Since this appears to be causing some confusion in other threads, you may want to update the armor penetration mechanics description to reflect the latest blue posts about the changes to armor penetration in 3.1.

GC even gives the exact calculation for finding the cap here:

116% Armor Pen only giving 66%!?!?!?! | DPS | WoW Blue Tracker | World of Raids

In his words, the tooltip is only telling you the maximum possible armor penetration you can get for a percentage of the target's armor. Since physical damage is currently less than half of dps of any hunter spec, armor penetration is not something we should really stack, especially with the effective hard cap in place.

Armor penetration affects the target up to the cap (found in the above link via calculations) with the full armor penetration in your tooltip. After that, NONE of your armor penetration applies. Perhaps it would be best to use the current boss armor values with the calculation, find the exact maximum armor penetration that is required before the cap, and show calculations based from 0 armor penetration to that level.

I have updated the armor pen section since then. As mentioned in the OP, there's more discussion about armor pen here: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...evel_80_a/p18/. Basically, GC got a couple things switched compared to actual testing. Also, unless they changed something very recently that I missed, the armor pen cap is not a cap at all. You can even take armor below 0 and do more damage than an unmitigated attack. The calculations I'm using should be the same as in Shandara's spreadsheet, which should be the same as the general accepted theory in the thread above, which is just a minor tweak to what GC posted. The calculations I did are on the accompanying spreadsheet; feel free to point out any errors you see there.

Also I think you're way off with comments like "Since physical damage is currently less than half of dps of any hunter spec, armor penetration is not something we should really stack, especially with the effective hard cap in place." Ostensibly, yes, armor pen looks weak because it is only affecting a certain percentage of your damage. However, in the spreadsheet it is coming close to or beating crit depending on gear. You also have to consider that outside of gems we don't normally get to go heavy on agi/ap while ignoring everything else, at least not as much as was possible in BC. Decisions like haste versus pen are more likely to be what you face.

How about the effects of haste + ArP?

I am wrong to think that the more ArP you have, the more beneficial haste is? Haste is linear, but ArP at the moment is not. Could haste be used to increase the impact of ArP?

I know it sounds a bit off, but we are unique(at least so I think, since I don't understand rogues fully, and our shots get fired at a much faster rate than lets say a warrior) in how fast we can consistently put out physical damage.

Haste increases your auto shot frequency (at the least) which means that the harder they hit (ArP in this case) the more useful haste will be. The reverse is also true - adding ArP increases the value of haste. This is also the case for pretty much every stat pairing we have.

Mate, as your gear/talents/latency changes, the value of stats change. Its faulty to estimate how much Crit = AP and the rest of that without taking these into account especially because they scale with each other. The only answer that will be even remotely close is the one you'ld get from the spreadsheet. If you can't run the numbers yourself, I'd suggest downloading the BIS one with setups already saved and just taking the Stat valuations from that.

Also, just because you outperform other hunters going with Crit gems does not mean they're superior. It could mean you're just consistently lucky or even that the other hunters have less skill or more limiting factors than you. Ultimately, you should only compare DPS with yourself - try crit gems this week and agi next week for example. But even then, RNG plays such a huge factor that these comparisons are limited, even though not as limited as comparing with another player.

As another poster pointed out, the answer for relative weights changes with gear, with talents, and with buffs. Getting a relatively accurate answer requires considering all these variables and more (and hence, the spreadsheet is your friend).

Having said that, here are *my* numbers. As you can see, I'm an SV hunter with fairly typical entry-level Ulduar gear (mostly 213s, with a 200 and couple of 226s):

Agi = 1.187 dps per item budget (e.g., per point of agi)
AP = 0.795 dps per item budget (e.g., per 2 points of AP)
Crit = 0.791 dps per item budget
Hit = 1.235 dps per item budget (until capped, of course)
Int = 0.434 dps per item budget
ArP = 0.641 dps per item budget
Haste = 0.402 dps per item budget
Sta = 0.268 per item budget (e.g., per 1.5 points of stamina)

There are some pretty clear tiers here:

Tier 1 = hit, followed by agi
Tier 2 = AP, followed by crit
Tier 3 = ArP
Tier 4 = Int, followed by haste
Tier 5 = stamina

So if your question is "what is the best overall stat to gem for?", the answer will usually be "hit unless you are capped; otherwise agi". If the question is "what is the best *yellow* stat to gem for?", the answer will usually be "hit unless you are capped, otherwise crit." But crit is nowhere close to agi for overall punch. And I doubt that would be any different for any SV hunter. Agility just does too much for us.

Is there an point as to where i should stop stacking agility and start stacking another stat?

Wow I'm disillusioned. I was always under the impression that slower weapon gave bigger steady shots and had no effect on Aimed and Multi. Those formulas on Wowwiki are severely outdated and inaccurate!