[Rogue] Mutilate Raid DPS Discussion
 

I did a search and couldn't find any consolidated discussion on Mutilate in a raid situation, so I thought I might start a discussion thread on the subject.

I see the DPS spreadsheet places Mutilate behind Combat Daggers, and keep hearing people give accounts of this being true in their raiding, but it's something I've never seen to be the case for me so I'm curious. Do I just have a better dps rhythm with Mutilate than others, or somehow I always did something wrong as Combat daggers?

Seeing as my guild just got our first Illidan kill the other week, I'd really like to hear from any Mutilate rogues in guilds that are farming Illidan as well. How close in DPS do you come to your Combat guildmates? What stat emphasis do you find works best and with which speed weapons?

I've done some of my own experimentation in raid the last 2 weeks, and Rupture is still the best DPS as the 2nd finisher next to SnD. For the 3rd finisher I'm still undecided -- Evis will seem to be the eventual only choice once I have full T6 with all the Ignore armor + Executioner ... but atm if I use a 1.4spd OH with DP on it, I've been finding good results with still using Envenom sometimes since the re-apply of DP happens so quickly then.
(Envenom avg dmg from Recap is around 2900-3000, while Evis lags well behind around 1800-1900. I don't lose anywhere near 1000dmg from DP re-apply for example)

On the note of Combat Daggers supposedly being superior: On a fight like Gorefiend I can do ~1800dps as Combat swords and ~1600dps as Mutilate, but Combat daggers lags well behind ~1400dps. Yet both Combat builds of course would be best to weight towards the same stats.

Mutilate I'm not entirely sure which stats would be best to weight towards, although it's not really practical for me to re-gem every time I would respec back and forth. I know Crit is of course extremely important (Therefore AGI by correlation), but with the lack of Combat potency +hit gems aren't as desirable beyond a certain point. Beyond that I've heard conflicting reports on what to stack (AP, AGI, or 5/5 agi/hit gems)

I am combat daggers now, but i really dream to get back to Mutilate one day, but unfortunately it not that viable on a raid situation right now. I am just entering Hyjal right now, so i dont have the Illidan experience Aereus required, but i will try to give my 5 cents.

Today damage is like:
60% white damage
30% goes to backstab
5% to rupture
5% to poisons

Getting back to Mutilate ( 41/20/0 ) i would:
- lose some white damage ( dagger specialization, Weapon Specialization )
- Swap from Backstab to Mutilate ( increasing damage )
- Generate almost 3X more combo points.
- Generate "less" energy because of the loss of combat potency.
- Swap Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush with Cold Blood and +10Energy.

In other words, your damage output would be something like
50% white damage
30% mutilate
10% Rupture
5% poisons
5% Envenon ( or 7%poisons and 3% Eviscerate ).

Now some comments:
- Mutilate > Backstab, yes, for sure, but Combat potency enables you to Hit more Backstabs then Mutilates.
- 3X More Combo points is not that great, basically i could allways keep Slice and Dice, Rupture 5CB (and find weakness) up and always had a chance to use a 3-4CB Envenon. But our Finishers are not that great their damage and function didn't scaled well from 60 to 70, and left us with only one very important finisher ( S&D ).
- AR is a great cooldown, but while Mutilate i really missed Blade Flurry, helping on "AOE" is always a great buff on a raid environment. Earning Cold Blood is nice, but its really worse then the other two. And Mutilate spec is a very bad spec when you have to switch targets a lot, mostly because of the poison requirement and the amount of CB you lost.
- And your white damage fill fall a lot on damage, and since its your main type of damage, its were it hurts this build a lot ( even with dual wield specialization ).
- +10 Energy on vigor is almost a waste of a 31 talent, needless to compare it will AR
- and besides Hydross, Void Reaver and maybe Vashjs adds, poison imune mobs are really a pain in the . . .

About gears:
- Combat build need a lot of hit rating, the more you have, the more combat potency will help you, and more damage you can do.
- Assassination builds requires a lot of crit rating, but you cant get dagger specialization ( i will kill who prefers this instead of dual wield ), but your mutilates will benefit better from a higher crit than it would be with backstab. There are some rumors of good geared mutilate PVE rogues that sacrified some hit hating to get more crit rating and noticed some increase on the damage output.
- A Mutilate build generates a lot of CBs, the more CBs you have, the more damage you do, the more CB you get back (ruthlessness ), the more energy you get (Relentless Strikes ).
- 2/5 T5 and 4/5 T5 are great helpers to this build. 2/5 T4 helps less then on a combat spec, but its also very nice. ( i never had T6 to test them )

What could be done to save this build:
Find Weakness could be applied to white damage also.
Our finishers could have its damage scale better with attack power.
Remove poison requirement or make poisons apply to any kind of mob/boss.
Make Vigor regenerates 25 energy per tick ( instead of 20 ).

