So, I put together some quick and dirty numbers this afternoon to estimate what stat weightings for a Mutilate rogue are going to look like. And in the course of so doing, I came to some rather interesting realizations - I'll be posting more on this later after I have more time to work through all the numbers, but the two immediate things I want to mention are as follows:

1) As has been discussed in various places, the number of rating points required to get 1% of a stat has increased by more than a factor of 2; thus at equal weapon damage, the benefit gained from a single point of rating is a little under half of what it is at 70. However, this is mitigated by the fact that you have somewhat more Attack Power on the whole - but how much? Well, with the best gear we've seen to date, enchanted and gemmed in reasonable fashion, with full raid buffs, I'm getting an AP number around 5500. Compare to the current value for a Sunwell rogue, which is in the neighborhood of 3500. Thus, we have about 50% more AP, and our weapons do about 50% more damage (150 DPS instead of 100), and we find that weapon damage is up perhaps 50%. Thus, the matching increase in damage output for a point of rating goes up 50% due to this... but that still leaves it at about .5 * 1.5 = 75% of it's current value. Thus, all ratings give somewhat smaller amounts of damage... while AP gives about as much as it always has, as the total multipliers on it (crit, hit, haste, etc.) don't change that fast. Hence, relative to level 70, I'm finding AP to be a much more valuable stat at level 80. I'm still playing with the numbers, of course, but in my preliminary estimates I'm finding that AP is far and away the most valuable stat in terms of benefit per itemization budget... with one notable exception.

2) And that notable exception is, that's right, you didn't guess it, hit. It turns out that, at the moment, hit rating - or at least, the first couple hundred points thereof - turns out to be very important for Mutilate rogues. It is in fact the only stat the competes with AP in terms of benefit per itemization budget. Why? Pretty simple, actually - it's the same reason why it's important now: quadratic scaling.

See, at level 70, hit is powerful because it applies twice in terms of computing your WF and Sword Spec damage - once to see if you hit and can even trigger a proc, and once to see if the proc hits. The same thing applies at 80, due to poisons. Until you get to the spell hit cap, hit rating applies once to see if you hit and can proc poison, and a second time to see if the poison proc hits. The difference being that poison is an even larger section of your damage than SS or WF, and hit rating gives a larger benefit to spell hit (per point) than it does melee hit (26.2 rating to the spell hit versus 32.8 rating to the melee hit). Thus, hit rating up to the yellow hit cap is actually really quite important for Mutilate rogues - and probably for all rogues, as poison is going to be a major part of our damage.

Of course, once they nerf poisons, this will change somewhat... but as things stand, the first 315 points of hit rating - to get to the hit cap - are really pretty important, at which point it drops back in value to be more in line with all the other stats... all of which are far less valuable than AP. Which is really pretty different than the way things stand right now. I suspect once they nerf poisons this will start looking a lot more reasonable, but it's really pretty striking at the moment.

315 points of hit rating for hit cap you're referring to is to get approximately +10% hit at 80 and be yellow hit capped, correct? But that doesn't include Precision. So assuming you have precision that number is halved, and and least for your poisons hit chance, you'll get an additional +3% of spell hit from Imp. FF or Misery.

Getting the additional ~158 to hit rating to be yellow hit capped will clearly be extremely important though, but that should be very easy to do. What I'm interested in is how the stats scale once you hit that yellow hit cap.

It takes 17% spell hit to cap on a +3 mob. The rumors that it was down around 9% were false. Thus it's 315 just to make it to 12% from hit rating, with the last 5% coming from precision.

Oh, okay, I understand. But it's actually only 9% spell hit we need to make up assuming Imp. FF or Misery (which I hope is a fair assumption for 25-man), which means we need about 235.

EDIT: Actually, as a side note do we know for certain that Precision affects spell hit chance? I know at least Malice does not appear to affect spell crit chance. Not at home so can't check my character sheet and/or test it.

Precision specifically says it effects poison hit chance. A more interesting question is whether Envenom still uses melee hit mechanics or whether it's switched over to your spell hit/crit rate - that's something that will require testing.

I believe I had some Envenoms dodged last night, which would mean it's still using melee hit tables.

Edit: Ok, I can confirm after looking at what was left in my recount. My Envenoms indeed were being dodged, so that would in fact mean it's still using the melee hit table.

So I'm looking over the Naxx loot and the consistent 1.6 speed of the OH-intended weapons is really jumping out at me. I'm wondering if the faster OH speed of a fist/dagger combat build is enough to help it pull even with combat swords, especially considering that both 10 and 25-man KT are dropping a MH fist.

