First off, thanks for this thread, the OP and many of the following replies have been an interesting read and they've helped me stave off boredom at work

Anyway, just wanted to comment on a couple things...

Regarding threat problems on Morogrim; honestly to me this sounds like crappy tanking. I don't have the best gear in the world by any means but our last Moro kill my DPS was 1500 and I go pretty much balls to the wall right from the beginning. The only lead time I give the tank is pretty much the time it takes for me to walk from the back of the pillar to the boss, so like 5 seconds at most. Threat wise I ride the MT pretty hard but I never pass him and the earliest I've ever needed to vanish is like 50%. Dunno, maybe you're doing considerably more DPS (certainly possible) or maybe your MT is just not generating much threat. I've never felt it was an even remotely agro sensitive fight though (for rogues anyway).

As far as trinkets go I was lucky to get DST back in the day when Gruul was considered hard but I've had shit for luck on trinkets since then so I'm still using hourglass as my 2nd trinket. It's interesting to read about everyones opinions on trinkets, espically armor ignoring ones such as WSC....

...which brings me to something that's been on my mind lately. I wish there was a more reliable way to quickly model the effectiveness of ArP vs other stats but it seems to be affected by so many non-linear things that figuring out a basic per-point value is very difficult. Using the gear/dps spreadsheets helps with this obviously but it would be nice if there was an easier way to weight ArP vs other stats accurately.

A lot of work has been done on armor reduction passively and as a proc. The simplest way to see the results is to download the rogue gear spreadsheet and switch out different trinkets.

Well, to some extent it depends on your tank. If you're that threat-limited and working on Tidewalker, it's probably safe to assume that the fight is reasonably long (8-10 min) - hence, you really should be planning around 2 vanishes rather than one.

For instance, when I was doing Tidewalker the guild's MT had extremely low aggro, so in order to stay behind him I'd wait to open fire, feint regularly, and generally play very conservatively on aggro down to 85-90% (sitting at 95% tank aggro all the way down), vanish, and then burn all out; I'd catch him again before the end of the fight, but usually there was enough of a lead that vanish was up again by the time I caught him the 2nd time. So I'd vanish once at 90 and once at 40-50 or so, and it worked fine.

Working out the numbers: say you generate 20% more aggro than the tank. Thus, in the 5 minutes between vanishes, you generate as much aggro as the tank generates in 6 minutes. Hence, you need to give him a 1 minute head start to avoid catching up - so vanish 1 minute into the fight, and you're pretty much good. And 1 minute into a fight that can easily take 10+ minutes, and we're talking a vanish right around 90%.

Of course, if you have to choose between waiting a bit too long to vanish or blowing it a bit too early, it's better to wait longer - so you might want to wait till 85 just to be sure, but you get the idea.

The numbers also change if you overaggro the tank by more (or less) than 20%; however, the less you beat him by the sooner you can vanish the first time, and if you're beating your tank by more than 20%, something is usually very wrong. So blowing at 85-90 should usually work pretty well.

The other thing to keep in mind is that there's no fundamental difference between opening fire (almost) immediately and holding back versus waiting to start and then going all out. The total amount of damage you do is the same, so personally in an aggro limited situation I prefer to open early just with autoattack and then add SS in once the tank has a decent lead. The added advantage of this is since you start generating a small amount of aggro right away, you can also start feinting right away, and every feint in an aggro-limited situation is pure added damage. Similarly, in highly threat-limited situations, making use of Anaesthetic Poison can make sense.

Long story short: I find the best way to deal with low-aggro situations is to make use of all -aggro abilities you have at your disposal to control aggro for the first little bit of the fight, and plan for two vanishes over the fight duration.

One way to do this is to use the equivalency values in the spreadsheets for your gear level.

1) Put in your current gear
2) Use the macro (DPS Spreadsheet) or find the appropriate sheet (Gear Spreadsheet) to get the equivalency table

You should be able to get a customized value for ArP for your particular spec and gear setup.

For me, for example, 10 ArP ~= 1.3 AGI

This is the best way I've found to deal with it, since the value of ArP goes up the more of it you have (or the less armor the boss has).

I want to first apologize if this question has already been brought up and I missed it, I have only discovered this forum recently and as much as I have tried to read through it all, I do sometimes miss the obvious. I also want to thank those of you who have put so much work into this because since reading here and working on my rotations and the correct gems/enchants as I can get them, I have seen a noticeable improvement in my dps in raids. I am math deficient though and statistics in particular is much like trying to read hierglyphics so I am struggling with a lot of the formulas posted on the forum and the spreadsheets. So I appreciate your patience with my question.

