First of all, thank you for the program it is great.

I am probably not understanding how the program works exactly, but I found something interesting.

I went through all the slots and updated them to the BiS according to the program, and depending on the order I upgrade the pieces to BiS, the BiS suggested trinkets will vary. Sometimes it will have the War Token as BiS along with Heroic WFS. Other times it will suggest the Heroic WFS with the Heroic Abom trinket.

Also I compared the overall DPS that could be attained by myself and a friend of mine. I am human and he is an orc. We have the same exact mutilate 51-18-2 spec, and I selected the BiS gear for both of us, but somehow he comes out with 14100+ overall DPS and I have 14000 even overall DPS. We have the same buffs/debuffs selected.

What am I doing wrong or understanding wrong about the program?

Concerning the order you change your gear leads to different "Bis" lists, it is logical since the program rate the item by dps increase if you change one specific item to another, but it doesn't think about all the combinations possible to find the best combination.
(I am not sure my explanation is very clear...)

Concerning the total dps of you and your orc friend, I think it's pretty clear that it is due to the fact that orcs have racial advantage that human don't have, such as Blood Fury, which is a very good cooldown for rogue, when humans don't have any offensive cooldown from what I know.

Thats what I thought, the orc racial, I just didn't know if it was calculated as well.

As far as the gear, so essentially you are saying there is more than 1 BiS list with this program?

Take for example trinkets. I've read on EJ forums that heroic abom and heroic WFS are the BiS for mutilate rogues. But if i followed iDPS it suggests the heroic WFS and war token.

I will try again to explain what I meant earlier (my English not that good to write a clear explanation):

In fact, what I wanted to say is that the app take into account only one change at a time. And at a precise time, you have a lot of different change possible (gear, gems,...). And after every single change, the app will reprocess the calculation of the increase in dps for every item you could change (and the EP values as well).

So deciding at one time to change your pants instead of your shoulders can make a huge difference since one may have haste and the other crit on it. Maybe the crit will make you closer to the crit cap and then all the suggestions for the other pieces will now take into account that crit is now a stat lesser interesting than before.

Finally, moving one step after another you can reach different "BIS" list, also concerning the trinket.

Concerning the PVE guide that you quote about the BIS trinkets, I think that the EP values of each trinket were calculated from a basic gear considering basic EP values. Because, for example if your are reaching crit cap with HWT and Tiny Abom, the crit from WFS will be a complete loss reducing the interest of this trinket.

I would say that in general, to evolve well we have to see what change can be good to enhance our actual gear, and for that purpose the app is perfect ( and the spreadsheets too), but to research the real BIS list it takes a lot more experimentation to find the final gear that would provide the best dps.

The spreadsheet and Java app are simply there to help you find the best upgrade for you in your CURRENT gear. The BiS list is something that optimizes your character, but there's no guarantee that each item on the list will be the absolute best for you with your current gear. You need to think of the BiS list as a destination, and the Java App and Spreadsheet as a map to help you get there. Each piece of gear will help you be better and get closer to getting every BiS piece, but that piece may not always be from the BiS list.

In short, the Java App says what's awesome now, but use the BiS List to plan for the future.

There seems to be a discrepancy with the hit rating my character has, and the hit rating iDPS is displaying. For some reason iDPS is displaying 281 hit rating when I actually have 309. Does anyone know what the problem might be?

I've reset the gear on iDPS multiple times through the armory function and it still shows 281 hit.

Any thoughts?

With regards to Mongoose/Berserking specifically: Mongoose was at some point stealth-nerfed, which was only recently discovered; hence while at various times in the past it's been competitive, it no longer is; hence the differences are probably at least in part because some tools have been updated and some haven't. Regardless of what the tools say, at the moment the answer is "always use Berserking".

As to the larger point: the simplest way to explain it is that one or more of the tools - and quite possibly all of them - are wrong. All the tools provide a model or simulation of what's going on, and they all use different techniques and assumptions to do so. Hence, on any given point, one may be more accurate than the others; hence, it sort of comes down to which one you trust most. Personally, I know which one *I* trust most, but that might not be true of all people. In order to figure out the exact nature of the discrepancy to decide which is actually right on a given issue would require a significant in-depth understanding of all tools under discussion, which I don't believe anyone currently possesses.