From my experience my numbers as Mutilate break down something like this:
55% Auto-attack
27% Mutilate
10% Non-SnD Finishers
8% Poison

Mutilate damage growth also happens exponentially, as the more crit you have, the more 3CP Muts you get, the better chance you have to proc Relentless Strikes and return 25 energy. So while it's true that Potency is a great talent and Mutilate lacks it, they do get far more energy returns out of Relentless Strikes than Combat Daggers will. On the average boss fight lasting say 8-9mins I would get around 600-650 energy returned by Relentless Strikes at least.

The T6 bonuses are nice, but they don't really favor one build by a large margin like T5 was for Mutilate. Slight edge to the Potency builds probably because the 2pc bonus is 5% extra haste on SnD. While +hit is of course very important to a Combat build, it's very rare to find a T6-equipped Rogue that would have more than 300 due to also having things like Expertise rating and Ignore Armor to consider now as well.

Whereas Mutilate also has the very nice effect that pumping Agi also gets benefits from Kings, while buffing your AP and Crit. Recap shows that my crit rate on Mutilate sits at around 50% currently. Due in large part to the Lethality trinket which is up a good 80-90% of the time. SnD and Rupture are also up 100% of the time, while you slip in 3-5pt Evis or Envenom finishers for the Relentless proc spam and keeping Find Weakness/Lethality active.

The burst potential of Mutilate in the middle of a boss fight is pretty fun to watch if you get a string of like 3-4 times in a row where Mutilate crits and the finisher returns the 1CP. It allows you to spam a 4pt finisher every 4 secs for awhile =D

Of course when it all comes down to it, the end-game would be getting the Warglaives which due to being legendary and the awesome proc, just trumps even the very nice Shard of Azzinoth. Why can't there be legendary Rogue daggers? :)

Are you actually saying that you do 400 dps more as combat swords than as combat daggers? If that is the case I would indeed say that you are doing something very wrong as combat daggers, as unlikely as that sounds. Swords are better than daggers but not 400 dps better.

As for Mut my own experience with it pretty much matches the spreadsheet. It's worse than combat daggers, not massively but enough to be noticable.

Here's a WWS stat showing pretty clearly the difference between combat swords and mutilate daggers.

Here's my own stats from tonights Winterchill kill, combat swords build:
Zaq - WWS

And here's my guild mate's, who has equal gear and is using every juice out of a mutilate dagger build that's possible.
Thira - WWS

The difference is ~100-150 dps, in large part due to haste and combat potency. Mutilate sure as hell is more challenging and more fun, and since we've been farming illidan for almost 6 months now it's a most welcome change to go mutilate at times. It just doesnt cut it though in the end - swords are the Pve'rs choice atm.

Would personally choose mutilate over combat daggers any day.

Hmm, a good example but there's some things I'd like to point out. DST is ~~15dps better than MotB.
Vengeful Shanker and Tracker's (alternatively Mutilator) seems to be the best combination.
Thira's gemming choice is a bit weird. He's opted to get his 2 blue gems from shoulders/belt while chest/belt is a better choice, not to mention that 10 hit gems aren't that good for Mutilate (10agi, 5hit/5agi is the optimal choice).
He would gain 55 agility (and drop 50hit) by re-gemming. I assume that he's usually combat?

Looking at the WWS, we see that his crit with mutilate (and white) is less than your sinister/white. Maybe a bad string of luck, but what flask/potion is he using? I personally prefer Major Agility over Relentless.
[Edit] Checked the rest of the WWS's and it seems that his crit is 30-40% in most fights. Weird.

Here's a WWS for Apex from the 27th
WWS
Notice how I have higher crit (And that's without LotP). Our casters are sick though. (Don't mind Welt he's our raidleader and has to yell on the ventrilo to keep our ragged troops orderly. Hence the low dps.)
Here's are two older ones from November. I think the only difference is that I didn't have Alejandro's or Vengeful Shanker/Mutilator.
WWS Nov 15th
WWS Nov 11th

Although the high hit might make sense with him using Envenom. But again, using envenom in itself is questionable. With high -armor that comes with t6, I'm looking at 810 passive armor reduction at the moment. Add WSC and you have quite a bit of -armor.
Then again I'm not sure. Envenom might be better, but every math I've looked at shows otherwise.


