Not one that you're going to hit in current content. The gear set I've used to generate most of the numbers I've posted has 2154 mastery and 887 haste, and Mastery is still clearly ahead (1.26 vs 1.21). The best gear set that I know of winds up with 1167 haste and 1998 mastery and EP values of 1.28 vs 1.20.

Basically: what generally happens somewhat before you get to the point where Haste would catch Mastery is that you reach the point where if you reforge every piece without mastery to mastery and every piece with mastery to hit, you wind up with significantly too much hit; hence, you need to reforge some pieces that already have mastery to haste instead, which helps maintain the gap between the two stats.

Currently, would anyone know if the Vicious Gladiator's Shiv an upgrade to the blue 1.4 dagger offhands we have available? I'm thinking whether to get that or a throwing weapon to replace my green ninja star.

Using the estimated 1.0367 EP value for OH weapon DPS and the current EP values for Assassination, the 359 Gladiator's Shiv is ~244 EP behind heroic Barim's Main Gauche and the 372 Gladiator's Shiv is ~120 EP ahead.

Assuming we use kick on every cooldown (this is obviously the most extreme case scenario, but we can extrapolate from here), how valuable would the -10 energy to kick on the Vicious Gladiator's Leather Gloves be? It seems like quite a few of the current bosses are interrupt heavy, but I wasn't sure how to convert energy into EP/DPS for comparison purposes.

I'm new to the forums and have not seen anything like what I'm about to say. But couldn't you take this macro one step futher and add something with Vanish if in combat.

Im not sure if this would work. Someone tell me if I'm wrong.

I believe the value of Unsolvable Riddle is being understated for two reasons: A) the 2 minute CD can be macroed with Vendetta usage; B) while the uptime can be looked at as 16.7% for 20 seconds of every two minutes, in reality it will frequently be a bit higher as long as the trinket isn't coming off cooldown right as a fight is ending--for example, if used a few seconds after a pull in a 5 minute fight you would have 20% uptime (@ the pull, @ 2 minutes, and @ 4 minutes = 60 seconds out of 300). With these in mind to me it looks like the EP value of Unsolvable Riddle is usually going to be in the range of Prestors Talisman / heroic Tia's Grace, and may even pull ahead of those two depending on fight length (more likely on shorter fights).

However, as the frequency between procs of the ICD trinkets is shorter, the potential for increased effectiveness is less with the ICD trinkets since most of the current raid fights will take several minutes. For example if these ICD trinkets were to take an average 3 seconds to proc when available (rough estimate given 10% proc rates for Prestor's Talisman of Machination and Key to the Endless Chamber), or every 78 seconds, and the fight lasted 5 minutes and 30 seconds and ended right when a 15 second proc ended for the fifth time (75 seconds total uptime), the uptime would be 22.72%, or 13.6% more uptime than than what appears to be a 20.0% uptime estimate that was used to establish these trinkets' EP values. If a fight lasted 6 minutes and 20 seconds with Unsolvable Riddle and ended right after trinket usage for the fourth time (1 min, 20 sec total uptime) the uptime would be 21.05%, or 26.0% more uptime than the 16.67% uptime estimate that looks to have been used to establish its EP value (not to mention the increased uptime also being in the hands-down best stat). I recognize the current raid encounters are less than routine at this point, so trying to estimate a fight duration in which Unsolvable Riddle would provide more value is going to be very difficult, which kind of makes this a moot point.

Edit: grammar change only.

Rather than directly answer your question, I made a graph of the average EP value of the various trinkets as a function of fight duration (from t = 0 to t = 600). These assume 100% time on boss. Any time spent off boss will be (on average) a gain for the proc/activation trinkets and a loss for the stack trinkets. This is doubly true if the time off boss is long enough to cause your stack to drop.

Not included are the Darkmoon Card and the Unheeded Warning. Modeling for these was beyond the scope of my quick and dirty math, and Aldriana's simulation values are probably much closer than anything I'm going to get with theoreticals. The most current EP values for assassination were used. I used the previously stated "3 seconds to proc a 10% trinket" estimation, which seems to be in line with other estimates I've seen on this forum.

Trinket Chart

The problem with this is, assuming Assassination given this is the Assassination Guide, Vanish is actually a valuable DPS cooldown in and of itself because of Overkill, so burning it early just to get a potion would more than likely be a net DPS loss. The same is probably true for Sub, though not to as big of a degree, and Combat least of all, but overall just stick with the Stealth only macro.

