Well, that's basically cookiecutter raiding shadowstep with Blade Flurry instead of Shadowstep... which means you lose the mobility advantage of Shadowstep, but still have the low DPS of Shadowstep. So, off the top of my head: on trash, it's a little better than Shadowstep but still worse than combat. On bosses, it's just plain terrible. So I'm gonna go with "no".

As regarding Cheap Shot applying poisons, I think that might be true, since I've myself experienced applying poisons with feint. It's easy to test out, just go to Gammon in Org, Criipling poison on main hand, and aggro him using feint. Every third feint or so, he'll get the poison.

Edit: After going back and trying it again i can't seem to reproduce my initial result, so my original observation was either a bug in the game occasionally causing non-damaging attacks to proc poisons or my memory is just simply wrong. I tend to believe the latter.

I've run into a problem recently, I'm getting threat capped more and more often. Mostly this is due to the fact that our MT stacks avoidance, which is fine, just makes it hard for me to dps as much as I would like to. For example this evening on morogrim I had to vanish at around 90-92%. In addition my enhance shamman has just started twisting totems so while not perfect I still had salv and grace of air. I was also attempting to get feint into my cycle, which pretty much resulted in me keeping SnD up and getting a rupture off every other cycle. This was also before I got Talon off him and was still using spiteblade, now I'm sure it will only get worse. I didn't end up being threat capped at the end as I got graved three times in a row at the end, but from the rate I was closing before that I certainly would have before vanish came back up. Does anyone have any recomendations of how to avoid this? If this keeps up I will probably end up specing Hemo to get a shorter vanish. The only thing I can really think of currently is to try dps slower at the begining so that I can vanish at 85% or so.

Give your tank ~ 10 k threat before you start dps, if you have salv on and use feint after a few attacks to begin with you should be fine. If you aren't, vanish. If you still get anywhere near your MT on a boss like morogrim he is doing something wrong.

Relating to the table you have given for evaluating items, how does dps factor in for weapons? I'm trying to decide whether the slightly better stats on Akil'zon's Talonblade - Items - World of Warcraft are worth losing 2 dps to Merciless Gladiator's Quickblade - Items - World of Warcraft .

Also, I need a convincing arguement to persuade my Huntard guild leader not to take DST, seeing as it is the best rogue trinket in the game. His arguement is that it is also the best hunter trinket in the game, though I haven't seen any illidan geared hunters using it.

For future reference, how do I link items correctly?

Yes, I suspect he is doing something wrong. I am going to try to talk to him and get him to do more tps, but until he does that will not solve my problem. You implied that I might not need to vanish if I give him a 10k head start, that is not anywhere near the case. I can't say what his threat was at when I started dpsing, but I had the shaman threat reduction totem in addition to salv and was using feint when it was up the whole fight. Does anyone have any ideas for a cycle that works feint in and still manages to keep a decent rupture uptime?

I think it's your tank who need some advices, not you. Catching a tank on threat having salvation AND tranquil air (and even using feint) is really strange, not to say impossible. ( especially on fight like morogrim)
I know it won't help you in any matter but on morogrim i start dps when tank has ~7k threat and never has to use feint (not even vanish in most cases). One or two water tombs u might get act like uber_feint if u want to know
Just saying that so you will realize that starting ~7k threat after tank and simply dpsing without any kind of active agro reduction from your side IS possible, Everything is up to your tank

İ have heartless in MH(from ZA) and s2 sword on OH, waiting our tank 10k threat. Just using 2-3 feign and like you at %90 using vanish. İ havent any threat problem and our shaman continues wf totem and strength of earth totem. im using my cd's after vanish like BF,AR, haste poitons etc.İ havent any threat problem especially after vanish. Morogrim is a hard-hitting boss, maybe your tank making something different for surviving.

Generally tank-spank, non-aggro reseting bosses are no problem for me like morogrim.

If you are threat capped that much, your warrior definitely needs help on improving his TPS. He's holding back the whole raid dps and will cause you to wipe due to insufficient rdps on enrage timer bosses.

As an interim solution to keep your cycles as optimal as possible, I'd suggest to respec to hemo trispec 11/28/22 or 11/27/23, dropping one point of dirty deeds for preparation (and 2 points of elusiveness).
That build is definitely not the absolute maximum dps you can do (that's irrelevant when you're in a threat capped situation) but it will give you plenty of vanishes which will ensure that you never need to include feint in your cycle, except maybe one or two very early in the encounter before your first vanish.
And it may also help increase the warrior TPS thanks to the hemo debuff

When your warrior gets his act together, you can respec to whatever max dps template you prefer.

This is most likly the autoattack (that starts as soon you use a "spell") having a lucky procc at the same time the Cheap Shot (or other opener) lands.

