Aereus

Made the mistake of asking about this on WoW Rogue forums first... big mistake >.>

Was thinking about the Dragon-Encrusted Longblade today vs staying with the Blade of Savagery.

I know this sword isn't that hot for Rogues as far as upgrades go (neither is the S4 OH for that matter) over the Blade of Savagery. I was thinking though, that if Slayer's Boots are combined with this OH sword (assuming you don't have OH Glaive yet), + 2/2 WeapEX + Human racial would put me at 24 expertise out of a cap of 26.

Currently I'm using Shard of Contempt + Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality, and even without factoring in the Expertise on them, they are a clear upgrade over the Shadowmasters Boots. But it puts me at 32 expertise, wasting that entire stat. It would seem a better idea then in the long run to grab the next Madness trinket + the Longblade so as not to waste the massive Expertise bonuses that are on the Shard of Contempt and the Slayers Boots. Then I would get the full benefit out of the Madness trinket, instead of a lot of wasted AEP.

Anyone tried this out yet? The spreadsheet won't be an accurate metric for this complex of a comparison.

 

Aereus

That's my feeling as well -- I like a lot of what I see deep in Assassination now, but it's just too early to tell how it will end up. The only thing I feel a little disappointed in, is that in order to keep DW spec, you will have to make some hard choices on which new talents to take for Mutilate.

If they really want to make Mutilate on par with Combat Swords for raiding in Lich King, I think it might be a good idea to make DW spec 3 talent points instead of 2. This would allow Mutilate Rogues to only put 18pts into Combat and save 2 more pts for deep Assassination talents. But it wouldn't really boost the power of Combat Rogues significantly, since all they could get instead with those 2 points is early tree talents.

 

◊ songster

If he has less time on target he'll have less damage overall done, even if he's putting out more DPS/TPS while he's actually attacking. 400 TPS is an insanely large number though, is he not getting Salv, or something stupid like that? Final alternative: his Omen is broken.

 

• Aldriana

I guess I'm not seeing what the proposed benefit in switching to DEL is. I mean, you do have a problem at the moment in that T6 boots will put you significantly over the Expertise cap, so you need to find a way to dump some to get back under, and swapping out Shard of Contempt for something else (MotB, DST, Sliver if you can get it) is certainly the natural option. However, you can do that without changing swords.

If I'm reading you correctly, you're looking at switching swords to get back closer to the Expertise cap. But what's the benefit to doing so? Expertise is, after all, just a number; what matters at the end of the day is not whether you have 2 expertise or 20 expertise or 200 expertise, but how much damage you do. And as DEL is usually pretty clearly inferior to Savagery, I'm not seeing much benefit to the switch. Being at 21 Expertise with Savagery seems like a perfectly reasonable option.

So my recommendation would be: perform whatever trinket manipulations needed to get back under the Expertise cap, but keep using Savagery.

 

• Vulajin

Yes, it would.

 

gyrinth

long time reader, first time poster...

The solution I found using the spreadsheet (much to my surprise) was actually to use the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve (Scryer version) after swapping SoC to WSC. Not optimal if you have the Supremus or Brutallus neck pieces, but plenty reasonable if you've been screwed by the RNG like me.

 

• Neto-

Why would you do that...? The Resolve neck is inferior to the Might neck in every way. It seems like you'd do that just to reach some arbitrary expertise number. Just keep the BoS and switch SoC to something else, or use the spreadsheet and mess around with trinkets and the Dragon-Encrusted Longblade.

 

Aereus

What the wonderful "spreadsheet lackies" say is that the MAEP of the Savagery and Longblade are about the same, with Longblade maybe ahead by like 2 MAEP. So the swap would at least not be a downgrade, but would allow removal of the Shard of Contempt since the 44 expertise rating on it wouldn't be needed anymore -- which WOULD give a boost in DPS then. Being at 21 Expertise would largely nullify the benefit of swapping out the Shard in the first place.

Vulajin: Some professional criticism -- Your spreadsheet has made it impossible to have a civil discussion anymore. Nearly every thread I see now is "spreadsheet or gtfo" trolls that hijack everything. I'm sorry but your spreadsheet isn't freaking Gospel. It doesn't work well on OpenOffice, and I don't own or want to own a copy of Excel. It was also incredibly undershooting my DPS for Mutilate comparisons, which makes me doubt the accuracy of it in general.

 

• Vulajin

Frankly I don't care how inaccurate you think the spreadsheet is. If you don't like it, don't use it, but don't come here essentially calling people "lackeys" for choosing to trust the sheet.

