Since I get a lot of inquiries as to why my WWS parses show me using Dragonspine Trophy and Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality I thought I would use my first blog post to explain why.

A lot of people assume I do this because I am unlucky and have not gotten a Shard of Contempt. This is not the case as I have a Shard, but opt to use AToL instead. Some people tell me I would do more DPS if I used my SoC because the spreadsheet said so. You have to take the spreadsheet with a grain of salt. It is a useful tool, but you have to know the limitations of it.

As Aldriana, the author of the spreadsheet,  stated at Elitist Jerks (http://www.elitistjerks.com/659643-post2253.html) :

"The AToL model does not currently include any level of energy queuing. I have some ideas on how to do so (basically, keeping track of how much "slack" energy the various cycles have and estimating the number of extra SS you can squeeze in during uptime), but such a thing is beyond the scope of this spreadsheet."

Combine this with the fact that I am over the Expertise cap with SoC, and that is why I use AToL on certain fights. Any fight where I don't have to move much I tend to go with AToL as I can practice energy queueing with no danger of losing precious energy ticks while I move. Some fights where I use this are Teron Gorefiend, Brutallus, Kil'jaeden and Felmyst.

What exactly is energy queueing? Energy queueing is waiting until you have a considerably high mount of energy before executing your finishers. Since my cycle with this setup is 5s/5r the proc rate on AToL is 100%. What this means is that instead of doing a finisher with 25 Energy, and having 25 energy left, I might have 75 energy, and tick to 95 by the time I get my finisher off. Essentially I am trying to maximize my energy levels immediately after a finisher. This allows me to get the maximum possible amount of Sinister Strikes off under the effects of Exploit Weakness which means that the actual DPS value of AToL is actually higher than indicated on the spreadsheet, and because I'm 1 over the Expertise cap the value of SoC goes down slightly as well. Coupled with a bit of RNG luck, and you can push out some serious damage using this method.