This has been covered to death in this thread and elsewhere. Here's the original announcement from a month ago where a blue poster explains the new buff/debuff stacking in wotlk.
World of Warcraft (English) Forums -> Changes to Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking

For an up to date list, there is an active thread here on EJ that covers them all:

Raid Buff Versatility Among Classes

To summarize:
The raid debuff portion of Master Poisoner does not stack with Heart of the Crusader or Totem of Wrath
The raid debuff portion of Savage Combat does not stack with Blood Frenzy

Vulajin, if you are planning on updating the FAQ at the top of the thread, could you possibly add this info? It seems to come up every few pages.

I use a macro for Vanish on bosses in raids:
/#showtooltip Vanish
/cast Vanish
/cast Garrote

Instant threat wipe and reopen of attack (can be replaced with Cheap Shot/Sap for arena/PvP and will often work even if you have dots ticking on you if you time it well). Works to vanish out of Teron Gorefiend's Shadow of Death, Archimonde's Air Burst, Kalecgos if you were too retarded to notice that you had both the crit buff and the threat increase buff, to drop threat for Bloodboil, or whenever something is looking at you that you wish wouldn't. Only time the instant reopen doesn't work from the macro is when the mob happens to quick turn around right then (like Najentus to throw spines at people, Archimonde to curse or air burst someone, etc...).

I bind it to the same key as /stop autoattack, /cast Vanish with a modifier key through the Bartender keybinds (which I use for trash when some clueless retard in our raid decides to wander too close to a new pack of unmarked mobs).

My expectation on Master Poisoner is that most rogues are not likely to need it. Many raids will have ret paladins. Our guild raids with one now and one of our hunters is going to raid on his ret paladin in the xpac (one for each 10-man group, 2 for the 25-man raids). However, most guilds probably will not raid with an elemental shaman unless you have a very dedicated one. Their DPS is abouabove that of a holy priest right now in WOTLK and is pretty much bottom of all the casters. It looks like our guild is dropping from 5 raiding shaman to 3 with one switching to play a moonkin and the other to another healing class.

This has been covered multiple times but yes, the need to use EA vs using a damaging finisher is a loss in personal dps in a raid setting. The mob will already have reduced armor that is equal to EA from another source (ex. warrior via sunder) that is able to do so at a reduced opportunity cost and EA will not stack with these other debuffs.

If you are by yourself then of course EA will be a dps increase as the mob is not yet exposed/sundered/acid from hunter pet. This will help all of your physical attacks thus making evisc relatively better than on a target without an armor reducing debuff. Also, it is a good idea to work EA into a rotation when you are the only one capable of applying the debuff as it will boost your dps as well as that of other physical dps.

But still, him using EA to "simulate" a raid situation and ending with Eviscerate as the "better" finisher is a valid testing approach to my theories which seem to work for him in a "real" situation. If he was in a raid situation where the armor debuff would be provided from another source than himself, he'd run Rupture/Envenom or Rupture/Eviscerate cycles, and by my calculations and his tests, Eviscerate should/could come out on top.

Thanks. You are 100% correct. My guild is going to be without a warrior in our 10 man group so I was trying to figure out what spec I should use as Mut to maximize my dps while being the EA monkey.

Contrary to Vulajins findings that 2-finisher cycles surpass the 3-finishers, I found the maximum dps cycle for 5/51/5 -> 7/51/13 in the sheet to be 2s/5r/5evis with evis/shiv/slice&dice glyphs. Though its only a quarter percent better than 5s/5env - may be better to maintain efficiently because of less problems with energy capping, but I gotta test the cycle on the crash test dummies next time on beta. May be worth for you guys to check it out.

At 70 you only get 2 glyphs and the shiv one is not available until WotLK herbs exist.

Hey all. I apologize if this has been covered already (I try my best to keep up with this thread, but sometimes it just goes by way too fast), but I had a question regarding Mutilate and dagger speeds. On the beta, I noticed that Vulajin had determined through his testing at one point that faster daggers, for both the main and the offhand were proving to be superior to slower daggers, due to poison procs and Focused Attacks. With the patch coming out soon, I am trying to make preparations to switch over to Assassination for raiding, and am trying to pick up the appropriate weapons to use. I just wanted to see if it was still the case that faster daggers are superior to slower for Mutilate, or if something in a recent build had changed that.