We'll have to see if combat is worth it against mutilate as it stands, otherwise it won't really matter. I did read somewhere that the arena offhands are 1.5 though?

Is there any testing done on a combat dagger build? With the change to prey on the weak, having lethality opportunity and PotW might make backstabs pretty huge, as well as daggers being inherently better for poison application (although with less main hand attacks I guess?) Points are a bit tight with relentless being a 5 pointer, maybe something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Or perhaps drop a point of lethality for Murder Spree (not sure how good it is as I haven't played beta)

I wouldn't think relentless strikes is really worth 5 points for a combat dagger build especially compared to improved poisons.

Well the build is variable, I guess I'm not used to high poison damage and relentless used to be the best damage for 1 talent point

So, while working on my estimates for WotLK, I ran across a couple of mechanical questions that I don't know the answers to. Some of these may have been answered and I simply missed the answer; if that's the case, I apologize. But I think at least some of them will need to be tested. So any feedback that can be provided based on the beta would be appreciated:

1) What is the typical armor value of a boss mob at 80? At 70 it was 7700/6200; what is it at 80?
2) Are there any new trinkets worth considering? For purposes of my estimates I've just been using the high-end level 70 trinkets, but presumably level 80 trinkets will eclipse those, so it would be good to know the new stats.
3) Does the reduction from ArPen Rating apply before or after non-percentage armor debuffs? To use the level 70 numbers: if you have a 6200 armor boss with Sunders (2600) and Faerie Fire (610), does one percent armor reduction give 1% of 6200 = 62 armor reduction, or 1% of (6200-2600-610) = 30 armor reduction? This will have a fairly dramatic impact on the value of Armor Penetration, on the whole.
4) Have Glancing mechanics changed at all? I know it's been discussed, but I don't remember what was concluded.
5) In post 1772, Vulajin worked out the damage of poisons in terms of talents, AP and the base damage of the poison. What are the base poison damages for max rank poisons at 80?
6) Does anyone understand what changes are being made to DoT mechanics, and whether these will apply to Deadly Poison or not?

Also, could someone remind me where to find the damage formulas for Mutilate? I couldn't find any quick summary of what order the bonuses are applied in (i.e., is the +181 damage affected by DW penalty? What about Opportunity?)

Thanks for the help.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think this was the formula Kalman once posted regarding Mutilate:

(((DAMAGE+(AP/14*1.7)))*0.5 + 101)*1.5*POISON


Or rather, what I did to his formula.


// Edit
The formula used in the DPS spreadsheet is:
Slayer4value * (1+0.04*opp) * (MHavg+101+ap/14*1.7+(0.5+0.05*dws) * (ohavg+ap/14*1.7) + 101*(1+0.1*dws)) * 1 + 0.5*Poison

1. I have no idea how to test this. I could try to run some combat tests on the heroic test dummy though maybe and see my damage vs. expected? Though I seem to recall someone saying they have no armor?
2. Most of the blue/epic trinkets aren't itemized yet. There are some trinkets you can get with badges, and I've seen a couple drop in Naxx as well, but they all currently have no stats. Right now I'm using a Shard of Contempt and a +40 haste, +148 haste rating for 20s every 2 minues trinket.
3. Not sure.
4. Well, my overall data for the entirety of Naxx (so includes bosses and the trash) I had 1578/5514 glances for a total of 20.3% glance rate. If I just look at the Sapphiron data from 2 attempts + kill, I had 218/952 glances for 22.8%. I'll try running more tests on the test dummy to get a bigger sample size though.
5 and 6. Not sure.

Additional thoughts:
1) We may wish to retest the Mutilate formula, since I'd be willing to be that the fact that the 101 damage on OH isn't diminished by the DW penalty but is increased by DW Spec is a bug. I'm sure it was tested and found to be true, but it's probably worth verifying that the bug still exists.
2) Some people posted in the Combat Ratings at 80 thread with info on how ArPen rating stacks with armor reduction effects, so we can cross off #3 above.

For testing armor value: well, my initial thought would be "Can Hunters still Beast Lore bosses"? As, if so, having a hunter swing by Maexxna seems easy enough. Unfortunately the test dummies have no armor, so that will not work; Thus, we'd need someone to launch some low-variance attacks (kick will probably still work okay) with a known set of stats and debuffs in order to get pairs of unmitigated and mitigated damage values. I find the simplest way to do this is to find a boss that can be stealthed to, strip off all gear with procs or that is subject to durability damage, and then kick the boss, die, stealth back, and repeat to get a few data points.

So, it sounds like 1, 4, and 6 still need testing, while we have acceptable answers to the rest for now.

