[Rogue] Best Combat Sword PvE spec?
 

Hello, I've been playing the Rogue class since launch and prefer it over the others that I have tried. I have typically geared and specced without the outside help of others but I can openly admit that I don't understand everything 100%.

I am working on a Combat Sword spec for complete maximum PvE DPS. Link:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

I have a few questions and I am sorry if this has been covered before, I attempted to search for it but came up with nothing.

As you can see, I have 4 points left and am unsure the best place to put them. As far as I see it, my best options are:

3 in Imp Evis and finishing off Nerves of Steel.
4 in Vile poisons (which I assume is better than Improved Poisons. If my tired brain is assuming correctly, 16%increase in damage is better than 8%proc)

I am assuming Vile Poisons are my best bet since I keep poisons up at all times in instances and I rarely finish with Evis but I wanted to make 100% sure that I am not overlooking anything or misunderstanding anything. Your help is much appreciated, thank you.

Well, the short answer is: plug it into either rogue spreadsheet and find out for yourself.

The slightly longer answer is: if you ask 5 different people you'll probably get 5 different answers.

In my opinion, the answer is 4/5 Vile Poisons. I'd also move 2 points out of Lightning Reflexes and into Imp Sprint. But I fully expect to hear other people disagree.

I was debating on moving out of Lightning Reflexes myself but I thought I would put it in Endurance instead. My current guild is facing Magtheridon right now but I haven't noticed any fights aside from Shade of Aran and Gruul that have any movement binding abilities, in which case I just use CoS.

The spreadsheet will tell you to go with vile poisons, none of the other options will increase your dps on the type of fight it models.

On Vashj, Imp. Sprint is useful.

Depends partly on race. Imp sprint is less useful for Gnomes, who have the racial to break roots.

Personally I wouldn't consider running without improved Eviscerate. Yes, I know that boss fights use only S'n'D and Rupture, but the world is not only boss fights. Soloing, PvP, trash fights, small mob zergs - you nee at least *some* front loaded damage, rather than being reliant on ruptures to tick out and S'n'D to run its duration. You're also of course very nerfed against bleed-immune mobs and bosses unless you have at least one other finisher. For a long time I tried to make Envenom be that finisher, but (as covered ad nauseam elsewhere) it just isn't workable.

3 in Imp Evis. is a must for me. I've also put points in Remorseless instead of Murder, as a concession to grinding. Also useful on AoE packs when you pop blade flurry - you can't keep up with the magical AoE classes, but you come somewhat closer.

So, with 3 in Imp Evis being a given, that leaves you as 19/42/0 with four filler points in the Combat tree. Maxing out Lightning Reflexes, putting a couple of points in Deflection, or choosing Nerves of Steel, Imp Sprint, Endurance, Imp Kick - none of these answers are wrong. To some extent it depends on what you enjoy doing outside raid time, to some extent it depends on what race you are, and to some extent it depends on which boss fights you're currently working on.

maybe read his post …
Combat Sword spec for complete maximum PvE DPS

I wouldnt go for Nerves of steal since this can bring you into trouble. Resisting a fear often means drawing aggro and getting killed.

I would put 4 more points in Imp/Vile Poisons. And I would take 2 points out of Lightning Reflexes and put them in Edurance/ImpSprint/ImpKick

It is both my experience from gaming and from examinating different specs on spreadsheet, that 19/42/0 is the best PvE spec. On assassination side, I go Assassination 5/5 Malice, 3/3 Ruthlessness, 2/2 Murder, 1/1 Relentless Strike, 4/5 Lethality, 4/5 Imp. Poison. Combat side needs to have the essentialts, 2/2 Vitality being one of them, since it boosts Agility, and I recommend Imp. Sprint, Imp. Kick aswell, since they are very usefull fillers. In regards to, "Imp sprint is less useful for Gnomes, who have the racial to break roots.", Imp. Sprint is still as usefull, if not more against Vashj, as Gnomes hence have one more ability to escape roots in phase 3.

I basically only go 1s/5r snd cut, and use Envenom if my target is on a low percentage which won't allow full duration of rupture. Thus investing points in Vile Poison is wasted points. Imp. Eviscarete is also wasted points in most cases, except on certain trash in TK and on VR. Overall Eviscerate is a joke as a finishing move, as Sinister Strikes in most cases does more damage.

About, "...but the world is not only boss fights. Soloing, PvP, trash fights, small mob zergs.", I have one word: Respec. If one wants to do maximum damage in PvE, one specs accordingly to that specific encounter / instance, and worries about grinding / PvP / etc should not even enter the equation.

Agreed. If you're a gnome rogue, Imp Sprint is probably less important. However, as a NE I've found having a 2nd snare break to be fairly useful; while it doesn't come up every fight, historically about 1 fight in 5 has found a use for it; realistically, though, it's largely a case of not having anything better to do with the points. Imp Kick comes up even less often than Imp Sprint. The only other option I'd consider competitive is Endurance.

