Thanks for the explanation, I thought it was the other way around re: White/Yellow. You've cleared it up for me.

Master poisoner is situational depending on your raid comp though, you don't need it if your raid has a paladin with heart of the crusader - but otherwise those points would be in Turn the Tables anyways which has nearly 100% uptime in almost any raid encounter.

Just to add also a raid with an Elemental Shaman (totem of wrath).

Did totem of wrath have physical crit added to it? I thought it only affected spell crit, meaning you'd still need master poisoner for yourself and your fellow physical dps, barring a pally with heart of the crusader.

For those of you worrying about vanish interrupting white damage and messing up your rotations, lost damage to swing timers and what not, have you considered dropping a garrote opener in there to compensate or would the energy cost not be beneficial to do so?

I always pretty much used vanish as much as often as I could if not to wipe threat but to drop another garrote on the mob to burn extra energy when I had a full pool, granted this was during my ar cycles so the energy cost wasn't as big of a deal and I'm not sure how much it would affect the mutilate rotations, haven't been mutilate since before we finished kara.

With the new combat tree, I'm finding it neccesary to vanish/garrotte near the end of AR just to avoid energy capping. There's just no other way I can dump that much energy in the time allotted to me.

I can't comment if it's still true in the expansion, but when the numbers on this were run for TBC, the conclusion was that Garotte only beats another SS if the mob has no armor debuffs on it - that is, as an opener, it's fine, but once the fight has started and there are sunders up, there is no gain to doing a Garrote over another SS. If that's changed, of course, it would be an advantage to Vanish and thus Garrote; but I wouldn't assume it's true without running the numbers.

If Garrote is balanced on such a knife-edge as to vacillate between worthwhile and not by armor debuffs, I suspect that Blood Splatter would push it over the edge, even with the 10% Sinister Strike picked up in combat builds from Blade Twisting.

Err, this has already been stated a lot, but it is -not- the case that all mutilate rogues should have MP, as that debuff is much easier obtained by the other classes that possess it.

The spreadsheet seems to suggest that with a hunger for blood build ruthlessness is now a trash talent.

With this build Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft putting the last 3 points in ruthlessness is a 0.15% dps loss on a build with only 68 talent points spent. Putting those points in close quarters combat is a 1.64% dps increase on a build with only 68 talent points spent.

In fact in a build with master poisoner instead of turn the tables (no retri pala or ele shammy in the raid), putting the last 3 points in turn the tables is 0.16% less dps than putting them in close quarters combat.

Close quarters combat is a better spend than turn the tables and ruthlessness or am I working something out incorrectly?

I made some minor analysis on the specc you posted, and my thoughts about the 42/12/7 is the following;

- You have 2 points in Quick Recovery! Sure, the extra heal on you is good to put some stress of the healers, but at bigger raids you shouldent be taking that mutch damage anyway, right? And the 80% less energy on your Finishing moves.. If you are anywhere close to the Hit Cap then none of your specials (Finishing abilitys in this case) should be missing anyway right? So I think you are better of putting theese 2 points somewhere else, like Imp. Poisons?

- 2% more crit with daggers - Crit is allways nice, but I would rather put those 2 points in Imp. SnD instead due to being mutilate without Cut to the Chase. Having SnD up 50% longer gives you more time to do rupture/envenom or whatever cycle you are doing.

My 2 cents on this spec, hope I helped you abit my friend

Well my suggested build is mostly about dropping the new talents (CttC and HfB) at level 70 raiding for things like opportunity and Precision. Quick Recovery is just in there because I attempted to copy my current Mutilate raiding build directly and I always had QR in there. It's mostly useful as a survivability talent and not wasting energy on the odd dodged rupture. I always considered Improved Poisons a bit wasteful since it's pretty easy to keep a 5x Deadly Poison stack on a boss throughout a whole fight without it and we rarely raid with Instant Poison on the mainhand anyway.

Switching CQC for Imp SnD seemed like a reasonable choice, though with a 3+S/5R cycle I tend to cut SnD all the time with my current build and I figured I might get away with not getting the talent.

To restate, the build I suggested was mostly to see whether it's worth getting Opportunity and Precision by sacrificing Hunger for Blood and Cut to the Chase (reminding you I'm talking about 3.0.2 level 70 builds).

On this subject, I spent about an hour with each build on the dummies last night on the PTR and I can't say I saw much of a difference. I'm well aware that one trial isn't proof or even comes near to an adequate amount of testing, so I wouldn't mind some discussion on the subject if this build hasn't been considered before. The main difference was that with the "classical" build (no HfB and no CttC) the cycle was much tidier and cleaner making it easier to sustain.

With the new Windfury, we're going to be raiding with Instant Poison on mainhand so Precision goes slightly beyond the ever so useful 5% hit chance by adding some extra poison applications in the mix.

