One thing to keep in mind is that you're sucking stormstrike charges when timing envenoms like that. If you want to look at raid DPS on the whole, you would have to subtract from envemon the expected damage lost from someone's lightning bolt or earthshock not getting its 20% damage bonus. Or, possibly, someone's instant poison. There's also the potential, albeit minor, consideration that stormstrike (if it works like improved shadowbolt) will increase DP damage while active, without consuming charges, and that's no longer occurring.

As far as I know, using a stormstrike charge with a cold-blood'd envenom with 5/5 stacksDP/CPs will be much more damage overall than letting it be eaten by a DP tick or IP hit, even if the occasional Chain Lightning comes in.

I also use a fast offhand and usually stick to envenom on non-boss fights, and sometimes even on bosses. If I'm dropping XA on a mob for the raid, I usually drop rupture from the rotation instead of envenom. I run double-deadly, no enhance shaman or WF totem, just Bshout and salv/might. Envenom usually hits for just a little less, or more if CB'd/feral, on average, than rupture. Granted, if I have 5pts and SnD isn't near dropping and the boss is above half or so, I'll drop a rupture in the mix, but past that point, I mostly just do XA and Envenom.

Not saying that I think it's best, just that it's how I like to play it when not needing to min/max.

Deadly poison ticks do not consume stormstrike, that I know for sure. I do not know however if instant poison does. That would be a big waste of stormstrike.

I'm with DMM here. I don't trust the numbers I got. Expertise should be well above +hit. My best guess is that neither Mutilate nor Finishers are taking Expertise into account, which would cause it to be significantly undervalued. drumbum's recorded bug validates this theory. For white attacks, expertise = hit, and that seems to be what is happening.

I have little time today, but I will try to poke around some more and see where the formulas need help.

Instant poison DOES consume Stormstrike charges, Deadly poison does NOT consume Stormstrike charges.

One thing to remember when comparing Envenom vs Rupture - Rupture costs less energy. The 10 extra energy you're spending on Envenom is directly taken out of the energy you could be spending on more Mutilates. Rupture should be doing about 300+ a tick, probably closer to 320 for a BT-geared Rogue. 8 ticks, thats roughly 2500 dmg for 25 energy. Envenom may average 3500 (after factoring for crit rate and such) for 35 energy if you have the right buffs for it, however the loss of deadly poison effectively lowers the Envenom damage done. If you have an elemental shaman, your raid will be worse off if you are using envenom.

I decided to goof off this week and go 41/20/0 for a night in Hyjal. My armory gear is deceptive. I had a retadin enhance shaman and warrior in group. Flask, scroll, haste pots, and food for each fight. I completely forgot to hit drums the entire night. Unbuffed stats were 1788 ap 270 hit rating and 27.08% crit. Of note is that I was using the ashtongue talisman of lethality. Weapons were Boundless Agony and s2 shiv.

WWS Loading...
Rage: ~1200 dps
Anetheron: ~1600 dps
Kaz'rogal: ~1400 dps
The weird part for me is that I actually beat my 20/41 combat record on Anetheron :/ I must really suck at generic combat rogue cycles.

Question:Is it fair to look at the coming patch and increase the mutilate damage by 18% (15% crit and lethality's 1/5increase on that crit damage?) and finisher dps by ~25%?

Combat wws: 1820 ap ~330 hit 26% crit
In this wws I didn't have a scroll but I actually remembered to spam drums :P

Wow Web Stats
Rage: ~1200 dps
Anetheron: ~1600 dps
Kaz'rogal: ~1500 dps

No not really. Unless you get extremely unlucky or have a lazy raid the only thing that stops you from doing damage is sleep. If the targeted person moves the infernal spawn spot fast enough you never even notice etc.

Honestly? On my end the difference is small enough to be discounted as a rng issue. I just never expected Mutilate with my crappy crit% to keep up.

I've had plenty of weird tri spec hemo moments though. The last time I ever saw Void Reaver I set a personal record on him with trispec hemo swordspec and he can't even bleed.

How badly did you beat your combat set up by getting 1880?

I dont have the log but mid 1600's best combat spec on Anetheron. Now that you mention it the nights I was Hemo I may not have gotten slept v/s combat I may have been slept once or twice. It was a while ago and I can't remember either way. The RNG is the RNG I guess.

The same night though I hit 1711 on Azgalor too. WWS

It's so hard to compare fights from week to week. Getting slept or stunned by an infernal can have a huge impact on a fight since it's so short. Also, as your raid-wide DPS goes up, the mob dies faster, meaning bloodlust/haste pot/etc are up for a larger percentage of your combat time. Even if you changed no gear at all, if you had cooldowns front-loaded in the fight, and the rest of the raid got better to kill it faster, it would make your numbers look better too.

