The way I see it, at certain levels of expertise and under certain assumptions regarding timing of envenoms, it is possible that an envenom will be dodged and it will be necessary to resume a cycle, starting with a slice and dice. This event, a broken cycle, if you want to call it that way, has a probability and a certain cost, and it is possible to estimate both. If the spreadsheet calculates this probability and estimates the cost of the broken cycle properly, it should capture the true value of expertise. If it assumes the cycle never breaks even at high chances to be dodged, it will undervalue expertise.

I have used a simulation approach to compare these two stats for mutilate in BiS gear. In a simulation, if a cycle breaks due to a dodge, it will have to be restarted and there will be an associated dps loss. The strategy also involves timing envenoms and DP ticks and refreshing SND by way of an envenom 1 second before it expires. A substitution of 50 agility for 50 expertise gives me a 10 dps increase, which is neither statistically nor materially significant, so for all purposes I consider the two stats equal. If you are going for a record dps, you will probably do better stacking agility instead of capping expertise, but on average your dps should be about equal.

As a last note, it is theoretically possible to change the DPS strat regarding the timing of envenoms to decrease the chance of a broken cycle, which could give agility a further edge over expertise. Let me give an example. My regular rule is to refresh snd using an envenom 1 second before it expires. If you change it to 2 seconds, then the substitution of 50 agility for 50 expertise gives an increase of 41 dps, statistically significant at 98.7% confidence level. Thus, to see the true benefit of one stat over the other requires an ability to change the DPS rules governing the cycle.

Mavanas, thanks for the input. Do you think then that along similar lines, that a missed envenom or rupture that does not result in a broken cycle would also have a minimum affect on your dps? this would also apply to your SS or your Muti Keeping in mind that a missed finisher would waste the energy used (not specc'ing for quick recovery). And also, just out of curiosity, do you know if both of yours and Aldriana's spreadsheet have similar if not the same EP ratings for agi and expertise?

Mavanas, if you are using Envenom to refresh at 1 second before drop, assuming you're not doing EA, but you are trying to keep rupture at 100% uptime, what else are you using the combo points for if not more envenoms thus negating the need to wait till 1s before SnD drops.? I find myself easily able to put multiple envenoms between each rupture/HFB/TotT etc, and thus never have to time one near the end of an SnD like you are stating. Am I doing something wrong, and should I be using something else other than envenom when rupture/snd/HFB/TotT and a major armor debuff are already up with plenty of time left and I have extra combo points/energy?

Perhaps I should have worded it better. When I say I use envenom to refresh SND 1 second before it expires, it does not mean that before that I am not using envenom at all. If SND is not about to expire, I simply instruct AI to keep rupture up and use envenom when I have four combo points, enough energy, and 4 DP ticks, and delaying it if next DP tick is about to occur. However, when there is 1 second left on SND, I disregard the normal rules based on pooling energy, combo points and DP ticks and can do a low combo point or low DP stack envenom to keep SND up. It's what I follow in real combat if a situation likethat happens as a precaution to preserve the cycle, and that's what I model in the simulation.

The ordering of the EP values can be inferred from my previous post, i.e AG slightly higher than expertise, especially with 2 second SND refresh. However, the exact values that come out of the spreadsheet are not precise. Even before I switched all trinkets to simulation method, confidence interval size with 10,000 iterations was between 0.04 and 0.1 depending on the spec (higher for HAT). DPS per point values were more precise, but my last estimates are too old now. As soon as I recalculate them, I can compare them to what Aldriana has.

I do think it's the case that there are some cycle stability issues that are not well modeled by the Mutilate spreadsheet - problem is, it's rather tricky to figure out how often your cycle drops with a given setup, as the criteria that cause it to happen are complex and not easily defined. And, in my experience as Mutilate, cycle drops are pretty uncommon once you start getting into Naxx10 level gear, much less Naxx25 and beyond. So the general advice I'd give is: if your cycles are stable with the recommendation from the spreadsheet - you never feel particularly in risk of dropping - then Expertise is probably more or less correctly valued by this sheet. However, if you're having issues with cycle stability, you may need to increase the value of expertise accordingly in order to stabilize things.

That said: it's worth noting that it's pretty rare that cycles fall apart so badly that you have to drop the cycle entirely. Generally if you notice the problem early enough you can just drop an undersized envenom or rupture to keep things moving. This, of course, does cost some DPS, but significantly less than having things drop entirely. Thus, the increased value of Expertise may be a bit less than one might estimate under the assumption that your cycle drops completely.