Well, you can still *use* eviscerate untalented, of course - the question is what does more damage. And I would argue that over the long haul, the extra ~200 damage per eviscerate from 3/3 Imp Evis is going to matter less than the 9+ dps from vile poisons. I would argue that unless you're launching an evis more than once for every 20 seconds you have deadly poison up, vile poisons are just the strongest option.

Against rupture-immune mobs, imp evis certainly helps; but even at 1s/5r, you're only launching an evis every 18 seconds or so, so you're right near the threshhold of where 3/5 poisons would do more damage. So it's only against things that are both poison and rupture immune that imp evis has a clear edge - and that's a pretty short list of bosses. Against everything else, Vile Poisons is comperable or better.

Well, Remorseless Attacks, last I checked, only activates when you strike the killing blow, which, in 25-man content, isn't very often (~10% of the time, usually). Cross reference with the number of times having a bonus after killing a mob is useful, and it strikes me as pretty useless for raiding.

It sounds, on the whole, that you're looking for a more hybrid build that concedes some raid utility to make other aspects of the game easier - which is fine - but it's not really what the original poster was asking. I think for his question, neither Imp Evis nor Remorseless Attacks makes much sense.

Well, dropping a point of lethality to get an extra point of combat filler is clearly not optimal, in my opinion. If you want the extra point in combat talents, you should be pulling a point out of poison talents instead to keep 5/5 lethality.

Why so? Vile Poison increases the damage of your deadly poison ticks, while Imp Poison doesn't. Hence if you're going WF MH DP OH (fairly common), 4/5 Vile beats 4/5 Imp by about 12 dps. And there were some calculations posted in this forum a while back (I don't remember where) which showed that even if you're using IP MH DP OH, Vile still beats Imp on damage. The fact that it also boosts Envenom, which is a competitive finisher to Eviscerate for the short-fight and end-of-fight situations where you aren't using rupture is just sort of an added bonus.

I took imp eviscerate. I highly recommend it if your guild is in SSC/TK exclusively.

You can't use rupture on: hydross, Void Reaver, Al'ar, and Solarian's armor is hella low as well (and you have to burst down his adds). I will probably spec out of it once we move into BT/Hyjal (downed Vashj for the first time this week).

True to a point, though I'd like to see the guy that takes time out to respec between the trash clear and the boss! Even raiding is not only about the boss fight, and taking a small hit on boss DPS in order to do more DPS on trash clears and thereby speed things up is not necessarily the wrong choice. And these days, even in boss fights there are often adds to be focused down (on which a rupture won't tick out, and you'll waste S'n'D uptime moving to the next target, and so on).

Thanks to Urraca for confirming which bosses are rupture-immune - further down still, a lot of the Kara bosses are rupture-immune, so once again Eviscerate will be your finisher of choice between S'n'D refreshes.

That's why I said there was no one correct answer, and that it depended on your race, and which boss fights you're working on. And for the pure filler points in Combat (Imp Kick, Imp Sprint or Endurance ?), then yes, it will partly depend on what you do outside the raid environment, unless you really do respec before and after every raid.

Given the high variabilty of damage from evis I've never really had that much faith in it, though I am one of those people who'll respecc for bosses such as Hydross (c'mon 50g is 5 dailys now, not that much hassle)which is for us at least still a tight dps race, and as such I wouldn't place it highly in an overall quality pve combat swords build. I'd rather take the 2 points in Murder and have that 2% boost to all damage than rely on imp Evis.

I'm 16/45/00 at the moment and looking at 19/42/00 with some interest now. Riposte served me well when I did a lot of solo, 5 man and pvp but those times are getting left behind and all I really do on my rogue is raid.

Correction, Al'ar is most definitely able to be ruptured, and since many guilds use rogues on adds, it is a nice way to continue dpsing while you move out of the explosion range.

Try this.

Cookie cutter : http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

Max damage : http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000
Alternative : http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000
Alternative2 : http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

Dagger option : http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

Feedback is, obviously welcome.

Eviscerate makes such a small proportion of your damage that improved eviscerate doesn't add much dps. Personally, eviscerate makes up ~5% of my damage output, so that each talent point in improved eviscerate adds 0.25% total damage.

I haven't found lethality to be quite so good. At 27% damage from SS and 28% crit rate, it comes out to ~0.35% damage per talent point. Vile poisons is quite close: with 8.5% total poison damage, it adds ~0.34% damage. I contend that improved poisons can be quite valuable, especially if your DP stack isn't capped out. Due to the difficulty of modelling deadly poison I expect different spreadsheets will disagree, but for myself the first point in improved poisons adds +0.41% damage, down to +0.32% for the last talent point.