Problem with getting Setup in 11/28/22 Sword Hemo spec is that you end up with 5 minute Vanish CD without Preparation. Point is, if you have Elusiveness you can probably drop Preparation, if you have Preparation you can probably drop points from Elusiveness, but without either of those talents you end up having Combat like aggro dump.

At any competitive level of PvP you are going to be respecing anyway. And with swords I would lean towards: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Prep + AR and more survivability etc, and then you can pick up setup as well.

As far as a pure PvE build, I am not going to spec into a talent for 1 fight a week (Mother), where I have to wear sub-optimal gear anyway, and that we one shot most of the time regardless. I vanish on almost every fight, I resist spells/dodge on: High Warlord (Resist comes with full energy), Mother, and not many others. It is definately something to think about, but I don't think a little more DPS on Mother will win out over the shorter Vanish.

Well my gear is a little better than the gear I logged out in, but not too much. I plugged the numbers into the spreadsheet though. and my dps is almost even between my current build and my planned 2.3 combat/hemo build NOT counting the hemo debuff, and couting the hemo debuff it increases my damage by at least 10%, so it seems like this would be a big win for me in either case.

Initially I saw a lot of the 2.3 hemo build including ghostly strike in them. The reasoning was that ghostly strike still was not normalized and would hit harder than hemo would with a slow speed MH. The latest build look very similar but i have noticed that many are leaving out ghostly strike at this point. Just wondering what the reasoning is? Is the added damage from a ghostly strike not worth the extra 5 energy to cast it? Or had ghostly strike been normalized as well which would pretty much kill its use in pve?

Thanks for the help

Splay
Last Stand of Misha

Anyone tried 3x/0/3x spec with proper gemming/items and Ashtongue trinket? Other thing is, Premeditation or Vigor for PvE, tried to calculate them somehow but not sure which one to pick.

Losing out on all the white damage talent would probably be more then you could make up elsewhere.



As far as Ghostly Strike, I plan to take it for RoS if nothing else, 100%+ Evasion for half of the enrage makes life much easier and less stressful on that fight.

Definetly going to try it again when 2.3 hits live. I just think that spec is the one which requires most itemization/gemming for it to work and I'm in state where my BT gear is epicgemmed for combat spec so would like to hear if someone actually has tried to regem gear for that spec.

I have read about every page in this thread and am really excited to go Hemo. But you pose a good question Killars. Would you pop onto my armory and tell me if I should stick with Combat Swords, or try out Hemo. Atm I top DPS but my guild is worried I will drop down. I don't want that to happen, and according to this thread I should be alright. But I am curious as to what you think. Thanks.

Also could you post the Hemo spec you plan to use?

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This was my PvP spec on the PTR. I am not a fan of imp kick at all, I just don't have a burst team that needs to stack silences to make it effective, guess thats a personal opinion talent. Instead I like the shorter Evasion/Sprint, esp with Imp Sprint. I also don't care much about WE in PvP considering only rogues have high dodge. Nerves of Steel is an absolute must, I can't stress how I'd never not get that talent for PvP. Riposte is also pretty great now that you can only max out at 50% resist to disarm, works well against Rogue esp. I wouldn't use SnD either, but gouge is pretty useful for kiting or helping your healer kite =P Mostly have the same idea, I think PvP depends a lot more on personal preference and what your using it for. PvE is a lot more cookie cutter.

Honestly Jaticus, you'd have to test it out yourself. I hardly ever look at spread sheets, and I don't have a program to even open one at home (I'm lazy) so you'd really have to check yourself if you want the technical mathematical details. You have a lot of AP compared to your other stats like hit and crit, which is more of a hemo oriented build I guess, but you have some big changes coming, so who really knows. With some Zul'Aman pieces, you may really benefit from the stacking of armor pen, not to mention the Executioner enchant (-840 armor). As said many times, your going to want at least 2 of your 3 or what ever rogue in your raid to be hemo for the debuff, because they not only put up the buff but they seemingly only lose a tiny bit of personal damage, if any at all. Most of what I say is based on personal use and experience on my own character and how I see my own changes being apparent, so I can't be of much service with entirely different gear. Either way I'd try combat and at least Combat will always be the safe bet for personal damage, it's still a great PvE spec nonetheless.

