Jester wrote:
"Swords allows for the OH swing to proc an MH attack. It allows for the MH to proc a MH attack. Does that seem logical, at all? From a non-biased position, no person can logically say that having a weaker weapon do as much dmg as the stronger weapon is "working as intended". "

Thanks for the insult, by the way. It was incredibly necessary and mature.

I fail to see why you don't get it, but you bet we can say it's working as intended. The weaker attack is not doing the damage. The extra mainhand attack is doing the additional damage. That's the way the mechanic was built and it's part of the game. It's no different than any other set of mechanics that fail to pass the *logic test* of the real world but make sense in WoW. Incidentally, I'm guessing the mace stun effect procs from the offhand too, which makes the mace OH benefit equally powerful no matter what hand it procs from.

What I find ironic about your tirade, is you actually prove the point. Too many encounters don't allow for easy backstab spamming. So maybe Blizzard is sending a message that combat daggers is not the preferred raid spec anymore. How many bosses are in partial or constant movement or rotation or what not. Fact is we still all endeavor to attack from behind, but we don't have to when we swing swords.

This notion that somehow Blizzard in its grand vision intended for the specs to be equal, accidentally overpowered sword spec by a shocking few percentage points in dps, and needs to fix this lest the WoW universe collapse into burning rubble is absurd. It could very well be intended. And even if it isn't, it's very player friendly to have the rogues wielding swords.

What to make of all the daggers that might drop then? Well, hmmm, they might not be the greatest raid items. Like the resilience items in SSC. Or the one that helps you avoid silence effects. Or the vast majority of two handers quite honestly. Lots of raid loot drops that isn't all that helpful for raids. And lots of people sit around waiting for a relatively small number of drops.

Many people made my point through persuasive arguments of their own after your insult, but I'll add one more thing. A build of 15/41/5 sounds pretty offspec to me. Most builds involve two talent trees, not dumping 5 points in the third one. I realize opportunity is an important backstab talent, perhaps what you really need is to get that put into assassination somewhere to avoid forcing 5 pts in a 3rd tree when what you really need is 3 pts in assassination and 2 pts to put elsewhere in said tree? I don't really know.

But I do know amidst my dribble that there is absolutely nothing sacrosanct about multiple combat buiilds having mathematically identical dps. I also know there is equaly nothing sacrsanct about rogues being associated with daggers. Once upon a time priests were associated primarily with healing in raids. Paladins would've been laughed at for suggesting they could tank. Ditto druids. The game changes. Maybe you need to adapt.

Good post, Grunge.

IMO the rogue talent tree and the "additions" to pre-TBC talents and minor changes, are out-dated and talents seriously needs a make-over, aswell as mechanisms for rogues.

If you look at Backstab vs. Sinister Strike, BS has - with Imp BS - 1.35 dmg per energy per second, while SS has 1.4 dpe/s. As such, Imp BS and SS are (almost) balanced, in terms of dpe/s; BS could use a little tweak though. Anyways...

The problems arise when applied to combat. If we look at a 20/41 spec for both swords and daggers (using merciless weapons - identical gear), daggers fall aprx 7% dps behind swords, simply because 3s/5s/5r for daggers is a aprx 26 second longer rotation than 3s/5r for swords.

IMO the main issue is the 60 energy for BS vs. the 40 energy for SS. While both attacks are balanced in terms of dpe/s, the build-up of CP is prolonged by 50% by BS, which directly translates to a loss of finishing move damage in rotation over time. One way of adressing this, could be to change dagger specialization to 10% increased damage from eviscerate / rupture per talent point, rather than 1% critical strike. Another way could be to change Imp BS from adding critical damage to reducing energy required (5 less energy per talent points).

How's this?
ShadowPanther.net - World of Warcraft Rogue Info - Charts, Articles, Strategies & more!

This daggers vs. swords debate has moved well past the realm of theorycraft and into the land of name-calling and speculation as to Blizzard's intent. As such, I agree with the several posters who have said that we should put this discussion to rest.

These are the inarguable facts: sword spec is currently superior to other weapon specs, except that fist/sword hybrid is roughly equivalent. Even after the 2.3 changes, daggers will be roughly 2-3% behind sword builds.

Obviously none of us will ever convince anyone else of the validity of claims regarding whether this situation is balanced or not, so it's simply not a productive discussion. Let's drop it.

Not a bad thing imo. I'd hate to be forced to spec combat daggers simply because it is better. It was always a boring spec and bad for everything except raiding.

To be clear: the argument was never that daggers should be better than swords. The argument was that daggers should, at least, be a reasonable alternative to swords, which they're really not at the moment. The crux of the disagreement is how to go about resolving this - how close they should actually be, and what aspects of the class should be buffed/nerfed to get there.

