For Kael, I actually set up macros to equip the dagger in my offhand when i hit shiv for mind controls, and to switch back to my offhand sword when I hit SS to resume DPS.

Sword spec and combat potency gains from using a faster sword offhand are enough to offset the dps loss from the legendary dagger. As long as the fury warriors keep their dagger equipped for the spell damage debuff, you're good to go.

Do you guys have any opinion on a possible 53/0/18 build? I wonder what the numbers would be when getting both Blood Splatter and Serrated Blades together with mangle and trauma. Although I think it would be much more viable with some tweaks to CttC to encourage a Rupture/Envenom cycle.

Hunters have better threat dumps than rogues, although last I heard they don't have a passive threat reduction like rogues do so need to pay someone more attention to it than we do. Meanwhile, while it's true that other classes have threat dumps, it's also true that ours is one of the better ones, and that we have a threat management ability outside of the dump. So while our threat management isn't necessarily a *lot* better than most classes, it's still among the strongest of all the classes. Also, the list of our primary competitors for raid slots - fury warrior, ret pally, enhancement shaman, feral druid (i.e., the other melee DPS classes) reads a lot like the list of classes without a threat dump. In the melee space, our aggro management really is a lot better. So I do think it's fair to say that threat-limited encounters work in the favor of rogues, on the whole.

I'm not going to say it's completely inviable, but it does seem weak. It appears that Rupture may no longer be the undisputed king of finishers, so stacking +rupture talents may not actually gain you much (actually, it never gained you that much in the first place given that Rupture is only about 5% of your DPS at the moment, but that's quite a separate issue). And in order to get those 18 points in subtlety, you're giving up a lot of powerful abilities in combat.

On the whole, it's going to have the same relation to 51/20 that 43/18 and 41/20 have at the moment - that is, 41/20 is better in most circumstances. And when you factor in that 51/20 is not necessarily even the strongest Mutilate build in the expansion... well, I'm inclined to say that 53/0/18 is going to wind up back in the pack.

Yes I'm aware of the current state of 41/20 and 43/0/18, I was just playing around trying to come up with possible mutilate builds for wotlk and this sparked my interest. I was also toying with a mutilate/preparation/dirty deeds/deadliness build for arena but I guess this is off topic for this thread.

You're overestimating the value of Dagger spec, at least in TBC terms. It's possible that finisher damage may be buffed enough to make it significantly better if you're using envenom a lot, but otherwise Opportunity represents a larger damage increase. Right now the big known seems to be whether there are enough decent deep assassination talent to justify skipping out on Opportunity and Blade Flurry in order to grab HfB. My current best candidates are 44/22/5, 41/25/5, and 51/20/0.....though I'm particularly uncertain about the points in the 51/20 build, I just ballparked the talents based on a recent Gorefiend parse and an assumption the poison damage will increase about 3x relative to other damage (due to the addition of 2x IP). Obviously there are serious problems with this approach, but it's a starting point.

On the whole, Turn the Tables doesn't strike me as particularly strong. It should be up most of the time, but the fact that it doesn't apply to our white damage or poisons would seem to really hurt it...even at 2% crit per talent point. Again, a significant buff to envenom and its inclusion as a regular part of our rotations seem the best arguments for a change of assessment, but we'll have to wait and see.

If it hasnt been mentioned, there is also 2 Expertise enchants in WotLK.

15 Exp to Gloves
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...hanting_02.jpg

15 Exp to Bracers
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...hanting_37.jpg

I have a couple things I was hoping to get clarification/instruction on, hopefully they are concise.

1. With the removal of Blessing of Salvation, aren't we simply going back to the position of pre-TBC horde guilds, where feint and vanish were both used to control rogue threat levels?

2. Currently, gear itemization on expertise is arranged so that we have fairly large amounts of the stat on only a few pieces of gear. With the introduction of both gems and enchants, it seems that we'll have a lot more chances to tweak the stat to where we want it in the upcoming expansion. Does the parry/dodge chance of trash versus bosses spike like the miss chance does? Or is it a flat .5% per level of mob over our character level?

I too would like to numbers around this build asked this previously though no one seems to want to try such a build. I understand there is a lot drawbacks from not going down the combat tree, but like you I am just curious.

I put this together and I wonder if anyone could crunch a few numbers around it please. I'm sorry, but I don't fully understand the mechincs of equations you guys all put together. If any could spend a few minutes, it would be greatly appreciated.

World of Warcraft Europe -> Info -> Classes -> Rogue -> Wrath of the Lich King Beta Talent Calculator

So, the first thing to note is that we don't really have any numbers on *any* specs right now, because there are just too many unknowns. Without having a good handle on what gear and buffs at 80 are going to look like, we can't do damage estimates. Without having all the new skill ranks in (notably envenom and poison), we can't do damage estimates. Hence, our ability to run numbers on specs as a whole is basically nil. We can make some estimates around specific talents, but that's about it.

That said, looking at your proposed spec, it does have some issues. The major one is that CttC just isn't very good, and you're dropping some talents points that are better in order to get it. This is particularly true since the presence of Blood Spatter and Serrated Blades imply that you expect to Rupture a lot with this build, which makes CttC almost totally useless. Similarly, with hit gear applying to poisons, Master Poisoner is a pretty minimal benefit. So I'd drop those 6 talent points and get, say, the last 2 points of Focused Attacks and 2/2 Fleet Footed. The last two points I don't have any good numbers around to say what's clearly best, but my guess would be that the answer is either the last two points in Improved Poisons, 2/2 Quick Recovery, or the last two points of Turn the Tables.

So, will the resulting spec be any good? Possibly. I feel confident in saying it'll be behind the 41/21/5+4 family of builds, and probably 51/20/0 as well, but by how much it's simply too early to say.

In addition, there are Red and Orange gems that add Expertise, so the combination of these make Weapon Expertise less of a "must-have" talent.

For Combat builds, yes; but it's conceivable that there are hybrid builds where there might be other things worth taking.