I'm currently specc'd combat daggers for raids weeknights and am speccing pvp weekends now to arena and start working towards arena weapons because of how OP they are and faster to get than the weapons in the instances my aid is progressing through. We have finished Kara and are regularly killing Gruul and just beginning progression into SSC/TK and ZA. I have 2 t4 pieces currently. I do not dispute that combat swords is more dps, I see it for myself regularly, but I enjoy playing daggers more and with the help of this forum in particular, have still been able to maintain high dps in raids to stay in the top 5-6 on trash pulls and top 3-5 on bosses, some of this could be improved mainly by gear as I have plenty of room to improve there, and that is the reason why I'm looking at pvp weapons now. So I would like to stay daggers so that I can enjoy many of the talents rogues have the require a MH dagger. However, I was looking at the arena off-hand swords and they seem to offer more dps than the daggers, though not quite as fast. But still faster than the offhand I have from Kara right now (Emerald Ripper).

So I'm trying to decide if I should keep the combat dagger specc and just get the S1 offhand dagger to start with while I work on earning arena points, or if I should consider moving some points around to get 4 points in swords on top of the 5pts in dagger specialization, and get the S1 offhand sword instead. To do it, I had to lose a point in ruthlessness and have no points in lethality. And a copy of my proposed specc would be at: World Of Warcraft Talent Calculator

My thoughts behind this is that it might be better dps in a sustained boss fight with the offhand sword sometimes getting the extra procc on my mainhand then if I had the offhand dagger with the +5% crit, because I believe, tho possibly wrong, that I only lose the 5% crit on my offhand attacks, but not on my MH since I would have a MH dagger. Since I am truly awful at math, I am asking for some help with this. And if this the dumbest noobest thing and obviously wrong, I know you all will make sure I know that. It might be best to put those 4 points I have in swords elsewhere, like lethality and just get the slightly faster offhand S1 dagger for now while I work towards S2/S3 gear. I just haven't found a combat dagger/sword conversation yet.

Hybrid dagger/sword tends not to work very well, for a couple reasons.

First, relative to hybrid fist/sword or mace/sword, you're losing more valuable talents. Fist/Sword is only losing points in poison talents, which is a fairly small source of DPS. Dagger/sword has to give up, like, Lethality, or something of comparable worth; hence, you lose a lot more by OHing a sword.

Secondly, the power of OH sword spec comes from the fact that your weapons are of vastly dissimilar speeds. When you have a MH Sword/Fist/Mace, you're making unnormalized attacks at 2.6+ speed, whereas with a MH dagger, the sword spec procs will only be at 1.8 speed, which reduces the advantage you gain by a third.

Hence, sword spec benefits a MH dagger build a lot less than it does a MH Fist/Mace/Sword build, and it requires giving up more to get, so it tends not to be particularly value.

For more information on your specific case, consult your local spreadsheet.

Does anyone know if there is a specific stat that influences energy regeneration or is it just a static rate no matter what?

I know Adrenaline Rush increases the rate, but what is the default rate?

Thanks, and sorry if I missed it someplace, seems like I should know this.

Also, the hit cap that is listed is for a 28% miss rate against raid bosses, what is the hit cap for same level mobs?

^_^

Wowwiki Hit Rating

Unless that number is wrong, which it could be, it's only a 4% difference between a same level mob and a +3.

I'd agree that you should know this, and could probably figure it out if you just watched your energy bar.

We get 20 energy every 2 seconds. AR doubles that to 40 energy every 2 seconds.

This amount is not effected by any stat. However, certain talents do offer energy regen: Combat Potency and Relentless Strikes. Both are proc effects and do not affect the rate of energy regen/2 seconds.

Yeah, your info about the talents are obvious, and I wonder why you bothered to post that since it's largely irrelevant to my question. As well as being what I would consider, self evident information, available to anyone who's spent time looking at talent specs.

I was curious however if anything effected the ambient rate such as stat or level, and didn't assume that my energy regeneration was the same as everyone else's, because I hadn't run in to any information specifically regarding that mechanic yet. Don't assume that because I ask a question that has a potentially simple answer that I have overlooked the obvious.

