Mace Spec no longer includes WE, you now have Mace Spec that has the stun and 1% more damage on crits (not 1% more chance to crit) and Weapon Expertise that provides 10 Weapon Expertise with all weapon types. So with Mace Spec you still want WE for for -1.25% chance to dodge/parry.

Use the Wowhead talent calculator since Blizzard hasn't updated their's: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The preferred spec for Maces is actually: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is due to the fact that Mace Spec is no where near the DPS of sword spec, so Deadliness is a better use of the points, you have to give up Weapon Expertise as well though, but since you would have to use 4 points in Mace Spec to get there it really isn't worth it. If you have equivalent Swords and Maces aka S2 Maces or S2 Swords, the swords with Sword Spec will beat out Maces with Deadliness, but if your Maces are better then your sword options, go with 11/21/29

So you weren't gemming for hit as combat fists? Also, if you are using an OH Mace, you should be using 11/21/29 (linked above)since your OH can't proc Sword Spec (and you get most of your Sword Spec Procs from your OH since it only procs off Auto Attacks now, if you have 1.5 speed OH and a 2.6 Speed MH you hit just under twice as often with you OH so you are giving up almost 60% of the sword spec procs a rogue with a sword OH would get).

Also, just to ask. Does my 5% miss rate on the boss look accurate with 339 hit and precision, and +15 wep expertise from the gloves?

I saw this thread, i figured id try it out, it is the best raid spec ive ever had...in Kara im 2nd or so on the dmg meter. thats when things are immune to bleed, when they aren't immune to bleed, im on top by atleast 1.5% on the dmg meters, going against epic'd casters, it is seriously the best thing ive ever dealth with...
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Rogue -> Talent Calculator

thats my spec, its very good, and it allows for a good amount of pvp, 3 or more garrotes a boss fight....on mag i usually get 5 ish.

Any rogue not finishing top 3 on Mag is failing in some way. Prep is lost DPS, you should have put that point in Dirty Deeds.

Kara really isn't raid content in the same way we are talking about, you don't see a full set of buffs debuffs, so depending on your group make up the DPS numbers are completely irrelevant. AKA if you have an enhancement Shaman, a Warrior running BS and Sundering and a Feral druid tossing up Faerie Fire and Mangle you are going to do a ton more DPS then if you have a Paladin Tank and all caster DPS. Depending on which classes get the buffs determines who does the best, if the warlocks had a shadow priest and elemental shaman and one could throw damage curses, or you had mages with a shadow priest and elemental shamn, odds are the numbers would swing the other way. Results outside of a similarly set up 25 man with the same buffs/debuffs and gear isn't a good basis for comparison. Also, there is no way Hemo should out damage Combat at Kara level gear and 10 man buff/debuffs.

Thanks for th irrelevant information and posting a spec that was debunked a while ago.

You missed 1 time on Moroes and the rest were dodges, you missed 3 times on Curator and had 2 dodge and 1 parries, sample size is way to small, you would only get 15 expertise "RATING" from the gloves, so about 3.75 actual Expertise, you probably have 13.75 expertise. So 1.5% chance to miss, 5.6 - ~1.6 = 4% chance to dodge... seems about right.

Energy ticks are synchronized, but that doesn't mean that hemos *have* to be synchronized. The current paradigm is to button-mash, because there's not reason not to. We have now found a reason not to. Stop assuming that spamming hemo as soon as possible is simply a given, because it's not a rule, it's a changeable player behavior. Tell players that they can do better damage by following a different pattern, and they'll follow the different pattern.

It's not that hard to coordinate if you have two hemo rogues: one spams, and the other plays reactively. The nature of the energy system means that you have a six-second window within which you can apply the hemo debuff without wasting energy. And if you're not wasting energy, you're just redistributing attack points, which results in the same total damage for that six-second period. This will only mess up when the mashy rogue gets a long string of dodges and ends up being able to hemo twice in succession--the odds of which go down with the new expertise rating.
The major exception I can think of is fights punctuated by stuns where if you have near-full energy at the beginning you will waste a tick or two. However, with full hit and expertise rating, the second rogue is only going to be delaying the half-second it takes to deplete the first hemo, which will rarely affect anything.

THanks for the breakdown. Just FYI it was Bear boss and then Eagles Boss of ZA, names had to be manually set cause WWS didnt parse the new ZA bosses.

The easiest way to time it with 2 rogues is to have 1 spam, and have the other watch the hemo debuff. When the debuff disappears, the second rogue uses hemo. Far from impossible.

The second rogue's lost dps from broken SnD uptime, or at best shiv-spammed SnD would appear at first glance to stand out far more than the gains of an 'as-needed' hemo application.

Not sure why you'd ever even consider this.

