Actually one of the best things I think you could do to raise your dps as a non-poison mutilate build (ie, not going for envenom) would be to get a Night Blade and then put it in the offhand. The proc would still hit as often, and the damage isn't terrible, but the difference in overall damage with TNB as an offhand giving -armor and a real high end dagger with stats and like 10+ more dps won't be that big, simply because of the effectiveness of -armor debuffs.

Additionally in my 5 man mutilate build I was 41/2/18 with 3/3 serrated blades, so base 350 + the additional -armor from the proc will only benefit me even more, which is a synergy worth looking at, in my opinion. Especially given the higher armor values which seem to be appearing in TBC on boss mobs, going with armor reduction might end up working out to be a fairly good idea.

I'll leave it to someone else to do the math though, especially in terms of opportunity cost of the -armor talents vs other, more conventional +dps talents.

I was told the Night Blade did not stack with sunder armor and it pushed it's proc off the mob. Can anyone else verify? It wouldn't surprise me, being a world drop epic.

On the sheet, +1 skill (not rating) gives:
+.04% hit
+.04% -dodge
+.04% crit ( .14% if boss mob is enabled).

Kalman sent me this: http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/en/166546791.htm

Which means against a lvl 73, +1 skill should give:
+.20% hit
+.10% -dodge
+.20% crit

This is roughly 120% better than what the sheet predicts for boss level defenses. If this is truely the case, +skill is the best raiding stat, about twice as good as agi/ap against boss level mobs. I have made adjustments to the sheet to reflect this and I will release it maybe tomorrow, but I have also heard there are quite a few itemization changes around the corner that I have no plans to implement, so I'll leave that up to someone else.

Since The night blade is a buff, and sunder armor is a debuff, I highly doubt this is the case.

Whilst I quite like the gnoll in that he's better than many blues, the numbers he posted there don't give me much hope they're accurate.

+0.2 hit - fine
-0.1 dodge - fine
-0.6 parry - say what? Yes, I know doesn't apply to strikes from behind but since when does WS produce that much disproportionate swing in parry compared to dodge?
+0.2 crit - fine

A net swing of 1.2.
Eh? they add up to 1.1. And the parry is questionable. Even in crazy world where it's not a one roll system I can't finesse that extra 0.1 from somewhere.

While it's nice having your own DP stack on a mob, it sure as hell would be nice for a full poison mutilater to know which stack was his.

It's been asked for before, and people have been told it isn't going to happen because "the client doesn't have access to that information" (i.e. it's server-side).

Which is stupid; I don't want to know who owns a given stack, I want to know if it's mine, which seems like necessary information to the client.

To check your own DP stacks wouldn't it be a pretty simple mod?

Every time a DP stack is applied it displays it i.e. Deadly Poison (4) on your fourth stack.
It can time how long the stack is on the mob between applies so it will know when it drops. Soon as you see DP(5) to can envenom, once you successfully envenom it resets the DP stack counter to 0.

I am sure I have seen mods showing the number of times a buff is stacked, such as on garr for example. Spell alert announced "enraged 5" or something. Can DP not be counted the same way? All you need is a visible indicator for when you have 5 stacks, maybe your CPs could start flashing once you have 5CPs and 5DP stacks.

Oops, I largley ignore my combat log and never noticed there was no message for that 5th stack reapplying =).

Then would the simplest solution not to be simply to report the 5th proc again and again whenever it occurs? I agree that it should only consume the CPs for as many charges but I think that may be quite a tough change to make considering every finisher uses all our CPs. I guess they could work around by giving us a passive (i.e. invisible) skill that returns cp-dp worth of CPs. Sounds like a hack though to me. Bleh, I won't even pretend to know how WoW code works.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that even when you're building a stack and getting the application messages, there's way to tell whose stack a given DP combat log message was from - it just reports "<mob name> is afflicted by Deadly Poison(n)". I think last time this discussion came up, the proposed solution was watching the weapon buff, and updating a counter based on the number of charges used, which should work fairly reliably, even for determining how long is left on a 5-stack, since resists don't use up charges (in conjunction with combatlog parsing, it should work fine for single mobs, but would probably fall over quite messily in encounters with multiple identically-named mobs).

However, that solution requires continual scanning of charges, which isn't ideal either.

There's really no reason not to make ownership information client-accessible, and given the current functionality for DP/Envenom, it's simply a necessary change.

Ok well I've trying to make sense of these + skill % numbers since i saw them earlier. I have but a theory that may already be widely known or disputed but I'm going to throw out it here anyways.

From the combat mechanics post:
Skill:
Skill affects the probability of a Miss, Parry, Dodge, Block, and Crit.

The magnitude is the same in all of these cases, henceforth known as the Skill Term, S:

S(in %) = (TargetDefense - AttackerWepSkill)/25

this would put 1 skill rating at 0.04% regardless of the level of the mob.

The way i think it might work is on some kind of scaling, where it is much more valuable while you are below the targets defense and becomes devalued once your attack skill reaches the defense skill of the target.

This would explain why against an equal level target its worth +0.04% crit (etc) but against a 73 its worth 0.20%. I would assume if this is the case you would not want to stack +skill but only get enough to reach the defense of a level 73 mob (do we know what this is btw?)

EDIT: THIS IS A GUESS, take it as such, and maybe help out with testing it. Thanks.