1. Dummies definitly dont have armor (or really low), i tested that on the Boss dummy in Orgrimmar.
2. Trinkets -> Trinkets - Items - World of Warcraft -> most are not itemized as Chalon mentioned, but the jewelcrafting one are listed and "not bad"
3. Armor Reduction, heck if i could figure how to test that without kick and gouge ...anything that involves more than me, a tank and a healer would screw alot with the data and its hard enough to find people to test the easy stuff, try convincing someone to "tank a mob for 5 hours to gather statistics"
4. The combat log looks not quite done for me at the moment, those 1 resists, absorbs etc ... but as Chalon mentioned, glancings are in the bounds of ~20%. You might want to have a look in the Benefactors Bar Beta Q&A thread, i think i saw a WWS posted there recently from doing Naxxramas, you should find plenty of data in there.
5. Poisons. Item Enhancements (Temporary) - Items - World of Warcraft
-> Deadly Poison IX -> 536 + 0.12 * AP over 12sec / stack
-> Instant Poison IX -> 445 + 0.16 * Ap / hit
6. no idea

edit for clarifications
@Aldriana neither Kick nor Gouge deal damage anymore.

Kick no longer deals damage, and Gouge, while it is supposed to deal damage, does not at the moment.

(edit) Instant Poison has a damage range, which you can only find at the moment by digging heavily into Wowhead entries. For Instant Poison IX, it's 445 to 595. Reference: Instant Poison IX - Spell - World of Warcraft

(edit 2) As for testing things without fixed-damage abilities -- take your pick of these and use any instant attack whose damage formula you already know. Or simply regular melee attacks.

(edit 3) The AP coefficient of Instant Poison is 15%, not 16%.

I don't think you can necessarily assume that the Mutilate formula was a bug, as we have nothing to compare it against. Does any other class have an ability that does offhand damage plus a fixed bonus damage?

Regarding DST, they may very well do with it what they did with Hand of Justice once you were past level 60. But yeah, definitely hard to say without seeing how they itemize the epic trinkets.

Well, I'm not saying it's a bug because it works differently than other mechanics; I'm saying it's a bug because it makes no sense. Why should DW Spec increase the bonus damage, when the DW Penalty isn't reducing the damage bonus in the first place?

Just tested Mutilate damage, the base formulas are still:

MH: (Weapon DMG + AP / 14 * 1.7 + 181) * (1 + Find Weakness + T6 4pc + Opportunity)
OH: ((Weapon DMG + AP / 14 * 1.7) * 0.5 + 181) * (1 + Dual Wield Specialization) * (1 + Find Weakness + T6 4pc + Opportunity)

1002 attacks using a single [Dirk] with 2032 AP, 634 agility, 288 hit rating, 223 crit rating, 24 expertise rating, 5/5 Malice, 0/5 Close Quarters Combat, and 0/2 Weapon Expertise against a boss-level Training Dummy in Orgrimmar:

Type	Num	Min	Avg	Max	%	Mult.
Hit	601	233	234	235	59.98%	1.000
Glance	256	152	174	199	25.55%	0.744
Crit	127	480	482	484	12.67%	2.060
Dodge	15				1.50%
Miss	3				0.30%

The glancing damage multiplier ranged from about 65% to about 85%, averaging out at about 74%. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually 75%. I'll have to ask Aldriana to do the statistics on this, as I no longer have access to my stats textbook I used to use to remember formulas. :p

More testing! I found that the spell entries for Envenom 3 and Envenom 4 are accurate in that the base damage of those abilities is 176 per CP and 216 per CP, respectively. The increased damage of these abilities is already implemented. I'll be checking Backstab and Ambush soon to see if these are also implemented, as you can already see the same pattern in the Wowhead entries for those spells. (edit) Backstab and Ambush ranks are implemented.

HOWEVER, I also found the following very interesting functionality of Envenom. When you perform an Envenom, the following things occur:

1) The game checks to see if you have a Deadly Poison debuff on the target (any number of stacks). If not, you cannot perform the ability.
2) The game checks how many CP you have and how many stacks of Deadly Poison you have on the mob and stores these values.
3) The game reduces your number of Deadly Poison stacks on the mob by the number of CP you have.

This alone is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the damage formula of Envenom:

DMG = (Base DMG * DP Doses Removed + (AP * 0.07) * CP Spent) * (1 + Find Weakness + Vile Poisons)

The damage is based both on the number of doses of DP your Envenom ate, and on the number of CP you spent on it. Thus, a 5-CP Envenom with 1 dose of DP active will still deal substantial damage (but not as much as 5-CP with 5 doses), while a 1-CP Envenom with 1 dose of DP active will deal the same amount as a 1-CP Envenom with 5 doses active.