First of all, thanks for a fantastic thread. Has really helped me push dps.

Quick question, and Ive gone through some spreadsheeting here as well. Its the hit-factor combined with the 4/5 swordspec-build. Im currently at 312 hit unbuffed, and suspecting this is a bit high. The spreadsheet comes up with 280 hitrating unbuffed, which seems a bit low again, and if I adjust with hit / agigems I actually get a higher rough dps by bumping hit up to aprox 300.

Do we still value hit as much in the hybrid hemo-swords build as in a pure combat swords? Page 1 states that hit should be as important, but I havent seen any real numbers on this yet.

I hope this is a relevant question, and also hope it hasnt been discussed to death before (at least I cant find it here at the moment.) There is currently a discussion going on in the hemo vs sinister thread, but no conclusion has been drawn yet.

And again, thanks for a fantastic thread!

With my current gear i can go up to 340 hit unbuffed but as some of you mentioned before it seems a bit unnecessary, although new hit cap was confirmed for 363.

Instead of that i still stick to 270-280 hit after 2.3 and my miss % was around 2.

The point is... is it pointless to get 363 rating ?

Oh btw, i'm a combat dagger (pve) rogue, with weap expertise & 5/5 precision.

There's no better way I can say it. Use the best pieces of gear available and don't worry so much about whether you're capped, uncapped, "low" on hit, or "near" the cap.

This may be a bit off topic but it's rogue specific. After the discovery of the new ranged weapon found from a lock box I started my quest to see if I could get as lucky. I pickpocketed mobs all over Shadowmoon Valley and ended up with around 20 lockboxes. To my suprise, [The Night Blade] was in one of the lock boxes. Has anyone else gotten a BoE epic from a lock box? I'm willing to believe that [Spinesever] is a normal BoE epic in the sense that any mob can drop it and now as a result of a bug or not, pickpocketed lock boxes have a chance to drop an epic BoE item.

So has a consensus formed yet concerning Hemo vs. Combat in 2.3? Pre-patch almost everyone agreed that Hemo builds would be putting out as much, if not more sustained dps, once the changes to Hemo went live. And now that it has gone live, many people are stating that they do noticeably less dps after spec'ing Hemo. But since this is all here-say, and there are a million variables to take into account every time you're fighting something it's hard to know for sure where things currently stand.

Gern, please notice, that while the hype of combat/hemo speccs lasted, on the PTR hemo wasn't yet normalized as it is on the Live Realms currently. After normalization you need some quite good gear to get en par with combat swords when going 11/27/23 for example.

Considering all this discussion on armor penetration, why nothing about using expose armor when it won't gimp the tank's ability to gather threat (any non-warrior tank)? Given the equivalence point chart to calculate its relative value, it's worth about 615ap - or 922.5ap when specced - to all physical dps for 30 seconds, costing only 25 energy and 5 combo points - which I'd think is a fair investment.

Though I get the feeling this is more about higher-end raiding, where I've heard warrior tanks are practically required due to their superior scaling. But no mention at all? Unless I'm missing something critically crippling about this ability.

Just about any high-end raid will have a protection warrior as the main tank. In any instance where a protection warrior is not main tanking, there is almost always a protection warrior in the raid anyway, so he has nothing better to do than apply Sunders. Although Imp Expose Armor is superior to 5x Sunder by 475 armor, it's not superior by enough to justify the rogue giving up his normal Rupture or Eviscerate or whatever.

Last time I used Expose Armor in a raid was to debuff Fathom-Guard Tidalvess, because we use a druid to tank it and all the warriors are busy tanking other stuff. We have a druid tank Morogrim, but again, since there's a prot warrior, he does Sunders.

(edit) And if it wasn't clear, yes, this post is heavily biased towards raiding, which I would imagine is what the large majority of people needing theorycraft of this degree would be interested in.

One of the sources I checked was wowwiki & they say otherwise. Since they calculated SuA additiv to other modifiers long before it got changed in the spreadsheet (in fact I only assume it did get fixed there by now, didn't check myself), I at least wanted to ask if the're also right in this.
Anyways, thanks for clarifying.

That all being said, if you find yourself in a situation where there is no, and will be no sunder armor applications, expose is a very large raidwide buff and one rogue should be trying to keep it up - I have been doing so with prot pally/feral druid ZA group. Cycles will very much depend on set bonuses - I'm currently using 2pc T4, so I can do 1s/5r/1s/5xp without losing SnD downtime as combat. If you're running 5s/5r or any other cycle that's nearly 30 seconds long, you'll just end up replacing rupture with expose.

