Using your spreadsheet with the default T6 gear uploaded in it I switch from S3 Mace in the MH to S3 Sword in the MH and put 4 points in Vile poisons, I get a 0.88 loss in DPS, which puts it on par if not slightly better. (buffed DPS)

Because you can spec for both Mace and Sword just like you can Fist/Sword. 16/45 which is what I've been using for a while. Despite having only 1 sword, I still get alot of extra attacks.

Well, let's look at this...
What's the difference between Sword/Sword and Mace/Sword?
First, we have 5 talent points in favor of Sword/Sword.

Let's look at damage:
Mace/Sword loses 5% extra MH attacks that proc MH attacks.
But gains 5% extra damage on all crits (that is multiplied by all crit multipliers) and also includes specials.

It might be possible especially with the high crit rates at top itemization. I was using an old version of the spreadsheet that showed a decline. Current version looks to agree with what you've said. Be interesting to see how this looks on the Gear sheet with those changes.

Yes it would. His calculation before all this was that you needed 50% crit for Mace spec to equal Fist spec.

Sorry, brain turned off on me for a second and I was thinking Mace/Mace, not Mace/Sword. Yes, Mace/Sword would certainly draw closer to Sword/Sword. The real difference lies in:

For white attacks, an extra attack is better than extra dmg on crits. In fact, until you have a good 60%+ crit, the extra 5% crit from Fists is more valuable than 5% more dmg on crits.

For yellow attacks, extra dmg on crits vs extra crit chance will have some point at which they become equal. At lower crit rates, Fists will be better. At higher crit rates, Maces will be better. An extra attack proc from a Sinister Strike will generally be worth less than extra damage on Sinister Strike (either via higher crit chance or higher dmg on crits).

These principals will remain true within any feasible level of gearing in a raid environment. Determining which spec is better for you will be largely affected by the itemization you have available to you and your overall hit and crit rates.

A couple questions guys if you do not mind please.

First: You say executioner/mongoose, you mean executioner main hand mongoose OH ? Also, when is executioner better? You say approaching t6 and I understand that damage reduction from armor is not linear so it becomes good in large amounts...but does anyone know the number of armor pen one should have before executioner?

Second: I just got a 4th piece of tier 5, but that puts my hit down to 243 (unbuffed, unwellfed). Is it worth it to switch in some old gear to improve the hit? Not necessarily breaking the t5 bonus. Perhaps switching in cloak of darkreaver instead of cloak of fiends?


Thanks for the advice!

And we've arrived back to my first post. Due to itemization mace/sword spec can be in some cases better than fist/sword spec and on par with sword/sword spec. =D

Two great minds have been attacking questions just like these via creating and maintaining spreadsheets for quite some time now, among others. Some will find these questions offensive because you didn't even try to answer these questions on your own first.

Ya executioner main hand. But, the info about when executioner is better is outdated. Mongoose almost always better. Might be able to squeeze out a few dps more with executioner under the right conditions and high gear levels, but mongoose wins out all other times.

Check a spreadsheet. Though I doubt wearing gear just for the sake of hit rather than dps stats will benefit. Cloak of Fiends is generally better I believe, but not by much.

Edit: Heh, was too slow!

I was under the assumption that with T6 rogues with Hemo specs tend to benefit more from executioner MH and mongoose OH. I think it also depends on the mob armor value.

If T6 rogues worry about squeezing out some extra DPS by taking executioner on MH, then they should seriously consider speccing Combat in the first place, since T6 rogues tend to get a lot more haste, which scales better for Combat rogues then it does for hemo rogues, due to Proc per Strike mechanics on Combat Potency.
Then there's the theory that the armor penetration isn't as effective for hemo rogues, since
1) raidbosses will often already be at ~0 armor because of all the armor ignore / armor pen effects
2) hemo rogues already get an armor reducing effect from Serrated Blades to get boss armor to ~0 if it wasn't there already.

I'm sure this has been explained before in this thread or somewhere else, but I tried searching and couldn't find anything in the sea of pages.

