Would using double deadly poison make Envenom a more desirable finisher? You would reapply deadly almost instantly, and still be able to rotate SnD / rupture easily. Edit: While also obviously keeping Find Weakness up*

1700 with that gear was indeed good. But that pretty much just tells you how different the dps is between certain bosses and what group buffs you get.

I did 1500 with alot better gear on council: Wow Web Stats

So that prolly the point you missing Iliyan. Need to check same bosses before making any assumption that your dps sux. I think 1.1 sounds just fine.

Hmmz, seems my cycles are fucked after checked eyegores wws and spreadsheet. You dont use third finisher at all it seems? Just mutilate and rupture? Well well, see next time if il improve.

It would cause poison to refresh more quickly, thus making Envenom relatively more desirable; however, there is lost opportunity cost due to no longer having IP or WF or whatever on the other hand (at least, until Deadly Brew comes along) which eats what little advantage you may gain; moreover, my understanding is that even without the loss of DP uptime, Rupture is still superior to Envenom. Hence, it's a case of "if you happen to have double deadly poison up anyway for some other reason, it might make sense to use Envenom more; but you shouldn't double up on DP to try to boost your Envenom, as it will likely result in a damage loss".

As I understand the cycle thought currently optimal is in fact just slice and dice and 5 point ruptures, pooling energy before SnD to get, at least most, ruptures within find weakness. After the rupture there should be enough time on SnD to mutilate once and pool energy before refreshing SnD right before you would cap and chaining off 2x (3 if unlucky even if it wastes CPs) then a %pt rupture, repeat.

It may be optimal to mutilate again before SnD if you're first mutilate leaves you on 2 CP, I have been tending to go with 2 thought this can leave you having to refresh a tad soon on the next SnD without pooling as much energy. Depending on your situation the second mutilate may leave you in the same situation on the first SnD however, this seems akin to combat's need to adjust on the fly to variable combat potency procs.

I am afraid I missed the discussion of the exact theorycraft behind this cycle, I gather it was found to be optimal based on spreadsheet investigations. If someone happens to know where I might find the details I would be grateful. The rogue TTT article list this as the currently thought optimal mutilate cycle, and I have seen it referenced elsewhere in passing as something recently found based on spreadsheet(s?) work. Plus it seems to be working for me, 100% SnD and near 100% 5pt FW ruptures.

I believe you'll find discussion about it earlier in this thread.

You're doing something similar but not identical to the current thought-to-be-optimal cycle. The best cycle according to theorycraft is 3-5s/5-5r; you're doing 2+s/5-5r.

From your description it sounds like you may get more ruptures under Find Weakness with your variant (emphasis on the 'may', I haven't done any real analysis). However, you're also losing some energy return from Relentless Strikes. Each RS proc is worth almost half a mutilate, which makes low-CP finishers a questionable proposition.

It's also not hugely important to get every Rupture under FW. It's nice, but Rupture is a small percentage of your total DPS, so buffing it by 10% doesn't move your total all that much.

Yeah, the work on this cycle is found in the DPS spreadsheet (new cycles model) and in earlier discussion in this thread. (I'm not sure exactly where at the moment.)

The caveat, always, to the spreadsheet result is that the spreadsheet looks at an average cycle and cannot tell you how to adjust to changing situations. Thus, while the spreadsheet comes up with 3-5s/5-5r as optimal, what I end up running in practice is 2-4s/(2xMutilate)r. This is because I find it difficult to keep up SnD if I either (a) have to Mutilate again on 2 CP after a Rupture, or (b) have to use 3 Mutilates to achieve 5 CP for Rupture. If either of those events occurs, I find myself at the risk of losing SnD for a few seconds, so I simply finish early. The loss of DPS from an early finisher (2 pt. SnD or 4 pt. Rupture) is worth the gain from not having SnD drop.

Every once in a while if I have Cold Blood up I may run 4s/4r/4e(n) for a single cycle, where the Cold Blood is used to guarantee me 4 CP on my second or third part of the cycle. I only really do this for one cycle, as it really stretches SnD, and only if I get Ruthlessness procs so that I can chain Finisher-Mutilate-Finisher-Mutilate-Finisher. If I don't get to 4 CP in a single Mutilate somewhere in there, then I break early and return to the SnD/Rupture cycle. Effectively, I see this as the equivalent of tossing in an extra Evis. during AR as combat rogues do.

All in all, the spreadsheet still models Seal Fate builds the worst of any standard builds, because Seal Fate combo point generation is so granular that it really makes it hard to average well in a spreadsheet format. What we have now is a lot better than what we had before, but it still isn't 100% accurate due to averaging. Aldriana is working on a very interesting Rogue DPS modeling program that may be able to take Mutilate cycles to the next level of analysis in the near future, so maybe that will help validate the cycle we currently use further.

