The thing is PPM mechanics are a bit confusing and not transparent to the player. I think they have been trying to get away from the PPM concept and I don't see them wanting to introduce them to core abilities/talents. They could make Focused Attacks off-hand only, but I suspect that would make it too similar to Combat Potency.

They could change Focused Attacks to be the opposite of Combat Potency and proc only off of main hand crits, but increase the energy per crit. The talent can be changed to give 2/4/6 energy per mainhand crit. So while combat will look for slow mh/fast oh, assassination will look for the exact opposite of fast mh/slow oh. The dependency on 2 fast weapons drops in half, making a large part of the itemization problem disappear since the slow daggers are actually useful.

Another advantage to a mechanic like this would be that instead of needing 2 sets of daggers, 1 for PvE and 1 for PvP, the weapons could just be swapped from 1 hand to the other. 1.4 MH 1.8 OH for pve, 1.8 MH 1.4 OH for pvp.

Focused Attacks could be 'fixed' to be more inline with current itemization options if it were adjusted to 'your critical strike from offensive abilities have a 100% chance to regenerate x/y/z energy.' The exact values could easily be adjusted so that the expected energy return in a mutilate build is the same and it would be a fairly undesireable talent for any other CP generator because mutuilate is counted as two attacks and has a talent which increases critical hit chance in the same tree.

Don't you want two slow daggers for pvp, for heavier hitting mutilates?

I would assume low energy cost on shiv for cheep application of piosons is a larger advantage in PvP then harder hitting mutilates.

There's a new build out - the talents just got posted on mmo-champion. The only difference I see is that Focused Attacks is now listed as a 33/66/100% chance to add 1/2/3 energy, which makes... precisely no difference whatsoever. However, it's worth noting the change, since it really only makes sense if they're thinking of making it a 33/66/100% chance to add 1 energy. This would bring FA back down to about where it was before the recent buff - just slightly better, but in the same ballpark. So lets think about the implications of this for a moment.

Well, first off, it makes FA significantly less powerful. But as it was clearly overpowered before, that's not too surprising. But what does it do to the weapon speed debate?

Well, based on my preliminary estimates: it looks to me like a fast MH is still better, but not by quite such a ridiculous extent. It appears, for instance, that Webbed Death (156 DPS, 1.4) and Sinister Revenge (171 DPS, 1.8) now do very similar damage. Hence, for weapons of equal DPS, the faster will usually be better; but higher DPS weapons will usually be better than lower DPS weapons, barring extremes of weapon speed.

It would definitely be a step in the right direction, but I'd still like to see either more fast daggers or some additional benefit of a slower weapon. It seems to me that in order to do so, they need to make Mutilate a larger portion of our damage so that the damage it does - and hence, weapon speed - matters more. I suppose, alternately, they could make Mutilate non-normalized which would solve the problem pretty neatly, but I don't really see that happening.

Edit: Said Combo Point, meant energy.

Also in the new build, it appears that Find Weakness is 2/4/6% rather than 3/6/9% as it was previously.

Hmm, I'm looking at those talents on mmo-champion and I still see it as 1/2/3 energy.

I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but regarding focused attacks it's very possible that it's just bugged.

-Your Melee Critical Strikes have 33/66/100% chance to give you 1/2/3 energy.

So basically the 2nd and 3rd point are just way way way better than previous points. I have never seen a talent before where both components scale at same time, which means the talent is 3 times as powerful than it should have been.

I think you may be onto something with that. You're right, I can't think of a single talent that scales that way either.

Killing Spree has also changed; it now has an additional caveat: "Cannot hit invisible or stealthed targets".

Is the talent tree correct though? The patch notes themselves on MMO only says:

"Focused Attacks changed to : Your melee critical strikes have a 33/66% chance to give you 1 energy"

Build 8982

Talents
Assassination

* Focused Attacks changed to : Your melee critical strikes have a 33/66% chance to give you 1 energy. (Old - 100%/100% , wasn't implemented)
* Find Weakness damage increased reduced to 2/4/6%. (Old - 3/6/9%)


Combat

* Killing Spree cannot hit invisible or stealthed targets anymore.


Subtlety
Opportunity now works all the time. (Old - Only increased the damage of attacks from behind)

Ah, yea, I didn't think of that. I just made my assumption since the mutilator pvp weapons are slow.

I think that the patch note is just worded poorly. I think this just took away the flat 100% that you got for 1 or 2 points invested? I could be wrong but that's how I interpreted it.

Also of note in the latest build:

Fur Lining now adds 114 Attack Power instead of 120.

