It doesn't. All it does is "If dagger is equipped, try to BS. Otherwise, try to SS."

As an aside, has there been any decent testing of the new DPS balance yet for raiding/PvE in beta? I realize some of this will be quite hard to test, as Fury warriors' power did not appear until they had high level gear. Factors to consider for purposes of comparsion are rage normalization, which I hear conflicting information about, and the fact that Shaman now have access to DW with +9-10% hit from talents/abilities alone. I have seen videos of Enhancement shaman putting up similiar PvE DPS numbers in 5 mans.

Anybody have any insight on how this is stacking up?

Wow! That's actually really cool, since there's no other way to do that without using a macro. I use blind far less than I probably should just because I hate losing my combo points.

The same goes for kicking to interrupt a target that's not my target. I do it, but I hate losing the pts.

A little off topic since it's not rogue related, but this is a major pain for a protection spec'd tank. You have sunder, heroic strike, cleave, revenge, devastate, shield slam, shield block, shield bash, taunt, and devastate that will probably all need to be bound. I can't think of too many 5 man's that I've tanked and NOT used all of those. Realistically most people can hit 5-10 keys without thinking about it. I just listed 10 essential tanking functions without even getting into "exotic" stuff that you may need to hit in a split second (stuff like last stand, challenging shout, lifegiving gem, or shield wall). Sure tanking is hard, but it really shouldn't be 18+ buttons hard. There's enough other things that a good tank has to do, that their keyboard set-up shouldn't be another requirement.

I really fail to see why this change was necessary to be totally honest. I'm still going to riposte within a a second of it popping up, it's just annoying that I now need to eat up another position on my keyboard/keybindings for it. It's possible I'm just a retard, but I haven't found a way to bind 2+ actions together other than the /random command someone just listed.

I've got between 45-50 spells/whatever (including R1's) bound on my warlock that I can access w/out even thinking about them. The only real problem I have is getting my fingers to contort the 'right' way due to how I have my shift states set up for my N52. Rogue bindings, after playing a warlock who likes to bind *everything*, really are pretty simple. I think on my rogue I can get everything I need to bind down with the base keys, plus 1 shift state and mouse keys; whereas my warlock takes the base state, plus 3 shift states, plus my mouse, plus mouse shift states. At that point it's a function of organization and constant refinement to get something that actually makes sense.

I've been putting a lot of thought into raiding specs and level 70 and I thought I'd post them here.

For swords/fists:
20/41/0 at first seems to be the most damaging spec starting from fresh new level 70 gear and scaling as gear increases. However, I'm also curious about a more broadly spread tri-tree build, such as 15/25/21 (or 14/25/22 if you want to be uber in arenas). It benefits by getting most of the heavy hitters in the combat tree (duel wield spec + weapon spec + precision) as well as most (but not quite all) of the goodies in the top of assasination, and has better combo point generation with hemo and ignores some armor. It doesn't have combat potency, blade fury, adrenaline rush and surprise attacks though, so the question becomes whether or those outbalance the other benefits. It's also quite tough to say which will scale better with gear. I'd almost give the nod to the subtlety build, since with serated blades it will be pushing out slightly better white damage, unless stats scale extremely well and benefit vitality. Deadliness and sinsiter calling are quite good, and of course scale very well with gear, but you have to sacrifice so much to get them.


Dagger specs:
To me there are again three possible frontrunners. The most obvious is based off the all-popular combat daggers, which becomes 15(16)/41(40)/5 at level 70. This build yields all of the current benefits of combat daggers with better combo point generation through combat potency. One of the main issues I see with this build is that getting to combat potency requires a lot of filler talents that don't directly contribute to a rogue's dps. Imp. sprint and imp evasion are fun pvp toys, but hardly necessary for the raiding rogue. Blade twisting could yield some raidwide benefits due to its synergy with prot warriors heroic strikes, but I have yet to see any clear information regarding raid bosses being dazable.

Secondly, a 30/25/5 build seems to have the potential to be a viable alternative. As with the hemo build above, its white damage is equivalent to a combat spec (minus vitality if you spec for it), but it yields better combo point generation through seal fate (will 5/5 seal fate yield more combo points than 5/5 combat potency) better poison damage, a guarateed crit every once in a while, and less energy lost through missed finishers (and more healing on the rogue!). As with above, the question becomes do these benefits outweight combat potency (I think the comparison is pretty direct to seal fate), AR, blade flurry and surprise attacks if you spec for it. Scalability seems to be a tossup to me. The big talents on either side are seal fate and combat potency, with one scaling with crit gear and the other scaling with hit gear. Although, poison damage scales slightly with hit gear as well, so that's also something to consider.

