When I'm solo-grinding mobs with my mutilate build, I don't put on my standard Deadly Poisons, as it will interrupt the Gouge effect, which is necessary for my energy regeneration and positioning; therefore, I'm left with two options:

1) Instant Poison - High DPS, but no poison debuff on the target means that you lose the 50% mutilate bonus.
2) Wound Poison - About half the DPS as Instant Poison, and I consider the heal mitigation negligible when solo-ing as I'll be stunning/kicking any casts. However, the poison debuff means that my mutilate dps is increased.

Has anyone done the theorycrafting on this one? Which one drops the mob faster? What poison/poison combo do you other mutilaters use?

Am I missing something? Crippling would give the bonus damage to Mutilate wouldn't it, while both being useful in solo play, and not breaking gouges.

Crippling/Wounding.

Crip/Wounding for solo or battlegrounds.

Crip/Mind Numbing for arenas (warrior uses MS which pushes wounding off the target).

(Windfury/Instant/Wounding)/Deadly in raids.

You can use the rogue dps spreadsheet at rogue.bleedo.net to calculate your character's DPS and then do things like toggle off 'target poisoned' to see how much that lowers your DPS, and switch from wounding to instant to see how much it increases your DPS. For me there's really no contest. Not having a poisoned target is far and away a much larger loss than more instant poison procs.

Sorry, sorry, I should have specified. I mean for grinding on PVE mobs. For PVP, I'll use Crip/Wounding every time.

mh instant
oh wound

its kind of 1.5 instant poison with a debuff on the mob and you still have full CC on the mob cause no dots up. why do i have the feeling i read that exact same question on another board 5 minutes ago *think*

edit: no dejavu... reality... http://forums.roguespot.com/viewtopic.php?t=5154

It's been a couple months since I've actually played around with these options, so I might be behind the times, but IIRC isn't dual deadly the only way to go for solo grinding with mutilate (assuming 5/5 Vile Poisons)? That way you always have 5 stacks of dp up when you're ready for envenom. I realize the deadly ticks destroy a full gouge, but for grinding I didn't find gouge to be necessary. I guess I'm assuming that *grinding* implies you are trying to kill mobs asap, and a little SS spam at the end of a mob's life is more time efficient than using a full duration gouge. I just don't recall grinding mobs that weren't near death after a standard CS -> KS with mut's inbetween.

I suppose there are times when you need to go grind some elites that aren't really grindable (or even meant to be soloable) and I always just equiped crip/instant (or was it crip/crip? I forget) and gouge kited them.

I could probably count the number of times I've had to use Gouge while solo grinding on one hand in all the time I've played a Mutilate spec. So, for me, it's dual Deadly all the way since I'm currently running with 5/5 Improved Poisons and 5/5 Vile Poisons. There aren't many mobs that can survive CS - Mutilate - KS - Mutilate - (Mutilate) - Envenom/Evis, and I've basically never found myself in the position of having to use Gouge. If worst comes to worst and you get an add or something, Blind works better anyway. I'm probably going to move the 3 talent points out of Imp Gouge, at least until they fix the Sweeping Strikes/Cleaves.

Dual Deadly most of the time. Get SCT, watch for the poison tick, and *then* Gouge. It's not particularly hard.

Wean yourself off the need for Gouge as energy regen. I find the time lost outweighs the incoming damage saved. You're sitting there, waiting, not doing melee damage. If you just use Gouge as a "KS missed and I want to Mutilate again" tool, among other benefits you're saving yourself 3 talent points.

Dual Deadly, Envenom instead of Evisc.

OH crippling, or OH crippling/MH wound if I'm not feeling too particularly lazy.

Use a lower rank of DP. Envenom damage doesn't depend on the rank of DP you use, just need a 5-stack. When grinding, mobs die so fast that the lost DPS from downranking will hardly be noticeable.

Crippling mainhand, and Deadly offhand for me. I typically brute force two mob pulls, so being able to Gouge the second mob after killing the first without having it broken by a chance application of MH Deadly is nice. Beyond that situation I rarely find a need to Gouge mid-fight on non-elite mobs. Crippling is also really nice to have for times when you need to step back and bandage, wait for the CD on KS, or just regen some energy. The extra damage that you may potentially get from dual damage poisons isn't really all that beneficial unless you're struggling to kill mobs beyond the 8-10 seconds of CS->KS.

Depends on the target. When I farmed Ogres and the likes I used dual DP and Envenom. When mobs got harder, I resorted to more traditional methods, using WP and depending on the target WP/CP/MP/IP as secondary one.

I second this, I was running out of poisons after 15 minutes quite often enough when I was farming reputation/gold with my mutilate/poison build.

For solo pve, either dual crippling or dual deadly - i like the added dps from deadly. I found wound poison to run out very quickly while farming.

The reason you want dual Deadly is to ensure you have a 5-stack when it comes time to Envenom. Really sucks when you have 5 CPs but only 2-3 stacks of DP on the mob, and with dual Deadly that's much less likely to happen.

I used to use DP IV when grinding to save a bit of cash, though DP III is the lowest rank that uses Crystal Vials and may be a good option too.

I grinded out consortium exalted using deadly/crip.

CS (with autoloot pickpocket macro)>Mut>cripple kite till energy is 70ish>KS>Mut>Mut (if necessary). On melee types, you will take close to 0 damage.

Instant MH and Deadly OH are your best bets for DPS. Though I have found the Mulilate spec inferior to Combat Daggers overall.

For solo play I can't think of any reason not to use dual deadly and envenom.

Did you read the thread (topic even), or just assume we're talking about all scenarios? If you're saying this for solo farming, you'd better back it up somehow to counter general consensus and the vastly opposite experiences I've had.

Even though we're veering off topic here, I guess it's worth mentioning that I found combat specs to be superior for grinding as well. Mutilate reigns supreme for the solo target stunlock burn down, but combat specs just do so well vs. 2-4 targets at once. It's nice to get in a rythm of burning cooldowns/trinkets on multiple targets every time BF is up. Just my own experience.