Poison hits/misses are affected by spell hit so rogues have three levels of hit capping and thus there are 3 EP values. Hit is incredibly valuable until you cap yellow attacks (at 241 with 3/3 precision). It is less valuable, but still important (especially to assassination rogues) until you reach the spell hit cap (1127 with 3/3 precision) as poison makes up a lot of the damage. It is significantly less useful after that as the only thing it affects is white damage and even then not by much.

Yes, that's exactly what it means for assassination (for combat it's more valuable and thus should be capped. It's not that being expertise capped is bad in itself (you'd rather be capped than not all things equal), just that putting those points into spell hit, mastery, or haste will have a larger positive effect on your damage.

The major potential issue with not capping expertise is a potential loss in cycle stability (due to missed envenoms or other specials), but the current best guess is that it's not a big enough issue to require expertise capping.

I've never seen anything suggested a minimum crit required for a rogue. I believe hunters (and several other classes) have abilities that are triggered by crits, thus making a certain number of crits important to keeping those abilities active. Rogues don't really have those type of abilities. All we have is Seal Fate which is based off mutilate crits and not sufficient to worry about in this sense. The benefit of crit is simply small over the long term.

Well, we gain energy, not focus, but as for the meat of the question it's theoretically possible given the close EP values and the synergy you've noted that in some gear sets haste would be better than mastery. EP values are estimates as the actual benefit of any stat depends on its relationship with other stats. It's for this reason that minute min-maxing can only be done with spreadsheets or other calculation/simulation tools.

So yes, it could happen. But check a spreadsheet/simulator (as available) for your particular gear for a more useful answer.

Regarding Expertise: To cap or not to cap

Having read post stating that the theoretical EP value og Expertise is rather low for Assassination Rogues, and seeing several people ask the question "Do I cap expertise?" over and over, I thought I'd provide some input, having raided most of the new encounters.

A lot of the current bosses, focus much more on movement, positioning, avoiding "fire" and killing adds of some sort, than we're used to from WotLK. All of that needs to happen quickly and without much hassle, for your guild to be successful on these encounters.

Even on fights with only the occasional movement as melee (Magmaw, ODS, Valiona/Theralion), being low on expertise (4/4) I quickly started to value the overall benefit of it. I found myself getting into rotation trouble a lot more than what felt "okay" on the movement heavy fights (CoW, Atremedes). Tank & Spank fights are non-existant (maybe Halfus) in current Cataclysm content, so me having 4/4 expertise, lowered my chances to perform optimally on most fights by quite a bit.

Now, I'm not suggesting anyone to go out and cap it to a perfect 26/26, that is indeed sub-optimal. However, with reforging being available now, it's easy to find a good sweet-spot for your expertise. What I feel to be important, is having your expertise be at a number you feel comfortable with. A number where you don't feel troubled by dodges and parries more often than not. There's isn't any perfect number, but keeping it at 15/15 or above, is what I'm aiming after. Some players would want more, some would want less. That comes down to individual playstyle and the current encounter.

Regarding Cloak of Shadows, I've noticed at least two oddities so far:
1) It doesn't remove Petrifying Gaze from the basilisks in Deephholme, despite being classified as a curse.
2) Also it didn't prevent me dying from Twilight Meteorite in the Valiona & Theralion encounter (was 2 seconds into cloak when the meteorite hit - unfortunately I have no logs of this).

Not done the fight this week, but last week I was able to run out of the raid with Twilight Meteor and avoid the damage with cloak:
There's also an instance of being immune to it:

Is there any chance that we could get the (approximate) EP or, failing that, relative values of talents at a tier 11 level? I ask this in particular in regards to being Combat specced and having the liberty to choose between maxing out Coup de Grace, Ruthlessness or Quickening.
Mainly Quickening is a talent that I find hard to judge as the extra 7% movement speed and 10 agility (by getting +35 agility to boots instead of Assassin's Step) is worth at least some DPS on fights with movement (on top of the non-trivial 20% healing received which can't be calculated).
Also, what is the value of 3% critical damage? With the meta gem requirement the way it is till a patch is released, I am wondering at what point it is still worth to have a critical damage gem over a 54 crit/mastery(/thundering?) meta.

