If you're really not enamored of Relentless Strikes I think your best option is going 2/5 there and 3/3 Vile Poisons. Could be wrong but the spreadsheet(Vulajin's, Aldriana's lacks all my stuff) and my logs seem to bear this out.

Right, We have 2 other rogues who are both Combat and I pretty am always above them. My main focus is DPS obviously, I really do like the Mutilate rotations in 3.1 I'm just hoping that the spec does not become "obsolete".

Would you say that with BiS gear for both Combat and Mutilate, Combat would pull a good amount ahead? What would be your estimate on the DPS variance between the two? Again like I said above I would rather play Mutilate since I like that playstyle and it something new then what I did all of BC... but I wont take personal preference over vastly superior DPS results.

It all comes down to the fight. In order for Mutilate to beat Combat, it has to be a fight that a.) the mob is Murderable and b.) relatively long stretches of DPS as opposed to burst. If both of these are in play, I would argue even with BiS, Mutilate will win and by a significant margin. However, as pointed out, I would agree there are more fights that play to Combat's strengths.

Breaking down the Ulduar fights, I would say the following:

Advantage: Combat
Razorscale - Combat is better for the add phases, and because it's 2 phases of burst damage, the cooldown timings work better.
XT - You can time your cooldowns to coincide with heart phases
Hodir - While he's murderable and Mutilate can do a lot of damage, the advantage combat has is you can time your cooldowns to be blown when you have Heroism + all 3 buffs (which likely will happen in the fight)
Mimiron - Having cooldowns and Throwing Weapon spec helps a lot, especially in P4
Yogg - You can use cooldowns in the brain, and Blade Flurry is pretty helpful in P3
Kologarn - Blade Flurry will hit the arm + the body

Advantage: Mutilate
Ignis - Mutilate has a huge, huge advantage on this fight. It's fairly long and you can maintain basically 100% uptime (as long as you don't get slag pot)
Iron Council - The fight is quite long (30M HP in total), and you can maintain pretty high uptime. It's not as big of a margin as Ignis though, mainly because Combat can time their cooldowns to coincide with a Rune of Power (and Rune of Power + Heroism, if you're doing Steelbreaker last).

Even
Flame Leviathan (obviously)
Thorim - While Thorim is murderable, the overall duration of P3 is short enough such that combat still puts out excellent numbers. Also Combat is without a doubt better for P2 (though DPS is obviously far more important in P3)
Auriaya - It's a fairly even fight, while Combat has a bit of an advantage on the adds, Mutilate makes up for this with the boss portion.
Freya - Combat has an advantage on the add phase, but Mutilate has an advantage once it's Freya by herself
General Vezax - I think it's probably fairly even. Even though he's Murderable and the fight is long, I think being energy starved hurts Mutilate more than Combat


Algalon is of course unknown, but my guess would be he's Murderable and it may be a long fight, so it might skew in favor of Mutilate.

So I think that's what Aldriana means when he says more fights favor Combat. But that's not to say that you can't still put out excellent damage as Mutilate on all the fights. And even on some of the fights which favor either spec, based on other circumstances you may end up winning even if your spec is ultimately unoptimal.

Well I was more into that point for the sprint cd rather than the 2% stamina, but I'll think about it a bit more. I'm only lvl 46 anyways so I have some time to plan out and play with builds.

I have a few more questions, but I can't remember everything I wanted to ask. Could somone help me out with some good strategies for surviving a solo boss fight? I've seen a few videos of people solo'ing onyxia, but I'm not sure if a rogue could do it. I'm basically asking for a strategy to keep yourself healthy in a long 1v1 boss fight. I was thinking of vanish to sap, but sap is pretty limited since it only works on humanoids. A 5 point kidney shot to a band-aid maybe? But if you're hit with any kind of DoT, your bandage is cancelled. How does a rogue kill something like onyxia or something similar in hp/lvl?

Sap works against more than just Humanoids since WotLK.

But Onyxia can't be stunned or CC'd, it's a raid boss.

I don't really see how Onyxia would be soloable for a rogue, to be honest. We take enough damage from her such that we need to be able to heal ourselves in order to last the fight. But we don't really have any mechanism to heal ourselves effectively for that fight.

I don't have the 2 pc T8 bonus yet to test it, but I was wondering, if you have DP on more than one target at a time, whether it gives you more than 1 energy every 3s. I suspect not, but I'm thinking that DP on one or both weapons for FoK might enable you to gain enough extra energy to make it more dps from the extra FoK than IP/WP.

