Boss Parry rates are over 10%, so unless your expertise is 40+, you shouldn't be attacking from the front anyway as you risk parry-gibbing your tank. It's probably possible to get it that high, but it'd cost way too much DPS to be worth it.

On the subject of parry haste, I've been thinking a bit about ways to cope with being threat capped when working with an over or undergeared tank (too much avoidance, or too little dmg,etc.) On non cleaving mobs, (I.e. Where insta-gib isn't an issue), with managable melee damage would a rogue attacking from the front provide an appreciable increase in rage/reflective damage to help tank TPS? Considering that the rogue in question is concerned about being threatcapped from behind the DPS loss should be immaterial, so, is it worth it?

Well, let's examine it. We avoid attacking from the front because:

1) Parry strings cause the tank to be insta-gibbed
2) Melee cleaves cause us to be insta-gibbed
3) Increase in incoming tank damage stresses the healers more, even in the absence of insta-gibs
4) Our DPS is severely reduced

Now, in a hypothetical situation where none of these four apply, it's conceivable that there might be an advantage (or at least no disadvantage) to attacking from in front.

You suggest two potential situations.

1) Tank is undergeared (insufficient damage). It seems a seriously bad idea to deliberately increase damage on a tank you know to be undergeared.

2) Tank is overgeared. In this case, frankly, who cares? If you need to increase the incoming damage on the tank, it makes more sense for the tank to slap on DPS gear than for you to attack from the front.

Tanks carry around various sets of gear for stamina and avoidance. I think the tank can certainly focus more on threat generation by himself instead of damage mitigation. I'd rather not have to worry about potentially getting myself killed.

Also, as Songster notes, if your tank (and, I assume, raid) is so overgeared for the content, why worry about your DPS output being a little lower than normal?

We just Cleared up to Vashj our second week of raiding SSC, so he has the option of getting TT, however he believes that DST is the best trinket for hunters as well. I looked at an analysis thread of the trinket and it seems that there are mixed views of this, some claiming hunters get more attacks in any given minute than a rogue. I've heard that TT is better than DST for hunters but haven't seen any huntercraft threads to back that statement up.

Also I have a gear question. I've replaces a couple things with hit in favor of haste and more AP, one of them being netherblade gloves with the badges gloves. I'm thinking of getting the badges pants as well in favor of netherblade pants, but it would bring me down to only 260 hit rating. I would still have the 2 peice bonus, and I will be getting WSC next, so that will bring me back up to 281. Any thoughts as to what would be more valuable?

What is the chance of the tier 5 four piece bonus procing?

There is no *magic* number regarding hit. Aldriana in particular has said this over and over. They are all just numbers, what actually matters is DPS. We want to maximize *DPS*, not hit, crit, or any stat. To do this, we take the gear whose stats contribute the most overall to DPS. So pick your gear based on what item is better, rather than some arbitrary idea that you *need* a certain amount of hit.

The short answer is to check your new acquisitions using the various spreadsheets. They should give you the best answer.

Having said that, adding hit is almost certainly the best way to increase DPS on otherwise equivalent items. Normally this means gemming for hit.

While this is true (and something I definitely want people to keep in mind), being below the yellow attack no-miss zone is going to be a larger loss in DPS than above it, so the value of hit isn't continuous at this point. THAT being said, no rogue who is even remotely reasonably geared/spec'd should have to worry about it due to the fact that you should have precision, and getting the 60-odd hit rating that you need on top of that is trivial.


Also, regarding hit gemming, as you get into T5ish gear, you tend to see Agi/Hit coming to very close competitiveness with eachother. Hit tends to edge it a little in a pure sustained situation, agi tends to edge hit in interrupted situations. For these reasons, I personally gem nearly everything with Glinting gems.

True, although I'd note that the change in value at the yellow hit cap is not as large as most people expect. Hit below the yellow hit cap as roughly the same effect as expertise (reducing miss chance of both white and yellow attacks), and Expertise for most of us is only worth about 10% more than Hit above the yellow hit cap. So it's value increases, but it's not like it doubles or anything.

