I typically pop AR during the start of fights, regardless if we pop hero/lust or not. I typically pop it after KS, and after a few sinister strikes to lower my energy as much as possible. Popping it earlier helps bring it back up (and KS) due to Restless Blades. So, yes - I may be energy capping, but using that AR early on could result in more AR/KS's through out the whole fight. Its best to figure out how long it takes your guild to down an encounter and adjust from there.

It is very very likely that if you wait ~40 seconds before popping AR the first time, you will lose an entire use. While it is absolutely dependent on the fight length, you get such a significant amount of restless blades cooldown reduction from heroism that you're not just cutting off 40 seconds, you're cutting off all of the cooldown reduction during that period too.

In nearly all situations you'll want to pop it at the start. Bloodlust will increase the value of adrenaline rush's attack speed boost as well - which is certainly not enough compensation in itself but helps tip the scales even further in favor of popping it immediately.

Absolutely use killing spree during bloodlust. You can force a bottom-out before you pop it (or as close as you can get) so you have much more control over its use than you do AR.

Could this guide also include (or could someone explain to me) why more top-end Rogues are going with 3/3 coup de grace, 2/3 lethality. As I am facing constant energy caps and asked this question on the mmo Rogue forums. Leitka informed me as to why this is becoming a much better popular spec amongst combat Rogues - regardless if its simply just a 1 talent point difference.

The optimal rogue spec is 2/3 coup and 3/3 lethality, but the optimal combat playstyle prioritizes rupture over eviscerate. Due to many factors (lack of mangle debuff, primarily playing combat when there are blade flurry opportunities, simplicity of evis-only leads to higher raid-awareness) rogues very commonly run evis-only as it's a very minor dps loss. So for evis-only 3/3 coup and 2/3 lethality comes out ahead because you're performing more eviscerates per unit of time versus a rupture rotation, increasing the value of the talent.


I have my own question. Between t11 and t12 the EP of weapon dps changed. Naturally. What confuses me is that the EP of mh dps went down (perhaps to be expected) while the EP of offhand dps went up....pretty significantly. There are absolutely no mechanics that use offhand dps in their calculations but white dps, whereas there are many many things that are derived from mainhand damage. Why would the values have changed in that way - such that a point of attack power was worth less compared to offhand white dps than it used to be? I can't seem to put it together.

More rogues (at BiS gear atleast) than not play Combat without Rupture and spec 3/3 Coup De Grace 2/3 Lethality instead. In BiS gear using Rupture comes out to about a 0.5% DPS increase and that's assuming perfect play. Chances are likely that something will be mismanaged and that 0.5% DPS increase will vanish. In addition to this, there's many situations in FL where you prefer the direct damage of Eviscerate over Rupture. For example any time you use BF, burning Rag before Intermissions, etc.

Apologies if this has been mentioned before, but are there any estimates on how long you should wait with Killing Spree until it no longer pays off to get the full Bandit's Guile bonus? So often I'm in this dilemma of having KS off cd but being another 4-5 SS/RS away from the 30% bonus and I don't know whether I should screw the bonus in hopes of getting another KS down the line - or wait for it.

Please remove.

I think you overestimate the value of the sprint glyph. I currenly run feint/tricks/blade flurry fulltime due to the vast amount of feint opportunities in this tier, and +30% sprint speed is rarely any lifesaver, and if it is - chances are high it's only caused because you had too little control of the situation in the first place, so you should rather improve your positioning if it's such a urgent glyph for you.

The only time I end up swapping glyphs this tier is for Rag. If I'm a dreadflame soaker in ph4, I drop my Feint glyph for Sprint. I choose Feint over Tricks because ph3 is the only time DPS really matters, and there's no reason to Feint in ph3. I haven't found another fight where the Sprint glyph is even moderately useful.

Shadowcraft already gives you an estimate of the glyph's dps worth (about 390 dps in close to BiS). But to give you an illustration, here's a scenario where you would spend the saved energy only on SS. The glyph saves you 15 energy on each use, so over a 5 minute fight it comes to 150 energy. That's just under 4 sinister strikes, at 11725 damage each (taken from my recent logs, averaged over hits/crits/dodges/parries). So, you gain 45k-46k in SS damage over 5 minutes. YRMV

Recently I've been thinking about poisons and I believe that these days it's better to use Deadly Poison on thrown weapon instead of Wound Poison. I hope this wasn't discussed already, I was watching this thread quite closely and I don't recall any posts on this topic.

In Firelands, there is exactly one encounter where combat rogue AoE can actually be used - Molten Elementals on Ragnaros. And even in that case, our damage is pretty insignificant compared classes like Death Knights, Druids or Hunters. For the other encounters with multiple targets (Beth'tilac, Majordomo Staghelm, ...), I think it's much better to just nuke the main target and Blade Flurry the rest. As for Dragon Soul, so far I've seen only first 4 encounters (again, no combat rogue AoE there) but I am quite sure it'll be similar for other 4 as well.

So let's say that we are not using FoK for AoE damage at all, which means that the general reason why to use Wound Poison (best instant damage) is irrelevant. This can suggest using a hunter stat stick instead of a thrown weapon. Well, not sure about other rogues, but I am not a big fan of this way because I just feel disarmed without being able to cast FoK at all. Other option is to stick with thrown weapons, but use a poison for other reasons than AoE damage.

Currently I can think about three different scenarios where Deadly Poison on thrown weapon can be actually quite useful:

1. FoK during Killing Spree. I know it's not optimal, but delaying KS for more than just few seconds is probably even bigger dps loss (I base my assumption on this post). So it just happens that we are full on energy during Killing Spree and there is no reason to not use this energy to cast a single FoK. With Deadly Poison on our thrown weapon, this can refresh our DP stack on the target and provide an Instant Poison proc from mainhand (Can someone confirm this? I am not sure about "other weapon" wording in DP tooltip, but I can't test it till the evening). I did the math and it seems that Wound Poison actually does a little bit more damage (+16% in my gear) than Instant Poison applied via Deadly Poison stack. So this point is void.
2. Deadly Throw. This is very situational, but it happens. Sometimes you just have few extra combo points on a target in range and there is nothing else to use them for than SnD/Recuperation/Deadly Throw (either because redirect is on cooldown, or there is nothing to redirect on). I can imagine this happening for example on Yor'sahj the Unsleeping due to lots of running and target switches. A lucky Deadly Poison proc from Deadly Throw can either prolong DP stack duration on the target or even prevent it from falling off before we can get back to that target.
3. Throw. Similar to previous one, but less situational and more encounter-specific. In T11, there was Atramedes and his air phase. In Dragon Soul, we have Morchok and hiding behind stone rocks. As pointed out by others, with a little bit of luck it is possible to refresh DP stack few times so we don't have to start building a new one when the phase ends.

This is why I think that Deadly Poison should be used on thrown weapon, as it can sometimes more (preventing DP stack from falling off) or less (extra damage from the poison application itself) increase our single-target DPS. Sorry for being a bit descriptive. But I wanted to cover the whole background instead of just stating the conclusion. I'd like to know what others think about this and ask you to point out possible flaws that I've overlooked.

Edit: Considering that I was wrong in the first point, I think that the only real reason to use DP is on encounters, where a Throw or Deadly Throw can prevent from losing DP stack on the boss. This is very encounter-specific, situational and also dependent on used tactics so I'd say that a rogue should choose thrown weapon poison based on personal preference.