So sap works on everything now? I think I've tried to sap other monsters before, but it didn't work. Its probably because I don't have wotlk yet? Didn't know that about sap though since I've only been playing WoW for a few weeks and haven't learned a lot of the little details yet.

Yeah, Sap ranks 1-3 only work on Humanoids. Sap rank 4, which you learn at level 71, works on Humanoids, Beasts, Dragonkin, and Demons.

Demons, Beasts, Humanoids and Dragonkin. But it's only max rank sap which you get around 75 or so.

I can confirm this is correct. For tons-o-fun spec mutilate and open out of stealth w/TotT after the tanks have ran around and picked up a few worm packs and maybe two of the normal packs before Hodir. After the first DP tick it's almost possible to regen energy faster than FoK can spend it.

I've been thinking about soloing instances/old world bosses, most of the time I take a druid to heal me, since they can stealth through with me, but I also tried putting Enchant Weapon - Lifeward - Spell - World of Warcraft on my spare webbed death, and in a solo normal sethekk clear it healed me for about 10% of the damage i took (I am muti atm, and dont have any of the survivability talents in my raid build that I used for that). I haven't tried it in any vanilla content, but I think even with 2 weapons enchanted with it you would still end up not getting enough healing to solo Ony.

I was looking at possible specs for this, plus a little added functionality to FoK spam, and came up with Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Something like this might help to minimise the damage in to the extent that lifeward would be enough to keep you up, possibly combined with bandages on mobs that can be stunned. Other things that might help would be the self heal from herbalism, the self heal trinket from one of the early quests in Northrend and a potion of course. I don't think that that trinket would be better than a dodge/parry tanking trinket tho.

It depends on your kill order for IC. For example, if you're doing Brundir > Molgeim > Steelbreaker, you can use your AR early on and it should be up again for the Rune of Power burn on Steelbreaker.

Ive got a number of replies:

Chalon..GREAT post man, I think ideally a great rogue will have a setup not basing off of a "main spec" anymore...but one that uses both Combat and Mutilate back and forth between bosses and even trash if you know you can gain considerably more situationally...

To Jeppathum's comment about the tier 8 2 set bonus. It does IN FACT apply deadly on multiple mobs...the problem though is....like on Auyiana and the guardian swarm adds. The speed in which you kill them is so fast you may only get 1 tick off of deadly poison...where as if you do Instant/Instant your dps will jump considerably. A great example to use deadly poison on your Fan of Knives set is on Freya and the Demolishing Lashers...when everyone is grouped in the middle to aoe down the first half of their lives. You can get some SERIOUS energy back...its devastating.

Also a point to make in Fan of Kniving as Combat...you want to weapon swap to the HEAVIEST SLOWEST weps you have in BOTH hands for that period of time. Because FoK is not effected by speed (autoattack is but thats minor) your weapon damage from Fan of Knives is MASSIVE.

Mitra your deadly poison should not "drop" off too much providing you have a fast offhand. Use Webbed death or a 1.4-1.6 wep and keep snd up. Considering shiv doesn't crit anymore or it's poison, you want to stay away from it and keep with a SS.

Kryptyx the link you posted...im not sure about either....According to that I should be ranked nd for Iron Council in overall dps o.0 in the world....Is that updated recently? Another point to make is combat may be on top of 2/3rds of them but the fact remains assassination is still right near them on many of the fights.

COUPLE QUESTIONS:

1. I use outfitter to swap out dagger everytime I FOK (im mutilate) to 2x SR's If i have beserking on all 4 daggers I use regularly (2x webbed death and 2x sinister's revenges) given the fact that when you weapon swap it kills the beserking proc would it be more beneficial to put mongoose on my other fan of kniving dagger? So I can (almost immediately) get a mongoose proc right as I start to FoK. Or does it not matter....will I still get another beserking proc due to the fact that it's another dagger....?

2. When you are AOE'ing with a fan of knive's set of daggers would it be more beneficial to have deadly on your main hand? or off hand? or hell even both hands maybe? Again this is providing the adds will be up for a descent amount of time. Is there anyone that could chat with me on the calculations involved here to decide WHEN 2x instant poison or dp/ip would be more beneficial. Obviously for 1 -3 seconds deadly would NOT be more beneficial but at what point would it be a considerably higher gain to use deadly poison on your daggers.

Sorry for writing alot hope this helps/ thanks in advance for the response.

