I'm reminded of a quote by Winston Churchill:

Lets be clear here: spreadsheets aren't perfect. They have a number of well established issues, never mind the fact that they often contain bugs. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. In a purely abstract sense, it's simply not a very good way of figure out what is truly optimal.

However, it's also vastly superior to every other method at our disposal. As bad as spreadsheets are, in-game testing of something as complex as cycle comparisons for optimal DPS is even worse. There are just too many sources of variance to ever get any meaningful answers.

Simulators help with this to some extent, but even they are generally based on some simplifying abstractions and assumptions which may or may not reflect the realities of raid play, are limited by our knowledge of the actual game mechanics, and may contain bugs - much like spreadsheets. Additionally, they're really bad at determining EP values - while they're good for assessing full sets of gear in a general sense, if you want to deduce EP values they're basically hopeless.

Thus, while spreadsheets such as these ones may be imperfect... we don't really have any better options. They're the best we can do for certain aspects of theorycraft. And to the extent that they can be improved on at all, it's only by simulators which are going to have many of the problems you mention as well. These tools are guides, true... but sometimes a good guide is the best you can do.

Also, I think you're underestimating the subtlety of the modeling in sheets such as this. All good spreadsheets - including, notably, these and Vulajin's (I exclude Mavanas's not out of an effort to snub him but merely because it's more of a simulator than a spreadsheet in the conventional sense) - spend a great deal of time and effort making sure the modeling is as good as possible. These spreadsheets take into account things that most players have never even thought about in an effort to make the modeling as precise and reflective of the reality of play as possible. As a simple example: if you're doing the traditional 4+ finisher cycle for Mutilate, on average, will your ruptures and envenoms be the same size? The answer may surprise you. And that's the sort of level of detail that these spreadsheets operate on.

So yes, there may be mechanics we don't fully understand. There may be bugs. There may be proc synergies that aren't modeled as well as they could be. But for all that, I wouldn't be to quick to pass off the answers you get here as "just a spreadsheet" and go looking for some "real" data. As, for all it's flaws, a good spreadsheet is still probably a better way of assessing upgrades and specs than any reasonable amount of in-game testing.

Aldriana, If you took offense to my post I apologize. I didn't mean to reduce the spreadsheets to a description of a defective product and I completely agree that they are the best of what we have available to us for theorycrafting. The level of detail that the spreadsheets can simulate for us goes far beyond what we could hope to accomplish without them and they are responsible for many of the ideas and topics we have available to us for discussion.

My post was only a attempt to see if it would be worth while to add a ability to the spreadsheet that could compile a gear ranking specific to that of the mutilate rogue that could take into account the current gear that one inputs into the spreadsheet. But based on what you said, it seems that EP values are not something that is set in stone either. I think for my own purposes I will still make a attempt.

I would too. I just want to see a number difference.

Bug: When Treads of the Invader are equipped in the Mutilate sheet, the EP values of many other items become largely skewed and incorrect (some 300 EP items bump up to 1000-ish suddenly while others stay relatively the same, etc.) These were the only boots that did this. Can anyone else confirm?

Edit: Downloaded sheet again and equipped TotI with default settings and no problems. Changed gear back to my current setup on new sheet and reapplied settings and got the same skewed EP values on other items. What's weird is when I change equipment in ANY other slot (boots included) everything goes back to normal. Dps estimate is not affected, just EP values.

It is easy to emulate the 4piece T8 Bonus from a recount parse though.

Everything else being equal: Multiply total rupture damage by 1.<Your crit chance>, add up total damage done, divide by duration of fight in seconds. VoilÃ*, new dps.

Malloron, shouldn't you also multiply by your critical strike damage bonus? For example, for a Combat rogue with a meta, Rupture * 1.critchance * 1.23 (for Prey on the Weak and the meta) = post_4t8_rupture_damage

While I'm sure that the work that went into this spreadsheets was high, I can't help but wonder why spreadsheets are still used at all.
The UI is beyond minimalistic, and performing tasks such as changing gems is highly unintuitive. I see no way to play around with raid buffs, debuffs and profession bonuses besides LW, JC and enchanting.
Why not integrate into something like rawr?

Because this sheet was released with the disclaimer that it is for Aldriana's own personal use and wasn't meant for the public.