Maybe this is too much discussion for just a month or so of raiding (depending on when we get the patch) but I think it's good to know.

Considering the way they are trying to make different versions of several buffs/debuffs in order to make classes interchangeable you are probably right. I felt slightly embarrassed when I realised that the talent worked as a target debuff for the whole raid. I haven't been looking into too much discussions about the new talents and I got stuck with the initial idea that the effect is just a personal buff.
I guess talents like this come and go depending on what you have available in the guild at any current time. If you know that one of the alternative buffs are not available in your raids then it seems like a good choice. It was about time we gave something that affects the whole group/raid instead of just huge amounts of personal damage.
Sorry I missed the previous posts. It's kinda easy to get lost in 100+ pages.

It honestly just sounds like you still have much catching up to do since you seem to have missed things like where it was found that IP goes on whichever dagger is faster because of how poisons will be scaling with AP. I'm not trying to be dismissive but your quickest way to all your answers is to just read the last 15 or so pages of this thread as well as look at EVERY single talent as found on a site like MMO-Champion. Or just use Vulajin's BC 4.1 spreadsheet as it's designed to answer just this very question.

Hint: The answer is 51/5/5 : )

I decided to do some more research into DP downtime using a timeline approach to get relatively realistic values. If we take the classic 2s/5r cycle and change it so 2s/5e, we have one important fact around for a combat build, which is the need to refresh our SnD. This could happen via a Relentless Strike proc and one Sinister Strike, or 2 Sinister Strikes. As a fact of the matter, there is one thing that i totally left out in my previous calculations, which is the exact point in time where you hit Envenom. Between DP ticks, you basically have a 2.9 second window for Envenom before the next tick kicks in. Obviously, the sooner you envenom within this window the better. I built a timeline in .1 second intervals in Microsoft Excel and put in all actions that can be taken manually (including autoattacks, energy regeneration etc...). My starting point has both an MH and OH Attack, refreshing a 5 stack of DP at 5 CP. The mainhand has a 2.6 speed, the offhand 1.5. For sake of easy calculations, i set the Energy at that point to 100, basically ignoring all implications of lost energy.

You generally want to Envenom between a DP tick and the first auto-attack after said tick, so you get different timeframes obviously due to the different timers involved, the maximum being a 1.4 seconds window (ie. snyched DP tick, MH attack and OH attack). To refresh at least one stack of DP, you need approximately 2 attacks landing on your foe, the earliest this could have happened is 1.5 seconds after Envenom (1 OH attack, 1 Sinister Strike), which means you're at least losing half a tick of your previous 5-stack by moving the ticks by 1.5 seconds in the timeline.

After this first reapplication of DP, i added one stack for every 2 attacks. Doing this for one complete cycle (i.e. until next Ev/En) shows a difference of 7 DP ticks worth of damage in comparing Eviscerate vs. Envenom. Keep in mind that is under optimal conditions, my following cycle (Envenoming 0.1 sec after DP ticks) shows a difference of 16 DP ticks worth of damage, bringing the total to 23. The following cycle loses slightly less again, namely 12. This only gets worse the longer the fight takes because of the loss the tick continuity.

In these 3 complete cycles, we had:
.) 3 Ev/En
.) 3 SnD
.) 33 MH Attacks
.) 56 OH Attacks
.) 18 Sinister Strikes

For DP, we had
.) 140 Ticks for Ev cycle
.) 105 Ticks for En cycle

For IP, we get roughly one extra for every Envenom, i.e.
.) x for Ev Cycle
.) x+3 for En Cycle

A single tick of DP is roughly worth 0.17 of a single IP proc across most gear levels, which means our 35 lost ticks are worth about 6 IP procs. Because we're getting 3 extra procs when using Envenom, we're losing damage worth of about 3 IP procs.

This puts Eviscerate at a comfortable lead over Envenom in my tables at 5000 AP as long as mitigation is 50% or less.

Please keep in mind that i didn't take any talent into this calculations (RS, Ruthlessnes) which may or may not skew this analysis in either direction. But as those talents do nothing than compress cycle times, i kind of doubt they would change anything.

Sorry for being this persistant, but i really wanted to get closer to how this really works. It seems to me that losing the Deadly Poison stack has more of an impact than we would've thought.

*edit*
I had to edit my post because i ran under the false assumption of having DP on both weapons. I cut out the AP table and changed some numbers (red) as well as changed my conclusions.

As a note, I didn't consider the JC only gems, as it only covers a maximum of two sockets nor am I personally a JC on my rogue. The Crit gems were a blatant oversight on my part, though I'm finding that at least in my own situation that wicked pyrestones universally appear to be ahead, albeit slightly, of smooth lionseyes for my gear. I am showing that there is some sort of point of inflection where glinting pyrestones pull ahead of wicked pyrestones in a mutilate build, so for optimal dps in the sheet I find myself running the two gems nearly in equal proportion. As far as when I go and plug in a combat build (and in my case swap a trinket), I still find glinting ahead of wickeds, though by a very small margin (~0.2 dps).

