Interesting stuff. Picked out these two bits. On Shard vs WSC, from a playability point of view I think I would always prefer to have shard equipped, as dodged mutilate + finishers really mess with timing. Perhaps something that doesn't really show up in the spreadsheets.

On the second point, I can't remember if it was this thread or somewhere else I saw someone observe that 'Relentless Strikes is like the combat potency of Mutilate' which I felt was a nice way of putting it.

I have to agree that the Ashtongue is the best trinket for Mutilate, I also run with the Shard of Contempt. I'm wondering how the Tsunami Talisman compares to the DST and WSC?

It was coming out below them, at least in the tests I ran. I only looked at those four trinkets, but I never saw the sheet recommend Tsunami Talisman when I ran the "Upgrade" macro for the trinkets, no matter what the gearing or armor levels.

It is no upgrade from a certain gearlevel and onward. At least that's how it has been for me.

Right now I'm trying to decide how much I value the stability Expertise brings to the table.
Seeing how both Fang of Vashj and Shard of Contempt seem to be outperformed by Armorpenetration Alternatives on the spreadsheet.

I had a quick look and even when paired with the Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality (for extra crit, to boost the procrate), the Tsunami Talisman consistantly places below even the DST. Shard, WSC and DST all perform within about 5dps of each other, but the TT places about 10dps below the DST according to the spreadsheet. Madness of the Betrayer sits in between the DST and the TT.

Given the ease of obtaining the Shard, any Mutilate rogue with the Ashtongue rep needed to get the AtoL sould pretty much never use anything else other than Shard or WSC with it.

--edit--

Interestingly, with ideal Sunwell-level gear (except Thori'dal), you get to a point where WSC outperforms Shard on high armor bosses, due to high passive armor penetration. But at the same time, Shard outperforms WSC on low armor bosses for the same reason; the WSC proc starts being wasted. This switch becomes even more pronounced if you're using Improved Expose Armor. using the CurrentAlpha042808 DPS Spreadsheet, I'm seeing 6,102 passive armor penetration at the highest dps I seem to be able to eek out of a Mutilate build (3,142 dps using a 4-5s/4-5r cycle) with full raidbuffs, including totem twisting, Thistle Tea, a hunter with 5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark and Trueshot Aura, Improved Faerie Fire and both the warrior and shaman in the group being draenei. Of course if Improved Expose Armor were actually being used, it would likely be the Mutilate rogue who was applying it, so realistically you're never going to be able to get such dps unless you have 2 Muti rogues and it's the other one who is using Improved Expose Armor.

That dps figure may seem high but bear in mind the equivalent for Combat Swords using dual Warglaives was 3,636 dps (3,516 for non-Demons).

The more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that it should be a Combat rogue who keeps up Improved Expose Armor. Mutilate could do it, sure, but the truth is that we have enough things to put talent points in already. And the issue of cycles is also important. For a combat rogue, an SnD/EA rotation works almost perfectly with 5 pt. SnD, since the cycle time will be approximately 30 seconds. AR also helps a combat rogue get EA up early on without losing too much SnD time.

With Mutilate, however, you have around an 18-20 second cycle time, which means you are either refreshing EA 10 seconds early (SnD/EA cycle) or letting it drop for 10 seconds(SnD/EA/SnD/Rupt alternating cycle). (I suppose you could run a SnD/EA/Rupt cycle, but even then you are likely to see EA drop for a few seconds.)

In terms of consistency as well, the combat rogue would have a much easier time of it. If I were assigned to EA duty, I'd probably respec back to combat swords. (Not that it's likely to happen any time soon, as my guild isn't all that big on melee maximization... yet. We still don't use CoR.)

What if you alternate between cycles depending on how well your procs go?
Since it is sometimes viable to queue Energie for EA (when SnD allows such) you could possibly run SnD-EA-SnD-R-SND-EA- with varying CP used to SnD.
Or you could try to run SnD-EA in a 5CP-both cycle to recieve a cycle with 30sec length and look at what you can possibly cram in there.
My point beeing if you focus on keeping SnD and EA up you should be able to never let any of the two drop and still use bursts of CP/energie to weave in some Ruptures if you do it depending on situation.

Using Left's advice of AToL/WSC and a 3-5s/5-5r cycle I got some parses to show that Mutilate can be viable in a raid environment if you don't have Warglaives.

Wow Web Stats

Naj'entus: 2025 dps
Teron: 2320 dps
Gurtogg: 1937 dps
Mother: 1775 dps (but I died)
Council: 2324 dps
Illidan: 1746 dps

I would like to see what kind of numbers others are getting with Mutilate in a T6 or Sunwell environment so that we have more data to compare with, but it looks like to me that if you are unlucky with Warglaives Mutilate is a very competitive build. Consider you also receive 20% more healing with Quick Recovery which I am sure all of your raid healers appreciate the extra 'bang for their buck' that they get from this.

Perhaps Mutilate could use a small tweak (Envenom doesn't eat DP charges, hi), but from what I can tell it's still very competitive. It seems to fall behind on the excessively short 2 or so minute fights where Adrenaline Rush is worth a lot more, but it has very high sustained DPS when played correctly.