Thanks for the clarification, unless I'm moving between mobs, or having to move due to a bosses abilities, I've never really found SnD within 10 seconds of dropping. But yeah, if it's close to dropping and I'm starting on a new mob or returning to an old one that I had to move away from, I will envenom asap even with 1 point in order to keep SnD up, under which situation I imagine having more expertise helps. Though I don't want to sound like I'm trivializing that, because tons of encounters have you moving between adds or moving away from bosses for long enough that your SnD will become endangered. If every fight was just focused DPS on a single target with no movement needed our lives would be a lot simpler, and far less exciting.

I'm new to your spreadsheet, but is there a way to tag the gems to which socket bonus they pertain to?

New version of the combat sheet up. It may look familiar to some of you that have been around for a while. Socketing has been significantly improved, among other new features; there's also some minor modeling improvements and assorted tweaks.

However, because this constitutes a fairly major rewrite of significant portions of the sheet, there are probably new bugs as well. If you find any, please let me know.

Very nice, and much more user-friendly, especially in the socket department.

Small point: You're lacking Hyperspeed Accelerators under possible glove enchants. If you want to add it, it can be modeled as 340/6 or ~56.67

I was wondering if it was still possible to manually add different gear pieces by inserting rows in the gear sheet (and copying over the corresponding formulae), or if that threw off the selection mechanism of the drop-down lists. I'm not sure how the latter are implemented (i.e. do they list a constant range of rows from the Gear sheet), so I'm not sure if adding a line in the Gear sheet throws everything in the Equipment sheet off by one. At first glance it seems all is well, but there's too many variables to be sure.

I suppose if doing so screwed up the Equipment sheet, one could still manually select the gear they have equipped on the gear sheet as before, is that correct?

I don't know if you're interested in this or if it is even supported, but I'm getting Err:502 in pretty much every calculated field in OpenOffice 2.4 under Ubuntu (NB: the combat sheet a version before worked fine).
Other than that, great work on the sheet, I'm a big fan

Thanks for all your work Aldriana (and others who contribute). I have been looking at the latest combat spreadsheet and something felt surprising to me so I felt it would do no harm to bring it up for discussion here.

I have been fascinated by the idea of armor penetration and mace spec since 3.1, but had no means to model or test it early on. I plugged in what I decided was an optimal setup for using armor penetration (4 conqueror's with Legguards of Cunning Deception, followed by the best overall ArP gear pretty much). Of course using Mjolnir and Grim Toll with ArP food.

I was reaching just over 7800 dps, which felt pretty decent; then the weapon choices are what confused me. I got highest DPS with Vulmir, the Northern Tempest MH, this felt ok as the stats far outweigh those on the Furious Gladiator's Truncheon for dps. However in the offhand, I was getting more dps with Bladetwister (by quite some way) than for example, the Furious Gladiator's Punisher, this was over the standard option of a 300 second fight. I did wonder to myself about whether perhaps during the proc activation of GT+MR together, the FG-Punisher would be more valuable, that would seem reasonable, but didn't really remove any surprise from the initial result.

Using Conqueror's Terrorblade Chestpiece, Soul-Devouring Cinch, Runed Ironhide Boots and Vulmir, I came to 210 expertise making Weapon Expertise obsolete. I therefore used this spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I am wondering if this has the potential for being the most potent combat spec in some situations, or whether as long as a better ilevel 239 mace does not exist, CQC will still have the upperhand with a GSD MH. It just surprises me greatly that with 15% more armor penetration, maces don't breeze past.

Easiest way is to insert an extra row in the middle not the bottom of whichever gear section. Copy the entire row for an existing item, then just edit the name/stats accordingly. I added several *ahem* "sub-optimal" pieces this way without breaking anything.

Not quite correct, the overall value of Hyperspeed Accelerators highly depends on the fight duration. Nevertheless, I'm using your model as well, would be nice to have it modeled correctly though.

It looks like the spreadsheet assumes that the RED Meta is always activated, even if you dont use any blue or jewelcrafting gems. This might be worth fixing.

Sorry, I'll try to clarify as that is indeed what I was doing. I just wanted some sort of confirmation that doing so on the new sheet wouldn't somehow get the new UI into an inconsistent state (it's quite handy for choosing gear without making a mistake). It seems to work fine, but I've only added 3 items and thought it was within the realm of possibility that the UI doesn't intrinsically support an arbitrary number of such additions.

That's more of a PEBKAC problem than a spreadsheet problem, as far as I'm concerned.

Going back to the discussion on the EP value of expertise vs that of agility is it correct to assume that regardless of what gear you are wearing that the EP of agility would be higher than that of expertise before the expertise cap in most situations? (obviously after cap the ep of exp would be 0)

I guess I'm having a rough time with this fact as I have been seeing some rather weird DPS numbers lately in raid. Although testing without any raid buffs on the dummy does give me higher numbers when I have more agility and AP rather than Exp, in raid I have been seeing some rather different results.