I've managed to apply poison with non-damaging abilities on mobs several times in different circumstances (granted, 'feinting' DP on sheeped mobs in heroics wasn't the brightest of my ideas).

In the rogue DPS spreadsheet, currently, armor penetration procs are handled by averaging the armor penetration over the uptime of the proc. However, it is known that this approach is faulty. Thus, both Warp Spring Coil and Executioner enchant are undervalued. The problem is known by dontmindme, he will probably remodel the procs it in the upcoming releases.

Well, if WSC is undervalued in the spreadsheet then doesn't that mean it's even more ahead of AToL then? Depending on gear WSC is perhaps 15-20 DPS higher than AToL in my spreadsheet atm so if it in reality is even more than why is AToL rated higher in this thread?

So I don't know much about numbers... and I am fairly new to actually calculating out what is better than what... But I play a rogue on my server with a 20 41 0 spec with an envenom rotation of something like Xs/5e. I am only beat out by beast mastery hunters as fair as raid dps goes (so long as its not a poison immune boss like VR). I read your post about rupture but the numbers still dont add up to me... My envenom crits often. I have a 25% crit rating with swords and it can hit upwards of 1500 to 3000 easily and every now and then 4000. Fully raid buff without mongoose procs I have a 31% crit. 33 if I was fortunate enough to hook up with a shammy for grace of air. So if I usually hit for 1100 without criting and crit for 1500 to 3000, how is a rupture better? A 5r does 1000 damage plus24% of your AP. I have 1800 ap. so that would be like 432 added damage... 1432 damage. And you cant crit with rupture, right? So how is it better? I dont doubt you guys know what youre doing I just wanna understand.

Sorry, I forgot to state that AToL will get a revision too.

There are a couple things to consider:

- Envenom can be resisted, which blows your combo points - Rupture can be dodged, but you don't lose your points
- Deadly Poison continues ticking when you Rupture, but not when you Envenom. If you -really- want to see why Rupture is a better choice than Envenom, look at how much that 5-stack of Deadly Poison is doing that wouldn't be there otherwise.

The thing that concerns me though is that you said you're running a cycle using Envenom. Either you have some very good hit rating, or you're poisoning your main hand sword (which is a BIG no-no). Saying that your shaman is dropping Grace of Air makes me think I may be right, but I sure hope not.

Ideally, you would only have Deadly Poison on your offhand, and allow your shaman to drop Windfury (which a Deadly Poison on your main hand would override). This provides much higher DPS, and consequentially would make an Envenom cycle harder to maintain. Enter: Rupture.

While there was a long explanation for this issue, I will try to cut it short.

1st, rupture costs 25 energy instead of 35. 10 energy usually means 300 damage. So, you lose 300 damage by using a 35 energy finisher for the start.
2nd, your envenom hits for (1250*0.7+2500*0.3)=1625 on average
3rd, your rupture hits for 1432 damage. If you add the 10 energy gain by using rupture, it becomes 1732 damage (which can be further improved by mangle on the mob.
4th, you lose all of your deadly poison charges on the mob. You lose many poison damage there.

Our tank actually is in mostly BT/MH gear, he took a break from wow while he was in the top guild on our server and just started playing again a bit ago, but regardless he stacks stam/avoidance. I think he sockets mostly for stam, but either way his rage bar will be full after the first 10-20 seconds of the fight anyway, he was not rage starved he just doesn't have much in his gear that would boost his tps. I didn't realize that morogrim slowed attacks, that makes me less concerned. I guess another part of the issue is that I'm still not 100% accoustomed to monitoring my threat, as almost 100% of SSC/TK has either a decent amount of not in melee range or some aggro reset built into the fights.

Our tank is in mix/match T4/T5 and the only people who have threat issues on Morogrim are the warriors and enh shaman. I ride him pretty close till about 80%, vanish, and never catch up. Then again, we keep the feral in his group and have an expose weakness hunter, so his TPS is pretty slick on those fights. He does NOT have a shaman for Morogrim, however.

Fundamentally, I wouldn't trust the Rogue DPS Sheet very much on trinket effects, since they tend to be the sort of challenging, fiddly effects that give that sheet problems. Thus, for this particular question, I would argue that the Rogue Gear sheet is the better resource, and what one finds with it is that Dragonspine is clearly tops, and at low-T6 itemization, Ashtongue is clearly 2nd, with Madness/WSC in the next tier, followed by Tsunami Talisman/Berserker's Call. However, at high-T6 levels of itemization - particularly if you're using Executioner - WSC/Madness catch up with Ashtongue and, in fact, WSC becomes quite plausibly the 2nd best trinket in the game.

