Bandit's Guile Goes 5% (shallow insight) -> 10% (moderate insight) -> 15% (deep insight). The progression is reliably every 4th sinister strike/RS, regardless of what combination they're used in or any extra combo points that might be generated, but dodges don't count. Once you get to the 15% buff it stays there regardless of how many more SS/RS you use, fading after 15 seconds. It then resets and you start all over again. (SS/RS used during the 15% don't count toward the next 5% buff, it's 4 SS/RS after the 15% buff fades).

Naked except for a level 1 white weapon, I can confirm that the 15% buff applies to melee attacks, sinister strike, revealing strike, eviscerate, wound poison, deadly poison, and rupture. Rupture and deadly ticks do damage based on your current buff, not the buff when the rupture/deadly was applied. The 4th, 8th, and 12th SS/RS don't benefit from the damage increase despite the fact that they trigger the buff. (It takes half a second or so to appear)

Anything I missed?

Edit: I hadn't really thought about how bandit's guile worked before this. With the recent buff to eviscerate at least at level 80 it's going to do very comparable damage to rupture (after armor), so ideally we'll have a 30ish second BG cycle with SnD as the finisher with 5%, rupture at the 10% level, and as many eviscerates as we can at 15%. Rupturing late in the cycle will probably be a dps loss if the two abilities do very similar damage since many of the ticks will happen with no BG buff.

Fan of Knives's damage appears to be dependent on thrown weapon speed. A [Balanced Throwing Dagger] was compared to a [Weighted Throwing Axe]. The damage done appears to be proportional to the weapon speed.
Weighted Throwing Axe:

Balanced Throwing Dagger:


Sorry for not being clearer on the Venomous Wounds data, the damage column is the average non-crit damage from each trial. The range of damage is basically zero, with the largest observed variation in damage within any trial being 1 damage. Added the raw data to the previous post on Venomous Wounds.

EDIT: As this probably doesn't merit its own post, speccing into HAT increases spell crit according to the character sheet.

FoK on the main target is buffed, but not on any of the secondary targets.

Edit: I can also say something more about energy regen. Without a doubt base regen is 10/second and 12.5 a second with vitality. The value of haste was up for debate in the 4.0.1 combat spreadsheet thread, so I did a somewhat longer test. I spammed fok for 120 seconds and recorded both the total casts and the energy remaining at the end of the test. With 32.57% haste I got 58 casts off with 58 energy remaining, for a net expenditure of 1988 energy or 16.566 energy/sec. If haste is multiplicative (e.g. regen = 12.5 * (1+haste%)) then I'd have expected 16.571 energy/sec, well within the margin for human error here. The only alternative hypothesis I've heard advanced was 12.5 + .11 * haste% which would predict an overall regen of 1930 energy, a reasonably large difference.

Having done that I went one step further and did the exact same test (with the same 32.57% haste) but this time also used an adrenaline rush during the test, making sure not to cap and without the glyph. Here I got 63 casts off with 78 energy remaining at the end, for a total regen of 2183. The total difference in energy regained was thus 195 (give or take a little bit given that I might have read the energy remaining bar slightly early/late). Without the glyph I would have expected 150 energy regained if there was no interaction with vitality, but this is significantly higher. It's a much closer match for it being 150*1.25 than it is for just the flat 150, but also pretty clearly not being influenced by haste.

Grinding through the data a bit, I think the more elegant way of expressing the damage formula is 302.5 + .1125 * AP, which is increased by Vile Poisons and Master Poisoner to 392.04 + .1458 * AP. This gives perfect agreement with your data in all cases (assuming, at least, your metagem was unequipped or inactive for the 2036 AP test).

Hence, it appears that Venomous Wounds procs work just like any other poison proc, benefitting from all +poison talents and spell damage abilities. The only lingering question is whether procs also miss at the usual spell miss rate; I would assume they do, but it would be good to sanity test it.

We can also infer that Potent Poisons and Vile Poisons stack multiplicatively if this damage formula is to be correct; it would be good to verify this by dropping Vile Poisons for a similar test and seeing if the damage responds as we expect.

It seems to me that your second test confirms that AR stacks additively with one of Vitality and Haste Rating and additively with the other, but does not distinguish which is which - that is, the gains from AR could be interpreted at 150 * 1.25 = 187.5 ~= 195, but could also reasonably be interpreted is 150 * 1.3257 = 198.9 ~= 195. A repeat of this experiment with 0 haste would be illuminating.

The helm was unequipped for the 2036 and 616 attack power trials, so that agrees with your model.

With a 2.5 speed 7.4 dps Axe and 5099 AP I expect normal attacks to land for about 929 (I can probably get a larger sample if needed but there were boomkins in every city putting up FF)

The boss level dummy has approximately 31.43% damage reduction from armor. It also appears that glancing blows still have a 24% chance to happen and reduce damage by 25%.

With no talent points and using the same axe


With Imp SS only (5874 AP now with Vitality)


With Aggression only


Both Aggression and Imp SS

Aggression and Imp SS appear to be additive.


