This seems to hold true for alliance if you change spinning fate in favor of Envoy of Mortality. Thrusting bands and Footwraps of veil deceit w/Envoy of Mortality gives me a 6dps upgrade over the default w/Envoy of Mortality. I know why Envoy was omitted from the gear, but we are getting to the point where most/all the hunters have it and it is becoming a viable option for that slot.

I would say taking thrusting bands over sinners if you have access to the gun.

Given recent Expertise findings (does not truncate), I suppose it's safe to assume that Thrusting Bands is clearly the best-in-slot bracer?

By the spreadsheet, swapping in Thrusting Bands and Ring of Invincibility gives a 4 DPS increase over the existing default values for alliance. However, there are some unmodeled cycle stability implications to having a .13% dodge rate; it's probably not enough to make up 4 DPS, but for those of you who are desirous of maximal cycle stability, the defaults in the current version of the sheet are still a reasonable option.

Yea, after modifying the sheet to account for using the full value of Expertise, Thrusting + Vile Deceit come out on top for me, both Horde and Alliance, for either Envoy or Spinning Fate. I was testing with time-envenom set to off. Everyone who uses that field (myself included) would probably pick a different number as acceptable. Either way, that won't affect best-in-slot choices since the only (minor) scaling I can see from it is increasing the value of AP slightly.. and each set pair of Wrists / Boots have roughly the same AP (after accounting for gems and kings).

I found the following values with dual Webbed Death, no envenom timing and optimizing gems for each set as I went.

Alliance:

Wrist + Boot	Gun	Thrown
Sinner + Dawn	5137.0	5123.8
Thrust + Dawn	5139.3	5126.0
Sinner + Vile	5135.0	5129.4
Thrust + Vile	5146.1	5133.1

Horde:

Wrist + Boot	Gun	Thrown
Sinner + Dawn	5110.1	5097
Thrust + Dawn	5112.5	5099.4
Sinner + Vile	5095.7	5097.5
Thrust + Vile	5116.1	5106

Uploaded a new version. Two changes of note:

1) Expertise is no longer truncated. As noted in the past few posts, this slightly changes the optimal gear.
2) I fixed a bug that was causing the value of weapon speed to be overestimated. I still show 2xWD ahead of WD+SR, but by a much smaller margin than before - and in particular, Murder and SR now seem to be comparable as OH weapons (previously Murder was somewhat ahead).

I have a request that you include envoy of mortality as an option to switch to in the spreadsheet, including it or not in the optimal gear setup. Motivation: While what you say about taking the weapon from a hunter is true, it still is the best ranged weapon and rogues have/will get thier hands on this without stealing it from a hunter.

Of course I could add it in myself but I don't see the point in banishing it altogheter from the spreadsheet.

It means that you should check your expertise rating instead expertise itself. For example there is difference between 209 and 210 rating even thought in both scenarios it says '25 expertise 6.25%' in your character sheet.

OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

Thanks

I've downloaded a trial of Office 2007 now, but I guess I'm fairly retarded since those spreadsheets make no sense what so ever for me.

So rather than troubling you all with questions on how to get this working, I'd just like to know if there's a spreadsheet for determining gear, gems and enchants which is user-friendly, apart from Aldrianas and Vulajins? And if Shadowpanther.net is a good site to do this or pure rubbish?

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the trouble.

Vulajins is the most 'user friendly' from a pure usability standpoint. I'd just dive into it, it's not really that bad. You see a "final dps" (or similar) field and you see a list of gear. Just add it all up to match your own character and you should see what the fuzz is all about :-).

Vulajins sheet is one of the more userfriendly spreadsheets on the market. If it is to much of a hustle for you to set it up, go ahead and use Shadowpanther. His AEP-values are rather good for general reference and itemtrends (i.e. an item of 1000 AEP being superior to one of 950 for example). However, your results will not be as accurate as with a spreadsheet (see Belt / Wrist, where AEP are rather close and the best slot might even depend on your Faction)...

Haste affects fast and slow weapons equally. It is a percent increase to your total amount of swings in any given time.

Yes, but there's a thresholding effect with the offhand / DP weapon. Once it's swinging fast enough that you restack DP to a full 5 points within a few seconds, the effects of haste are greatly lessened, since beyond that point it only buffs the white damage, not the poison damage as well. A dagger with a faster base speed will hit the point of diminishing returns at lower amounts of haste. Not sure whether this applies to Murder / SR though. I strongly suspect not, since Webbed Death is a better offhand than Murder, presumably due entirely to the faster speed.

