Assassination Guide for Cata [12/01/2011] - Page 6

Verain · 12/14/10, 7:13 PM

Avalanche can't proc off of instant? How can I test if it can proc off of wound? Does the combat log 100% tell the truth and any avalanche right after an attack was procced by that?

I've been opening with garrote if possible, then a one point slice and dice, then mutilate almost always twice (once if that takes me to four, which is rare), then envenom (or EA then envenom if in a heroic and no one is bringing the buff, to which I bring two points of improved expose armor). That refreshes the slice and dice and gives me time to get up a rupture and build combo points for a real envenom.

That method delays my rupture by about 10 seconds in the worst case, but it seems to pretty reliably keep up the slice and dice. It's frustrating to be making these decisions based on what feels right, but I so haven't had the time to math anything out yet. I also find that I'll use cold blood early in the fight with intention of getting extra energy to put up that rupture faster (cold blooding the first envenom).

My intuition is that paying as little for slice and dice as possible is correct, and that every combo point put on beyond the first is a "wasted" combo point, being that the energy return of rupture takes so long to add up to a whole mutilate. This method also gets S+D active on the second global, which has some small merit over the third I guess.

• Aldriana · 12/14/10, 7:29 PM

Consult the Mechanics Testing thread for IP/Avalanche information. I also did a shorter test that seemed to indicate that WP doesn't proc it either, but I didn't run it long enough to get full statistical confidence - partly because it was late and I was tired, and partly because the question is to some extent moot, as Wound Poison is generally not worth using for any spec.

fourdots · 12/14/10, 7:53 PM

Originally Posted by Krushinator

This seems to indicate that the only setback to being under expertise cap is possibly having to refresh SnD manually. Even with the energy loss from dodged attacks, does expertise rating really have just a 1.1 EP value before the cap? What changed from 3.3 to now that made expertise so insignificant?

I have a question about this that I haven't seen addressed here. It seems as though the focus of the discussion has been on cp generators and finishers, and I understand the part they play in exp's relative lack of ep weight now. But now that my exp is in the dumper, I've also noticed that about 5% of my melee swings are being dodged as well. Bearing in mind that a certain percentage of melee swings are going to be misses anyway, it seems as though by having a low exp rating that we're effectively raising the number of misses we have from all sources, resulting in a loss of physical and poison damage that was never an issue in Wrath.

So I'm just wondering if the recovery of some of that lost dps might give one a reason to want to raise one's exp, not to the cap perhaps, but at least to the point where the melee swings are being dodged at a significantly lower rate.

• Aldriana · 12/14/10, 8:03 PM

As it turns out, missing white attacks just isn't that big a deal for Assassination - Expertise's effect on white attacks is the same as white hit, which, I might note, is the weakest stat for Assassination rogues, behind even crit. Its not that those misses don't cost you damage - they do - it just turns out that fixing this is less efficient than making your poisons hit harder (mastery) or having more attacks to start with (haste).

The reason why we focus on the yellow effects of expertise is that that's what differentiates it from white hit. And as it turns out, those differences work out to a small amount of energy lost needed to reapply dodged Mutilates, Backstabs, and finishers, mitigated slightly by increased Envenom uptime. So expertise is a little better than white hit... but not a *lot* better, and in particular not good enough to be worth capping in many cases.

Affness · 12/14/10, 8:48 PM

hmmm, it is a bit of off topic, but i got a question ...

is the requirement for relentless earthsiege diamond fixed yet?

Felform · 12/14/10, 9:45 PM

very much no
they said future patch so we'll prolly have to wait for that

Morfea · 12/15/10, 2:24 PM

While Assassination rogues do predominately poison spell damage, given that spell hit's value is close to mastery's and both are well behind Agility, it is conceivable that we won't get to spell hit cap.

Considering this, would it just be good to just not worry about hit after the yellow hit cap? Or should certain things be considered when comparing the weight of a piece of gear between hit and mastery in the case that we are yellow hit capped but not spell hit capped? Most gear so far seems stacked with hit but from what I've played with, we'd still have to push it to get to that point.

Killme888 · 12/15/10, 2:34 PM

Here's some values for some of the trinkets for people too lazy to do their own math (assuming 100% uptime on Fluid/Tia and 20% uptime on the procs):

Mutilate:

[Prestor's Talisman of Machination]: 1467
[Fluid Death]: 1437
[Essence of the Cyclone]: 1336
[Prestor's Talisman of Machination]: 1297
[Essence of the Cyclone]: 1182
[Tia's Grace]: 1149

Combat:

[Prestor's Talisman of Machination]: 1633
[Fluid Death]: 1572
[Prestor's Talisman of Machination]: 1445
[Essence of the Cyclone]: 1394
[Essence of the Cyclone]: 1233

As Fluid Death & Tia's Grace are easily obtainable, I found no reason to do any other trinket which is below them.