Sorry, I really don't understand this. You are wearing t5 gear so naturally you should have played rogue for some time. But energy regeneration rate is something you can figure at level 1, yourself, by just hovering your mouse over your character bars. Also, you have of course seen how much your abilities cost and that everytime you would use them the same amount of energy would be consumed and see the ticks move your energy back up in a constant manner.

On top of that, you can see what each stat does on your character tab as well.

That's self evident information as you said.

Well, looking at the default gear setup for a Combat Swords rogue in the Rogue DPS Spreadsheet, that trinket shows about a 29.43 dps gain for a single rogue (end of Tier 5 gear level). With the default gear setup (beginning Tier 4) its showing a 23.68 dps gain. I'd also guess the enhancement Shaman and the Feral Druid (if we are talking kitty and not offtank) would probably be gaining a similar benefit (assuming Feral Druids gain a benefit from buffed AP as I get a little confused about what does and does not help them).

For me as a T6 rogue, 94 AP increases my actual DPS by about 29. At a T5 level of itemization it would be a little less, but, fundamentally: if you're in a group with one other melee DPSer, Solarian's Sapphire is borderline worthwhile. If there are two or more, it's almost certainly the best trinket you can use from a raid DPS perspective. Since you describe your group as usually 2 rogues + at least one other feral DPSer, you do probably want to be using it at all times.

hey all dose the Scope that you can make with the plans from attunman work for melee to ?
As i dont see you can choose it in gear i would think its a no.

You would think right. It only affects your ranged crit.

Hey there.

We are a guild that working our way though BT atm, anyway, We just had our second Teron kill, I ended up first on WWS with 1623 dps. I'm currently running with 4/5 T5, S3 swords and a normal combat sword spec (no imp evi). The other rogues ended at 1331 dps and 1291 dps. We were all in same group with 1 warrior and 1 enhanchment shaman. We all got almost exactly same gear, just one rogue running with Kael mace and S2 off hand mace instead. The other rogues were doing the normal 2 SnD and 5 rupture combo, I did same, but Used Eviscerate instead for finnisher to try it out.

Now i know rapture>Evi almost always, but my dps was higher, so i was thinking, maybe it have something to do with the 4/5 T5, i mean, it says the 200 damage wont make evi better then rapture, But what about the 4/5 bonus? it makes it FREE COST, so if you compare rapture to Evis with NO ENERGY cost, what's is the best one? It's good to point out we dont have any feral druid atm... ( Any ferals looking for a guild =P? ).

Maybe it's a good idea to use Evis every time you gain that buff? and rapture when you dont have it.

While it's possible that Eviscerate with T5 4/5 competes with Rupture (I doubt it, but I can't rule it out entirely), it's not why you beat the other two rogues. Rupture only adds about 100-150 DPS, and even if Eviscerate does a bit more, we're not talking a factor of 3 more. So the fact that you won by 300 DPS is a sign that something else is going on - seems likely that your other rogues are either a) significantly undergeared or b) violating one of the aforementioned commandments of Rogue DPS (in particular, one of the first 5). So I'd just be careful about drawing any conclusions based on that Teron kill on the Eviscerate/Rupture debate.

Anyway, lets break out some numbers. With, say, 2800 AP and 35% crit (not unreasonable with raid buffs) and no passive armor pen (usually the case for T5 rogues), a 100 DPS weapon, and a typical combat spec, we want to compare the damage from 4.4 Sinister Strikes and a Rupture to 4.4 Sinister Strikes and an Eviscerate, assuming 4/5 T5 procs.

So, lets see here. 1 Sinister Strike will do about (2.7 * 100 + 2800/14 *2.4 + 98)*(1 + 1.3*.35)*1.06 = 1323 base damage, reduced to 1096 by armor. So 4.4 SS will do 4822 damage.

1 Eviscerate does about (1135 + .15 * 2800) * (1.35) = 2100 average base damage, reduced by armor to 1739.

1 Rupture does (1000 + .24 * 2800) = 1672 damage without Mangle, or 2174 with Mangle.

So, observation 1: If you have Mangle, Rupture just plain does more damage. Hence, lets look at the nonMangled situation is a bit more detail.

If 4/5 T5 procs, the cycle does 4.4*40 - 25 = 151 energy either way. So the Eviscerate cycle has an energy efficiency of (4822 + 1739)/151 = 43.45 damage/energy, and the Rupture cycle has an energy efficiency of 43.01 damage per energy.

