Just wondering...

Why does dps increase when noxious stings talent is taken? The talent itself should add 0 dps?

I have Darkmoon Card: Greatness and it imports it on my spreadsheet with my other trinket and everything else I have without failing, I don't think the trinket has an issue... possibly someting else you have.

From Thottbot: increases all damage done by you on targets afflicted by your Serpent Sting by 3%.

If you are using the spreadsheet, it is taking into account damage dealt while your target is afflicted by SrS.

Ahh so the wyvern sting actually has nothing to do with the increase and does not need to be dispelled for it to occur. Got it.

See this thread for the details. Current thinking is the level mechanics for crit have changed to mimic weapon skill, defence etc which means you lose 4.8% crit against a boss level mob. As that drop has been verified for both hunter and melee classes, the spreadsheet now takes it into account.

The moth ability Serenity Dust seems to still not be implemented. Is there something about the spell that's proving difficult or did it just get lost in the shuffle?

Thank you for the great work.

There seems to be something wrong on the pet tab as far as calculating dps for the different pets. I plugged in all the ferocity pets and the one that comes out on top, by a wide margin, is the wasp. This was not the case with the pre-ptr sheet. I also discovered that the skills have to be in a different order now to get max numbers. On the pre ptr sheet, I put rabid first, followed by the family special skill (e.g. rake etc.) then the focus dump. On the new sheet , to get the highest numbers, I have to put the focus dump second and the family skill last. This results in the wasp being first, followed by the exotics, and the wolf even beating out the cat. These numbers just do not seem right.

What is the correct order for the skills on the new sheet?

This is a a bug.

Update:
My apologies for the slew updates this week. I don't have much free time at the moment so I'm catching up to the current PTR status whenever I can. I'm afraid I'm not that organised in updating the sheet so I tend to make quick changes here and there as they pop up, which sometimes leads to bugs.

I've been testing this a bit this morning, seems to stack with everything I can find, including raid buffs. Tested Abom's Might, Battle Shout, Call of the Wild, Rabid, Horn of Winter.

I think, honestly, this will be one of the best pets come 3.0.8. It stands out because of the way it will stack with Bloodlust, Call of the Wild, and other buffs at the start of a fight. And the tiny heal isn't bad, either, as a bonus. Edit: For non-BM hunters. Bit off-topic, but yeah.

Wait, Explosive Shot with a 30 second cooldown? What? That should be LNL.

Yeah it's a typo.

That's where the bug was, it wasn't restricting the GCDs available to lower priority abilities. This should be fixed.

There seems to be something a bit off with Raptor DPS in the newest version of the sheet.

Re-download if you downloaded the last version. I accidentally uploaded a work version instead of the final 81g release.

Yep, all better now. Great work!

Now that long abilities are off the GCD, we're really only selecting pet racial then focus dump. To make it easier to change pets, could we just select that from the selection list i.e. 'Pet Racial' and 'Focus Dump' which would then, in a new column next to it, print out what that ability was. Then if we change pets, the new column would auto update to match the new pet.

With that implemented, it would be very easy for you to add a Pet Planner page, which iterated through all pets by just changing the pet family, and then sorting via total DPS to see which is the best pet for your buffs/talents/setup.

I've always thought that Mortal Shots 5/5 was required to avoid a sticky "n00bsauce" sign adhering to one's derriere.

According to the spreadsheet though, all other things equal, 5/5 Improved Tracking and 2/5 Mortal Shots is better than 5/5 Mortal Shots and 2/5 Improved Tracking.

Improved tracking gives 1/2/3/4/5% more damage to those creatures that you are tracking, while Mortal Shots increases the damage of Crits by 6/12/18/24/30%. So, with a Crit% of 28.5% like I have, Mortal shots should increase overall damage by 30%, 28.5% of the time, or .285*.3 = 8.4% increase to total damage. Improved Tracking should only be able to improve damage by up to 5%.

What am I missing?

I have been considering this ever since Blizzard took more and more pet abilities off the GCD. My initial design for the pet rotation proved to be a bit too elaborate for it ended up doing.

On a related note (and the above poster) I'm considering how to properly represent trap dancing. One thing a spreadsheet can't do easily is model conscious decisions made by the player. I.e. waiting on CDs or acting upon procs. Trap dancing is one such thing as well.

You can't really say how much time it would cost or how it impacts your rotation. Not in a mathematical sense really. Would you wait for your instant shots to come off CD before trap dancing, thus wasting no Steady Shot time or would you use it as soon as your trap is ready?

There are a great many possible ways to do trap-dancing, not mention on some bosses you might move further away for safety or trap-dancing would be all but impossible.

As I understand it, trap-dancing would mean the following:
1) Move closer to the boss, within trap-triggering range, costing X seconds
2) Spend 1 GCD laying your trap
3) Move back, into ranged range, costing X seconds again

Say X is 3 seconds (for sake of simplicity) then, given 0 latency, that is 2 GCDs you can only fire instants. For SV this means you could fire an Explosive Shot and Kill-Shot/Multi-Shot.

But on the way out, despite having laid down the trap it takes 2 seconds more (the arming time was 2 seconds if I remember correctly) before it triggers. And despite things being instant it does take slightly more than before L&L triggers and you actually the see the buff and can react. That is if both your instants are off CD at the time you go out to trap.

The bigger X is the more GCDs are wasted doing nothing, although Explosive Shot can get off CD before your trap triggers L&L then. And you can fire the free ES when L&L triggers as well.

Remember; Mortal Shots only affects your SPECIAL shots; i.e. Explosive Shot, Steady shot, etc. It does not affect auto-shots. Imp. Tracking applies to everything.

With the way Steady Shot is on live, Mortal Shots does come out ahead. However, with our special damage being lowered so much, the other ways to spec become better.

@shandara: First off, thanks for everything. Second, I do agree with the difficulties of implementing trap dancing, specially since it differs every time out for every player for just about every encounter. All I was thinking is, if we can use the spread sheet to calculate the dps with out the sniper 30+ yards bonus, but still keep the kill shot to crit part of the talent, it would help to make a comparison between the two styles, for each individual player by hand (collect proc rates by an addon, or wws, and do the math by hand).

On the same subject, if we did make it so range is an option, maybe we could turn off serpent sting LnL proc. I just thought it would be easier for every one, if we could figure out the base dps (no range bonus+ serpent LnL proc) by the spread sheet, and then add our own averages from trap dancing (so the last 3 naxx runs my addon tells me it proced x times for y damage).

@seoman: Your own Crit rating will influence how effective Mortal shots is. The more you crit, the more that bonus adds up. Eventually, it does surpass Tracking

I believe Multishot is still considered a "0.5sec" cast and causes an "Cannot do this while moving" error message whilst not standing still? So the only things i can think of during trapdance walk is ES, KS, and erm... refreshing serpent? Also with the 30 sec internal cd on LnL your disengage is likely to be up on either your way to the boss or back... so that should make the "dance" a bit quicker.

However, as you rightly said this already goes pretty deep into playstyle and it's indeed arguable whether a spreadsheet can / should cover this kinda mechanics at all - it's great for what it is, but to find out whether trap dancing or sniper suits someone's personal dps more i still believe there's no way around bashing some training dummies :P