Personal ring enchants are for enchanters, and I have not ever seen any mention of JC-only meta gems, just the prismatic "Dragonseye" gems they can cut for themselves.

Was thinking of the Dragon's Eye "special" BOP gems. Not an enchant, you're correct.

Does anyone have any experience with the new weapon enchant Berserking in a PvP context? I think we all know that it's the best enchant for pure raid DPS, but I use the same weapons for raiding and PvP, so I'm a little worried that losing 25-50% of my armor is too risky in the arena, even for 400-800 AP. Should I just stick with Mongoose and accept that my raid DPS is going to be a little lower than it could be?

Mongoose is actually still quite good at level 80. I haven't spent much time looking at spreadsheets yet, but just going by Shadowpanther's AEP for now, Mongoose is still around 85% as good as Berserking from a raid DPS perspective. (This shows just how strong Mongoose was for rogues at level 70.) I wouldn't feel too bad about "downgrading" to Mongoose for raiding, but you should check with Vulajin's spreadsheet to see exactly how much raid DPS you would be giving up.

Some other decent options are Accuracy and Superior Potency, although these are not proc-based which may lower their value in PVP.

According to Vulajin's Roguecraft spreadsheet, I only gain about 30 DPS raiding in my current gear with Berserking instead of Mongoose on both weapons... that doesn't strike me as worth the sacrifice of losing half my armor in arena, so I guess I'll stick with Mongoose until I see people pushing above 2k next season with Berserking on their weapons.

For as much as Berserking costs in enchanting materials, you'd think it would be more appealing...

As a rogue new to PvP and arena (didn't play BC) I'm wondering what would make "noob-friendly" arena 2v2 team? Ice mages and BM hunters are the most interesting at this point (ranged snares, good survivability, good burst), DKs are interesting too (does the new DK ressurect work on players in arena?), but seems two meele would make you very susceptible to kiting (although death grip is certainly good to drag-and-kill)?
At this point it seems rogue-feral would also make a good team (feral has great mobility, great survivability, decent cc, great burst, aura/buff synergies), cc->focus.
Seeing as most people will have very little resilience most teams will be about cc->burst? Mutilate does decently against plate, but double-plate (there will probably be quite a few) might be a problematic match. Another problem with double-meele is ping, which is probably an important factor.

At this point I'm trying to learn PvP / arena, but would be good if the combo can put up a fight against most matchups.

Poison and Mutilate

I think everyone will agree that wound poison will be used as one of the two poisons when using Mutilate. The question is about the other one. I plan to play with two different offhand weapons. One poisoned with Mind Numbing Poison but am still unsure about the other one. Either I will take wound poison on the other hand or the non-scaling Anesthetic Poison. I am still unsure which effects will be dispelled and a research on google didn't give a me a lot answers. Changing poisons after knowing which setup the other team has is something too risky in my opinion.

So my question is which poison combinations will you choose and whether you have a list of effects that Anestethic poison removes in PVP.

I will be trying wound/wound with my muti/prep build. Will post updates once I've had a chance to try it.

I'm wondering though which would be a greater damage increase for this build: DW spec in combat, or the 10% AP increase from Deadliness. (41/5/25 or 41/0/30)

What are the community's opinions on Mutilate vs. Shadow Dance?

I've had a fair amount of experience with Mutilate, and I just tried out Shadow Dance today.

Mutilate just seems so much *easier* to play; a full energy KS into two Mutilates and an Eviscerate seems to do a lot of damage while using zero cooldowns. Using your cooldowns it feels incredibly simple to unload an incredible amount of damage.

On the other hand Shadow Dance works really when when it actually works at all. First of all, it's pretty annoying to have to use a weapon swap if you're using Hemo, and Backstab feels a bit clunky with the positional requirement. The other annoyance is the necessity of keeping your opponent constantly stunned when you're Dancing, or you won't get your Ambushes off. When everything goes perfectly, and you pull off a Shadow Dance + CS + 2 Ambush + KS + 2 Ambush, you can easily unload anywhere from 15k to 40k damage in the space of several seconds, and it's incredible. But for each time I succeeded in doing that, there was at least one other time where I couldn't pull off the combo. It takes a lot of setting up to get the perfect opening, and it feels decidedly weak between Shadow Dance cooldowns.

In all honesty Shadow Dance feels quite a lot like the old Shadowstep (patch 2.1), which was only usable in stealth and allowed you to unload massive Ambushes. The only thing I feel making Shadow Dance really viable at the moment is that burst in 3.0 is so much more important than it was back in 2.1. I don't like the idea of a spec being essentially built around a combo you can pull off once every 2 minutes.

For poisons i think wound/wound will be the most effective but ill be saving another dagger with Mind Numbing in my bags and will switch if needed.

Thanks for the post on this. I'm currently re-rolling from level 1 and have had my eye on Shadow Dance, but most people seem to be loving Mutilate/Prep right now.