I thought the notes just didn't make sense, thanks for clearing that up.

That happened last patch.

Yeah, I never remember seeing talent scaling involve two parts. The fact that one part changed (and started scaling) means the fact that the other didn't change (and is still scaling) is likely a bug or more likely a typo in the tooltip.

Tailoring just got a decent melee buff:

Swordguard Embroidery changed to "Embroiders a magical pattern into your cloak, causing your damaging melee attacks to sometimes increase your attack power by 300 for 15 sec. You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound. Requires 400 Tailoring to use." (Old - Ignore 1000 of your target's armor)

Note: the following analysis assumes that Focused Attacks winds up as a 100% chance for 1 energy rather than a 100% chance for 3 energy, which seems like the likely conclusion based on today's beta patch. If that's not the case, points 1 and 3 remain valid, but point 2 - and the exact numbers - go out the window. But as point 3 is the major surprising part (at least to me), I'm not going to worry about that too much.

So, as it turns out, the question of weapon speed for Mutilate builds is... much messier than we thought. The whole characterization appears to be more or less as follows:

• At weapons of equal damage, faster is better
• Higher DPS weapons are usually better, even if they're a bit slower
• If you have one slow weapon and one fast weapon, the slow weapon should go in your offhand

If you're anything like me, the first two of those seem at least plausible if not exactly obvious, and the third one seems utterly insane. But having thought about it for a while, I'm pretty sure it's right. Allow me to explain why.

Let us initially posit that we are using two weapons of equal DPS of equal speeds. We make the same number of white attacks with each hand, and the same number of Mutilate attacks with each hand; however, we additionally launch a finishing move every 10 seconds or so, which hits with only the MH. Thus, we have a few more MH attacks than OH attacks, so we put IP MH and DP OH to get a few extra IP procs (as DP is far less sensitive damagewise to increasing the number of procs).

So, that's simple enough. Now, what happens if we have two weapons of unequal speed but equal damage? Well, regardless of which way we assign them, we have the same number of FA procs, and the same amount of white damage. So the only differences are going to be Mutilate damage and Poison damage. At this point infusing some actual numbers into the equation might be useful. So lets posit that one dagger is 1.4 speed, and the other is 1.8 speed, and both are 150 DPS. This means that the average damage of the first is 210, and of the second is 270. Since all Mutilate modifiers apply to each hand equally, the primary difference damagewise is going to be which of those values is subject to the OH penalty - that is, whether the base damage is going be 1*210 + .75*280, or 1*280+.75*210. When you multiply this out, it works out to about 18 base damage. If we then apply Opportunity, Find Weakness, the poison damage bonus, HFB, Crit Rate, Armor Mitigation, and everything else, this 18 damage difference gets inflated to up around 70. So each Mutilate will hit for about an extra 70 damage if you put the slow dagger MH; you get about 1 Mutilate every 6 seconds, so that works out to be about 11 DPS.

On the other hand, whichever hand has the fast dagger is going to be the one hitting more (for a speed difference this large, anyway; I'm not going to omit this for clarity, but details are available upon request). Thus, we put IP on the fast weapon, and DP on the slow weapon, and regardless of which hands those happen to be, we'll get the same number of IP and DP procs from white attacks and Mutilates. But if we have the fast dagger MH, we will *additionally* get the IP poison procs. So how much damage do we actually gain from IP poison procs?

Well, we launch a finisher about once every 10 seconds; each finisher has a 30% chance to proc IP, doing about 1500 damage. So the difference in IP damage is about 1500 * .3 / 10 = 45 DPS, while the damage gain on Deadly Poison from that extra attack is more like 5 DPS. So by putting a fast weapon in the MH, we gain a free 40 DPS in poison procs, give up 11 DPS in Mutilate damage, and thus come out 30 DPS ahead relative to putting the slow weapon MH.

So, that's weapons of equal speed - what happens when the weapons aren't the same speed? Short answer: it takes a pretty big weapon damage difference to make up that 30 DPS gap. For instance, using Webbed Death (156/1.4) and Sinister Revenge (171/1.8), I still show a 15 DPS advantage to having the faster weapon in the MH, even given the 15 base DPS difference. Hence, you'd probably need a weapon that was ~30 DPS ahead in addition to being slower before it made sense to MH it.

So, after a few posts, it looks like the answer really is that poisons are the problem with fast vs. slow weapon choices. IP scales so well right now with weapons speed that it's really controlling what we're going to be looking for. That is... most unfortunate.