Personally, I've survived incoming damage with less than 500 hit points on any number of occasions, which made me think "boy, am I glad I have as many HP as I do". Fundamentally: when the tank dies (or you pull aggro) and the boss starts wailing on you, stamina isn't going to save you (though dodge might, but that's another story). However, when you get aggro on Hyjal trash (which happens) or are being hit by the raid damage of a boss (Ice Bolt on Rage, Rain of Fire on Azgalor, Doomfire/Air Burst/both on Archimonde, plus various and assorted effects on over half the bosses in BT) stamina can - and does - make a difference. And while good healing can reduce the need for this, taking some of the burden off your healers is not a bad thing. So I subscribe to the philosophy that while stamina (and dodge) are significantly less important than DPS stats, there is a point at which one can say "losing X amount of DPS is worth Y stamina or Z dodge". Which is why, in the Gear sheet, I allow and encourage having a small sta/dodge weighting to assess your survivability in combination with your damage output.

Off-topic slightly, does Armour Pen still become better as you obtain more of it? I've always read this to be the case on various theorycrafting discussions about it but recently when I checked Aldriana's spreadsheet the removal of Sunder Armourx5 (2600 armour) reduced my dps on a boss with 7700 armour from 1917.67 to 1631.17 (14.95% loss in dps, 286.5 raw dps), whereas the removal of CoR reduced my dps from 1917.67 to 1818.01 (5.2% loss in dps, 99.66 raw dps).

From the calculations here it seems like Armour Pen actually became worse for me dps-wise as I got more of it :S, have I done something obviously wrong or has the theorycrafting on armour pen changed since I last checked? (I'd bet on the former seeing as my grasp on the actual math formulas used to work this stuff out is sorely lacking heh).

I have 2 sets of gear for this. If you PvP more than I do, you can probably solve it that way. There's a lot of rogue gear in MH/BT that isn't really an upgrade over T4 type gear (sob, sob), but are a sidegrade with massive additional stamina (like an additional 40 stam).

Our guild encourages the rogues to pick this up as "off-spec". I can go from 10.1k health in my normal dps gear, to just under 12k health with about a 1% loss in dps. On fights like Najentus and Archimonde, that can be the difference between collecting loot, and wiping.

I picked up a 2nd pair of t6 pants for mainly pvp but using stamina enchant and a shifting shadowsong I often use it on stamina sensitive fights. I also took Don's Money Belt for that reason.

P.S. What's up with your gems tho?
I did some math and I think it came down to Brigand's/Nethershadow/Midnight/T6 and Vashj belt would be the best options for your purple needs. T6 shoulders and Nyn'ja Tabi's are better off with 10hit in them.

Re the Stamina/DPS tradeoff:

My general philosophy on this is to always use an agi/stam gem (usually shifting(?) nightseye) in all blue sockets in my gear. Sure, I may lose a little bit of DPS by doing so, but most of the time doing so also allows me to meet a socket bonus that lessens the impact. Usually, this DPS loss is quite small, and what I get in return is 60 HP per blue socket. This seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me, and lets me run between 10k and 11k health while raid buffed.

All in all, this seems like a better strategy to me than swapping in random PvP gear, since PvP gear uses itemization on resilience and crit. For very stamina-sensitive fights I do swap out my T4 legs for S3 legs with the stamina armor kit, and this gets me an extra 750 health or so. However, with my socketing strategy I find that I rarely am too low on stam for the fight.

(For context: my guild is in T5 content.)

The bolded part of your statement there is something I didn't even consider. Our tank for the Morogrim fight has gained some extra gear lately, which would explain why I'm starting to have some troubles on threat. Usually when I start having problems with controlling a fight, I look only for factors about myself that have changed (gear, rotation, etc). I'm up to date on the mechanics of the fight, I just never considered how tanking improvements would affect me. Time for me to work on generating steady threat as opposed to jumping from zero to "sweet jebus where's the vanish key!"

Now, if I could only stop our hunters from pulling aggro on Leo. :P

This may not be the best place for this question, but it applies, somewhat. I've done a search or two, and I can't recall where I saw this...

A while back, someone posted a screenshot of attack speed after several haste procs (warglaives, double mongoose, etc.), and it was insanely fast.

Does anyone have that screenshot, or a link to the thread?

Here and elsewhere I see the +4 stats ring enchant theory crafted to be superior to +2 weapon damage. On the other hand I see Nihilum rogues (yea I know, don't flame me too hard) running +2 weapon damage. With kings +4 stats on both rings works out to be 18 attack power (by my calculations) and roughly .33% crit. +2 weapon damage is 1 more weapon damage than +4 stats on every swing, which seems to indicate to me that it is superior. Thoughts?

