Let me tell you my 'realcraft' experiences, then.

On my old server, in my old guild, we ran with 2 rogues for 25 man raids. Both of us started out as daggers. Our gear was very close. So was our position on the meters; we took the top 2 slots on most fights and it was a tossup which one of us took #1 on any particular day.

When Arena Season 2 came around, we decided to test swords vs. daggers by having me stay daggers and my guildmate go swords, in part because he was in a better arena team situation and could buy a set of S2 swords right away.

Result: I started losing the damage meter battles by a wide margin. Even after I completed my S2 dagger set (bringing our gear back to near parity) it still wasn't close. The only times I ever beat him were on low-armor bosses during the short period of time when I had Warp-Spring Coil and he didn't.

I'm on a different server now, so I can no longer compare to him, but I did recently get a Talon of Azshara and a S2 OH to replace my S2 MH/OH daggers. The Rogue DPS Spreadsheet predicted about 150 raidbuffed DPS gain from doing this without any other changes to my gear. I can report that it doesn't seem to be horribly wrong in practice; I'm not actually getting quite that much but the set of buffs I have enabled in the spreadsheet is probably a bit optimistic. It's certainly worth at least 100 DPS, which is substantially more than 5% gain for me.

So yes, sword spec really is that good.

Both specializations benefit a great deal from Arena items. The S2 OH dagger is vastly superior to anything you can get before Hyjal, and there's nothing to compete with the S2 MH dagger until Vashj.

I think you may be overestimating the impact of the availability of the Arena OH on swords, too. Consider a thought experiment: All else equal, what is the DPS due to weapon specialization for sword and dagger when changing between a 1 DPS OH and a 1000 DPS OH? Sword spec's contribution stays constant, because SS procs from your OH result in MH swings; changing OH DPS doesn't change sword spec DPS at all. The DPS from dagger spec, on the other hand, changes considerably since the 5% crit scales the DPS of the OH weapon.

So the point of my thought experiment is that sword spec is quite insensitive to OH weapon DPS. If you have to use a Latro's instead of a S2 OH, you only lose out on the raw autoattack OH DPS -- about 26 * 0.75, modified by crit etc. Latro's happens to have excellent DPS stats, probably better overall than the DPS stats on the S2 OH sword. It's also 0.1 faster than the Arena OH, and that means even more for sword spec than it would for dagger spec. Thus, Latro's is surprisingly competitive with the Arena S2 OH. Not as good, but not a disaster either.

I'm afraid, then, that you are going to have to be horrified. If you're beating a Vindicator/Latro's rogue, it's because that rogue isn't up to your standard in some regard (gearing choices, talent choices, player skill). Like I said above, I've seen two of the best real world scenarios to verify what the theorycraft says: both comparison between two closely matched rogues and personal experience switching from daggers to swords.

I think nobody would disagree that the Rogue DPS spreadsheet can't predict exact outcomes. (At one time pre-TBC it came close, but it really ought to be a Monte Carlo simulator these days to accurately model the interactions between haste procs, combat potency, cycles, etc. The game's too complicated now to model in a straightforward way with a spreadsheet.) But you seem to want to have it both ways: anything that's useful as a guide obviously does reflect what happens in practice to some extent, no?

Personally, I've had great success using it as a relative ranking tool. That is, if you set up your gear, talents, race, and buffs, save the DPS you get from that setup, then start playing with the options available to you, it's quite good at predicting whether your dps will go up or down, and even at predicting the relative value of different gear upgrade options. Do I rely on it as much to tell me whether spec A is better than spec B? No, but it's at least close, and when it predicts a huge difference between one spec and another, I'd take it seriously if I were you. People have done a lot of work on it to make it reflect reality as closely as possible.

Here's the thing, though. Over a given period of time, you generate a certain amount of energy from base energy regeneration, and you also generate a certain amount from Combat Potency if applicable. Both of these effects, we will assume to be independent of cycles (as they largely are).