First, don't give Wowwiki, itself, too much credit for declaring those additive first. I did testing on this when the 41 point talents came out pre-BC, and I changed the formulas on the backstab page way back then. As any Wiki, it's modified by it's users. And maybe its relevant that I'm following these forums as the premiere source of theorycrafting, and not Wowwiki.

I should probably add a little background. I had developed my own personal spreadsheet and was looking for various formulas after the pre-BC changes to weapon skill. Wowwiki was one of the first places I looked, because many people at least made an attempt to post the actual formulas. Many of these are spot on, but many aren't. I built some double-checks into my spreadsheet and noticed a problem with the backstab formula in particular. I did some testing, fixed it on Wowwiki. I actually ended up finding these forums after months of trying to find out what weapon skill actually did (as opposed to random forum posts saying it didn't seem to do much with no real quantification). After seeing the work done on these spreadsheets, my own spreadsheets are now gathering dust as, in particular, the DPS sheet was enough ahead of my own effort that I converted.

I never really went back to Wowwiki to fix anything else. There are too many pages, linked in too many ways and enough errors it didn't seem worth my time. That and the fact you get people reverting changes because they "think" they know better, including people who believed melee has a small chance to always miss, not wanting to believe there could be a hit cap among other issues. The fact that anyone can make changes without any relevant testing turned me off to the concept of correcting errors in Wowwiki.

The 125% applies to but weapon damage and attack power. I may have something to add to Hemo formula mechanics when I get some time to do more testing. I did a little preliminary testing and discovered a few anomalies. I was cut off before I could double-check my findings, it was time for raid invites and haven't had the time to go back and prove and document my possible findings yet. The biggest thing seemed to be an apparent 11th charge...it seemed as though the first Hemo gains the benefit of the debuff, even when no debuff has yet been applied. If this holds true, it means the real formula is 125% (weapon damage + AP/14*2.4 + 36) as it appeared you get a free debuff on all your Hemo attacks. Again, this should be taken with a certain grain of salt, it needs to be verified, but even with a low-range weapon, my first Hemo seemed to be doing the same damage as subsequent Hemos (with the debuff up).

Well, that's exactly why I wanted to revisit it. My very quick number-crunching seemed to indicate that I was getting the debuff benefit, but I was also hurried as raid invites had started and may have miscalculated something. As to testing has already been done, I've heard that other places, and until I see the actual tests, it's hard to draw conclusions. For example, I had heard how Surprise Attacks, Opportunity and Aggression were multiplicative, how it had been tested, yet no one could point me to that evidence. I would have believed it too, if I hadn't already tested Surprise Attacks when the 41-point talents first came out pre-BC and found it to be additive. If you can point me to specific posts or other forums where this has been tested, it might narrow down my own testing a bit. At the very least I can check out their methodology to see if the testing was sound.

It should be noted, I prefer to do all testing on Live, as Blizzard seems to make any number of changes during PTR testing, including sometimes undoing changes temporarily and reinstating them on Live. We'll see. This isn't the only thing I'm looking at.

I switched to hemo/deadliness today from Combat Maces, and I have so far been underwhelmed. On trash, am I supposed to do a 1pt SnD then hemo until evis? or would a 5pt rupture to start off with be best?

ModusTollens thats pretty basic.

1s/5r rotation. While you can check the spreadsheets to clarify your best cycle, most combat/sub specs will want to use the same rotation.

Also evis, is only a filler finisher, and used on bosses like hydross and void reaver who are bleed immune.

DPS spreadsheet says 3s/5r, which is understandable for bosses. I got so used to combat mace cycles that I am wandering in the dark a little, not knowing what to expect. This thread says that hemo/deadliness isnt that far off on damage with combat mace; the spreadsheet put hemo/deadliness a full 60 dps in raid buffs over combat maces with my gear and gems. My problem is, dps meters is telling a whole different story....

Maybe I didnt word the first post correctly. This is for trash mobs.

