ZorbaTHut

- Fix Titanium Plating
- Add more boss numbers
- Add a useful Custom Boss config option

Download new version. This will be the last version out of me before I rip it apart, clean it up, and try to get more useful numbers out of it. Wish me luck!

The problem is that many item names change when you change factions - once you go through and set all the items to be ones it recognizes, it'll work again. I'm not quite sure how to solve this in a useful way at the moment. I'll think about it.

I think this is going to come down to subjectivity more than anything else. It depends too much on your raid composition for any objective answer - my guild doesn't really worry me about threat, so I'd weight it . . .

. . . well, I wouldn't, it's a cakewalk at that point. I've accidentally tanked it in DPS gear without noticing. So, honestly, if threat isn't an issue for you, you can basically sleep through that fight, in my experience at least.

 

Langie

So, after playing around with the new sheet i realized, that all items with BlockValue on them raised and some are even BIS or far ahead of other items. Is this because of the buff of the "Critical Block" talent in 3.2. or because of the DRs which are huge for PDK gear?
For example the T9 helm is according to the sheet superior to the 75x Badges helm for my setup.
Or pdc 10 heroic shoulders from the faction champs are BIS.


Sorry for mistakes or gramar, no native speaker.

 

foopeemoa

Agreed, although you have a lot better mages than we do, apparently. I haven't tanked the 25-man, but for the heroic 10-man I find I need to be putting out at least 10k tps to build up a comfortable margin for when dps get the Empowered buff. Survivability is a non-issue, I just hit whichever cooldown is available if I'm the opposite color when the aoe is coming. We've had attempts where all of the healers/dps died from stupid ball control, but the two tanks stay up for like 30 seconds afterwards still. I think you could potentially single tank the heroic 10-man encounter if the tank could keep threat on both.

 

janaka

The values are not "correct", and not mathematically calculated in any way. They are just roughly the values I used the last time with Rawr, I can't even promise that I'll use exactly these next time.
Also note that Rawr doesn't have a DPS weight like the spreadsheet, so I use the TPS weight if I want to push DPS.
If you have no threat issues and don't care about your DPS, just weight only Mitigation and Survival.

 

oscrin

I recently started tanking on my warrior, after a lot of experience being Fury. I have a quick question regarding vigilance. I always run with a pally as the OT or he is MT and I am OT. Therefore, our raids always have a sanctuary buff. I believe vigilance cancels out sanc buff. So, after thinking, IMO, it is best to keep vigilance off of all melee dps (including tanks), since sanc provides a damage reduction plus 10% to strength, whereas vigilance gives a reduc and +plus threat to me. I have no problem generating threat, but the highest on my meters are always the warlocks. Is it a good call to say that so long as a high threat lock, or hunter in raid should always get my vigilance before any melee dps or tank?

 

ZorbaTHut

The Sanct bonus doesn't stack with Kings. If you've got enough paladins to put Sanct on people, you absolutely have enough paladins to put Kings on people. Also, I'm pretty sure that, while the 3% damage reduction doesn't stack, Sanct and Vigilance will cheerfully coexist on the same player.

You basically have two choices for Vigilance - have the tanks swap Vigilance for extra taunts and damage reduction if nobody has the 3% damage reduction buff, or toss it on whoever deals out the most aggro. At this point I virtually always do the latter.

If you want to test it, wait for a warlock to get Sanct'ed, toss Vigilance on them, and see if the buff went away

 

ZorbaTHut

Alright here have a totally experimental spreadsheet. There may be bugs, but I've tested it a bit. It now supports a more objective "score value" that can be used to compare armor sets somewhat better than looking at the above stats and trying to do weighting in your head.

Note that the score value depends strongly on the boss you've chosen - gear that's great for one fight may be terrible for another fight. However, in general, the higher you can get your Total Gear Quality, the better off you are.

I'd be interested in people plugging their gear into it, choosing a representative boss, and giving me the four numbers on the Stats sheet from C89 through C92. Please tell me which boss, and give me a general sense of your gear quality. I'd be especially interested in someone with BiS or near BiS, and in someone who's a relative tanking newbie and isn't even in full heroic epics. I may still need to rebalance some of the numbers a little to avoid biasing, although any formula that tries to combine four such totally divergent things is always going to be somewhat subjective.

So give it a shot, let me know. It should feel very similar and give very similar results, although I do have plans to change things further to diverge it a little more from the original sheet (most notably, trinket procs and other special procs need to be dealt with in a much, much better manner.)

 

Hexadril

Bug Report: I am having an issue with the last few iterations of the spreadsheet, including the all new reworked one.

Whenever I select Tauren, Orc, Troll, Undead or Draenei from the race drop down on the 'Talents+Setup' sheet, the AEP values on the 'Gearlist' page change to #N/A.

Reproducable with any of the last three sheets. Fixes itself if you go back to a "working" race.

Note: Using OO3.1.1 on a Mac, though the rest of the sheet works just fine.

 

ZorbaTHut

The problem is that some of the "default equipment" is Alliance-specific. If you go and set your equipment to be your equipment, it'll work fine. I'm not quite sure how to fix this in an elegant manner yet.

