Raid utility.

There simply aren't any other decent talents to sink your extra points into if you're getting Vindication. In terms of utility it allows you to BOP twice on Heroic Deathbringer and it allows you to BOP twice if you're getting two burrows on Heroic Anub'arak. It also lets your Rotface tank stay HoFed longer while he runs through the slime. All marginal gains for sure.

I revised my spreadsheet to take into account the GCD from the last strike used spilling over past fight length. Essentially I just reduced the number of those strikes by an amount proportional to how far over fight length the GCD took them. For example, if I hit CS with .75 seconds left in the fight the sheet now records 127.5 CS casts in the fight and calculates appropriately.

It turns out this does not change the value of haste significantly when this calculation is improved in this way. (No big surprise.) Haste is still as about 3-4% worse than crit on average in my sim, though the value still fluctuates slightly based on fight length. I don't have a good way to fix that situation though without going to enormous fight lengths so at the moment we will just have to accept the approximations.

The upside is that this did dramatically stabilize the value of haste as I changed fight length around. I got drastically less spikes up and down which suggests that this implementation is going to give us a much more reliable, robust model. I will be publishing this with my next release, but since it isn't really changing our gearing or anything I don't know that it will come out soon.

Lately I've been considering a switch from Blacksmith to Engineering. The conventional wisdom is that the 40 STR from BS provides higher theoretical single target DPS. I don't know if this is true when you take all of the various Engineering perks into account.

Modeled benefits:
Hyperspeed Accelerators (340 haste rating @ 12 sec per 60 seconds)
Flexweave Underlay (23 AGI)
Nitro Boosts (24 critical strike rating, run speed @ 5 sec per 180 seconds)

Unmodeled benefits:
Saronite Bombs (1325 avg fire damage @ 60 seconds, not on the GCD but has an AOE target reticule that requires an additional click(?))
Gnomish Battle Chicken (5% melee haste to party @ 240 seconds per 1200 seconds)

The chicken isn't guaranteed to use its party buff. However if your guild runs with a four to five player Engineering melee group, then it seems fairly likely to occur. You don't have to be an Engineer to benefit from the party buff, but it seems only fair that the Engineers should buff each other!

I am curious as to how Saronite Bombs work. Do they operate on spell or melee hit? Can they crit (@150% or 200% damage)? Is the damage modified by things like Sense Undead, Crusade, Sanctified Retribution, and Ebon Plaguebringer? From what I can tell from logs they are subject to partial resists.

I can't remember ever seeing one miss, and can't find a single miss from our logs either - Melee hit it is then I'd say. As for critting, this log has two Saronite Bomb crits which suggest 200% critical damage. The large disparity of the average normal and critical hit is probably due to hitting un-debuffed targets when multiple targets are present (so yes, I'm pretty sure it scales with the +13% magic damage debuff at the very least). From my experience the crit chance is rather abysmal though.

With such a low crit rate I guess none of my evidence is 100% solid, but as for Engineering in general, I've never regretted making the switch from Blacksmithing. Even if the modeled benefits weren't quite up to BS's levels (they certainly aren't far behind), the unmodeled ones should be enough to bring them even. There's also the fun (obvious ones) and convenience (Auction House in Dalaran, portable mailbox, repair bot) factors. The only thing I miss is being able to open Lockboxes.

Looking at your average damage (1745), it's fairly close to the modified damage of 1325 * 1.06(crusade)*1.01(undead)*1.13(CoE)*1.03(Ret aura)*1.05(icc aura). It also seems to be effected by Avenging Wrath. The bombs crit at 200% damage, but the rate does not appear to be related to the player's spell or melee crit (2%?).

At least for my modded version of Exemplar's sheet, the ~29 DPS from Saronite Bombs are actually enough to bring Engineering to 10 DPS ahead of Blacksmithing. I didn't take the chicken into account in the direct BS/Engi comparison, but its 5% melee haste buff is worth approximately 220 DPS.

If the nitro boost gets you even a couple extra swings in its a pretty hefty boost as well, although you can't really model it.

Very true. My question is does the haste proc stack if multiple people use the chicken and get the battle squak?

No, it doesn't stack but more melee using the chicken trinket means it has a higher chance of giving the buff out.

The bomb targeting takes 0.5 seconds to cast and has the target circle you have to aim, but does not reset the swing timer. Eng is a little better once you add in the bombs and using the glove enchant on cooldown, but I prefer passive bonuses.

If you have 4-5 engineers in your group I would think the chances of getting the haste buff is pretty high. If you get the proc, it is pretty much a passive 225 dps increase. I would think that with BS and Engineering being so close as it is, any procs you get is just added bonus.

What is the cooldown on using bombs? If it is over 30 seconds, you should be able to consistently fit them into your rotation, depending on 2pc procs. Nitro boosts can be considered passive in my opinion too. Anytime you have to get to a new target, you will be making up pretty decent chunks of time that you would otherwise be attacking nothing. It just seems like this is more dps no matter what way you look at it.

