GG, I always seem to have a wall of text in the end, but I'd rather be thorough. :POriginally Posted by Arel
It seems that the general mentality since Mjolnir's Runestone came into existence and through ToC/ToGC was that you either go Arpen softcap + Arpen proc trinket or hardcap Arpen, anything in between is sub-optimal DPS. Just from a theoretical standpoint, that is ridiculous. I do believe this mentality developed because it was impossible for druids to reach arpen hardcap or get much beyond softcap when the MR came out, and there wasn't anything much better than a MR. Perhaps the individual math is a bit harder to comprehend, and if I get a little free time I'll attempt to crunch the numbers more exactly. However, I can at least provide a simplistic argument for the time being.
First, I'll supply a personal example since it will provide the basis for the argument. Since kitty dps is one of my offspecs, I've been maintaining one throughout the content. Since I don't always get the best and greatest gear for not being a kitty mainspec, my gear tends to lag based on the content. That being said, going into ICC, I had constructed my gear around Mjolnir Runestone, ~64% crit static, ~12.5k AP static, hit/exp capped, arpen soft-capped. Throughout progression, I noticed that even though I was getting several gear upgrades and gemming agi since "going over arpen softcap is bad!" mentality was around, my DPS was not increasing and severely lagging behind the rest of the raid. Being fed up with sub-par DPS, I decided to overhaul my gear to attempt arpen hardcap. This entailed actually downgrading several pieces... in the end, I achievement 1401 arpen at the cost of approximately 400ap, 10% crit, 1% haste, and 1.5% below expertise softcap. After several parses on fights such as Saurfang, the average DPS increase from my soft cap to hardcap gear was 2.5k DPS. For the general idea of what my gear is/was, my DPS gear falls into the 5.5k-5.6k GS range for kitty.
Alright, so what's the point? Even at the expense of a lot of other DPS stats, dropping Mjolnir (which provided limited arpen hardcap moments) and going for full-time arpen yielded a ridiculous gain in DPS, 2.5k DPS in my case. I just can't swallow that there isn't a point where you can stack arpen, be below the arpen hardcap, and not see a DPS increase over sticking with softcap + trinket. Now, I propose that there is an effective arpen (eArpen) provided by a Mjonlir/NES. In layman's terms, one should ideally be able to unequip their MR/NeS and add a static amount of arpen to their gear and see no change in their DPS output.
The tricky part is that the value of arpen and the DPS increase it provides gets better the more you have (just because of how it scales), so we can assume that the eArpen is not an empirical value but dependent on the current state of your gear, aka your current passive arpen. Actually, most people already know this already, because the proponents of softcap + trinket clearly state that "more arpen beyond the softcap devalues the arpen proc of the trinket," meaning the DPS gain of the trinket proc goes down with more arpen. Ignoring the crit portion on MS/NeS contributing to DPS (crit trinkets are a dime a dozen anyways), the eArpen of the trinket is a function your current passive arpen, the amount of arpen the trinket provides, and the uptime of said trinket. Now, I know there are going to be some people screaming "I line up my cooldowns to blow when the trinket procs," and that's all fine and dandy if you could actually control when the trinket procs (especially NES, I've heard the horror stories). What you can do is throw a fudge factor to sooth your spirits, when I did napkin math I tacked on an extra 10% to the estimated eArpen and it worked out fine.
I did napkin math and actually tested this on my gear since I was going to overhaul it anyways:
With MS, I saw approximately a proc per minute. 665 arpen for 10 seconds, 50 seconds w/o it => ~111 arpen over 60 seconds => ~111 arpen static. Throw in a fudge factor of 10% and you get 122 static arpen. Using my current arpen as starting point (basically, I was too lazy to calculate it around anything else), so using an eArpen = 122 arpen, I replaced my MS with a Banner of Victory (84 arpen) and replaced two 20agi gems with two 20 arpen gems (I was going to replace them anyways). Granted it isn't a perfect scenario, since I dropped 102 crit rating, gained ~1k ap proc with Banner of Victory, and lost 40 agi, but this is napkin math and I'm not made of gold! Well, long story short, sitting on a target dummy yielded a slight DPS increase (we're talking averaged out to be a 25 DPS increase). However, the result hinted that there is an eArpen value where you can just drop your arpen proc trinket, replace it with static arpen equivalent to its eArpen, and DPS will not be adversely affected.
If someone can beat me to the empirical math accounting for the trinket's proc rate, the arpen proc amount, and the current stat of your passive arpen to yield an effective arpen value, please do so! Until then, I'll work on the formulas and post later.