That said I agree that swords are better. I'm just not sure that they are that much better. Although I think we all agree that mutilate is much more fun to play. It requires a lot more effort and concentration as well, to the extent that being tired or distracted can result in significant dps loss. Combat on the other hand is much more subtle.

P.S. GG at Scathe xD

One thing that might help Mutilate in raid damage would be moving dualwield spec up in the tree, so that you could go 41/15/5 with Dual-Wield Spec and Opportunity. Then again a 20% increase in mutilate damage isn't all that much.

Pure speculation here, but if DWS was moved up in the tree would it be worth taking Opportunity or simply putting the 5 extra points into Dagger Spec? My instinct would be Dagger Spec since more crit would equate to more Seal Fate procs and even faster CP generation.

As I said -- I don't know what to say. The priority stats for Combat Swords and Daggers are basically the same, and it has an easy consistent cycle just like Combat Swords, but it sucks balls for me.

Do you have the Ashtongue Lethality trinket from BT rep yet? That makes a big difference in Mutilate damage, as it averages to around 4-5% permanent crit bonus in sustained fights. Obviously you need to make sure as many of the timers are up at once as you can, and all Mutilates and finishers should be used while Find Weakness is active or you lose 10% of their damage.

As for Envenom, it's the white elephant of Mutilate. Basically a good way to see if it's worth using is raid 1 week using Envenom all the time, and 1 week using Evis and compare the average damage in something like Recap. If your Evis average is say 2000, and your Envenom avarage is 3000, and you know you don't lose 1000 poison damage in re-applying -- then Envenom is probably better. Although the other consideration is will you do less DPS bc of lower Mutilates using the 1.4spd OH and Envenom, compared to 1.8spd OH and Evis.

I'm curious about the Poisons and group make up you have. Do you get an Enhancement Shaman? Is WF better than double DP (assuming that's what you're using)?

If our Enhancement Shaman is available then we usually get him, but recently he's been unavailable.

Shaman-Warrior-Rogue-Rogue-Feral/Rogue is our usual melee setup. WF for the warrior, WF for my mh, DP oh.

Going double DP is generally not a good idea.

Double Deadly is only like a 1.5% DPS gain overall for poisons ofer single DP. Like DP does 6.5% of your DPS and IP 4.5% or so, but double DP is only like 8% when I checked my meters when testing that. So no, it's not worth using dual DP, you lose too much overall DPS.

About Thira's armory: 10 hit rating gems are not good Mutilate gems. Other thing is why no FleetFooted? I see myself it as the biggest benefits with Quick Recovery for going to Mutilate spec in first place. The fact that in quite many TBC boss encounters (and trash) you need to move away from target once a while so FleetFooted actually increases the time you are on the target, therefore increasing the damage output significantly.

I don't know why anyone would enchant Executioner with Mutilate either when Mongoose gives so much more.

Ah well guess I was wrong then, he's usually combat swords so i'm guessing he's not regemmed caus of that and the executioner is caus he uses the dagger for pvp mostly. Difference was still pretty low considering all of this to combat swords, and I think generally people are underestimating mutilate as a raid option.

Hi everyone.

I see my choice of gems are getting flamed, this is basically because of one thing: i've been combat swords for quite some time and actually never ever tried Mutilate. Only cool spec i had was the 11/27/23 hemo one a while ago.
Now for Mutilate, it turned out to be quite the surprise dps-wise.
On Rage Winterchill the other night i didnt use my Ashtongue trinket or Shadowmaster's Boots = lower crit than the other fights.

Executioner on Main hand seemed to be working quite okay and sometimes refreshing itself, do not underestimate Armor Penetration. Remember that i've never tried this spec before so ofc it needs more testing and experience from my side.
And i dont think i'm gonna be regemming my T6-pieces anytime soon, this was just something else to do while waiting for new content and IT WAS FUN. ;)

Since the topic went over to Armory/Fleetfooted. I'm surprised seeing you use Cat's Grace as your boot enchant, since it doesn't stack with Fleetfooted.

As for Mutilate in raids, one of our rogues was specced for it when we did Bloodboil, and he was lagging about 125 DPS behind Combat Swords (WWS of the fight is too old and got deleted, I'm afraid). Especially when you have the current content on farm, I can see Mutilate being a really fun option to use, even though not the optimal choice.