Sadly, I have but two options at this point.

I can Mace-Spec/Hemo, and never be able to raid. (Have Drakefist/Fool's Bane for MH, and S1 Bonecracker for the off).

Or I can go Combat Daggers(*shudder*) for raid dps, but be relatively gimped in any real pvp.

Is there any possibility/reason where Mace-Spec and Hemo are viewed as raid viable? If so, how and why?

I rather prefer Hemo to Sinister Strike, even with Imp SS, for the energy efficiency, the debuff, and the non-normalization.

Swords would be the way to go.... but I have zero swords, MH or off, and getting competent groups for 5man's to get said swords just isn't happening.

Please help? My raid dps has gone down with TBC, and my gear acquisition rate has been far behind the times. Any tips/hints on openers, finishers, basic dps cycles, and the like are most welcome.

Thanks!

I honestly have no idea what you meant, why on earth would you want higher uptime? The debuff does a fixed (almost) amount of damage every time it's applied unless it gets refreshed, then it does less. Higher uptime has a negative effect on refreshes and nothing else.

As for my numbers being unreliable that may be true but they were certainly not made up. With 20 attacks per sec the debuff lives for 0.5 sec on average meaning 0.5/3.5=0.143 uptime, 3 rogues would thus under ideal conditions have about 43% uptime. Wasted charges would reduce this somewhat so I don't feel that "under 50%" can be considered terribly unreliable even with a different raid makeup.

Actually no, 0.5 sec between two hemos would only waste 20% of the charges, 4 wasted, 20 total. A hemo rogue does not generally have potency or AR which means that "hemo every second" will be quite rare in a sustained fight. Certainly charges will be wasted but nowhere near 20-40%.

Thanks for reading the thread.... you must have read the title, maybe read the first post, and then replied... good for you, you managed to miss the 40 pages in between, this probably isn't the forum for you. But on the off chance you are having an off day:

With Patch 2.3 Hemo is as good or better then Combat, Hemo Swords > Combat Swords > Hemo Maces > Combat Maces > Combat Daggers.

The Hemo Mace Spec you want for Raid DPS is going to be:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

A more PvP oriented version would be:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

So yes, Hemo is now raid viable, it is actually better then swords for 25 man at any reasonable gear level. Swords are still better then maces if you have equivalent options, however if you have the choice of Drakefirst or Edge of the Cosmos... go with Maces.

Cycle: If you have 2 pieces of T4: 2 Point Slice & Dice/5 Point Rupture, if you don't 3 Point Slice and Dice/5 Point Rupture.

And Hemo is now normalized to 2.4 like everything else... sorry.


Edit - 16/40/5 Combat Daggers... come on... how do you not take 10% more damage on Backstab and no dodges on finishing moves... and you skipped Ruthlessness for Murder... you fail.

15/41/5 Comabt Daggers should be: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Aggression is a new addition to combat daggers as of 2.3, but the rest is unchanged since 2.0

Edit2 - Finally, you fail at gemming, +8 Hit in every slot unless you need something else for your Meta... you don't need +stam or +resiliance gems or even +crit. Your damage sucks because you don't have a clue, not because of a gear issue.

No, it wastes 4 charges out of 10 on the original hemo. The second hemo is unaddressed; depending on the number of rogues using hemo, it might exhaust, or it might be refreshed. You see why I gave a wide range.

And hemo every second isn't that rare in a sustained fight. Any time you're pausing to let a rupture die off, or if you aren't using SnD cut (and there are times when you shouldn't), you're going to accumulate energy; enough of this buffering effect and you will spit out a pair at GCD intervals. Other than that, there's a reasonable number of 2 second separations because of the energy tick.

If in the best case scenario its possible to waste 20% of total charges with only 2 hemo rogues on a regular basis, why is it so unrealistic to expect 20-40% waste in reality with more than that?

When everything is up for me I have SnD (30%) BF (20%) Mongoose x2 (4%) and 585 haste rating from trinkets (DST & Abacus).