As a final point before I drop the topic of discussion: I personally would be somewhat opposed to dropping the energy cost of Backstab, as, while it would certainly buff the spec, it would also diminish the differences between sword spec and dagger spec; in my opinion, part of the difference between them, and the appeal of one versus the other, is that they *do* maintain rather different cycles and energy management capabilities. If you play swords for a while and want a change of pace, you can play daggers for a different experience, and vice versa. I would worry that this distinction would be lost if the energy differential between them were reduced. Again: this is not to say that daggers don't need a buff relative to swords; they do. But I don't think adjusting the energy cost would be my preferred solution.

Aldriana assures me that this thread has use left in it still, and that the positive posters far outweigh the idiots. I'm going to open it back up and see how it goes.

But let this post also serve as a warning - I'm in a banning mood.

Aldriana, forgive me if this has been brought up before.

One of my supreme wish lists for this sheet is a simple reorganization of the "recommended" gear. I'd love for it to place the upgrades in sorted, delta-AEP format. In other words I want a sorted list of my best upgrades and the value of upgrade they are.

My ultimate use is a way to prioritize my bidding for items based on their increase in worth to the slot based relative to other items.

I think this would be quite easy to implement, and I'd be willing to make the sheet at least for me to use, if others think it'd be helpful, then it could be a useful feature I think.

Actually, I have a technical question about the way cycles are modeled on this spreadsheet. It came up on the dps spreadsheet forum, I believe I understood this correctly, that the dps sheet does not count abilities such as Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush and possibly certain trinket use in its determination of the appropriate combat cycles. I was wondering if this sheet takes those into account in terms of average energy gains and the like, or whether those are ignored on this one as well.

I don't see a problem with either modeling, but knowing which model is being used can help tell me if the cycle is under or overestimated under various circumstances. Certainly ignoring them gives a good base value to work with, yet including them gives a nice expected average cycle.

You should check this page, Post #1129. To sum it up, these buffs are not calculated in your cycle because it doesn't really make sense to do so -- you want to have the best possible cycle that works for most of the fight, and adjust it while these buffs are up, especially AR.

So, you're advocating a list of "largest available upgrades from selected instances"? It certainly seems possible, although I'd have to think a bit about the right way to do it and where to put the resulting values - the Talents_Equipment page is already pretty crowded, and the Advanced Settings page is about to have a lot of stuff added to it as well. I kind of hate to give it it's own page, but... that might turn out to be best.

On that note, I'd like to open up a little discussion: What information not currently displayed (other than stat summaries and next-stat information, which are already planned) would you like to see displayed? I will compile a list of people's ideas, and, from that, we can work out the best way to organize everything.

For that matter, if you have ideas about features in general, let me know and, again, I will see what I can do.

To be honest, however, I'm pretty busy right now, between work, various other engagements, and some other side projects I'm working on, so it may be a few weeks until I'm able to work on the spreadsheet again in earnest. I don't have any real expectation of getting another revision out before Thanksgiving. If, however, there are those among you that feel you have a pretty good grasp of the spreadsheet and Excel/OO, I would welcome any assistance you may feel like providing. If you're interested, send me a PM and we'll work out the details.

On another note, in order to try to prevent this thread from getting mired down again, I would like to compile links to some of the most interesting/important/worth reading/worth referencing/whatever posts from the thread, so in addition to the FAQ section on the front page I can add a "recommended reading" section, to try to cut down on the number of repetitive questions. So if there are posts you feel should be so linked, and/or other questions you'd like to see addressed in the FAQ, PM me with your suggestions and I'll update the first post accordingly.

Thanks for the help getting the spreadsheet working. Now, I've got a question about the results it generated. It suggested that I use 5s5r3s. (Note: I've got the 2-piece t4 bonus.)

That circuit seems off to me. For one, shouldn't I be opening with a much smaller combo point SnD (so that it's up immediately), and for that matter, isn't generating 5 points for any finishing move unreasonable as a Combat Dagger build? Or is the expectation that I Sinister Strike as often as I need to pull up the CP's and only BS when I have available energy? (I guess part of that question is, is the spreadsheet adjusting for Dagger over Swords?)

My Armory is here: The World of Warcraft Armory

Also, I have a more general question. What do you all do during things like Maulger's Whirlwind and Gruel's Ground Shake, when it seems like you'll lose a lot of DPS having to back away from the target? Do you restart the circuit after that? Or do you try to shiv them up to 5 stacks of poison and rupture them before you have to back off to try to mitigate the loss?

From my raiding time as daggers I usually went 1s/3s/5s and then went into the cycle. About fights were you get interrupted often that is one major flaw of daggers that swords or any of the SS based builds don't really have. You might want to try the 1s/3r it is much shorter and I recall positive feedback about it earlier in the thread.

That is awesome!! =D
thank you very much =)

With 2pc t4 and the proper talents, a 1s/4r is almost always attainable with DST. Our dagger rogue seems to not have trouble running that cycle almost all the time, and if need be, does a 1s/3r mixed in till he gets good potency procs.