 

Hexadril

Unfortunately, this bug also occurs when I have all my tanking gear properly selected.

It also comes up when you select 'Draenei'.

Not sure an Alliance/Horde check is even needed though, since all the faction-specific gear seems to be an exact duplicate stat-wise with a different model or texture.

 

Gruntle

I think it's a better solution to just have the horde/alliance identical items as the same entry (make the textbox longer if you can't fit both names in there). That's the solution I have used in my version of the sheet anyway. Having conditionals to check what race you have selected and then give you different gearlists just seems like an invitation to trouble.

 

ZorbaTHut

Yeah, but this makes it harder to use. You're either penalizing horde or alliance users by requiring them to know the name of the alternative for text search purposes.

Think I've come up with a mildly grim solution though, so I'll just grim it up a bit. Always good to hide complexity from the user.

 

todemax

Can't you just set up the gear sheet with conditionals? Something like =IF(OR(Race=Orc;Race=Troll etc); Item name 1; Item name 2). Ctrl+C on a cell with this conditional will just copy the text if pasted in a browser or the like for item search.

 

ZorbaTHut

That's exactly what I'm doing, but the problem is that the dropdowns in the equip list. When you drop down, it cleverly grabs the text of the source cell . . . not the equation . . . so it ends up being "Wrynn's Pauldrons of Triumph" in the equip list, not a conditional.

So then you change from Dwarf to Tauren and suddenly it can't find Wrynn's Pauldrons of Triumph, so the entire sheet turns into lookup errors and NaN's.

Sigh.

 

todemax

Oh. How about that . As far as I can tell, this is the way Warrior DPS Calculation Spreadsheet works. Although it might be differences in how OO and Excel works.

EDIT: I misunderstood what you were saying. I don't really see why it's a problem that changing races without changing the gear results in temporary errors. When you're using the sheet you would normally set the race and buffs and then equip your items, so those should always match. Alternatively you could add every faction specific loot twice and suffer a bit of redundancy.

 

Gruntle

Hmm, I think you misunderstood what I meant. I write the name of both the Horde and Alliance item in the box, e.g. "Shoulderplates/guards of Enduring Order". I shorten the names when possible, but you can as well put in the full name if you want to be able to search.

 

ZorbaTHut

Well, apparently it's a problem, because like three people have reported it as a bug

Personally, when I'm rigging up my gear, I usually do it by just typing the name. I can remember "Shoulderplates of Enduring Order" and I can probably type it faster than I can find them, especially as the equipment list is getting longer.

If I start customizing it with things that aren't actually the item's name, that breaks badly - I either have to know the Horde equivalent also, or I have to guess at the shortcut that the spreadsheet author used. Not ideal.

Also someday I'd kind of like to try rigging up a download-from-the-armory option like Landsoul's spreadsheet has, and so I'll need both names easily accessible in full string format anyway.

 

Zagokar

Is there someway to get your newer spreadsheet working in Excel 07? I'm missing all of the dropdown menus that the Excel 07 specific spreadsheets have, and without those, I'm not sure how to change options like gear and race.

 

ZorbaTHut

Not that I know of. I'd like to fix it, but I've got a lot of other stuff on my plate, and I don't have time to work on this often - I've been spending the time making the spreadsheet better, instead.

OpenOffice is free, note

 

Executation

I've noticed, Zorba, that your recent release of the spreadsheet has an inflated AEP for block rating (and maybe BV, as well). I found that there is a formula in the burst value cell of block rating on the stats page when there is no formula in the corresponding cells for dodge and parry. They are simply set to 0. This gives block rating an enormous advantage over dodge and parry, and I can't imagine why block rating would be more powerful against burst damage. It's still ruled by chance, therefore we can't predict that it will protect us from burst when we need it.

I understand better why BV has a higher weighting on this release than previous ones, because of simultaneous use of shield block, critical block, and glyph of blocking. The majority of damage from raid bosses is still physical, even though it's not as bursty as magical damage. Which is why I have a slight issue with a high burst value on BV, as well.

Why the change?

 

ZorbaTHut

I'm actually not sure what you're looking at there. Are you sure you've got the latest version? The worst-case blocks/min is simply set to 0 across the board at the moment (C17 through W17), and if you rig up a custom boss with 100% burst, you end up with zero block value and zero block rating. (In fact, you get only AC, BAC, Agi, Sta, and Exp, as technically nothing else matters for pure burst.)

If you're looking at the B column it's pretty much ignored right now, I haven't deleted it yet but I might. I'm not sure anyone uses it since who uses a spreadsheet for fighting lv80 monsters anyway.

Edit: Remember to set the boss profile to "custom", also. I should probably put up some kind of a warning if you don't have a custom boss chosen.

 

Executation

Zorba,

Yes, it was cell AC80 on the stats page. Some how I missed the most recent update you released with the Twin Valkyrs and Anub boss profiles. I also like how expertise is brought back into balance as more of a threat stat than a mitigation one. It seems like bosses that are flagged for parry haste are never ones where extra physical burst is ever an issue for healers.