I also have noticed the same thing. It seems there's extra EP value placed on Mjolnir. With my gear, I'm well past poison hit and I'm still showing a DPS gain from switching to Blood of the Old God.
Before being asked, yes I did change my default spec to reflect 51/13/7.

I'm not particularly surprised in this assessment, mutilate undervalues the proc on Mjolnir. I'm just curious if there's any situation that would make it better than Blood of the Old God.

It's designed to represent a min/max situation. There's no reason for you to ever have any professions besides those 3 (well, maybe BS, but you can simulate that easily by adding 2 gems), and your raid should always have every buff. It's more work to allow you to "turn off" buffs, and since the sheet is designed for Aldriana's personal use, he has no reason to do that work.

Only people have alts which might not be the most optimized char in the world, and people raid in a 10m group that doesn't have all buffs.
Not criticizing anyone's work, it's just a shame to see the rogue community at large hanging on to the punch-cards of theorycrafting.

I dont understand all the concern about this issue. Both spreadsheet are fairly easy and intuitive to use. If an item is missing, you can just alter the stats accordingly by giving it positive or negative inputs for the corresponding stats. You can also avoid the whole gemming issue by adding gem's stats and socket bonuses in the same fashion. I give a lot of credit to the authors who took the time to work on such project but I think any given player should be able to do some critical thinking on his own when it comes to comparing upgrades.

As for professions, for min/maxing I wouldnt consider any of them worthwhile other than JC/BS. Given the superiority of agility with the T8 4pieces bonus while considering the epic gems coming out from a future raid instance, BS is ahead of LW/Ench/Alchemy/Inscription.

You seem to think that Blizzard won't add an upgraded gem to JC, an upgraded leg/bracer patch to LW, etc. when better gems come out.

Regarding insults to these spreadsheets and their authors- make your own if you don't like them. No one is twisting your arm to use them.

Kudos to Ald and Vul for doing them.

A minor quibble: Godbane Signet is listed with 42 hit instead of 42 crit in the Combat Sheet. Easily fixed, but thought this might help others figure out where that extra hit was coming from.

Thanks for all the work on the sheet Ald.

Just had a quick question about EP again. Based on the pocket guide posted by Cally, where she got the EP figures from Aldriana's spread sheet, expertise for mut is at 1.88. I'm asssuming the EP would go down after reaching the 216 cap. This is shown in the 3 tiers of hit EP ratings...i was wondering if the affect of the cap was considered for the spreadsheet, or if the 1.88 EP continues to apply even after the cap in theory or is it correct to assume that the EP would drop to 0 after reaching the cap. Just wanted some clarification Thanks.

The expertise cap is mostly a soft cap. It's the amount of expertise needed to overcome average boss dodge. Bosses do not parry from behind, so it's generally accepted that you do not need to mitigate parry. There are however fights where you can not fight the boss from behind, such as Auriaya. You can periodically wander off to the side, but you can't exactly park yourself there. With this said, you won't really see a theoretical increase in DPS from going past 26 expertise but on occasion you will find fights where you'll need to battle parries as well.

Beat me to it, deleted.

I vaguely recall reading that mutilate rogues favor haste over armor penetration as poisons and envenom are considered spells and do not benefit from armor pen. However, I wanted to know if people agree based on their spreadsheets. Based on some hypothetical inputs I found that essentially there is no real material difference to favor one or the other.

In fact, while haste may improve the dps of all attacks, armor pen improves that of white damage which is still the majority of the dmg from a mutilate rogue. so the trade off seems minimal.

And although armor pen scales higher with more stacks...you really need a ridiculous amount of armor pen to make a significant improvement which i don't think is realistic. I combed through all the lvl 80 gear with the highest armor pen rating and found that the max you could hit is 601 or so without enchants or gems or anything. Having 601 armor pen you would sacrifice a lot of agility and AP.

Just for a example sake here are some numbers i ran really quick.

my current haste is at 293 and armor pen at 71, and my dps is about 5770
if I buff expertise to 600 holding everything else constant except reducing haste to 0 i see a improvement to 6033.
While if go the other way and lets say reduce armor pen to 0 and haste to 600 i get a DPS of 5987.

I don' think this is anything to write home about..i don't realistically think that anyone will be able to stack armor pen to 600 without losing a lot of AP and Agility as i stated earlier and therefore I would like to believe that when it comes to haste or armor pen it makes little to no difference for mutilate rogues on which you should take. Therefore, using the spreadsheet would still be the best method of deciding which piece of gear to take.

