Aha... Sorry about that - complete brainfart. Can a mod remove my post / whatever?

By the way, that is one of the reasons that the abbreviation should be switched from "AP" to "AEP" or "AtkEP".

Personally I tend to use EAP (Effective Attack Power) rather than AtkEP, because it's shorter. Although I suppose there is more possibility of confusion when talking about both EAP and AEP.

Yeah, I suppose I'm not being hardcore about what it ends up being, as long as it's not "AP", and I suppose I'd kinda prefer not "AEP" since that can be confused with Agility Equivalency. EAP is fine. APEP would kinda work too, and is reasonably distinct.

Overhauled the Gear Selection section, also added a tidbit to the patch 2.3 info about valuing expertise rating. Check it over and let me know if it's okay now (I'm still a bit uncertain about two-digit decimal precision and having so many different values, but I'd rather be accused of being too comprehensive than inaccurate).

You should qualify the 3.5% loss to hit as being "vs. bosses" in the Expertise section. The loss is minimal vs. trash.

It is intentional. I'll update the other sections when 2.3 is imminent (i.e. a week away) or live.

As for geming for a Mutilate build, my hunch is (and the current Rogue DPS spreadsheet agrees for T4 level gearing) that +agi has a greater benefit than +hit. Thus, all red sockets should be +8 agi and all yellow sockets should be +4agi/+4hit.

Unbuffed, when I ran the DPS spreadsheet's agility equivalence points calculator I got 1agi=0.74hit=0.56ap for a Mutilate build. Buffed (Kings and Windfury being the key buffs), the equivalence was 1agi=0.88hit=0.51ap. Since so much of a Mutilate build's damage comes from specials and finishers, the combo point generation scaling of crits from +agi yield a better DPS boost than the white damage scaling from +hit.

(Interestingly, without Windfury +crit is worth almost as much as +hit in the spreadsheet, which shows the importance of crits in a Mutilate build. Also interesting was that going from Windfury to Instant Poison was only a ~10 buffed DPS loss for my gear level, which surprised me.)

This was my experience early Kara when I was still running a Mutilate build. Getting in 2 4-5CP finishers between slice and dices is just awesome.

Hello,

I've been playing a rogue for a while now - never had much time to play, and now I have a bit too much time which lead me to these forums. I've learned a lot about the rogue class, and I want to thank you folks for all your hard work and valuable information. There are a few things that aren't as clear to me as I'd like however and I hope that as I read, the mud will clear from the water.

I would like you to take a look at my current rogue on the armory, and give me a critique on how I could improve my raid damage. I currently am what I thought a rather pvp/pve hybrid, where I took out some points from sub (motd) and rearranged my other talents to be a productive combat build in a raid scenario. However, I feel that I'm lacking maxing out my rogues' potential quite a bit.

If you take a gander at the build; the gear I have is the "best" gear I own. There's not much I change when I pve/pvp except for a resilience/+dodge helm.

I have yet to look at my gems and their EAP worth, (which I just learned today from this post) but could you give me a critique on my rogue, and let me know what/how you think I could improve. (short of going to a pve combat swords build; since I dont have any swords or daggers that are higher than 71 dps blues)

Goatpoker, hakkar server
The World of Warcraft Armory

Thanks for the advice in advance

Just so you know, these types of posts are frowned upon - the whole reason we have topics like these with summaries at the top is so you can do the general work yourself - if you have specific questions, you'll usually get an answer by "Here's my armory, tell me what I can do better" is best left for the WWS thread.

So as not to just be a crybaby about forum rules, to answer your questions, your best bet is to look into the two spreadsheets linked in the first post of this thread - for your gear level, and to figure out how things work with your particular talent build, I'd highly recommend the DPS spreadsheet. If you end up in a more conventional combat build and with a tad higher gear level, I personally prefer the gear sheet (though that is a personal opinion). Both sheets have a lot of value, and will get you within very acceptable margins of error for the answers you're looking for.

Alright, I figured as much.

I'll have to take a more indepth look at the spreadsheets - I had downloaded them and browsed through them trying to understand... but the problem I encountered was that I could not pick gear (such as maces) that I had, and therefore I could not use the sheet as I initially thought I could.

It seems that as well created the sheet is; it's based on very high end gear specific to conventional "best" raid types - such as combat swords.

