Dps AA Progression calculator

[Tastian]

Some of the most commonly asked questions here on the boards center around AA progression and what to get when.  Personal preferance and style will always play a big part in making this decision, but let's say you've decided to boost your dps.  What do you get first?  Combat fury?  BF?  Is it ever a good idea to not train a certain AA to max and instead begin training up another AA instead?  Well these are just some of the questions that this AA calc will try to help you answer.  

http://www.beastlords.org/aaCalc.html

That's the link and here's the short version of it.  Go to the link.  Enter how your dps breaks down. Then select your current rank in the various AA skills.  Click the "do it" button and in the results window you will see a printout that shows what the value of "dps gained per AA point spent" for the next available rank of an AA is to you.  The higher the number the better the dps return for AA spent.

If that's enough for you stop reading now.  If you have any questions or just want more information continue reading down.

First the fields...

Melee dps -  This is your personal dps done through weapons.  Your "punch" or "crush" or whatever.  The combined damage of both your melee weapons or your 2hb damage.

Nuke dps -  This is quite simply the amount of damage you do through your nukes.  

Proc dps -  This is the amount of damage you do through your personal procs.  This is for damage from innate procs on weapons and augmented procs from LDoN.

DoT dps -  This is for the amount of damage done through your dots.  Plague, scorpion venom, tainted breath!!, etc.

Pet dps -  This is for the amount of MELEE damage your pet does.  Pet proc damage is not a factor here because currently there are no AA's that augment the damage a pet does through proc'n.

Make sure that you enter numbers for all fields or leave them at the defaulted 0 value.  If for some reason you are compelled to delete a zero and not enter a new value and leave a field blank then the applet won't give you any results and you will have to make sure you enter the data correctly.

If you are have questions about what your dps is for the various fields I highly suggest parsing yourself.  Also cop's great spreadsheet can give you a good idea on melee damage from weapons and proc damage as well.  Pet damages are semi-well known and if you search the forums you can get a rough idea.

Now that your dps is entered simply choose your current rank in the various AAs from the drop down menus.  Remember here you are entering what level of the skills you already have and the applet will then let you know how much you are expected to gain from the next possible level of each AA.


Now that you've entered the information and clicked "do it" you should have a nice little print out in the results field.  This only displays AAs that you are able to actually train.  For instance if you have BF5 already then there simply won't be numbers for that.  

After the values for the AAs from the drop down menus are printed there are a couple lines and then a section for Feral swipe, Ambi and Sinister strikes.  These are computed seperately because the applet doesn't factor in whether you already have them or if they are applicable to your situation.  Ambi for instance requires that you DW and Sinister requires that you already have ambi too.  These values are there if they pertain to you and if not simply ignore them.  Although they are kind of interesting for comparison sake imo.  

You can continually adjust values in the dps fields and the drop down menus and the simply click "do it" over and over.  One word of caution is that the applet factors in total gain based on dps you gave it.  If you enter 100dps and then click "do it" then the applet will give you a value of 1.5 for BF.  However, if you then select BF1 from the drop down menu and click "do it" again the value will go down.  The reason for that is that you didn't update the melee dps to reflect 103dps that you should have gone to by training BF1.  In most cases the numbers are close and you can easily keep dps numbers the same and try out different combinations of the AAs to find points where one AA falls behind another.  The error in most cases by not updating dps properly is usually fractions of a %.  However, if you want the most accurate results then you should enter your parsed dps break down and AA breakdown correctly, click do it.  Then after you train AAs and your dps values change enter the new values and your new AA distribution and "do it" again.  

Also note that this applet assumes you are simply deciding which AA to train next, not how many AA's you have to spend.  Spell casting fury is one of the very few skills that actually gives more of a return as you get higher ranks of it.  This means that in a few cases although spell casting fury 1 will show a very poor return you should also check the expected return on spell casting fury 2 and possibly 3 before deciding what path is right for you.  As with all things this is a personal choice and this applet is only here to help you.  The final choice is your's.

There are also a few weapons that cause minor issues.  A weapon like a shinai procs, however, its proc damage isn't increased by Spell casting fury.  Also SPF or Timeweaver "proc" isn't augmented by SCF, but is augmented by Warder's fury and Alacrity.  There are very few cases where this is an issue though.  All that will happen is that SCF will have slightly inflated numbers because the applet thinks SCF will boost your proc damage and it simply won't.  

Next to finally, there is the issue of web browser.  IE 6 uses it's own JRE by default and it's not the greatest.  Some people that use IE and haven't updated the JRE to sun's 1.4.2(ish) may encounter problems.  

http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_manual.jsp

The above is a link that should help most IE users with getting sun's newest JRE, so that IE will run applets much better.  Once you download and install that just go into your IE options under advanced and have checked "sun(java) blahblahblah".  Netscape by default uses sun's JRE and there are no issues that I'm aware of.  I personally much prefer netscape ( <3 tabbed browsing) and always have semi-recent versions of both browsers on my computer just in case of such compatibilty issues.  Whether you choose to try fixing IE, DL'n netscape, use Mozzila or whatever is again entirely up to you.  8)


Finally, I just want to say thanks to Bengali, Coprolith, Derrict, Hrann and Kashmiir for their feedback on this.  There are still a few changes I'm working on, but I think it's to a point where I can open it up to others to use and play around with and find other issues with it.  8P

[Oneiromancer]

Wow...this rocks!  Very nice program and nice idea!