Did you run an "optimize" after swapping your gear around? I find that the Shattered Sun necklace is about 5 DPS behind Choker for me after I run the relevant "optimize" macros.

EDIT: Also, as Mutilate Akama is somewhat of a bad fight to compare yourself to other rogues on because it is so short. Adrenaline Rush, Blade Flurry, and Heroism (which favors combat rogues) all have their effects amplified significantly by the short length of the fight, while the benefit of increased poison damage goes down due to the ramp-up time for DP being around half the length of the fight. I don't find myself on top of the Akama fight very often. You'll get a better comparison out of Gorefiend, I think. (And more practice time, too, if our guild's experience is any indicator...)

Reading this, I was thinking maybe (2xMut)s/(2xMut)r might be a viable cycle - but a 4cp S&D gives 26.1 seconds of uptime, or 260 energy, and 4 Mutilates use 240, so if even one of those finishers fails to proc Relentless, you're going to drop S&D for about 1 energy tick unless some energy is queued.

Do you ever drop S&D on a 2 point S&D cycle? 2pt S&D is just 17.4 seconds, so the energy budget is less than the cost of three mutilates.

As for mutilate cycles, i was doing pretty well with the following:

2x mut, snd, 2x mut, rupture.

if relentless doesn't procc and your second mutilate doesn't crit, ie you might end up having 4 cps, you use coldblood. if it is on cooldown, you use thistle tee (and blood elves out there might want to use their racial if they were unlucky for the third time). before refershing snd i wait for my energie to regen, unleashing the mutilates and the rupture under FW.

of course the smoothness of this cycle is dependent on proccs and luck, but after ~7 raid nights as mutilate i never noticed snd dropping because of bad proccs.

anyway, i hope to get ashtongue exalted, WSC and boundless agony soon - can't wait to make mutlate my main specc for raiding.

I was running;

Mutilate SnD Mutilate Mutilate Rupture

65% of my mutilates crit (per hand) so the chance of getting a 2pt snd isn't too high and I found I was able to keep SnD up 100% and all mutilates and ruptures within Find Weakness 100% of the time like this. Exploit Weakness is only 40-80% proc chance of the SnD though so that didn't stay up. If after the first mutilate after the slice and dice I have two combo points I use cold blood to guarantee a 5pt rupture; in the rare case it has been on cooldown and I'm on 4combo points I have just ruptured to keep cycle steady. 2pt SnD was always enough for me but i found 3 mutilates for a rupture would really throw of my energy pooling for the next few cycles dropping rupture out the find weakness.

Managed 2100 dps on brutallus without anything silly buff wise, one heroism one flask one food, no haste pots or demonslaying. Below what i've managed as combat but reasonable, was finding it quite horrible with the adds on muru though unfortunately. Gear is armory but differently gemmed shoulders, [Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality] and two [Shiv of Exsanguination] (was [Fang of Kalecgos] but I got a second that week). Guess I'll get using up them thistle teas and the brew from zangamarsh from leveling up too :p.

Going to have to agree with Left on akama, quite a weak fight for mutilate. Bloodboil is also quite demoralising if you get fel raged leaving you wishing you were combat, shiv shiv shiv envenom <o/. Supremus can be quite mutilate friendly which his huge hitbox and your 15% runspeed, aslong as you are out of range before 'tank and spank' phase start and no-one uses an immunity skill while being chased. As long as the fight isn't a incredibly nice mutiple for adrenaline rush and there isn't large breaks in combat without movement then mutilate does just fine.

One thing to consider about an item like scryer [Shattered Sun Pendant of Might] is that its proc is basicly a static dps addition meaning that unlike most gear it does not scale with the other gear you have. This means that it will tend to be a better item compared to other items the lower your overall gear level is and that every upgrade you get will increase the value of [Choker of Endless Nightmares] over [Shattered Sun Pendant of Might].

Scaling with other gear is also why [Boundless Agony], [Dagger of Bad Mojo], and [Tracker's Blade] beat out the badge daggers despite their higher base dps and why the [Shard of Azzinoth] was an inferior weapon until it's proc got buffed.
This is the cycle I have been using since I got my [Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality]. I energy que before SnD, Mutilate twice, then wait to try and catch the very end of find weakness with my Rupture, mutilate twice more, and then que 60+ energy and SnD.