In earlier postings, people have been asking for spreadsheet formulas that address non-linear weightings for defense capping. I am of the mind set that these formulas require a boss rotation table (which would be unique to every boss) that shows average timing of melee strikes and magic attacks. The speed of attacks from bosses would require detailed parsings to detect average attack rotation timing. But once you get the average rotation of the boss, you could determine what the critical stages of incoming damage are, and how much total damage happens in the shortest amount of time. From those critical stages, determine how much stamina and armor is needed to avoid death before a healer can top you off. After a tank stacks about 2-3 critical stages worth of stamina and armor, the weightings on these stats should drop significantly in favor of avoidance stats. Once again, this is a non-linear formula that could probably be solved with iteration using a boss attack rotation table. Personally, I wouldn't know how to manipulate Excel to get this done, but I know it's possible.

A few non sequitur points:

1. Forget threat, it isn't an issue anymore. If we gear for pure survivability, there's enough threat stats on the gear so we don't have to think about it.

2. Of course, this isn't taking into account the severe avoidance debuff coming in ICC, which is basically making us focus on pure stamina and armor.

My question now, is, since ICC is only a month and a half away, should we start weighting our gear now to get ready for the pure damage absorption that will be needed?

 

Gruntle

Maybe it was my sheet you tried Executation? I had the error you described in my blocks/min cell for the worst case calculations. Well, it wasn't anything I introduced, the "error" was there in taliafears sheet to begin with, I guess it's a leftover since TBC. I've had problems finding out why BV and Block rating was so highly valued in my sheet, thanks a lot for posting the solution.

The kind of detailed incoming damage simulation you describe would be nice to have, but I'm not sure it would solve anything. You already use the burst survival statistic to weight for the critical situations, the randomness you would get in a full simulation would just make the output confusing to most users and make the sheet very slow and prone to errors.

I agree that threat is hardly an issue any longer, but it's easy enough to turn it off by setting the weight to 0 in the boss profiles.

The avoidance debuff in ICC doesn't really change anything. Well, it means that the TTL and burst survival statistic becomes more similar. And things change in the absolute sense (i.e. your time-to-live will of course go down compared to no debuff), but I can't see that the debuff will affect the AEP values of different stats.

edit: grayed out the last part, I failed to understand how ICC will affect avoidance vs sta/armor. It will and should have an effect on the AEP values. Should be easy enough to see in the spreadsheet.

 

Executation

Gruntle,

That's a good point with the ability to change the threat value to 0. I'll have to experiment with that.

The idea I was having with the in-depth boss rotation was to use it to base the non-linear equation on that would devalue stamina and armor in relation to avoidance stats. My reasoning behind having that functionality is based on the idea that having an extra 300-500 health (picked a random low amount) becomes a wasted stat if it isn't enough to survive the boss hit that kills you. Basically, if you were to graph the value of health as I'm describing it, you would see repeating sets of sharp peaks and rounded valleys, with an overall decreasing trend to the graph. I wish I could insert a paint image .

I'm theorizing that a boss rotation table would be a necessity in order to figure out how close together the bosses largest attacks occur, be they magic, melee, or a combination (a combination is most likely). We would then need to assume a base amount of time it takes a healer to get you back to full and use that number as the "bracket" on the boss rotation table to find the largest amount of damage that can occur between those topped off periods.

I see an issue with determining the amount of time it takes to go from less than full to full, because it's a factor of healer haste, crit chance, HoTs, and cast times. Maybe we could use a worst case scenario for healing like we do for burst value (i.e. no avoidance) ?

Not to mention any extra little damage that can occur while a healer is moving, or healing someone else for a split second.

Is any of this making sense? It's starting to seem like it would be too complicated to bother with configuring, but maybe that's because I'm just not a spreadsheet wizard. I've seen other spreadsheets used by different classes and specs (notably landsoul's sheet) that uses a great deal of in-depth dps iteration.

Zorba,

Do you see any possibilities of building something like this, or am I in the realm of wishful thinking?

*Edit: Does burst time simply assume that the largest melee hit and the largest magic hit happen simultaneously?

 

Gruntle

So I guess you mean that each boss should have a set "rotation" (so not really a swing simulation). That should be possible in the sheet even without using iterations. Iterations is problematic in sheets and should, in my opinion, be avoided when not absolutely necessary. Landsoul uses it in his dps sheet and it is working, but it should be noted that almost all of the problems people have with running his sheet is due to the instability that you get from the recursive references in the sheet. Making such boss rotation schemes will be a lot of work though, very hard for one person to get right.

It would also cause quite a lot of non-continuous jumps in the evolution of AEP for different stats. These jumps and peaks will really only depend on the boss rotation so it will be hard to know if you can trust the AEPs you get out (unless the boss rotation is really simple and can be described perfectly in the sheet). At this point the sheet becomes more of a boss fight tool than a gear evaluation tool. Sorry if I sound negative, I still think the idea is quite nice, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better to look at these things in a full simulator.

The burst value is really the worst case. It assumes no misses/dodges/parries/blocks (and a tripled crit unless crit immune). It also assumes that you get no heals at all. Magic damage is included in the statistic, it is set to double the boss value for the burst.