Quick suggestion: have the results field explain what you say in this post...just a few words, it can't hurt.

Long term: integrate this with Coprolith's sheet, so you can choose your weapons from a database, and maybe also be able to choose your nuke/dot spells...I really have no idea what my nuke/dot dps is, although for dots at least I can make an educated guess.  I suppose I can for nukes too...well, anyway, it would just make it simpler but is hardly required.

Kudos to you, Tastian!

Game on,

[Vidyne]

BAH
now i actually have to find a way to figure out my dps :(

[Kashmiir Battlekat]

Sticky'd and you are all welcome :) Tastian asked if I would host it for him. I didnt see a problem with it so there ya all go.

Tastian will be emailing me updated .class files as he repairs or adds additional goodness to the program.

Please direct all communication regarding this nifty program to Tastian as really all I do is host it.

[Tastian]

Parsing and cop's spreadsheet all work well for getting melee dps.  Here are some of the more common numbers some might want.  These are all base values so no focus/AA intitally.  Also for spells it assumes running full time or dang close.  In actual use it'd be lower for most.

Sorsha(with usual buffs)   ~55 dps
Plague    ~9 dps
Scorp venom ~24 dps
Frost spear  ~10 dps  If used once per minute  ~20dps if recast soon as it refreshes
Ice Shard   ~7 if used once per minute,  ~14 if recast soon as it refreshes

It's impossible to be exact, but in most cases you can get close enough considering the gap that is usually present between two AA's.  Also this is only for referance and just to try and help people choose, by no means does it make the decision for you.

[Oneiromancer]

That's great, Tastian, those are the numbers I (and I'm sure most of the other non-parsers) were looking for.  Thanks again!

I was already planning on dabbling in CF1, WA1, and WF1 when I finally got MGB and before moving on to more "meaty" things, good to see that's a reasonable assumption!  :D

Game on,

[Vidyne]

Hrm.. really wanna calc my dps, cant seem to DL Cop's spreadsheet tho
On the first link I get "your security settings do not allow you to download this file" and the browser closes that window.....

On the second, the file isnt there...

[Otuol]

Just asking this to make sure that I understand this correctly.  I take for granted if I currently have no Weapon Affinty AA's and it lists a ratio for it though, that would be the effectiveness of getting that first level of AA in it ( I guess per aa as 2 are spent on the first WA).  If this is the way this works I would defintely go with Ambi first, then WA.

Anyhow, I followed your post from my thread on the Ambi AA discussion over here.  Between using Cop's spreadsheet and this java app, this makes for a great setup.  Thanks to everyone involved in getting this up there!

[Tastian]

I'd check your internet options to make sure your security level or some option isn't selected that auto prevents you from DL'n a file.  Make sure you have it set to "prompt" so you choose whether to DL it or not.  Otherwise it will just autostop you from doing it.

What the applet currently does is give you a look at where you are and what would happen next.  You plug in your current dps and AA's and it will tell you what the next rank of each AA would yield you dps wise for the points cost.  You can use it to to do a few other things, but it's not designed for that.  I have another update I'm trying to finish that will add some other funtionality, but that's going to be a bit.  8)

[Vidyne]

Yea I found it Tastian

Program called IESPYADS, i use to block spyware companies, adds 5000 sites to the restricted list in IE....  Now why would it add yours?

[Tastian]

No clue, if you view source on the page you'll see what is one of the simplest HTML pages ever created lol.  It might just be browser burps when it hits an applet hehe, might want to try it out on a few other sites.  8)

Also, there is a new version of the applet that will be uploaded whenever Kash has the time.  What I added was another button called "do all".  This will calc out expected values for all remaining ranks of the AAs available to you.  The numbers aren't quite as accurate because by buying one AA you increase the gain from another, but it helps with seeing how SCF improves in ranks and how CF falls off.  Please ignore the rounding errors and feel free to PM/post comments as always.  8)

[Vidyne]

Erm well all it does, is add 5000ish sites to restricted zone part of IE

Then it sets restricted zones to disable all java, scripting, file download, etc.... so all I can do is look at a restricted page.... Gator cant run scripting to autodownload itself... or other scumware cant be installed because its disabled....

[Toln]

I'm also unable to view this at the moment.

When I load the page and put cursor over the java applet, I see:
load: class aaCalc not found

I'm running IE6.0, with Java settings set to Low security and downloading all set to prompt.

Any ideas? Not sure what version of java i'm running, so that might be it. Want to see if this is a problem on my end or not though before I spend hours downloading a likely huge Java installation. Blah dial-up.  :)

[Tastian]

Bleh is right.  IE has issues with java because they use their own JRE well netscape and others use sun's own JRE.  I personally would just DL netscape and use that for viewing this and certain other web pages.  There are lots of sites where netscape simply works better than IE for me.  

If you want you can go through all the DL'n and patching of your IE though.  Did you read the first post already?  Toward the bottom it lists how to update IE and how to make IE use sun's JRE instead of its default one.  Microsoft and sun not at each others throats atm, so hopefully soon we'll have IE being very java friendly.

[Chubaka]

I put in my numbers and hit do it and got the numbers.  I assume that this is DPS / POint? or %dps / point?

Anyway.....if I hit Do ALL.  How come I get a different number for the next level that I am allowed to train in something?

IE. I put in spell Fury at lvl 1 and when i hit Do It I get the result of 0.0978 for the next level.

If I now click the Do All button, it shows spell fury 2 at 0.088.

All of them seem to be different.