The down sides to this cycle are sometimes I miss FW on my rupture and I often waste alot of combo points. The plus is I get all of my mutilates and most of my white attacks with Find and Exploit Weakness up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't vanishing the debuff spawn constructs without providing a new spirit (IE the vanishing rogue) to kill them?

I believe he's suggesting vanishing during the cast, so that the spell does not have a valid target when it completes, and you never get the buff to begin with.

Hello all,

I have been combat swords for an extremely long time. When I came back to WoW (after BC) I went with Fists because the S1 gear was easily attainable.

As of right now I have respec'd to Mutilate. I was wondering if anyone could give me some pointers to either improve my gear or my build. I tried it out in a Heroic SP last night, but my stoopid @$# didn't train anything above Rank 1 Mutilate before going, woohoo!

Anyway.

I'm still learning Mutilate "rotations" so my DPS is going to be a little lacking, but I don't want to be a complete let-down. I can already see that my Agility is pretty lacking because my crit is so low.

Here is my Armory: Shonuf

Just from playing around on trash mobs testing it out, my DPS steadily went up as I got the feel of it. It's going to take a while to get as used to it as straight Combat, but I want to do my best.

Just read this thread and download the dps spreadsheet and play with it.

Your gear seem ok, gem your stuff and buy the right Meta gem. I have see more "geared" player with worst gear :/

Very anecdotal evidence, but I've had some surprisingly good results with mutilate the past 2 nights. I'm not in an Illidan farm guild, but in the past 2 nights we cleared 4/5 hyjal 4/9 BT with me as mutilate. Usually I'm slightly above our other rogues, who are all either combat swords or combat fist/sword. Typically if I screw up at all they'll overtake me, so it's always close competition. One was there both nights, so it was decent comparison. I beat him in every fight by roughly the same amount I do as combat swords. Nothing changed on his part, and I actually "downgraded" my weapons from dual s3 swords w/mongoose to a boundless agony and bad mojo both with mongoose. My rogue isn't exalted w/BT rep yet, so I didn't even use the exalted trinket. The spreadsheet showed that my current gear was still top, so I didn't change anything but my daggers and talents, and I didn't fall behind the other rogues at all.

Unfortunately, I don't have web stats for the past few weeks. We all got lazy about keeping that stuff going, and now my combat log is over 2gb and I can't open it heh. Still, week to week comparison wouldn't be very accurate, as my raid buffs change from night to night depending on who comes. Additionally, I've picked up a piece of gear here and there. On the other hand, the other rogue was always in the same group as me both nights, so we got the same buffs, and my margin over him seemed to be actually larger than when I was combat swords.

I used basically just 3-5snd/5r. A little variance w/cold blood but other than that pretty consistent with the rotation. Really only those 2 finishers the entire time. It seemed to do quite well. Everybody in the guild was surprised, as they were all shocked that I showed up as mutilate and ended up topping the charts on almost every fight (dying when getting a resisted distract on a hyjal boss sucks and waiting for a bres sucks lol).

Anyway, just thought I'd share my experience.

Best answer I've got is try the DPS spreadsheet... it's where my answers will come from.

I was mutilate for many months until about 3 days ago, when I got a Blade of Infamy. (I figured if I bid on it I should at least use it for a while.) While not in Sunwell, it has been my experience in early T6 that agility is the preferred stat to stack, so use of 10 AGI gems in red sockets and 5 AGI/5 HIT in yellow sockets is the preferred gemming. (In fact, I'm using this gemming even as combat because I don't want to regem every time I swap back and forth.)

By and large, there is little difference in armor selection for Mutilate vs. Combat. I use the DPS spreadsheet to determine my armor selection, but in most cases it comes up with the same upgrades for either spec. Of note is that hit rating drops a good bit in relative weight, so that items with a lot of hit but less of other stuff aren't worth as much to Mutilate as Combat. (EG, I stopped using [Garona's Signet Ring] in favor of [Band of Eternity] because even without the proc it was coming up better as Mutilate. That's not true for using Garona's as combat until you get the exalted version.)

You won't lower your Mutilate damage much by using a "combat" set, since most combat gear is the same as Mutilate gear, but gemmed for hit instead of agility. I would guess regemming towards agility from hit would net you at most 10 DPS, probably less.

The only significant difference that I know of is in trinket selection. As Mutilate, use Ashtongue+WSC or Ashtongue+Shard; as combat use Dragonspine+w/e (if you have a Dragonspine, which I don't.) Once search starts working for you search this thread for trinket info; I had a pretty comprehensive post on it a while back.

Expect a 5% dropoff or so in your DPS output as a high-end rogue. Combat outscales Mutilate pretty handily at the very high end due to the way it synergizes so well with white DPS.