I would also like to note that because of the interaction between armor pen and haste, haste does seem to have a cap. It isn't a cap in the traditional sense that you find no improvement after a certain point, but rather that it no longer becomes more valuable than armor pen. The only problem is that this cap is not a constant, it varies depending on the value of armor pen. This means that when either haste or armor pen reaches a certain level, armor pen's EP rating seems to climb as haste falls.

Again for numbers sake..holding all things constant from the previous example at haste rating of 293 and armor pen of 121, armor pen begins to overtake haste on EP alone. Like wise the same occurs at a haste rating of 379 and armor pen of 71. This suggests that haste has a cap according to the value of your armor pen. You should monitor this correlation as you obtain upgrades if you are really interested in min/maxing your dps. I hope this may also help in figuring out what the best in slot combination of gear may be.

My analysis is very quick and there may be things i am not accounting for, but based on the numbers i see above I really can't imagine it making a huge difference. Please let me know your thoughts.

A previous iteration of rogue spreadsheets (called RogueDPS, most recently maintained by DontMindMe) had this functionality built in - I had rewritten some of the macro code at one point to automate the process as well. It basically cycled through each item, and if it was a DPS increase, it copied the item, DPS increase, and source location to a separate sheet. This sheet could be sorted by DPS to create a ranked list, and it could be autofiltered to allow you to filter for just certain slots or locations.

A version of this code was hacked into some later sheets as well, but I don't think any of the current sheets have had this treatment applied.

I have sorta hacked something similar together for Ald's combat sheet, but it doesn't have any macroing (since that sheet doesn't use comboboxes, it just lists all the gear choices). Since the items are generally listed from best to worst, I just copy from the top of a given slot down to whatever i have equipped currently. Each row has that baseline DPS-like value included as well, so on the target sheet I do some manual calculation to give each item a DPS delta as well. I then added all the source and boss info by hand.

It's not easy, but when I am bored at work it gives me something to do, and it makes gear identification and selection a little bit easier in mid raid.

So, there seems to be a lot of confusion over how EP are used in this spreadsheet, so I'd like to take a few minutes to address this topic.

I think the key point is this: the sheet is specifically designed so as to not have the EP values of items change radically when you hit a cap. This is a design principal I hit very early on when I started working on spreadsheets. Basically, if the EP value of expertise zeroes out as soon as you hit the cap, it's very hard to assess what pieces of gear are actually good when you get near the cap - as soon as you equip a piece of gear with Expertise on it, it suddenly looks like it sucks.

Thus: Expertise is going to have an EP value of - whatever it is - no matter what your current expertise is at. It's up to you to figure out what the best combination of gear to stay under the cap is for you. And if you find that confusing, I apologize, but all I can say is: trust me, it's better this way.

Similarly: all items are weighted using the white hit value. The EP scoring of hit items thus does not spike simply because you're below the spell hit cap - and again, this is very much intentional. So, for instance, what's hapepning with Mjolnir vs Blood is: Blood of the Old God is scored with the white hit value (1.1-1.2). But, if you're well under the spell hit cap, the real EP value of hit is much higher (1.6-1.7), thus, the item is - for your current gear - about 50 EP better than it looks, which is why your DPS goes up.

Thus, the recommended way of assessing upgrades is this: enter in the best gear you have based on EP values; then look at how you're doing relative to the Expertise and Hit caps, and adjust your selections accordingly. If, for instance, you're low on hit (as BIS gear frequently is), you can swap in Blood of the Old God for Darkmoon Card or Mjolnir's to get there. Ultimately, the DPS number is going to be the final arbiter of which setup is best, moreso than the EP values. The EP values are designed to help you figure out, in a general sense, which items are "good" - and no more.

Ald, I know this sheet is for you, etc etc, but perhaps a small indicator or two in the frozen rows on top could indicate if your current gear choices are under the poison hit and expertise caps (and thus require the extra intervention you describe to determine actual best DPS choices).

I was thinking the same thing and thought to my self let me just add a totals column at the end of the gear sheet. And low and behold the author has them already there, one for ungemmed and one for gemmed totals. I just added two formulas h.Cap-current h and e.cap-current e to show me what I need to tweak with gear/gem wise.