Well, I mean exactly that. Moving the original Blizzard player frame to the center of the screen.

The reason for this was that all energy meters so far I've tried do not update energy in real time, but still remain some sort of tick behaviour, i.e. only updating the energy each 1-2 seconds. Which is rather suboptimal of course.

Now if xPerl supports the streaming energy feature, glad to hear, that means that it's possible right now and other mods will adapt it soon. But if not, moving the original frame is still the only option to have a real time display of your energy.

I seriously doubt that Blizzard will let a shiv based spec be the best combat spec anyhows. SS will get more buffs.

I use xPerl on Beta, and it does indeed support the "streaming" energy display. The only time it "jumps" is due to procs like Combat Potency or Relentless Strikes.

And like you, I'm sure such functionality will be widespread in a month or two.

Why is mutilate listed twice on your damage breakdown? Is one of those MH and the other OH?

The only question we might want to look into now is.. For which class will it be most beneficial (or least costly for that matter) to spec into these talents?

What talents are we skipping to grab Master Poisoner, and what alternatives do Paladins and Shamans get? Of these three, the shammy Totem of Wrath seems most beneficial to the raid, Master Poisoner is still a good personal buff, while Heart of the Crusader doesn't do anything but give the 3% crit effect. So if I were a Paladin, I would prefer to see a rogue pick up this talent, and spend my points on something else myself. For this debuff, it looks like Shaman > Rogue > Paladin. But, that's depending on the alternatives available to the shaman.

Same thing for Savage Combat vs Blood Frenzy. Which class gains more from the talent, since they're both somewhat beneficial. Rogues from their 4% more AP, or Warriors from their 6% haste? And which one has the better alternatives? 1 point into Savage Combat is almost mandatory already if you wish to max DPS, just for lack of damage affecting alternatives. Warriors have the same with Blood Frenzy. So for which class is it more worthwhile to put that second point there, instead of spending it in another tree?

Well, that's not really the right way to look at it. Looking at which talent is best individually is fine, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

For Savage Combat and Blood Frenzy, the question is simple: who does more damage, a Savage Combat Rogue or a Blood Frenzy Warrior? Since both talents are worth taking for other than the raid buff, this basically comes down to: Combat Rogue or Arms Warrior? The Arms warrior in my guild is of the opinion that the Combat Rogue probably wins that, but I can't swear to that; the point is, regardless of which is true talent-by-talent, the answer is going to be whichever spec does more overall damage.

Similarly, the issues for Master Poisoner are more complex. How do paladin talents stack up? Do they have something better to do with those 3 talent points? Or is any pally going into that tree going to reasonably take those because the alternative is just filler? How much damage does a rogue lose by keeping the debuff up? If you're using Envenom, you're going to leave gaps in the debuff, meaning that your choices are either sub-100% uptime or use Eviscerate instead - which is better? And how much do you lose by so doing? How does the damage output of a Master Poisoner rogue compare to an Enh shaman or a Ret pally? These are the questions that need to be addressed before we can discern the best source of the buff.

Based somewhat on the discussion in the last few pages on this thread, I've been wondering if this build has any merit.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Yes, it's probably a minor drop in personal dps over something like 54/10/7, but I like it because it has a lot of interesting benefits.

Combined with the Rupture glyph, it maximizes the potential damage of the Rupture ability by picking up both Blood Splatter and Serrated Blades.
It gives you the benefits of Dirty Tricks, which could be relevant if Blizzard does follow through and make Sap a valid form of CC in raids. I suppose you'd want to combine this with the Sap glyph.
It gives you Elusiveness, which allows you to vanish every 2 minutes, and thus make extra use of Overkill, as well as making Cloak of Shadows more accessible. Heaven knows I use Cloak of Shadows a ton in raids.
It gives you the armor penetration bonus from Serrated Blades. I've looked in vain for any description of how this effect will be updated in wotlk given the change to how armor penetration works in general. Besides pumping up your Rupture damage, I remember reading somewhere, on EJ I believe, about how for a Mutilate build, the benefit of Precision is no greater than the benefit of Serrated Blades, so the loss of Precision is balanced.