I run 334 unbuffed +hit and just picked up a TT. The rogue DPS spread sheet indicates that berserker's call (which was previously paired with my dragonspine) is slightly superior to the TT. Has anyone's experience differed from this? It seems to me that the TT should be superior for several reasons (proc is basically like activating the berserker's call, and it has passive +10 hit and 38 crit rating rather than 90 AP).

The DPS spreadsheet also tells me my "optimal hit" is 282. Is that section of the spreadsheet to be disregarded? It seems wrong to me.

That's pretty much it. The question on ring enchants has been bugging me for a long time since I am getting conflicting information from EJ and Nihilum.

Thanks.

Ask a Nihilium rogue, and he/she will tell you because it looked cool. Nihilium may be (one of) the top guilds in the world, but that's not due to heavy theory crafting, but due to more than excelent team work.

For the theorycrafting part of these enchants, keep in mind that the +2 damage only scales with the weapondamage modifiers, while the +4 stats scales with those, but also with various raidbuffs and other stat modifiers. Furthermore, the +2damage has no effect on your Ruptures, since it's a raw weapon damage increase (you can estimate it's AP equivalence, but it's still not AP) while +4 stats does improve your Ruptures.

The end results aren't too far apart, but for min/maxing it's something to consider.

I have more than once argued with nihilum rogues on irc... they are those kind of players "doing what their stomach tells em whats right". If you want to see First Kills head over to nihilum.eu ... if you want hard facts just stay here. My favourite occasion was one of them claiming that DST wasn't best in slot...

Im guessing they are socketing to keep meta bonus on sharhaz. You dont really lose that much overall dps on all over fights to maintain a decent amount more for a fight that is god awful. I personally don't do it only because shadowsong's are fairly rare for us on drops, so I leave those to the healers since I already socketed. If we get an excess at a later point, sure, I'd do the same, but until then, meh.


As for nihilium rogues, while skill does play a factor into progression, when you're guild literally smashes their head against bosses for hours on end, even the most retarded/unskilled people can beat bosses. If everyone put in the time that they did and gave it a really effort, most people would be a lot further than they are now. That isn't to say they arent skilled people, they are, for the most part, excellent players, but don't count on them for expert advice. They do what they want full well knowing that they need no other explanation than "I'm in Nihilium".

First off, wonderful addition to the post. Very informative.

I have a question however. My current spec is Combat Hemo (Swords). My only armor penetration comes from the Serrated Blades talent. Is this enough armor penetration to warrant Executioner on the Mainhand for raiding?

Once again, great addition to the post.

-Snus

I have a quick question

I've been reading and looking at different dps rotation cycles. With the 2 piece tier 4 bonus you only need 1/2 point snd whereas w/o the 2piece you need a 3/4 correct me if i'm wrong, but where would the line be drawn as to replace the tier4 two piece? is there that much of a dps loss to replace it asap? or to wait until hyjal/bt.

The World of Warcraft Armory

^^ that's my rogue btw ^^

I think it has been told around there, but basically stick with 2 pieces t4 until you can get the 4 pieces t5 bonus, and replace the t5 4 pieces bonus when you can get the 2 pieces t6 bonus.

My question ties on from the question above actually - while i know that you replace 2/tier4 with 4/tier5 what if you never got 4/tier5?

My guild has essentailly stopped doing TK now, so ive missed out on the helm which would have given me 4/tier5. From checking the spreadsheet i found i have either 2 options:

• Tier 4 helm and tier 4 legs for the set bonus
• Deathblow goggles and tier 5 legs, with no set bonues

The difference between both options is around 1 dps in favour of the first option in most cases. However, in fights with intermittent gaps in time on target (every fight really) which option would be better? Im inclined to think that 2 piece tier 4 would be better for dps as the cycles are shorter but im really not sure so advice would be appreciated.

(July 07) Tigole (Jefferey Kaplan), on Nihilum's rapid progression:

"It's not surprising that the three EU guilds who have progressed the furthest in Black Temple are also the guilds that spent the most time on the PTR. While it's "only taken them 2 weeks" to kill most of the content in BT, we've been watching them rep on the dungeon for 2 months now."

I browsed through WWS for the top 200 guild dps kills for every boss in black temple, trying to find Nihilum. I assumed that what's maybe one of the best geared guilds in the world would be there. No such luck. Either they're not interested in doing top level dps, they can't, or they don't post their kills on WWS. It might be all three.

However, some of the people posting on this website ARE part of the teams that are highly ranked on WWS, and they use the spreadsheets found here, the same spreadsheets that frequently, and accurately, contradict Nihilum's gear/gem/enchant suggestions.

So I recommend using the spreadsheets.

