snail: I tried the same thing with Zeherah's online version of the spreadsheet. It showed a decrease of about 700 dps when I removed Black Arrow from my rotation, but also gave a warning: Warning: Division by zero in /home/cdaveb/femaledwarf/services/update_stats.php on line 3407.

Sounds like there might be a bug in the code, division by zero certainly does not sound good. I cannot use Shandara's sheet at the moment (am at work), so cannot test with that one. I do not know how much of the code is same anymore, but I would think it is likely they both could have a bug in BA calculations.

I ran the rotation tests in Shandara's spreadsheet and it produces the same calculation without creating any LnL procs. Unless someone in the spreadsheet thread (or this one) confirms its a bug I'll be running a couple of test runs on a target dummy this weekend.

Regarding ArP and Trinkets and the advantage of Glyphing SS vs ES.

My ArP atm is ~28%, and when NES proc, it jumps to about 77% (if I recall correctly).

Would this be enough to really make a difference in glyphing SS vs ES? (and yes realizing that NES is on the 45 sec internal CD).

It's not *just* having more arp that makes the glyph switch ideal. When you're at high levels of crit, you could probably crit-cap explosive shot with MT and a trinket proc.

So I've got a dilemma. As I near 80% static 25m buffed crit I'm worried that I'll soon be over the crit cap when abilities/trinkets proc. This will defiantly be more of a concern as I acquire more 277 gear. The only way I've really been able to think of combating this has been to get gear with more armpen and less crit or just no crit all together, but I don't really like the idea of trying for gear with no crit. So my question is: Does anyone know of another way to try and reduce the diminishing returns of crit? I know the cap is 104.5% but at times even now I've seen myself pushing 95% crit with some procs.

Well, your goal is still to do as much damage as possible, whether that entails sometimes exceeding the crit cap on some shots or not. Even if some upgrades push you over cap during procs, they are likely still upgrades.

As for gearing to combat that, you don't really have much choice in gear, all 3 specs aim for fairly similar gear, because the alternatives are poor - too much hit, or haste, or not 277 or not providing a good set bonus - this leads to the above situation of an upgrade still being the best choice even when over a crit softcap. As you gear up the problem will sort itself out though, since you'll end up gemming arp instead of agi, which will reduce your crit by 8-10%. Looking at your current gear, you'd potentially gain DPS in your MM spec by gemming arp, and after doing that, assuming you don't have a duplicate set of gear around for SV, your crit would have fallen and you'd likely have so much passive arp that arp would be near equal or better per point than agi - especially if you replaced your arp-less 2hander for one of the arp weapons and gained another 100 or so arp from there. Even if you're not at the point of gemming arp as SV yet, you're already acquiring 277 loot so will be there soon.

I was thinking about gemming ArmPen in the future as SV but wasn't really sure if it was viable. I'll need to fool around with the spreadsheet when I get a chance to see what my gearing/gems/enchants will be like once I get to mostly 277 BiS. And I know, I'm currently only about 2.5% away from the hard armpen cap in my MM gear if I regemmed, but I enjoy SV more

If any other SV hunters have encountered or have at least theory crafted with armpen as SV, send me a pm as I would like to pick your brain if you're up for it

BM-hunters also see a theoretical dps increase on higher levels of arm.pen, by regemming from AP to Arm.Pen, though that might be more obvious considering the shots they're using.

However, I wouldn't reccomend doing it, nor the survival hunters. A DPS-increase of 7 ON A THEORETICAL BASIS is just no enough to cover up for the fact that Arm.Pen will not benefit you much when you are moving (firing ES and maybe AS), which you do quite a lot in ICC.

The stat values change point-to-point each time you modify something. I´ll try to explain. While most of stats are "linear" and they´re value doesn´t change a lot while you gear up, arpen scales exponentially. Well, the same goes when you start moving from arpen to AGI, it will lose value point to point. 1º Gem X-5, 2º X-4, 3º X-2... 10º x+10 and so on.

Anyway, I wouldn´t been surprised if after changing every gem the DPS is +-5% from arpen to agi since you may have loads of passive arpen and the spreadsheet doesn´t take movement into consideration, so autoshot and steady gain value