Without getting into the whole "weaving a third finisher into Mutilate cycles" point (as I have very little experience in the matter, though I understand that there are reasonable alternatives that some people prefer), fundamentally this really just comes down to the eternal question of Envenom vs Eviscerate. And conventional wisdom on this is that in most cases, the loss of DP damage is such that Eviscerate proves better. Now, I know you assert that it stacks up again pretty quickly, but lets look at this a minute:

1) If your attacks are happening every 1.08 seconds, and you have a 34% chance to proc, that's one stack every 3.18 seconds assuming everything hits. In practice, not everything hits; I'd say 90% hit rate is more likely, which takes us to one application every 3.5 seconds.

2) At one stack every 3.5 seconds, that's 17.5 seconds to get the full stack back up, during which you lose, on average, something like 945 poison damage. An Envenom may be bigger than an Eviscerate, but is it 900 damage bigger on average?

Also, of course, there's the fact that "it's worth using one every 3 cycles for Mutilate rogues" is not generally what is meant by "PvE viability".

I am sporting a 4set T5 at the moment, and my server is right around the bend from completing the Anvil and opening the new Badge items. I'm currently progressing through BT, doing attempts on RoS and was wondering how the [Trousers of the Scryers' Retainer] compare to the Slayer's Legguards. I am asking because 1). Should I break 4set T5 for one piece and possibly swap in another piece (shoulders) and yield more DPS than the 4set? And 2). Should I just wait for the T6 legs and not get the Trousers? Yes, they are a upgrade over the Rogue T5.

I can't imagine that any of the spreadsheets linked on these forums (or, say, in the first post of this thread) would answer this question.

While browsing MMO-Champion i realised I forgot about an item that will be coming to servers very soon...

[Righteous Weapon Coating]

This at first glances seems to be better than deadly poison?

Obviously it depends on the proc rate etc but what do people think?

With regards to hit rating:

When I first came to this forum to gear up my rogue pre-raid content and very little of my gear was even on the spreadsheet (it slowly got there as I did more quests), I had been using Dr Damage as an in-game mod to determine what was the best for my DPS. It was constantly "under"-evaluating hit rating by what was listed here, but as I got better gear I figured out why. Once you hit level 70, your AP is probably very low unless you had the purple LW set ready to put on. Your crit rate probably isn't that great, but given that there's a lot of quest gear with crit rating it's probably decent. Together, that means that your best stat is almost certainly AP. And that's what Dr Damage and the EP calculator on the sheets told me once my gear got good enough.

As good as hit rating is, and as much as people say that it's the number one rogue stat, it's really relative to what else you can get. When trying to talk about this with members of my guild, they agreed that you certainly wouldn't drop 200 AP for 1 hit rating, but failed to grasp the fact that the cut off point could be as high as I was telling them was being calculated via spreadsheets/mods. You must do your own research to determine if the item you're going to get is better and not just use the fact that it has/doesn't have hit rating as a sole basis of comparison. As I was leveling, Dr Damage constantly told me the items with a ton of AP were better even though I lost hit rating and given that I wasn't suffering terribly from strings of misses and was hitting a lot harder, I trusted that it was accurate.

Nevertheless, hit rating is extremely cheap compared to other stats once you have level 70 purples and more things that rely on hitting the target. With AP (and crit%) going higher and higher, it becomes better and better to cap both expertise and hit ratings, and for the former it's basically up to a spreadsheet to tell you when to switch around gear. For the latter though, what hit rating you need for the cap can vary depending on the fight (is most of your DPS on adds that aren't level 73?) and buffs from your raid (Imp FF). You also may need to wear non-DPS gear for resist fights and fights where your best DPS gear doesn't provide you enough HP. That gear will probably have less hit rating, so you should never pitch gear until you are absolutely sure its worse than something else you have in absolutely every conceivable encounter.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Dr Damage doesn't take into hit (and haste) when determining the expected damage of your attacks, but only your AP and crit rate. So it would make sense going from a high hit low AP item to a higher AP lower hit item would give you a damage 'increase'.

Seems to me that using it for calculating the average damage your attacks will land for (unmitigated) is what it's good for, but for proper evaluations of potential dps in a controlled (theoretical best-case) environment is best done with spreadsheets.

Im curious about the Shard of Contempt.
I hear it is a 5% DPS increase for any rogue. Any thoughts?

Bornakk on the Dagger Rogue Issues:
WoW Forums -> Won't there be gear scaling issues?

I'm sorry if this has been answered before somewhere but I couldn't find anything yet. Does anyone know at what armor class Brutallus is figured to be? Like Voidreaver around 8800 or even higher maybe?

So far it doesn't seem to be wise using armor penetration trinkets etc, since you can't stack it to a sufficient degree on that boss to be as effective as pure haste/ap stats. With all the new armor pen. items available in Sunwell it would be interesting to know at what amount of -armor it would make sense to do so again.

Brut is ~7700 armor just like most other 'high' armor bosses.

It makes no less sense to stack armor pen against him than it does against a boss like Gurtogg Bloodboil - that is, while armor pen is less valuable, it's still great, and will still provide similarly substantial dps gains.

hello,

i heard rumours that the number for the weapon expertise cap is only an estimation and its possible that it is higher especially the cap for parry. how was that cap number measured or is it a direct information from blizzard?

i am asking because i got the belt from vashj+the new trinket shard of contempt and i am a human rogue what would give me way to much expertise. i am thinking about using the belt of deep shadows+new trinket instead of vashj belt+bloodlust broach

/edit 2.question is the dps calc on raidcalc.com asuming that i am behind or in front of the boss?