Now, for PvP, kicking, and that sort of thing, the fact that your attacks more reliably gives it something of an advantage beyond that, but, fundamentally: the change in the value of hit at the yellow hit cap, while nontrivial, is not so strong as to override the underlying point, which is that you should use whatever gear is best, regardless of which stats it has to get that way, even under the yellow hit cap.

Agreed. Particularly since agi also gives a bit of dodge, which has been known to be useful when a boss gets a bit out of position (or someone pulls aggro) and cleaves the melee, and on bosses (such as Zul'jin and Hex Lord in ZA) that have Whirlwind type abilities. I'm a bit believer in socketing everything with orange, although a few yellow gems work in here and there if my guild happens to be low on oranges at the time.

my question is, how is hemo swords only 2% below combat swords, when you can't get lethality, AR, or combat potency. Im considering going hemo swords, since no other rogue IS hemo, and the raid debuff is kind of appealing. Im just wondering if its worth doing over my personal dps loss from not being combat swords.

erm, i thought hemo scaled better, since its a % dmg, whereas SS is a fixed amount..

Depends on how you define the damage of Hemo. What keeps it at all close is the debuff, which is a very large chunk of damage that basically doesn't scale at all. So, setting aside for the moment the scaling of the physical attack itself, your viability to a raid measured in total damage - including the debuff - tends to scale more poorly.

Now, regarding the scaling of the ability itself: well, the first thing I'd notice is that with Surprise Attacks and Aggression, SS already scales as 1.16xWeapon Damage, whereas Hemo is only 1.1. So from that already, we'd expect SS to scale better than Hemo. Even if that *weren't* the case, Combat Potency means you get more SS per unit time than you do Hemo, meaning that if you actually work out the damage per unit time instead of the damage per attack, SS has even more of an advantage. And finally, Combat Potency assures that SS scales with both Hit and Expertise, while Hemo generally does not.

So, if you want to be technical, the immediate physical damage of Hemo in a vacuum scales better with gear than the immediate physical damage of a SS. However, there is more benefit to be gained via talents, so the scaling of a combat SS build is better than that of any Hemo build, just in terms of the damage of the move itself. When you throw in the fact the Hemo relies on a large chunk of minimally-scaling debuff damage to be competitive, it is pretty clear that Hemo builds scale more poorly with gear than combat builds do.

Looks like Rupture > Eviscerate+T5+ImpEvisc+Aggression. Let me know if I have made any errors below.

I am using the following melee attributes:
Attack Power = 1938
Crit% = 26.18%
T5 Armor (+40 dmg per CP)
Improved Eviscerate (+15% dmg for Eviscerate)
Aggression (+6% dmg for Eviscerate)
Murder (+2% dmg for Rupture and Eviscerate)
Level 73 mob with 7700 armor (39.166% mitigation)
Assuming 0% chance to miss

RUPTURE
1 CP - 324 + 4*.01*AP
2 CP - 460 + 5*.02*AP
3 CP - 618 + 6*.03*AP
4 CP - 798 + 7*.03*AP
5 CP - 1000 + 8*.03*AP

EVISCERATE
1 CP - 245 to 365 + .03*AP
2 CP - 430 to 550 + .06*AP
3 CP - 615 to 735 + .09*AP
4 CP - 800 to 920 + .12*AP
5 CP - 985 to 1105 + .15*AP

5CP RUPTURE CALCULATIONS
5CP Rupture = 1000 + 465 (8*.03*1938) + 29 (Murder) = 1494 (299 dmg per CP and 60 dmg per Energy point)

5CP EVISCERATE CALCULATIONS
5CP Eviscerate = 1045 (average base) + 291 (.15*1938)+ 200 (T5 Bonus) + 230 (Imp Evisc) + 92 (Aggression) + 31 (Murder) = 1889. Reduce for armor mitigation (39.166%) yields 1149. Adjust for critical strike chance to 1751 (1149+1149*26.18%). 1751 works out to 350 dmg per CP and 50 dmg per Energy point.

