Using the modified version of Vulajins s/sheet on my Rogues gear(admittedly far from BiS a permanent state for me)18/51/2 with 5s/5r rotation is calculated to around 1.6% ahead of 15/51/5 with 5s/5r/5e (and around 1.9% ahead of 15/51/5 with 5s/5r). Using Malvanas' simulation sheet 18/51/2 with 5s/5r appears about 1.5% lower than 18/51/2 with 5s/5r/5e and 1% ahead of 15/51/5 with 5s/5r/5e. Aldriana's sheet doesn't appear to 'obviously' consider the 5s/5r cycle and whether it will ever do so will be up to him and whether he finds it interesting to explore. It'd be great if that sheet could evaluate this cycle, but there are the other tools that can evaluate this too if it never does.

Given the way my guild and I manage the Ulduar fights (and that I often have difficulty achieving 5s/5r/5e in a stable rotation in practice) I find that in practice I end up running a pseudo 5s/5r (perhaps with the odd 5e thrown in anyway).

So the conclusions I draw are the following: 18/51/2 & 15/51/5 can both be viable depending upon gearing, as a result 2) both should be considered and 3) if thinking about 18/51/2 the 5s/5r should be further evaluated. Outside of those conclusions your milage may vary depending upon your individual situation and particularly gearing. This is what the tools are there to evaluate after all. And so responding to Nightbliss: 'clearly inferior' is not correct for a lot of people.

There are a couple of other effects in-play also. For 18/51/2 the best 'additional' finisher is Eviscerate not Envenom as its better for DPS to keep the DP stack ticking at maximum (and as you note providing more poison damage). This provides a bit more DPS boost to the build than you might have calculated. Secondly where 18/51/2 with 5s/5r is preferred it's because (with the gear set people have) there is an additionally higher percentage of rupture up-time as well (also providing additional DPS) being off-set against the missing Eviscerate. For those people the 15/51/5 with 5s/5r/5e cannot maintain enough 'rupture up-time + eviscerate damage' to off-set the 'extra-rupture up-time + addtional poison damage'.

I could also hypothesise that even at higher gear levels (and with 4/5 T8 set-bonus) there may be fairly competitve gear sets DPS-wise where (due to drop RNG) the mixture of stats favors 18/51/2 with its higher rupture up-time and poison damage boost, but with my Rogue being quite far from BiS I've not done the work on this so cannot confirm one way or the other. Like I posted earlier - its an option worthy of exploration IMO.

Another thing to mention is the synergy between sword specialization, wound poison ppm, and it's effect on 18/51/2.

There can be some modeling quirks that make 5s/5r pull ahead of 5s/5r/5e in the modified Vulajin's spreadsheet. Like you said yourself, 5s/5r/5e is really a pseudo 5s/5r with odd eviscerates thrown in the mix when rupture and snd are up, not about to drop and you have 4-5 extra combo points. That's exactly how I model it in my simulation spreedsheet. I perform the checks for snd and rupture and only if they are in no danger of dropping (you can adjust the checks yourself), I end up weaving in an eviscerate. With this approach adding those extra eviscerates is only going to be a dps increase. Adding an eviscerate for 25 energy (40% chance from 2 relentless to gain 25 energy back), is always better than the only other alternative use of energy - using a sinister strike and letting combo points to cap.

As far as 15/51/5 vs 18/51/5, in my latest analysis in BiS gear, the two specs are really close, provided you use eviscerate as opposed to envenom for 18/51/2. 15/51/5 is only 13 dps ahead, which is probably within the standard error from RNG, so in reality you won't even notice the difference.

Okay, we've now spent a full page discussing 15/51/5 and 18/51/2. And, fundamentally, that's fine - that's what these forums are for. The problem is, most of the discussion over it has sucked. So let me be clear about this:

We don't care about your gut instinct.
We don't care whether your personal experience indicates one or the other is better.

If you have theorycraft, detailed analysis, extensive testing, or some other source of data, that's fine; but a significant portion of the discussion has been baseless assertions, which helps no one. So knock it off.

The 15/51/5 vs 18/51/2 discussion caught my eye and I tried it out. Following Vulajin's modified spreadsheet, 5s/5r with the 18/51/2 pulls ahead.

What I want to know is what are people doing with the extra combo points? Is it strictly 5pts slice and dice 5pts rupture rinse and repeat so your guaranteed the 100% uptime on both while overiding snd and ruptures (aside from AR evi's in between) , or are people doing something else with the combo points. It feels like such a waste to override both of these abilities when at times there is 10secs+ on both.

Additionally is there a particular reason why Aldriana's spreadsheet doesnt suggest a 5s/5r rotation when inputting 18/51/2 with the same gear set?

I'm going to go with "because Aldriana's sheet doesn't support that cycle family". It's one of those things that Aldriana may work on when Aldriana has time, but as of now it's not supported.

You may also consider that spending points in Vile Poison over Relentless Strikes is going to yield you more damage with FoK. You all seem to forget that FoK is a rather large part of our DPS in Ulduar, at least when it comes to BiS lists. Loosing a small amount of singletarget DPS for a larger FoK boost might in many cases be well worth it. Like in the cases were you can choose between haste or armor penetration on otherwise similiar items.

There are no fights in Ulduar where doing more FoK damage will make the difference between a wipe and a kill; It's actually quite the opposite.

Just to add something here: A "convincing parse" and your "7k on Ignis" amount to precisely nothing from a statistical standpoint. You need dozens-to-scores of "same buffs, same target" situations to show that the reality of your gear and your spec is better than what the simulations inherent in the spreadsheets show. This is, of course, nearly impossible to get. You can hit target dummies without raid buffs which provide zero-movement, inaccurate data -- also useless.

One thing that could be true is that the difference between two specs which are more or less equivalent on the spreadsheets/simulators comes down to playability. An extreme example would be if there was some oddball 4-finisher cycle that involved making a decision within 1 second whether to envenom/eviscerate/rutpure and that getting it wrong meant the cycle broke and you lost 200 dps, but if you played it perfectly you'd beat the standard one by 30 dps. Then it's pretty clear that the standard one is going to be better for most people.

If there is something about 18/51/2 that actually makes it more reliably playable, you could perhaps demonstrate that -- or vice versa for 15/51/5. The spreadsheets/models do a fine job of simulating near-perfect play if I understand them as they are currently pieced together. Ulduar has a lot of chaos, however, and while you might well be able to play perfectly on XT, it's perhaps less likely you can do that on -- I dunno -- Hodir maybe. The repeatability of the cycles and your ability to actually squeeze out more rupture uptime or get in extra eviscerates -- real-world play where this is happening -- can differ meaningfully from the simulations. If you can show while that's the case, it could be interesting.

http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t37183-p...1/#post1273655 - This is the post you are referring to.

I find myself having similar problems with energy capping during AR, and as the previous poster said, switching to 18/51/2 gets rid of that problem for the most part.