Re: Expertise (and hit) calculations. To handle caps correctly, instead of adding rating, I add the equivalent amount of miss chance further down in the calculations, after caps have been evaluated. Hence, the values are changed in rows 42 through 46.

Yeah. I think the ideal would be to get some of your energy-queueing modeling into this sort of approach to try to get the best of both worlds; if anything, I think this sheet still underestimates the value of Expertise in terms of allowing more aggressive queueing.

And you're certainly correct that combat/HaT/whatever wouldn't easily fit in to the current calc sheet - there would need to be a new calc sheet for each fundamentally different spec. Fortunately, I wasn't going for generality here, just accuracy at the one that matters most to me.

The weapon speeds in line 13/14 are the base weapon speeds; as they're used to figure out instant attack damage and such things, they're just the base values. Haste is applied in line 67/68, where the number of attacks performed is counted.

The first number is the number of Mutilates since the last Envenom; the second is the number of Mutilates since then the last finisher of any sort. The first number provides an estimate for how long it's been since you wiped poison stacks, and thus allows us to estimate how many you're going to have for the envenom; the second is to figure out how big the Envenom is going to be.

So, for instance, if we're in the 1,1,2 cycle (1 mut, envenom, 1 mut, envenom, 2 muts, rupture) cycle component, the second envenom is a 1,1 envenom; the first one is either 2,1 or 3,1, depending on the nature of the rupture in the cycle before.

So, rows 115-120 are adding up the number of Mutilates of each type you expect to do during a cycle component; we then compute the cycle duration and, from there, the poison stacks. The assumption is made (for simplicity) that if you've Mutilated at least 3 times since the last Envenom, you're going to be at full stacks. This isn't of course 100% accurate, but it's pretty close - it would take a pretty significant statistical fluke for that not to be the case. So we break down only these three cases: 1,1; 2,1; and 2,2. This is what's done in lines 157 to 193.

At that point, we go into a second round of Envenom classification. Starting at line 196, we again see a,b notation classifying envenoms; this time, the first number is the number of Mutilates used to generate the envenom, and the second is the number of poison stacks that that envenom will have. Then, starting on line 207, we get the final round of classification; we convert to size + stacks instead of Muts + stacks. All 1-mut finishers become 4-pt finishers, and the 2-mut finishers split into 4 and 5 point based on the probabilities (though note that a 2-mut finisher will be a 5-pt finisher some 99% of the time).

Thus, after lines 207-216, we have the frequencies for every combination of stacks and CPs that is possible, which we then average out in lines 218-220. We also at that point define a no-stacks Envenom to be an Eviscerate, and work out the number of those (which works out to be "not very many").

Can we pretend, just for the moment, that I might possibly know what I'm talking about? If you'll note, the weapon parameters being passed in are weapon DPS and speed, hence weapon damage for instant attacks is

Weapon Speed * Weapon DPS + 1.7 * AP DPS

See that "weapon speed" term in there? So yes, even normalized attacks do depend on weapon speed. Contrary to popular believe, I'm not a *complete* moron.

Should the racial agility be 194 instead of 197? I only have 194 agility on my level 80 night elf rogue, so I can't imagine where the extra 3 is coming from.

Yes, actually. Must've typed it in wrong. Also, the Rupture damage multiplier in row 280 should be 1.49 rather than 1.46 based on recent findings. I'll release an update in a few days - there's a few other changes that I'm thinking through at the moment and want to make before I make another release.

The correct formula for your crit rate is ((Agility / 83.33...) + (Crit Rating / (14 * 82/52 * 131/63)) - 0.295) / 100. The "Agi-28" part is supposed to account for that, but 28/83.33... is not equal to -0.295. 25/83.33... is also not accurate, but it is closer. You could fix the formula to be fully accurate by just removing the "-25" and instead subtracting 0.295 from the final result..

I pulled that fomula out of an older spreadsheet I'd written - I'm not entirely sure where it came from in the first place - I think I probably wrote it sometime during the early beta, when the numbers were not precisely pinned down yet. So it wouldn't entirely surprise me if it's off by a bit.

That said: has it been confirmed that it's exactly .295? Or is that merely the best current estimate?

I didn't publish my results but testing I did in beta at level 80 verified that, yes, -0.295 was still the intercept for crit rate. And yeah, we did linear regression at level 70 that showed it was exactly 40 agility per 1% crit with a -0.295% intercept.

