I've been wondering if it is better to save Prep-Vanish-Ambush for a Bloodlust, to maintain the 70%-Armor-debuff longer or to use it after the first shadow dance, so you can have it a second time later in the fight.
That is assuming the fight lasts a good bit longer than 5 minutes, otherwise it's certainly much better to save it for Bloodlust.

Having Al'Akir Heroic in mind, it's most certainly better to save Prep for the Bloodlust, as your raid will have Feedback debuffs up.

As a rule of thumb, it is always better to have a cooldown up more often than it is to have it up during Heroluststeria Warp. That said, one of the skills that distinguishes good players from great ones is the ability to analyze expected fight length, plan ahead, and know when they are able to delay a CD without losing a use, and when they need to use it immediately, in order to maximize both their uptime, and their simultaneous buff uptime on the variety of buffs availiable to them. i.e. this should not be a binary question for most uses of Bloodlust.

This above math looks correct, and on page 1 of this compendium, Unheeded Warning is accordingly given 1792 Ep. So I was surprised today when I checked Shadowcraft's Ep value for it and saw 1462 (putting it behind many other trinkets). Removing the contribution from the static agility component, it seems to give the proc an Ep value of 297. Now, the Ep value of your mainhand and offhand dps is a function of your gear, but not strong enough to get you from 297 Ep to 624 Ep. Is Shadowcraft vastly undervaluing the proc's value or am I missing something?

I only made some testing on dummy (so no HaT procs except from my crits) and what i can say is that i feel that using 1-2cp SnD (glyphed) helps in keeping up recup and refreshing rupture, can someone confirm this?

I have a question in regards to the "Survival" spec for Valiona and Theralion. With no points in Serrated Blades or Sanguinary Veins, should we still be rupturing? I am new to the spec and should be attempting Twin Dragons tomorrow for the first time.

As I recall, and as currently noted in Caffeine's Shadowcraft-test (which I assume is using the same items/calcs etc as Antiarc's), Unheeded Warning still has not been updated since its buff in 4.0.6, and as such is undervalued.

If during a fight I have 5 CP and a low duration on both rupture and SnD, would it be better to refresh rupture first and then refresh SnD as soon as it falls off? While SnD does more damage than rupture in general, it seems as though the damage of an eviscerate, rupture ticks while you would otherwise be saving up CP, and potentially keeping up MoS on rupture would make up for the lesser amount of CP spent on SnD.

Also, the finisher priority chart doesn't specify any number of CP for recuperate, similar to SnD. Is it a dps increase to refresh recuperate at a certain minimum CP, or is it best to wait for five? I understand that SnD is optimally used whenever it fades due to the glyph, which doesn't apply for recuperate.

Me again - Now I doubt this is something really looked at but i'd like to bring it up anyway. Racials.
Now Orcs and Trolls are clearly two of the best options for a rogue, with humans and dwarves being the only considerable options for alliance side.
However with subtelty in particular, would nightelves not be the top by quite a considerable ammount?
I don't know the numbers and all that jaz for how much of a dps increase the orc/troll racial CDs would be, ignorring the other various mild benefits the classes have, but shadowmeld would effectively be an extra ambush every 2 minutes, translating to a 10% damage buff on a 2 min CD.
Any feedback would be pretty awsome, trying to work out which race would give the best dps increase, and I do appologise if this has been spoken about already but I have looked and didn't find anything on it.

So far as I know, Shadowmeld doesn't allow restealthing in raid content, and thus doesn't grant an ambush. The primary benefit of NE is the slightly higher base agility, which is pretty minor in comparison to most of the other racials.

Actually, the *primary* benefit of NE is flippy jump, but the benefits of that are somewhat hard to quantify.

It doesn't allow restealthing but you can use any ability that requires stealth straight from shadowmeld.

No you can't.

While in Shadowmeld you are not considered in stealth at all.

Hey, thanks for the great compendium. I brought my alt rogue to our 10 man Heroic Valiona and Theralion tonight since we don't have a rogue in the group and I had heard how easy it was. I had no clue how to gear, spec, or anything and grabbed it all real quick from this guide a couple of hours beforehand and figured out the tricks for the fight. The guide was really helpful in figuring things out quickly.

I just wanted to make a slight comment though. In my build for it I picked up Deadly Momentum over Coup De Grace (as others have mentioned too). Deadly Momentum does trigger if you get the killing blow on the Twilight Sentries (And in 10 man I was the only person in there, and I never left one time during the whole 7:30 fight) so with it I never had to refresh my SND or Recup once the entire time I was inside. It really trivialized things. I don't know if this will be as effective in 25 man since you may not always get the killing blow, but I would highly highly recommend it if you plan on doing the 10 man heroic version because it just makes the buff management nonexistent and lets you focus on just spamming eviscerate finishers.

