Yes, the Belt of One-Hundred Deaths now has 25 Expertise instead; all the melee-based weapon skill affects were directly converted to that.


It does seem worth stacking some Expertise, after hitting the 9% hit cap, to eke out more DPS, if the items with it are otherwise worth using.

Does indeed seem to top Don Alejandro's. Also, unless i missed something, this ring is going to be seriously good for us:

Signet of Primal Wrath - Items - World of Warcraft

Signet of Primal Wrath
Binds when picked up
Unique
Finger
+28 Agility
+30 Stamina
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases attack power by 58.
Equip: Your attacks ignore 126 of your opponent's armor.

It has 25 expertise rating on PTR as expected. All the (melee) items I could find have had their weapon or feral combat skill exchanged for the equivalent expertise rating.

Edit: Goddamn, I type slow.

So now that we have yet another way of mitigating a mob's avoidance, what is the expertise cap for dodge on a 73 mob?

9% dodge will need 36 Expertise, or 36x4= 144 Expertise Rating to fully mitigate

I didnt think mobs had a full 9% dodge rate. I thought it was more near the 5.6% area.

It's not that simple, see the old Weaponskill Discussion Threat. Mobs don't dodge while casting, so you can only consider Fights against Bosses who don't cast or channel anything (and are stun immune). Furthermore, as of 2.2.x, the person collecting the data may not wear any +skillrating items / skills as it may influence dodge values to an unknown extent.

There's also the ever present issue of the +skill many melee classes use already. The testing would have to be done by someone using 0 +skill (this means no orcs or humans in addition to the gear/spec requirement.)

So, trying to figure out how good the new idol is for tanking I used it while smacking my favorite punching bags, the skettis trees, to test expertise.

Like mentioned earlier the idol cannot refresh the buff, so I parsed out procs from the mangles done with no buff on.

In 421 mangles I had 224 procs for a rate of 53.2%. Small sample size applies, but it seems like it will be by far my preferred tanking idol once the patch goes live - unless something insane gets dropped into Z'A. The idol is also dirt cheap at 20 badges.

To quickly test the proc rate in cat I ran out today to lay waste to the ashtongue camp in SMV (level 69-70). Here I had 127 procs in 136 mangles (93.4%). Sample size applies even more here, but it does seem like the rate is higher for mangle in cat form. I don't quite know what kind of proc rate we'd need for the idol to surpass Everbloom in a raid environment (I think the needed uptime was posted earlier, but I'll let someone else do the heavy brain lifting).

All in all it seems like a very good idol.

It seems to me that it might be worth taking the GCD hit to swap the Idol of Terror in and out with the Everbloom Idol, Mangle > Switch to Everbloom Idol > Shred to 5 Combo Points > Switch to Idol of Terror (usually waiting for energy ticks here if you didn't powershift, or could work the switch in with the shift?) > Rip > Mangle ... Repeat ad infinitum.

This way, if it doesn't proc you can regain the damage lost by not having it proc with the increased shred damage. Although if the proc rate is high enough such that there is a good chance it will always be up each mangle it probably isn't worth it? Thoughts?

Each Idol Swap is a lost white hit, using the "zomg best feral gear" posted by Malazaar That's 597.61 * 2 = 1195.22 damage that has to be made up.
65 * 1.03 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 89.11 AP and 3.56% Crit (SotF, HotW, BoK, UR)
89.11/14 * 1.1 (Naturalist) = 7 damage and a 56.24% critrate.
9 * 7 = 63
63 * .5624 * 2.266 = 80
63 * .20 * .76 = 9.58
63 * .2376 = 14.97

[top]104.54 white

7 * 2.25 * 1.3

20.475
2 * 20.475 = 40.95
40.95 * .5624 * 2.266 = 52.19
40.95 * .4376 = 17.92

[top]70.11 shred

174.65 damage from the bonus AP

Online time just ran out, but I don't think applying 3.56% crit to the base white/shred damage is going to make up the 1020 damage still missing, maybe 750.

