In terms of Mutilate without Backstab: its about a 5% damage loss. Or rather: it's about a 1% DPS gain for the first 2/3 of the fight, and then about a 15-20% DPS loss for the last third of the fight.

However, that's not a good estimate for how much damage is lost by attacking from the front; to model attacking from the front you also need to factor in the fact that your attacks can now be parried, which is a significant DPS loss in its own right. ShadowCraft doesn't currently support accounting for this, but it shouldn't be too hard to add; in the meantime, I'd estimate that attacking from in front is probably a 5-10% DPS loss just due to parries, depending on your exact gear setup.

Would you expect that combat would be subject to the same level of dps loss from attacking from the front (I mean due to parries). Assuming 0 expertise for both sets, my feeling is that combat would lose less dps then Mutilate to parries due to the RNG of CttC not refreshing on a parried envenom (or two...or three).

I guess what I'm wondering is, assuming a relatively close to equal gearset in terms of ep values, if combat would beat Mutilate if you're attacking from the front. I've done some *very* basic napkin math in ShadowCraft by using the default gear setup and only changing the specs and I get:

Mutilate: 22,031.24
Combat: 19,572.02
Mutilate (no backstab): 20,902.13

Going with a flat dps reduction of 10% for parries.

Mut (No BS): 19,001.93
Combat: 17,792.74

Leaves Mut about 6% ahead. Which leads me to suspect that I won't be losing 1100 dps by occasionally manually renewing SnD.

And, now that I think about it, combat's theoretical dps is also probably hurt by parries as much or more then Mutilate since you're looking at parries on Main Gauche procs, as well as lost energy regen to parried offhand attacks.

Which is too bad, since I really enjoyed flipping between combat and Mutilate in ICC.

There is a flaw in comparing 0 expertise of both sets. Combat favors expertise much more highly than mutilate having it as their best secondary stat (once accounting for yellow hit), and will already have more expertise for a fight simply because it is optimal for that set. Mutilate however would then have conflicting stats between fights.

So it turns out I need to redo all my calculations (oh no...5 minutes of work) because I just realized I didn't change the main hand weapon from a dagger to a 2.6 weapon.

Which cost combat 500 dps, and really narrows the whole thing down.

Derp.

However the reason I ignored the superior weighting on Expertise for combat (and mastery for Mut) is simply because Mutilate is so far ahead on any fight where I can get behind the boss that I'm reforged for/gemmed for Mutilate ep values. I'm not going to farm up a second combat gear set until I think there's some basic value to it.

But yeah, ideally I should compare a reforged Mut set to a reforged combat set.

And I should let the combat set use a decent weapon...

Derp x2

After a brief conversation with a feral druid earlier today, he was saying that given the value of Agi vs other stats that because of the set bonus for pvp gear (70 agi for 2pc 180 for 4pc) that even the blue pvp gear (ilvl 352) was better than using heroics gear. Looking at the Assassination guide thread Agi is valued at 2.6 with the closest stats being spell hit and mastery at 1.4 and 1.3, even taking into account resil being a wasted stat in pve for us, due to the weight of Agi itself + the pvp gear having haste/mastery/hit/exp now which we could reforge as needed, are we in the same situation? This is from a non-raiding perspective, or even entry level raiding perspective as a casual who doesn't expect to see much gear soon.

Edit: I couldn't figure out how to get reforging to work in wowhead profiler, or to link the set up for that matter, but something like this. Not all pvp gear, and with gems/enchants appropriate etc. The chart showed 1388 hit, 1326 mastery and 4194 Agi pre-gems/enchants/reforging. 1700 resil, which is obviously not the most ideal as Shamdingle said but in regards to what the druid was saying, all the agi might outweigh whats lost from resil just because of how much better agi is than other stats. There's 540 crit, 159 expertise and 597 haste to play with reforging.

