All those things and Seal Fate, which is probably considerably more important, combined with find weakness, than something like vile poisons.

Additionally, I don't know the DPE off the top of my head, but how does mutilate stack up against SS in damage per energy? It could be that the yellow damage from that alone is a significant component of the white damage deficit. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can comment on those numbers.

To answer your question, the 10% of the white damage lost is mostly made up in finisher damage. I was combat daggers before I went to mutilate, so this wont be exactly the same as swords, but thats where my damage went.


Combat Daggers 15/41/5:
Wow Web Stats

Mutilate 41/20
Wow Web Stats

Summary: As combat I was about 60% white damage, 28% Backstab, 12% other sources. As Mutilate I'm around 50-55% white damage, 30% Mutilate, and 15-20% other sources. The amount of combo points you generate, as well as Find Weakness, leads to the increased finisher damage, .

assuming a 2.7 speed sword, a 1.8 speed dagger, 25% crit chance, 5 points in imp DW, and a poisoned mob, 100 dps weapon and 2800 attack power (easy math), find weakness buff and +16% dmg from talents for ss, no dodges

ss normal => ((2.7*(100)+2.4*(200)+98)*1.16 = 983.68

ss crit => normal*(2.33) = 2291.97

ss avg => (normal*.75+crit*.25) = 1310.75

ss dpe => avg/40 = 32.76

mut normal => ((1.8*(100)+1.7*(200)+101)+(1.8*(100)+1.7*(200))*.75+151))*1.1*1.5 = 1917.3

mut crit => normal*2.33 = 4467.3

mut avg => (normal*.6+crit*.4) = 2937 (i know they can crit individually but the math works to be the same)

mut dpe => avg/60 = 48.9

so assuming no calc errors (i did it in excel) mut has much higher dpe

It's not really very meaningful to compare the DPE of Mutilate and Sinister Strike (or any other two attacks under different specs) because your average energy generation isn't the same in both specs (combat potency, frequency of Relentless Strikes procs, etc.). I don't doubt that Mutilate does more DPS than Sinister Strike, but DPE is a poor way to gauge it.

I Decided to go Mutilate for my guild raids because swords is overused and combat daggers I can't stand. And I've found that it can be vastly superior to combat daggers and a bit over combat swords (unless that rogue has glaives.)

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft <--- this is the build I'm using after 2.4 went live. I didn't take Fleet Footed because when I get my new pair of slayer's boots at some point I'm gonna put 6agi + run speed on them, and quick recovery is kinda useless when you throw expertise into the equation and I'm not someone that takes unneccessary damage in raids.

Now the change to the backstab talent in Assass tree increased my mut dmg by a HUGE margin and I also have a lot of armor pen sorta....well maybe not really ...2540 or something around there. That makes my mut's hit BIG I mean I'm constantly hitting 4.5 - 5k muts on average and upwards of 6.5k when the right buffs / procs are all up at same time.

Armory Link --> The World of Warcraft Armory
Pay no attention to spec!!! I was messing around with combat fists during ZA and haven't specced back yet for raid on wed! HOW DARE YOU JUDGE SO FAST!!! anyways.

I use 2 1.8s daggers. (Fang of Vashj / Vengeful Gladiator's Mutilator), frickin Illidan dagger DOES NOT DROP FOR OUR GUILD!!!! GRRR. My rotation is kinda odd and depends on the situation / amount of time left on other finishers on boss.

I don't start with Garrote or Ambush. 1. Ambush would blow ass, 2. Garrote uses WAYYYY too much energy for a 1point BLEED effect that even with mangle won't amount to much damage. I walk right up and shiv....38energy lowest 1combo point I can get and adds deadly to mob 99% of the time.

Rotation --> Shiv > SnD > Cold Blood Mutilate (only for bosses) > Mutilate > SnD > Mutilate > Rupture > Mutilate > Envenom > Mutilate > SnD. <---- sometimes I can get off 3 finishers before I have to reapply SnD....it owns. The reason I SnD right after shiv is to put up the 10% dmg proc and then start off with mut's at full dmg.

A lot of the time after I shiv > SnD it will give me energy or combo point or both...so I just go to town with 4 point finishers till a 5 pointer comes up. This rotation just plain owns in dmg with the new 2.4 Assass talent making muts crit 50%+ of the time and having Ashtongue trinket from BT just makes this build own even more.

We have a really good sword rogue in guild named Pris who just came back to raiding when 2.4 came out and he is only partly t6'd out with sword build and can't touch me yet with mut...actually we have 3 sword rogues, Pris / Carv / Zeidrich. <--Another reason why I went daggers lolz?. Anyways none of them have been able to touch my Mut damage I can generate, so hopefully when they get almost all t6'd out or just sunwell geared we can do more testing.