For example, I have a combat rogue who is slightly better geared than myself in raid with me. Normally through NAX and the first 3 bosses of Ulduar or VOA I have consistently out DPS'd him when i was expertise capped. However, after using the spreadsheet and making some gear changes increasing my AP and agility and lowering my exp below cap and getting mongoose over the 26 agility enchants I have been noticing that my finishers have been missing quite often and my DPS seems to be very unstable...meaning it fluctuates too often. This fluctuation could be do to mongoose's proc rate; however the issue that i am having is that even at the highest point....i am now below his dps by at least 100....which seems like a fairly large difference.

(feel free to armory me and my friend for comparison I am tedoubledy and he is Kalvonos on the shattered hand server US.- and by gear change i merely changed out my belt from jorach- with expertise gems, to belt of tortured with expertise gem, and replaced my expertise enchant on my thrusting bands with that of greater assault and mongoose over the 26 agi enchant mentioned above)

I'm trying to reason why this is occurring. I have ruled out mongoose as given at least a 3 minute boss fight the added value of mongoose would completely blow the 26 agility enchants out of the water. I am beginning to think that this difference is caused by the expertise cap.

Due to the constant moving around between boss moves, such as on Emalon I have noticed that although my rotation does drop at times when i can't refresh slice and dice or rupture prior to his lightning nova, or moving to the charged mob...it takes longer to start my rotation over again esp when a 1 point envenom/rupture misses. What is frustrating is that even on archavon my DPS was below that of his. I also did not have a ret paladin, so the lack of crit on mutilate also may have been the culprit...but I'm beginning to believe that the player's style of play could play a large role in your overall DPS. A player's style could in fact make expertise more valuable in certain situations more than others i guess. What do you think?

I guess my point is that while in theory, behind a dummy with all settings being stable the EP values are undisputed, i just want to see what others think about the value of expertise in practice. And I've always been told that the priority of stats should be hit cap up to 315, expertise up to 214, then stack agi and AP, im hoping that there's some truth to this. I would really appreciate any feedback.

Also, I am planning on going into naxx25 tonight...and will do patchwerk first. As i record my patch DPS after every run I will report back what i find out. I'm hoping to see that my dps increases from last week's to confirm that in a tank and spank the EP values hold true. If it is in fact true, then i guess you can chalk up my DPS decrease in raid below that of my friend's to poor execution on my part. and I hope to see that not only is my DPS higher than last week's but its still in fact higher than my combat friend. If it is not...so help me God im going back to my expertise cap and placing my expertise cap as higher priority over that of AP or agi no mattr how high of a increase it may be.

First off, why are you enchanting mongoose on your weapons? You should be using beserking on both. As for EP values and which stats to choose, I think you are missing the point of them. EP values are based off your current gear and changes you make to them also change EP values. You shouldn't base your gear decisions based solely on their EP values, but by how each item affects your dps as a whole, which only the spreadsheet will be able to tell you. Using EP values in an addon such as Pawn are great for quick on the fly assessments for gear choices. Certain things like cycle stability are not modeled perfectly by the spreadsheet and will inherently value expertise lower. This has been discussed ad nauseam and stacking stats up to certain number in order of priority isn't necessarily ideal.

If you find yourself dropping your cycles while raiding, get more expertise. If not, then you are probably safe dropping some for AP or agility.

You nailed it. There is no "could" about it.

A spreadsheet will help a good player with gear selection/enchants/gems/specs/etc.

An off-the-cuff example- If you burn toast and can't cook an egg then no cookbook in the world will save you.

i got mongoose because a friend enchanted for free. Didn't want to use the gold for beserker until i got new weapons. But thanks for the suggestion on Pawn. But based on what you said it seems that you don't value expertise cap as much which i think is what people are saying here in the forums. I have been previously told by other rogues to reach expertise cap first, im just trying to assess if this is a misconception which seems to be the case.

Enchanting for Expertise, or equipping an item 'for the expertise' is almost universally a bad idea. You shouldn't use an inferior item just because it has a particular stat on it. The available Expertise enchants are vastly inferior to the AP equivalents for those item slots - you'll get more AP and more Expertise by enchanting AP and gemming expertise. Any gaps in cappable stats like Expertise that you might want to fill for reasons of cycle stability, you should do through gems.

(i.e. The enchant and item swaps you made were a good move, if you are finding dodged Envenoms to be a real issue, slap some Expertise gems into a few sockets - if every socket is gemmed expertise, you just need better gear, and it'll come with time)