Fists, swords, and fist/sword are all with about 5% of each other, just go off personal preference.

Although if you are curious i remember reading somewhere that Fist/sword was on the upper end of that 5% due to the sword spec procs procing main hand atks (assuming you have a fist in the main hand) that have a 5% increased crit chance, as well as SS having 5% more crit.

Regardless they are all very close so just go with a spec that matches your weapons and preferences.

Apart from Arena gear, fists and swords with identical stats simply don't exist.
However, given identical stats, the fist-MH / sword-OH is very marginally better than dual sword. But, this difference is marginal enough that few, if any, people would notice in practice. So for dropped weaponry, the solution is to simply check the latest spreadsheet to see if a given drop is an upgrade, and to see whether the upgrade is big enough for you to spend DKP on.

The MH/OH poison issue is very similar: the difference is marginal enough for people to notice. Untill a certain amount of AP, Wound Poison deals slightly more damage than Instant. On top of that, Deadly Poison seems to have moved from the Offhand to the Mainhand for certain builds, while during fights where a rogue has a hard time staying on target or on trash/adds fights, dual wound or dual instant will perfform better than having Deadly Poison on either hand.

All of these things are things you'll want to keep in mind if min/maxing damage is that important, but at the same time, you'll hardly notice them in practice. If for some reason your noticably lower on DPS than the other rogues in your raid (say, 5-10%), these are not the first things to look for.

so i guess that, for human rogues, there is no difference or fist/sword is not as good as dual sword?

I tried Fist MH (2.6 speed)/Sword OH (1.6 speed) for a few hours of grinding on my 68 rogue today, and while sword spec proced as often as one would assume, the damage seemed to be based on the offhand. Sword spec procs accounted for 0.5% of my total damage (for Sword MH (2.6 speed)/Dagger OH (1.3 speed) Sword Spec procs was 4% of total damage).
Has anyone else seen similar results?

Everything you said was correct except for this part. With 0 points in improved poisons (i.e, a combat build), Wound Poison is always more DPS than instant poison. Once you start putting points into improved poisons (say, a mutilate build, for instance), then a crossover point exists where they are equal. Above that amount of attack power, IP is better; below it, wound poison is better. The other advantage of Wound Poison is that, if you run dual WP (say, for leveling), then the WP procs actually enable Savage Combat, giving you a 2% damage increase, whereas dual IP would not.

I'm not too sure about that because I've noticed the following behavior:

The Savage Combat Debuff seems to apply about half a second after the poison proc.
If a poison other than Deadly gets refreshed the SC debuff disappears only to reappear about half a secound later.
As long as Deadly Poison is active the SC debuff never disappears.

Now, I'm not too familiar with the internal workings of Wow. The SC debuff only apearing whith a delay doesn't seem to be singuar issue. The Winters Chill debuff works exactly the same.

If this is simply an interface issue and Savage Combat actually applies as soon as the poison procs, than this doesn't matter at all. However, if what i'm seeing actually is how the game works, than running dual wound would lead to a really low SC uptime. It might even be advantageous to run wound MH instand OH if you can't use deadly.

Here's the actual break points, you'll notice that 0/5 imp poisons isn't listed for the exact reason that Octaviann had posted earlier.

Are these values for lvl 70 or 80?

Those were level 70 values.

I've compiled a list for level 80 ([Wound Poison VII] and [Instant Poison IX]) below.

Rank of Improved Poisons	Attack power
1	19250
2	7875
3	4084
4	2188
5	1050

This is entirely dependent on the specific itemization availiable to you. Sword Specialization (the racial) has been nerfed down to 3 Expertise, so while nice, it isn't good enough to demand a specific spec and item priority without regard for other options anymore. (Hell, it was never quite good enough to completely overcome that, but it's worse now than before is the point)

Recount does not accurately track the damage or impact of procs from Sword Specialization.

I have a question regarding how to go about calculating the difference in energy gains from a 1.5 speed dagger versus a 1.8 speed dagger. I am attempting to determine how many more mutilates per a period of time I would gain from the faster of the two and compare that with how much mutilate damage I would lose. A guildmate of mine is skeptical about my choice of fast weapons and wishes to see the math behind my spreadsheet findings and subsequent weapon choices.