My question is, in the Working Theories of Theorycrafting 2.3 thread it is said that our special attacks work on a two roll system. What exactly is that system and how does it compare to other classes special abilities systems?

Sorry if I am the 943672346786312384089265th person to ask this.

With tons of haste you run into energy cap out problems too as combat because lets say during bloodlust you procced potency 5 times in a row. I cap out alot now because of Rod of the sun king, potency and relentless proccing all at once. With my gear level the AEP calculations show haste as .94 with combat AND hemo raid specs.

Fully debuffed, with T6 and Serrated blades, I'm penetrating 6050 armor. (that includes executioner/wsc/madness averages based on the RogueDPS spreadsheet). 6200 armor is the lowest armor mob you'll see in BT/Hyjal with most bosses being 7685. Hardly pushing it to 0, but close.

There are times I've done alot better as hemo than I ever have as combat with my T6 gear.

I'm not disagreeing with that, but it happens alot. I'm combat mace/sword right now but I guess I was a luckier Hemo rogue than I am as a combat rogue.

For hemo specs, it could occur that you proc all three, but how often do rogues have all three? I do but I'm only one guy and I consider myself lucky to have them. But let's say I upgraded to a DST and Shard of Contempt or Blackened Naaru sliver next patch, doesn't seem like it would be possible to cap out armor pen then.

I just hate when people make general statements like, "with full T6 and hemo you're going to be at max armor pen and most likely wasting it". Full T6 doesn't mean anything except a couple hundred passive armor pen. The only way to hit the armor pen cap now is with a fully debuffed mob with all three of those procs going at once on a typical BT boss. A portion might get wasted sure, but how many other unavoidable things can happen that get wasted?

Edit: Actually you got me thinking about hemo v/s combat and I re-looked at the WWS from last week to this week. If you're interested I'll post them. It'll show you that my white attack damage was far superior compared to being combat. Using the same gear, and no other buff differences on at least 5-6 fights in BT/Hyjal. If my white attacks do so much more damage(~100 more on average hits), then why exactly is combat better than hemo? You say mathematically it's impossible, but for some reason I put out alot more white damage as Hemo with this gear. To the point that the additional rupture damage on top of other hemo spec benefits could possibly be better.

I'm going to say this from the DPS Spreadsheet perspective. Stacked Armor Pen procs is very high on the "to do" list as it's now all too possible to hit 0 armor on a boss. Assuming I don't run into the same problems I had with Windfury (where part of the spreadsheet revolted against me changing some things), I'm hoping to have to new, probability driven, Armor Pen proc model up with the next release. I've worked through a good way to do this, by building a probability table with all proccable armor pen effects and using basic actuarial theory (i.e. Bayes Theorum) to "average" the effects. By doing so, I can account for "overprocs" where the armor pen is greater than remaining armor. As an aside, I plan to do the same for Expertise as there are procs in the new patch that can bring dodge to 0.

In both cases, averages that bring one very close to 0 are going to overstate the effect. If all your procs happened to go off at once and it's enough to drop the mob below 0 armor, averages will be overstating the result to some degree (more so, the closer you get your average to 0 armor).

Normally, averages work well in the spreadsheet for proc effects. This is not the case for Armor Pen and Expertise (when the combination can take one past the cap), so I would use results while realizing there is going to be a degree of unrealized armor pen potential.

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As to the two-roll system for special (yellow) attacks, it's pretty simple really.
First roll, does it hit, dodge, miss?
Second roll, does it crit?

Here's an example (maybe not so real-life) that shows why this matters.
Let's say your special attack can miss or be dodged 10% of the time and you have a 50% chance to crit.

If it were a one-roll system, you would miss/dodge 10%; hit 40%; crit 50%.

With a two-roll system, you get miss/dodge 10%; hit 90%
Check for crit 50% of that 90% is a crit, so overall you miss/dodge 10%; hit 45%; crit 45%

This is why most people's special attack crit % doesn't match the tooltip.

Regarding armor procs:

Currently, the Gear sheet models Executioner and WSC as procs, but Madness of the Betrayer as an average. However, the benefit of Madness is small enough that the linear approximation is adequate so long as you don't cap out; and given that it's pretty hard to cap out without using both Executioner and WSC, and very few people use both WSC and MotB, I decided that wasn't a major issue.