I realize this may not be the best place to pose this question, but I can't think of a better one! And it's bugging me.
Is Cataclysm dropping the rule that item stats budget is ilvl* quality? I am finding a lot of item examples where rare item of the same ilvl as an uncommon item have both identical (or almost identical) stats. What is the point of item quality then?

I believe ilvl is all that matters now, and rarity specifies only the rarity.

In terms of talent values: the thing to keep in mind is that while run speed is worth quite a bit relative to a boot enchant (hence why it makes sense to use Assassin's Step or (back in the day) Cat's Swiftness, it's not worth very much relative to a typical talent point - there's a significant difference of scale involved. So generally I don't recommend taking Quickening except as Assassination. Which is among the reasons I'm specced Assassination.

In terms of specific talent values, rough value dump from ShadowCraft for offspec Combat talents (values are not EP but DPS):

The value of the crit damage metagem bonus varies quite a bit with gear level; at BIS its usually up around 250-300, but it tends to be somewhat lower at lower gear levels. Unfortunately I don't currently have good numbers on how much lower.

Sorry to resurrect this old question from page 2, but the answer given wasn't quite accurate. I use Pawn with Aldriana's values to make my gearing choices easier while leveling and I was alerted to this phenomenon by Pawn's reforge adviser.

Converting the lowest value stat is not always the best option. For example assuming combat's numbers, if I have 100 Mastery and 200 Crit on an item, I could convert 40 Mastery which would be my lowest stat, into Haste, or I could convert 80 Crit to Haste, which is not my lowest stat, but due to the volume, would result in a greater gain overall. I'd suggest checking your math when you think it matters or using Pawn to do it automatically when reforging.

Q: Are there EP values for MH and OH DPS?

In regards to reforging, the answer on Page 2 was "Take the least valuable stat on an item" not "Converting the lowest value stat". In your example, Crit is less valuable than Mastery, so you would reforge Crit regardless of the values attributed to the particular stats.

I am sure that at some point if the disparity between the values was great enough, then it would be an option. But there is no gear in game that I am aware of that has stats with such a great disparity between the values that makes reforging a more valuable stat into a more optimal solution.

Slower weapons with equal dps will have a higher damage range (to make up for the lack of speed), which means bigger hits when you use abilities, like sinister strike (since you're talking about combat rogue weapon speeds).

As an extreme example, look at http://www.wowhead.com/item=65081 and http://www.wowhead.com/item=68600.

Even though they have the same dps, Organic's damage range is 751 - 1128, and Uhn's is 511 - 950, giving them average damages of 939.5 and 730.5, respectively. This means 209 damage more per ability, plus applicable multipliers.

Quite right that what was said doesn't cover every scenario. Reforging is too complex for there to be a quick blurb that tells you how to do it that will never be inaccurate. It boils down to the same thing as every other decision we make: how do I attain the highest possible EP/dps. In the example you gave, it's obviously right to reforge 200 crit (.95 EP) before 100 mastery (.9). I would place that in the category of the stats being equally bad and therefore you reforge whichever is numerically higher. But it is certainly possible that you could have, say, 60 crit and 210 haste on an item and - as assassination - you would therefore want to reforge the haste into spell hit. That situation is in the end both extreme and, frankly, pretty intuitive.

You probably didn't want another answer from me, but there you go. Aldriana's been replying to every 3rd post in this thread so I'll try to make it unnecessary once again.

With the usual caveats about these numbers being based on a specific set of gear which probably isn't what you're using, such that these answers will be approximately right but not exact:

Assassination
Combat
2.7 MHs for Combat tend to be slightly better than 2.6 OHs. Your Sinister Strikes (and RvS, and Killing Spree) will hit harder, and you'll get a few extra MH poison procs; but you'll also lose a few Main Gauche procs. As a rule of thumb, the difference between a 2.7 weapon and a 2.6 weapon is probably about 65 EP, meaning that a slower weapon will usually be better at equal ilvl, but a higher ilvl weapon will usually be better independent of speed.

RE: Expertise and current content.

