Or the screenshot was taken with an old version of Recount, prior to the change to make it register Sword Specialization procs correctly. In any case, using Recount as a method of determining how Sword Specialization works is fundamentally foolish, because the only way Recount knows how to calculate Sword Specialization hits is by applying an interpretation of the combat log.

If you want to contest the known explanations of how Sword Specialization works, stop clutching at questionable proof methods (Recount? seriously?) and go test it yourself. The testing method is fully laid out in my post from the old thread, which I linked above.

Ok I think I got to the bottom of the problem with Recount. The problem in fact appears to lie with Recount's methodology to flag sword spec procs, and Sword Spec works exactly as explained by Aldriana, at least for autoattacks that were my focus.

I did my own testing as well with two swords: [Razorscale Talon] and [Crystalblade of the Draenei]. I autoattacked boss-level dummy for slightly less than an hour and in that time observed 3006 melee swings and 99 sword spec procs as categorized by Recount. The main hand hit for about 240-380 and the low level and faster offhand hit for about 60-80, so it was easy to distinguish the hits. There were some glancing hits, but no crit because I was below 4.8% crit reduction.

Same as in the wow forum thread, I observed that Sword Spec proc damage ranged from 66 to 388, indicating that both mainhand and offhand damage was classified as sword spec (see the screenshot of Recount).

Next I looked at the combatlog, and found three cases where Recount incorrectly identified regular offhand attacks as Sword Spec procs.

But before that I matched Recount's numbers. They seem to follow the method suggested by Vulajin in his analysis: they treat the first line after "Sword Specialization" as the attack that procced it, and the next line as the damage of the proc itself. They do not however, investigate the timing between mainhand and offhand swings to determine which swing falls out of line. This method normally provides correct identification, but in rare cases when a scheduled OH attack occurs at the same time as a schedule MH attack, it can happen that wrong damage is classified as sword spec.

Consider for instance these lines from the combatlog:

-3.032 OH attack
-2.407 MH attack
-1.532 OH attack
0 Sword spec indicator
0 MH attack
0 OH attack <= flagged by Recount following their methodology
0.015 MH attack <= actual sword spec proc
1.5 OH attack

The expected time between attacks is around 2.35 between mainhand attacks and 1.45 between offhand attacks. If you look at it closely, then the offhand attack that appears two lines below the sword spec is 1.5 seconds after the previous attack. And the sword spec damage is actually on the third line below the sword spec announcement, it occurs 0.015 seconds after the previous mainhand attack.

I am sure something similar happened to the guy on wow forums who tested this before.

P.S. I used this excel file to match recount's methodology and identify all incorrectly flagged sword spec procs.

Mavanas, to put it short, could you please tell me how i can input my own trinkets into the spreadsheet? I was thinking the Mark of Norgannon might be a good choice because of being able to activate with the Wrathstone and Blade Flurry multiplicatively. I would really appreciate it.

I'd like to do an update on best in slot items according to the simulation and a comparison of DPS among different specs in best in slot gear. A few things changed since last time, 100% armor penetration cap was put in the game and I spent more time analyzing what's best after the change. Dark Matter (DM), Comet's Trail (CT) and Solar Bindings were discovered and changed several best in slot lists. It's become common to hit the crit cap for white autoattacks, which changed the EP weights of hit, crit and agility. Because crit and armor penetration caps (during trinket procs) became so important, I added the two caps to the Gear tab, so you can see them alongside with expertise and various hit caps. The new version of the spreadsheet 3.1k also has a properly working sword spec, new HAT proc timing simulation, a couple bug fixes and new Overkill as in 3.1.3.

Main highlights:
1. Armor penetration is still best gemming choice for combat and vHaT; due to DM, mutilate does more damage with AP gems.
2. Going above ArPen cap is normally a dps decrease. If you end up being above ArPen cap, it's normally worthwhile to swich to some AG gems and/or AG food.
3. Choosing trinkets is a tricky matter, due to hit, crit and ArPen caps. DMC:G is still the best for HaT specs, and DM just does not work there because of the crit cap. MR+CT combo is best for combat. DM+CT is best for mutilate.
4. In BiS gear, mutilate without Murder is on par with combat; however, the discovery of CT gave combat a slight edge over mutilate.
5. It's hard to judge what the crit/sec rate for HaT is going to be when entire group is in BiS gear. Right now 1c/s is a bit generous, but it could be a better estimate in BiS gear.

BiS Gear:

I might note that Solar Bindings puts you way, way over the expertise cap for combat; I strongly suggest using Fluxing Energy Coils instead. Also, in my analysis, Band of Lights is a better second ring than Cindershard. So I might try making those changes, which should close the gap between the two specs somewhat.