^ Probably, I had forgotten about the loss of the white hits to be honest, so I doubt it is worth it. I hope it has a good uptime, as on some fights I am not always in position to shred (council) and so I mangle so as not to waste energy.

Actually, I will be throwing this into my rotation. Quartz swing timer will be my friend. Hit a macro to Rip and equip the Idol of Terror as a swing starts. Mangle as a swing starts, with a macro to idol swap to Everbloom. Overall, losing MAYBE 0.4s of one white hit.

I'm still trying to get understand how this patch affects our scaling and how far we are along the path to where we should be. Certainly the FAP and HotW changes bring us much closer to where we should be with respect to rogue dps and (at least new) itemisation. All new rogue leather has agility on it when previously over a quarter including the only high-level non-set piece drops in some slots had no agility on them. The expertise change is probably a net benefit for us, as it means that there are more items available for us to get the stat from, although like everyone we will need to get more hit rating from somewhere.

My concern then shifts to feral tanking, and tanking itemisation. Unfortunately here things haven't changed much, and in several ways have perhaps regressed a bit since 2.2. While 2.3 was supposed to help fill in off-spec itemisation, it has really only added PvE itemisation for our relic and bracer slots, and only at a relatively low item level. (Also the relic isn't a tanking relic per se).

The main issue is that our tanking gear is in fact hybrid gear and also poorly itemised hybrid gear at that, with the HotW change it no longer competes with the (agility based) rogue alternatives for dps purposes, it is also suboptimally itemised for tanking, especially at the high-end (swapping the agility and strength on t5 and t6 would buff both tanking and dps with no change to item value). While you could argue that intellect is of some small use when dpsing, it has no value when tanking, and yet it's on all our prime tanking gear.

However I think the problems go beyond that. We struggle to get tanking stats outside of agility, bonus armour and stamina. Too many tanking items are of little use for us, and very few stack our core tanking stats with other useful ones.

How would that macro look?

At the moment im using the Macro:

#show Rip
/Use Crystalforged Trinket
/Cast Rip

And when i hit it, it triggers a global CD for using CFT. Is there a way to remove this? maby with /stopcasting?
Anyhow, if you cant remove it, maby you could make a new macro including the
/use CFT and /equip Idol of Terror just before rip, so that you do 2 things in the same global CD.
My theorycrafting may be flawed..Is this the cycle you mean?
Rip->Idol of Terror->Mangle->Everbloom idol->Shred to 5CP

Chance on mangle to gain 65 agility isn't a tanking idol?

Au contraire, I think the new Idol is as close as it gets to a tanking idol. It certainly doesn't beat out the easily obtained Everbloom Idol for kitty dps. Even with a 50% proc rate, it's what, an average of around 2.5% dodge. That's a damn sight more useful than anything else I'm going to have in my idol slot while tanking.

While trolling the new loots, I noticed the [Vestments of Hibernation]. Fairly typical 'feral drood' loot, extra armour, all the usual stats including the ever hated Int, and armour penetration.

Is everyone else as puzzled by this as I am? Or am I alone in looking at it scratching my head wondering exactly what this is intended for?

** Apparently the answer is learn to read. But it's not the full answer, as aside from a few disses of its obvious lacks (stam and sockets), no-one wants or feels like commenting on the actual interesting bit of the item, the armour penetration. Cest la vie. **

No, you're totally alone. No one else is as puzzled as you are, especially not anyone in the thread you're reading.

I am fairly sure [Idol of Terror] has a 10s internal cooldown. I tested it by mangling in cat form, clicking off the buff and repeatedly mangling untill the buff reapplied - my combat log never showed it refreshing earlier than 10 seconds after the initial application.

Given that we will be able to one button powershift, it seems like the int isn't totally unwelcome. However obviously you could have a macro to drink a super mana potion instead of using a haste or strength potion, so who knows. Everyone else is puzzled by it too, but I think we can chalk it down to whomever itemizes Druids being clueless again.

I think it's really likely that the itemization for Zul'Aman and the badge rewards in this patch was completed long before the changes to HotW and feral AP.