So far I have just compared how many more crits I would get per minute with each different weapon speed assuming 30% crit and the standard 51 5 5 build with no haste/WF/slice(1.5=40 attacks per min*.3 vs 1.8=33.3_ attacks per minute *.3) but I was unsure if mutilate procs FA and how to account for that.

I am ignoring the difference in poison damage for now as I think I can work that out(roughly) on my own.

I have searched through this thread a good bit but I am still a little stuck on a few points about how to do this. Any help pointing me in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Hi, I have been trying to find a definitive answer regarding Master Poisoner. Does it stack with seal of the crusader? If not why would blizzard implement a talent like this when ret pallies can easily keep it up or possibly a holy paladin. Thanks.

You mean Heart of the Crusader? They don't stack. Totem of Wrath also brings the same benefit, although it is applied in a slightly different manner. The point of giving buffs like this to multiple classes was that you don't need the paladin giving the buff, but you can manage with different classes when your paladin is ill/visiting his grandmother/likes to spend his talent points other way/your guild doesn't have paladin at all/something else.

I do agree that rogue seems the least tempting option to provide this buff.

To prevent raid stacking. Now that a number of classes can bring the same buffs/debuffs, raid leaders can now be more flexible with what class composition they bring to raids. Before, you NEEDED certain classes for min/maxing, now its a lot more flexible.

This is correct. Almost all buff and debuffs in the game are available across multiple classes without stacking, meaning you don't need everyone in the raid to spec differently to do the best you can.
In most cases, the talents that provide these non-stacking buffs or debuffs also add an additional benefit to make them worth taking even if you expect that the buff is already being provided by someone else. Either that or the tree has enough "filler" points available to warrant taking the buff over anything else that is available.

Mutilate rogues seem to be an exception, as the reduced poison duration is of practically no use and mutilate rogues don't have ANY points to spare for filler, especially that deep in the tree.

I don't recommend taking the talent at all unless your sure that nobody else in the guild provides the same debuff.

Alright, so I've been reading this thread daily since it's inception, i'm aware of the theory that fast/fast is better than fast/slow or slow/fast for mutilate, but i've ran into somewhat of an issue here regarding testing on training dummies.

I get a higher dps with Fang of Kalecgos MH/Shard of Azzinoth OH than I do with Shard/Fang or Fang/Badge Dagger. Rotation is fine, HFB and SnD are not falling off, no buffs other than my own poisons and procs. I've tested it quite a few times over the last few days and consistently come out with this result.

So.. am I doing something terribly wrong that I am completely overlooking, or is the 3 dps difference(plus those worthless ember pets) and 20 AP more important than .4 speed/20 hit rating?

They want people to pick the professions they like instead of the professions they have to have to be competitive. If you don't want to be a leatherworker, your raid spot doesn't depend on it. It's good for the game. I wouldn't say it's taking away from the uniqueness of professions so much as balancing them so that players have more choices.

Since you've read this thread daily, you probably have seen this message quite a bit. Check the spreadsheet. Another consistent message is that even with test dummies, it's hard to get concrete evidence about optimal gear choices out of anecdotes. Dummies are better for practicing your rotation more than an accurate gauge of gear choices.

Edit: Wrongly assumed you meant the 1.8 speed badge dagger.

Aye, I edited the sheet to let me put Fang of Kalec in MH and I guess you are right about the training dummies. Getting different answers from the sheet and the dummies, but I will trust the sheet I guess.

You never specified which level dummies you were testing on but one thing to keep in mind with test dummies is, certain stats may not make any dps increase versus them. For instance if you're testing your dps on level 70 test dummies then Hit Rating won't be giving you any benefit which could be what's making the difference in your dps on them and is conflicting with what the spreadsheet is telling you. The spreadsheet is geared more for optimum gearing against boss level mobs and keeping raid situations in mind.

While there are boss dummies available, I believe they are all level 83. Once we're all level 80, the boss dummies will be useful for checking stats that only really matter for boss fights (although that still won't reconcile the raid buff vs. solo differences).

...If your over the level 70 hit cap, which I believe is 300 with precision (which most mutilate builds don't have at 70). So I don't believe that's his particular problem in this circumstance.