Second, I confess to a certain degree of skepticism over those Mutilate numbers - they're a good 5% higher than anything anyone has suggested previously. Could you confirm what cycle and/or priority system you're using to generate that sort of DPS output?

I have tried other T8 combinations for combat, and the particular one above came out ahead. I tried Fluxing Energy Coils along with Legguards of Cunning Deception and rest t8 (which was the best setup before Solar Bindings were discovered), and it was slightly lower dps. In the setup above, you are not over expertise cap because you use Embrace of the Gladiator. Also I haven't seen the Band of Light before, but now looking at it, it should definitely beat the Cindershard Ring.

You were right about Mutilate, I was wondering about it too, and it turned out an error the way I implemented the new Overkill. The extra energy regen was up for the whole fight, hence a huge dps difference. The new numbers are much more in line with Combat as they were before (7650 without murder). So I will change the previous post.

The difference between Solar Bindings/Embrace of the Gladiator and Fluxing Coils/Legguards of Cunning Deception comes out positive, but not statistically significant (10dps on last try). What that means is in 500 boss fights, one will not be able to tell the difference between the two setups because of RNG. By the way, to get the best out of Fluxing Coils/Legguards of Cunning Deception set, I had to switch some gems from ArPen to agility since I was hitting the ArPen cap and it started to lower the value of ArPen.

While the following estimates are not very precise and have 0.05 standard error (10,000 observations), I did calculate that ArPen dps-per-point value drops from 2 to 1.4 when you are 50 points above the soft ArPen cap (getting capped when MR procs). So it drops from the top stat to below attack power and agility at that point. I am also getting higher dps/point values for white hit and expertise than before, which is likely because I am over crit cap and below expertise cap in Solar Bindings/Embrace BiS setup.

Hey Mavanas,
Thanks for updating the spreadsheet! I like the new numbers with BiS Gear, because Mutilate is just more flexible to play for me than Combat.
I just downloaded your new spreadsheet and opened it with Excel, there is a warning like "Excel found unreadable content and would like to repair it." After repairing the file there is a warning that some data is lost.
I sent the download link to few other people but everyone got the same problem.
Could you fix that?

Try this mirror site at filefront. I also reuploaded the file to myotherdrive.

Minor note, but you should be running Agi gems as the filler ones in your Mutilate setup, not AP.

EDIT: Also, wouldn't Blood of the Old God actually be a better choice over Mjolnir in at least the 51/7/13 setup, simply because (unless I'm missing it), you aren't going to be poison hit capped?

It's actually possible that in BIS AP gems are superior do to crit-capping. I'm going to assume that Mavanas at least tested that.

Hmm, it's actually pretty interesting then that none of the setups yield Blood of the Old God as a better choice. The gear you have listed has a total of 180 hit rating. Now, if you're running 51/7/13, you want 262 hit rating as Alliance in order to be poison hit capped. Thus with Blood of the Old God you would be at 288 hit rating, which isn't over by a tremendous amount. Then combine the fact that the proc is better for you than Mjolnir's proc, and the fact that you would then most likely be free to once again gem Agi without worrying about being crit-capped (especially since you've lost 3% crit, as well).

Now, this is all moot I guess if every setup still shows that 51/13/7 is superior according to your simulation. I'll have to look at it more when I get home I guess.

Chalon, if you look at the table above where I listed several specs and their DPS, next to 51/7/13 in the special notes I do indicate that highest DPS is achieved with BotOG (short for Blood of the Old God). Same thing with 23/5/43. For 51/13/7 BotOG loses because all that hit becomes white hit which has about 40% less dps value.

I did test that changing agility gems to AP gems in BiS gear for mutilate is a modest dps increase.

I have added Comet's Trail (CT) and Band of Lights to the simulation. The ring is best in slot for every spec, and so is the trinket. For mutilate, two best in slot trinkets are DM and CT, for combat, it's MR and CT. CT benefited combat more than mutilate, so the slight gap between the two specs closed and now combat is slightly ahead of mutilate on non-murderable targets.

I have updated the table above with new dps estimates and BiS items.

Need to add the 2 sockets for Valorous Terrorblade Legplates.

Two questions about the critical damage calculation in the sheet (AvDamage->F)

1. Talent "Murder" still affects crit multifier?

The sheet shows that "Murder" still affects critical damage multifier. However, I did some simple tests recently to check critical damages on "Murder"able targets, and found that the auto swing crit/hit damage ratio is exactly 2.06, not 2.14. It means "Murder" 4% bonus no longer applies to crit multifiers (at least for auto swings). Can someone else verify this?

