I had a thought regarding the Improved Expose Armor talent, since expose armor has a chance to proc the extra combo point from ruthlessness, and can proc poisons could it be worth using when at 4 combo points to increase it to 5 for free? Other then the 20% chance of not getting your energy back anyway.

A note for Assassination rogues with Herbalism. You are able to macro your Lifeblood haste bonus in with Vendetta as they both have a 2 minute cooldown and can both be activated with a single button press. One less cooldown to keep track of.

#showtooltip Vendetta

/cast Vendetta

/cast Lifeblood

I am a little new to rogues, but how does pooling ~90 energy before using envenom help proc poisons? I attempted this on a dummy and found that I was flirting with the SnD timer waiting on pooling enough energy.

You pool energy while the envenom buff is running. If you envenom as soon as you have the combo points while you already have an envenom buff up, you're wasting envenom uptime, but if you wait til it falls off before you envenom, the buff is up longer. What they meant was you shouldn't pool energy higher than around 90 while doing this or you risk capping out.

Any chance at a normal BiS list at any point? I've made my own assumptions on the gear for the most part, but be nice to see a list since our spreadsheet is still being worked on.

I resist the notion of making lots of intermediate BIS lists under different restrictions, as in practice most of them are completely artificial. People will generally start picking up raid pieces before they finish full heroic 5man BIS; people will generally start doing hard modes before they finish full normal BIS. In terms of which pieces you're going for, I recommend plugging the EP weights into Wowhead (or equivalent) and letting it rank stuff for you (make sure to set gems to rare and turn reforging on). For trinkets you might need to do some calculations manually, but most of the information for the better trinkets is available for you to do that.

So: if someone would like to build a convenient guide of "items that are good" for a range of gear levels, that'd be fine, but I don't think we want to go down the road of building half a dozen BIS lists under different assumptions.

Real quick, I didn't mention Quicksilver because I didn't know about it, which goes to show how lucky I am with drops. Throat Slicer will yield similar dps and is easy to get. Always a plus in my book.

My opinion on what to look for in your equips is hit/mastery/haste. You're going to get some crit so reforge that into hit until the spell hit cap. I hesitate to say that most of the gear now is decently itemized but it isn't necessarily godawful either. Morrie's Waywalker Wrap is better than Assassin's Chestpiece for example by quite a bit, but that might get fixed. The trinkets are listed here and you can assume that their ranking will stay mostly the same as you are gearing up. The set bonus is nothing we haven't seen before, and thusly nothing special, so do offpieces until you can grind up the valor points if you really want it. When you look at it you don't have many options really, if it says 372 you can assume it is BiS or close to it, not counting trinkets.

Reduced cooldown of Vanish not only increases Opportunity uptime, but also increases Garrote uptime, which in turn creates more Venomous Wounds procs. This is with the assumption that Garrote is more viable opener than Mutilate.

If we take a deeper look, Elusiveness puts Vanish cooldown in line with Vendetta cooldown, as Zurm pointed out eariler. This means Elusiveness has increased potential when used in conjunction with mechanics that make Vendetta more than just plain 5% overall dps increase, and when these mechanics occur more than once per fight. While this may sound far fetched, it really isn't. Whenever boss enters a phase of increased damage taken multiple times during the encounter, the importance of Vendetta is increased. At least Magmaw and Omnitron have these kinds of mechanics. It also increases EP value of on-use effect trinkets with 2 minute cooldown, namely Unsolvable Riddle at this point of the expansion. If Vendetta was taken into consideration when calculating Unsolvable Riddle EP, this obviously does not increase its EP into levels where it would be considered viable alternative to other trinkets.

Bottom line is, saying that Precision will always beat Elusiveness seems a bit too much, seeing how many variables affect it's effectiveness.

1) If Garrote is in fact better than just autoattacking out of a Vanish, it isn't going to be by very much.
2) Its very easy to overestimate the benefit of stacking cooldowns - it increases their value, but typically not by very much.

So: yes, there are other factors that will increase the value of Elusiveness. But they don't triple it. They probably don't even double it. I'd be very surprised if they boost it by as much as 50%. So while Elusiveness might not be *quite* as bad as indicated above... it's still clearly vastly inferior. So unless something changes radically, Elusiveness is always going to be worse than Precision, no matter how badly you want it to be otherwise.

On the discussion of what you open out of stealth with, it seems that Garrote would be the obvious choice, given that venomous wounds is worth a pretty substantial amount of damage (3344 in my current mediocre gear @ 15% crit, 6 ticks per garrote = an average of 13844 damage per application of garrote as well as 36 energy), plus the damage from garrote itself (926/tick, 6 ticks, same crit etc. = 6389 damage), makes for an average total of 20233 damage per application of garrote as well as the 36 energy, which is significantly more damage than both ambush and mutilate.

The only thing you are losing straight out is 2-3 combo points, but unless those 2-3 combo points are worth 11k~ damage and 36 energy, I don't see how anything else can even be considered unless I'm missing a significant variable.

Last I checked vanish doesn't invoke a GCD so it's not a whole second, right? You're losing out on some autoattack damage while you wait for the client to recognize that you're vanished and actually attempt to cast Garrote, but I'd expect that to be on the order of a single server round trip, i.e. dependent on your latency. Plus, I'm not entirely certain that attempting to cast garrote while out of stealth won't send the command to the server anyway, meaning that the dps loss could be minimal (is there an easy way to test this?).

I think it'd be interesting and relevant--both to vanishing and to starting a fight, in case you have to run around the boss or something--to be able to determine the exact dps gain of Garrote over mutilate, and how many [milli]seconds of autoattack that corresponds to.