I was comparing a dagger build and a sword build.

Changing from a dagger build to a sword build, basically this is what happens:

1.First the 5 points of dagger specialization are changed into 5 points of sword specialization.

2.The 5 points of Opportunity (subtlety tree), and the 3 of Puncturing wounds (assassination tree) are converted to:

(Assassination tree)
1 extra point in Ruthlessness
1 extra point in Lethality
2 points in Murder
3 points in vile poison

3. Leaves us with 1 point to spend.

And the strange thing is what happens with that point.
This seems to be put in the talent ‘Nerves of steel’ in the combat tree.
Can someone tell me why this point is put in a talent, that is a filler talent, and which is unneeded to get to the higher talents? (I am sure it is unneeded, as the dagger build didn't need it either to get to Surprise Attacks)

As far as I can see it is more useful to put that extra point in Vile poisons (a 4th point)
Or even put it in another talent.

I know that removing movement impairing effects can give you extra damage (ie more time on the mob, but is the poison point not worth a lot more?
It appears to me that a 20/41/0 build is more damaging then a 19/42/0 build.

I don't know if it has been covered so far, somewhere in the thread (or that I have read over it). If so, then my apologies, and please point me to the correct posts then.

A matter of preference. The Nerves of Steel talent also works on many abilities that would be unresistable otherwise.

I would argue that in practice those resists give you alot more DPS-time on the target. eg. Kaz'rogal.

Because Blizzard still loves to use fear mechanics to control the difficulty of fights and an extra 5% resistance to this equates to more DPS on those fights than 4% extra poison damage.

As for Garrote, I use it on most encounters myself. It gives the tank a little extra time to build threat and does solid damage compared to SS when there are no Sunders up on the target. I don't always use it on fights like Gruul or Void Reaver though; the room is so massive that I'd lose way too much DPS in-time stealthing all the way to the back of the bosses.

I do have a couple more questions of my own.

-From my understanding, a Rogue using Imp EA is going to be a rDPS increase over his personal loss from using Rupture -- is this correct?
-Because of that assumption, lately I've been thinking of asking one of our least-geared Rogues to spec for and keep up Imp EA on bosses to play around with it and see how our results turn out. I know I read of this being a strategy that a lot of guilds use on Brutallus; my guild is far from being in Sunwell, but is this a worthwhile strategy to use beforehand (think SSC, TK, early MH)?
-Besides the rDPS factor, how much, if any, would this interfere with Warrior threat generation from Devastate? I tried to read the Prot Warrior megathread to find an answer, but the math on that thread just kills me. It didn't sound like Imp EA would interfere with threat generation, but I thought I'd ask to make sure.

You don't ever use EA if there is a warrior tank, as imp EA will overwrite sunder stacks. Sunder/Devestate is a prot warrior's main source of threat. If you have bear/pally tanks, then by all means have your least-geared rogue do imp EA. Hell, our dual-warglaive rogue does Imp EA rotations on Brut some nights

Yes, Imp EA is a rDPS increase, and a fairly significant one, assuming you have at least 2 physical DPS in the raid (the rogue and one other). The catch is that if you have a prot warrior tanking, you generally can't use it - it costs them quite a bit of threat, and I suspect it'd be almost impossible for them to hold aggro with EA up. I mean, talk to your tanks, and if they're okay with trying it feel free to do so and tell us how it goes; but I suspect you'll find that you're badly aggro limited, which negates the advantage of Imp EA.

Additionally, Imp EA isn't appropriate in all circumstances; it takes rather longer to stack up than Sunders do, so on a fight with lots of interruptions it's not worth it - it doesn't take too much Imp EA downtime before Sunders catch back up in rDPS contribution. So while it's good for largely sustained fights where you get it up initially 10 seconds into the fight and never drop it, it'd be a poor choice for, like, Al'ar or Solarian.

So, all in all: Imp EA does have it's uses, and there are fights where it's a great benefit in combination with druid (or paladin) tanks. But it's not something you can use all the time.

Edit to address Goldengiff's comment: keeping up Imp EA doesn't really cost a 2-glaive rogue any more damage than it does a rogue with lesser weapons; the only damage you're losing is Rupture, which only scales with AP; hence, it's entirely possible that a Infamy/Savagery rogue will lose less DPS than a 2-glaive rogue, depending on what their other gear looks like.

I was able to convince our Prot Warriors to allow me to try using Imp EA on bosses which they were tanking after reading this article on Tankspot:
Warrior Expose Armour vs. Sunder Armour Revisited - TankSpot
I was using the 5s/5e rotation, which I found somewhat difficult to keep up on certain fights, especially Supremus (for whom I returned to using Rupture). None of the tanks had any complaints in terms of threat loss, and I did not notice a drop in their TPS as reported by Omen (I tried to keep on eye on to be sensitive to any problems). I'm including a WWS of that night, the first 3 Naj tries were with a Paladin tank, but everything beyond was tanked by a Prot Warrior.
Wow Web Stats
EDIT: I realize there are a lot of "didn't notice" and other subjective descriptors. If there is anything I can do to generate more reliable evidence, I'll do everything in my power to get it. I'll be adding another WWS of tonight's raid if that's deemed worthwhile.

