Well, right. You have to use what you have access to; Talon of Al'ar is certainly better than any pre-raid sword; I think Talon of Azshara is probably a bit better, but certainly the same ballpark. So if your choice is Talon of Al'ar versus, say, Spiteblade or Hope Ender: sure, Fist/Sword spec is fine. And even relative to Talon of Azshara, you're not going to notice a *large* difference - we're talking maybe 15 DPS either way.

But, for the people asking "which Arena MH should I buy", my answer would be the sword.

Seems he went back to Azshara + Quickblade now =) no idea why just checked his armory, might ask him today =) The reason he swapped to talon+oh in the first place was cause he found sword+sword to be boring and no more dps.

More likely they would make offhand sword spec procs cause extra offhand swings. Right now sword spec is, at the very least, out of whack with other weapon specializations because the offhand is causing full extra main hand attacks.

Well, no. The reason sword spec procs MH attacks is because otherwise it would lack considerably behind the other specialisations.

5% crit from dagger spec and fist spec is a straight up conversion of 5% of your total attacks from hits to crits. Sword spec, by contrast, means you get an extra white hit on 5% of your successful blows landed. Even just autoattacking, this is worse than fist or dagger spec, since it's 5% of blows landed rather than 5% of total attacks made.

It gets worse when you factor in procs from yellow damage. With lethality, a crit on specials does more than 200% damage. Furthermore, combat builds have Aggression and Surprise Attacks, which scale with the added crit. Sword spec only gives white hits when it procs from your yellow specials.

Thus, sword spec would be massively underpowered relative to fist and dagger spec if offhand procs gave extra offhand attacks. This is the reason that OH procs give MH attacks, and I don't see it changing unless they overhaul the talent radically.

You seem to have completely missed the point of my argument, or at least only addressed a third of it. You're talking only about offhand sword spec procs - i.e. ignoring both main hand procs and procs from yellow attacks.

Let's break it down into the three categories:

1) Offhand autoattack damage
Sword spec is better than fist spec, since it procs MH hits

2) Main hand autoattack damage
Sword spec is worse than fist spec at low levels of hit, but fractionally better once you are hit capped

3) Yellow damage
Sword spec is much worse than fist spec


(3) is the reason why sword spec is set up to proc MH swings from OH procs. If they altered it to proc offhand swings instead, DW sword spec would be much much worse than DW fist spec.

The rationale behind the hybrid fist/sword build is to take advantage of the good points of both (1) and (3). However, you have to sacrifice 5 talent points from another tree (usually poison talents). Right now, the tradeoff is near even. If offhand swings procced offhand attacks, it would be less so.

Thus if a DW sword rogue wants to look at fist/sword, there's not a lot in it, while if they altered OH procs as you suggest, there'd be no question that DW swords is better.

By contrast, a mace rogue (and there's plenty of us about thanks to the BS weapon's accessibility) has a good chance of improving their DPS by moving to mace/sword, since they don't need Weapon Expertise and have a couple of spare points in the combat tree. That means that filling out sword spec costs less in terms of talent points in other areas.

Well said. This is essentially what I've been attempting to say for months with math, but you really got the wording well to summarize.

And for the millionth time - the DPS difference between the two specs is MINIMAL. As in.. less than 10 dps. RNG on a 10 min fight will play a larger role in your dps. The entire point of Fist/Sword spec is generally to have another perfectly valid option available in case Morogrim doesn't drop for you pretty much. When picking a MH, either a sword or fist is equally viable - go with whichever weapon is more dps on its own, regardless of type.

I fully understand the argument. The problem is that it's incorrect. I've mentioned this in passing a couple of times, but let me spell this out in detail.

Consider: lets say our main hand weapon hits for 500 damage, we have 25% crit (easy to do even as swords with raid buffs), and ~250 hit rating such that our combined miss + dodge rate is 10%. Hence, 90% of attacks land, and 25% of them crit. Additionally, 25% of them glance, doing 75% damage. Hence, the expected damage of a MH hit is:

500*(.9+.25-.25*.25) = 544 damage.

5% crit chance is a 5% chance to do an extra 500 damage; hence, 5/5 Fist Spec adds 25 damage per attack.

5/5 sword spec, however, causes those 5% of the 90% of attacks that hit to do an extra 544 damage, on average. Thus the damage increases from 5/5 Sword Spec is 24.5 damage per attack.