A warning though, the proc uptime is closer to 18%~, so the values for proc trinkets are abit inflated, for example [Prestor's Talisman of Machination] would be about 1414 instead. It also doesn't take into account the ramp-up time for Fluid/Tia, which is going to affect their EP too, but not by much at all.

• Aldriana · 12/15/10, 2:36 PM

Originally Posted by Morfea

Considering this, would it just be good to just not worry about hit after the yellow hit cap? Or should certain things be considered when comparing the weight of a piece of gear between hit and mastery in the case that we are yellow hit capped but not spell hit capped? Most gear so far seems stacked with hit but from what I've played with, we'd still have to push it to get to that point.

Just because you can't make it to the cap is no reason not to try for it. Until you get there hit is more valuable than any other stat, so its just good sense to stack it. The spell hit cap is not some magical number that gives you a huge DPS bonus when you get there - its just the point where hit stops being the most valuable stat, such that you should prioritize some other stat instead.

Syncness · 12/15/10, 4:07 PM

Originally Posted by Killme888

As Fluid Death & Tia's Grace are easily obtainable, I found no reason to do any other trinket which is below them.

Sorry, Tia's Grace is the only pre-raid available item, is it possible you could simply list how to test a trinket for EP values so I could do it myself? (and future reference)

Many thanks,

Nexism.

paraa · 12/15/10, 4:42 PM

I wonder myself how strong Darkmoon Card: Hurricane is? You haven´t listed it. Is it really that bad?

edit: wowhead is down at the moment so I can´t link DMC: H sry about that...

• Aldriana · 12/15/10, 5:13 PM

Well, we don't actually have any testing on the proc rate for DMC, so its hard to say anything definitive; however, assuming its 1 PPM (which seems plausible) it's uninteresting for Mutilate but pretty good for Combat.

On a related note, I sort of disagree with the trinket EP values a couple posts back in this thread. I wrote a small program using ShadowCraft as the backend to compare trinkets for Assassination and Combat at specific near-BIS gear sets, and came up with the following trinket EP values:

Assassination

heroic_prestors_talisman_of_machination: 1426.24849878
fluid_death:                             1387.76296847
heroic_essence_of_the_cyclone:           1311.52713267
prestors_talisman_of_machination:        1262.14909046
heroic_tias_grace:                       1249.02648025
heroic_key_to_the_endless_chamber:       1206.90078548
darkmoon_card_hurricane:                 1180.97130948
essence_of_the_cyclone:                  1159.72233447
heroic_left_eye_of_rajh:                 1158.19274338
unsolvable_riddle:                       1098.30860438
unheeded_warning:                        1010.0863035

Combat

heroic_prestors_talisman_of_machination: 1587.470001
fluid_death:                             1482.21812325
prestors_talisman_of_machination:        1406.71748082
darkmoon_card_hurricane:                 1373.47963511
heroic_essence_of_the_cyclone:           1358.27045555
heroic_left_eye_of_rajh:                 1298.41614865
heroic_key_to_the_endless_chamber:       1295.70939023
heroic_tias_grace:                       1244.2592468
essence_of_the_cyclone:                  1201.11519623
unheeded_warning:                        1198.2000663
unsolvable_riddle:                       1084.97730932

Note that Tia's Grace and Fluid Death may underperform their theoretical value on interrupted fights.

Also note that these are for a particular gear set at near BIS values; answers will be slightly different if you check at a different gear level or different assumptions. So while values above have 15 digits of precision, they're probably only accurate to 2 or 3 places, and - depending on how different your gear is from the set I used to generate the numbers - possibly not even that. However, it does provide a decent general picture of which trinkets are good and not.

Killme888 · 12/15/10, 7:25 PM

Yea like I said, my values were based on those 2 uptime assumptions and was using your values from the Cata FAQ. So they'll be a bit higher than the actual values, but they're still pretty accurate to tell which trinket is generally better than another as they're in the same order as your list and pretty close in EP difference apart.

As for Tia/Fluid, I think there's only a single fight far that has a 15 sec interruption on the transition to the last phase on Ascendant Council. Nef & Conclave of Wind is pretty close too, but you can keep it up pretty easily.

dmbrandon · 12/16/10, 5:16 PM

A commenter on wowhead claims he had 41 procs in 10 minutes, with several procs in close succession. Does anyone have the tools to steadily test this? I'd really like some solid data before dropping 20-40k on a trinket.

Malkom72 · 12/17/10, 12:09 PM

Hi all,

After some test on Boss dummy, I have 0.04% of miss with 14.96% hit rating. It seems that the cap is down to 15% from 17%....

Have you the same result on your side ?

I can send some screenshot if you want....