Hmm. For the longest time, i was using t4 helm+legs despite many significant upgrades elsewhere. Now i'm using badge legs but still t4 helm. Has anyone done some serious math as far as how much dps is lost from rupture dropping? I'd wonder if you compared the static increase of the badge pants over t4 pants, if it outweighed the old rupture damage over its complete cycle.

Assuming 6 second rupture downtime per 18 second cycle (12r + 6), 275 average tick.. that's 825 damage every 18 seconds lost, or 2750 per minute, 45 dps. Switching from t4 pants to badge pants on the spreadsheet, it actually claims a 48 dps increase. Hmm, that seems excessive. I wonder how much rupture downtime the spreadsheet model assumes - because there's a rotation that's recommended, but that doesnt imply how it calculates rupture damage falling off.

If this all somehow works out, it does seem to imply that at least in ideal circumstances, dropping 2 pc t4 for even 1 piece upgraded like that, is worthwhile.

One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of our damage is our white damage, particularly with SnD. So, yes, you will lose fairly significant damage due to the downtime of Rupture, but according to the spreadsheet its a net gain in dps, presumably from the increased white damage you'll receive from the better pants.

EDIT: I double checked, and I do believe the decreased rupture is accounted for. In Aldrana's spreadsheet it lists the set bonus value of 2pc T4 as 39.30~ dps. For me, I've noticed it takes nearly a full tier upgrade in each piece in order to increase my overall dps just from losing that set bonus.

I have a question. I've noticed that lately many rogues are using mutilate for high-end content (by which I mean Sunwell).

I left mutilate behind after Karazhan, and have been combat swords ever since.
However now that I'm working on Sunwell (Just Kalecgos attempts so far), I'm wondering if all these rogues using a mutilate build in there know something I don't.

I have pretty good swords (Infamy/S2 quickblade), but I also have decent daggers (boundless agony/messenger of fate) so I don't think there's any reason as a non-human for me to prefer one build over the other from a weapons perspective at the moment.

Has mutilate at the t6 level finally caught up with combat swords?
I'd greatly appreciate input from someone else at the t6 level who may have experience with these builds.

So, the math in that tankspot article does have some definite issues, but fundamentally I suspect their answer is on the right order of magnitude - it's probably "about" 80 TPS. It might be 60 and it might be 100, but it's not going to be 500 or anything. Which, I admit, is a smaller threat loss than I might have expected, and there are certainly circumstances where that loss is survivable.

On the other hand, it's also true that, at least in my guild, a number of people are already threat limited. There's a fair number of people in the raid - warlocks, fury warriors, sometimes even our dual-glaive rogue - who pull off the tank even as it is. So if tank threat were lowered by 80 TPS... that would be a bad thing, on the whole.

But, if you're in the situation where no one is even coming close to pulling, and your tanks can lose 80 TPS and still hold aggro against everyone - or if, for instance, they have a significant head start on the mob - then, it could be worth considering.

It does, easily. The math is in the spreadsheet. The 2pc T4 bonus is "good" but it's not "that good". Back when people would make small upgrades from T4 to T5, it made sense in some situations to keep 2 pieces of T4, because the upgrades were small when looking at it piece-by-piece. However, now that people can easily upgrade directly to T6 quality badge gear, this just isn't true anymore.

The spreadsheets don't "assume" any arbitrary Rupture uptime. It calculates the average length of your cycle, and adds the damage from one Rupture to that span of time.

Depends on gear/progression level. Imp EA at boss armor values comes out to about a 3% increase for physical DPSers.

For a Brutallus-killing guild you'll have something like 7 of them (5 melee group + 2 hunters) turning out 2k DPS each, that's a 420 DPS increase. Losing Rupture damage is going to take ~80 DPS off that, for a net of 340 DPS boost. If you have a warrior tanking, you're costing yourself threat - a progression guild can probably afford that though. For a less-progressed guild in BT, you're looking at your physical DPS only turning out an average of ~1500 DPS each. After accounting for loss of Rupture damage, you're looking at only ~240 DPS boost. Moreover, at that level, you may have less-geared or less-skilled tanks, which means you can't afford to lose the threat.

In addition, for my group, we often end up with a prot warrior on the raid even when we have a feral or pally tanking. That is, we run with one of each type of tank, and on fights where the feral's tanking, the prot warrior does leet Devastate DPS(*). In cases like this, the prot warrior is turning out ~1k DPS, 25% of which is from Devastate, which will be approximately halved if Expose is up. That drops the net gain from using Expose Armor down to only about 115 DPS, which is much less worth it, especially given the problem of temporary drops, etc..

