Honestly it all depends on the specific circumstances of the fight in question.

Right now the only times I use Fan of Knives are:
Halfus (burning the whelps down)
Maloriak (burning the adds during the green vial phase)
Conclave (when I'm on the add boss, which is never, but in theory anyway)

For all three of these fights it's crucial that all the adds dies as soon as possible, so I just spam FoK while autoattcking the nearest mob. The reason I don't try to maintain my rupture/SnD while I do this isn't the energy cost (which is trivial) but rather the GCDs since seconds count during those phases.

There is far more available to you than that. For starters, there are very few fights which will have significant adds up that you need to burn down, and that will take longer to kill than a full duration of rupture/SnD.

On any current boss, you should definately maintain SnD and Rupture on your main target while killing the adds; using your cooldowns to burn adds can also net a large advantage, using vanish during this time will net you your overkill buff, a garrote, and a 1pt rupture on another mob, which will shoot your energy regen to ridiculous heights.

The biggest thing you can do though, is watch your boss timers, refresh SnD and Rupture before the adds spawn, and then get back onto the boss after they are dead. All of your bleeds will net you increased energy, as well as doing increased damage, not keeping them up is a DPS loss. The boss will always live longer than the adds, not keeping SnD up is a DPS loss as having to refresh it uses CP that would otherwise be doing damage.

Especially on Maloriak it woukd be more beneficial to make sure you have a long enoug rupture duration on him prior to the add switch to not have to put up a bleed during the green phase. Focusing on putting as much damage as quickly as possible on the adds is the #1 priority. I haven't done Halfus yet when we had whelps, but I imagine the concept is the same.

Maloriak is rather easy, you can stay on him, and the cauldron will knock you back on top of the adds, hit rupture as you're in the air and a 5 pt rupt will tide you over for the whole phase. I also vanish->garote->rupt one of the adds as well, if vanish is available.

One of the most compelling reasons for an assassination rogue to use Fan of Knives early on the Vile Swills and Aberrations is to apply the Master Poisoner debuff to all the targets. Since initial threat isn't an issue by using Tricks of the Trade to the add off-tank, we're uniquely able to provide the debuff without any downsides, which is not the case with other classes that can provide the same debuff. In heroic, getting the adds down quickly is important, so any slight personal DPS loss from moving early from the boss to the adds is easily offset by the overall raid benefit.

Is it possible to get a guide together for macros? Or at least all of the commands to making them? My question is about putting a macro to start Slice and Dice as soon as I Garrote, would it be:

#showtooltip
/cast Garrote
/pause [number of seconds]
/cast Slice and Dice

I'm not sure if /pause is even a command, just a thought if anyone has any suggestions or ideas for different macros on other things that kind of go hand in hand like CoS and Vanish as an example.

-Viro

Just in the interest of 100% accurate information - regardless of class - assassination rogues are one of the easiest no-maintenance sources, but affliction warlocks with Jinx are a faster, no randomness, no-threat-generated source of a 40 yard aoe curse of elements on up to 15 targets. Assass rogues are still an excellent source, but don't feel like your guild requires an assass rogue for aoe curse of elements.

I feel this is kind of silly since I will try to find the answer next time I raid, but what interrupts besides kick works for tentacles on the 2nd phase of cho'gall? Does blind work? gouge? cheapshot/kidney shot?

I can personally confirm cheap shot, kidney shot, kick, arcane torrent, and I do believe gouge. I don't recall trying blind personally, though if gouge works I'm inclined to think that blind works (even if the mob cannot move) though this is uncertain. The take-home point is that aoe silences and stuns both work wonders. War stomp, shadowfury, arcane torrent, hungering cold, shock wave, etc, are excellent for stopping the channel if you happen to have a nice cluster of 3+ or whatever.

And to answer the sustained aoe discussion above, like a couple people have mentioned, keeping up SnD is going to be a large large loss for aoe dmg now that mut's energy income is independent of attack speed (because of SnD no longer increasing energy returns via focused attacks). What *does* matter now though is garrote and rupture. For trash aoe situations, you should open with garrote, then apply a 1 CP rupture, and then if ruthlessness proced, you should redirect that extra CP to another mob and then apply another 1 CP rupture to that mob. From there you can spam FoK basically at the GCD for quite a bit of time. If the pack has reasonable health left after overkill is finished (half health or so on average) you can vanish, garrote, rupture, and then with the possible ruthlessness proc, you can either wait for redirect again (unlikely to come back up) or you can simply reapply the 1 CP rupture when the current one runs out. Keeping garrote/rupture up on as many targets as you easily can while spamming FoK is a very noticeable dps increase for sustained aoe situations. For boss aoe situations, Halfus, Maloriak, etc, you want to be sure to get a 5 CP rupture up ahead of time along with garrote if possible (on the opener for Halfus, or garrote via vanish on Maloriak). I have not specifically tested it, but it is my observation that lower CP ruptures are best for these sort of applications, since the VW proc chance is a static 30% and rupture duration is 8s + 4s for each CP beyond the first (which makes duration per CP highest at 1 CP).

Lower CP gives you less chance of recouperating your energy off of relentless strikes, you also end up paying more energy for that rupture as the cost of the finisher itself is only divided by one CP.

While those are true statements, it's not really relentless strikes and energy per finisher that you really care about. It's energy returned per energy spent. "Free" CPs via your garrote opener and ruthlessness generate a fair bit of "free" energy via VW. But dumping 110 energy plus the cost of rupture minus the cost of relentless strikes sure seems like it would be less energy gained relative to energy lost.

Napkin math just to sanity check my statement:

1cp rupture (from garrote opener) costs 25 energy, refunds 20%*25 = 5 energy via RS and refunds 4*10*60% = 24 energy via VW for a total of 4 "free" energy.

5cp rupture costs 110 energy (which is an automatic 5 CP after the "free" one from garrote) for 2 muts and 25 energy for the rupture, refunds 100%*25 = 25 energy via RS and refunds 10*10*60% = 60 energy via VW for a total of 50 energy lost.


Feel free to correct anything I missed, but this fully supports my observations in practice.