Really? Even with a gear set that is aiming for avoidance and not DPS?

I'm guessing that your threat generation in a suit that doesn't optimize a lot of important rogue stats (hit rating, for example) is going to be significantly less. Keep in mind that you're also attacking from the front, and many bosses parse at 13-15% parry (see posts in The Protection Warrior thread). That's a pretty big hit to threat right there, and it's not like you can get some expertise to mitigate it.

Well, it depends on your gear, clearly. A number of the earlier gear sets stated that reach 100% have quite a bit of T5 and T6 quality loot in them; thus, you actually wind up with quite a bit of hit rating, tons of agility, and so on. I mean, you certainly do *less* damage, but I don't think your damage drops by half or any such thing; and with the 30% aggro reduction that everyone else has from salvation, I think your aggro would be, if not spectacular, certainly adequate.

20 crimson spinels? That would piss half the guild off and take (at least us) 2 months minimum. I guess you could farm juts for this purpose, but I'm not sure that you'd get what you might expect. We have had more than a couple weeks now with 0 spinels.

Yeah.... I think this is the sort of experiment better done on PTR to start with; once someone does it on PTR and proves that a) it can be done and b) it's actually good for something, there's a chance a guild might spring for it; until then, it seems sort of unlikely.

The problem i rather see is stuff like Shadowmoon Insignia... we have 5 active warriors, 2 active ferals and we have seen like 3 drops so far. Not even talking about the occasional Paladin speccing Prot for Hyjal Summit. I am still curious though if someone will manage to get it working.

Is there yet a concise list on the optimum gear? And on a side-note, it might be reasonable to fork the rogue discussion out to a new thread.

Going by the leather list on page 5 (albeit for a druid) I'd say a rogue is going to lose a TON of damage potential.
Certainly in the 50% range. You'd end up at ca 1000 agi, but you'd be hit starved, and have way less AP. Remember that almost all your enchants and gems are to be avoidance oriented and not for damage purposes.

Keeping aggro is a lot more difficult than drawing aggro. Tanking is about keeping aggro the whole time. Add in a parry string by the boss (they parry a lot) and you are in trouble. Especially in those cases where snap aggro is important (think phase changes on Illidan, Zul'Jin, ...).

But this is just theoretical talk until someone tries it. I expect a phenomenal failure (for aggro reasons) though

Well, all gems will be Agi, not dodge, and same for enchants where a possible. For a rogue with Bok + Sinister calling, agi is more dodge than dodge rating, whilst also providing AP and Crit.

You are right here.
Nonetheless the helm, shoulder, wrist and legs enchant would not cater to your aggro holding needs ^^
(and the trinkets would be pure avoidance even for rogues)

Regarding threat:

*Salvation means another player must generate 42.86% more threat to pass the tank, 57.14% more to cause the mob to turn to them from melee range, 85.71% more to cause the mob to turn to them from range. Tranquil air is rarely dropped, which would mean that after salvation another player would need to generate 78.57% more threat to pass the tank, 96.43% to cause the mob to turn on them from melee range, 132.14% to cause the mob to turn to them from range.

In other words, with liberal use of misdirects and proper group set up, a meter-topping rogue might actually hold agro doing 1/2 of his or her normal damage.

*Many classes/players do not even use the threat reduction tools available to them (e.g., invisibility, soulshatter, vanish, feign death, feint[lol]) to anywhere near their fullest potential, since traditional tanks generate enough threat to make them unnecessary.

*Unfortunately a complete avoidance tank doesn't benefit much from buff agro (PoM, Earth Shield, thorns effects), but in a pinch you could have all your melee attack from the front feeding a rogue tank an endless supply of combo points.

Well, the only list designed for a rogue so far is in post 50. However, it's a couple percent over the cap, so it's not really optimal. In terms of optimizing it further, one could go one of two directions:

1) Use easier-to-get, cheaper items, or
2) Use items with more rogue stats on them to generate better aggro.

Some investigation will need to go into determining the easiest to get 100% aggro set and the actual best set; I'll see if I have time sometime this week to work on that.

Well, the thing to be careful with here is that it's probably not a good idea to try to pull stuff directly with a build that cannot afford to eat an accidental hit from behind; hence, rather than pulling directly everything would get MDed to you, which, last I checked, means you are not considered the "owner" of the mob, meaning you don't get the extra 10/30 percent margin before people pull. But, point remains: if you can generate 70% of your usual damage, you're probably fine. If you're at 60%, people will need to hold back a bit and use vanish, etc... but it's probably still doable. Below that would get iffy, but I think that 60% number should be totally achievable.

I almost fell off my chair laughing when I read this. It's an excellent idea, and really calls into focus just how ludicrous this would be it if actually works. It does have the downside of hurting your melee's DPS, and it wouldn't work on bosses that cleave, but there are defenitely fights where you can conceive of doing this.