Without going into encounter specifics there are several situations (Maloriak, Conclave adds, Chimaeron and Argaloth from personal experience) where you are directly attacking mobs from the front due to Saber Lash 'split the damage' mechanics or just plain short term aggro. There are also a few instances of having to move from fire into a position which can present parries (most encounters), as well as random secondary target abilities which can turn the boss to you for a couple of attacks.

Is there any way of pinning down the inflation of expertise value due to these mechanics? It's fine to look at things in a Patchwerk bubble, but if that's not really how things ever play out, it's a little useless. More than once I've had to refresh SnD due to a parry or two on envenom when the raid clusters up in front of a boss. Not to mention in these circumstances you're looking at an extra what, 14% avoidance on all attacks when these mechanics are present?

In terms of a quick and dirty estimate: Expertise roughly doubles in value when attacking from the front, as its reducing both Dodge and Parry instead of just Dodge. So if you had to attack from the front all fight every fight, the value would go up to ~2.2 instead of 1.1. However, you don't. Most fights where you attack from the front you only do so for a portion of the fight, and its not all fights that you have to do it on. So if you, for instance, spend 10% of your time attacking from the front, a decent estimate of the EP value might be 2.2 * .1 + 1.1 * .9 = 1.21 - i.e., on a par with haste. In practice, though, i suspect most of us don't even spend that much time in raids attacking from the front, so unless you're having serious cycle stability issues when it happens I don't think its a large enough factor to make expertise worth reforging for.

I have seen "envenom clipping" or other abilities mentioned like that and was wondering what exactly that meant. I assumed it had something to do with letting your energy pool, but I'm not real sure as to why we are supposed to do that either.
I searched and could not find the answer. A brief explanation of both would be much appreciated.

I'm seeing something weird with SnD's duration while leveling, and I'm guessing it has to do with the glyph. Due to the dearth of useful prime glyphs for a low level (he's 66) assassination rogue, I'm using the SnD glyph (with mutilate as the other) to help keep the buff rolling when I have to grind mobs. With glyph, a 5cp SnD runs for 27 seconds and refreshes to 27 seconds when a mob dies thanks to deadly momentum (as expected). What is strange is that CttC, with the glyph, only refreshes SnD to 24 seconds--meaning the glyph is only adding 3sec and not 6. Is this a known bug? Am I retarded and missing something here?

Well, the old glyph used to only add 3 seconds to the SND timer, so you can probably assume it's a bug where they simply forgot to update the glyph with all effects. Just report it as a bug.

Has anyone done arenas as both Sub and assassination ?

I currently use assassination, but feel a little limited in terms of mobility. Teams like to kite me, its a given. This is why I want to look into the sub spec for arenas. They have more mobility in terms of not getting kited and CC's, but it seems the downside of this is their damage. Especially when playing against mail/plate.

Any thoughts / advice on this ?

Envenom clipping refers to using Envenom while you still have the Envenom buff up on your target. The correct way to do it, as of Wrath (not sure it's changed) is to pool energy while the buff is up, hence not doing anything, and re-Envenom when there is 0.5 seconds of the buff left. This is a DPS increase as you will have the extra energy for your next Mutilate, etc. after Envenoming again and re-applying a full Envenom buff. Alot of your damage comes from having that buff up, so clipping it is a bad idea in terms of DPS.
The reasoning behind using Envenom at 0.5 seconds of the buff left is strictly server lag as far as I know.

Hello, I have a macro question but i think it still somehow relates to PvE/Raiding as Zereo said above.
I have a macro for mutilate/backstabing bind to a key. What it does it switches ActionBar1 (default action bar) with another action bar (ActionBar6 in my case) which is the exact copy of ActionBar1 except it has Backstab in place of Mutilate. That way if boss hits 35% mark i just press one key enter Backstab mode.
It's simple '/swapactionbar 6 1'
The question I'd like to get an answer to is, can you make such a macro to show the tooltip of any given ActionButton?
I tried #show ActionButton 2 (thats the name of the button in WoW UI) but it didnt work.
Is it maybe possible to add a condition to '#show' command making it showing one tooltip when i'm on action bar 1 and another one when i'm on action bar 6?
I'd really like my macro to have a dynamic icon showing Mutialte and Backstab respectively.