I'm in a guild on a newer server, and the topic of PvE specs recently came up in guildchat, as we're looking to progress as far as we can pre-expansion. Having formerly played a rogue, I explained that generally, as gear improves combat daggers outpaces seal fate by a large amount to some of the newer rogues in the guild. However, they asked me for the math for this, as most of them prefer seal fate for pvp reasons.

I had a couple questions I was hoping some of the rogue experts on here could answer:

1) At what gear level does combat dagger begin to outdamage seal fate by a noticable amount?

2) At any point is seal fate a preferable raiding spec?

3) Where can I find the math to back up the superiority of combat daggers, if it is indeed superior?

I'm not looking to force spec on rogues, just trying to help them understand how to optimize their own dps in raids. Also, if you have the math for SF vs. Combat SS builds, that would be appreciated as well.

Thanks.

When you say Seal Fate, it honestly depends your exact spec points and how you play it. If you're 31/8/13, but have 4/5 Imp. Poisons, 3/3 SnD, and keep SnD up all the time, you can probably stay within 15% of a Combat Daggers build, at least if you have currently achievable gear (especially with say 5/5 Death Dealer). But then again, 15% more damage is quite a bit.

As for when, I'd say when people start running around with a mid 50-dps main and off-hand, you really start to notice the benefit of Dual-Wield Spec, and other white damage boosts. However all of this is subject to change somewhat in 1.12 when the review happens.

In terms of Combat Swords, it's pretty much on the same damage level as Combat Daggers, given equal tier gear, though Combat Daggers edges it out a little bit. So thus, Combat Swords is still quite a bit better than SF daggers.

Seal Fate vs. Combat Daggers discussion, I remember this one...

The reason Seal Fate appears to almost be as good as combat daggers is because people don't know how to read damage meters. Seal fate can shorten the damage gap on combat daggers on trash mobs and then fall behind on boss fights. So people think, oh seal fate isn't that far behind combat daggers so it's still a viable spec. Wrong. Want to test this for yourself, next time you have a long boss fight reset the damage meter right before the pull /dmsyncclear then make sure to synch it after the fight, /dmsync Assuming that two dagger rogues stay alive (one from each spec) you will be able to see a noticable difference. Also, make sure they're not PvE stupid and know how to SnD properly (that is, all the time). And eviscerate = trash.