1. This comes down a lot to the need of extra dps while bloodlust is active and total fight length. If AR/KS is rdy when BL is popped and you delay it for 40 seconds, you're most of the time guaranteed to lose a full AR/KS over the course of the fight, so you should use it while BL is active, but not delay it to wait for BL. BL doesn't have a huge impact on KS in terms of energy capping, but for AR you will most likely perma-cap, but with the introduction of SB, using AR while BL is up, isn't too bad any longer. It might be beneficial to use AR without SB if a bloodlust will be active soon and line SB with bloodlust + potion. We probably need further discussion regarding this topic.

2. No.

3. It's a 360° with your character as the center, spreading the damage into all directions if there is a target to hit within range. So as you said, you can also hit targets behind you with BF.

4.1 For the gloves and trinkets you wan't to use them as often as possible throughout the encounter, so you need to compare the cooldown with the respective enrage timers. If your raid will wipe at e.g. 8:30 because of an enrage, your last use of such items should be at (8:30 - buff_duration), so 8:20 for the gloves and so on. If you got spare seconds according to those values and can delay it for the use with AR/KS you should go for it. Macroing the gloves might be a good idea, if its your only or strongest on-use effect, since most of them trigger their duration as cooldown for other on-uses so you want to use the strongest to line them with your dps cooldowns.

4.2 This significantly depends on the amount of haste your gear has. For your personal values you could run simC and check the interval of uses for AR and KS respectively. The T14H entry on the simC page shows that AR/SB occur every 87.75s and KS every 60.96s with 100% uptime on a patchwerk-encounter.

5. If you can manage to do so without losing dps, you should do it. You can even switch at any time for some whitehits to proc the poison and retarget your RvS target again before using SS or finishers. Try to keep track of your raids debuffs though(weakened armor, +4% phys. dmg taken, etc). If only one target has them, you want to stick with that one.

I just want to note a minor correction in the single target rotation.

Clipping the last tick of a higher insight rupture IS a dps loss. It does not work the way it's described in the guide. What it does is if you apply rupture with say 1.5sec remaining on the current one, the new one is 25.5 sec and the last tick of the previous rupture takes on the per-tick new rupture value--there is no stacking/rolling. Basically what you get is 11 ticks at old value and 13 ticks at new value. It does NOT add the remaining deep insight damage to the new lower-insight rupture.

Here is a picture demonstrating:



Note that there are 11 ticks at 3194 damage (a deep insight rupture--you can see the deep insight aura fade after the 5th tick). At 06:51:14 is the first tick of a new, no-insight rupture (you can tell because 3194 / 1.3 = 2456.9). Note that there are 11 ticks at 3194 damage and 13 ticks at 2457.

If it used the "rolling" method of ignite, the new rupture would have added about 266 (3194 / 12) damage to each tick of the new rupture. (3194 / 1.3) + 266 = 2723. The damage of the new rupture is almost exactly 23% (1 - 1/1.3) less than the deep insight rupture, on a per tick basis.

For that picture I used unenchanted weapons and unequipped my trinkets. There were no procs that increase my attack power. Revealing strike was not used. My attack power was 33,341.

At The Art of Combat (Version 1) i wrote the following:

What i said in the guide is that the additional damage of the higher insight tick will only be added to the first tick of your freshly applied rupture, not that it's damage will be evenly spread among all ticks. But your log indeed doesn't show that either, so it probably got fixed since i last tested it. I will try it again and post my combat log excerpt.

Edit: Tested it once more and i indeed couldn't get any extra damage to my first tick of the new lower insight rupture. Need to do the calculations now if it's still worthwile to clip the tick or not.

In order for adding the two rupture tick damages to work without creating damage out of thin air, the first rupture would have to have a tick removed for a total of 23 ticks--otherwise clipping a tick of every rupture would become a dps gain and I do not believe that's what blizzard would intend.

As to whether or not it's worth clipping a higher insight rupture, I would guess no. It may still be better damage-per-energy than eviscerate, but it may be better to just pool the up-to-2 seconds (rupture ticks 2 seconds, clipping at 2<x<4 will lose a tick) and apply after it falls off, or add to anticipation charges (if talented) until then. Uptime for combat is not as important as it is for the other two specs. In late-gear scaling (not necessarily T14) it may even turn out that you don't want to clip the last tick of a higher-insight rupture at all, due to the fact that eviscerate has a higher AP coefficient than rupture.

In either case, due to those mechanics it is unequivocally a damage gain to clip the last tick of a lower insight rupture with a higher insight one. I did extensive testing on rupture clipping mechanics in beta, as seen in this post. The behavior is the same in the converse scenario where you clip a lower insight rupture with a higher one. I've found that no-insight to early shallow insight ruptures fall off during deep insight. Whether or not it's worth delaying the rupture if it falls off in moderate insight, I don't know.

Use

#showtooltip ambush
/cast [@focus] tricks of the trade
/cast ambush

when vanishing will boost your raid dps, if you dont glyph tricks and got shadow focus talent.

Not much but everything counts.

I would not recommend using a macro like that, as TotT is on the GCD and thus you'd spend more time in stealth and no auto attacking than you should.

TotT got its GCD removed quite a while ago, just fyi.

I have just upgraded Windswept Pages Shado-Pan's agility/haste trinket Hawkmaster Talon as according to the Shadowcraft it was the largest dps gain for my current gear for VP-sold gear.

Just wondering about this though - the tooltip says:

+1079 Agility
Use: Increases your haste by 3,595 for 15 sec. (1 Min Cooldown)

For combat spec, haste is most important after hit/expertise cap, and much more important than mastery/crit. However, seeing that trinket is USE and not PROC, I'm wondering what is the best time to use it? My initial thought is to macro it to be used with Adrenaline Rush and Shadowblades.

But does this make sense? Haste helps energy regeneration, i.e. speed of the attacks. Since Adrenaline Rush already boosts energy regeneration by 100%, would it not make more sense to use this trinket in between Adrenaline Rushes, when I'm actually waiting for energy to be regenerated to do a few SS's and other hits?

Of course, a good answer is "use whenever possible" as it has a relatively short CD, but just wondering would I benefit more, if I had the option, in trying to use it between Adrenaline Rushes rather than during them?

Cheers

As long as you don't end up capping on energy when you use it during AR, then there is no problem with doing so. Indeed, if you're using AR and Shadow Blades together, this will be optimal. Obviously you will be able to use it between ARs, as well. Most likely you will be able to use it with first AR, on CD, during second AR, etc.

1. Have anyone done any math considering saving CP's for a higher insight level through Anticipation vs. reaching a higher insight level faster with the help of the energy you regen from your finishers?
When I try to save up 9-10 CP's for a higher insight level, I feel like things are going so slow. At my current state of gear, I'm nowhere near capping energy without AR/SB. So I'm wondering if that extra energy that I might gain from a couple of "early" evis will be a dps gain?

2. I've caught myself a few times really pushing to get rupture up before a KS. It naturally seems like a dps gain to have all dots up before you go into a state you can't controll. But after reading here, it seems like I shouldn't use a damaging finisher at all. I should just save up as many CP's as possible. And if KS still got a few secs on CD, I should use Evis instead while waiting and a SS to dump energy beofre the KS.
Am I correct?

I thought it was established that Rupture ticks don't change, so if you apply it during DI it will keep ticking for that 30% increased damage.