I'll be posting the thread above in the wow forums to see what type of reaction I might get since I'm not up to par yet on the elitist level.

I noticed something interesting today while leveling my unarmed skill in Blasted Lands against the invincible mob. All my strikes always hit for 139 or 140, but my critical strikes hit for 285 or 286 (about 204% damage). I do not have the 12 agil/+3% crit damage meta gem (I have the +3 damage/chance to stun one [which is underwhelming, by the way], and I took my helm off in case that was messing with something). I was just auto attacking with my bare fists, so nothing like Lethality could explain it. In fact, the only explanation I have is that Murder doesn't just give +2% damage, but acts like the Hunter Slaying Talents, and gives +2% damage and increases critical damage by an additional 2%.

Anybody else have any explanation, information or insight on this talent/situation?

This was dicussed in the Relentless Earthstorm Diamond thread; the conclusion was that, yes, Murder double-passes on critical strikes.

From the second page:

http://elitistjerks.com/509683-post30.html
http://elitistjerks.com/513443-post44.html

It was covered a few more times in later pages, these were merely the first two I found.

Hemorrhage: This ability now does 125% of weapon damage. (source)

I'm aware of it and plan to have some DPS comparisons for the new Hemo available tomorrow at some point. A rough guess on inspection suggests that an 11/28/22 Hemo/swords build or 11/21/29 Hemo/Deadliness may well equal or surpass combat swords in base DPS, before factoring in the contribution of the Hemo debuff. However, this is just a guess and should not be taken as gospel.

This thread depends on the equivalency calculations that Vulajin has in the first post. The end result is along the lines of : Raid buffs make pure agi gems better then pure ap (with the exception of 1 20 ap gem from pvp) until you get access to t6 gems (10 agi is basically always worth more then 20 ap). That will probably be all moot anyway when the patch hits and the hit cap rockets up another 60 points.

http://elitistjerks.com/536225-post549.html

I ran the numbers in the above post and, as I thought, 11/28/22 is more than competitive with combat swords, even before factoring in the Hemo debuff. As such, it may be beneficial for several rogues in any given raid to be Hemo, even if all the charges don't get eaten up every time.

I'll wait a couple days to see if anything more changes before I put this information in the first post.

Now, in the interest of balance, what buff to Hemo (along these same lines) brings it up to par with Combat Swords, but doesn't trounce it out of the water? I think it's somewhat ... silly that a buff to Sub makes it FoTM (though it's been known to happen - see arcane mages in 2.2) and something like this single change that totally affects the class and makes one build vastly superior (+5% dps BEFORE the debuff? yes please) is likely to get nerfed in the future. It may be interesting (and hell, if Blizzard reads these boards, it might even be USEFUL) to extrapolate a weapon damage % buff to Hemo that would bring it completely in line with combat swords without making it so that all your rogues should be sub. (I'd advocate a similar setup for assassination/mut builds, but Bliz seems to be happy with assassination atm).

What would those numbers look like with a 110% weapon damage modifier on Hemo? 115%?

And before everyone jumps me as a hemo hater, I'd really like it to be very viable for one rogue to go hemo and have it be an overall raid dps increase, but the marginal benefits of more than one rogue being so to be less (though still within ~5% of all other competitive builds). If it isn't, and regardless of the debuff 11/28/22 is still king, then we just have the same problem we have today (Combat being the only way to be), except it's in a different tree.

I have probably been unclear in my post, but all the theoretical DPS numbers given for the builds did include the Hemo debuff estimate. At that gear level, Hemo/swords (11/28/22) comes out roughly equivalent to 19/41+1 before the debuff.

Not trying to disregard your work Vulajin, but what kind of spreadsheet are you using for your calculations?

I know spreadsheets can only be so far precise, but comparing a 11/28/22 build to a standard 20/41 combat build with the newest DPS Spreadsheed (already updated with 125% normalized hemo), I see combat leading with a good 30 DPS. If I uncheck the home debuff (but leave it checked for the hemo build), combat is falling behind by only 3 DPS.

This is why I'd like to ask, are you confident that your spreadsheet can take it up with the DPS spreadsheet, with all its considerations and side effects, procs, etc. (but also possible flaws)?

*edit* found the answer to my question in the Hemo thread