Yeah I know, and the Warglaives only make it worse I wasn't going to seriously use Mutilate for Sunwell, more just for fun on the side. Although for Lich King it looks like it might be good again. I'm already using Ashtongue+Shard for Combat as well, for lack of better trinkets. WSC never dropped for my guild, and only 1 DST which went to our Enhance shaman for dubious bait-and-switch reasons. Spreadsheet says that the only trinkets that would be a real upgrade anymore would be Naaru Sliver or DST. WSC even if I got one is like 1.5dps better than Shard it says.

DST I don't see as possible. There is another raid guild that runs a pug Gruul raid on Tues nights that I'll inquire with. But I know they have like 1-2 people that still need DST. Maybe I can offer some money as well as my help with the raid over the next couple months and nab one after they get theirs.

I had great results last week as mutilate, using Boundless Agony and Bad Mojo. A few days ago, a few of us sold our guild's BT and got run through the last few bosses. I was lucky enough to pick up 3xt6 (giving me the 4pc bonus) along with the Shard of Azzinoth. I thought, awesome! time for mutilate again. My guild is currently on RoS, so I heavily outgear the other rogues now. Surprisingly, I barely topped them. I topped them about as much as I used to as combat/swords before gaining 3xt6 and Illidan's dagger. I topped them less than last week when I was using my old gear with BA and the ZA dagger.

I changed nothing about my rotation/style (3-5s/5r), and the group makeup was the same as last week (enh sham, dps war, roguex3). I actually got beat by another rogue on Naj'entus and Shade of Akama, and honestly it was the first time I've ever not been top melee dps in my guild without dying or d/c'ing. Even last week, with my old gear as mutilate, I beat them by a considerably larger margin.

Is the Shard of Azzinoth a horrendous dagger for mutilate? The spreadsheet was changed to estimate the proc as a 45dps increase, but my parses tonight show it to be closer to 7.5 dps.. way less. This was from a parse of Gorefiend, where I did nothing but straight dps the entire fight (no constructs). The stats are definitely lacking, and the proc seems to be pretty weak, but damn the 106+ dps and 1.9 speed are hot!

Does t6 not scale well with mutilate? I gained 3 pieces, giving me both the 2pc and 4pc bonus. I was absolutely certatin that I would crush everybody due to the outgearing, but I didn't.

The Shard of Azzinoth is still quite an excellent dagger for Mutilate. Possible shortcomings that may (or may not) affect your choice to use it:

*You have no control over the spawns once they engage. You can influence them using your positioning when they're not engaged.
*The spawns have ~7K health and do take AoE and direct damage from bosses. If they die, you lose DPS. But since you can't tell them to move to safety, not much you can do.
*The spawns are autoaggro based upon their positioning. You'll enjoy watching them take off to engage non-aggroed mobs because they're within range of the spawn. Luckily they were fixed to not break CC.
*The spawns do physical DPS. They swing as though they were regular level 70 mobs. Their attacks do miss. Their damage is mitigated by armor.
*There is little joy that can compare to watching a virtual army of 4-5 spawns beating on something.


As for the raw weapon, I have used three different combinations to verify the spreadsheet's accuracy in a more comparitive sense:
Shard of Azzinoth + Fang of Kalecgos
Shiv of Exsanguination + Fang of Kalecgos
Shard of Azzinoth + Shiv of Exsanguination

My results haven't been surprising. The spreadsheets seem to be right in line with the results I get from each combination. The last combo is the highest damage output consistently. However, I also run with a slightly different role for my raiding. I use 3-5s/5ImpXA/4-5r cycles and don't expect to be top DPS. I am generally around 7% less DPS than the pure combat rogues, but my XA pushes out a lot more damage for the raid than I would being another combat build. Even if I were to go into a pure damage rotation, I'd still be 4%+ behind the combat rogues. You won't be able to compete with Combat Potency and Sword Spec. Accept that, and Mutilate is a lot more fun to play.

I didn't have a problem with the Shard aggro'ing mobs in raids. Well, I did in a heroic and kara badge run I did, but not in ZA or any 25-mans. My main problem was that the elementals barely did any damage. My parses were showing that they added somewhere between 7-20dps (wide variance unfortunately) rather than the 45dps the spreadsheet assumes.

But, as mutilate you lose a lot more from having to keep up expose (since you need to do 5cp EA), than a combat rogue.
Combat can keep up 5s/5ea without any difficulty.
*shrug* Well, whatever works for you I guess.
Raid wise it would be better for combat to do it though.

Just out of curiosity, have you done Brutallus, where you've done pure damage cycles?
I've seen quite a few wws's showing impressive numbers.