Now let's say you gain 5 energy back on every single combo point generator you perform (let's use Sinister Strike as an example). Let's assume only the base energy regeneration of 10/s (if there were Combat Potency, it would apply equally to both cycles):

Running 1s/5r
Sinister Strikes used: 6
Finishers used: 2
Total energy spent per cycle: 40 * 6 + 25 * 2 = 290
Total energy back from Relentless Strikes: 6 * 5 = 30
Net energy spent: 260
Sinister Strike energy spent: 240
% energy spent on Sinister Strike: 92.31%
Cycle duration: 260 / 10 = 26s
Relentless Strikes energy/s: 30 / 26 = 1.15

Running 5s/5r
Sinister Strikes used: 10
Finishers used: 2
Total energy spent per cycle: 40 * 10 + 25 * 2 = 450
Total energy back from Relentless Strikes: 10 * 5 = 50
Net energy spent: 400
Sinister Strike energy spent: 400
% energy spent on Sinister Strike: 100%
Cycle duration: 400 / 10 = 40s
Relentless Strikes energy/s: 1.25

So not only does the cycle with higher-CP finishers use more of its energy, on average, on Sinister Strikes (thereby increasing Sinister Strike DPS), it also obtains higher energy output per time from Relentless Strikes. The effect, thus, does depend quite heavily on the cycle you run.

This topic has helped out my rogue nicely, thanks.

One question though - I plan on making a mace/hemo build given the changes to 2.3. Does the hemo calculation treat your main hand weapon as .3 quicker with SnD on? Or is it the static 2.6-2.8 given with the base weapon speed?

It's based on your tooltip weapon speed.

mutilate off hand weapon = Vengeful Gladiator's Mutilator - Items - World of Warcraft

You do not want to let SnD drop, ever. Hence, the ideal solution is to watch your SnD uptime carefully and do 1s4r when you can and 1s3r if you can tell that that will give you an SnD gap. If you are having trouble with that, it is better to just do 1s3r than to have SnD gaps.

First up thanks Vulajin for this thread, I've found it extremely useful in helping to plan future upgrades/compare pieces of gear =)

I apologise if this has come up elsewhere but I've been reading conflicting views on the value of different trinkets for Rogues after the haste nerf in 2.2

Pre-2.2 DST was the best by a fair margin but after the changes in calculating haste rating --> haste % I've noticed some rogues preferring to go for the combination of Warp-Spring Coil and Tsunami Talisman (and later Madness of the Betrayer) as opposed to using Dragonspine in one of those slots, are there any post 2.2 calculations on this to back up one side or the other? Also what would be the better option between Warp-Spring Coil and Tsunami Talisman assuming neither would put me above the hit cap?

Sorry if I've posted in the wrong format, first time posting on EJ ^_^

Cheers for clearing that up for me =), hope to replace the Abacus with a Warp-Spring Coil soon if Void Reaver would hurry up and drop another one after close to 3 months+ of downing him every week ><.

I wonder, has anyone researched or modeled effects of crit over hit for Mutilate builds?
Seeing how Vashj has been very uncooperative in regards of the belt I was starting to consider Don Alejandro's over my current Belt of Deep Shadows.
Common sense tells me that Deep Shadows is superior (dps wise), but I began wondering if crit might be better for Mutilate due to it's "2" attack nature, or where the cut-off point would be?

From what I understand Mutilate is a two-roll (or is it rather one+two roll system?)
First to check if the attack lands and two "secondary" rolls to check if the attacks are either crits or hits.

Assuming that the only "procs" are Mongoose (WSC+Lethality in my case. DST or MoB would alter the results somewhat I assume) would mean that hit isn't that valued.
So I'm throwing it out here as a idea.



As for the overall mutilate aspect. I'd have to disagree. The suggested spec assumes the usage of dual DP that is highly unlikely as WF is much better (at least with a warrior in the group). Even in case of GoA I would use IP over dual deadly.
I personally use: this build.
Even without Imp. Poisons I rarely find DP falling off and Fleet Footed allows Dexterity or Surefooted enchant.
As I mentioned above, for mutilate hit isn't as important so I prefer Crimson Spinels over Pyrestone/Lionseye where possible.

As far as my understanding goes, first it is determined wether Mutilate hits at all, so 1 roll for dodge, parry (in dead zone or lag situations) and miss. This roll counts for both main hand and off hand. You won't see any missed main hand Mutilate but a landed off hand Mutilate (however, you will see a main hand mutilate hit and no off hand Mutilate at all if the target is already dead after the main hand hit).
Then for each hand there is another roll to determine wether it's a hit or a crit.

Well say you get airbursted on archimonde with 4cp, usually i then ss-->rup. Do you mean a 4pt snd there would be better?