So best case I'm looking at:
MH 2.6:
2.6 / ( (1+(30%/100)) *(1+(20%/100)) * (1+(4%/100)) * (1+(((585)/100)/10.52)))
2.6 / ( (1.3*1.2*1.04) * 1.56 )
2.6 / 2.53 = 1.03
MH after haste = 1.03 speed

OH 1.5:
1.5 / ( (1+(30%/100)) *(1+(20%/100)) * (1+4%/100)) * (1+(((585)/100)/10.52)))
1.5 / ( (1.3*1.2*1.04) * 1.56 )
1.5 / 2.53 = 0.59
OH after haste = 0.59 speed

MH swings per second + OH swings per second = total swings per second
( 1 / 1.03 ) + ( 1 / 0.59 )
0.97 + 1.7 = 2.67 swings per second

That's dang close to 3 swings per second. It's very possible for a rogue to consume 9 of the 10 charges in 3 seconds. Granted, this is the extreme... but when it goes off you're looking at attacks at that speed for a solid 10 seconds of combat. At 10 seconds of combat you're looking at 26.7 swings. If I apply hemo once every 3 seconds I will consume all of my own charges minus 3-4 out of 30 in that 10 second time frame.

You need more then one hemo rogue in a raid. Period.

Alright so here is a summary of what I have gotten from this thread. Correct me if I am wrong, and please add if I missed anything.

Most people believe that hemo>than Combat. But the difference is not huge.

The best raiding spec in regards to hemo is 11-28-22: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Weapon Expertise is a must.

The variables to the 11-28-22.
4/5 Sword Spec vs 2/2 Dirty Deeds
Sleight of Hand or Dirty Tricks (If you plan to PvP as well as raid I would go with DT).
Endurance or Imp Sprint (not a big one at all, just what you would like more).

Hemo scales with gear. Therefore if you only have heroics/kara gear your best bet might be sticking with the cookie cutter combat spec.

Hemo was normalized.

Personally I enjoy Hemo a lot. Always have. So for it to be viable again in raiding is fantastic! If I can keep my DPS/Damage the same or close to my old combat spec I will surely stick with it. Thanks to everyone who has posted such great thoughts on this issue.

And when 3 hookers are blowing William Hung simultaneously, he's a sex god. Too bad it doesn't exactly happen on a regular basis.

You also have 16% +hit and a slower offhand than Killars. So you're ignoring your piss-poor +hit, despite my explicit and repeated statement that miss and dodge needs to be accounted for in any *realistic* comparison of strikes/second, and saying "Well, if the lightning hits the road at the exact second he's walking on that spot, he'd die". Excellent methods there.

Also, fill out your profile completely.

This is a spurious argument. You cannot use two cooldowns and DST (which runs roughly 25% uptime these days) to display an extreme situation, and then argue from the extreme to a general conclusion.

So is there a flat out answer for this yet?

Combat swords vs. 11/28/22?

It would seem that Hemo is better. But not by a huge amount, both are great just depends on your preference.

There is not a flat-out answer "yet", nor will there ever be. Swords does more inherent damage. Hemo provides a debuff. Both have other advantages and disadvantages in terms of which talents they do and don't have. There are tradeoffs. Hence, some people will prefer 11/28/22, and some will prefer combat swords.

After tonight, when people raid, there is a possiblity of a flat answer. Then we can decide and argue if 11/28/22 is better or 11/27/23 is. I am firm with 11/27/23 btw, and that's what I'll be testing tonight in BT.

I tried to read as much as I could. 40 pages of posts is a bit hard to take in all at once without forgetting the first 30 by the time you hit 40. I apologize for that, really.

Thanks for the advice. The top sword choices I have are Edge of the Cosmos and Vindicator's Brand. Even the Vindicator's doesn't have the top end that Drakefist does.

As you folks here are 'respected' in the community, I'll make sure to link back to your post if my raid leader laughs at my spec/gear and says no to my coming along. The guild itself is pretty deep in 25-mans right now, working through TK with Vashj down as of the middle of last week.

Somehow this just figures, huh?

The last thing I like to do is to blame things on anything but myself, but latency has been a serious issue lately with both Twisting Nether and Comcast. Was going for 4/5 Opportunity, and ended up with 5/5 and only 40 talent points remaining. As of last night's logging off, I only had 16g to my name, and a 50g respec fee. Don't yet have 300 Riding, so can only do 6 daily's(pre-2.3). I hope to rectify this as quickly as possible.