However, an extra attack does more than just damage; it can proc poisons and other effects. For instance, even if your only MH proc was Instant Poison, which adds an average of 34 damage per attack, the value of sword spec would increase by 1.5 damage, putting it ahead of fist spec.

Hence, for our hypothetical rogue with these stats - stats that are easily attainable for a Karazhan geared rogue with raid buffs - Sword Spec is superior on white attacks. As hit and crit rate scale (and they do, as one moves into T5 and T6 instances), the advantage of sword spec on MH attacks grows.

Now, what about yellow attacks? Well, admittedly, in this department fist spec does hold a slight advantage, since you get double the damage of a Sinister Strike versus an extra white attack. So the question is, when you add the extra damage on yellow attacks, and take out the damage lost on white attacks, how does sword/fist compare to sword/sword? Lets find out.

I have taken my current gear (see armory) and entered it into the rogue gear spreadsheet. However, instead of Talon of Azshara, I will be using either Merciless Gladiator's Slicer, or Merciless Gladiator's Right Ripper. Additionally, I will spec into both sword spec and fist spec, and keep all other talent points the same. I am using the same gear and same spec, with the only difference being whether the main hand is a sword or a fist. Note that with this gear configuration I only have 240 hit, which is fairly low and should favor fists. Lets see what sorts of damage numbers are produced:

With swords in both hands, the spreadsheet indicates that I will do 1422.3 damage.
If I change my MH to a fist, I do 1426.4 damage. So, fist spec does just slightly (.3%) more damage.

But, in practice, you don't get to have the identical spec, straight across. In practice, you lose 5 points out of some combination of Endurance, Nerves of Steel, and poison talents to do sword/fist spec. Typically, this includes at least 3 points in vile poisons, which increase your DPS by 9. Hence, in practice, while fist spec is very marginally superior to sword spec on my MH in my current gear, the difference is not worth the loss of talent points it takes to get that spec.

So, what does this mean in practice? Simple.

*If you are buying an arena MH, you most likely want to get the sword.
*The ranking of top rogue MHs is as follows:

1) Warglaive of Azzinoth (duh)
2) Blade of Savagery
3) Talon of Azshara
4) Talon of the Phoenix
5) Merciless Gladiator's Slicer
6) Merciless Gladiator's Right Ripper

So, if you haven't found a MH Sword better than Spiteblade, yes, Talon of the Phoenix is a good choice. But if you have a Talon or above, you're probably better off as sword/sword than fist/sword.

Stated briefly: there is no fundamental advantage to fist/sword spec. The fact that Talon is a powerful MH weapon means that it is potentially worth using if you haven't gotten a Talon of Azshara; but the advantage to doing so is simply that it's a well-itemized weapon, not any inherent property of the spec.

I don't disagree with him. I disagree with you.

I was attempting to disprove the following assertion:

My counterargument is that
1) I have been talking about sword spec vs fist spec all along, and
2) Despite what has been often asserted, fist spec is not significantly better than sword spec on MH, regardless of current itemization level.

Both of which are totally true, and demonstrated in my previous post. I'm am not debating Latito's assertion that the difference is small. It is small. I merely assert that the answer to the oft-asked question is that given the choice of a sword and a fist of equal quality, sword/sword beats fist/sword. Sword spec on MH is every bit as powerful on MH as fist spec.

is blatantly untrue. If OH sword hits procced OH attacks, sword spec would be very well balanced against the other two specs.

I don't think we disagree on conclusions; I think we all agree that, as things are currently balanced, sword/sword spec is just barely better than fist/sword spec assuming swords of equal quality. I think we all agree that the quality of available MHs is the larger factor. I am not attempting to dispute this in any way shape or form. What I *am* trying to do is refute the blatant falsehoods and misinformation that has appeared in this thread en route to this conclusion, as there has been plenty of it.

I skipped some of this so if this has already been posted sorry for double posting,

If you are truly concerned with lossing 2/2 vitality or something like that consider this.... nothing makes you put all 5/5 fist spec if you have a good crit rate already maybe you only need 3/5 fist to put you above average. I've done this before and been very happy with the results.

I'm curious how this spec would be affected by Darkmoon Card: Wrath. Because the Main Hand has a higher crit chance, the effect of this trinket would be to shift critical strikes in favor of the main hand, right?

The trinket is generally considered to be mediocre, but I feel like a Fist/Sword rogue with low crit gets more out of it than everybody else.