Then there's nice little exotic buffs that could sway things too. Just make sure your tank gets one too

Thats awesome but I dont think you could keep an M/C'd mob long enough to last an entire fight could you?

Well there's 2 necros in wave 8, and it stacks if both are MC'd and cast on you, but we only MC'd one and it killed the priest controlling it partway through the fight, so my numbers, while not bad, are not earth shattering.

I got the buff twice

Others have had better luck:

I think these guys have had some practice

Isn't some energy refunded when a special fails even if you haven't got Quick Recovery?

For all Combopoint generating Moves yes, 80% of the energy cost will be refunded. Für mutilate this is 48 Energy, but the 12 will belost and this is quite a bit in the long run.

Yes, 80%, so the difference shouldn't be all that much when finishers cannot be dodged, but it should still be some. I can't think of any reason Expertise shouldn't be greater than Hit Rating.

It has been shown in another thread that Mongoose is clearly the winner for combat swords. Combat mutilate benefits somewhat more from crit, making Mongoose even better.

Use Slice and Dice as first priority finisher. It's easily the best damage per energy.

Stick with mongoose. If you read through some of the material in the 101 thread or seen the gear spreadsheet discussion of late, you'll see that for all except possibly the highest-end gear sets, Mongoose > Executioner for a combat spec. This is even more true for Mutilate, since in a Mutilate build crit (and AGI) is worth more than in a combat build.

If you already have executioner on BA, don't bother re-enchanting though. The difference is small enough to not be worth the mats unless you are really persnickety. (This is the situation I'm in right now. I got executioner main hand on Heartless to try it out, found out it wasn't better, but I'm not going to drop cash to fix it.)

Another good reason to stay with Mongoose. Also, you are probably better off with a 1-3 SnD, 3-5 Rupture cycle than a triple 4-5 cycle of SnD, Rupture, and Envenom. Envenom, as mentioned many times in this thread and others, wipes your DP stack, reducing it's usefulness significantly in a sustained fight. If you do use Envenom, try to just time it with a Cold Blood. I can see CB Envenom being worth it, as it will hit really, really hard with 5/5 vile poisons.

Yes and no. For normal specials, yes - you get 80% back (I believe). For finishers, no, you lose all the energy of the finisher even if it misses. That's the reason the talent exists, as far as I know.

By the way, both the bug affecting Mutilate and the bug affecting finishers were tracked down.

The first fix I mentioned on the previous page of this thread (http://elitistjerks.com/660022-post421.html).
The other one was tracked down by Dontmindme here (http://elitistjerks.com/660089-post439.html).

Note that when I used the default gear set on the 2.4.0.3 spreadsheet (2.4.0.4 seems to be having some problems that are still being worked out, but I don't know if they affect Mutilate cycles or not), that I found that expertise rating was ahead of agility making it the best stat, much as we expected. However, once I included the extra 15% crit chance for Mutilate from the new Punctured Wounds talent, agility once again took a slight lead over expertise. (The difference seems a little suspicious to be honest.)

Now, don't get me wrong: I appreciate all the work that has been done to date in the DPS Spreadsheet. But, in the end, I feel that the Mutilate modeling (cycles and Seal Fate) are simply too crude at this point in time to really base any serious analysis on -- which is something to expect since Mutilate has never been shown to truly compete with combat builds for raiding.

Something that was brought up earlier in this thread was that taking points out of Improved Slice and Dice actually increased the predicted DPS for a 41/20/0 build. This logically makes no sense. This makes me question the validity of the AEP values it gives as well, although we don't really have a better source for AEP values either.

I'll probably start to spend some time soon to look over exactly how the spreadsheet deals with Mutilate cycles and see if I can't come up with a reason why this happens.

The main reason that sort of thing happens with Mutilate (Imp SnD lowering dps) is because the cycle lengths are based on SnD times, so the same cycle is actually longer. In other words, a 3s+/4r+ cycle is actually a different cycle when you have Imp. SnD. The same would apply to trying to go 3s/5r Combat Swords without Imp SnD. Your DPS goes down because SnD will always drop for a time.

Because Mutilate doesn't need the full cycle length, Imp SnD doesn't help and the longer cycles are actually worse than without them due to lower rupture uptime. This is why the difference isn't 0. The sheet adapts to a fixed set of cycles. The cycles are different when they have different lengths. So, it does make logical sense why the DPS changes (sometimes negative) with Imp SnD.