So, *if* 4/5 T5 is up, *and* you don't have Mangle, it may marginally make sense to drop an Eviscerate rather than a Rupture. In this example, if the buff was always up, you'd gain about 5 DPS by so doing.

However, using Eviscerate *all* the time is a mistake; while it's .44 damage/energy more efficient when it procs, it's 1.72 damage/energy less efficient without the proc. Hence, unless the set bonus is up 75%+ of the time when you're ready to drop a finisher, always using Eviscerate costs you damage.

So, the answer seems to be that you can gain maybe 2 DPS in an Unmangled situation by dropping Eviscerate while 4/5 T5 is up and Rupturing otherwise. But if you have Mangle, just always use Rupture.

Where does the number 1135 come from?

Average unmodified damage for Rank 10 Eviscerate is 1045. +200 from the T5 2piece (which you necessarily have if you have the 4piece!) takes it to 1245. You also forgot the 6% bonus to Eviscerate from Aggression.


I calculate as follows:

5pt Eviscerate base damage = 985-1105, average 1045
Add 200 for the 2piece T5 = 1245
Add in the AP factor = (1245 + .15 * 2800) = 1665
Add 6% from Aggression = 1764.9
Multiply up by crit rate (35%) = 2382.6 average base damage, reduced to 1973 by armor.

Edit: Actually that's still underestimated because of Lethality / RED. Accounting for those takes it to at least 2430 / 2010, depending on whether Lethality and RED are multiplicative or additive.

Still not quite as good as Rupture+Mangle, but much closer.

And remember, this is before taking imp. Eviscerate into account. With 3/3 imp eviscerate, you'd get another factor of 1.15, to give an average base damage of ~2790 (~2310 after armor). That's considerably better than Rupture even allowing for Mangle. The loss of poison DPS (or Murder) you'd take from going for imp. eviscerate however means that it's not worth speccing that way unless you know the boss can't be poisoned/murdered.

Edit2: Actually....

3 points in Vile poisons loses you 12% * 75 DPS * .83 = 7.47 DPS. Assuming a cycle length of ~28 seconds, that's ~200 poison damage per cycle that you'd lose by speccing Imp Evis. instead of Vile Poisons. A fully talented Eviscerate has an advantage of at least 150 damage over Rupture + Mangle. Only a little more crit, and it'll be flat out better to spec for and use Eviscerate whenever the T5 4-piece proc is active, even if you have Mangle active.

So what it boils down to is - what is the uptime for the T5 proc? Will it be active for 100% of your finishers, or only 10% of them? If it has high uptime, it's actually not clear cut at all whether Eviscerate or Rupture is the better option.

Hmm, for some reason I was thinking Evis was base 935 average, so you're right about that. However, I would point out that Lethality doesn't apply to Eviscerate, so it should be 1763.9 * (1 + .35 * 1.06) = 2418 raw, reduced to 2003 by armor.

Closer? Sure. But Mangled Rupture still wins, as does unmangled unprocced rupture. So, admittedly, my numbers were a bit off, but I think the conclusion is still valid.

Regarding Improved Eviscerate: Yes, it helps, but it comes at the expense of Vile Poisons, which, on the average, will contribute more damage even if you're weaving Eviscerates in. So, yes, if you spec that way you can cement Eviscerate's viability in non-Mangled situations when you have a 4/5 proc... but you'll do less damage overall than if you took the poison talents.

Lethality - fair point. On the other hand, mace spec :-)

Conclusion seems clear enough though. If T5 4-piece procs and you don't have a feral druid, Eviscerate. If you do have a feral (i.e. Mangle is up), Rupture.

Might be worth some more detailed analysis in future though, to check out the impact of things like Executioner, WSC procs, mace spec etc. etc. I think it's certainly possible that for some people, it'll be worth using Eviscerate on T5 procs even if Mangle is up.

It is worth a minor loss of DPS to hit the Expertise cap and have the nice convenience of being able to attack from the front? Right now, I have [Gloves of the Searing Grip] and [Shoulderpads of the Stranger]. If I equip my [Latro's Shifting Sword] and grab a [Brooch of Deftness], that's 67 rating, for 26 Expertise with talents, which is enough for 0 dodge (is it known whether the parry rate is the same?).

Parry rate appears to be higher (see tanking threads). - best guess is that it's double the dodge rate, i.e. 13% parry.

Given the amount of cleave damage going around in many fights, it would be irresponsible in any case to attack from the front even if you could cap expertise for parry - which with current itemisation you can't.