Agility gems ever worth it?

[Arcand]

Because agility wastes itemization on crit, and it provide very little armor, it is not a good gemming option.

But the extra crit increases your DPS, causing the boss to die sooner and thus inflict less overall damage.

[Isetnefret]

But the extra crit increases your DPS, causing the boss to die sooner and thus inflict less overall damage.

This is where I incoherently ramble about str/stam gems having miniscule EH and large DPS boosts, whilst gluing googly eyes to the Godzilla figures that a new guy at work set up all around his office.

[Veilan]

Cue random inuendo-laden rambling about agility making your toon more flexible.

[theckhd]

Because agility wastes itemization on crit, and it provide very little armor, it is not a good gemming option.

It doesn't "waste" any itemization on crit. Breaking down 1 agility rating into threat, avoidance, and mitigation components the way you have doesn't make sense, because the point of agility doesn't have to "spend" any of it's itemization on armor. It just gives you armor, dodge, and crit at a certain rate. There's no reason to expect that because Agility gives you x% the threat of a STR gem that it will thus be x% less effective at other things.

Viycktor's analysis is much closer to being correct. But he didn't properly calculate the reduction in incoming damage.

I see that the question you raised in the first post is the one you asked in this thread, which I unfortunately never got back to. I apologize for that, I was on vacation that week. But I'm here now, so let's take a look at it. We can use my current armory as a source of stats.
26,666 armor unbuffed
798 Defense Rating
522 Dodge Rating
309 Parry Rating
152 Agility.

I'll get 230 agi from raid buffs (SoE totem, MotW). Raid-buffed my agility should be 420 after kings (382*1.1).
I'll also get 1807 armor from Improved Devotion aura, 230*1.1*2=506 armor from the agility buffs, and 152*0.1*2=30 armor from the 15 agility I get from the interaction of Kings and my base agiility. That leaves me with a total of 29,009 armor raid buffed.

Using avoid_dr.m, this gives me the following raid-buffed avoidance after diminishing returns:
Dodge: 20.1836%
Parry: 10.7402%
Miss: 4.7612%
Total: 35.6851%

Using avoid_dr.m again, I'll calculate the contribution from 522+10=532 dodge rating and 420 agility. This simulates the amount of dodge you get from a 10 dodge rating gem.
Dodge % goes up to 20.3208, an increase of 0.1354%.

After kings, 10 agility becomes 11 agility, so I'll calculate the same thing for 522 dodge rating and 431 agility:
Dodge % goes up to 20.2976, an increase of 0.1140%.
We also gain 22.44 armor. Normally that would be rounded, but we're going to preserve the decimals so that if someone wants to scale this up the results will still be correct.
That 11 agility also gives us crit, at the rate of 1% crit for 52.0833 agility, for a total of 0.2112% crit (equivalent to 9.6954 points of crit rating).

So the relevant conversions we want are:
10 Dodge Rating = 0.1354% Dodge
10 Agility = 0.1140% Dodge, 22.44 Armor, and 0.2112% crit

To calculate incoming damage, first we have to add in sources that aren't subject to DR, which is 10% dodge, 10% parry, and 5% miss. Thus we end up with our overall base avoidance values:
Dodge: 30.1836%
Parry: 20.7402%
Miss: 9.7612%
Total: 60.6851%


Incoming damage gets reduced as follows:

If the bosses dodge-able attacks do X damage per second, then before either gem is added, you're taking X*(1-0.606851) damage per second (due to the attacks you don't avoid). Adding the dodge gem reduces this to X*(1-0.606851 - 0.001354). So by adding the dodge gem you've reduced your incoming damage by a multiplicative factor of (1-0.0.606851 - 0.001354) / (1-0.0.606851), or 0.996512. In other words, after adding the gem, you're taking 99.6512% the damage you were taking before you added the gem.

So you've added 0.1354% avoidance, but you've actually reduced incoming damage by 0.3488%, not 0.1354%.

Repeating that calculation for the agility gem, you get 99.7101%, or 0.2899% reduced incoming damage due to dodging. However, that incoming damage is now also mitigated by the armor you've added. Using the armor formula

Code: Select all

mitigation_%=(Armor/(Armor+15232.5)

, we have a base mitigation at 29,009 of:
29009/(29009+15232.5)=65.5697%
Bumping this up by 22.44 armor gives us:
29031.44/(29031.44+15232.5)=65.5871%

So before we equipped the gem, we were taking:
X*(1-0.606851)*(1-0.655697) = X*13.5363%

After equipping the gem, we're now taking
X*(1-0.606851-0.001126)*(1-0.647844)=X*13.4902%

For a net reduction of 13.4882/13.5363=99.6595%, or 0.3405%

So in terms of incoming damage, the Agility gem is 97.6% as good as the pure dodge gem, and also gives you critical strike rating.

So, we can stop making snarky comments about how gemming agility is so much worse than dodge, because according to the way you're phrasing it, agility is clearly superior to Dodge in terms of "itemization cost". Every point of agility is equivalent to 0.976 points of dodge rating and 0.96954 points of crit rating. So you're getting almost double the bang for your buck, split nearly evenly between avoidance and threat.

I've written all of this math up in a MATLAB script in case anyone wants to play with it: calc_dodge_v_agil.m. I've also used it to do a little testing of how all of this scales.