To address your actual original question, it is stupid to consider picking up an inferior trinket so that you can use an inferior weapon in conjunction with Slayer's Boots. Madness of the Betrayer is crap and Dragonscale-Encrusted Longblade doesn't give you any special benefit by virtue of using it, certainly not compared to Blade of Savagery.

(edit) Also extreme irony in responding to Aldriana with that "spreadsheet lackeys" comment, since Aldriana wrote the spreadsheet on which most of our current roguecrafting is based.

(edit 2) Second point of irony, if you're talking about a sheet having problems with OpenOffice, you're talking about a sheet that I don't even write. There are three spreadsheets: the one I make is the Roguecraft Spreadsheet. I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the DPS Spreadsheet. Aldriana's sheet is the Gear Spreadsheet.

 

• Neto-

I'm sorry if you think you can't trust on the spreadsheet, but if you don't, on what are you going to base your thoughts exactly? People's opinions and anecdotal evidence are worthless in a mathematical discussion like this.

For the sake of answering your question, for my gear (I understand it changes in your gear), I'm getting 2318 with AToL/BoS and 2314 with AToL/D-EL, 5s/5r. Obviously I changed my boots to Slayer's and my race to Human. The other trinket slot is DST.

 

gyrinth

So I thought as well.

When I upgraded to the t6 boots, according to the spreadsheet using WSC over SoC was an upgrade on it's own. That's reasonable enough, some of the expertise was wasted, proc isn't that sexy, etc.

I was fiddling around w/ other stuff at that point, using the find upgrade macro in the DPS spreadsheet, and it tells me the Scryer version of Resolve is upgrade over the Scryer version of Might (my current neckpiece, since I've had poor luck on Supremus/Brutallus drops). It's not me thinking "Oh I'll get some expertise, tee-hee!" Also, I don't use (or plan to use) the Kalec sword.

I haven't compared results to the Gear or Roguecraft spreadsheets, so there may be a different story from those.

ADDENDUM:

Trying the other spreadsheets, they do not appear to have SS Pendant of Resolve modeled. I'm not savvy enough on the internals of those pieces of software to make the changes myself, so perhaps the authors will. Perhaps not, not particularly fussed.

But those spreadsheets do agree WSC.ge.SoC, so it's static 18 agi + 64 AP, transient arcane strike vs static 13 hit + 18 expertise, transient expertise capped. Static stats favor Might, but the arcane strike seems pretty uninspiring relative to being expertise capped for 10 seconds. Not that I am convinced it's better, just that it's not beyond my ability to rationalize it.

 

Aereus

My point is if they aren't going to answer the question or offer real input, then they shouldn't post at all. Not everyone wants to buy or warez Office, as it's a resource hog on your PC. The spreadsheet can give you a good estimate of some things, but I hate people that just point to it like it's the bible, plug their ears and go "lalalala"

On the subject of the Longblade though -- it's rather short-sighted of Blizzard not to provide a real OH upgrade for Rogues in Sunwell. Even the S4 OH Sword is about the same as the Longblade, so people don't even have that option either. I guess they expect all Rogues to get Warglaives? ...

 

• Aldriana

A brief word on spreadsheets (which might be worth paraphrasing in the FAQ in the first post):

Across recorded history (most recently by Aereus), the following sentiment has been expressed any number of times: "I don't trust the spreadsheet(s), so I'd like an answer that isn't just straight out of the spreadsheets". The problem with this is as follows: almost all verifiable information available on these forums are based on the spreadsheets.

See, here's the thing. There are fundamentally three types of information on these forms:
1) Quantifiable data based solidly in mathematics, modeling, and or statistical analysis of observations, more commonly known as "facts"
2) Speculation that's currently under analysis to attempt to determine whether it can be backed up by mathematics, modeling, or statistical analysis, more commonly known as "theories", and
3) Speculation that has no evidence whatsoever to support it, more commonly known as "useless crap"

Note that items in category 2 tend to migrate to either category 1 or category 3 over time.

That said, since most of us are not interested in dealing with useless crap, we tend to deal in fact - that is, stuff supported by evidence, confirmed by our best known models and tests, and so forth. And the spreadsheets represent the best available modeling based on the best available data. The reason why the spreadsheets are widely respected and used is because they've been around for a while, inspected and used by hundreds of people, and are generally felt to be among the best available tools. If there was something better, we'd use it instead... but there isn't. So we use the spreadsheets.