Ok, then taking this further, what about trinkets (especially Abacus)? Is this modeled as static haste as I've seen some sheets do, or is this "on use" effects also excluded? Just trying to get a sense of how minimum a cycle this is actually modeling and how often I should be expecting it to adjust up.

hi, this site is awesome. some of you guys are brilliant and are making me feel pretty dumb. im sorry for making such a long post, please feel free to ignore it.

i want to ask a question about dagger vs sword to some people who can explain it correctly to me. i just started playing again after along time and was really surprised to hear that swords outdps daggers. but i dont know if thats for overall after long raids, or for minute long tests, or just for 15 seconds of AR. what i want to know is if the balance shifts during adrenaline rush, because i had been planning on an 8/31/22 AR/prep spec with daggers for arena. i am mainly worried about dmg during AR, because i plan to have 30 seconds of it every fight.

this is the way im guessing things work. i really dont know for sure if this is right but this is how i see it.

what i think is that the different combo point generation rates between SS and BS mean that a larger percent of sword spec's dmg comes from finishing moves than with daggers, because it has so many more to spend. so if theyre relatively close in dmg, i hear its about 5-6% more with swords, than dagger is probably getting a larger percent of its total dmg from energy spent on BS than sword is getting from energy spent on SS. and if finishing moves are a somewhat smaller portion of the dmg pie than white dmg and SS/BS, then maybe daggers gets a larger % in dmg increase during adrenaline rush than swords do.

what i mean is this, with made up numbers. pretend on sword spec finishing moves account for 20% (putting extra dmg from SnD in this category and not in white), white accounts for 40%, and SS account for 40%. with daggers, white accounts for 38%, finishing moves account for 14%, BS accounts for 48%. im guessing daggers would get less from white dmg because sword spec will push white dmg a bit higher. and im saying sword spec gets more dmg from finishing moves because of much higher CP generation.

if you doubled dmg from finishing moves and BS/SS due to AR, daggers compared to swords do slightly more dmg relative to what they did before, even though sword would probably still be higher overall. and i also want to assume that there are diminishing returns on dmg caused by finishing moves during adrenaline rush. because you move from the most effective use of CPs to a less effective use. and during adrenaline rush you get farther into the diminishing returns than normal because you have so many more CPs. so that would affect sword spec's total dmg more sharply than daggers.

does this seem right or wrong? and also, since i think that when people say swords are better theyre talking about against mobs with no resilience. so would that mean that even if BS was better than sword during AR, this wouldnt be true anymore after resilience and i should just give up on it?

This thread is (no longer) about sword vs dagger. :P I think enough of us are wary of opening that little can of nasty again.

Instead let us brainstorm about how we can improve Aldriana's spreadsheet even more. :-)

I don't think there's a fundamental problem with examining the differences between swords and daggers in terms of how they perform in practice; I think where we got into trouble before is when we started speculating about how to fix it, and, in particular, when people started posting without reading the other responses.

With regards to the specific question at hand:

Daggers do get more of their damage from backstab than swords do from Sinister Strike; however, AR also increases your combo point generation so also gives finisher damage; as such, I'm not aware of any major selective pressure favoring swords or daggers.

Additionally, from a PvE perspective 8/31/22 would be weak, because it's lacking Relentless Strikes, the single best talent point any rogue can spend. From a PvE perspective, you'd far rather have Relentless Strikes than AR and should thus spec something more along the lines of 11/28/22.

Moreover, typically Hemo builds are swords, not daggers; hence, doing that build with daggers would be unusual to say the least.

With regards to PvP viability: can't help you. This sheet is designed solely for sustained PvE situations. If you want help with your PvP spec, I'd recommend heading over to the PvP forum.

However, before doing so, I would also clean up my spelling and capitalization, as the moderators tend to get cranky if you don't.

I'm curious on peoples thoughts on [Shapeshifter's Signet] now that it grants 20 Expertise rating in 2.3 instead of the feral/dagger skill. It still seems a bit underwhelming to me at first glance with the lack of a flat +crit/AP bonuses but I'm not as well versed in the math as many others are in these neck of the woods. My gut tells me to stick with my Garona's Signet and 1k Marks.

And also a big thanks to Ald and the community for the continued work in these forums and spreadsheet. I lurk these forums often and there's a lot of wisdom here that I pass on to fellow rogues in my guild.

I for one agree that a list of potential updates and their relative value would be especially useful, in particular because you'd be able to set it to the zones you're in. For example, my guild has Vashj and Kael left to kill in the T5 Instances and I'd like to know what would be the best way to spend my DKP in those zones.

Well it definitely is a significant boost to the power of the ring (assuming you have Weapon Expertise), but I do not think it compares to any of the raiding rings. Here's why:

With the new stats, it should grant 20 Expertise Rating = 5 Expertise = -0.25%*5 to be dodged = -1.25% to be dodged. Just to give you a better grasp of the comparison (for simplicity's sake while sacrificing a bit of accuracy), since -1% dodge ~ +1% Hit, you're basically getting a ring with 25 Agility and 20 Hit Rating, which isn't really all that great.