2. The way talent "Lethality" applying to crit multifiers?

By my tests and other sheets it should be (C-1) x 1.3 + 1 where C is the crit multifier including all crit bonus except Lethality. Therefore, for a combat rogue the sinister strike crit multifier should be ((2 x 1.03 x 1.2) - 1) x 1.3 + 1 = 2.9136, not 2.3 x 1.03 x 1.2 = 2.8428.

I am not convinced ArPen is the hands down best gemming choice for combat. My simulations using 3.1k (with a manual fix for the T8 pants gem slots) of 15/51/5 combat fist/dagger indicate ArPen and Agi gemming is basically equivalent (6544 with Agi, 6547 with ArPen).

I fixed the gear errors, thanks guys. The crit cap calculator did in fact have that problem with CQC, which I fixed a while ago, but was delaying a new version since it does not affect dps calculations, it's only for your visual assessment whether you get crit capped with a a proc or not. I changed the visual representation of the crit cap even further, flipping talents from left (with a negative sign) to right (with positive), so now on the right side you will see your actual crit percentage.

The way lethality interacts with the crit multiplier is in fact wrong. I've looked at that problem before and I thought I fixed it a while back, but apparently it never got into the final version. For combat you wrote down the effect, for mutulate without murder it changes themultiplier from 2.37 to 2.38, with murder it changes from 2.46 to 2.49. I did not rerun the numbers, but it will give combat a bigger boost than regular mutilate. I had mutilate settings loaded in my personal version, and dps in BiS gear due to multiplier fix only did not change in a statistically significant way. For mutilate with murder it changed by about 10 dps.

Now about murder itself, I did not change the way murder interacts with the crit multiplier pending further testing. In the past it was solidly shown that murder does in fact factor in the crit multiplier calculations, so I want to make someone else independently tests it before making any changes.

Septhaka, whether or not ArP is ahead of agility depends on several factors. The biggest ones are whether you have a ArPen proc based trinket such as Grim Toll or Mjolnir Runestone. I am pretty sure without them gemming for ArPen is suboptimal. It also depends on how much ArPen you get from gear when gemming for it. As you get close to BiS gear, your items have more and more ArPen and they also have more gem slots. The effectiveness of ArPen as opposed to the effectiveness of agility has increasing returns up to the cap, so the more of it you have, the better, until you start hitting the 100% cap with a trinket proc.

Chalon, I am getting the same result for 51/13/7 in BiS gear, not statistically significant, yet every time I run it, 51/13/7 comes ahead by 10-15 dps. I am aware that Aldriana's spreadsheet puts 51/7/13 ahead by about 10 dps, and I mistakenly thought it was due to crit capping. However Aldriana demonstrated that crit cap has nothing to do with it since CQC offsets precision. I also independly verified that below the crit cap or above it, my simulation shows 51/13/7 ahead, so whatever the reasons are, they are not crit cap related. I've done dps comparisons with Aldriana's sheet and mine in the past, and I did notice minor differences mostly with mutilate and envenom damage, so I think it's related to differences in modeling of cycles and action priorities. I mean I would be very surprised if me and Aldriana were getting exactly the same results since our methods are so different.

P.S. I just looked through the Change Log, and back in version 3.1a I was supposed to fix the lethality problem. Back then, I talked to Vulajin to make sure I was doing it right, however somehow I forgot to save it in the 3.1 release version. Anyway, now it's fixed and I have uploaded the new 3.1k to mydrive.

So now there are two changes pending some testing, one is related to murder and another one brought up in Simple questions thread is whether the envenom buff is applied even if envenom is dodge or misses. Right now if it's dodged, the buff does not go up.

Mavanas, FYI, getting this from myotherdrive.com:

"File not found: http://www.myotherdrive.com/file/843...ation+3.1k.xls
The file you're trying to download is not valid. This is generally caused by a problem during upload."

FileFront worked fine.

Sorry I let it upload and went afk, and apparently there was a problem uploading. I reuploaded the file, so this link should work fine now.

I am currently uploading the new version to filefront as well. The one you downloaded 10 min ago is still old.

About rupture damage calculation, there is one difference between your sheet and Aldriana's. The difference is on the rupture multifier calculation when considering the following three factors: (1) T7 2pc bonus, (2) Blood Spatter, and (3) Serrated Blades.

Aldriana's sheet is like:
(1 + "T7 bonus") x (1 + "Blood Spatter bonus") x ( 1 + "Serrated Blades bonus")

Your sheet (and Vulajin's sheet, too):
(1 + "T7 bonus" + "Blood Spatter bonus" + "Serrated Blades bonus")

I remeber I tested this about a month ago and my results show that you and Vulajin are right. Therefore, Aldriana's sheet will slightly overestimate the dps of 51/7/13 (when Blood Spatter and Serrated Blades are both active).

[Footpads of Silence] appear to be slightly inferior or at best equivalent to [Flamestalker Boots] for most builds.