I'm not saying the spreadsheets are perfect. They certainly have bugs and issues and quirks and so forth. But then, our knowledge of the game is imperfect to start with. So, flaws and all, they're still the best tools we have. Which means that anything useful and grounded in fact that anyone here can tell you ultimately derives from the spreadsheets. Some of the information has some external verification to it as well... but, all of it was either discovered in or verified by one or more spreadsheets. Hence, if you don't trust the spreadsheets - well, you're basically wasting your time here, then, because if you throw out all knowledge derived from the spreadsheets, there's not much left.

So, in this case, when we assert that the spreadsheets can, in fact, model the proposed problem - it's because they can. And if they can't, that means no one knows the answer, as we don't have any other good sources of information. If there's a spreadsheet you don't like - that's fine. We have more than one for a reason. In particular, the available tools at the moment are:

Rogue Gear Spreadsheet. Written by me. Has been around for over a year. Contains no major known issues. Models all non-Mutilate/SF builds. Works on OpenOffice.
Rogue DPS Spreadsheet. Currently maintained by Dontmindme. Has been around for over 2 years. Models all specs. Not sure on what the current level of bugginess of it is, as I haven't been following it, but usually pretty good. Does not work in OpenOffice.
Roguecraft Spreadsheet. Written by Vulajin. Attempts a more detailed model of Rogue DPS than the first two sheets. Somewhat less mature than the first two, hence potentially more buggy. Still provides useful information in some cases.
RogueCalc. Python program currently under development by me. Fairly immature at this stage, so may contain bugs. Still provides some useful information.

Lets be clear: I'm not saying that you should blindly follow the spreadsheet in all things. You do need to think a bit while using them. But in so many cases, the spreadsheet-haters aren't opposing them because they have a specific complaint against them, but on general principal. If you have reason to believe that the spreadsheet might not be taking everything into account in a given case, by all means, ask about it and we'll discuss it. But when the topic is something well-established and well-covered by the spreadsheets, and you exclude them purely out of spite - well, that's just ridiculous.

 

Dorvan

One minor point: the Rogue DPS Spreadsheet does work with OO as far as the base DPS calculations are concerned, you just miss out on a number of convenience elements that are only available through macros with it, such and saving DPS/buff/talent sets and displaying upgrades options. I've been using the DPS spreadsheet for a long time primarily because it was the only one to model Mutilate.

Which reminds me, I noticed a few weeks ago the the DPS Spreadsheet and Roguecraft Spreadsheet produce very different results on the relative damage of Combat Daggers and Mutilate. DPS Spreadsheet has them nearly identical (CDag ahead by <1%), Roguecraft Spreadsheet had Combat Daggers about 12% ahead. As far as I could tell, I had identical buffs entered (heavily raid buffed in both cases, I can post exact buffs as needed).

Gear selection was as appears in my armory. I haven't had time to look into it recently, so any initial ideas would be welcome, I'll try to take a closer look myself in the next couple of days.

 

Aereus

Sorry, they just hit a nerve with me in their anti-social behavior. They hang out on a forum for Class discussion, then all they do is tell you not to discuss and hide in a spreadsheet instead. *scratches head* What I was asking is if anyone had *verified* if stacking the other expertise and dropping the Shard was a DPS gain or not. If nobody has, then that's fine.

For example: I asked a question on the WoW Rogue forums and proceeded to get the following:

- Trolled rudely about the spreadsheet
- I'm a 'lolol nub' because I recently made gear upgrades that gave me 3 blue gems while I don't yet have 15 badges to buy a Pyrestone.
- I had Slayers Boots for 2hrs so slapped a green gem in them for farming and get trolled bc I get the epic gem in the mail from the guild bank tomorrow before raid ...
- Trolled over using Imp poisons instead of Vile poisons despite it being a marginal 3dps difference the spreadsheet says. Also not considering that I'm working on M'uru currently where applying faster is more important bc of adds.
- Trolled for not knowing they had supposedly made DP benefit from Stormstrike without using up the charge. Something that is so obscure and hard to test.

Not one relevant comment Yea or Nay.

 

Aereus

Mutilate is incredibly hard to model accurately due to how many timers you have to keep track of and all the different synergistic ways they interact. For example, the DPS spreadsheet undershot my actual dps by like 300 for Mutilate, and said Combat daggers was better, when frequent testing always put it well behind Mutilate for me. And as you know, it's kinda hard to screw up combat daggers bc there really is nothing much else to do but keep up SnD and maybe fit in a 3pt finisher every so often if you're lucky.