This is off-topic with the current discussion, but I was wondering if Drums of War might be more suited to a mutilate build than Drums of Battle because of lesser importance of haste in a mutilate build. Just something that occurred to me last night in TK.

Speaking of which, I never realized how important group synergy is with a rogue. We did Al'ar (guild first w00t! ) and Void Reaver. I ended up doing about 850 DPS on VR and got outdps'd and out damaged by a cat druid in my group. I know he has good gear (new badge staff and ZA+T5 content loot), but it was kind of a low-blow to me haha. I later found out that the resto shaman in our group was not dropping any totems for us during the fight, the warrior was using Commanding Shout instead of Battle, and the hunter's pet died to pound and so there were no hunter buffs either. There was a Ret pally, but I don't know what they give. So all I had was +5% to crit from feral druid. I think it might have been different if I had not been mutilate because of the poison immunity and after removing all the buffs I never had and the activating the poison immunity, the spreadsheet pretty much showed I lose about 450 DPS from the lack of all those buffs. It kind of irked me to see a cat druid #2 on a fight, mostly because this guy is always asking for meters and bragging about cat dps

[Drums of Battle] are drastically better than [Drums of War]. While Mutilate may value haste less, there's still no comparison between the two.

Left,

When you calculated trinket priorities did you happen to find a break even point in boss armor where WSC and SoC are equal for a Mutilate build? I have more ArPen than you used in your simulation, and I'm looking to find the point where WSC surpasses SoC in every case.

I didn't do a heavy analysis, so no, I don't have a break-even point. I would imagine that the point where WSC > SoC will vary not only based on armor penn. but also based on other factors, such as hit rate, crit rate, and AP. It seems that WSC outscales SoC until very late gear levels (when the massive amounts of passive armor penn. blunt WSC's potential). Thus, I'd say you can safely assume T5/Early T6 -> use SoC, Late T6 -> use WSC, T6.5 (Sunwell) -> go back to SoC for low-armor bosses.

Unfortunately, I think that the answer to the break-even point question is going to have to be "consult the spreadsheet" unless someone wants to spend a lot of time running data through the sheets to get some relative points.

I'll respec mutilate next week for our farmed content (we're 5/5 hyjal, 8/9 BT atm, hopefully illidan will go down this week ^____^) and post my wws if you would like. I'm not as geared as you are, but it could help/be interesting.

Another thing is I prefer running a 1/2/3 snd 4/5 rupture setup, and throwing in evis's when I can afford to. It just seems to make more sense to me because snd and rupture are up all the time with this, and i'm using less cp on them. The only down side to this is the less of a chance for relentless to proc, but I don't really think that would make rotations using higher cp snds better.

In general, you actually are better off to use more CP for finishers than less CP, for two reasons:

1) You get a greater return on a higher CP finisher (eg, more slice time) so that you can use more instants before needing to refresh
2) More importantly, you get much better energy efficiency because relentless strikes effectively makes 25 energy, 5 CP finishers free. So, yes, less of a chance for relentless to proc really does make lower CP finishers quite inferior.

I'm not sure about your second point there. Relentless Strikes is basically 5 energy per (unwasted) combo point, regardless of whether it's spent in a 1-point move or a 5-point move. More lower-CP finishers actually works out to more energy regen overall, because you get more Ruthlessness procs, which are worth 5 energy in themselves (3 per finisher). The tradeoff, of course, is that each attempted finisher also costs more energy. I'm actually unsure if you want to maximize your energy efficiency on finishers, or drop the efficiency and hit a sweet spot where you get as many finishers as possible while still more efficient than mutilate.

Your first point is still true though, the fifth combo point can be worth more than the first.

The point is that you spend less energy on finishers the more combo points you finish with, leaving more energy to be spent on mutilate, which is doing more damage than any of your finishers.

Theoreticly using low-CP Finishers will give you more relentless procs and more AToL procs than stacking to 5CP and wasting CPs that go beyond the cap. This statement is based on probability theorie and as such gives you an average estimate of what will happen.

On the other hand stacking up to 5CP gives you a guaranteed proc of both of the former, wich could argueably simply be better than more procs on the average.

First off, just wanted to say thanks for all the helpful information in this thread. All the comments about combat cycles, gem selection, and miscellaneous information has really help me understand mutilate much better.

I recently started doing SSC/TK bosses using combat daggers, going to switch to mutilate soon, and the two bosses every rogue hates as mutilate comes to mind. While Void Reaver and Hydross are immune to poisons, poison phase of hydross that is, is it still worth using mutilate or should I use backstab during these encounters?

Also, the 2.4 patch notes mention that, "Elemental creatures are no longer explicitly immune to poison and disease effects. Elementals with nature school immunities will still be immune to nature-based poisons, however." Does this mean that elemental creatures with nature school immunities aren't immune to poisons such as mind-numbing poison? I read this somewhere on a forum and just wanted to see if it holds any validity.