This parse would leave me to believe 1v1 Hemo might be better. On these fights you were actually giving the other rogue the debuff, and on Bloodboil you did more dps w/o the felrage. I still havn't managed to raid with my guild yet, besides ZA, I guess it's just a bad week for attend, but I assume a parse like yours would be what mine would be around.

This definitely shows you'll want the min of 1 hemo rogue though, the hemo debuff for the raid completely takes off the loss in personal damage (if there actually is any). I guess im staying hemo, sounds good.

Its impossible to "watch" the hemo buffs to make sure they are always up. We run with feral druid, 2 prot warriors, Dps warrior, 2 hunters and pets, Enha Shaman, and 3-4 rogues. That much melee means there is no way to properly time when to Hemo cause the debuff will disappear as soon as you put it up. Honestly you can theorycraft when to properly time when to swing but then your running the risk of gimping your own DPS and cycles. If your gonna ruin your dps by doing this then whats the point of going hemo.

Just for reference I have been playing differntly with Hemo, and I don't see an issue with having 2 Hemo rogues in the raid.

When I was Combat Sword you never knew when you would get a couple CP Procs in a row, so you always wanted the minmum energy possible, however with Hemo there is no unexpected Energy gain, so I have been watching the buff, and getting a feel for how fast it goes away. Even when I have the energy to spam 2 or 3 in a row I tend to pause between, I can still get my energy level down without spamming it. The only time I really spam is if I know I have to run out so I want as close to 0 as possible when I run out, or sub 35% where I want to keep energy as close to 0. Pre-35% I am normally not hitting Hemo on the energy tick like I was with Combat, unless the debuff is already gone (which isn't the case when people are running in and out - like on council).

You need to re-read what he said. He did not say an "offset application" -- which implies some rediculous notion of two timed out sequences where you have perfectly figured in the total amount of hemo charges used in X period of time, and broken it into timed applications of the debuff across two rogues running then independant yet non-overlapping cycles -- he said, one spams and the other applies when he sees the debuff down. This is not the same thing.. and you comparing two rogues running spaced cycles based on debuff usage is no where NEAR running mutilate against yourself efficiently. I'm not even sure how you're trying to relate the two.

What you're suggesting might work. It might make a minimal gain. It would, however, also hold a crazy lop-sided ratio of effort to value -- and not in the good way.

You don't actually need to explicitly watch the enemy's debuff bar. All you need is a mod that says HEMO UP--HEMO DOWN, or "time since last hemo: 0:01.45" or beeps on a hemo application or something, by parsing the combat log. And as left is saying, it's just an offset. With enough it and expertise its an entirely deterministic half-second or one-second offset, too. The second rogue is losing maybe half a second of slice and dice over the course of the fight, which altogether adds up to probably not even one autoattack.

edit for kellhus's reply: Because the hemo combat cycles are so deterministic, one rogue holding back until the other's hemo is down results in the two rogues working in offset lockstep as a natural consequence. The comparison to mutilates is a valid point in that, unlike a GCD-limited class, being constantly energy-starved means waiting half a second (or even six seconds) is valid strategy without hampering dps.

One of the main topics of discussion is whether 2 rogues will have synchronized hemo debuffs when normally attacking a boss. If this was true, then 2 rogues with the same combat spec should also be fairly synchronized in applying Sinister Strike.

Wow Web Stats

I'm not as technically competent in combat log parsing as many of you, but I skipped to the end of this log and looked at myself and Genecyde through a manual review. I noticed almost no instances of executing Sinister strikes at the same time. Clearly part of the the difference is that we apply different cycles due to gear disparities.

Genecyde and myself were both in the same party with the same buffs and the I beleive the same combat sword spec (I was 18/43 and I think he is also, he might be 19/43, but all the key talents are the same). We have different MH weapons, gear and trinkets.

Also, related to whether it would be useful to have more than 1 hemo rogue in a raid, we must have an idea in different situations of how quickly the charges will be consumed.

Here's where my skill in looking at the combat logs was lacking. Turns out that when you select the mob, WoW web stats tells you exactly how many normal attacks there were (/facepalm). Physical attacks on Hydross 3835 over 452 seconds = 8.5 per second, Lurker 3442 over 538 seconds = 6.4 per second, Morogrim 4555 over 538 seconds (wow - coincidental) = 8.5 per second, and Leotheras 3216 over 500 seconds = 6.4 per second. I exclude Fathom Lord since there aren't rogues on all the mobs and it's a little meaningless.

So hemo uptime would average between 1.56 and 1.18 seconds, leaving 1.94 to 2.32 seconds of downtime. So up between 33.7% and 44.6% of the time. It's very unlikely that the other rogue in my raids will respec to do dual testing to determine how often the debuffs would overlap, but it seems likely that they would.