Thus, while it's true in principle that sufficiently large amounts of haste will boost a slow offhand more than a fast offhand, we're not yet at the itemisation level where that's relevant.

Fake edit: The point at which the poison part of the equation finally caps out is the point where the DP stack gets back to full before the subsequent poison tick (say ~2 seconds after an Envenom). DP proc rate is 55% immediately after an Envenom, which means that to have a 95% chance of stacking to 5 within 2 seconds, we need 14 hits within those two seconds: i.e. a hasted speed of 0.143s or faster. That's out of reach for all conceivable itemisation.

It is worth noting that a lot of these stats do have some implicit diminishing returns to them, though; while hitting the soft haste cap Songster discusses is impractical, I believe it is the case that haste gets somewhat less valuable the more of it you have. However, as haste does other nice things (more white damage, more Focused Attacks procs, etc.), the amount the value drops specifically due to poison stacking is likely to be small in terms of the overall value of the stat.

Similarly, crit's effect on CP generation has strong diminishing returns; however, as it still gives energy regen and, well, more crits, it's still a valuable stat even when you get into the heavy diminishing returns part of CP generation.

In short: yes, the stats do change somewhat in value as they (or other things) are stacked. This is why we have spreadsheets to let you tune the last few details of your gear. But as they don't seem to change very fast, it is possible to make some off-the-cuff estimates in terms of gear valuation - such as what we've been doing on SR versus Murder, and the like.

I find this spinnoff of Vulajin's spreadsheet the most user friendly for selecting gear upgrades while you are still generally gearing up:
http://elitistjerks.com/1050689-post900.html
Works in MS Office only.

I've been tinkering with the spread sheet (I wanted to switch from Leatherworking to Bsmithing - subracted 64 ap from the Enchants total and added two more Gems).
I then started to screw with the options to see if the default was indeed the best dps (5153.5) available.
I came up with this (5163.7): THIS
Overall changes include.
Dawnwalkers over VD
2x Bright Scarlet Ruby + 50 ap wrist In place of LW enchant (no change)
2 Delicate Dragons Eye changed to 2 Bright Dragons Eye
2 Delicate Ruby Changed to Bright Ruby
2 of the 3 Deadly Monarch topaz changed to Wicked Monarch Topaz

Some of these changes didn't actually show any dps change. (Switching 1 Bright Ruby to a Delicate will yield the same dps) I figured since the sheet was using agi gems over AP I would try and stack AP until I started to lose dps (which you do once you change the last deadly monarch to wicked)

If someone could please look it over and confirm that I didn't somehow screw something up, I would appreciate it.

AH! I see what I did there. Didn't Account for dawnwalkers not having a socket. Switching back to VD shows it at 5153 which is indeed lower. Now the reason I was trying to maximize AP in the first place is because I was thinking about those fights where you spend some time off target. When you're off target the only dps you have is Rupture and Deadly poison, it was my assumption that these both get more benefit from AP than they do AGI.

If you were to give advice on the case where AP and AGI both give the exact same single target DPS as modelled by your spreadsheet, what would you recommend. Which stat can you guess will hold up best in more situations. (Time off target, losing a raid buff, or other random raid occurences)

Perhaps, though you need to be careful about that; the larger effect of interrupted fights is to skew the ratio of white to yellow damage (as you spend time regenerating energy without attacking), and the balance between Envenom and Rupture (more interruptions = more Envenoms to keep SnD up). My guess would be that, when all is said and done, hit and haste become somewhat less important, and the other stats stay about the same in relative value; but it's going to depend highly on the particulars of the fight and thus is hard to model precisely.

I added some colors to the sheet and changed formatting a bit around.
Use it if you wish.

OptimalMutilateGear.colors.rar

I'm relatively ambivalent regarding the colorized version of the sheet vs the original. If people have a preference between them, let me know and I will use whichever people like better as a basis for future changes.

Well, the Calcs sheet definitely look a lot cleaner with sp00n's formatting, albeit the font on the gear selection sheet is a bit too small. I like the colored version, but I have a preference for the original font size (granted, it's easy enough to work around it myself; for some reason the numbers are a lot more visible for me with size 11 instead of 10).

Quick question.

If one or more pieces of gear are not on the sheet, is it safe to go about changing the values? For instance, still wear fool's trial, can i adjust Favor of the Dragon Queen's stats with fools? I don't want to screw up a possible calculation based on specific slots on the sheet.

btw: Awesome SS. /cheer