So, relative to Chalon's list, I'd make the following adjustments:

Hodir: While it's true that combat's cooldowns are a significant advantage, the spell damage buff helps Mutilate more. At this point it seems unclear which will prove better.
Kologarn: This one's actually a bit ambiguous - it depends on your strategy and kill order. Not all the Blade Flurry damage you do necessarily proves to be helpful, and Combat does lose the use of killing spree. For some strategies Combat will be better due to BF; for others, Mutilate will be.

Ignis: It's certainly a Mutilate fight, but I'm not sure I'd call the advantage "huge". It's a sustained fight against a Murderable target, so Mutilate is - in full BIS gear - perhaps 2% ahead. Unless fight duration amplifies the benefit fo Combat's cooldowns - which it probably does. So it might *slightly* favor Mutilate, but the margin is actually razor-thin.

Iron Council: I think Combat's cooldowns take this. Particularly in the harder modes, this is the quintessential example of DPS at different times being unequally valuable, not just because of runes but also because, for instance, the only part of Steelbreaker last that's at all a DPS race is killing Steelbreaker himself, so the ability to dump cooldowns on him and get a big DPS burst is far more important than any DPS difference on the first two guys.

Thorim: I'd put this in Combat's camp. Phase 1 doesn't matter, it's better in phase 2, and Phase 3 is short enough that I'm pretty sure cooldowns take the day. Like Ignis, not a large difference, but if you're going to give Ignis to Mutilate you sort of need to give this to Combat.

Auriya: The ability to Killing Spree through fears is a pretty powerful advantage for Combat on this fight. When you factor in better performance on adds, I'd similarly give the edge to Combat here.

So, overall: the number of fights isn't really that different for each spec - though it might be slightly higher for Combat than for Mutilate - the real difference is that most of Mutilate's wins are narrow - it's scraping by on it's 2% increased DPS in sustained fights on Murderable targets. Whereas on the fights Combat wins, in generally does so by 5% or more. Combat is a *lot* better on XT. It's a *lot* higher on Mimiron. It's a *lot* higher on XT. Which is why, overall, I think Combat is the stronger spec.

Quick question, since this is the simple question thread. I can't find it anywhere real quick, and I'm at work so I can't load my spreadsheet. What's a bosses armor? It's like 12000 or so right? Trying to do some ArPen calculations...

Adding to this in particular, but also true for Razorscale, and Yogg-Saron, is that CQC combat can use it's filler point on 1/2 throwing specialization - all three fights involve some time spent AoEing interruptable mobs, and the ability to have a spammable and/or ranged interrupt is invaluable. Sure at only 50% I wouldn't count on it for something like Vezax, but for FoKing Immortal Guardians on Yogg P3, it's pretty damned nice.

A question about Aldrianna's combat build. Unless you're actually using a dagger or fist weapon (which he clearly says Combat daggers is not viable), then what is the point of wasting 5 points into close quarters combat if it only works with daggers and fist weapons? Assuming you're not dual wielding fist weapons.

Because you're mainhanding a fist weapon and offhanding a dagger?

I think you missed the point on this one. Combat Daggers is an entirely different spec altogether in which you would wield 2 daggers and use Backstab as your main CP builder. This is a poor choice for multiple reasons, not to mention the fact that you need to be behind your target to use the main CP builder. In a CQC combat build, you are mainhanding a slow, hard hitting *fist weapon* and using either a fast dagger or fist weapon in your off hand. CQC combat =/= Combat Daggers.

Okay I think something went wrong here.

Iv checked the Aldriana combat spreadsheet and it doesnt even list the 1850 rating fist ( [Furious Gladiator's Right Ripper] ).

Also, it lists the 2350 rating fist as only a little upgrade from Calamitys grasp.

Now my question is, is that correct? I mean its 8dps difference between calamitys and 1850 fist AND 17dps difference calamitys-->2350 fist.

Is the loss of stats so huge or is it incorrect calculation?

I'd add that BF in P4 hits the legs/body both so that's another little boost Combat's way. And having cooldowns to burn in P3 when the head comes down doesn't hurt.

What good is thrown spec on Mimiron exactly? Nothing he does is interruptable as far as I know, and Assault Bots are now tankable, so a ranged interrupt for Magnetic Field is not particularly helpful.

The cooldown advantage on Mimiron on the other hand, is decidedly strong, as the long downtime between phases allows ample time for them to reset, and the fight in general, favors coordinated burns during periods of high target uptime/raid danger, especially for melee.