@tito149: I believe you started figuring this out towards the end of your last post, but the extreme variability of each individual trinket during each individual boss fight is exactly why people like Aldriana focus on the averages to determine their value. The problem with looking at specific time breaks is nothing is ever consistent besides the trinket itself, and even then proc trinkets can vary slightly. Even the same bosses over time become faster because your group becomes better at the encounter and gains gear. While it is obvious that certain trinkets could be better, you are better off using the most consistent trinket because it will, for the most part, be consistently high for you. Perhaps sometime in the near or distant future, something like a time table to show exactly where each trinket, or any proc for that matter, will excel at which break points in time will be implemented into a tool like Shadowcraft. But right now I'd have to suggest that you stick with the averages, or if you are A) confident that your group will down X encounter in Y time and B) you have the calculations for each trinket you have available on hand, feel free to try and swap out on a per fight basis.

Edit: Noticed the post that snuck in before mine. That looks like a good start to what I mentioned above.

If you are looking for a little more hit on weapons you don't care to blow expensive enchants on, [Pyrium Weapon Chain] provides 40hit per application, and you can use one on both your MH and OH simultaneously for a net 80 hit.

So, this is sort of an interesting graph - thanks for making it.

In terms of analysis, I'd suggest focusing on the 4 to 8 minute range, as most boss fights seem to fall in that range at current gear levels - as gear improves fights will get (significantly) shorter, but I'd argue that optimizations of this sort make more sense during progression periods.

So, in that range, I'd argue that the lines fall into 5 main groups.

1) Red and Purple, i.e., Fluid Death and Heroic Prestors. These were predicted to be the best on average, and it looks like they mostly still are. In particular, no trinket on the graph pokes above the Fluid Death line past the 4.5 minute mark.

2) Teal, Yellow, and Pink. Yellow is probably the highest on average, but all three cross and recross each other repeatedly throughout the range - they're pretty close. This corresponds to H:Cyclone, H:Key, and Prestor's, with H: Cyclone being perhaps a bit ahead of the other two - which is reasonably similar to what the average weights tell us. It might imply that H:Key is a little stronger and H:Cyclone a bit weaker, but realistically its hard to draw too many detailed conclusions from eyeballing a graph.

3) Magenta - H: Tia. Runs straight through below the previous group and (mostly) above the next. Which basically confirms that its a solid trinket in the average case for the time being, but one needs to be careful of interruptions.

4) Orange, Light Green, and Dark Green. These - particularly Orange - are very choppy lines and hard to average by eyeballing - but they do run fairly close throughout the range, and are below the previous 3 trinket groups. This would imply that Riddle, Cyclone, and H:Eye are reasonably comparable, with whichever turns out to be tops depending a lot on the exact fight length. Looking at the average weights, we find H: Eye and Cyclone were indeed neck and neck, while Riddle was a bit behind. So it's probably fair to say it overperforms the average a bit in the time range we're looking at... but its still not notably good compared to the other options available.

5) Light Blue - H: Grace. This was never felt to be that good, and its basically consistently bottom of the barrel here. Again, nothing surprising here.

So, briefly stated: there is some structure here that's not apparent from averages, and if you happen to know exactly how long (and how interrupted) a fight is you might be able to pick a proc/activated trinket that is better than the average EP value might indicate... but in general, if you're talking about picking trinkets for a range of fights with a range of lengths, I don't think the conclusions are massively different than what averages would indicate.

No. To my understanding, your ideal meta gem is the Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond with 54 Mastery. The loss of agility to fulfill the Relentless requirements isn't worth the extra 21 Agility.

We know that Assassination is strong at AOE via FoK, but I'm curious about what is optimal when there are fewer targets present. When you have, say, 2 adds alongside a target mob, there's the option of tab targeting each mob and applying a ~3 point Rupture to each one to proc multiple Venomous Wounds. The power of VW energy returns is also another important point to consider, where you can literally blow your entire energy reserve on an add and have it immediately restored by a timed Rupture when it dies. While its obvious you at least want to Redirect a Rupture onto one of the adds before it dies, I essentially would like to know how many adds need to be present to make the Vile Poison procs off FoK outweigh the gains from such tab targeting.

From general observation I've noticed that pure FoK spam reaches the same DPS as my single target DPS when there's 3-4 mobs to fight. This is without keeping SND or Rupture up.

