Stabilized Effort Scope

HOW I COW FOR NUMBARS REGARDING GEM

To quote Negs over at The Angry Butterfly in her latest post:

Now I’m figuring out some of the new gemming concepts that are coming out. Words through the grapevine mention Deadly Ametrine being useful where gemming for some crit is actually better than gemming for pure Agility, depending on your crit rating. Me being the skeptic that I am (not to mention stubborn), I’d like to see some numbers for this, so besides plugging away at my own spreadsheet, one of you more math-inclined bloggers should totally do a post about this. Yeah, you.

Well, okay then.

Looking at our handy dandy… SPREADSHEET!, we notice that on the Overview page, it gives us a DPS equivalency for each point of a given statistic. This is what mine looks like with my current gear (only relevant stats included)

Agility + 1 1.695 1.695
AP + 1 0.674 1.347
Crit + 1 1.461 1.461
ArP Rating+1 1.590 1.590

The reason there are two numbers is simple – the first is what one POINT gives you, and the second is what one ITEMIZATION POINT gives you. AP is worth two half an itemization point, so that’s why the second number is double the first.

So with that said, we look at the DPS values of our two contending gems: Delicate Cardinal Rubies (20 Agi) versus Deadly Ametrines (10 Agi/10 Crit).

DCR: 20 * 1.695 = 33.9
DA: (10 * 1.695) + (10 * 1.461) = 31.56

As you can see, in a one-on-one comparison, the Ruby beats the Ametrine by 2.4 DPS. But that’s not why we gem Deadly Ametrines.

Look at, oh, my beloved best-in-slot shoulders. They have a yellow socket (which an orange Ametrine matches), and a 4 Agility socket bonus. This skews the numbers like so:

DCR = 20 * 1.695 = 33.9
DA = (10 * 1.695) + (10 * 1.461) + (4 * 1.695) = 38.34

Aha! With the socket bonus added, the Ametrine wins out by almost 5 DPS! Thusly, the thesis for gemming Ametrines versus Rubies can be summed up as such:

When a socket bonus provides a DPS gain equal or higher to the value of the DPS loss incurred for using Ametrines, Ametrines should be used in favor of Rubies.

For me, this means that if a set bonus offers 2 Agi, 2 Crit, 2 ArPen, or 4 AP per yellow socket, it is wise to gem for the bonus versus STICK A ZOD RUBY IN THAT BEAST.

Edit: Thanks to Feist and Jez for pointing out my inability to type or close tags properly.