[Vicious Gladiator's Leather Helm]
[Don Rodrigo's Fabulous Necklace]
[Vicious Gladiator's Leather Spaulders]
[Dory's Finery]
[Morrie's Waywalker Wrap]
[Vicious Gladiator's Armwraps of Accuracy]
[Vicious Gladiator's Leather Gloves]
[Belt of Nefarious Whispers]
[Vicious Gladiator's Leather Legguards]
[Vicious Gladiator's Boots of Triumph]
[Gilnean Ring of Ruination]
[Signet of the Elder Council]
[Fluid Death]
[Tia's Grace] or [Key to the Endless Chamber] (both heroic, not normal)
[Steelbender's Masterpiece]
[Vicious Gladiator's Shiv]
[Slashing Thorns]

In any event, was just hoping to find out if this might work for us like how the druid was saying it worked for them.

PvP gear really isn't that great for PvE primarily because of Resil.

Resil cannot be reforged into anything else and that, plus the excess stam, eats most of the itemization points.

As far as entry level raiding gear, I would highly doubt it, however I don't have the time atm to see if one is able to reach the hit cap.

According to if it's worth using PvP gear in current PvE - it's quite easy to add those pieces to sp00n's Cataclysm Gear Sheet and check relative EP values of this gear. Just don't forget to manually add agility from the set bonuses somewhere to the armor piece itself (socket bonus, for example).

I actually had the same thought couple of days ago and decided to try. When you pick two PvP pieces with the best stats (thats shoulderpads with expertise and leggings with haste for combat), the +70 agility bonus puts this set surprisingly high.

From my calculations, 2-set bonus makes Vicious Gladiator's shoulderpads and leggings as good as normal raid gear. It's better than gear with "wrong" stats, worse than gear with "good" stats. To be more specific (EP values refer to combat spec):

Shoulderpads	Relative EP
[Wind Dancer's Spaulders]	+42
[Vicious Gladiator's Leather Spaulders]	0
[Caridean Epaulettes]	-18
[Poison Protocol Pauldrons]	-43
[Thieving Spaulders]	-80

Leggings	Relative EP
[Aberration's Leggings]	+106
[Vicious Gladiator's Leather Legguards]	0
[Wind Dancer's Legguards]	-7
[Beauty's Chew Toy]	-17
[Leggings of the Burrowing Mole]	-46

4-set bonus doesn't give that great results any more because you are forced to take either crit or master or both. Also it's not hard to obtain [Assassin's Chestplate] and [Stormbolt Gloves].

So yeah, I am definitely going to grab those shoulderpads and leggings, considering how easy it is to get required conquest points, and use them while raiding untill I can get a PvE upgrade.

So since poisons are considered nature spells would it be beneficial to use a trink such as [Bell of Enraging Resonance] or [Anhuur's Hymnal]?

Poisons don't benefit from Spell Power. So no.

Based on the spell page's Effect 2 (Explosive Bolts - Spell - World of Warcraft), yes.

[e] Though due to ms and cast time reasons, this is most likely unreliable in most cases (Omnitron and Halfus off the top of my head).

For the last week or so I've noticed something odd about Assassin's resolve. When I'm going to be in a trash fight in which I know I'll basically be spamming FoK, I replace my 1.8 mh dagger with 2.6 mace of the same ilevel. I do this for the increased IP procs (the OH and thrown have DP on them). I admit I've always been a bit concerned about the loss of the Assassin's resolve buff, but in the absence of any way to model this currently, I've been going with my gut and it seems to be working out quite well. The reason I'm explaining this up front is not to necessarily advocate for this (as I said, I have nothing but my in game experience to support this), but because my actual question probably won't make a lot of sense otherwise.

So here's the rub: what I've noticed lately is that even with a mace in my main hand, I still have 120 energy. So I tried different combinations of weapons, and as long as I had at least one dagger equipped, I still have 120 energy. I distinctly remember this not always being the case.

So my question is: does anyone know if, under these circumstances, one still gets the 15% buff to one's melee damage as well?

As always, thanks for any and all help.