Thanks for any input!

According to the DPS spreadsheet I'm still seeing Mutilate coming out ahead in terms of overall dps on unpoisonable bosses. I know this was decided definitively a while back but I couldn't remember if those results included what is now Puncturing Wounds, since Muti builds never used to take the talent when it was just Improved Backstab.

--edit--

That patchnote means that, say, fire elementals are no longer poison immune but all the nature ones (air and earth elementals) still are. Basically it just means that mobs need to be individually immune to either the nature school, poisons or bleed effects rather than every creature of 1 type (elemental, mechanical, demon, humanoid etc.) being poison- or bleed-immune.

Maybe I worded my statement poorly the first time.

You want to maximize your efficiency on finishers, while still maintaining Find Weakness up at or near 100%. As it turns out, Mutilate is nearly as much damage-per-energy as your direct-damage finishers (such as Rupture), which means that there isn't much benefit to converting energy from Mutilates into finishers. Coupled with the fact that lower CP finishers both deal less damage and cost more energy, you are better off pushing your finishers to as high CP as possible.

Basically Jakani has it right, although it's more of an efficiency thing than it is a direct damage thing. It's more efficient to get free finishers and spend all your energy on Mutilates directly than it is to spend a little bit on finishers and the rest on Mutilates.

As I believe I said before in an earlier post, it's a tradeoff of "wasting" CP or "wasting" energy. Whenever you finish with below 5 CP, you waste 5 energy per combo point below 5. As it turns out, I am of the opinion (and the spreadsheet backs me up) that the 5 energy there is worth more damage than the 1-2 "wasted" combo points would be were I to Mutilate again to get to 5 CP.

In other words, spending more energy on finishers means you are spending less on Mutilate, and that trading Mutilate damage for finisher damage turns out to not be as good as you would think. In other other words, less, having less relentless procs really does make it inferior. Check the spreadsheet cycle model (unhide the "Buffed Cycles" page) if you want to see how it all plays out.

EDIT: I should comment here that we are talking about very small differences in DPS... the cycle model is coming out with only 2-3 DPS difference for me, at most, between 2-4s/4-5r and 3-5s/5-5r. I would imagine the scaling tips more in favor of 3-5s/5-5r with better gear, although I don't know for sure.

One thing that I have experienced simply from a cycles perspective is that it is very easy to accidentally clip Rupture when using a 1-Mutilate between Finishers cycle. IE, sometimes you get a 4 pt. Rupture, Relentless proc, Mutilate, SnD, Relentless Proc, Mutilate, and if you had any energy queued up at all you are ready to Rupture but your last Rupture is still ticking. You have to be quite careful to not reapply Rupture prematurely, as it's efficiency will go down quite a bit if overwritten. Now, this is only at the lucky end of the proc spectrum, but from a playstyle point of view you do need to be aware that the potential for Rupture clipping exists, and when you do clip Rupture it is bad for DPS.

Based on months old discussion in this thread, it appeared that using an unpoisoned Mutilate was better than Improved Backstab. At the time (before 2.4), an unpoisoned Mutilate did less damage on average than Backstab, but the higher combo point generation of Mutilate allowed for higher FW uptime and in general let you maintain a better cycle. (Note for example that it is theoretically possible -- although improbable -- to require 5 Backstabs to get to 5 combo points. Mutilate guarantees it in 3, and has about a 95% chance of doing it in 2.)

After the buff to Puncturing Wounds, now the damage of an unpoisoned Mutilate has been increased to almost exactly what you would expect from an Improved Backstab, so Backstab literally has no advantages at all anymore.

Short answer: Take Backstab off your bars if you spec Mutilate.

All poisons are nature-based, including Mind-numbing Poison.

On this topic, I do think a mut rogue could do this using 5s/5ea. You would treat a SnD and EA cycle the same and queue up energy for both to get in 2 mutilates in per cycle. Neither snd or ea do damage so you don't need find weakness up for them. You'd end up with one more mutilate per 2 cycles at the cost of no rupture. (mut, mut, snd. mut, mut, ea. repeat) If Mutilate and rupture are approximately the same damage per energy, it should be a about the same or a net gain due to IEA? Mangle is pretty powerful for rupture, so I'm not sure.

I was doing ZA last night with no warrior and lots of physical so I attempted a EA rotation. Doing Snd/EA/Rupture does drop EA for a bit. I did a SnD/EA rotation and added another mutilate into the SnD cycle so my EA clipping wasn't so bad. It was also 5am in the morning so I don't especially remember how much time was left on EA before i cut into it.

I'd agree that it's easier as a csword build to start, though. I always did 2SnD, AR, 5EA, 4SnD and the AR would finish leading you perfectly into your SnD/EA rotation from then on. Mut goes 3-5s, into 5ea, then continues. Takes a bit longer to get EA up unless you 5EA to start, then follow up with SnD to EA cycle at a huge loss to personal DPS.

As far as talent goes, I guess it depends on what you raid? Sunwell doesn't really have anything that is murderable so you could take out 2 in that and put it into IEA.