So, I put together a reasonable option in terms of a plausible gear set for making this happen as a rogue, by a couple of criteria:

1) Hit 100% avoidance
2) Don't use any high-end items that you wouldn't reasonably have anyway (i.e., no Shadowmoon Insignia)
3) Generate as much aggro as possible.

So, best option I've found so far:

[Slayer's Helm], Relentless Earthstorm Diamond + Delicate Crimson Spinel, Glyph of the Defender.
[Necklace of the Deep], 2xDelicate Crimson Spinel
[Slayer's Shoulderpads], 2xDelicate Crimson Spinel, Greater Inscription of Warding
[Thalassian Wildercloak], +12 agi
[Slayer's Chestguard], 3xDelicate Crimson Spinel, +6 stats
[Insidious Bands],Glinting Pyrestone, +12 defense
[Slayer's Handguards], Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst, +15 agi
[Belt of One-Hundred Deaths], Delicate Crimson Spinel, Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst
[Slayer's Legguards], Delicate Crimson Spinel, Nethercobra Armor Kit
[Shadowmaster's Boots], Delicate Crimson Spinel, Glinting Pyrestone, +12 agi
[Delicate Eternium Ring] +4 stats
[Band of the Eternal Champion] (or Revered ring), +4 stats
[Drake Fang Talisman]
[Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch]
[Blade of Infamy], +20 agi
[Umbral Shiv], 2xDelicate Crimson Spinel, +20 agi
[Barrel-Blade Longrifle], 2xDelicate Crimson Spinel

Everything on this list is reasonable rogue DPS gear, reasonably socketed for DPS, with the exception of 2 BoE items (Necklace of the Deep and Delicate Eternium Ring) and one Karazhan drop (Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch). Some of the enchants are screwy, but that just costs money; you don't actually have to request anything totally unreasonable for a rogue to have from your guild (although they might balk at the number of Crimson Spinels).

Now, if I'm adding this up correctly:

730 agility, 38 defense rating, and 98 dodge rating from gear; Adding an NE rogue's base 163 agility and 181 agility from buffs (see post 50 for details of what all these buffs are), plus 15% for Sinister Calling and 10% for Blessing of Kings, gives a total of 1358 agility. 38 defense rating works out to +16 defense, and 98 dodge rating is 5.18% dodge. Hence our total dodge rate is 5% (talents) + 5.18% (dodge rating) + .64% (defense) + 1% (NE racial) + (1358-11.5)/20 = 79.14% total dodge, minus .6% from being 3 levels below, for a total effective dodge of 78.54%. Parry is 5% base plus 5% from talents, +.64% from defense, minus .6% for being 3 levels below, for a total of 10.04%. And enemy miss chance is 5% + 7% (debuffs) + .64% (defense) - .6%, for a total of 12.04%. Hence, your total avoidance is

78.54% + 12.04% + 10.04% = 100.62%

against a level 73.

Note that actually getting a Shadowmoon Insignia in place of DFT allows you to do useful things like put Exec/Mongoose on your weapons which will significantly increase your DPS (and thus aggro); however, even without it you have reasonable DPS stats; by my count your unbuffed stats are 2168 AP, 31.38% crit, 105 hit rating, 25 expertise rating, and 350 armor penetration. Oddly balanced? Certainly. Weaker than a full T6 dps-geared rogue? For sure. But with a 0/20/40+1 spec, this could plausibly generate enough aggro to not drive your DPS nuts.

@Moogul
I plugged the gear Aldrianna listed into the spreadsheet and a 11/10/40 will do ~1250dps compared to 0/21/40 doing ~1310dps resulting in 0/21/40 being better for threat generation, especially as it includes Riposte.

Aldrianna, put a tank oriented enchant on the proposed legs since you've put one on the proposed helm. Nethercleft Leg Armor grants 12 agility, which will increase the final avoidance figure, where Nethercobra will not.

Also, I know you were going for a minimum of "off-spec" items, but simply substituting the Phoenix Wing cloak (or possibly the badge cloak?) for the Thalassian Wildercloak will likely net you a little extra additional dodge.

Combining the two approaches could get you over the line.

Re: leg enchant. I thought about it, actually, but here's my thought. What you're mostly getting from a Nethercleft leg enchant is Stamina, which you don't care at all about; in terms of utility to this character, you're trading 50 AP and 12 crit rating for 12 agi - and on the whole, trading less than 1% dodge for 40 EAP doesn't seem like a bad exchange on the aggro/avoidance tradeoff metric.

Fundamentally, I just went to Lootzor, sorted items by how much avoidance they give, and then took the highest-aggro item in the top couple results for each slot - this is, for instance, why I picked Thalassian Wildercloak (which has a lot of nice DPS stats on it) over Phoenix-Wing Cloak (which has slightly higher avoidance but no DPS stats at all).