Edit: In a combat build it would seem that things work in reverse... for mutilate I was finding a 3:2 Wicked:Glinting ratio was optimal, and for my combat scenario the ratio flipped to 2:3. I'm guessing the determining factor is a diminishing returns effect on hit rating, which the point of inflection for a Mutilate build is somewhat lower than for combat, though in both cases for me this appears to be hit rating in the 200-240 range. So I guess the answer to what orange/yellow gem do I use really does become an "ask your spreadsheet" question. I'll also reiterate that this is for level 70 builds, and that level 80 EP weighting does favor AP very slightly over Agi so I would not be surprised at all if crit-AP gems outperform hit-agi at level 80.

Boy, just finished ~30 minutes of Shiv testing on the ogres.

That build is officially no fun. After 10 minutes I had to switch fingers, for Adrenaline Rush I even had to hammer the key with both hands. Still capped to 100 energy during AR too often.
The suggestion to bind Shiv to your mouse wheel now seems very tempting. Wish I had done this before the test.

I was much better at keeping my energy below 100 while not using AR though, mainly due to Malan's excellent suggestion on how to move the player frame.


To conclude, I was not even better than using SS. Within 1618 seconds I was able to pull off 1893 DPS with Shiv, compared to the 1921 from SS. Now this may be due to me being simply overstrained with what the build requires, or not 100% optimal cycle usage (sometimes I was able to fill in a 4th finisher, aka Rupture->Evi->Rupture->SnD), but also sometimes doing so ended me up in dropping 1 second of SnD uptime or having to revert to a 4cp SnD to not let it drop. 5s5r5e was maintained easily however.

The build I was using was the standard SS build, and not 'specialized' to Shiv as it was mentioned here before. Surely played its role as well. Shiv was better than SS with the very same build in 8982 though.


Overall, and this is not only due to me thinking this kind of DPSing would be highly illogical, I also don't like it. It is very dull to play, you have to mash the keys like a monkey (switching from Shiv to Evi and back during AR! Horrible!), you mainly have to focus on your energy bar only.

And my hands still hurt.

You wait until 60 energy, refresh SnD and try to squeeze in as many SS as you can while Exploit Weakness is up. Rinse and repeat.

Well, if you have 8 seconds of SnD left and 75 energy I'd say SS. But I suspect that at 8 seconds left you probably don't have that much energy pooled. With AToL rotations, it is generally in your best interest to have energy pooled before firing off your finisher, and until they change energy regen in live you only get it in ticks of 20 every 2 seconds+ potency procs. You want to have pooled energy so ALL your CP builders get the benefit of the AToL proc so I'm guessing you want at least 40 energy in the bank when you refresh SnD. Add to that the fact that is has been shown that it is better to refresh SnD 1-2s early than to allow it to drop, I would say so long as you have more than 5s to refresh SnD, it becomes an option, as in theory you are trading in some rupture uptime (about 5s per cycle where the stars align) for 1 extra SS (which may or may not also get the benefit of the AToL proc depending on just how lucky you've been) and some efficiency on SnD from delaying the refresh to a point closer to it's expiration.

Odds are, you're probably needing to pool energy, so more often than not I suspect that squeezing in that one extra SS (which in my experience probably isn't getting the AToL proc at this point) will end up costing you in your next cycle when you do your last SS with no AToL proc. There's a lot at play here, but my own inclination is unless I have a lot of time and energy on my hands then I'll just pool up to 60+ energy and get my next cycle going.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - This just in: Rogues,war,druid.mage most

I don't think I was the only one that misunderstood.

I was reffering to the possibility of refreshing sap. It was stated a while ago that sap will affect not only hummanioids, but other mobs too and I doubt that it will be enough to make sap on par with other CCs in raids for example.

I think Eyesolated has some very good points. With a 51/3/7 build, I've been messing with a 4-5 Expose 4-5 Env/Evis type of rotation on the PTR, and the Eviscerate variant has so far proved to be better dps than straight envenom spam. Whatever damage I lose from using Evis instead of Envenom seems to be made up in the fact that I have expose up, and the lost IP procs seem to be made up and then some in DP ticks. Is it really 100% clearcut that Expose Armor is a personal dps loss?

What exactly do you mean by moving the player frame? I use xPerl and it allows me to move all the different frames any where I want. I stick the one with my portrait and energy bar right to the left of the middle of the screen. Unless you mean something different by frame.

Are you saying that these buffs don't stack? How would you know that they don't stack? I wondered if even multiple rogues with Master Poisoner (or Savage Combat) would stack.