Okay so a lot of the items in TBC are very different from the old style ones that I'm used to seeing playing a rogue. I'm not very clued up about the mathematics behind my class tbh and was wondering what would be the best for me with regards to getting the most dps out of my char. I play a sword rogue with assasination/combat talents. The gear that has been dropping for me and from quests is very heavy in AP vs agi. My crit % has gone really low now, I think its about 18/19% when it used to be about 10% above that but my AP on the other hand has sky rocketed. Am I best to specialise in AP over agi gear or try and retain a good mix? Any help would be appreciated and soz if this is a bit of a noob post!

Aside from some formal things you could work on (tbh/soz), remember that you lose crit rate when you level due to your weapon skill not being maxed out. Well, more accurately, your character sheet at the moment you level is calculating your crit rate against mobs that are a level higher than it was before you leveled.

Did you read over the rogue mechanics thread or look at the rogue DPS spreadsheet?

sorry apate, thats flat out wrong. leveling up reduces crit because of changing the relation of crit-rating to crit % and agi needed for crit %. and the weaponskill has little to do with your crit-rate. unless you fight mobs above your level and you have more weaponskill from items then your max skill allows at your current level turning it into something like +crit (which is nowhere documented by blizzard and only empirical to my knowledge)

Spot on post, but I would disagree with this statement. As it stands now at 70 crit (and hit as well) seem to be absolute premiums on rogue gear. There's very little in the way of crit, especially when we need 22 crit rating to get 1% crit and up around 40 agi for 1% crit. The gear just doesn't appear to be there. It's almost as if blizzard is nudging us into combat builds. At least it's giving that impression.

I wouldnt mind it so much if they were laying on the AP really thick, but I'm typically seeing most rogues at 70 with just around 1300-1500 ap and 20% crit. Wheras ferals are ending up with 2500-2800 ap. Now that would be worth having <20% crit for on a rogue imo. ;)

Maybe there are some super high crit valued rings/belts/bracers that we just haven't seen yet. But they would have to nearly be fully itemized for only crit to get the % back up to pre 2.0 levels I would think.

Looks like blizzard is going for steady damage rather than burst for us in the expansion maybe?

I said nothing about the change in crit rating and agi:crit ratio changing as you level. I was simply noting that people often neglect the fact that your crit% tooltip is based on an even-level target, assumed to have defense*5, and when you level your weapon skill will be lower relative to that. It's a fact that is often overlooked - for the remainder, the OP should refer to the other posts on these forums that discuss mechanics. This tooltip display is the cause of bug report after bug report, so I thought it was worth noting. I apologize for being so "flat out wrong;" was the tooltip changed to reflect your current target with 2.0 or something?

AFAIK the tooltip wasn't changed Apate. I can literally watch my crit % on the tooltip rise a good 1% or so during the process of skilling up my weapons for the reasons you stated (with no change in gear). You were not flat out wrong.

What is tough is for combat-mutilate builds (41/20) who need both all the crit and AP they can get. It's very frustrating.

Also keep in mind that people with 30% crit had an awful lot of raiding under their belts. Right now, 70s are around the gear levels that they were when they hit 60 (in relative terms). And I didn't know many fresh 60 rogues with higher than 18-20% crit. After a bit, they'll be at a higher gear level, like after you ran UBRS/DM/Scholo/etc. Those rogues typically got up to about 22-24%. The insane 25-30+% crit percentages were only reached by rogues with a lot of time invested in raiding.

Crit is a percentage stat, so it's valid to compare your crit upon reaching 70 to the crit you had upon reaching 60.

People can flip out all they want when their crit dips down to 23%, but can you imagine how happy you would have been at 55 if you have 23% crit unbuffed?

People flip out because they're seeing their characters digress on a key stat instead of progressing. No matter how you spin it, it's still disappointing.

Not that I disagree with you, but I can also understand why people are "flipping out".

Oh, I definitely agree that it's disappointing (well..not dissappointing, because that sounds like it was unexpected, but certainly not a positive). But, if it's any consolation, non-raiders like myself are seeing their crit inch slowly up. Started TBC with about 20.5, and now up to 22.5.

It's just a symptom of the fact that their gear-level massively out-classed their character-level.

I came into BC with 32% crit. I just dropped below 22% with massive upgrades :/ However, my AP is up--but I'm specced 41/20

I suggest entering your current gear or equal into the dps sheet and then try to increase 10 AP, 10 crit, 10 hit, 10 Agi and so on and watch how much your dps increase.

I know for me 10 AP = 7 Crit = 6 hit = 5 agi roughly in gear choices when trying to figure out my dps. Im running a 11/21/29 instance build atm and will be swapping to a 16/45/0 build when we get more serious about the raiding. Im using the blacksmith mace MH.

I definitly look more for agility on gear and gems since it give me dodge beside dps equal to twice the amount of ap. The problem is when you need to figure out what dodge and stamina is worth. :)

AP has vastly inflated in value due to the fact crit is becoming more and more expensive in the ibudget. ~20% crit is fine and just continue to stack AP since it's so much more available. When we're all 70, we'll have a solid idea on what is a reasonably balanced AP/Crit/Hit equilibrium.

I'll counter that with compare your T2 equipped rogue to your T5.