Pris showed me how to use rogue dps spreadsheet and the only thing that can beat out my mutilate gear build in DPS is Warglaives obviously...NOTHING can touch that....like..ever....till expansion makes them useless. Not even Sunwell Swords came close to it. Warglaives Pris got it up to like 756dps above a t6 sword rogue and my Mutilate build was 537dps. Yeah it's way crappier than glaives but what did ya expect. I plugged in sunwell swords to Pris's Glaive build and OMG did the dps drop far...even farther than my mutilate build /shrug. I also opted for mostly 5agi/5hit gems for a miss chance of 2.58% white attacks and 2.25% dodged on all attacks. Which isn't bad at all with a 37.87% crit chance not including mongoose procs or the Assassination talent. Which also in turn makes envenom more viable cause you can use an Envenom finisher and stack it back up in 3s and never lose a tick of dmg from it if you time it right. You have that 3s window after a tick to use finisher and restack with a double mutilate + white attacks.

But I've accepted that mutilate won't be as great in dps as glaives, as such I still want to show undecided rogues that mutilate can be a very very very good alternative to the boring combat dagger crap and still generate insane dmg in raids. I mean how lucky do you have to be to even get a glaive in the first place cause the drop rate ISN'T THAT GREAT. Although some guilds are very lucky with them. In some of the WWS's I got beat by zohar our warrior who took MH glaive when I passed. (hardest thing to do EVER...and no other rogue in raid or online that night).

WWS Link --> Wow Web Stats

Oh yeah and we haven't had an Enh. Shammy forever so all those numbers in WWS is with no Enh. Shammy . 2 of the WWS's I was combat crap backstab and 1 of them I was playing with combat fists with S3 fists. The rest are mut's. A thing I hate bout the WWS's is it only shows MH mut dmg...like where it says Max crit 3*** that's MH only...not both hands.../sigh.

If anyone wants to ever talk through game, I play on Draka in DoG guild. Or just e-mail me. I Kinda like talkin bout potential of mutilate.

Sorry for all the dragging on ...sometimes I don't know how to shut up. Errr stop typing.

Mutilate loses in white damage, but gains in terms of (a) poison damage, (b) finisher damage, and (c) instant damage per energy. (Total instant damage may be the same or lower - I'm not sure - due to Combat Potency injecting more energy to spend into combat cycles. However, I'm pretty sure Mutilate is more efficient than sinister strike.) How much those respective gains an losses are determine which spec is better from a pure DPS perspective. Poison damage and finisher damage, for example, tend to be relatively insignificant, while a loss in white damage fairly significant. Thus, Mutilate remains slightly behind in most cases.

EDIT: I should probably realize that there was one more page of posts before responding. Meh.

NM... made a mistake... ignore this post.

Hehe nevermind Agkelos took it out.

I hope you were using 2.4.07 ot 2.4.07a versions otherwise the Rogue DPS s/sheet is overestimating your Mutilate DPS by 1 5pt Eviscerate per cycle time (around 100 DPS in many cases). Correct for that and Mutilate really struggles to match Combat Swords in theoretical output at any equivalent gear level and especially at T6. CS really gets huge boosts in DPS as you gear T6 (so much that I think Blizzard have done a very poor job in itemization levels for Rogues).

Sad really as I quite like playing Mutilate daggers. What's most interesting about this thread though is that there are a number of WWS logs where Mut has done very well vs. CS Rogues ... but is that due to Mutilate being better (and so poorly / incorrectly modelled) or the CS Rogues not being that flash?

Yeah I'm going to safely say mutilate cannot beat combat swords. Especially as you add haste buffs. But it isn't terrible either. I shocked myself by breaking 2k, and I'm not optimally gemmed by any stretch, and my cloak and ranged slots are just bad.

I don't know, I certainly won't pass up glaives if they ever drop for us, but until then I think I'm going to follow this to its logical end.

It can overestimate evis all it wants...cause I barely use it, I'm mostly using envenom finishers which are way higher in dps than evis ever will be and would be even higher if our frickin server would give us a good enh shammy. But i'll see if I do have it downloaded..which I think I do cause I got it from these forums.

Yeah, there was a bug that gave elevated results. I didn't catch it because it only applied to Mutilate cycles (and normal cycles where Eviscerate was better than Rupture - very rare indeed). With the Puncturing Wounds change, I had no idea exactly how much boost was to be expected so the overestimation didn't look so wrong.

I don't know that Envenom is such a good idea, you're taking off a 5 stack of poison each time, it seems like overall you might be hurting your dps. I know that especially with Vile Poisons my poison dps is right behind my rupture dps. Plus after every envenom you'd have to shiv deadly or risk putting out an unpoisoned mutilate.

I don't have the theorycraft on hand to verify this, but it seems like a bad idea.

I know this should probably go in the spreadsheet discussion thread but here it goes:

I see talk about the sheet overestimating/underestimating the DPS by assuming one thing or another. What I use the sheet for is only to see whether a specific piece of equipment is gonna give me a DPS increase and how much (compared to other possible upgrades). Given I don't pay too much attention to the actual DPS estimate it provides for me and instead I only see the difference changing an item makes, is it safe to assume that the sheet is very accurate in telling me whether one item (or gem combination for that matter) will give me more DPS than another?

