Question for the mathletesFollow

Unless it takes you from 350 skill to 355, not much. +Weapon Skill is pretty useless except to get you to 355, which is basically +3% hit. Any more is pretty useless, and any less is similarly useless.

Just a few quick things.

1. The claw has +15 weapon skill rating. That's not gonna get you to 365. I believe it's more along the lines 3.8 weapon skill.

2. It's true that the +hit is better for PvE than PvP, but you're gonna want some for PvP as well. It certainly helps when stacking poisons. Make sure you stay above +5% to hit. As I said in your other post, you'll probably lose some of your (already low) +hit as there really is none on the PvP gear. Consider switching to a 41/20/0 build to pick up precision to make sure you don't miss your specials.

3. The claw is a good dagger, and it's free. You just have to do the quest line. It actually has higher top end (but lower bottom end) damage than Ced's carver. The rogue dps spreadsheet told me I had higher DPS output using the Claw as opposed to a second Ced's Carver. However, the Stam on Ced's makes it more attractive for PvP purposes.

I believe the Wpn Skill mechanic is much like Hit and Crit Rating in that a certain amount of rating, in this case weapon skill, equates to a certain weapon skill.

So dagger skill rating will give a certain amount of dagger skill and so on.

Uh...

So Weapon skill equates to weapon skill, but weapon skill doesnt exactly translate into the same amount of weapon skill.

So you can see how this is confusing.

No, Weapon Skill Rating equates into Weapon Skill.

By about a 1/4 multiplier.

I see. The symantics of it just don't make a lot of sense. Why would blizzard differentiate between a weapon skill rating and a weapon skill ___ (level? value?)

So with a weapon skill value of 350 you have a weapon skill rating of, roughly, 1400. Why is that figure important? Why not just have the tooltip say "increases your dagger skill by three." ?

Or even "Increases your dagger skill by 3.8 but we'll round that down to 3."

The reasoning behind this escapes me, and normally Blizzard's logic is unassailable (whoo 50% threat decrease on shadowstep!).

It should also be noted, that if you have a decimal in the conversion from rating > skill, it is dropped completely. So 3.8 would = 3.

Okay I get it now. Sort of.

<casts a worried look at his Scholar status>

STill in the works, haven't forgotten about it. I'm trying to strike a balance between information and readability. I want everyone to be able to glean something from it, but to dumb it down so the people who don't care about the specifics will learn from it will remove a lot of information. I'm probably going to end up just having a TLDR section for each topic for those who just want the hard and fast rules, rather than the answer to "Why?"

That's exactly right. If they used the same formulas at 70 as they did at 60, we'd all be at max crit/hit/etc in greens, so there wouldn't be much point in trying to get better gear. By scaling rating with level, your gear becomes less effective as you level and forces you to get better stuff just to maintain your current level of effectiveness.