I have a question concerning Firestorm Band - Item - World of Warcraft
and Polished Dragonslayer's Signet - Item - World of Warcraft

How is it possible that, for an arcane mage, Rawr rates Polished Dragonslayer's Signet - Item - World of Warcraft as the better one, dps wise?

I mean isn't 19 SP supposedly better than 1%ish crit for arcane?

You are talking about 51 crit rating versus 19 spellpower. Even if crit rating were only half as effective as spellpower (which it's not, it's about 60%) it would still be better. However, you seem to have ignored the 56 hit rating on the Firestorm Band. Rawr does not ignore hit rating, but values it dependent on the gear you have selected for your character. So when you are undercapped, Rawr correctly rates Firestorm Band about 155 dps higher than Dragonslayer's Signet. When you are hit capped, Rawr correctly rates the latter higher. Try turning off misery in the buffs section to see the difference, or remove another hit gear piece from your character.

I'm seeing something that I don't understand.
With my current setup, Rawr says my DPS is 6020.208. I have enough emblems to buy the Talisman of Resurgence trinket, and when I tell Rawr that that's available and hit optimize (with maximum thoroughness) it tells me to re-gem some stuff and then I'll get 6123.9 DPS.
But if I simply replace my Sundial trinket with Talisman of Resurgence, it says I get 6135.76.

I don't understand why the optimizer doesn't find the 6135.76 solution.

I've uploaded my xml file here: RapidShare: 1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting
Since it can only be downloaded 10 times, I'd appreciate it if you only download it if you *really* want to see it

This is with Rawr 2.2.24, btw...

Short story, it does find that solution. It actually finds a better solution. If you had accepted the optimization result you'd see that the actual dps of the solution it finds is 6136.44 dps.

Now the long story. Why does it say it's only 6123.9 dps when it actually is 6136.44 dps? The reason comes from Incremental Optimizations. What Incremental Optimization does is it assumes that when you're making small changes to gear your optimal cycles won't change. By making this assumption it's able to compute gear comparisons a lot faster. It only computes the true optimum for the character that is loaded and makes comparisons/optimizations based on that. It does have a problem though that when you're on a boundary where your optimal cycles change it'll underreport the value. In your particular case you're right on a boundary between 2 arcane cycles since you're low on mana regen.

What can you do about it? If you want to have 100% accurate comparisons/optimizations then you should disable Incremental Optimization. The other more practical solution is to take into account that even though it is underreporting values it's doing so uniformly for all comparisons, so in almost all cases it'll still correctly rate which gear combination is best. And once you load in the new gear it'll give you the correct dps and further comparisons/optimizations will go based on this starting point.

This might be a silly question, but when looking at the DPS estimations from Rawr, there seems to be a noticeable discrepancy between the numbers shown for DPS and for the Rotation specific ones (ie: ABSpam04MBAM). I also noticed that certain items that would be upgrades to the "DPS" number, seem to lower the number shown for the Spell Info numbers (as stated above), and vice versa. One example of this would be when deciding between Abyssal Rune and Talisman of Resurgence. Which number should I be looking at? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

You should be looking at total damage done, but obviously this depends heavily on fight lengths. So for comparisons with different fight lengths, the overall DPS estimation of Rawr is ok, because it does not vary that heavily (if you don't enter extreme fight lengths like 2-3 minutes or 15-20 minutes).

You possibly confuse the rotation-specific DPS with the fight dps using a specific rotation. The rotation-specific dps just shows you how high your dps will be when you are in that rotation. The "overall" dps additionally factors in things like evocation, activity, cooldowns (procs, bloodlust, AP, IV etc), so it's rather a mix of actions you perform within a fight and thus approximates the dps in a fight better. The rotation-specific dps and hps number are very useful to look at when you need to get a feeling of how much mana a rotation costs compared to it's dps (a better number would be the dpm tradeoffs, but afaik Rawr does not provide those and the ones on page 1 of the Arcane thread are outdated).

Looking at the DPS values for a single arcane missiles cast and a single missile barrage arcane missiles cast in RAWR I get strange figures.