For instance, EAP values for me with my current gear in typical raid buffs:
DST: 215
WSC: 189
AToL: 185
MotB: 177
TT: 155
BC: 150

If, however, I downgrade my gear to, say, what I was wearing 2 months ago, I get these values instead:
DST: 207
AToL: 193
MotB: 176
WSC: 176
TT: 155
BC: 150

Basically: there's a lot of armor pen gear in T6 which increases the relative value of WSC and MotB; since WSC has more armor pen, it improves faster allowing it to claim the 2nd best trinket slot.

On the topic of DST - While I agree it IS the best rogue trinket ingame, it is also the best Warrior AND Hunter trinket ingame. For rogues, we have AToL and WSC which are both *nearly* as good. Warriors and Hunters have.. TT and Beserkers Call? Not sure how Madness factors in for them, but its about 4th best for rogues. In terms of drop rates and availability.. it does sort of make sense to let a hunter have DST in the long run since every rogue will get a AToL and its pretty hard to not get a WSC. That said, if your Hunter guildmate is a Huntard and can't maintain any sort of proper cycle.. or the warrior thinks 2H dps w/o Slam or Blood Frenzy is a great idea... well yea, the rogue will make best use out of it.

This of course changes if for instance Gruul is your guild's progression fight and AToL, WSC and TT are out of the picture.

What I'm trying to say is - giving DST to a rogue for the SOLE reason that he is a rogue and the "competition" is a hunter makes no sense.



As for the Morogrim threat thing:
Likely the main issue is improving your tanks TPS. Get him a Shaman who drops WF. Not GoA, WF. Having a feral druid in there can't hurt and since you already have a shaman dropping WF, a dps warrior (battle shout) can't hurt either. That said, if you only have 1 dps warrior - give him to the melee group of course. If your tank is in danger of dieing, you can likely fill the 3 remaining spots (tank + shaman being first 2) in the tank group with something a bit better than another warrior. A warlock (imp), a pally (devo aura), a tree (ToL), etc are all good choices for survivability.
Next, get your tank to read http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-protection_warrior/ . It has excellent information. As a 2-3 sentence general summary.. Use Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Devastate as your primary "GCD" rotation. If you have enough extra rage to sustain that rotation, slip in as many Heroic Strikes as you can while maintaining the GCD rotation - on Morogrim you should have no problem keeping Heroic Strikes up most if not all of the time. Get some hit rating and/or Expertise to up TPS.

As for how to survive in the meantime.. Start the fight after 5-6k tank threat with auto attack and feint only. Keep SnD up if you want - singe SS and just keep refreshing off of Ruthlessness procs until you need to SS again. The idea is that you are doing ~60% of your total dps and feinting on CD - the more you can feint, the more dmg you can do in a threat-capped situation. The longer you can wait to vanish - the more of a threat lead your tank has and the more threat you dump. Hold off as long as you possibly can. As for a cycle? 5s/5r should be fine with 3x feint in there. Drop to a 4-point rupture if you need I guess to lower your dps (wow.. that felt weird typing that) and save you some energy (40 energy for 1 less SS, 5 more for less ruthlessness, 35 net savings).



Rupture vs Envenom:
Yep, just like everyone said:
-25 energy vs 35
-loss of DP stack
-Mangle (can't compare to Storm Strike since *someone* will use those debuffs anyways - its not really a raid dps gain, especially if you have an ele sham [or moonkin?])
-etc

I would say, from a RDPS standpoint, avoidance is the worst thing a warrior can stack. If you don't have enough healing to keep an adequately geared tank up on most any ssc/tk fight, you should recruit healers, not get the tank to stack avoidance.

A tank can only "not" take damage so often, there will be strings of hits that avoidance can't mitigate and if the healing isn't there, he'll still get trucked. From a rogue standpoint, its' just as bad. If the tank is avoiding the attacks, all that rage and possible tps is lost and thus all the possible dps is lost. I've yet to see a t5+ tank gear/gem for avoidance and win as the MT. If you are tanking the second illidan flame, maybe avoidance is best, you'll have made enough threat by that time to cover...but overall, never, ever be an avoidance tank.

As for the whole "vanish at 90%". If a vanish at 90% is saving you from pulling agro again, why not wait like 10-15 secs before attacking period and then going all out? I can literally vanish at 65-70% and still come withing 5-10% of the tanks total threat by the end of the fight. I normally wait for 15-20k threat from the tank on that fight and then vanish around 60%. But, like the others have said, its your tank, not you, don't worry. Get him fixed and you'll probably see a lot of raid encounters made easier, especially if you've heard locks or mages gripe about pulling agro or sitting at the ceiling the whole fight.