The effectiveness value does change with dodge rating, but not much. As dodge rating increases, agility increases in effectiveness up to a maximum of 97.98% at around 1428 dodge rating, and then decreases again.



Similarly, it changes with buffed armor, but in this case it only gets worse as armor improves:



And now that I look back at this monstrosity, it really belongs in Advanced Training. Oh well.

[Threatco]

Haha, perhaps it does belong in advance.

I didn't mean to sound snarky, i just wanted to phrase my arguments as best I could until i got a clearer explanation like yours.

Now I agree that gemming agility is a good idea.

My general guess had been close in the sense that there is ever so little more survivability from dodge. I misjudged how little the difference, and how big the crit bonus was.

Again thanks for clarifying.

[theckhd]

I didn't mean to sound snarky, i just wanted to phrase my arguments as best I could until i got a clearer explanation like yours.

Actually, I don't think anyone in this thread has sounded terribly snarky. I share Arcand's distaste for "the stuff of heroic fantasy" though, as he termed it.

Mostly because about half the time, we find out a month down the line that what we thought was suboptimal is actually better overall. Like Agility, for example.
Or for that matter, hit and expertise. Remember when it was "common knowledge" that hit and expertise were crap threat stats for us, and that expertise was only worth a miniscule amount of avoidance?

Again thanks for clarifying.

No problem, it's what I do. "Theck, Dispeller of Myth and Conjecture."

[Grehn|Skipjack]

No problem, it's what I do. "Theck, Dispeller of Myth and Conjecture."

Theck, Bringer of Numbers and Pounding Headaches

[fuzzygeek]

No problem, it's what I do. "Theck, Dispeller of Myth and Conjecture."

Theck, Bringer of Numbers and Pounding Headaches

also pretty graphs.

[Veilan]

Actually, I don't think anyone in this thread has sounded terribly snarky.

I always sound snarky when I avail myself of englishes service, or so I've been told by those with a lesser command of it.

On the topic, I don't buy the heated controversy thesis. I've always used what I happened to learn first as gem recipe and never shed much thought or tears about it. It's Blizzard, both itemisations will work, and work well, it's not like there are many remnants of actual choice left in game. It works, which is at the same time comfortingly easy, and annoyingly dull.

I wanna go roll a titansorc now...

[æ]

Because agility wastes itemization on crit, and it provide very little armor, it is not a good gemming option.

But the extra crit increases your DPS, causing the boss to die sooner and thus inflict less overall damage.

LOL

[theckhd]

Question: Does the armor gained from an Agility gem also get a 10% boost from Toughness? If so, that's a factor that we've overlooked in our analysis, and for the numbers I've used in my calculation above it makes Agility 99.1% as effective as dodge rating.

[Awyndel]

Kind of off topic here, but I just remembered I'm using an updated version of the armor vs stamina formula now wich takes toughness and kings/talents into account. I was just recalling how this whole agility gem discussion brought you to dig up that formula in the first place. Might help assess the value of armor ( on gear ) better, wich can obviously be used on this topic.

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f63/4152 ... amina.html

[McSloane]

While I agree that in an argument that asks "is agility/stam as good at dodge/stam?" agility edges it out, I've changed my red gem slots from agi/stam gems to parry/stam or straight stamina where the bonus was only 6 stamina. Why?
1) Because witht he Trimph badge libram (200 dodge rating, up almost always), and the amount of dodge on new gear dodge is sky-high;
2) My current on-use trinket (heart of iron) is 432 dodge rating; and
3) If I really love armor I will get the new triumph badge trinket

[theckhd]

While I agree that in an argument that asks "is agility/stam as good at dodge/stam?" agility edges it out, I've changed my red gem slots from agi/stam gems to parry/stam or straight stamina where the bonus was only 6 stamina. Why?
1) Because witht he Trimph badge libram (200 dodge rating, up almost always), and the amount of dodge on new gear dodge is sky-high;
2) My current on-use trinket (heart of iron) is 432 dodge rating; and
3) If I really love armor I will get the new triumph badge trinket

Unless you have a lot more parry dodge on gear than I do, dodge will still give you more avoidance point-for-point. The rule of thumb is that:

Code: Select all

(character_sheet_dodge_% - 10) / (character_sheet_parry_% - 10) = 1.88

If you plug your character sheet dodge and parry % into that formula and come up below 1.88, you should be gemming dodge (or agility) instead of parry.

<edit> corrected mistype. I have parry on the brain.

[theckhd]

Kind of off topic here, but I just remembered I'm using an updated version of the armor vs stamina formula now wich takes toughness and kings/talents into account. I was just recalling how this whole agility gem discussion brought you to dig up that formula in the first place. Might help assess the value of armor ( on gear ) better, wich can obviously be used on this topic.

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f63/4152 ... amina.html

So for paladins, the formula should be

Code: Select all

           12.54(K+A/1.1)                     
1 stamina: ------- points of armour
              H

So at my gear level, estimating my buffed HP at 45k since I can't remember what it is:
12.54*(16635+29009/1.1)/45000 = 11.9846, or roughly 1 stam = 12 armor.

In any event, that doesn't change the code I wrote, since it didn't use that formula at all. The factor of 1.1 does though (again, makes Agility increase from 97% to 99% as good at reducing incoming damage).