 

• Aldriana

Well, my point is: how are we possible supposed to say whether it's a DPS gain or not without using the spreadsheet? Whether it is or not, the difference is small enough that you're not going to be able to see it on any WWS who's length isn't measured in days; as such, the only way we have to assess it is via the spreadsheets. So when you post saying "which is better? I don't think the spreadsheet can handle this", the response "the spreadsheet will do just fine" is perfectly valid (if perhaps a bit rudely stated).

Now, if your question is about, say, discussion of how close AToL comes to the theoretical uptime in trash situations so you can make a more accurate estimate of it's quality for nonsustained fights - okay, that's a good non-spreadsheet question, because you're pointing at a clear problem with the spreadsheet model. But for a simple question like this with no known issues that would prevent spreadsheet accuracy... what's wrong with just using the spreadsheet?

 

Aereus

Well thanks for your help Aldrianna. It's not worth the DKP for me to find out I think. Hopefully I can get a Naaru Sliver before LK comes out. I think I'm just gonna go now bc apparently a non-personal derogatory label is considered trolling. And I don't take kindly to mod harassment after asking politely but firmly why they believe it is trolling, only to get god-complexed without a reply to the question.

 

• Neto-

The Roguecraft spreadsheet models Mutilate and Combat Daggers almost equal, it's only after you add Bloodlust stacking, Blade Flurry and Haste potions stacking and so on that it pushes ahead.

 

Lucsoke

Sadly, you had many replies to the question, but were too stubborn in your belief that the spreadsheets wouldn't help you when you hadn't tried them at all.

I quote, "And fsck the spreadsheet, the thing isn't accurate enough to factor in overcapping expertise being wasted AEP. Our tanks already HAVE the sword, and what else besides OH glaive could I upgrade to in BC? Oh thats right -- nothing."

"I hate mindless "Spreadsheet" puppets. Can't even think for yourselves and are too stupid to realize when the spreadsheet won't even be good for the comparison."

Maybe next time you'd be better off making less assumptions and actually asking questions about the modeling of the spreadsheet. As Aldriana pegged it, you had a principal issues here with a lack of understanding how any of these sheets work.

Many people use these sheets without the base understanding of what makes them up, and frankly, it's their loss for not wanting to delve deeper. As mentioned, you can't blindly use them in some cases and have to have a core understanding to make sense of results that may seem out of place.

You asked on the rogue forums if the subect had been discussed yet. Of course it had, not in your exact context, but those discussions are part of what make up these sheets.

Most of the negative replies, including mine, were because of your attitude. Might want to check that next time too.

 

Zaroua

Was looking at the new talent Deadly Brew and was wondering if putting more than 1 point in the talent would be a waste, given that in a raid situation Instant Poison would be on both weapons?

Dogma also claims that God has a sense of humor and at times presents Him as a joker of sorts, thus again lowering Him to human level. While I am certain God has a "sense of humor" since He gave it to us, I find it most difficult to believe He finds humor in sin since He will cast the unforgiven sinner into the lake of fire for eternity. Not very funny at all.

 

Eyegore

Well it seems you have gotten banned, but on the off chance you read this: One of the things people have been trying to tell you is that spending the DKP will NOT actually help you find out. Either way the dps difference will be on a level that there simply is not any practical way to test the question in game with any degree of accuracy. What you have done is to ask a question that has no possible answer outside of statistical analysis outside of the game, then talked down to people for recommending you try using the only tools we have at hand to do said analysis. Also, it may be beneficial for your mental health if you try to avoid the blizzard class forums, it works for me.

 

swelt

I would guess the answer depends on whether with dual instant and 2/2 deadly brew you'd be stacking deadly fast enough to envenom. Related to that will be whether Cut to the Chase stays as-is or is buffed. Like most of the questions, I think it's too early to be sure.

Edit: btw, "# Windfury Totem is now a flat 20% melee haste totem. All ranks have been modified. " I had interpreted the WWI dev panels as saying that WF would be a buff. This seems to contradict that. Is this the end of the extra attack WF totem we know and are addicted to?

 

Mazz

I assume that what they meant at WWI is that instead of giving a weapon imbue the totem itself will give a buff like for instance grace of air totem does now. Btw unless I missed it, those notes say nothing about WF weapon itself, only the totem.

 

Professor Hurt

I think they key phrasing in the Windfury patch notes is "a flat 20% haste", which indicates it no longer triggers extra attacks. I'll leave it up to the beta testers to find the truth.