On the deadly poison versus versus envenom timing: what I personally would like to see in the sheet is a variable solution. A field on the sheet where one could enter a value between 0 and 1.5. So one could see how much impact this part of the play style has on the dps.

If perfect envenom timing brings me 75 dps, I will do it. If it brings me 5 dps, I will probably focus more on other things like optimal timing in refreshing hunger for blood, optimizing rupture uptime versus the need to envenom eventually to keep slice and dice up, or simply on surviving.

The reasoning behind this is, that I am convinced, that one can not focus on every factor that has an impact on dps, since there are too many of them. (for example the idea of queuing energy to make optimal use of trinket procs, that you have commented on somewhere else.) So I like to know what brings me the most and to focus on that.

I haven't had a look at the sheet in detail. So I unfortunately do not have an idea, if this would be a lot of additional work.

I too agree with having the time between Envenoms and the DP tick as a variable.

It makes more sense, as it would be a pretty big thing to pay attention to, in addition to our HfB, Rupture and SnD timers *and* having to move out of fire; and even then, I suspect the large majority wouldn't bother doing that, but I also know that there are people such as myself who would do it anyway even if it is a 5 DPS gain, and if it does come out to be a low number, I could use my discretion to decide if it is worth doing or not for certain fights. It definitely sounds like something interesting.

Timing off ticks seems unlikely additionally because there is simply no consistent method to do so using the current UI. A target debuff timer is only so useful since DP starts ticking the first time you apply it and ticks every 3 seconds no matter what weird intervals you apply further stacks or refresh the full stack. Thus, effectively the only way to currently do it is to watch for a tick on SCT or Parrot, which hardly strikes me as conducive to precise timing.

Of course, having said this, I'm sure someone will now go write an add-on to display precise timing for Deadly Poison ticks, rendering my points moot and enabling precise timing off ticks.

(edit) Minor error found, cell B164, which prorates the Envenom buff across white attacks performed during its duration, account for attacks not landed or failed procs, does not factor in the dodge rate. B165 has the same problem with respect to Mutilate, as do the corresponding cells B175, B176, B186, and B187.

The net result should be a very slight increase in the value of expertise.

(edit 2) More thoughts - would it be useful to track situations where you Envenom at 4 CP (i.e. a 1-Mut Envenom) with 5 DP stacks up? In this situation you'd still have a stack remaining afterwards, which would help contribute towards your stacks for the next Envenom. This would primarily matter to cycles involving multiple successive 1-Mut Envenoms.

Actually, on second thought, this would result in a circular calculation...might not be worth the required effort.

On timing off ticks: even if no so mod currently existed (and it sounds like one does), I can't imagine that it would be that hard to create an energywatch style bar that starts ticking whenever you apply Deadly Poison and has a nice timer bar to make it easy to time the envenom. This would actually be preferable to something that simply indicates when a tick as occurred, as you would be able to time the usage of the ability rather than relying on your reflexes.

On the minor bug: I agree that B164, B175, and B186 need to be updated, and will make this change; I don't think it's necessary for B165, B176, and B187, though, as even if the Mutilate is dodged you're going to reapply. Basically, this is the total number of procs gained during 1 Mutilate, which thus by definition must include the procs generated by the Mutilate.

On the DP lasting through a 4-pt envenom: I actually do this for the 2,2 table, as the only time you get a 2,2 Envenom is in the cycle elements 1,2,1 and 1,2,2; as such, you perform the rupture in the previous cycle (giving time to get to 5 stacks), followed by a 1-Mutilate (and hence 4 point) envenom, leaving you with one stack as you prepare to make the following Envenom. As such, it is assumed that you have one lingering stack in the table for that (which is why rows 189 through 193 offer no "0 stacks" option.

In the more general case: I was actually thinking about this some last night, and I believe with some cleverness a better estimate is possible, but there's still some details of it that I'm working through. At the very least I'd like to get it added to the DP DPS calculations, but I think it should be possible to get some improvement even for the Envenom stacks modeling by making suitable simplifying assumptions.

Edit: On second thought, B176 and B187 to need to be updated; however, making these changes actually causes the value of Expertise to go *down*, which is very strange and makes me suspect another bug; hence, I'm going to look at this further before I release again.

Edit #2: Found the problem. The damage contribution of Eviscerate was being significantly overestimated. Still playing with a few other tweaks, but I should have something up later this evening.