If that's true, I believe that evenom would be replacing Rupture on rotations? Assuming that we'd get most of the Stormstrike charges and the damage increase from the talent. Any thoughts on that yet?

I'm in pretty much the same situation, though I have 3 pieces of T5 (shoulders, legs and gloves) in addition to my T4 (using helm and shoulders) and when I get the Kael Vial (attunement run tonight) it's likely I'll not see T5 content again unless there's another attunement run so I'm unlikely to ever get the 4-piece bonus.

However, according to the dps spreadsheet (I'm using 2_3_2_9 - haven't updated yet) the difference between using Netherblade and Deathmantle shoulders (the piece that I can trade to go from 2-piece T4 to 3-piece T5) is only 4dps. Once you're at that stage of progression it seems that the value of the T4 2-piece bonus becomes so small that you may as well simply ignore it. If you get an upgrade then take it and switch to 5s/5r. The worst that can happen is that your dps will fall by a fraction of a percent (4/1335 = 0.3% for me), which is frankly unnoticable. That difference can happen due to even 2 lucky extra SS crits (or unlucky non-crits) across a 10 minute fight.

I would imagine you wouldn't even need the added bonus of Stormstrike to make envenom do more damage than rupture in this new scenario. The real question I guess would be what's better a 5/5 Vile Poisoned Envenom or 3/3 Serrated Blades Rupture w/ or w/out mangle. Since there's a higher probability that you would have the mangle debuff in a raid as oppposed to stormstrike, you may want to include that. At least that's the case in my guild. We've only recently starting bringing an enhancement shaman.

Most top end guilds always have an enhancement shaman in the raids, so it really depends if you have an elemental as well, because if so odds are they will get the charge before you. But the more realistic comparison that we need to run is a 4/5 Vile Poison Envenom versus a 0/3 Serrated Blades Rupture with Mangle, since those of us concerned with our DPS are typically running 20/41/0, and Serrated Blades isn't exactly part of a Combat Swords build.

I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Envenom (Rank 2) = [900 + (AP*.15)] * 1.2
Rupture (Rank 7) = [1000 + (AP*.24)] * 1.3

Just at a glance, Rupture scales much better with your AP even without Serrated Blades. Just for argument's sake, assume a rogue has 1800 AP:

Envenom = [900 + (1800*.15)] * 1.2 = 1170 * 1.2 = 1404
Rupture = [1000 + (1800*.24)] * 1.3 = 1432 * 1.3 = 1861

An untalented Rupture still beats a talented Envenom. And to top it off:

Envenom - 1404 / 35 = 40.11 DPE
Rupture - 1432 / 25 = 57.28 DPE untalented, 74.44 DPE talented

Just for argument's sake, let's look at a typical 20/41/0 spec with 4/5 Vile Poisons (1.16 modifier) and no Serrated Blades (no 1.3 modifier). Again, assume 1800 AP:

Envenom = [900 + (1800*.15)] * 1.16 = 1170 * 1.16 = 1357 (38.77 DPE)
Rupture = [1000 + (1800*.24)]

[top] 1432 (57.28 DPE)

The obvious counter-argument is that Envenom can crit (200% damage), Rupture cannot. Ignoring energy cost in this example for the time being, Envenom is doing 1357 / 1432

.9476, or 94.76% of the damage of Rupture (and that gap would widen as AP increases). A base crit chance of only 6% would push the average damage of Envenom over that of Rupture (1357 * 1.06 = 1438.42), but the DPE is still lower (41.08).

To get the same DPE out of Envenom, we would need to get 57.28 * 35 = 2004.8 damage from it on average, which is approximately a 47.7% crit rate: 1357 * 1.477 = 2004.289.

I'm obviously not even in T5 content yet, so I can't really comment on how unrealistic it is to even try to get that high of a crit rate, but I'm thinking it probably can't happen easily. I haven't accounted for debuffs on the boss (Mangle, Misery, etc), but I can't imagine they'd provide anything close to the damage buff necessary to have Envenom catch Rupture.

At the moment, this change (if real) seems to be geared more towards 41/20/0 Mutilate specs who can consistently do a 4-5s/4-5r/4-5env cycle. Basically, a good combo point dump that won't kill your DP stack.

Note: Please correct my math if I've miscalculated something.

T6 quality in every slot with lotp, AToL up, BoK, is still only ~43% crit (unless you gem for agi or something) :P Pure Fist Spec envenom heroes? Not to mention you can't resist rupture and the only boss that can be poisoned and not ruptured is Supremus? 4/5 VP envenom still looks bad to me :P

Even for mutilate that change on its own isn't going to magically fix the short comings of everything to do with dagger specs like a 20% white damage buff in FW 5/5 would etc.