Incorporating rupture-free cycles is not something that can be done easily. I am in the process of doing so, but there's a lot of calculations to be written and rewritten, so it will take some time. Fortunately, it'll be at least a few more weeks before anyone has the gear for it to make sense anyway, so that should be fine.

So by that definition when the EP values with my current gear sets spellt hit at a 1.96 value, its related only to the white hit cap and is in no way affected by my current hit-rating (350)?

Let me clarify the way hit EP works, as there seems to be a bit of confusion.

The white hit EP value is computed by figuring out how much damage lose by increasing your miss chance by an amount equal to 1 point of hit rating. That is, whatever your current white miss rate is, it's increased by 1/32.whatever points and the damage difference is determined.

Similarly, the spell hit value is computed by figuring out how much damage you lose by increasing your miss rate on both white attacka and spells by that amount, and the yellow hit value is the same with all 3 miss chances increased.

So: if you have 350 hit rating and are thus spell hit capped, the EP value of spell hit is the damage difference between your actual gear and the scenario wherein your hit rating for white attacks is 349 and your miss rate on spells is equal to what you get from one point of hit. Note that this isn't actually possible, since with 349 hit you'd normally still be hit capped. Why, then, do we do this?

Well, the logic is that the value of hit changes significantly at each of the 3 caps, and, as such, its worth knowing what the value of hit is both above and below each cap - for which this technique is a pretty good estimate. If you're at 400 hit and nowhere near the spell hit cap, the value of spell hit might not be super-accurate, but its also totally irrelevant because you're in no danger of dropping below it.

Then, since in practice almost all rogues are either slightly below the spell hit cap or some amount above it, white hit is usually the number of interest. As such, all gear is scored with the white hit value regardless of your current hit. If you *want* to you could change it over to score with spell hit, but I don't really recommend this - I can pretty much guarantee you that unless you're well below the spell hit cap (like, 100+ points below), you're going to find the answers you get less useful in terms of actually figuring out what to use - outside of gemming, anyway, which is why the EP value for both white hit and spell hit are provided if you want to know them.

If you select Human as your race... the spreadsheet does not include the 3 expertise that you can gain, when using mace/swords. I have not really checked into the dwarf/orc races as those do not apply to me. I have fixed this myself on my spreadsheet, but maybe we can get this into the next update of the sheet? Because it at first threw me off as to why I wasn't expertise capped on the spreadsheet... but in-game my expertise is 27. I figured something this simple would have been caught.

Thanks.

I was just looking into the 3.2 spreadsheet for Combat that you posted, Aldriana. When I was filling in my gear, it began to read that ArP was best to gem over AGI. Once I finished filling in all my gear, it then changed and told me that the optimal gem choice was AGI, not ArP. Is anyone getting this? And also, what gear level should be the mark to start gemming ArP for Combat?

Gem'ing for ArP requires very specific gear and the sheet is defaulted to this gear set. You don't have that gear and as you put your gear in, ArP drops in value. It's as simple as that.

An armor pen trinket. Try swapping out your FotF for a Mjolnir and see how the weightings change.

It takes some points even with an arpen trinket for it to be worth it, It wasn't worth it for me till I had quite a bit of armor pen gear, and even then i had to gem a bit for armor pen before it passed agility.

Trust your spreadsheet, it wont lie to you.

That's the main thing about ArPen gems in the sheet. Even with a good set of arpen gear, if you dont have any ArPen gems, agility might be worth more, but once you swap in about 3-4 arpen gems, arpen becomes worth more than agility. You get so much arpen from gemming that it makes a big difference in the EP value of it.

A minor bug on the latest version of the combat spreadsheet: it defaults to having 4 glyphs enabled (SS, Rupt, KS, SnD). It doesn't look like this has been reported yet. I'm guessing no one thinks to ever tinker with glyphs, which is why it's gone unnoticed.

Glyph bug has been reported twice already, actually - see posts 1035 and 1037.

As a note on the agility vs ArPen gemming debate: its also worth nothing that if you have too much ArPen and gem full ArPen, you'll hit the Mjolnir softcap to ArPen and the value will dip below that of agility - what this means is that all the gem recommendations will change to agility, but you still want to be gemming (mostly) for ArPen - the goal in this situation is to wind up as close to the Mjolnir softcap as you can. At least, that's the goal until such time as you're ready to push for the ArPen hard cap. Point being: keep an eye on where you are relative to the cap, and use the DPS number as well as the EP values.

A viable no-rupture hardcap setup can be put together without any 25man hard mode drops. You can almost do it without any 10-man hardmode drops, though life is easier if you can get a few keep pieces from 10 or 25 hard. So short version: yes, you can get there short of BIS gear. As to exactly when... spreadsheet is not a bad guideline, for all that it doesn't have evis-only cycles in it yet. The crossover point where no-rupture cycles pull ahead isn't that different than the crossover point where hard-cap passes soft-cap as a gearing option.

Oh, I did not realize that hardcap ArP and no rupture cycles are going hand in hand. That's an eye opener.

So, beta version of 1.3 attached. Please note that the word "beta" is there for a reason. I guarantee you there are bugs in the attached sheet. I'm releasing it so y'all can help me find them.

Also note that there's a lot of polish missing at this stage - I'll provide more details on that during the walkthrough here. But, suffice it to say, not all information you want is currently exposed. I'll get to that for the release version, but I at least wanted to get this calc sheet on the table so people can start hammering on it and see what I screwed up.