AM DPS=4422.94
MBAM DPS = 8396.97

Given that AM takes twice as long to cast as MBAM and they have the same damage and crit multipliers I can't work out why either AM DPS isn't half of MBAM DPS RAWR gives or MBAM DPS isn't double the AM figure given in RAWR.

I am missing something obvious or is it a bug?

That will most likely be latency setting.

Could someone explain me this please : I have some boots with one socket, one blue one. The bonus if I put a blue gem is +5 spell power, it means that if I put a +12 spell power / +10 spirit, it will result in +17 spell power / +10 spirit. If I have 3/3 in Student of the mind ( +10% spirit ) and if I have some bok from a paladin, it will give +20% spirit so my +17 spell power / +10 spirit will " become " +17 spell power / +12 spirit. I have the glyph of molten armor and the 2/5 bonus T9, so I have 70% of my spirit in crit rating. 0.7 * 12 => 8.4 crit rating. It means that from this gem, I'll get +17spell power / +8.4 crit crating. ( I neglected the mana regeneration's factor, but it's on purpose ). If I now put a +23 spell power gem, I will " only " get +23 spell power. +23 spell power is supposed to be better than +17spell power / +8.4 crit rating so why when I tick " Unlimited mana ", Rawr keeps telling me that it's better to put a +12 spell power / +10 spirit gem ?

Rawr understands that you must use 2 blue gems for the meta at all times. While 23 spell power might be the best gem for that item, it isn't necessarily the best gem for your gear set all together.

Thank you for answering. I forgate to tell that I already have my 2 blue gems or maybe I misunderstood you and you said that even if I already have my 2 blue gems, Rawr will still think that the blue gem " adds something " since two of them are required to activate the meta even if I already have them ? ( Sorry for the bad english )

I actually have some 20/51 spec ( 3/3 Student of the mind ) and I meant in a full-buff PvE raid. My stats are then :
-55.60% crit
-3078 spell power
-628 haste.

You're underestimating the value of crit in 20/51 spec. It's not at all unlikely that the purified is better.

A question regarding the DPS value of Tuskarr's vitality - At what point should I disregard the value of the increased movement from Tuskarr's in exchange for Icewalker's.

Here's a link to my armory lite (for some reason, an error occurs when pulling wowarmory and I haven't figured out how to link my xml file from Rawr) - Armory Lite - The WoW Armory Alternative: Starym of Dragonmaw

If I optimize my gear setup, I could obtain a 9360.5 dps. However, in order to get Tuskarr's, I have to sacrifice down to roughly 9324.5. The difference being roughly 35-40 dps. I presume that's a small enough difference that the movement boost from Tuskarr's should still be an overall increase, but I haven't found any hard numbers regarding the DPS boost from Tuskarr.

In order for Tuskarr to be viable, you have to set the amount of time you are moving in a fight. By default the program assumes you are NOT moving at all. In order to set this, just go to the Options panel, then under Fight tab just list how often you move in a fight and for how long of a movement phase. even a small change of movement every 30 seconds for 5 seconds would net Tuskarr to go straight to the top.

Hi,

I'm having a small technical issue with the advanced options tab.
The fields for advanced constraints and max. parallel threads are displayed so narrow, that
I can't actually read whats in there. nither clicking on the up/down buttons nor resizing the rawr window
changes it at all... What cound be the issue here?
Any ideas appreciated

it is set to normal (96 dpi) .. any other idea?

can you supply a screenshot. I know this issue will become mute come RAWR 3.0 when they go with silverlight backend and sizing of tags/fonts will be based on the user's computer and not the static look it is today.

Also I do admit the combo selectors for the tags your talking about are a little too close compared to the other tags in the tab, but they are readable.

Looks like this ATM,
no changes when I use the "up" or "down" arrows....

In 2.2.28, selecting "Reconstruct Sequence" is crashing my Rawr on multiple computers. This is on a freshly imported Undead Mage. To clarify "crashing", it's going into "Not Responding" in Windows and never coming out. The program isn't actually closing itself on crash, I have to go end task.

You'll need to post the character xml where that happens (preferably as an issue on codeplex).

Version 2.2.28 seems to be missing the Lightweave enchant for cloaks