I was looking at a similar build. But I removed 3 points from dagger spec and put them into Focused Attacks. Unfortunately i havent had the time to do the math on which would be a better place to spend the talent points. But based on Aldriana's earlier post in which Focused Attacks works out to be 21-24 dps per talent point, if we assume a straight 1% increase per talent point on dagger spec on a 2000 dps rogue, they would seem to be very close.

Actually, I tend to think that spending talent points to increases finisher damage is a bad idea regardless because finishers are such a small portion of our overall DPS. I wouldn't take any of the above talents, and am currently leaning towards something like:

War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

edit -- sedrikk beat me to the punch :P

For a raid muta build combine with the following data:
*Opportunity: In end game gear a mutilate rogue is going to be running roughly 650-700 DPS from mutilate alone which would place opportunity at 26-30 DPS per talent point.
*Dagger Spec: Without focused attacks 1% crit on both hands is roughly 18-20 DPS per talent point. With focused attacks this value will increase substaintially.

Results in the following build:
War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

The true cost of hunger for blood is that after 3/3 focused attacks 5/5 opportunity and 2/5 dagger spec are the best options. If those points are allocated in the best possible prereqs for hunger, 2/2 devious and 5/5 improved, there is a net loss even after taking hunger.

This does, of course, disscount the utility gains from hunger. In a fight sprinkled with debuffs of the bleed or magical variety the power of hunger could be increased substaintially. Perhaps a chromagus type fight that has debuffs hunger can remove.

Hunger utility build:
War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

I'm not 100% on the second point in devious being better than the 5th in improved after the other talents are factored in but i imagine the trade off will depend significantly on gear.

The really absurd point in all this is the first 5 points in subtelty are worth more than at least the last 5 in assassination for an assassination build (probably closer to the last 7 points). This could be fixed by moving opportunity, the mutilate damage bonus at least, into the assassination tree. It would make an impressive replacement for the currently lackluster cut to the chase.

Edit: I forgot about blade fury. On a single target fight it is likely a wash with dagger spec but on trash it is significantly better so blade fury is likely an improvement over dagger spec.

I'm not saying your posted talent section is necessarily a bad choice, but I do think you need to rethink your philosophy a bit. It's true that finishers are a relatively small portion of your damage - but it's also true that the talents than improve them tend to give a larger proportional benefit. In the end, one should select the talents that give the most damage - whichever talents those happen to be.

As a simple example: if Imp Evis increased damage by 500% instead of 15%, you'd take it, because it would make Evis clearly the best finisher and give a nontrivial damage benefit. Admittedly most of the time it isn't nearly that clear-cut, but the fundamental point remains valid: what matters is how much damage you do, not where it comes from.

The damage increase that eviscerate and blood splatter provides are rather small.
about 25 and 30 dps.

If you have to drop talents I'd say Imp Eviscerate/Blood Splatter/Cut to the Chase are among the first to go.

Now whether or not putting extra points in assassination to go down to blood splatter, or dropping points in opportunity to go further down combat is worth it, I am undecided.

Currently, yes. However, this is partly due to the very weak scaling of finishers in TBC when compared to the scaling of everything else. If WotLK changes this and puts finishers back up to a significant portion of our DPS again, then spending talent points on finishers will make at least as much sense as spending talent points on poisons. I have hope this will happen, given the doubling of Eviscerate base damage. (I'm still waiting to see where Rupture goes.)

Even as the finishers are right now, Blood Splatter is perhaps better than Imp. Poisons (kind of sad that we're even debating it when they're so far apart in the tree...). If Rupture scales like Eviscerate did, or even *something* like how Eviscerate did, Blood Splatter may be clearly better than...say...Imp Poisons, or Devious Poisons.

Perhaps, but I'm not looking to take either of those talents anyway :P In my build Blood Spatter is competing against Focused Attacks, Dagger Spec, Blade Flurry, and Opportunity, and at the moment it just doesn't seem to measure up. It's certainly possible that the level 80 versions of abilities will change this.

How would it scale with hit and expertise? You have to crit to get the energy from Focused Attacks and melee misses and dodges would not be converted into crits with hit or expertise because of the one role system.

Yes, this is a better way of stating it.

That said, looking at the situation, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they opt to boost the damage done by finishers. Admittedly we only have one data point (Eviscerate), but Eviscerate seems to have been significantly buffed. But in the larger picture, buffing them really makes sense.

