Leatherworking's value is pretty dependent on how many other LWers are going to be in your raid, with the new Tinnitus drum effect.

Well Blizz has stated that they'd like to allow professions to make best-in-slot items, a la the Sunwell patterns, so many of us will probably be keeping it. With this in consideration, it still looks like Enchanting/Leatherworking would benefit our DPS the most.

Ah, indeed. I hadn't seen that change; for any of you in the same boat, Tinnitus is basically the equivalent of Potion Sickness for Drums - once you've been drummed, you can't benefit from another one for 2 minutes.

What this means in practice is that you can't benefit from more than one drummer per group, which, I imagine, basically means that it will no longer be the case that half the raid is LW and the other half is thinking about leveling it. It does, however, mean that the value of having LW in practice is probably somewhat less than estimated in my previous post, as you won't always be drumming yourself (assuming that LW will still be a likely profession for rogues). That said: it's still one of the highest personal bonuses due to the leg enchant, and it does provide some raid utility to be an eligible drummer. So LW is still (currently) the best profession for a Rogue, but it's now at least conceivable that something else will unseat it at some point.

I beleive I've seen that Blacksmithing will allow people to put an extra socket on their weapons. So 2 more sockets, plus however good the BOP weapons are, which is still ???.

Well, gems, from what we've seen, are 40 AP or 20 of the 2-point stats, so 2 extra sockets would be 80 points, putting it up with LW and enchanting in value. Since LW and BS are likely to have additional best-in-slot (or otherwise good/useful) items, it seems entirely possible that BS may compete with LW as one of the top professions. We'll have to wait and see what the itemization looks like to be sure, though.

I am pretty sure a Blacksmith can add sockets much like an Enchanter can enchant other people's weapons. It's intended to be a cash draw for the trade skill which really had none to begin with.

I believe Inscription gets an extra slot for a glyph (not sure on the strength), which is probably going to be more difficult to measure than what you've done for the other professions.

Well, if there's one thing the EJ rogue community is good at, it's taking character choices and breaking them down into a single comparitive statistic. So I'm not too concerned about that (even if the stat has to be changed from 'Attack Power Equivalent points' to something else, I'm sure it'll be done).

Blizzard will most likely be doing the same to this set bonus as they did on shamans' tier 2 3/8 one (5% increase to chain heal), and turn it into a flat amount. In this case we would probably see something around 80 haste rating instead of a 5% bonus.

You need 45.91 crit rating at 80 to get 1% crit chance.

You need 29 agility at 60 and 40 agility at 70 to get 1% crit, I am guessing 45 agility at 80.


So, assuming my agility guess is correct at 80:

TBC Elixir:
35 Attack Power and 1.21% Crit

Wrath Elixir:
45 Attack Power and 1% Crit

I don't know Rogue EP values, but using 70 Ret Pally values the Wrath Elixir is better.

WoW Forums -> Agility to Crit Data Collection

It's not likely to take only 45 agility to gain 1% crit at level 80, since it already takes more than that much at level 74.

I was wondering about the leg enchants. In the past I was a JCer and before dropping it for LW I just made 6 of each BOPgem and banked them. Would you be able to do the same with LWing? As in make 5-6 of teh EpicLW only leg enchants and then just bank them and get another profession?

Or are they unusable if your not a LWer muchlike engineering works?

EDIT:
About the combat ratings
+/- 750 hit for the hitcap? Damn I thought 363 was an extreme high number
+/- 215 expertise for 6,5% dodge ignore

Guess T6 isnt that good at 80 then...

I wouldn't get happy about that, the whole design of that talent is very faulty.

First off it is VERY mana intensive, second it has 50 charges, which in a raid environment are going to drop in like 10sec MAX, probably less. Which would in return require a reapply of the debuff for very low real gain, besides the HUGE dps lost from the sucker mage who is trying to make it work.

Thus, this talent will probably change.

Huge dps lost?

50 * 150 = 7 500
Instant Cast

Last time I checked a 5000dps instant (pre-haste, debuffs on target) is pretty good. Now if you want to argue its mana intensive thats fine, it is only 7.5dpm (zero debuffs on target). I can see it being useful in the last 30s of an encounter to quickly burn the boss down if you have the mana for it. It could do with a tweak though charge/mana wise.

