Correct me if I'm wrong, but the slower weapon speed of the new brewfest dagger should cause a small increase in instant poison proc rates (~5%?). Frankly, I'm not sure if this would be an improvement over the loss of procs you'd see as a result of dealing less white hits, but if that wasn't the case it would likely be the best 365 ilvl option for assassination. However, it is unlikely that it would be an improvement over a 378 or even a 372 ilvl dagger of 1.8 speed.

Normalization of weapon speeds removes the largest benefit of choosing a slower weapon leaving you with just a slighty higher average damage range which would produce slightly (~150 damage) higher instant attacks that use the MH weapon to calculate. As the previous poster said, not a large benefit for assassination, but a fairly decent benefit for subtlety.

Would have guessed something in this region too. Makes it a pretty competitive option considering how easily obtainable it is.

Assuming you're using garrote to open up from a vanish, would it be worth it to hold off on using vanish until you have a number of combo points such that the one from garrote is sure to not be wasted via a mutilate crit? It won't be wasted when you have 1 CP, 3 CP, or 4 CP. If you use it on 0 CP, you can garrote for 1 CP, then non-crit mutilate for 2 CP, then crit on mutilate for 3 CP, wasting the garrote CP. If you use it on 2 CP, you will garrote for 1 CP, then you could crit a mutilate for 3, again wasting 1 CP. Since having exactly 1, 3, or 4 CPs are very common situations to be in (namely the 1 CP case, via ruthlessness), this could certainly be a marginal DPS gain. The backstab case for holding off on vanish is much less viable, since the only time you're sure to not waste it is when you have exactly 4 CP. This could lead to less overkill uptime.

The three critical things to monitor when deciding when to vanish are total length of the fight, loss of autoattacks and envenom uptime.

Basically if delaying a vanish will cost you overkill uptime (less use, or it coming off cooldown for too little time at the end of the fight) then don't delay it.

Secondly, you want to be able to vanish and immediately garrote. Effectively what this means is that you'll want to be certain you are behind the target, and have pooled energy for the garrote, before you vanish. Even then you'll want to have a /start attack macro'd into your garrotte so that you don't lose any time on target.

Finally you should endeavor to vanish/garrote after your envenom buff drops so that you minimize the dps loss of not attacking for whatever fraction of a second you lose.

Honestly I tend to use garrote to "top up" my current cps by 1 since by the time envenom drops off you're likely at 3-4 combo points.

For instance: Assuming we jump into the average Assassination rotation, by the time your envenom buff (average 5-6 seconds) is close to dropping you will have had the time to mutilate at least once, which will put you at somewhere between 2-4 cps on the target before the vanish.

The /start attack isn't there to double up on the garrotte. It's there to minimize the dps loss of vanishing.

This is all very rough napkin math, but if we estimate that a full garrotte is the same as 12 seconds of rupture (in that both represent 6 ticks of venomous wounds) then missing out on a garrotte costs us 3375*12 damage (from the OP).

So not getting a garrotte on the target is a loss of about 40,500 damage.

Which would seem to me to say that it would be a dps loss to wait more then 1-2 seconds for a garrotte (assuming you have decent Firelands gear).

That all being said, the OP does state that you can wait up to 4-5 seconds to reopen with Garrote from a vanish, and he's done far better math then I have...so take that as you will.

The final thing to keep in mind is that if you're at all distracted doing the bossfight dance, you could miss that your garrotte didn't land and that you're still in stealth, costing you more dps time as well as throwing off your rotation.

To be clear, the ideal situation is to garrotte out of vanish. If you can do so in under 2 seconds, then yes it's a dps loss to /start attack. However if you lose anymore time then about 1 second, then you are likely looking at a dps loss and the risk of energy capping as well.

Edit: 12 is not 6

I would imagine the energy gains from Garrote (via Venomous Wounds) accounts for the remaining 2-3 seconds of time that OP referred to. In other words, you have to take into account more than just the damage from Garrote when figuring out the acceptable delay from Vanish to Garrote mid-fight. I see that you factored in the damage from Venomous Wounds, but the energy gains are even more important.

Edit: Even if you did take into account the energy gains when determining the 1-2 seconds maximum delay between Vanish and Garrote, I'd still be very hesitant to include /startattack in the Garrote macro. I can think of too many circumstances where the potential dps loss would outweigh the potential gains.

My "math" was based purely on assuming garrotte = rupture for dps calculations so I could use the "dps loss" table from the OP, which I assume includes the dps benefit from VW.

I have to admit that I agree with you in general. I'm being a bit hypocritical since I don't use /start attack with my garrote, but I also recommend it for newer rogues since missing a garrote also introduces the risk that you will be stealthed and not notice this fact (easy to do since stealth is generally a subtle change to the UI) and lose both time on target as well as likely energy capping due to overkill.

This macro works really reliable for me. Just spam the button to Vanish + Garotte immediately. If the boss turns to you and you cannot Garotte, it will simply start auto attacking.
(Macro might not work for higher latency settings, but it works fine for <50).

Note that Garrote only damages every 3 seconds, while rupture damages every 2 seconds.

From my post a few posts back.

"This is all very rough napkin math, but if we estimate that a full garrotte is the same as 12 seconds of rupture (in that both represent 6 ticks of venomous wounds) then missing out on a garrotte costs us 3375*12 damage (from the OP)."

Edit: If it's ok with everyone else in this discussion, I think we can all agree that the end result of the conversation is that you should always seek to Garrotte out of Vanish for maximum dps, and that you should be careful to avoid losing anymore dps time then you have to if Garrotte does not land. If you are finding that missing the garrotte is screwing up your rotation or costing you more time then 1-2 seconds, then you might want to use a /start attack macro.

Thanks!

While it is pretty hard to model this, the answer to your question on the buff is that it is both. The stacking buff is haste, and once you reach a breakpoint number of stacks (25), you gain a crit buff as well. Combat will cap out completely and utterly with an average amount of stacks (so will Assassination), so therefore the damage per GCD of Assassination will be ahead of Combat, all else equal.