Wasn't aware of the Aggression change, really, until I started reading here. Sadly, all I saw at the time was the buff to Eviscerate and Sinister Strike... then yawned.

At least 3/4 of the gems were given to me by guildies in past guilds, and I'm making do with what little I do have right now. Some of them, such as the crit gems in the belt, were of necessity, as the Raid Leader(who, frankly, knew nothing about rogues) demanded I up my crit over everything else, to make my prior Mutilate build worthy of bringing along.

I don't admit to being a rogue master/genius, and that's why I'm here asking for advice. I'm attempting to make sure I can prove myself worthy of a dps slot in SSC/TK.

I've read as much as I could. You DO realize it's over 40 pages long, and as being someone with really poor short-term memory, I'd have forgotten pages 1-30 by the time I got to 40. /sigh

1x/4x combat mace? Please explain?

(I'm not Trolling. I honestly am hoping to improve my raiding ability as a rogue.)

I'm with Killars. I think that I will go with 2/2 DD over Sword Spec 5/5

Roguecraft 101

This should answer most of your questions and point you towards how to itemize/gem/cycle. This thread is more for theorycrafting about hemo vs. combat, not basic rogue information.

Combat Maces is generally 19/42/0 but there are variants hence 1x/4x/0, and the preferred hemo mace spec is 11/21/29 or 11/20/30.

Will do on the profile thing, you're correct that I need to fix my hit rating... We've already covered that and the majority of that will be rectified when I can log back in and the rest within a week. So next week I should be sitting happy 270+ hit.

We'll pretend it's next week, the point still hold water. This is very possible and very likely every 2 minutes. Besides that, assuming SnD & mongoose is up 100% and DST is up 25% that brings my MH to 1.78 and my OH to 1.03... that brings my norm to 1.61 swings per second (considering SS). Granted not quite 2 swings per second, but that's more then 3 swings per 2 seconds. That's almost 5 swings per 3 seconds. Still that's consuming enough charges to justify a second if not 3 hemo rogue. I didn't even consider SS in my previous numbers, which would also increase the # of swings per second by 5%.

See above for baseline numbers. Point is even considering my current stats (which is under par when talking late SSC/TK) the raid should plan for a happy middle ground. Kalman already covered a decent baseline, I noted the best case as you should take into account both. The argument is that more then one hemo rogue should be in a 25-man raid. If the rogue alone has the potential to consume 30% or greater of the charges then it would be wise to have more then one. If you assume a minimum 5 out of 25 will be melee then this should be a no brainer.

It's never triggered an OH swing... OH sword spec proc triggers a MH swing, but that's a far stretch.

As for the slow MH weapon, you used to want the slowest thing you could find because hemo was not normalized, but now after 2.3 it is. All you need to consider now is the min-max damage range. Granted the slower weapons will usually have a better range, but it does changes things a little for the higher dps quicker weapons compared to the super slow lower dps weapons.

Itemization for Hemo is now the same as it has always been for SS. Daggers are still not an option =)

No offense, but this is a retarded question. That's a ridiculous rumour I have never heard before. It doesn't even make sense.

Don't ask questions based on stupid rumours, this is not the WoW Rogue forums.

That's only true if you use hemo with a fast mainhand dagger and a slow offhand sword/mace

given the way blizzard has worked out some class mechanics in the past, it wasn;t completely outside the realm of possibility, i asked the question here because i could be sure to get a real answer from knowledgeable people.

a simple "no, that is innaccurate" would have sufficed.

Offtopic note: Killars, be careful who you argue with, Kalman was one of the first rogue spreadsheet authors. He does VERY educated statistics and is one of the more respected theorycrafters.

@Kalman, i didn't want to step on your toe. I crossed a line. Sorry. btw. greetings from Daemona.

[Rod of the Sun King] vs [Syphon of the Nathrezim] for hemo spec? Rod was better for combat maces but does the case stay with hemo also?

And does anyone know the procrate for Syphon? Never really seen it mentationed anywhere.

Edit: yes Ive tried spreadsheet.