The basic rotation would be something like this: Mutilate, Mutilate, Eviscerate, Mutilate, Mutilate, Rupture, Hunger. Hopefully with the energy from Relentless Strikes and Focused Attacks we can get all of that in under the 24 second duration of Slice and Dice (with the SnD glyph) without it dropping. If not, then 1 or both of the points in Elusiveness could be moved to Imp SnD.

setting aside the actual damage output of talented evis vs. talented envenom, you're giving up a _lot_ of poison damage by no vile and only one point in improved poisons. And while elusiveness is nice for utility, you're getting 3-4 abilities or 40 energy max out of a vanish, so you're adding 40 energy per six minutes which is pretty minimal increase in dps.

The best dps from modelling I've seen is 51/13/7--if your raid needs you to take Master Poisoner, you're moving those points out of TtT, not CQC, so I can't see a build with 54 points in assassination.

Either way, 4+r/4+e is quite maintainable without imp snd. I've found that with lucky crit strings, I've had to use two an extra envenom since rupture hadn't ticked out when I had 5cp.

Just to be clear, you would get Overkill every two minutes, not every 6 minutes.

I suppose the poison damage lost can easily be rectified by putting those Imp Evis points in Vile Poisons (and using Envenom instead of Evis), although it seems like the extra Rupture and Evis damage from Serrated Blades would be making up for any such loss anyway.

Edit:

The suggested build isn't the optimal dps build, but is maybe a better build for it's greater utility.

You didn't address 2 of my reasons for investing those subtlety points: more accessible Cloak of Shadows and a better Sap (good luck sapping level 82 elite trash without MoD or DT). And perhaps most important is the question of how is the armor penetration bonus from Serrated Blades going to be changed?

@Chalon: What other "serious blunders" did I make in Assassination other than not having points in Vile Poisons?

Edit 2: removed comment about TtT vs CQC

This would be true except that CQC applies crit to ALL attacks, while TtT applies its crit only to your mutilates. It may be more crit, but CQC is more valuable because FA wants you to crit as often as possible, which means autoattack crits are key.

Either way, Serrated Blades is worth 63 DPS per talent point and thus giving up on other DPS talents to get fillers just to get to serrated blades isnt worth it.

Vile Poisons = 63 dps (3/3)
Precison = 32 (5/5)
CQT = 41 (3/5)
Thats 472 dps missing versus 189 for picking up serrated blades. An extra Vanish or two isnt enough to state Overkill as a benefit for this (its like adding on 20-40 extra energy on a boss)


I agree on the use of CoS. Sometimes I cant spam it fast enough and it does have its use in this aspect, though a better sap? Im not in beta, though sapping targets in BT and TK has never been a problem.

You're kind of missing the point, which is that I went for Dirty Tricks and Elusiveness specifically. And then, it looked to me that with those points already spent Serrated Blades would be better than Precision.

And I know the whole sap thing is hokey. But the idea is based on some blue comments about the possibility of reapplying sap to trash mobs during a pull in which case maybe having the cheaper longer range version would have some value.

If the utility from Dirty Tricks and Elusiveness is determined to be of little to no value, then of course I wouldn't spend more than 7 pts in Subtlety.

Even if they allow Sap to be reapplied during combat (which most likely they won't), Dirty Deeds would only be very situationally useful in 25-man raids. Sap lasts 1 minute now. The vast majority of trash packs you can Sap your one target, and everything else will be dead or nearly dead by the time your Sap fades. The only other fights it would be useful then are fights like Faerlina, but the adds there are such a joke you're better off not even bothering with the CC.

Yeah, but correct me if I'm wrong here losing precision means you have to get more hit which more than likely means gemming for it, which therefore results in an even bigger DPS loss by not being able to gem for more agility. I could be totally wrong, just thought I would throw in my two cents on the matter while I was skimming through here.