Sorry if I wasn't very helpful =(

You should probably go Hemo, check the spreadsheet to make sure, but the only level of gear/raiding that really doesn't make sense to go Hemo is 10-man Kara/ZA (if you are not doing SSC or higher), because you probably aren't getting full raid debuffs (CoR, FF, 5 Sunders, BoM, BoK, Windfury, SoE, etc.). Hemo is going to scale better with buffs and gear, so the less you have the better Combat is going to be.

I'm sorry, please don't take any direct offense, but I keep hearing this stated over and over again from many people, and it's just not true. Hemo does not scale 100% with gear.

Let's really look at SS vs. Hemo:

SS = 1.16 x [Weapon Damage] + 98 for 40 energy. But when talking effective energy, especially in high level gear with plenty of haste effects to proc Combat Potency, the relative energy cost can get as low as about 32, but its going to take a fair bit of higher lever haste gear.

Hemo = 1.25 x [Weapon Damage] +360 * [avg raid crit %] for 35 energy. Yes, that's right, Hemo also depends on a static additive bonus. Hemo has roughly the same scaling issues as SS. Assuming full usage and about a 33% or so crit rate, that's about 500 per Hemo.

Truth be told, Hemo seems to shine more off that extra 402 damage per instant, than any other factor. And when we really talk about scaling, that 402 damage is a flat number (except for the slight rise in the overall raid crit percentage).

So, in summary, the energy gains from Combat Potency with a fast weapon and haste effects makes SS match up fairly well energywise with Hemo, but its really the debuff that makes Hemo shine. The debuff that doesn't really scale much with gear.

You can't possibly mathematically look at CP energy procs and add it to your SS efficiency. It's random, not static and effects your cycle because of it, some things just shouldn't be made into a spread sheet. Hemo scales well not based on AP or Crit, it scales well based on weapon damage, which makes it better with gear and I believe that's what the above poster meant. Meaning, when you upgrade your MH your damage would go up noticeably higher with Hemo than the difference with SS.

Yes they match up well energy wise, yes CP is an excellent talent, Yes Hemo relies heavily on the debuff to make it amazing, but you failed to account for Serrated blades not only making hemo hit harder but also improving all white damage from MH and OH and also inc your main finisher (Rupture) by 30%!

Maybe the argument is solely based on wiether the ability Hemo will out do SS one ability vs the other, and I guess that race would be rather close, but the tree and talents that come along with Hemo just flat out seem to blow the backbone off of Combat which is Combat Potency.

First off, playing a Combat Rogue, the cycle doesn't really get screwed up that much, especially if you use a 1s/Xr cycle. You get to 3 to 5 combo points, your SnD is about to go down, you Rupture. Not that hard at all. And in that case, you can add combat potency, in a sense as an energy reduction. If you break it down to damage per second from SS vs. Hemo, they are very close especially with decent haste gear. Both scale similarly with gear, that's my gripe about all the "scales better" claims. It's not really true.

And lets look at your scaling of weapon damage:
Hemo 1.25 x WD + 500 (for the debuff) = 35 energy or every 3.5 seconds

[top] 0.357 WD + 143 damage per second

SS 1.16 x WD + 98

40 energy but combat potency has an affect on your energy per second. Combat Potency without haste with a 1.5 speed weapon gives on average 2 additional energy a second or enough for a SS every 3.3333 seconds.

[top] 0.348 WD + 29 per second

Scales better so far, but lets add haste effects into the equation. Let's say you have enough haste, haste effects to get your average offhand to 1.3 speed which should generate 12.3 energy a second.

Now you have:
SS

0.357 WD + 30 damage per second. Same weapon damage per second, they scale the same.

Now yes, Hemo gets armor reduction, bigger Ruptures, but Combat gets undodgable finishers, Lethality, poison talents that increase damage and added energy from Adrenaline Rush (the differences depending on build). The differences are kind of a wash probably a little in favor of combat.

The big difference *is* the 360 damage debuff multiplied by crit being applied about every 3.5 seconds. That's the bread and butter of the Hemo build, and thats where most of the difference lies.

The undodgeable finishers are somewhat lessened given the effect of weapon expertise however. With most bosses around 6% or so dodge, and weapon exp out of the box cutting about 2.5 of that away before gear, it does not seem that significant. Poisons and lethality dps increases, but they are not nearly as good as serrated blades/30% more rupture damage (that is, the per tick increase on rupture > the poison damage received from 4/5 vile, and the increase in dps from serrated > lethality).