Saronite bombs are 1 minute, pushing a skill while aiming a bomb will cancel it.

Haste to gloves is also a 1 min CD, i've always wondered if there's is a situation where using your gloves before having a 5 stack of veng/corr is a dps increase over using a gcd to switch to SoR for short bursts for a fight like putricide slimes.

SoV/C becomes better then SoR 1-2 seconds earlier with then the suggested 12 seconds?


Wowhead comments suggest battle chicken does ~2k melee dmg. (Free bomb!)

I wanted to point something out to those that might be switching to Engineering from Blacksmith. I have run into a problem where my extra prismatic sockets from Blacksmith are still showing up as active on my character screen, however I am not getting the stats. Obviously after switching, the stats should go away, however the problem is that as a Jewelcrafter, if you had a dragon's eye in one of those Blacksmith prismatic sockets, you are unable to replace it, thus only allowing you to have 2 dragon's eyes. I even tried to just put a green level strength gem in it to free up the 3rd dragon's eye, however it wont let me replace it.

I just wanted to give some warning to anyone that may be thinking about a swap. It must be a bug of some sorts, however I am not sure its something that can be ticketed and fixed.

The sapper charge is also on a 5min cooldown, while Saronite Bombs are on a 1min cd. Just saying

This is true, but it doesn't prevent you from using a sapper charge at the beginning of the fight and then using frag bombs for the rest of the fight. The sapper charges may have a 5 min CD, but the shared CD with saronite bombs (and other explosives in general) is only 1 min.

More importantly:
Gnomish Engineering - [Gnomish Battle Chicken]
Goblin Engineering - [Global Thermal Sapper Charge]

Your choice of specialization between the two would affect your end results.

Goblin gets 1 charge in a 5 min fight. Replacing a single 1k Saronite Bomb with a 2k Sapper Charge. In a 10min fight you get 2 for total of ~2k damage.

Gnomish gets 1 chicken in a fight. It does ~2k damage. It has a chance to produce melee haste increasing squawk. Raw damage compares on a 10min fight, beats a 5 min fight.

However, the Chicken would not be available every pull on a new fight (wipe, return, rebuff should be less than 20 min, I hope). On farm content you could hit multiple bosses within the 20min window.

I am not 100% sure on this fact, but I remember being told the battle chicken is vulnerable to ALL boss effects though, AOE included. The fact that it counts a level 90 will not save it with the minimal HP it has (2100 or so?). Assuming I'm not wrong, it's essentially useless for any fight outside of Saurfang (since blood nova won't hit melee if enough ranged are out).

A few leather pieces have better itemization than their plate counterparts.

Because of the way that item's are budgeted. Stacking the same stat means that you get less of it (For example, 1 str costs 1 'point', 2 str costs 2.1 points, 3 str costs 3.3 points). As you stack more and more of one stat, you are losing more and more to the stacking penalty. (Note that this is in reference to item budgets only. This is not an effect you observe on your character)

Our normal plate gear only has 4 stats. Stam, Strength, and then two others from [hit/crit/exp/arp/haste] while leather has 5 (stam,agi,AP then two others) and mail has 6 (leather+int). Because they have more stats to cover, they pay less stacking penalty per stat, resulting in overall more stats. Therefore in many situtations it's possible for Agi gear to be better then plate because there is simply more to it.

It also helps that paladins have the best agi->crit conversion in the game...to the point where it is NEARLY equivalent to crit rating.

Basically, leather gear has a 5 stat spread versus plate 4 stat spread. This means Plate items suffer more from diminishing returns on stat gains, as well as having more stamina than leather pieces.

So even though strength is far and away our best stat, the above facts make specific agility-pieces more attractive compared to their strength counterpart.

Examples where the agility version beats strenght version in similarly itemized slots:

[Shadowvault Slayer's Cloak] >>> [Winding Sheet]
[Frostbitten Fur Boots] >>> [Blood-Soaked Saronite Stompers]
[Astrylian's Sutured Cinch] >>> [Coldwraith Links]

Hope that made sense

edit: aww beaten to it

Out of interest, will this be true once Blizz fixes the red -> blue gem problem with the heroic Stompers? I'm not on my main PC atm so I don't have the spreadsheet available, but I know the 264 Stompers are showing up higher than the 264 Boots for me at least.

I'm almost 100% sure you do NOT need to stay Gnomish Engineering to use the Battle Chicken, just have to be Gnomish to create it. After that you can switch to Goblin and use the Sapper Charges. I had switch a while back and I'm almost positive (I can't really remember) that I was still able to use it. But I sadly had to go back to Gnomish to make the arrows.

I can confirm this. I only use it on Saurfang pretty much because on fights like Blood-Queen the aura instantly kills it before it can even come close to attacking.

Also I have a question concerning the subject of engineering tinkers: Is it a better idea to pop your Hyperspeed Accelerators synced up with wings? Or can they just pop them all whilly-nilly. I usually try to keep them synced.