I would need to have 41% crit percentage or 3900 AP for Eviscerate to be equivalent to Rupture.

You would want to factor in Sunder, Faerie Fire, possibly CoR, possibly WSC, etc as well. There was a fairly detailed discussion on this not to long ago which included calculations more accurate than your own. That said, you did still arrive at the proper conclusion.

Furthermore, you'd want to use Raid-buffed stats.

Most importantly you're missing the hugest component to these calculations: Mangle.

Well, I hate to say it, but: consult your local spreadsheet.

Fundamentally, the difference between sword spec and dagger spec is very hard to analyze with napkinmath. You're using attacks with different damage/energy efficiency, different specialization effects (including OH/MH interactions), different proc uptimes - different everything. It depends on level of gear, level of buff, and so on. So it's really hard to say "a dagger must be X amount better than your best sword option to be worth using" without coming back to the spreadsheet at some level.

I did perform an analysis of where the damage difference is coming from, and the answer, as I recall, came down to Murder, Mangle, and OH Sword Spec procs. Basically, against mobs that are not Murderable, if you don't have a Feral Druid around, Dagger spec does almost identical damage to Fist spec; the only reason Sword spec wins in that case is because your OH sword procs MH attacks via sword spec.

Now, how big of a difference is this in practice? Well, the numbers being bounced around at the time were that Vindicator's Brand/Latro's - a combination almost any self-respecting raiding rogue should be able to get - was better than any combination of daggers you could get at the T5 level. Recent changes have reduced this to some extent, but, for the sake of comparison: with my current gear (mid-high T6), assuming roughly half of targets are Murderable and everything is Manglable (which isn't exactly valid, but it's a decent ballpark figure), with Arena 3 Shanker/Shiv, I do about 1535.5 DPS. With Arena *2* Slicer/Quickblade, i do 1537.5. So, Arena 2 swords are comparable to Arena 3 daggers for a T6 rogue.

Now, if you don't run with a feral druid, and you're in a section of the game where most things aren't Murderable, the gap closes somewhat; in these cases, daggers are somewhat closer. On the other hand, this is for purely sustained situations; daggers present issues in terms of staying in position (not that swords don't want to attack from behind as well, but you can attack while you're getting there) and having energy cap out (as your energy-expending move is more expensive, your average energy level is higher so you cap out sooner if you have to step out of melee range for whatever reason). So swords have some intangible benefits as well.

Fundamentally: it's reasonably easy to see what advantages swords have from a theoretical perspective, but quantifying the difference without a spreadsheet is likely to be very hard if not impossible.

Forgive me if this is addressed in another thread or post somewhere. I've read this thread and am working through the DPS spreadsheet thread, and haven't seen this particular question asked.

Is there a certain assumption made with regards to how valuable a Hemo rogue is in a raid depending on the number of melee members you have? I've heard it said that it's usually worth one rogue to spec Hemo, but at what point does this become true when you have only a few melee members? My guild may be the exception. We're currently working on SSC (5/6) and TK (3/4). Our typical party is thus:

BM Hunter
Kitty Druid
CSwords Rogue
CSwords Rogue
Either another BM Hunter or a DPS Warrior.

We have no Enhancement Shaman. The other two groups are all mage/lock/hunter dps. So really our only melee dps is some combination of the above plus others in the MT group, about 6 or 7 total including prot warrior(s). Pets too if they count. From my reading, this seems lower than what most other rogues that post here have, especially concerning the Enhancement Shaman. Now, I've plugged my gear into the DPS spreadsheet and as CSwords I come out 1497.78 ideal, but with Hemo I can ideally hit 1527.40, a decent amount of increase, if the Hemo Debuff is checked and DD is set to overall.

So the question is, will I still be a benefit to the raid considering that there may not be enough melee dps to use up all the Hemo charges, or is the above example enough to do so and realize the dps gain from Hemo? I'm probably going to test this out tomorrow night and compare WWS's, but I thought I'd get some theoritical feedback as well.