However, it IS the mages damage. Albeit, not on the damage meters. If your poison proc's it or another person's spell you are just decreasing the 'cooldown' on the spell, not providing any additional worth damage-wise.

You need LW (450?) to 'use' the enchant to apply it to the legs.

However, I have a different dilemma for a PvE Mutilate WoTLK build...

I have found the stub for the proper build, however there are 7 points which hang in the air

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft --> 44/20/0

My initial thought is go combat, up to Weapon expertise 2/2 with 4/5 in dagger spec.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft -->44/27/0

However, I am not sure how will my dps change with the new change to Improved poisons reflect instant poison on OH dps. 5% is a quite nice boon for 1 talent point, not worth it when put up against expertise BUT should I change the spec direction to HfB the combined boosts might outweigh the combat points. ( Not likely, but I RLY want to see how well HfB will work, the talent is very attractive to me )

Hmm, you are most correct.

This would be weird though. It could very well justify having 1 such mage in a raid who's sole focus is pure mana regen and intellect. He doesn't need ANY spell damage, only mana to keep spamming that little spell, and when/if oom, spam frostbolts to gain more mana then you are spending and eventually start all over again.

Back to the rogue stuff though, If we have one mage doing that, our poison damage would take a lot of the charges, especially if mutilate does as good as it seems it will do in raids, Instant on MH and OH with DP proccing from both would mean loads of poison damage.

Again I'd like to point out that Improved poisons is looking VERY attractive for Mutilate builds with these changes, and 150 extra damage on a poison will be sweet, should mages decide it worthy to use...

We simply don't know how Focus Magic works. With some snippets we have currently, it is suggested that it works like +150 spell power for attacks against that target. Some mage also reported that the 50 charges got used in under 20 seconds by a party with a rogue/ret/deathknight, not sure how much magic damage it added for them if any at all.

Someone in beta should ninja a mage and see if it increases poison damage at all and how fast you chew through charges.
Keep in mind that most of the mage changes this push simply not functional.


On the DPS loss claim - we simply don't know how the spell works, or how it's supposed to work.
It does have a similar issue to Hemorrhage - it might get outscaled by gear at some point.

Don't forget Mongoose and Executioner are *raid* enchants. With a level cap of 77, I doubt you'd find a great many of them. We haven't seen any end-game content yet. Who knows, we may well see the 80s version of Moroes drop a Mongeese enchant that adds +150 agility on proc.

Well, since most recipes and other stuff was found by datamining the beta-client, I thought the real high-end-enchants would already have been discovered. So it seems we will have to wait.

From the druid forums, though relevant. Sheared to highlight the important part.

Source: WoW Forums -> Cat form end-game scaling...

It goes on to discuss why druid melee DPS "lagged behind" in Burning Crusade, and what adjustments are being made to address that. Class envy and Feral druid raid benefits aside, my major concern is the [even smaller] pigeon hole we're apparently being pushed towards, insofar as gear is concerned. I realize that it's somewhat irrational to pass judgment now, given that we haven't seen any real L80 heroic/badge/entry-level raid items, but we're already forced down a pretty rigid path.

Vulajin, I was looking at your data collection thread to determine crit conversion from Agility. Rather than collect every piece of available data (Level, agility, crit rating, weapon spec, etc.) can't you just mouse over your agility in the character sheet and have it tell you how much Crit % you're gaining from agility? Is that not working in the beta for some reason or are you just trying to get more accurate numbers since the character sheet only rounds to 2 decimal places?

So it's looking like the amount of agility needed to get 1% crit is going to be doubled (give or take), yet the new Agility Elixir is only giving us 10 more Agility (not to mention losing 20 crit). Doesn't seem very balanced. I know it's only the beta, but alchemy is looking severly marginalized in the expansion. It might be time to re-roll skinning/LW. Especially when you consider all the sweet bonuses it provides to a rogue. Oh well, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed.

Ding ding ding.

Also, as per http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...gs_level_80_a/, we're pretty confident the agility to crit conversion at 80 is actually 83.33….