So, lets start with what's new. The major difference is that the calc sheet has been totally rewritten to model 3 different cycles rather than just 1. And, moreover, they're real cycles - the sort of attack rotations you might actually do in-game, not the theoretical 3.7s5r5e type stuff that 1.2 deals with. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail into what those cycles are at this stage - I'll include a write-up of what they are and the relevant parameters in the final version, but for now just know that they're a rupture-free cycle and two different rupture-based cycles, one of which tends to be better when your rupture does (relatively) a lot of damage (usually corresponding to having 4/5 T8) and one corresponding to lower rupture damage. The sheet automatically detects which will be best, and then does DPS calculations for that one, including calculating EP values.

Note that as a result of the, the recommended cycle box is now blank - or it should be. If you manage to get it to pop up the "your cycle may be broken" message with a remotely reasonable cycle entered (i.e., roughly the right number of talent points and glyphs, real gear entered, and so on), please save a copy of your sheet and send it to me - I haven't managed to make it happen myself, but I can't prove it never will. Again, I will include more sophisticated cycle recommendations in time, but they're not quite ready yet.

Also, the poison and eviscerate/envenom selection options are gone. The latter is because as far as I can tell envenom cycles are virtually never worthwhile at Ulduar+ gear levels, so I wasn't going to waste time modeling them; the former is because it now automatically figures out which poison you should be using. This also includes figuring out OH poison - if Wound or Instant poison is better, it will use it. Eventually it will also tell you what its using, but again, that feature isn't quite ready yet.

Meanwhile, two new options have been added. The first is reaction time. This is basically a measure of how close you're willing to call it on cycle timing. I'll get more into the details of where this is used later, but roughly speaking: it's how much time you need to react correctly to a change in your status. Realistically this may need to become a couple different reaction times, one governing energy pooling, one governing rupture refreshing, and one governing SnD refreshing, but... again, that's in the future. It's by default set to 1 second, which is perhaps a bit conservative; I wouldn't realistically set it below half a second, though. In general, decreasing it should increase your DPS; if it doesn't, let me know.

The second option is to score gear with ArPen having the same value as agility. This is for use in capped - both hard and soft - ArPen situations. In these cases, each additional point of ArPen is no longer a point of ArPen, but rather allows you to drop some ArPen in gemming for Agility instead. As such, you can score gear with ArPen being valued the same as Agi to reflect this fact. By default this is off, but in capped situations you can play with turning it on.

So, briefly stated: if you have some free time, grab a copy of this, play with it a bit, and if you find anything that strikes you as at all unusual, wierd, or counterintuitive - or vastly different from the old sheet - let me know. Some of the differences result from legitimate changes in the modeling, but there are going to be bugs as well - just post anything weird you find, and I'll sort through it and see what's a bug and what's not.

Or, if you're feeling really ambitious, you can start tearing the calc sheet apart directly and let me know if there are any parts of it that don't make sense. Which would also be helpful, but as it's large and hairy it may not be practical.

Anyway, let me know what you find. Once I've had some time to chase bugs, I'll finish cleaning it up and make an official release. Anything you provide in the meantime will make said release that much better. Thanks.

Edit: Download removed, in favor of the more recent beta version. See post 1224 for latest.

It sounds like you are having the cycle be auto detected for the best performing cycle. Is there any way you can allow us to manually select which cycle we want to view the DPS of with our current gear? Or better yet, display all three (or at least one rupture and one rupture-less) cycles so we can compare the DPS of them while switching out pieces of gear?

I say this because there may very easily be a point where we are getting close enough to the rupture-less cycle, and perhaps even though our theoretical DPS is lower it could be better to be used simply due to the ease of the rotation. I'm sure many would be willing to sacrifice 100 theoretical DPS in favor of dropping rupture entirely.

Aldriana, just out of curiosity, what in your modeling would change the value of 2pc T9 so much? I assume it has to do with the different cycle-modeling, going to a somewhat more "reactive" model?

It went from 59.4ish in the last iteration of your spreadsheet to close to 120 now (based on my currently-equipped gear).

I haven't found any cycles other than 5s5r5e with my current gear, but here's the code to have it actually show you which cycle it found as the best choice.

Um, wrong. The cycle being computed is not 5s5r5e, nor any particularly close variant thereof. Again, I will explain what the cycles actually are in due time, and if you're sufficiently clever you might be able to deduce it from the calculations, but it's *not* anything simple like 5s5r5e. Largely because, given the current nature of combat rotations, it's not even meaningful to speak of "5s5r5e" as though it were an actual cycle.

Good Afternoon!
Thanks for your precious work, Aldriana, I do appreciate it and I have simple request. It would be possible to add a couple of blank rows so that I can insert items not already present into your sheet? I know it is intended for BiS gear only but it could be nice to use it for TotC items and maybe something older. I tried to add new rows but it looks to break things...
Thanks in advance.

Add the new row in the middle of the already existing items. Adding a new row at the top of the list can screw things up.

Ah, was going off of what it was showing in the calcs sheet, and having it just show what was being listed in those cells that were being referenced in the default 1.3 beta.

I've been using the Aldriana's 1.2 combat spreadsheet since I started getting a decent assortment of ArP gear. I resocketed to ArP as per my armory. According to 1.2 if I resocket all ArP gems to Agi my dps drops by about 30dps. Bearing in mind I do not have BiS, using Grim Toll & Banner, ArP food, etc I have 609 passive armour penetration.

After downloading and inputing my gear into 1.3 (and yes I am aware that it is a beta) there is an overall drop of approx 90dps from my current setup. Additionally a resocket from ArP to Agi gives a boost of approx 30dps, as opposed to version 1.2 indicating a drop of 30dps (swapping Banner for DMC:G and using AP food).

I'm not going to rush out and resocket everything immediately, just wondering if this discrepancy is in a re-weighting of stats, or something I'm missing in the spreadsheet.

Thanks.