EDIT: I'm talking about DontMindMe's DPS spreadsheet btw.

Vuljin's rogue 101 guide suggests mutilate rogues stack +8 agility gems (or their BT equivalents).
Since patch 2.4, mutilate rogues have received +15% crit on mutilates due to Piercing Wounds.

Should rogues still stack +8 agility gems, or has this blunt increase in crit shifted a tipping point for other stats?

Stack agi or no?

+1

A spread sheet is nothing like a real fight where you can get stunned etc.

We have 3 rogues in our guild the same 3 for 3 years.
1 Combat swords
1 is and has always been Combat daggers
1 Mutilate= thats me CL

2.4+
MH trash Mutilate cannot make up for AR BF on all them waves of trash.
BT when single trash using 2XDP Mutilate is well better.

On a good Spank and tank boss very close, sometimes I win other times CS just win, but Combat daggers is normally 3rd and our combat rogue is a very good player. 1xDP 1xIP if no shaman.

So to sum up,
Mutilate is hard work but great fun at the same time.
Does better than the other two build at times and less on other times but on a boss fight its a close fight on the damage meter.
Just try mutilate, get time to get the best from it and enjoy yourself.

If you want easy mode go for Combat daggers.

Long strings of maths have there purpose but until you spec it and run raids with trusted team mates, your just looking at figures.

All common sense really.

There are a couple references to simulators running around, one of which is a full Mutilate cycle simulator written by someone on this thread for the purpose of checking cycle optimization. I don't know where that simulator is, or if the source code on it is even public.

The other simulator mentioned is a Deadly Poison simulator which I made based largely on original code provided by Aldriana. This simulator's source code, with corresponding discussion (or lack thereof), is posted in the Advanced Rogue Mechanics thread.

The DP simulator was created for two reasons:
1) To get a better model of how much DPS Deadly Poison actually does over the long haul, and
2) To evaluate the merits of slow versus fast weapons in relation to poisons

I've used it capacity (2) in this thread to evaluate the usefulness of a fast vs. slow offhand for Mutilate. The conclusion was that slow wins, but only by a very small margin.

I got a fairly detailed simulator written in C# .net, and I believe Left is also working on something. My own work isn't progressing particularly fast at the moment, due to a case of RSI, lack of interest in working out a proper GUI, and the more fundamental question on how to properly play Mutilate. It would probably be best to support a number of different ways to play (cycles so to speak), from strict cycles like 2+s4+r to freeform finishers following general rules, such as 4+ Rupture while keeping up Slice and Dice. The dps difference can be several dozens - easily the difference between viable or not.

Currently I'm working on a theory for making decisions about Mutilate play - how important it is to keep up SnD and Rupture, at how many combo points to finisher, how to open a fight, whether to use Shiv for manipulating cycles, making best use of Find Weakness, etc. It involves calculating damage per energy values for ability sequences instead of single abilities. For example, MR(3) vs MMR(5) to decide whether it's best to use Rupture at 3 combo points, or Mutilate again before finishing. I'll make a more detailed post later.

If you're interested in playing with the sim's code, send me a PM.

Thanks Neshalin; I wasn't sure who the author of the other sim was. What I'm working on is properly implementing Mutilate in the DPS Spreadsheet, but it's not a simulator. The work there is coming along, but still a ways from next release.

How does this even come close to being an answer to my question?

I know about Mutilate. I know about C Daggers. I know about C Swords. I know their strengths and weaknesses.

I was asking whether I can safely trust the DPS spreadsheet to give me a rough estimate on whether an item would be beneficial for me or not. For instance, I have 4 daggers: Bad Mojo, Heartrazor and both S2 Daggers. According to the spreadsheet the best combination is Heartrazor MH and Bad Mojo OH. I might have guessed that Bad Mojo would be worse on OH and it would be better to stick to Merc. Glad. Shanker cos it has higher peak dmg and higher DPS. I trusted the spreadsheet on this one and stuck to Bad Mojo.

AAAAAAAAAnd now my question (making it as clear as possible): Am I right in trusting the spreadsheet to give me an ACCURATE estimate on whether one piece of equipment is better than another?

Ive been back and forth between mutilate and combat swords for the last few months.
Currently my guilds working on our brutallus groups.
With our 6 melee were trying to find who's the best to miss out on windfurry.
We have decided it'll come down to one of the 3 rogues in the other group.
Group comp will be:

group1 - rogue, rogue, enhancement shaman, blood frenzy warrior, ret pally.
group2 - rogue(me), feral druild, hunter, hunter, resto shaman droping grace of air.


My question is, would I be better off as combat swords or mutilate in the 2nd group?



Not sure what spec ill be if you armory me but my daggers are shard of azzinoth and tracker's blade.

Yes, it should be accurate enough in terms of comparing two pieces of gear.