I'm a little surprised that no mention of daggers has been brought up at this point.. probably because this thread has been a bit more focused on hemo and not on serrated blades. To me the jewel of this post has been the demonstration that serrated blades can be as good as (if not better) than combat potency. That post.

If we can assume that serrated blades trumps combat potency, there's a lot of value with daggers in dropping the whole second half of the combat tree.

1. Daggers gain a lot more than swords/fists/maces by going up the subtlety tree because backstab can actually utilize the tier 0 opportunity talent.
2. Daggers lose less by dropping the bottom half of the combat tree as compared to a sinister strike build because daggers can't utilize aggression.
3. The build allows for more points in the assassination tree.. something that can't be done with a traditional 15/41/5 build (notably getting 5/5 lethality).

I'm currently looking at a 17/21/18 +5 build. There are quite a few options for the +5.. full dagger specialization, full imp poisons, or preparation + a couple of points in either previously mentioned talent. Even imp poisons + cold blood is an option (not that cold blood is good for raiding). Obviously, this build loses the raid-wide hemo buff.

17/21/18 + 5

I'm curious if a serrated blades build can be competitive by utilizing daggers.. I think alot of it will come down to rupture uptime. Anyway, I thought I'd seed my thoughts here before getting down to the math.

Is there something major that I'm missing that makes daggers a bad idea for a spec like this?

What you're missing though is the fact that CP makes 3/5/5 possible in the first place. Without CP you're not going to get to rupture in your cycle and will be back to pre-2.0 with just running 5/5 cycles.

No finishers besides SnD = a very decent loss in dps.

Your rupture uptime will be practically nonexistent as daggers without combat potency.

The 11/28/22 swords build in the OP is appealing due to its versatility; doing competitive raid DPS while providing the hemo buff to your group/raid, and picking up a lot of PVP utility via the fun Sub talents. That 17/21/18 + 5 daggers build would sort of be terrible at everything. Why have 5 points in MoD and 5 in Camo if your CP generation, energy and openers are going to be awful in PVP? I just see it as a worse version of a Combat Daggers spec instead of a hybrid build.

Hmm, I was under the impressions that rupture didn't add a significant amount of dps. Also I know in actual fights I rarely get to use rupture as daggers anyway, due to avoiding AE, stuns or just plain poor CP procs. Would loosing rupture actually make this a poor spec for pve?

Losing not only rupture (which adds at least 100 dps to the combat dagger build buffed/mangle,) but the extra Back stabs, and increased efficiency in getting cycles going again after off boss time is a huge loss.

I run 41/0/20, it works okay but if I was to go combat I'm sure my DPS would go up. The biggest issue with the spec is no Imp SnD, so you can't even get 100% uptime of either, even using 4pc t4 theres some stall time.

It works amazingly for a PvE/PvP hyrbid spec, but now that respec gold means nothing I am thinking of spec'ing out of it.

Monkorn - WWS - Recent gruul, no feral druid/shaman in my group =(

Not having dual wield specialization is hurting you much more than not having imp SnD.

You're just giving up too much to get serrated blades. Mut sub is great for pvp for those big crits, but really giving up 5% hit, and 50% increased OH damage is just too big of a hit. Not to mention SnD uptime.

I used a 41/0/20 build not long after hitting 70, and it was good for heroics, and (I thought) reasonably strong single target, but then I switched to combat. There really was no comparison. I went from "I can almost go all out with no salv" to "I have to be careful even WITH salv or I will get myself killed", and while I was leading damage with the mutilate/sub build in raids (running kara at the time), the gap became *obscene* with combat.

I'd almost say that for PvE, you want 11 in assass and 20 in combat regardless of what else you get.

20 points in combat is non-negotiable for maximum pve dps. Now that we have that out of our system does anyone have any more WWS logs? ;-)

Our shaman went enhancement today so I will not be able to bring up any more logs comparable to those that I initially posted. In two weeks I will have another set of combat vs hemo comparison logs in an enh shaman / fury warrior / 3x rogue group (which is a pretty standard setup). We are also killing VR now so I will have an example of a high armor non-rupture boss fight and just how much this build can lag behind combat in as sub-optimal of a fight as possible.

One thing that I have started to notice while soloing is that ghostly strike + double mongoose + high agility + 5/5 lightning reflexes combined with setup have a very powerful synergy. I can get my dodge into the high 50's pretty easily which makes melee monsters [as well as warriors] basically kill themselves. The more enemies on me the merrier. This may also help us in 5v5 arenas as a small punishment for teams focus firing a rogue (if our healers can keep us up we have infinite combo points).

Not anymore, in patch 2.2. Extra attacks granted by sword spec will no longer be able to proc additional extra attacks.

All valid points. I'm looking at this purely from a damage perspective so I've largely ignored the value of the non-dps talents in the subtlety tree (MoD and Camo). I like to theorycraft more than play my rogue alt.. and since my rogue is stuck with daggers, I'm trying to find a non-conventional dagger build that doesn't suck. Yes, the build probably sucks for just about everything, but I like to play around and find out just how much it sucks (or doesn't suck).