Have you, or anyone you know, tried just going straight Hemo with Shadow Dance? There is obviously a bit of diminished value in Shadow Dance as main-handing a sword, fist, or mace only grants you Cheap Shot or Garrote (or Sap, I guess), but I can see those being powerful in certain situations. Not worrying about weapon swap and daggers also frees up a lot of points (Imp Ambush, Waylay, Lethality) to go for a clean 20/0/51 or 15/5/51 spec, depending on whether you prefer Vile Poisons or Dual-Wield Spec.

I'm having a hard time trying to Glyph correctly for Mut/Prep (2s partner is an arcane mage).

My Current Glyphs are:

Eviscerate
Vigor
Garrote

With Preparation, should I be running the Glyph for the Instakick?

Is the Sprint Glyph worth using to catch fleeing targets?

I sorta wanna run the Ambush Glyph since being able to Ambush from 5 yards away is awesome and usually comes undetected from the other team.

As mutilate my current glyph setup is Vigor, Eviscerate, Preparation. Preparation is most important for the double dismantles. Being capable to give a rogue or DK up to 20 seconds of disarm in a match can easily win you a match. I personally wouldn't run with a glyphed ambush because the other glyphs are just that important.

Very good point about Waylay, I hadn't thought about that. I guess I was primarily thinking of a situation where immediately after you land the Ambush, you're either feared (priest, Affliction warlock) or the mage can Blink away. In those cases, I could see Waylay coming in handy, but against melee classes, you're definitely right.

And, just out of curiosity, do you see any hope of straight up Subtlety daggers working well?

One of the biggest gripes I had with Subt daggers pre-WotLK was the lack of combo points and steep energy cost of Backstab. Once you burned Premeditation and landed your initial Ambush, you were pretty much forced to Kidney shot right there. If the proceeding Backstabs didn't finish the job (more often than not), you were a sitting duck.

However, in concept, it seems that HAT and SFTS would both go quite a way towards making Shadow Dance / Backstab a reasonable viable build. What do you think?

Thanks again for your input man!

Is it still better to wear slow daggers for PvP Mutilate?

I don't see any reason why a backstab Shadowstep build wouldn't work. The positional requirement is very annoying, but the burst damage you get from Backstab as opposed to Hemo makes it at least have the potential in my opinion to be a much stronger spec. Backstab overall doesn't do much more damage than Hemo (if you factor in the debuffs), but it does have a burst component which Hemo completely lacks. And you lose the annoyance of having to use a weapon swap.

The major problem I forsee coming, is with the advent of more survivability (resilience), Backstab really loses a lot more since it's very bursty. And at that stage you're basically pigeonholed into a kind of gimmicky spec which relies on using weapon swaps to put out damage. I honestly envision Shadow Dance being changed somehow to make it more convenient and accessible like Mutilate is now.

Just ate a coil a few hours ago, is is still working.

The problem with anything but Mut/Prep is there's a good chance you're going to die before you get to use all those precious cooldowns. Don't even think of waiting to trinket the kidney when a rogue opens on you, you have to Trinket the cheapshot into a vanish cheapshot > rupture on him if you're going to survive. It's a global cooldown battle when you're fighting as a rogue against another, and I just haven't found Shadowdance to be useful at all. Would be great if it was the version that was like 3 mini vanishes, but right now our biggest strength is a big fat cheapshot > mutilate > cold blood evis.

I also ran 21/0/50 for a while in 2s and 3s and just found it to be painful as well. Backstab was a problem when fighting so many mutilate rogues. You can surely fuck up some clothies with a shadowstep ambush into evis. But you need to spec to beat the teams that are popular and doing well, which are full of paladins (both ret and holy) dks and rogues.

I just did some more arena as Shadow Dance today (nothing serious, just a bit of a laugh with a friend). Yet I noticed that CB Mutilates were critting almost as hard as my Ambushes, which just furthers my previous conclusion that Dance is a lot of work for not very much reward. I think Shadow Dance's big strengths will be Shadowstep and a 5-minute-cooldown Preparation. Neither of these gets talked about very much, since they're largely irrelevant when matches last 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes. The only time I wasn't wishing I was Mutilate was when I was fighting a mage, where Shadowstep really came in handy.

Yeah, i totally agree.
When things goes PERFECTLY, SD is the top burst you can pull out, but so often things screw up...

Another thing i hate is that sometimes you have to "react" to situation and throw a immediate burst which mutilate does regardless position/being full energy/having a CD ready, while if you burn the SD without taking advantage of it, it feels more like a big lost.

I've played about 20~ games as Mutilate/Prep and I enjoy it much more than Shadow Dance. Simply for two reasons.

1) It takes simply too much prep to get Shadow Dance working. When it works, amazing. When it does, I'm in a completely worse spot than I was.

2) S1 is just a burst fight. As much as Shadow Dance can be burst, I enjoy Mutilate's ability to essentially always be able to put pressure on the other guy.

I did my 2's as Mutilate/Prep, and my 3's as Shadow Dance. Ran as Rogue/Holy Paladin (2s) and Rogue/Mut Rogue/Holy Paladin (3s)

I so need more hit though.

Honestly they should just move the facing requirement for Backstab, Ambush and Garrote.