I think the debate has gotten abit out of hand. Alot of the argument i'm seeing is "2/2 DD is better in this scenario" while someone else says "5/5 SS would be better in this scenario". I believe the general direction we're looking at is what to spec to optimise dps on new bosses, instead of farm content. There is perfectly nothing wrong with respeccing for new fights so most of the arguments i've read are rather moot. To me i just want a spec that saves me the gold from respeccing every raid since we have BC content on farm, and i would stick with 0/2 DD or just stay pvp spec. Discussing how in some situations DD is superior or in some others with multiple mobs BF is better is not a good gauge of what to spec. Even with the cookie cutter 2.3 sword spec i still respecced for raid optimisation, such as 2/2 nerves of steel for archimonde instead of vitality. By all means, if you are having problems with perhaps RoS, wiping at p3 1% and stuff then you should spec 2/2 DD. If after RoS you find yourself having problems with shahraz, by all means respec 5/5 SS and try and do as much dps as you can before you die (assuming FA is your problem). If you're having problems with Princec Malchy p2 then spec 5/5 SS, whereas if you're having problems in p3 then sure, go 2/2 DD. Arguing that just because a t4 rogue is doing different content from a t6 rogue hence the efficacy of 2/2 DD is giving no respect to the nature of individual bosses for guilds still climbing the progression ladder.

This line sparked off a thought. Has anyone tested/calculated the effect of having other hemo rogues in your raid on dagger builds? I believe daggers used to get the Hemo buff multiplied by the backstab multiplier as well as crit rate, with the debuff now seriously boosted to 36 damage per proc that's a hefty extra punch. Daggers also have a faster hit rate than swords (about 45% assuming 1.8 MH daggers and 2.6 MH swords) and for combat dagger builds have access to faster OH as well 1.3spd instead of 1.4 or 1.5.

My back-of-an-envelope calculations give the boost to combat-dagger dps from a permanently up hemo debuff of ~90dps, does this put them competitive with sword builds in similar situations? I was just thinking that some people would like to go daggers if there are 2-3 other hemo rogues in the raid.

Not sure how to calculate the effect in the spreadsheets but here's how I came to that conclusion.

Combat Dagger build 15/41/5 with key talents being imp backstab, 4/5 lethality, opportunity, aggression, dual wield spec, dagger spec, precision, combat potency, surprise attacks, weapon expertise. We'll assume that every hit has the Hemo buff applied, and that they're just back-stabbing and using s'n'd, if they can fit rupture into a 5s/5r cycle for free that's fine, but it has no bearing on the hemo calculation.

I picked a random rogue in this thread to calculate with, 4/5 tier 5, 1877AP, 27.5% crit, 245 hit rating, 25 expertise rating. Dagger spec would boost crit rate to 32.5%, weapon expertise including talents sits at 16.25, a 4% dodge reduction, hit at 20.53% including precision. Boss avoidance should be around 10% then.

We'll assume that they're using a 1.8spd MH and 1.4spd OH as these are fairly standard weapon speeds. With slice and dice constantly active and no passive haste these would be hitting at 1.38 delay and 1.08 delay.

Main Hand
Speed: 1.8/1.3= 1.38
Hemo bonus: 36/1.38 = 26.9dps
Hit and Crit Adjustment:
(hemo bonus*crit rate)+(hemo bonus*(1-boss avoidance))
26.9*0.325+26.9*0.9=32.95

32.95dps

Off Hand
Speed: 1.4/1.3= 1.08
Hemo bonus: 36/1.08 = 33.33
Hit and Crit adjustment
(hemo bonus*crit rate)+(hemo bonus*(1-boss avoidance))
10.83+30 = 40.83
Off-hand Damage Adjustment

[top] dps*0.75

30.62

30.62dps

Energy per second
Combat Potency Procs
(CPrate*CPenergy)/OH Speed
(0.2*15)/1.08 = 2.78 energy per second from CP

Standard energy gain 20energy per 2 secs

Total energy gain 12.78 energy per second

Backstab Damage
Basic Backstab Damage
Weapon-damage*(backstab modifier)*(opportunity+aggression+Surprise attacks)
36*(1.5)*(1+0.2+0.06+0.1)
36*2.04=73.44
Crit modification
(hemo bonus*crit rate*crit modification)+(hemo bonus*(1-crit rate-boss avoidance))
4/5 lethality and capped hit so boss avoidance is approx 2%
(73.44*0.625*2.24)+(73.44*(1-0.625-0.02))