However, since I didn't really go through and analyze all the tradeoffs, so it's entirely possible that you can make some swaps like the one you propose to squeeze a little more aggro out - for instance, it would help aggro quite a bit to get Mongoose or Executioner on the MH. But in terms of someone doing a feasibility demonstration of this (on PTR, or whatever), I think this set of gear would do fine; it's not *too* impossible to get, and I don't think it's *that* far behind the optimal aggro setup.

Edit: Oh, and on the topic of specs: since your first 10 points in combat need to be 5/5 lightning reflexes 5/5 deflection, you're not able to get Precision with an 11/10/40 build, which really adds a lot of nice DPS; hence, the tradeoff between the two specs is 5/5 Precision, 5/5 DW Spec, and 1/1 Riposte vs 5/5 Malice, 2/2 Murder, 3/3 Ruthlessness, and 1/1 Relentless Strikes. Now, Relentless Strikes is a very powerful talent point, but the others are somewhat weaker; and DWSpec is well up there on the list of powerful talents as well, so my instinct was that it would be better - which seems to be verified by Koaschten's estimate.

The main question is: Does that spreadsheet model the Setup talent correctly? If not, it's 'valuation' of Relentless Strikes is probably inaccurate. Honestly, it seem likely that it does not since most modeling system assume a rogue is not tanking, but is DPSing from behind.

Well, one of the nicer benefits of the tanking leg enchant (if someone is really going to try this) is that it allows you to swap down to agi rubies instead of spinels in several slots. Instead of requiring 15 spinels, that would drop you to 9, most (all?) of which would be going into T6 gear.

edit: I think Elementium Band of the Sentry or Ring of Sundered Souls both provide more total avoidance than the Hyjal DPS ring; they might provide enough to eliminate another spinel or two.

I'm trying to compile a complete list of obtainable and cheap gear to see how close I can get. For instance, obviously the X11 Deathblow is the best, but I'm not an engineer. However, a Styling Purple Hat is both a reasonable substitute (difference is 20 agility worth of gems). I recognize that my path won't give me 100 avoidance, but I want to get close to see if it's manageable in 5 mans.

For instance:
Rings - [Ring of the Stonebark] (via easy quest) is worse (but obtainable) vs [Ring of Sundered Souls]

My main limitation is that my guild is no where near T6 presently, or really even much past starting SSC, so most of the raid level items are unobtainable for me.

As I've stated above, I'm tantalizingly close to a workable set of gear. I've reserved about 8 rubies and I'm just going to burn them in the Skulker's. the Blade of the Unrequited. the Necklace of the Deep, etc. Once I can grab the Shattered Halls boots I'll burn the Heroic Badges to get a cloak (if the Devilshark hasn't dropped yet). The Styln' Purple Hat is an interesting alternative to the Grimgrin Faceguard in that it can simply be bought. My ZA team saw Zul'jin tonight for the first time but is unlikely to run next week, so I'm not sure how long I'll wait before testing this out. In other words, given the cost of re-specing, re-enchanting my Tier 5 shoulders with the tanking enchant in between raid cycles, etc. the extra 300g for a Stylin' Purple Hat doesn't seem all that stupid.

I still don't really see me tanking anything against threat, so I'm more seeking the whole "with buffs on me and debuffs on the mob, I simply don't get hit at all" thing. but presumably if we ever use this in a raid, my threat lead should allow me to tank whatever it is until it's dead so long as no one attacks it for a while.

If you get it together, it might be worth testing it out vs. Attumen (he doesnt do any magical damage from what I remember), and seeing how far you can get.

I was going to say that Nalorakk would be another good target, but I forgot that he does that annoying shout, which will unfortunately cause you to die fairly quickly - bring one healer though, and it should be doable. healer stands behind the boss and heals you and he through the shout, you tank Nalorakk (through both phases), laughing all the way home.

Edit: In fact, there are probably quite a few bosses, that whilst not 'soloable', will be duoable by avoidance-rogue + healer, as long as the healer can heal through the various periodic magic damage. Malchezaar would fall into this category too, if the healer can regen enough to always heal (and/or dispel) the shadow word pains and shadow novas, and you can keep up concentration to dodge infernals for long enough, he'd be doable.

What is the spreadsheet DPS of a comparable T6 equipped and gemmed rogue?

One note, I believe the best second ring is the Level 70 Green ring 'of eluding', which is 21 agility and 21 dodge. Wowhead and lootzor don't seem to have it in their databases. I picked up a 68 ring, and have a bid out a on 70 right now.

Using all "Best in Slot" Gear, Dual Warglaives, going close to the hit cap (say all 10 hit with 2 shadowsong amethyst for meta) with a 19/42/0 specc and default buff state when downloading the 0.9.1 version of the sheet, i get ~1770dps, which would relate to 880tps with salvation (30%) and inherent threat reduction (29%).