Because of your guide though we ended up getting them down on the 12th attempt and the shadow realm was completely trivialized .

Well, to be fair there is the extra nature resistance and the extra 2% miss chance. If one were to start caring about defensive stats as a rogue then those are somewhat decent.

Will be using sub spec for the first time next week, and this sounds very interesting.

Anyone out there with experience in 25m using deadly momentum?

Clarification: I apologize, I thought I had quoted. I'm referring to the post discussing heroic VT and using deadly momentum.

I can attest that Deadly Momentum works great on 25m. We had two rogues in the Twilight Realm, but we went our separate ways in order to take full advantage of Deadly Momentum. Unless you need to drop your target due to breaths or something, you can quite easily kill them by yourself in time to continuously refresh the buffs with it (given that you have the SnD glyph).

Thats what I figured would be the way to handle it in 25. I was quite surprised at how little damage you take in there too. If I didn't screw up and hit a bomb I rarely dropped under 80% health. Another very useful thing was being able to use the dragons themselves to maintain feint and get some extra DPS time when I was waiting for a new add to spawn.

If only they could make Subtlety a little more viable for PvE all around, I actually really enjoyed the playstyle when I was doing a more normal rotation on the dragons before entering the portal. Honor Among Thieves creates some really interesting potential, they just need to ramp up the damage on some of the moves. I really liked how I could be running towards a new target and it'd have quite a few combo points on it before I even got there so I could just dump a backstab and eviscerate into it and watch it pretty much fall over.

But yeah for anyone interested in the general V&T experience, you get to around 25 stacks or so before the 70 second cloak cooldown is up and I would also highly recommend using the resist elixir with your choice of matching battle elixir if you really want to turn the damage down to nothing. It is also less of an issue in 25 man but in 10 man I found myself constantly eating shadowbolts from the Sentries, so they can target you in the shadow realm too. Just gotta watch out if you're playing the low health game cause of a bomb or something, they can finish you off rather quickly if you get unlucky. The most difficult things were bombs right on top of sentries and actually seeing where you were going when Valiona was doing her breath cone...

It just so happens I have both a night elf feral druid and a night elf rogue. Shadowmeld on the feral triggers the bar swap to stealth, and allows abilities from stealth (such as unstampeded Ravage). Shadowmeld on the rogue does not trigger any effects of stealth such as the bar swap, and I am unable to use stealth-required abilities such as Garrote, even if stealth is off cooldown, when I am in Shadowmeld. Should it be this way? Your guess is as good as mine--but that's definitely how it works right now. I verified by casting straight out of my spellbook that it's different for the two classes, so there's no macro or bar mod magic involved.

I also have a NE druid and rogue and can confirm that kitty works but rogue doesn't

An interesting observation, when I try to use a rogue skill that requires stealth it says requires "Stealth". On kitty it says requires "stealth mode". So shadowmeld = stealth mode but not stealth I suppose. They should make this work, be very nice NE racial lol. Also, do the kittys know about this?

Cheat Death; My guild has been working on Heroic V-T. It would be very useful to be able to know when Cheat Death has come up off cool down, is there a way with power auras to put a timer on an aura to let you know its up, or any other addon/strategy?

Most likely if you have used cheat death, you may need to go back up top to get healed by your healers. Also, in my guild's HVNT kill we found it necessary to have a single healer to put up HoTs on the rogues down below everytime the tank hit 5 stacks.

I have set up an event for when Cheat Death procs, which is a clear sign for me to hurry to the next exit. Pop a health stone if needed, as the chance to die in the following seconds after the proc has faded is rather high.

Though such a situationthat should only happen if you're really really unlucky with shadowbolt hits or eat a bomb. When all is going according to plan, you should be able to stay down without needing external heal, although a HoT certainly helps. But you should be able to keep yourself alive with Recuperate, Feint and Cloak (which I do at about 20 stacks and as soon as it is ready again).

I actually find it a lot safer to reset your stacks WHEN cheat death procs. It's usually around 30-40 stacks (40+ is pretty much standard as long as you don't get unlucky with RNG), and then just healthstone up and go for another ~30/40, and if you did right, you're able to cloak again at that point, if it gets tight and rift blasts rape you, just exit and re-enter once you've cleared your stacks outside.