Of course it goes without saying that if you don't have a prot warrior on the raid, it's pretty much always going to be worth using Improved Expose Armor. But if you do, then for most T6-level guilds it's only worth it on multi-tank fights - i.e. any time you can guarantee that the prot warrior isn't hitting your target.


(*) Yes, I know it usually makes more sense for the prot warrior to tank and the feral to go DPS, but there are some fights where a feral tank is plain better for other reasons, not least of which are resistance fights where the warrior doesn't have the kit yet. The feral is also our highest threat tank overall, so on DPS race fights it actually makes sense to lose his DPS in exchange for a higher threat ceiling on the rest of the DPS.

Sure, I mean, there are other considerations regarding raid composition. Of course, on true progression content it's not unreasonable to respec your prot warrior for a fight he's not going to be tanking - our MT for the rest of Sunwell goes MS every week for Brutallus so we can run 2 feral tanks + Imp EA.

That said: even with all the considerations you raised, it's *still* a 115 DPS boost, and a DPS gain is a DPS gain. If your Imp EA rogue is bad it's possible that you'll lose the advantage, but with a little practice it's not really that hard to keep Imp EA up for all but the first 8 seconds or so of the fight (which is about what it takes to get Sunders up anyway). So I maintain that it is generally worth it to use Imp EA on any reasonably sustained fight that is not being tanked by a warrior.

Yes, I know it overwrites the Sunder. The entire point of my question was how much threat, if any, is lost from Devastating without the 5 stack of Sunders up due to Imp EA overwriting it.

All good points, thank you! And thanks for your explanations as well Aldrianna and songster.

I know I got a couple PM's when I was running around as Mutilate with the Sunwell Daggers (Twins and Kalecgos ones), about spec'ing Mutilate, but I would be curious if there is anyone else in a M'uru level guild that is actively raiding as mutilate, my experience was I could get close to the same DPS if I wasn't getting chained heroisms, but in a muti heroism situation I fell behind. In addition I was having to pay more attention to rotations and combo points and as a result wasn't able to help out as much with calls, group swaps etc.

My experience was that it was not an increase in DPS, if anything it was net even to a slight decrease and that is going from 100.2 DPS Sword to 108.1 DPS daggers, and it really didn't offer and advantages, and considering we are working on M'uru, the poison on target issue was more then a little annoying.

Hello, i am a bit new to the whole theorycrafting and was wondering what exactly 3s/5r means.
Does it mean that you get 8 CP for a 5 point rupture and the next 3 point SnD while you have a 3 CP SnD running, or do you throw anything else in, so that rupture is not up permanently?

It means you build 3 combo points, cast Slice and Dice, build 5 combo points, cast Rupture, then build 3 combo points and refresh slice and dice, so on and so forth.

So, forgive me if this a foolish question, but I was discussing this very thing with my friend (who plays a hunter) just tonight, and we came up with the exact same math that is laid out in the quote. He then brought up the subject of how crit affects the math. Since hit and crit are on separate rolls on the attack table, neither affect the other. However, with haste, you are simply swinging faster... which means more rolls overall. So then, does haste actually end up adding more than hit does, due to critical strikes?

This is my friend's math. So, say you had 90% hit. Out of 100 swings you land 90 of them. So if you add 1% hit you go up to 91. If you add 1% haste, you go up to 90.9. But now thinking of crit... if you had say, 30% crit, and you treated each critical hit as two swings, you'd end up gaining around 1.17 swings instead of .9 from 1% of haste rating, while still only the 1 from hit. So, 1% haste is 91.17, and 1% hit is 91.

I feel though that I am missing something, since I've not heard of anything like this in regards to haste before, and I try to keep pretty updated on my roguecraft. Is this math correct, or is there a factor that my friend and I are missing here?

Procs. It doesn't matter if you hit or if you crit, both will proc a WF / Sword Spec / Mongoose / DST / SoC / whatever. Also, current theorycrafting math indicates that PPM effects (such as Mongoose, DST, MotB, etc) are based off of hasted speed. That is to say, if you increase your haste, you will not increase the frequency of such procs. However, if you increase your hit, you have more landed attacks which are capable of proc'ing .. stuff.

From a strict "damage from auto attacks alone" sense, yes you are correct. Haste will add more than hit. However, since hit increases the frequency of procs and therefore uptime, it is *generally* a better stat, point for point.

At the risk of sounding like a bit of an ass: do you really think that these effects aren't modeled in painstaking detail in both spreadsheets?

In terms of a slightly more helpful answer: yes, crits increase the value of haste relative to hit. But glancing blows reduce the value of haste relative to the value of hit. And Sword Spec and Windfury count hit twice and haste only once in resolving their effects. And proc uptime of PPM effects is increased by hit and not haste.

Fundamentally: yes, the effect you describe exists. But there are many many others that aren't included by your logic; as such your analysis is incomplete.

Try using Pawn.

Download here: Pawn | World of Warcraft Addons | Curse
or use WowAceUpdater.

Then look at the first post in this thread and use the weighting values that have been posted to create your own Pawn Sets.