OP here; I'd like to make an update given the latest 2.4 PTR change.

On other threads, a couple people have figured that the +15% crit to Mutilate will net a 10-12% increase in Mutilate damage, and a hard-to-estimate increase to finisher damage due to increased CP generation.

I decided to plug in my current gear into the latest DPS sheet to get a feeling for how much more work Blizzard needs to do in order to make Mutilate on-par with Combat Swords.

I used my current gear with Shard of Azzinoth/Tracker's Blade & Vengeful Slicer/Blade of Savagery. Armor/Buffs stayed the same, except I converted all the Rigid Lionseyes to Glinting Pyrestones for Mutilate, which I feel is reasonable.

Without the change, the sheet estimates Mutilate is 170 DPS behind Swords, which is close to my personal experience of about 150+ DPS. If I increase the Mutilate portion by 10%, I get a 44 DPS increase. So we're still short about 125 DPS, which is pretty significant percentage-wise (7.5%).

So what if Opportunity was somehow magically folded into Mutilate & Backstab, so that you got the benefit without losing talent points from somewhere else? I'd gain ~89 DPS. When combined with the existing 2.4 change, I'd be down ~35 DPS from Swords at that point. So there would still need to be one more change on top of that.

The final change needed would need to be something on the order of magnitude of 1 point in Serrated Blades (which actually brings my Mutilate & Sword builds exactly even). My feeling is the leaked Envenom change (not consuming DP charges) might be big enough, when you factor in the increased combo point generation of the new Muti.

Overall, its nice to see Blizzard putting some effort into making Mutilate viable for something, even though it still needs at least a couple more changes to bring it up to par.

And of course, none of this addresses the large, smelly turd known as "Deadened Nerves" sitting conspicuously at the bottom of the Assassination tree.

I read through numerous threads and forums and I read some things consistently:

- Mutilate does less damage than combat swords, but more than combat daggers, but Seal Fate modelling isn't very accurate
- Envenom wiil only be better than rupture if mangle isn't on the target

Ok, a couple questions.

Just to clarify, the thing about envenom not consuming poison charges IS in fact just a rumor?

Also, I've been combat swords for a long long time for pve. I just want to make sure I'm doing this right when testing mutilate damage, because I haven't been getting good results so far. It's 3 or 4 or 5 combo points, then use a finisher? I'm believing the goal is to keep Expose weakness and Slice and Dice on 100% uptime. Priority for finishers being:

1. Slice and Dice
2. Rupture
3. Envenom

And my final question is about rupture taking priority over envenom. So I raid with a shadowpriest AND an enhance shaman for about 90% of our raids. So I always have misery up, and I've been watching for stormstrike on the target and saving a find weakness + cold blood for that. When I crit, with stormstirke and misery on the target, I've hit as high as 5215 5pt envenom, and a low one is about 4800. This has made me begin to wonder, if I have 5DP charges up, and i see stormstike is up when I'm about to hit a finisher, is envenom out DPSing/DPEing rupture with only 3points? 4 or 5? I should also note that I do often raid with an arms warrior and feral druid as well.

Just looking at my recount Overall Data right now (about 3 days of raiding including some hyjal, a ZA clear, and a karazan) and it's showing my AVERAGE envenom crit for 3938. So that's including all kinds of envenoms, as low as 1800, as high as 5k crits. Rupture minimum 163, average 230, max 337.

1836 AP
255 hit
28.66 crit

4/5 tier5
Fang of vashj (executioner) / Vengeful Gladiator's shiv (mongoose). (I know for mut i should go double goose, but I don't want to re-enchant and i'm waiting on getting boundless agony)

Edit: Sorry if I missed any of these questions that may have been edited in the other pages. Usually I refer to the current roguecraft 101 for information,which kind of discriminates against mutilate. I've seen several "discussion" pages and a lot of people saying they're working on things, but haven't found the kind of large consolidated mutilate information post. I'm also a pretty big shadopanther.net fan for gear selection with combat builds, however, it's horrible for mutilate information. It even ranks mutilate at the bottom of the PvP builds, and lists 41/0/20 and 41/20/0 as the pvp specs... /eyeroll.

Correct. The only place where that Envenom change was listed was a set of leaked patch notes prior to the official ones being released. However, IIRC, a lot of the notes that were in those have since been implemented. Those notes were leaked to the major sites by someone claiming to have seen them in internal Blizzard discussions about changes they would like to experiment with at some point on 2.4 PTR.

