I have been using ShadowPanther.net to gear my rogue, as I am sure many have.

Now that my rogue is fairly well geared and before I start rolling against guild mates in Karazhan I want to make sure I understand what is going on a little better.

So I decided to go Sword spec and I understand it is arguably sub-par damage in end-game raiding compared to daggers.

But that's not what I am posting.

I came across this little gem in the legend of the Shadowpanthers.net sheet...

This leads one to believe that faster weapons are ALWAYS better. Regardless of spec, weapon choice, etc...

I was under the impression from the hordes of information I have gathered on this site, and maybe I misinterpretted...

MH swords are ideally slow and OH swords are fast for Combat Potency specced rogues.

Can someone please direct me to where this is talked about in great detail so I can fully understand it? I did a quick search and nothing lately really delves into this. I am sure it's in the archives somewhere, and would appreciate a link to it.

Thanks in advance and great site!

Rogues have two primary sources of damage:

1. White damage from normal auto attacks
2. Yellow damage from special attacks

For white damage what you see is what you get, the dps listed on the weapon modified by the attack power, crit rate, weapon skill, and hit rate in your character sheet will work out to be your white dps for that weapon. In the case of white damage speed is irrelevent, the only thing that matters is the dps rating on the weapon.

Yellow damage works somewhat differently. Sinester strike and backstab generate damage based on your energy regeneration rate and the weapon damage of your main hand, not the speed and not the DPS. So for the bigest SS and BS numbers you will want to equip a weapon in your main hand that has really high min and max damage.

Poisons are also a factor, since poisons are based on a % of hits you will get more poison procs in the same amount of time with a weapon that hits more often i.e. faster speed.

What this all boils down to is, for the off hand, when DPS is equal faster is always better. For your main hand, when min and max damage are equal, faster is always better.

if you take a look at the other factors for AEP you will notice that offhand weapons generate AEP based on their DPS and main hand weapons generate AEP based on their average damage. take a look at the emeral ripper and the blade of the unrequited on the daggers sheet. for main hands the emerald ripper is on top but for off hands they are reversed with the blade of the unrequited coming out ahead. this is mainly because they have the same dps but different speeds and therefor different average damages.

He also uses average damage per swing for his AEP calculations, so the speed => AEP is account for the extra procs. If you notice, slower weapons still tend to rate higher than faster ones:

Imaginary Blade of Sharpness
150-200 damage (175 avg)
3.0 speed

57.75 AEP

Imaginary Quickblade of Sharpness

75-100 damage (87.5 avg)
1.5 speed

42.88 AEP

[Using MH calculations]

edit: Similar to what was posted above, now that I've read Tetra's post closer, but with more numbers. :]

/boggle @ double post o_O