And lastly, what about mutilate? I posted a few thoughts on mutilate earlier on in this thread, but I'll elaborate a bit more here. A pve mutilate build seems like it would shape up to be 41/20/0, with a preference to dual wield spec over dagger spec in combat. The downside to only investing 20 points in combat is a straight up 5% (actually, a bit more since seal fate is involved and mutilate actually scales quite well with crit) decrease in damage. As per above, you also don't get the activated abilities and combat potency with mutilate, but you get a lot of goodies in the assasination tree. You get a large quantity of poison talents, a guaranteed crit, saved energy from missed finishers and, the big one, find weakness. With a good attack cycle, find weakness has the potential to ALWAYS be up. In fact, with a decent crit rate, I wouldn't be toosurprised if rogues were pulling off 5/5/5 cycles (snd, rupture, evis/envenom).

In addition, the fact that mutilate is a two handed attack allow a bit more versatility with poisons. Deadly poison is our best dps poison, but it's stacking maxes out at 5 stacks. In order to keep it at 5 stacks, a combat dagger rogue (or even a seal fate dagger rogue) would likely need to keep deadly on the mainhand, or in the case of combat daggers with no improved poisons, both hands. Since mutilate attacks with both weapons, your instant attacks no longer benefit the poison on your mainhand over the poison on your offhand. Combine that with shiv, and I think a mutilate dagger build would be able to get away with deadly only on their offhand, and instant on their mainhand, which unless I misunderstand poison mechanics, has the greatest potential for poison dps. Yes, poison needs to be on the mob before mutilate can do much damage, but in a raid situation I see no reason to not open with shiv to force a proc from the getgo. Of course, as also mentioned above, poisons don't scale as well with gear (just very moderately with +hit) as other forms of dps, so take it for what it's worth.


Whew...that ended up being longer than I intended it to be. It's been brewing inside my head for a few days so I had to let it spill out ;) It's been a while since, at least in my mind, there've been this many things to think about and consider for the rogue class...and I like it!

You can honestly bind everything you need as a rogue (unless you're an engineering whore with a few buttons and some shifts too.

It's not like my priest where I have about 4-5 bars of crap I use once in a while :(

Currently, I do as well. But we also have to consider the fact that with a 25 man raid (or even ten, in something like karahzan), totem buffing may be limited. Furthermore, if we have an enhancement shaman in our group (and we might!), the net benefit from GoA may be greater than the net benefit from WF, since GoA benefits everyone and causes the shaman to crit more, further buffing the group, whereas WF benefits the non shaman. Of course, hunters also benefit from GoA, and with fewer groups to play around with, I'd assume it'll be harder to have the 1 shaman, 1 warrior, 3 rogue group.

Only time will tell though, I suppose.

I recalled that WF totem was changed to only work on white attacks, not specials, while agility is always handy for everyone (at least for armor/dodge bonuses).

WF is better than GoA/poison, but even though it got nerfed WF really helps warriors more than GoA, especially with the rage generation change.

While WF doesn't help the hunter, it does help his pet.

I guess it matters what the groups are like, and how buffed is the Shaman's totems. I think WF will still be used a lot.

If Mutilate is really a viable playstyle, I think that rather than having rogues hoping for Deadly to be up, we'll just make sure there's a Sting of some kind on the mob. 40 debuff slots is definitely an improvement, and Envenom seems to have turned out okay, but rather than hope you get a fast proc, or use energy on a Shiv, it seems like it'd be easy enough to just assign one hunter to keeping a Sting up from the get-go.

WF is good right now, but in the xpac, if WF hits don't generate rage, I think that'll reduce the gap between WF and GoA significantly for warriors.

I think it's been answered, but I'm feeling lazy: is Shiv's *damage* normalized?

Three words...Cold Blood, Premed.

Premed builds have definitely gained some PvP strength because of 1.12 (I'm currently 16-3-32 hemo swords myself) I won't be doing much PvP come expansion, as I'll go back to a raiding spec, but think of this...

Premed (2 Pts.)
Cold Blood
Cheap Shot (now 5 pts. because of initiative)
Eviscerate

That's a 5 pt. Cold Blood evis before they have a chance to realize that they got cheap shotted. Throw in Deadliness, and Master of Subtlety in that build and your an arena god. 21-0-40 ftw. http://www.wowhead.com/?talent-bc=ihgbRx0oZZxzeocGRsLox

The nice thing is, is that all cooldowns less than 15 minutes are reset before each arena battle, so Prep will always be up for each match, so you can do that rotation twice in a row.

Don't forget either that your Cold Blood Eviscerate will do 10% more damage than normal both times because of Master of Subtlety, and with the nice AP boosts from Deadliness and Sinister Calling, they will be mighty hard hits. If that mage happens to blink out of it (after your evis of course), vanish real quick, pop prep and do it again. =D