I am not sure how to give "proof" but I can confirm that on beta the following

Count for Restless Blades

• Eviscerate
• Envenom
• Deadly Throw
• Rupture

Do not count for Restless Blades

• SnD
• Expose Armor
• Recuperate
• Kidney Shot

Revealing Strike does not look like it's normalized.

Using the same 2.5 speed 7.4 dps Axe and 5864 AP on the boss level dummy


Using a 1.9 speed 6.5 dps Mace and 5864 AP on the boss level dummy



It is currently multiplicative on beta.

No talents


With Vitality


Both Vitality and Savage Combat

Good catch. Repeated said experiment with only a white throwing weapon equipped (0 haste). 48 FoKs and 70 energy remaining at the end of 2 minutes. Net regen 1650. 1650 - (12.5*120) = 150. It would seem like the scaling factor here is haste not vitality.

It looks like existing DoTs are not boosted by the 20% KSp damage buff. In this test I ruptured and swapped to a weapon with no DP on it just before a KSp.

I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss a testing technique that's helpful for getting detailed results. It involves the behavior of fixed damage attacks - i.e., things like Gouge, Rupture ticks, Venomous Wounds procs, etc. which always obey the same damage formulas. When you're actually testing such an attack, it will exhibit a damage range exactly one point wide - for instance, it will do 123-124 damage in practice. This is because, when the game calculated the damage for that move, it will find that it does (say) 123.4 damage. At this point, the game rounds randomly up or down based on the fractional part; in this example, it will round down 60% of the time and round up 40% of the time, so the actual average over the long term will be 123.4, but each individual attack will do either 123 or 124.

Hence, if you test once or twice and find that it does 123 damage, that's somewhat useful as it tells us that the internal damage number is between 122 and 124; but if you test until you get both values (123 and 124 in this case), it tells you that the answer is between 123 and 124, which basically halves the uncertainty.

Note that this is true for both crits and hits; for instance, if you look at the second Venomous Wounds test, we know both that the base damage is between 1002 and 1003, and that 1.545 times the base damage is between 1548 and 1549, which lets us state with absolute confidence that the actual damage number is between 1002 and 1002.59, which is better still. Hence, when testing this sort of thing, the most descriptive answer you can possible give is to get both damage number for both crits and noncrits; this gives us the most possible confidence in the answer.

However, sometimes the value comes out very very close to an actual damage number; for instance, in the first Venomous Wounds test above, the expected damage is 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.08 * (302.5+.1125*4347) = 1230.99912 damage. Hence, 99.9% of the time, it's going to do 1231 damage, meaning you can beat on the dummy all day and not see a 1230 - you'll note that he did 53 trials and all did the same amount. And while 53 tests with venomous wounds isn't that hard to do, once you start testing with Gouge... you won't *always* be able to get both numbers for a given attack. However, if you can at least make a reasonable effort to get them - 6 or 8 trials of a given attack - that does help reduce the uncertainty involved. More is of course better, but we'll take what we can get.

I bring this up because while ieatpaperbag's testing in post 23 is indicative that target armor is about 11950, I think it would be good to narrow it down further; in particular, some testing with a fixed-damage attack (gouge for rogues - other classes have other options) would be very helpful towards pinpointing the actual value.

Interesting - particularly since Venomous Wounds implies the opposite. I wonder if the damage range on IP is dirtying the results? Regardless, we'll need more testing - we should probably look at WP and DP in addition to Venomous Wounds and IP to try to get the full picture. As a note to people testing this: beware of Master Poisoner.

Interesting. Could you also confirm with Rupture, and perhaps try refreshing DP during KSp? That is, if you have a rolling DP stack and refresh it during KSp, does the following tick do 20% more damage? This will, of course, require getting lucky on poison procs during a KSp, and quickly unequipping your DP weapon once it ends, but I'd be interested to know the answer.

I suppose while we're at it it might be worth verifying the behavior of poison and Venomous wound procs during KSp; I recommend Wound Poison rather than IP for testing this to avoid the IP damage range problems. And I suppose if we're being picky I'm not sure we've ever verified that autoattack damage gets boosted during KSp - we've always sort of assumed it does, but it might be good to check.

18. Does HAT affect Spell Crit?

Hat does affect spell crit as well as melee crit.


No Hat.


With Hat.


I'm not quite sure why it says there was 32 sp, i had no buffs on me, so I assume it is just a bug.
And if anyone is interested this is the spec i used; shouldn't make a difference, but I'm including it for the sake of completeness.

I did 100 gouges with 6595 AP (after vitality, I only had 3 points in precision, forgot about them)
15 of the normal hits were 1030, the rest were 1029 (average of 1029.15)



I did another 50 gouges with no talent points (5735 AP)
22 of the normal hits were 905, the rest were 906 (average of 905.56)



Initially I used (AP * 0.21) + 1 to predict my damage before armor and got two numbers that did not agree with each other or the initial guess from earlier tests. I looked at the cata tooltip in wowhead and guessed at (AP * 0.21) + 117. The first test estimates damage reduction from armor to be 31.4791% and the second suggests 31.4671%. They don't seem to agree to the degree I would have liked for something like armor. What do you suggest for a better number rogue-wise, a larger sample? what are some of the other classes' abilities that could provide better data?