It is quite possible at current itemization levels to cap out on 6200 armor bosses; Sunders + FF + CoR + WSC + Executioner is 5850 armor reduction, meaning only 350 is necessary to reduce a mob to zero - which all Hemo rogues and most T6 rogues are going to have. The interesting part of this is that capping out isn't really fundamentally a bad thing. While it's true that during the 10% of the time when both procs are up you're not getting full benefit, it's also true that the 90% of the time when they're not both up they're more powerful than they would be were you not capping out.

Of course, even given this, Executioner does not generally seem to be worth using, and I don't expect WSC to last very long once 2.4 loot comes out, which brings us back into the territory where nothing is capped. But, for the moment, capping *can* happen but it's not totally a bad thing.

Regarding Hemo v/s Combat

We didn't upload our WWS to the WWS site but here is our WWS archive.

Index of /wws

Specifically compare fights from 2/19/08 and 2/26/08 as I had the same gear setup and same group buffs. Notice how much higher my white damage is as hemo.

If I'm doing something wrong as combat, I'd like to know, but from the looks of it with my gear setup, hemo outperformed combat.

If you armory me, I had the same gear on with the exception of 3/5 T6 2/5 T4 until 2/27.

I've been reading through this whole hemo vs combat argument and I'm going to throw in my two cents along with a WWS log from my guild a few weeks ago.

Here's the WWS.

Buffed with Might/Kings/MOTW/Spicy Hot Talbuk/SoE/Battle Shout (with Solarian trinket), using Windfury.
Debuffs on the boss were Mangle/CoR/FF/Sunders/Blood Frenzy.

We had no enhancement shaman in the raid. The build used is the one I have right now - standard 19/42/0 with 3/5 vile.
A couple of gear changes from my current armory, I did not have DST until last Sunday; I was using Swiftstrike Bracers, as Insidious Bands dropped that very same kill. Also I didn't have +4 stats. I was using Tsunami Talisman + Ashtongue.

I also didn't have Cloak of Fiends - I was probably still using Drape of the Dark Reavers.

The sheets point at ~1823.26 DPS (set to 'caster boss' armor settings, which Teron is included in), I'm using version 2.4.0.4a.

My output for that kill was 1819 DPS. The accuracy of the sheets is amazing.

We're on similar gear levels I reckon. We have approximately the same percentage outgoing damage per skill (SS, Rupture, whatever).

I only noticed a pair of things whilst skimming through this WWS of yours as combat on Teron.

A) Your crit rate on both melee and specials is dysmal for some reason, for both melee and specials (24/16%), but this could be a parser related thing. In comparision I'm getting 38/35%. Partly it can probably be accounted to using Executioner rather than Mongoose, but still it's a 10%+ difference.

B) Your miss rate seems a bit high, 14/11% miss -- but I'm assuming this is including dodge given that 11% miss on specials makes no sense whatsoever, especially given the miss rate for specials is 9% and you're way over that (320~ hit rating from what I see on your profile), so I think it's safe to assume you got ~5% miss in reality. Still 11% dodge on a boss seems a bit too high, I think the number thrown around is 6.5-9% dodge and it makes no sense considering you have at least 10 expertise. I don't know what's up with that.

Note also that average melee hits are higher for you as you got a 100 DPS innate 2.7 speed weapon versus my Talon and a truckload of armor ignore procs. But otherwise everything in terms of scaling seems identical.

The only explanation I can think of explaning the ~200 dps difference between us (assuming the same play style) is that obscure lack of crit you have there along with that high 'failure to hit' (I wouldn't call it 'miss') rate. Why those were there, I don't know. The 2/5 tier 4 wouldn't help, but it surely wouldn't account for such a level of difference. Any ideas?

Ok...so overall the general consensus is that double mongoose is better then Executioner MH/Mongoose OH?

The spreadsheet knows all. Short version: yes.

