Still kills you.

At the risk of sounding like I'm after hand-holding, can people who have bothered testing heroic modes on the PTR give some feedback regarding the viability of the different specs for each encounter? As it stands it appears combat is better single target and better cleave, so seems overall superior in Dragonsoul - depressing news for me as I cannot stand the current combat mechanics. Is assassination viable on any/all of the fights (by viable I mean is there any benefit whatsoever playing assassination over combat)? If not, just how much worse is it overall, and on specific encounters? A detailed list would be hugely appreciated by more than just me I'm sure.

Every encounter has a spec that it really favors, sadly for you that spec is rarely assassination.

Morchok - Sub so you can feint/cloak/feint every blood phase

Zon'ozz - Combat for cleaving tentacles

Yor'sahj - Combat for cleaving and having sprint up for every ooze phase. Assassination can be good here if you're having troubles with the black ooze adds, but blade flurry does a good amount of damage to them as well.

Hagara - Combat for cleaving ice tombs. Similar to Yor'sahj, if your group is having trouble killing them in a timely manner assassination can be helpful.

Ultraxion - Due to assassination and subtlety having to use backstab for optimal damage, combat is miles ahead on this fight. That is unless they make him able to be backstabbed again before 4.3 goes live.

Blackhorn - Combat for cleaving the vrykul adds in phase one.

Spine - Combat for cleaving bloods.

Madness - Combat for cleaving bloods, meteors, parasites, and elementium terrors.

To sum things up, there are a few fights where assassination has a perk over the other two specs, but even in those two cases combat has a good perk of its own, and barring those two situations it's combat/subtlety all the way.

Yeah that's what I was afraid of.. Thanks regardless, although I can only see combat becoming even less fun to play with more haste and 1.8 speed MG procs, and I don't think my finger will last another entire tier of spamming SS.

As shown here Morchok heroic's blood phase is very easily survivable. The blood damage on 25 heroic is the same as 10 heroic.

If you're having trouble staying alive compared to everyone else as a rogue with all the raid damage reduction we have, 20% additional healing really isn't going to save your skin any more than playing better will. Obviously in 10 mans this could play a bigger part, as with the other niche advantages of mut, but who cares about 10 mans.

And mut doesn't really switch faster or better than other specs, or at least not as much as people think. If you're smart with redirect use BG really isn't a problem (not to mention there isn't a whole lot of hard target swapping anyway). And sub can have great burst on new targets, provided you're ignoring rupture on things you shouldn't be rupturing. And of course deadly poison isn't near as big a deal for combat or sub as it is for mut.

Tested most of the bosses on heroic and I tend to agree with this post. I would say that Yor'sahj favors assassination over combat because of FoK spamming when black and yellow occur. The majority of the bosses favor combat from my experience. They just made BF so powerful that its hard to not find ways to use it. As far as Morchok, I think it is just going to depend on the strat and your healers. Personally, I am going to run like a little girl and hide until I know they can handle it :-P

Yeah that's unfortunately true, but it's really not fun to play an irritating cycle and rely on a single overpowered but generally boring cleave ability - I was rather surprised they did nothing in this patch to fix assassination, by at least giving it competitive single target, but possibly by implementing some kind of cleave. It seems like poor design that one spec can cleave but can't aoe, one spec can aoe but can't cleave, and one spec can't do either, when specs like fury, fire, shadow, etc can do both. Fingers crossed they fix this stuff in MoP I guess.

Emphasizing that Assassination's single-target DPS is competitive rather than equal to Combat is a bit misleading. If you're talking about which specs are simming above the others, they're all about equal (i.e. Simulationcraft Results ). If you look at sites that take the median DPS for a top number (usually 100) of WoL parses and decide that it accurately represents the relative strength of the specs, nothing can be further from the truth. The current number of Combat rogues vastly outweighs the number of Assassination rogues (Blade Flurry often gives completely useless number-padding which attracts the masses), so the median number for the top 100 of Combat is sure to be much larger than that of Assassination. In simulation, at least you can rely on all things being equal. I think people that write off assassination so easily are being extremely short-sighted.

I have no intention of turning this into a bitch-thread about combat vs assassination, but I will simply state that in my gear (close to BIS) combat sims just over 1000dps higher, and frankly playing a spec that costs 1000dps AND can't cleave simply won't cut it to me, especially when there's just so many cleave-friendly fights in DS. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE assassination, and would hugely prefer playing it, but that sort of discrepancy is too big to ignore. If they gave assassination a cleave or made its single target superior enough to combat to make it attractive on non-cleave fights it might be considered, but as it is now there's pretty much no reason to play assassination over combat (with the exception of the single aoe phase of the single aoe fight in DS). This is of course without even looking at WOL/epeenbot/etc parses, because as was said their data is skewed by people's preferences/fight gimmicks.

Ultraxion, looking for confirmation from someone that feint does in fact work for hour. Tried it and never lived through it.

Spine of Deathwing:
You can shadowstep the Tendons under the plates, but doing so teleports you to the rear of his back.

Madness of Deathwing:
Shadowstep does work on the Alexstraza's platform but definitely kills you on Ysera's platform so I would lean on the side of caution when using it on this fight.