Spreadsheets are never an exact science. They are more of a reference tool then anything. I need to be a better reader in these forums, you were clear enough on the trash mobs. I personally feel, in any fight, you want slice up constantly, so going for a 5 rupture cycle off the bat seems fairly counter-productive. Of course, sometimes your fighting low health trash, and the rupture won't get the maxed milage, but you do need to consider the fact it does avoid armor, and with sub spec it will outperform eviscerate by a healthy margin *even when you don't get the full duration from it*.

In the end it can be as simple as common sense.

Your target has 75% health at a 5 cp? Rupture
Your target has 25% health at a 5 cp? Envenom/Eviscerate

I personally prefer keeping the mace spec for the stun utility (i'm stunning trash in ZA, to my surprise) and the +5% crit damage.

My spec is outperforming my old combat mace spec, but my results my have several contributing factors (going from 368 weapon skill to, 21 expertise for example)

Getting slice up immediately is imperative for every single build. So start with slice after your opener.

After that, rupture is your next best damage / energy, but you'll lose effectiveness if it doesn't have time to tick. So you drop the biggest rupture you can, based on the expected time to death of the mob. Generally this means building CP until the mob is at about 50% health and then rupturing for 3-4 points. After that, continue to build CP and then either eviscerate in the last couple of percent or refresh slice if it's fading. Bear in mind that Dirty Deeds boosts all yellow damage when mobs are low on health, so a useful tactic is to eviscerate at about 5% and hope to refresh slice from a Ruthlessness proc.

Your goals are:

(a) Keep slice up at all times
(b) Use ruptures as long as the damage isn't going to be wasted
(c) Spend excess CP on eviscerates if the mob is low on health.


I haven't yet tested to see whether Envenom is useful as a final finisher - with builds containing Vile Poisons, it generally is a good idea to use Envenom rather than Eviscerate in situations where the DP stack won't have time to tick out (i.e. final finishers on dying mobs). However you don't get any poison talents in a PvE Hemo build. In any case it's annoying to be dependent on the DP procs to build the stack. Right now I'm just using IP on my offhand for trash: if the DP won't have time to tick and you're not using Envenom, then IP comes out better.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned yet that made sense to me when mentioned by a fellow guild rogue...

We NEVER stealth in raids. The loss of dps time that it takes to get behind someone for a garrote/ambush just doesn't seem worth it most of the time. I would often lose 5-6 seconds at least trying to get into position for an opener. I'm combat swords and I open every fight by running in out of stealth and whacking the mob with SS. My white attacks start ASAP this way.

Of course there are times when you want to use a stealth opener, depending on the trash, but in almost all 25 man raid situations I think they lessen your damage output. The same is true of many 10 man situations.

Also the damage per energy of garrotte vs ss can be debated.

Speak for yourself. On any boss fight you need to give the tank a couple of seconds to establish aggro - there's no reason to not to start in stealth. Particularly if the mob is being misdirected onto the tank, in which case you can be standing in position 30 seconds before the pull, so movement speed is irrelevant.

Stealth when it's useful. Don't when it isn't. Needless overgeneralisations don't help anyone.

I stealth on trash so I can pickpocket them.

He did.

So anyway.

I've formerly been Combat Hemo maces, double goose on S2 MH/OH. I'm a bit undergeared compared to the other Rogues in my guild (I joined a couple weeks back), but thus far I have done pretty strong DPS considering (almost always top 5 in 25-mans if not top 3). Last night, I went to SSC and won Talon of Azshara, which I put Executioner on after the raid, and with my little Latro's (fiery) in tow specced Combat Swords.

Now, I had my old info in the spreadsheet, which listed me (without the added Hemo dps checked) at 676/1250 DPS. My current spec and gear (replaced icon of unyielding courage with abacus, and grips of deftness with fel leather) lists me at 697/1261. I'm aware my offhand is 26 DPS below my last one, but even with S2 OH sword (which I'll hopefully be able to get next week), my dps only goes up around 15. Not the massive jump I was hoping for, but my main concern right now is that the spreadsheet lists Executioner on my Talon at 15/28 DPS behind Mongoose. That's an awfully big gap right there, and combined with the marginal spreadsheet dps different with my old spec (and very underwhelming grinding dps compared to my old spec - about 50 dps less), I'm concerned I'm just doing something totally wrong here. I'm worried that the next time I raid, I'm going to underperform.

Armory's in my profile, any ideas would be appreciated. I know spreadsheets are just kind of guidelines, and I try different specs, gear arrangements, and read a lot of info when I can, but advice is always welcome.