I do not think i have much to add to Aldriana. The only way you can get a correct result is if you rewrite WOW in a box as some kind of ultimate simulator, but that kinda exceeds our abilities. All tools use various methods to simplify the WoW universe in order to make it manageable. Those are different for every tool, some might be similar and some will be completely different.

Regarding Mongoose stealth nerf, I haven't been following the scene very closely as I am a bit busy with other stuff atm, but this is the first time i hear of a Mongoose stealth nerf. Are you referring to the one introduced with wotlk, working similar to the crusader stealth nerf? Or was there something new added recently?

EDIT: NVM it seems they changed Mongoose to haste rating instead of a static amount of haste.

Err, I may have misunderstood, but if I got it right, it's neither one of those: it's a static amount of haste rating (30 haste rating I believe).

First of all, I love this app., as most people seem to, and use it constantly. That said, I have noticed a quirk which I am at a loss to explain, so I hope someone can help me with this.

Recently, just for laughs, I plugged in the old 51/13/7 spec, just to see what would happen. Imagine my astonishment when I saw my projected unbuffed dps jump from 5888 to 5990! It seemed odd that the energy regen from 5pt. RS would be enough to even match, let alone surpass, and extra 2% crit and 10% haste, so I checked it on Aldriana's sheet (where 51/18/2 is still tops), and even went so far as to respec and spend an hour on the dummy just to see what would happen.

The results, not surprisingly, were not a success.

So while I still like this app and intend to keep using it, I'm AM fairly curious if anyone else has had this experience, and if anyone might have an explanation for it. Any and all help appreciated!

Great app, really nice and easy to use so many thanks for taking the time to create it.

Personally I'm using it to try and determine my dps given a more realistic rupture uptime (honestly dont see how 98% uptime is even possible given the ramp up time at the start of a fight before the first rupture - perhaps its just me) and see how much i'd lose by going ruptureless.

One thing I noticed whilst fiddling with rupture and ruptureless specs is the dramatic difference using the SS glyph has on dps for either spec compared to the usual spreadsheets. E.g. for a rupture based spec (assuming 85% uptime), adding the SS glyph (in place of ToTT glyph I always use) results in a dps increase in Aldriana's spreadsheet of ~25 dps. In the Java app it results in a dps increase of 204 dps. Thats certainly a non-trivial discrepancy. Was just wondering why the huge difference?

Apologies if this has already been answered. I did trawl through the other posts but ofc may have missed it.

Edit: Having also trawled through some more posts in other threads it seems this may be down to the SS glyph not quite being modelled accurately in the spreadsheet. I'll leave this post though in case that isnt the case.

Go to the "Loot Filter" drop down menu and enable the ruby sanctums.

I've recently respecced into combat and read Aldriana's post on Combat Cycles, specifically the part about optimizing energy pooling.

How does iDPS calculate the N and M values and could they perhaps be exposed in a later version?

I've noticed that my crit rate is still showing up as 4.8% less than my actual crit rate. Since it seems to have been fairly well established in these forums that this crit suppression does not exist after all, I was wondering if/when this will be removed from the applet.

Not a big deal, I realize, just wondering

Crit suppression was a myth. Crit reduction is not. Hence the program is correct.

Ok, now I'm confused.

I did some searching and found the threads in which (I thought) this issue was put to bed, specifically the one in which it was conjectured that "crit supression" was a result of partial blocks that recount was labelling hits.

Somehow I've managed to miss the concept of "Crit Reduction", and how this is different, although the number 4.8% seems to still be in play. I did a search for "crit reduction" and cannot find anything.

I'm not looking for hand holding here; if you could just point me to where crit reduction (as opposed--presumably--to crit suppression) is discussed, I'll be very grateful.

I have made a custom build of the original application, which uses updated combat ratings for lvl. 80 from Combat Ratings at level 85 (Cataclysm) , updated item stats from Wowhead Cataclysm DB and updated gems (including recolored, changed and new)

Surely, this can't be used to model DPS in patch 4.0.1, but at least it can be used as paperdoll stats calculator or to view hit/expertise/crit caps with current gear.

Known issues:

• DPS/EP calculations left unchanged and are wrong.
• Some items were not updated on cata.wowhead.com DB, so if you see an item with AP on it, that's probably the case.
• You should review the talents, and set '0' at removed talents like CQC
• To not interfere with normal iDPS installation, the saved file is called iDPS-4.0.1.xml instead of iDPS.xml

Download link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4560461/iDPS-4.0.1.jar

Update: exp rating fixed.