The EP values are averages and assume that you never lose your stacks (pretty reasonable assumption for most encounters). That said, Tia's comes with more passive agility and has passive mastery which is a higher EP value stat for Assassination then cyclone's crit via proc which all in all works out with Tia's on top.

Your last question is already answered on this page scroll up.

I've actually found that, assuming the trash isn't burst AoE, you can gain a considerable amount of dps by putting up multiple low point ruptures on targets before spamming FoK. The energy return of even 2 ruptures up at the same time is almost enough to sustain FoK GCD capped. Note that if you add Garrote into the mix it becomes even more amazing. I generally do something along the lines of Garrote -> Rupture main target, Redirect -> Rupture if a CP proc's on a secondary target, and spam FoK. If nothing else the initial energy gain is enough to sustain spam for quick 5 stack DP's on everything, even if you don't reapply rupture after the initial application(s).

Aldriana posted the EP values for MH and OH weapon dps in the FAQ thread. As expected, weapon damage matters more in your MH than your OH, with an EP of ~3.35 compared to ~1 for the OH. With that you can calculate the EP differences between the PvP and PvE MH weapons, and pretty much if the dagger is an ilvl increase, it's going to be worth more dps. See below for some EP differences:

[Steelbender's Masterpiece] (PvE, ilvl 349) - Baseline
[Bloodthirsty Gladiator's Shanker] (PvP, ilvl 353) - +20 EP
[Vicious Gladiator's Shanker] (PvP, ilvl 359) - +120 EP
[Organic Lifeform Inverter] (PvE, ilvl 359) - +233 EP
[Vicious Gladiator's Shanker] (PvP, ilvl 372) - +377 EP

1. Where does "Figurine - Demon Panther" fit into the BiS trinket list that you have created?

EDIT: I've done some rough math and found that it is inferior to even the "Unsolvable Riddle" trinket.

2. Opening in stealth -> Garrote -> 1pt Rupture -> Ruthlessness Procs -> Slice & Dice -> Mutilate to 4/5 -> Envenom
-> Ruthlessness does not Proc -> Shiv -> Slice & Dice ->
Mutilate to 4/5 -> Envenom

This is easily the quickest and most efficient opener that has yet to be discussed. Empyrically as well as fundamentally I believe you can see how it is clearly above the rest.

If anyone would be able to model this opener against the other proposed openers to see how it fares, that would be great.

Thanks this was a rather good advice.

However I have another question about assasination target switching.
Its true that AoE dps and single target dps is really nice, however my dps drops considerably (about 50%) in fights with lots of target switching.
For example halls of origination Ammunae or Setesh. Or that wolf guy in Deadmines.
In those fights you have to kill spawned adds very quickly, so its impossible to wait for poison stacks or to use Rupture on them. So I usually just run up to them and use Mutilate and try to keep SnD up with the CPs. They die before I am able to do much more but if I dont attack them they wont die fast enough for the group to succeed.
In other words I am losing that 50% dps because I have to move to them, cant use any dots, usually have trouble to even keep snd up and dont really have enough energy to do much more than a mut.

Since my guild is pretty laid back they cant really make up for my lack of dps in those fights, resulting in us not even being able to complete any heroic with mechanics like that.

So any input on how to maintain an at least acceptable dps with lots of target switching?

Rupture before the mob dies.

You're refunded the entire energy that you would've gained otherwise over time.

Especially for fights where adds die fast, like the vapors on the wolf boss in heroic DM, and you want to keep a more or less stable rotation, just mutilate -> rupture -> mutilate, this way you will be, as Grunge stated, refunded almost a full energy bar when they die, as well as your cp's from the last mutilate will remain on the target after death for you to popp a snd as it drops off, if you aren't able to squeeze in an envenom once in a while (I think mobs that despawn on death does not save your cps on them as they die, need to confirm this). This should makes you able to keed a snd up, as well as mutilate and rupture the next adds rather fast to keep a good income of refunded energy.

Keep in mind that the energy regain from a rupture is proportional with the time left of the rupture.

Also, switching targets a little before they die helps abit, as you might be able to do a mutilate on your next target before the first target is dead, and your rupture energy comes in.

Thanks a lot you guys this was really helpful

I can confirm that CPs aren't saved on dead despawning mobs. Maybe I'll be fast enough with that new strategy to get off Envenom before they die.