I've been working for the last couple of hours on the math of daggers using subtlety instead of combat potency. My conclusion is that backstab needs combat potency for high damage but not because of the inclusion of rupture. All the numbers used below were gathered from the rogue DPS spreadsheet.

Rupture, even with mangle, doesn't add a whole lot of damage to the 3s/5s/5r cycle. Using the spreadsheet, my buffed dps is 1243 with a vanilla 5/41/15 combat daggers spec. A 5cp rupture, with mangle, for me does 2256 damage over 16s. However, a 3s/5s/5r cycle takes 60 seconds.. so rupture is only doing 37.6 dps over the life of the cycle. With a pure 5snd cycle you lose a little less than that because you're not spending energy on the extra snd and rupture.. so it comes out to a difference of ~32 dps. That's a change of ~2.6% between 5snd and 3s/5s/5r. That's not trivial.. but it's not groundbreaking either.

Compare this to a fist/sword/mace build where you can do a 1s/5r on a 17s rotation.. the rupture lasting 16s of that. The same 2256 rupture damage is instead doing 133 dps over the life of the cycle.

The benefit of combat potency is the extra energy to dump into backstabs, not finishers. Without combat potency I do an instant attack (backstab) every 7.3s. With combat potency I do an instant attack every 5.6s. That's basically a 30% increase in instant attack damage. If backstabs make up 27% of my damage, then combat potency boosts overall damage by 8.1%. That is groundbreaking. That's not even counting surprise attacks.

I also did some experimenting with cycles not on the DPS spreadsheet. Assuming imp. snd and 2-piece T4, it seems that 1s/3r is a better combo for 5/41/15 than 3s/5s/5r. It has the extra benefit of being much faster to accelerate than 3s/5s/5r (which can be painful in stop and go fights). I determined this by just building additional lines into the cycles worksheets.

I came across the 1s/3r cycle when I tried to build a 1s/2r cycle for the 17/26/18 build. The 1s/2r cycle works well.. but you simply lose too much damage by not having the extra energy from combat potency to fuel backstabs.

Of all the things I learned in my testing, it's the trickiness of balancing energy and combo points. Low combat point finishers are more efficient in regards to combo point per point of effect (whether it's duration for snd or damage for rupture), but low cp finishers are very energy inefficient per combo point.

It has been explained a thousand times before: 1000 hits for 1 and 2 hits for 500 in the same time interval will do the exact same damage (per. second). Also, the best poison for at least on of your weapons is deadly poison, which is nearly independant of weapon speed, as long as it refresh itself. So if you put that on your slow MH, then you could pop the speed-dependant poisons on your offhand. Instant poison will never be better than deadly poison.
Why would you want to gimp your hemo damage so badly? You would be better off with spamming shiv using Latro's Shifting Sword if you wanted to do some kind of odd poison build, and then 20/40 would be a better choice.
Also, sword spec procs are always MH attacks, even if caused by your OH, so your OH and hemo procs will make toilet-drain-damage with 1.3 speed weapons compared to 2.6-2.7. For MH it's a "raw" 5% damage increase,

Is that enough, or should I carry on? It's really low-level stuff, I would suggest researching more before posting such questions, or maybe just making up some simple maths.

Off hand sword spec procs cause a free non-normalized main hand attack. Therefore both hemo and sword spec both provide the most benefit from as slow of a main hand as possible. Under no circumstances is a fast main hand weapon better than a slow one, as you should not be using poison on your main hand due to windfury totem.

Ah, okay, I thought that was changed back when the extra swing was changed from yellow to white.

I'll have some tomorrow night.

We had a great raid tonight and I have some very nice stats from it - I can't wait to post them up w/ analysis as soon as I get the combat stats to compare them against next week. The one thing I regret is not being able to equip the excellent Bloodsea Brigand's Vest I picked up for two weeks due to wanting as few variables as possible. (teaser: 11/28/22 pulled 1340 dps on Tidewalker with 1 watery grave, on hydross a non-bleeding boss it pulled 1206 dps! [hemo raid buff dps not included])

We convinced our raid leader to make the WWS stats public so any endeavouring souls can possibly find the logs.

Which buffs? Your gear is *slightly* better than mine, and I never seem to pull off more than 1150k average DPS on tidewalker, even with flask and WF, using combat spec. Has to be DST.

Interesting thread, im thinking about trying This build. But i cant seem to remember if Ghostly strike isnt normalized like hemo is... or if it works like Sinister strike.

Why im wondering is coz my mainhand is Dragonmaw which is fairly good for none-normalized attacks.

GS has a hefty cooldown, so at best you'd be mixing it into a rotation with Sinister Strikes.. I'm inclined to agree with the posts earlier in the thread that Aggression and Adrenaline Rush aren't worth giving up Setup and Hemo.

Have you tried running that spec trough : [Rogue] DPS Spreadsheet ?
I wonder what kind of dps difference you'd get.