Hemo affects both your tanks and your hunters, bringing up the number of people affected fairly reasonably. Also, the main metric to go by is "Is the debuff being used up before I refresh it?" (approximately every 4 seconds) - if 3 people can consume the debuff in 4 seconds (unlikely) then you're getting the same raid DPS benefit (within a margin of error, not counting external benefits like TPS, etc) as you would if it was being used up within 1 second of application.

It actually tends not to depend too heavily on the number of physical damage classes in the raid. It's pretty hard to have a raid wherein the charges will *not* all be used fairly consistently. As long as you're careful to not apply too close together on a regular basis, you yourself will likely use almost half the charges yourself; as long as there's a tank and one other melee DPS, you'll be using almost all the charges. By the time you're using 2 other melee DPS, the issue is basically gone.

The real dependency for the value of Hemo is itemization level; since Combat Swords (CS) scales better than Tri-spec hemo (TSH), the viability depends on where on that scaling curve you are. If you're at the T4 level of itemization, TSH is pretty strong; by end-T6, it's pretty much dead. Based on your armory, you appear to be at T4/Low-T5 itemization, so I would say that having 1 TSH rogue probably does make sense from a raid DPS perspective. To figure it out in more details, I would consult the spreadsheets.

I didn't even realize Hunter attacks use Hemo charges. My bad. I guess I need to read the tooltip better. That does change it a bit. Typically we have 3 hunters, 2 rogues, 2 feral druids, a ret pally, and 2 - 3 tanks depending on the encounter. So we have anywhere from 9 to 11 people that would use those charges within a 4 minute window. I'd imagine that that number would be enough to use the charges fast enough.

Thanks for the clarification.

I've read through some of the infractions on this site and wanted to start of by apologizing for my spelling and grammar; neither of which are too good.

I've been reading through a lot of the rogue material and have a few questions that I hope some don't mind answering for me. After looking at them I realized they aren't as important as I thought. Most seem to just be nit picking type questions that were bugging me, as most of my questions were answered in this thread. Also I would like to apologize if these questions were covered else where but in threads that are often lengthy I may have missed the answers (but I did try to find them).

1.) Energy Regen: This may actually be a pretty stupid question but does spamming any attack, let’s say sinister strike slow down your energy regen or will it still regen at the 2 sec rate. I know with casters they have a certain mana regen when casting and then one when not casting.

If it does regen at the same rate no matter what (not counting talents such as AR) then that leads me to my next question.

2.) EW: Am I missing the main point of the energy watch mod? When I try to use it I find myself staring to much at it and it ticks so fast I'm not sure how anyone can keep up with the count. It seems like you should just spam whatever attack and build up to the required number of combo points for your cycle, instead of watching or counting your energy regen.

3.) Trash Mobs: When trash will die quickly what would be the correct way of opening. My garrotes seem to never get to run their full course and using cheap shot seems like it might hinder the tank from generating rage as efficient during those seconds the mob is stunned. Would it be better to run up to the target and sinister strike, followed by SnD, and then finish out the cycle?

4.) Certain Math: In *general* where does certain math come from that's not on the tool tips. For example from reading info on this forum, I now know that a 5cp rupture does 1000 damage + 24% of your AP for 35 energy, or 40 damage plus 0.96% of your AP per energy. The tool tips only says *increased by your attack power*. So is it a matter of people doing extensive calculations to figure out the % of your AP on this attack or is there another resource/mod, in game feature etc that tells you these numbers?

5.) My last question had to do with trouble I was having with a macro to eliminate the red error messages you receive when a ability isn't ready. I recently did a reinstall and lost all of my macros so I don't have the code that was giving me the problem. In a nut shell I basically was trying make a macro that every time I used sinister strike it would check to see if trinket was up and if so then use it. I was able to get it to work but I was also getting a constant flow of error messages from spamming it that the trinket wasn’t ready. A friend helped me clear the message but then the macro was no longer using my trinket.

Sorry if the wording on these questions made y'all cringe but as I stated at the beginning my grammar and spelling aren't so good.