There's ~4% less crit (sockets reclaim some of that but nowhere near all).
Crit is not going to see the same heights in TBC as it did in 1.x

It's hard to see +crit dropping like a stone and it seems to me this fact makes Mutilate and SF based builds LESS desirable as level 70 approaches - combat becomes preferable.........combat fists in my view and we may even see more builds mixing heavy sub with combat to take full advantage of high AP at the same time as securing duel weild - 0/20/41 might just be a viable build. Running the numbers on Pf's spreadsheet with top end gear revealed the following:

Combat daggers clocked in at 798 DPS unbuffed (15/41/5)
Mutilate clocked 763 without Vile poisons and 780 with (41/20)
Combat fists clocked 772 DPS (18/43/0)

To me there isn't enough of a gain from combat daggers and mutilate to warrant taking them over a build that has zero positional requirements AND that adds toe to toe survivability. I seriously think combat is going to be the way and the light at 70 in TBC though combat daggers might be viable for 25 man raids - Mutilate really does lose its edge given (a) lower crit rates (b) poison requirement (c) positional requirement. I hasten to add that positional requirements don't really bother me - or haven't to date (i've pretty much always been daggers) - but in 5 mans and PvP against foes with tons more HPs it's inevitable that toe to toeing will be required. Combat also add survivability against those nasty AOE cleaves............now to look for a decent fist weap ;P

Bad comparison. If you're doing 50 base melee dps and gain 28 AP, you're now doing 52 base melee dps. If you say 20% crit that means 60 -> 62.4. 4% improvement. Now, if you're doing 200 base melee dps, it's 200 -> 202 and 240 -> 242.4, only 1% improvement. In the first case, 1% crit gains you .5 DPS (.833%), in the second 2 DPS (again, .833%). As 1% crit becomes more costly, 1% crit becomes more valuable over AP. Ratings may skew things in AP's favor, but it's certainly not vastly. You still need a balance of both for best DPS. The higher your base DPS is, the better crit is compared to AP.

As far as itemization goes, TBC is insanely good for rogues. Most pre-TBC rogue gear had strength. TBC rogue gear doesn't -- all AP instead. It's as if rogues suddenly got 2 AP per str. I've only been 70 for three days, and already I'm down to only two pieces with strength on them, and those will be going away very shortly once I replace their enchants.

There was a reason why things like Cape of the Black Baron and Bracers of the Eclipse were used by raiding rogues way past epic drops being available in those slots -- leather with strength on it is, and fundamentally always has been, feral gear. TBC just drops rogue leather, while retail was rather stingy with it.

Crit inflation from your AP base isn't fast enough to compensate for the the rising icost when you're dealing with practical numbers. "Vastly" may have been an exaggeration, but it certainly is a significant amount. You also need to factor in +hit if you want to achieve this optimum balance.

My crit is way down and AP hasn't budged. This is simply because I was in almost entirely T3 gear, which isn't replaceable for me yet (level 65 at the moment).

I don't see the big deal, really. If I want to keep my original stats, I can stay a 60 twink. But a 70 in blues would be stronger. Although my scaling stats are depleting (due simply to being overinflated in the first place), I'm getting access to new upgrades, new abilities, more talent points, a lot more HP. I'm still working towards becoming stronger than I was before.

What's really changing is my advantage relative to people who did not have the raid gear I had. When I first hit Outlands, I was blowing things away and soloing group quests. I got to sail almost 6 levels with this particular advantage and only now am I having to treat the quests like everyone else. I think I got good use out of the gear I "worked" for, and I get to do it again with all new content. Farming Naxx every week trying to replace one single item (since I had everything else) was getting old, to put it mildly.

I have no idea if crit will go back to what it once was. But in pve, this will make crit a very valuable stat for its item budget (I have not heard of npcs gaining resilience). The higher the differential between crit and AP, the more valuable the starved stat becomes. The best way to understand this is to imagine extreme examples: If you had a weapon that hit for 1 and no AP, 1% crit would only add one damage over 100 swings. If you had enough ap to hit for 1000, one point of crit would add 1000 damage over 100 swings. If you have to choose between an item with crit and an item with more AP, clearly it depends on what stats you have already. Don't forget that +hit plays a role here too and works very similiarly in terms of scaling (with some complications due to combaty potency, poison procs, that it stops benefitting specials, and so on).

Real world, the difference isn't that extreme of course, but the principle remains. If you're sketchy on the math part of it, there are good DPS calculators around that can help quantify the value of these stats for you at any given time. Look for Pf's excel spreadsheet. This is the best maintained public calculator that I'm aware of.

Has nothing to do with your DPS though.
The higher your AP, the better crit gets.
The higher your Crit, the better AP gets.

e.g. Consider your doing 300dps. With a 80% crit chance. For the sake of argument that would be 1.8*300=540 effective DPS.

Adding 1% crit would make that 543 effective DPS or an increase of 3 DPS.
Adding 28 AP would make that 540 +2*1.8 = 543.6 DPS or an increase of 3.6 DPS.

DPS is roughly speaking AP * Crit.
Assuming you have a fixed budget to spend on your stats (i.e. AP + Crit = fixed number), this equation is maximised when AP = fixedNumber/2 and Crit=fixedNumber/2.

I realize that i did many shortcuts to illustrate my point (e.g. crit does amplifiy weapon damage, AP does not), but generally that is the idea behind "balancing stats".

Did it not cross your mind that Maestroquark might have meant 'your DPS as a final figure representing the sum toto of all effects' rather than the more obtuse 'your DPS as meaning the value of your non-crit average damage' you've just used?

You're just arguing the same point, but you seem to dislike his usage of the term dps.

But if he meant that, he would be even more wrong.