I've respecced since this Tuesday's raid to 11/27/23 swords. I definitely intend to keep that spec next week when we kill these same bosses again. We still have at least 2 more raids this week as well. I am very interested in this thread and hope I can contribute in some meaningful way.

I saw someone inquire into a 3x/0/3x spec a few pages back I think. Well, I decided to give this a shot as my PvP spec, but wanted to see how it performs in a raid setting. Here's the WWS. Sorry, I usually log out in my PvP gear, but raiding gear is mostly Karazhan and Tier 4 epics, with a piece of two of SSC/TK equivalent loot (Bloodsea vest and WSC). My unbuffed stats are 1776 AP (with deadliness), 301 hit, and 24.87% crit. Group was enhance shaman, feral druid, warrior, retribution paladin, and me. No flasks or food were used, though I think I may have used an agility elixir in some of the fights. Keep in mind it being the first time I played this spec, my cycles were far from optimized.

Wow Web Stats

Unfortunately, I haven't raided in a while and don't have any WWS of me as full combat. So while it's difficult to determine exactly how this spec stacks up against full combat, we can at least see that it puts up some decent numbers. The other rogue in the raid was specced combat daggers, and his gear is just slightly worse than mine, I believe.

No, I did read what he said. I think we're interpreting it differently...

By "spams", what I assume he is saying here is that the first rogue will button-mash, thus using energy as quickly as he gets it. IE, presumably, this rogue is using his energy exactly on the server "tick".

The second rogue doesn't "spam" (button-mash). Instead, he waits 1-2 seconds or so after the energy tick before applying his Hemo. This gives time for the first rogue's Hemo debuff to wear off before the second rogue's Hemo debuff sticks. Nevertheless, the two rogues are still both using 35 energy within the same timeframe, and both (theoretically) running the same cycle. If the debuff isn't wearing off, well, then the second rogue applies his anyway so that he can keep his cycle up.

The difference (at least as I see it) is between button-mashing or not. I was comparing it to a Mutilate cycle because both amount to using precise energy management and proper timing of specials in order to maximize DPS. As for effort required and whether it is worth it, that's going to be up to the rogues trying it out.

Mind you, this is theoretical. In practice, dodges, misses (for lower geared rogues), movement, and lag will probably interrupt the cycles at least some of the time. With a server-side tick, however, it shouldn't be too hard to get back relatively on track to at least a "you use energy early; I'll use it late" sort of "cycle." I'd be interested to hear of anyone trying it, though. At the moment, my guild is just a small RL friends guild and I don't have another rogue to try this with.

Thanks for this. Your solo Hemo uptime would be about 1.5 / 3.5 = 43%. Therefore, a rough and ready estimate (assuming that there is absolutely no synchronisation of Hemos due to the energy tick) is that 43% of the charges from the second rogue will be wasted. It would thus seem unwise to bring a second Hemo rogue to the raid, since this is just about enough to tip the balance back in favour of combat specs.

Something just occurred to me that I overlooked. I left out hunter pets and the physical attacks from hunters. Since we have 3 hunters in our raid, that's a pretty big oversight. I'll add those in and edit my earlier post.

Fixed this in a more scientific way...

Point taken, but when it comes to spreadsheets, the modeling of seal fate is inaccurate to say the least. Put 3x/0/3x into the Rogue DPS spreadsheet and see for yourself. If I recall correctly, it comes out well ahead of every other spec, including full combat (when including hemo debuff damage estimate). My goal here was to provide some data, to the extent of my ability, in response to a question posed earlier in the thread, and I think I helped in that regard.

My real question now isn't what spec I should be, but rather what trinkets I want to use. With T6 Shoulders/Gloves, Stormrage Sig Ring, and serrated blades I'd have 1036 passive (560 + 476) pen. I also have Executioner now so thad be 1876, roughly 300 armor away from the base armor on lower armor bosses and 1800 from high armor bosses.

I have the Ashtongue trinket, the MoTB, and WSC. My question is which two should I use for the higher armor bosses and even the lower armor bosses. Should I use MoTB/WSC against the higher armor bosses (if all proc id have the high armor boss at around 500 armor if all procced together).

Using the senario where they usually wouldn't proc together (WSC/MoTB/Exec) should I still use both armor pen trinkets on low armor bosses to make the chances of having atleast 1 up at a time more likely. If all did proc together or actually if only Exc w/ WSC procced together id basically be wasting most of the trinket (id go over cap by 700), but atleast the boss would be at 0 armor. Atleast the proc on WSC alone would bring the boss to 0 armor, making it prob the most powerful proc/trinket in the game at that point.

Let me know what you guys think.

Out of curiosity, has any testing been done to prove that you cannot take a mob below 0 armor? Is it possible that a mob with negative armor takes even more damage? Everyone seems to take 0 armor being the minimum as a given, I'm just wondering if it was ever actually tested.