Well yes, of course, if we're talking about Shadowstep and not 11/28/22 then I'd say that's easily predictable. 560 armor ignore on top of whatever your gear has, 1.10 * AP from yourself and any buff, ~ 1.39 * your Agility in attack power raid buffed, ridiculously scaling your AP, of course white main-hand damage will go through the roof. All combat gets is 1.02 * Agility. I just don't see where you're going with this.

I was just pointing out you also don't seem to be doing as well as combat as you should - at least on that fight - given you're stating you do better as hemo often. I could be wrong, since this may be raid buff related, but I'm just pointing out you should be doing higher as combat rather than on par, if not worse. I just tried to come up with an explanation as to why you would be doing as good as hemo.

But yes, of course in practise sheets can't compare the two unless it's sustained damage.

EDIT: I don't mean to come off as rude, mind you. I'm just trying to understand what's the whole point of the discussion. Also in regards to being simultaneously in front/behind - aside from when the mobs turn to cast something (like Teron and his mark), I think you can avoid the situation by sitting at max melee range.

The 560 armor penn. from Serrated Blades is what causes this difference (as well as the AP boost if you run 11/21/29). The question I have is this: did you get more white damage overall than combat, or just more per hit? More per hit makes sense, as with a Hemo spec your white hits will hit harder. For 11/28/22, there should be approximately the same number of white hits for a Hemo build and a Combat Swords build, as both will have Sword Spec. Thus, CSwords vs. 11/28/22, I expect Hemo to exhibit more white and Combat more yellow. For 11/21/29 Hemo, you lose a bunch of white hits from sword spec, and therefore CSwords should have more white hits, and perhaps a little more white damage, overall.

Almost all combat talents in the bottom end of the tree (AR, Aggression, Combat Potency, Surprise Attacks) increase only yellow damage. In addition, CSwords gets Lethality and poison talents where Hemo doesn't. 11/28/22 Hemo picks up all the same white damage boosters, though, plus Serrated Blades. And let's not forget the Hemo debuff itself! It makes sense that white damage is going to be higher with Hemo+Swords, but you lose a good bit of yellow in the process.

Check out my armory :-)

In my case: Shoulders, Gloves, 2 Rings, and potentially the ZA Bow, so well over 600 Passive, although I would use the Al'ar gun if I would have bothered to pick it up...

For Tri-Spec that makes sense, you still have the same set bonuses, you don't attack any faster with Combat (except during BF), and you have Duel-Wield and Precision, so the only difference for white damage is you now have more AP (Assuming you picked up Deadliness) and Serrated Blades, so yes, your auto-attacks are going to hit for a good bit more, and I had the same experience where my white damage was higher, and it was a higher percentage of my total damage.

Regarding Hemo, I seem to remember getting more damage per tick, but less ticks due to longer cycles. Basically Combat is better due to the controlled burst, you do more yellow damage with Combat, you can chain cooldowns, and generally your DPS will be higher.

The best comparison I can find is Kaz'rogal because of lack of variability:
WWS
http://www.en-raptured.com/wws/archive/2008-02/2008-02-19_Kaz'rogal/apoq.html

You do slightly more DPS as Combat, but it might help if you can pull 2 fights that you feel are very similar, but generally on a tank and spank fight, Tri-Spec (especially Mace/Sword) will come very close 1-2% of Combat (Mace/Sword), to the point where the RNG will have a larger effect then your spec. The lack of burst/chaining potential is where you can fall behind Combat, especially on fights where you aren't in combat the entire time.

White hits will be for more for the reason I explained above, as will your total white damage because BF is less of a gain for white damage then Serrated Blades and the additional AP from Deadliness. As for Rupture, I would imagine it ticks for a decent amount more, but you should be seeing less total ticks, and you shouldn't be seeing anywhere close to 100% more, maybe 50% more, but that is a stretch... and that is 50% more on 5% of your damage.

Exactly.

@Hanos
Just wanted to point out a minor mistake in your gear suggestion post. Talon of Azshara is actually better than Blade of Infamy due to speed and stat allocation.
Edit: Also, the WWS you listed does not make for a good hemo vs combat comparison due to the drastic differences in gear between the two rogues.