The biggest factor I've found when I've experimented with Muti in raids is making sure you have at least 50 energy banked before you fire a finisher. It also makes sense to bank around 80 prior to firing SnD, since at that point you can afford to let Find Weakness lapse. I've found it an interesting spec to play because you are balancing SnD & FW uptimes, in addition to energy buildups.

In terms of gear planning, I haven't used shadowpanther.net since the spreadsheets have become available. The DPS sheet has a good enough Mutilate model to assist in gear selection. Basically whatever is good for other raid builds is good for Mutilate, except that you want to use Glinting Pyrestones over Rigid Lionseyes, and want to pass on items like Band of Devastation & Choker of Serrated Blades. This isn't a big deal, since those are essentially sidegrades anyways from Karazhan gear, except for the stamina.

So when you say correct, you just mean about the rumor thing? Is the info I posted about my attack rotation fairly accurate?

Also, I'm curious if there are any really good buff mods anyone can recommend which will help me track when find weakness is about to fall off.

Currently I'm using Natur ECB to monitor my SnD uptime, and Xperl with enlarged debuff frames for my ruptures and deadly poison stacks. Other than that I think I just have SCT telling me when FW falls off, which is after the fact.

I really want to do everything I can to give this mutilate dps trial a serious attempt.

Yeah, I meant correct as in "correct, the Envenom change as of now is still just a rumor."

I use NECB to track my debuffs on target, and NeedToKnow to track my short duration buffs (SnD, FW, Blade Flurry, AR, etc.). However, I had to hack in a fix a couple months back to it in order to handle parsing through a larger number of self buffs. And unfortunately, 2.4 broke the timer bars for NTK completely, so I'm not sure what I'll do then. If you're looking for something that's likely to keep working, I'd try ClassTimers from Ace. If you go that route, you can disable NECB's handling of debuffs & SnD, as it handles those. It might also be a good idea to have an energy ticker mod next to your energy bar, to help time finishers better.

I have a few things to say

Firstly, I don't understand how you get 10-12% Mutilate damage increase from 15% extra crit. It seems to me that you're getting 1n damage (1 * normal hit) on your normal attacks, 2.472n damage on your crits. Even with 30% base crit, and assuming both 5/5 Lethality and Relentless Earthstorm Diamond then we get this:

70% + (30% * 2.472) = 144.16n before the patch
55% + (45% * 2.472) = 166.24n after the patch

160.24 / 138.13 = 1.153... This is with no dodges - with 6.5% dodged the numbers become:

63.5% + (30% * 2.472) = 137.66n before the patch
48.5% + (45% * 2.472) = 159.74n after the patch

160.24 / 138.13 = 1.160... The outcome is even more pronounced when you have dodges (which most still do). We can check to see where the point of inflection lies, in terms of base chance to crit, where 15% extra crit chance stops adding more than 15% to Mutilate dps and starts adding less:

Where x is the base crit chance then 100-x is the base chance to hit:

100-x -15 + (2.472 * (x+15) ) is the new Muti dps
100-x + 2.472x is the old Muti dps

33% is the first integer value where 15% extra crit adds less than 15% dps from the Mutilate attck (based on the expertise-capped attack table). It would take a base chance to crit of 59% to make the extra 15% crit chance add less than 12% dps from the Mutilate attack. In short, close to everybody is going to gain more than 15% to whatever contribution the Mutilate attck adds to overall dps, compared to before the patch.


Secondly, the DPS sheet is undergoing some changes, specifically to the cycles modelled. The Mutilate cycles should change more than most. My version of the sheet (2.4.0.7a OO) tells me that, assuming equal weapons (I use Vengeful Gladiator weapons to make things as close as possible), Mutilate should be doing about 10% less dps than Combat Swords. That seems very wrong to me, particularly with the extra dps that the patch has brought. It also seems to go against all the anecdotal evidence we've seen in the threads here, saying that it's closer to Combat Swords than Combat Daggers is. I rather suspect that the recent changes to the sheet (where an accidental extra 5CP Eviscerate was being added to every Mutilate cycle's dps) have taken modelled Mutilate dps much lower than its true value, and that this could be rectified once the upcoming changes are made.

Anyway, the main thrust of this point is that the DPS sheet should soon be giving us a more accurate picture of Mutilate dps compared to Combat Swords dps, so anything the sheet tells us right now could very well change when the updates have been implemented.


Thirdly, you say you used the latest version of the sheet, which already includes the extra crit chance, and yet you still added 10% to your Mutilate dps for some reason. Why is that?