Also, I posted a new 2.4.0.4a that should resolve the earlier unrelated problems with all mutilate bug fixes in place.

The Mutilate modeling isn't that "crude", it's the majority of the cycle sheets. It has its issues, the biggest is the variability of cycles. There isn't a very easy way to model how much energy play one actually has and determine how often one's energy actually drops or caps out. Since Mutilate has a larger than normal amount of variability (given the additional randomness of Seal Fate procs), it will suffer unquantifiably more often from these issues. Combat cycles also have the same issues (a string of unlucky procs/non-procs with Combat Potency or finishers) could leave one in the same situation, it just happens less often.

This isn't to say there my not yet be undiscovered bugs, but it's still the best model for Mutilate in action. Maybe not perfect, but close enough for now.

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Rogue -> Talent Calculator

Seeing as in 2.4 they're going to have a 15% increased Mutilate critical strike chance, I'm assuming the Imp Backstab is Puncturing Wounds already. I'm having a difficult chance deciding if I would use two points in Master Poisoner, two more points in Improved poisons (bringing it to 4/5), or Quick Recovery. I'd just like some feedback on which one seems more viable for optimal DPS.

And I'm curious if there's some amount of hit rating I should try to maintain while improving my crit and AP to increase my mutilate damage. Any feedback will be most appreciated.

Well, taking the default T6 gear in the DPS spreadsheet, selecting the Mutilate talent build and equipping S3 daggers.
Looks like if you use the slow Mutilator offhand, Quick Recovery shows slightly better. If you use the fast offhand, 2 more in Improved Poisons is showing a slightly higher gain. But we are only talking about 1 buffed DPS or so per talent point with any of those options. You, of course, could see what it looks like with your own gear but inputting those into the spreadsheet yourself.

Well, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's generally accepted that when you raid as Mutilate, you don't use cycles. Therefore trying to model the DPS as if you did use a cycle just means you aren't really getting a good estimate of your DPS output. In reality the spreadsheet was originally designed for combat DPS modeling, for which using a fixed cycle methodology certainly makes a lot of sense due to it being so much more predictable. Unfortunately Mutilate is not so easily modeled in the same way, so the accuracy drops.

I'm not trying to belittle the work done in the spreadsheet. I hope I'm not coming off that way. It is the best Mutilate model currently and I don't refute that. However, with Mutilate getting a significant buff, I think it's starting to become a little more interesting to try and find a more accurate way to deal with Mutilate to hopefully bring it in line with the accuracy of combat modeling.

Of course, if WOTLK is just around the corner, it may just be a waste of time anyway.

Similar, though not identical, to many other builds already proposed elsewhere in this thread. The basic tradeoffs, again as covered previously in this thread, are the mobility of Fleet Footed and the +healing effect of Quick Recovery over the DPS increase of poison talents. General consensus thus far has been that FF is worth it because a large number of fights are high-mobility, and that QR is worth it because the DPS gain of the poisen talents is small enough that the utility/surviveabilty gain from QR is an even exchange.

From a stand-there-and-stab point of view, 2/2 QR and 2/5 Vile Poisons is probably the best DPS increase. For a mobile fight of any sort, you are better off moving those points to FF for increased movement speed. In fact, as has been previously discussed, you are probably better off not filling either Imp. Poisons or Vile Poisons, but instead splitting points between the two. This is because the first points in those talents are worth more than the last ones. (All in all, though, the DPS effect is very small, so personal taste comes into play.)

Also as stated (many times) here and elsewhere in the other rogue threads, there is NEVER any specific amount of hit rating (or any other stat) that you should try to "maintain." Instead, you should always select a piece of gear based on whether, as a whole, the stats on it improve your DPS. At different stat levels, the stats will be weighted differently. For example, until you are hit capped with specials (9% or ~143 hit rating, ~63 with Precision), hit will be worth much more than other stats. But, if you were under that cap and were to see a piece of gear with 1 hit rating and 1 agility, you would not select it over a piece of gear with no hit rating and 10 agility.

In practice, you might run anywhere from 150 to 363 hit rating and be a successful Mutilate rogue. Mutilate rogues, as a whole, tend to have less hit rating than other rogues because they will socket for agility and use items weighted more towards agility and AP. However, specific gear sets will vary widely from rogue to rogue depending on what is available to them and how they can use gearing to effect the most DPS. Bottom line: try out the DPS spreadsheet. For all it's shortcomings, it should still give you a good idea of whether a piece of gear is an upgrade for you.