (possibly from a subset you explicitly allow) -- at least in the hand, feet, and weapon slots, where you can pick up additional hit in cases where gems aren't enough.

I'd recommend swapping the positions of the 'copy top three from gear planner' and 'optimize' buttons. It seems like you'd be more likely to press optimize multiple times than copy from gear planner. One time I made some tweak and clicked the big friendly button in the upper left one time, wiping out my selections.

The algorithm is a fairly simple one at the moment, I still have to tweak it. Or change with a more sophisticated one.

Basically it does the following at the moment. Excuse the pseudo-code.

Obviously, the amount of loops is capped by the option to set the amount of iterations.

The big downside is that it always starts with the same slot. It leaves a lot of possible paths unexplored.
The advantage is that it's very fast, since it starts skipping a lot of items after the 3rd loop.

A better way would be to start with a random slot. Or to calculate DPS upgrades for ALL slots/items first, then pick the highest. This would require a great deal more loops though.

EDIT:
There's a bug in the automatic re-gemmer used by the Gear Planner (and the Gear Optimizer) that's making it fail at your boots. Since your boots are the only source of a yellow gem on your gear it fails to find a spot to satisfy the meta-gem requirements. The Gear Planner unequips your current item first, regems. Then starts trying all the boots in the list. Each time it equips a pair of boots it regems afterwards and checks the dps.

The Boots of the Living don't have a yellow socket so the gemmer fails at that point, leading to no meta-gem activation. The Boots of the Great Construct however do have one, which gives them the superior DPS.

New beta version, number 4, here

Mostly changes to the regemmer, which should help the Gear Planner/Optimizer. The optimizer now picks the highest dps increase item across all slots, rather than pick the one of the current slot each time. Depending on your starting set this can take longer or shorter compared to the '1-slot each time' method.

The regemmer should also now consider socket bonuses. It tries to pick the best one for your token 'blue' prismatic gem first and then tries to determine whether the default gem for that slot is worth it, considering the socket bonuses, compared to the 'red' filler gem.

As an aside, I've switched to Office 2007 as a development platform, so if any 2003 users experience problems, let me know.

Blizzard changed the Armory (added pet talents), the last Live version doesn't know what to do with this, so it breaks.

Ahh, I thought of that but dismissed it as being a different issue when I was unable to hand change talents myself. If I close the spreadsheet and hand change without trying to load off the armory first it will work however. Thanks for your quick response.

another thing i was wondering was, in v89g, is there any reason why changing talents on the talent sheet have no effect on the dps whatsoever? I was going to see how my spec worked in the older spreadsheet by just inputting it manually, but it isnt working properly. Any thoughts?

Shandara,

Does the latest iteration of the spreadsheet have the buff to Rake?

Rake in the sheet has always been dealing the full damage per tick, since that's how it was when I last tested Rake in game, shortly after beta. It seems like this is just a tooltip fix.

91beta4 Gear:Regem button doesn't seem to optimize very well. Load my gear, and push it a few times. The dps will drop, and the value will oscillate between two values.

I still want to be able to push a button in the Gear Optimizer and have it load the gear that is currently in the Gear tab into a selected slot, say, slot #1. The problem with the "Start with currently equipped gear" button apparently serving the same function is that the gear it references changes over time.

The gear optimizer was able to find an item configuration I failed to find manually that was a few dps higher. For some reason, though, it chose a +16 hit gem for my gun, even though I was already over the hit cap. Unfortunately, I didn't save the starting gear setup to allow you to duplicate the problem.

Just using "get top 3 from gear planner" and hitting optimize ends up with Dark Matter being used twice.

Another bug: load my gear in beta4, turn off the Draenei Racial buff on the Buffs tab, then hit Recalculate DPS on the Gear Planner tab. The planner will show that Cloak of Mastery is -2.83 dps under the Hammerhead cloak. Substituting the Cloak of Mastery in the Gear page slot, however, drops dps by -14+. I'm assuming that Recalculate DPS actually substitutes the item, so the 2 numbers don't make sense.

The gem optimizer now does a better job than I have been able to do by hand; congratulations!

In beta6, the value of "Ranged Critical Hit Chance vs. Level 83" in the upper left of the Gear tab seems to have changed meaning, and dwarves no longer get a 46 racial crit bonus. Specifically, beta4 said 59.47% crit with 1023 rating and beta6 says 51.71% crit with 978 rating (exact same gear, gems, enchants, and buffs.) (1023-978 != 46 presumably due to rounding to nearest integer in the display.)

Darkmoon Card: Greatness is ilvl 200, not 226.

The Gear Planner is choosing Darkweb Bindings as the #1 choice for wrist at -271 dps. Pressing Sort has no effect. Seems like an off-by-one error.