Some months back I did a calculation in one of the threads that a swords rogue hits something like 93% of hit damage potential just by mashing SS and SnD. It is for this reason that there's a perception that playing a rogue is easy - it is *very* easy to get most of the damage potential out of your character. But if finishers made up a larger portion of our damage pool, things like which cycle you use and how good you are at managing it matters a lot more. Hence, the more damage finishers do, the more skill and knowledge matter in distinguishing the good rogues from the bad, which on the whole I'd say is probably a good thing.

So: they've buffed the damage of one finisher, and it makes sense for finisher damage to be buffed; therefore, it may not be a safe assumption that finishers are an irrelevant portion of our damage. I mean, they're not going to suddenly become *half* our damage, but I can see them getting to the point where a 10% boost to finisher damage eclipses a 4% boost to Mutilate damage.

This is true, however rogue special attacks are determined by a two-roll system. I believe Focused Attacks applies to specials as well, So mutilate would indeed have to endure a check to see if it misses, lands or avoided, then another check to see if it crits. That said, I do not agree that Focused Attacks will scale equally as well with expertise as crit, but it does indeed scale to some extent.

Edit: Point noted Aldriana.

Rogues have a two roll system, don't they? The first to see if the swing hits, the second to see if it crits.

Yeah, hit and expertise don't matter nearly as much since specials (and finishers if talented) don't cost much energy if they miss/dodge, and the scaling would be incredibly poor even if they did.

Only for yellow attacks, which have a much lower chance to "Miss" (no DW penalty), and even when they do (or get dodged), the above energy analysis shows that it isn't as big a deal.

You can downrank by using macros. /cast Eviscerate (Rank 9) should work. Add in a show-tooltip function and we should be able to tell if that massive difference was a result of AP-downranking-penalty or not.

Hi i'm new here so please forgive me if this is posted in the wrong place.
I have studied The ElitistJerks forums like a second bible with regards to hit caps, expertise, agi and attack power for rogues however, I am still unconvinced with my current gem utilization and dps output when participating in raids. If yee could spare a few moments and check out my character sheet i would be most grateful. Once again i apologize if i have posted in the wrong place. Thank you

The World of Warcraft Armory

Well, obviously you haven't read the first post of this thread...

Except that you can't. I presume you were just speculating here, but the method you described does not work with Eviscerate. If it doesn't show up in the spell book, you can't cast it.

Currently I am wondering about a problem which will occur in the period of time between patch 3.0 and the actual release of WotLK: using talent trees made for lvl 80 with just 61 points.

Will War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree actually outperform a standard 20/41 Cswords, even while lacking 3/5 DW spec?

I don't see why this is a problem, and while discussions of the talents are relevant and possibly useful, saying "Will this do _____" when these are almost certainly not what will actually be released, and game mechanics for 3.0 are still relatively unknown means that you're just asking for baseless speculation.

Could it? Yes. Maybe not. The only people who have any chance of answering that question (blizzard class developers) aren't going to answer that question here. :P

I think it's a little early to be speculating about leveling talent specs when the talents are still in alpha. I think the most productive thing we can do right now is pick through the talents and figure out what's good and what needs help, so we can then present a clear message to Blizzard about what we want to see fixed. Once the problems have been ironed out and the talents have solidified - like, in the late beta stages - then we can discuss what to do from 70 to 80.

The thing to recall is that these things aren't set in stone. At this point in the BC development process, Cloak of Shadows was the 41 point Subtlety talent. So we have lots of opportunity to provide feedback to Blizzard and get things changed... so long as we're smart, clear, and organized in so doing.

As long as we are in the business of doing this... Fan of Blades should be a baseline ability, not a talent. It would make up a serious lack in the AOE department for all rogue specs. There is certainly room for additional AOE goodies, such as Blade Flurry (already existing) and Murder Spree (proposed), but what we really need is something good for AOE that is baseline.

EDIT: Well, I read the info wrong. "Fan of Knives" (not blades) is in fact baseline already (at level 80), not a talent. (Subtlety was the spell/ability classification, not a talent tree for a location as I had originally thought.) Good. This new ability is something I haven't seen mentioned much yet, but is a welcome and much needed addition to the rogue repertoire.

From what I understand, Fan of Blades *is* a baseline ability.