[top]102.816+26.07

128.89

Backstab Rate = Energy cost/energy per second

[top]60/12.77

4.6956

Backstab damage/backstab rate

[top]128.89/4.6956

27.448
27.45 dps increase from backstab

Backstab+OH dps+MH dps = 92.02dps

Incidently this uses up 6.5 hemo procs per 3.5 seconds

I haven't modelled the complex procs or buffs of the spreadsheet so that figure might change, and I might have got the math a bit wrong since it's been a while since I did any dagger calculations, but a 92dps increase seems significant boost for one buff. Has anyone any idea how to model it more accurately and how it compares to the effect on combat swords?

The problem with this assumption is that the charges aren't going to be evenly spaced and a significant number *will* be wasted.

Stacking hemo scales the debuff poorly.

Of course a reasonable amount of debuff charges will be wasted if you run the exact cycle at the exact same timing... but how likely is that. As i said, personal observation and assumption. I don't like statistics

I believe what Flermon tried to say was: does combat daggers build perform better on a hemoed target than a combat swords one? Mainly due to the scaling part of Backstab which does apply to the +36 hemo debuff. But is that enough to surpass the imba sword specc? I wonder...

You've got a point. It's not possible to synchronize the rogues in order to take 100% advantage of the debuff purposely. This is for a hundred reasons:
-The boss is not static therefor sometimes in order to catch up the boss you can't apply hemo
-A finisher might get dodged(Missed also, not from a decent gear rogue, except if there's a minus hit chance debuff applied on him)delaying the next hemo apply
-Dodged hemo, energy gets messup up and so are the hemo applies
-Someone loses the sync because he's just human.
etc etc

So even if you could say "Hey headhuntress you apply hemo first and then X applies hemo 1.5 sec later" it's not practically possible, even in the best occasion.

On the other hand, I believe that in a 25man environment all 10 charges will be consumed technically instantly. With 6-7 melee attackers at least(which is how a 25man group is) you won't have a problem getting full advantage of it. The only problem is when both hemos land the same time which is less likely to happen. So, bringing 5 hemo rogues will hurt the debuff but you can have up to 3 without any problem imo. You can't mathematically prove that sadly, since it depends on the cycles/procs of all melee attackers.

Then you're an idiot. Personal observation and assumptions are trash; statistics aren't.

A reasonable amount of debuff charges will be wasted as you run more hemo rogues because you don't hemo every 3.5 seconds. If you did, I wouldn't worry about it. In reality, you tend to hemo every 2 or 4 seconds, because of energy ticks, and occasionally every 1 seconds when you have energy built up and are GCD limited.

Assuming a dagger rogue in a CP setup using a 1.8/1.4 pair of daggers, you're talking approximately:

(1/1.8 + 1/1.4)*1.3 + ((10+(0.2*15*1/1.4*1.3))/60) = 1.86 attacks per second

That's the highest attack rate you're likely to see, and that's at an unreasonable gearing (100% hit, 0% dodge/parry).

Even at that attack rate, you need 6 melee to drop the debuff in one second. Hunters provide fewer attacks per second. Warriors? Fewer attacks per second. Combat sword rogues? Hemo rogues? All of them provide fewer attacks per second. Feral druids too.

The reality is, with 6-7 melee plus pets, you can reasonable expect to exhaust *one* hemo debuff consistently by the time it's reapplied, barring GCD-limited energy use situations. As you bring more than one, you will be losing charges to overlapping debuffs. At a rough guess, I'd figure you'll lose 20-40% of your charges, but that's based entirely on a gut feeling, not on math or simulation, and is quite probably off.

I don't want to get onto the personal rail here, but Kalman, just ONCE un-dust your rogue, spec hemo and head to blasted lands to notice you will consistantly run down to 2-4 charges when conciously building CP without wasting energy on a servant. SOLO. And unless you overlap badly i hardly can believe that the common amount of melee oriented DPS in a 25-man raid (2 Prot Warrior, 3+ Rogue/DPS Warrior and 1-2 hunter + pets) will see alot wasted charges.