Nevermind, delete this :X

Has anyone tried a combat daggers/backstab build?

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

With this your back stab will have -

+55% damage
15% - Aggression,
10% - Blade twisting,
10% - Surprise attacks,
20% - Opportunity,

+40% chance to crit
30% - Puncturing wounds,
5% - Cruelty,
5% - Close quarters combat,

+50% critical damage
+30% - Lethality
+20% - Prey on the weak

With the stigma that comes with combat daggers I have never seen anyone try this.
They all stick with the cookie cutter builds. Has it been proven less potent already?

It's not a stigma. And buffing one attack to do epeen numbers isn't enough to save the entire spec.

Vigor is useless (for the most part), Relentless Strikes and Lightning Reflexes are too large to simply drop for it.

At what point does haste begin to statistically deteriorate and what is the formula to determine this? Further, at what point does haste no longer, if at all, effect PPM? If the PPM is based on a 1.4 speed does this mean that poisons such as instant will not be effected with attack speed buffs lower than 1.4 speed ie; Starlight from Hodir?

The PPM for poisons depends on your base weapon speed, so having haste it a good thing, since it generates more poison procs. Note that this isn't the case for every PPM mechanic in the game. When people say it's normalized to 1.4, it simply means that for a 1.4 weapon speed, it matches the % of procs before the mechanic change to PPM for poisons (which was 20% for Instant Poison, untalented).

hi,
I see a couple of rogues still running around with 2pt6 (belt+boots), claiming this to be superior to most of the other items due to the 5%haste.
i've modeled around a bit, but cant seem to find any combination where this IS superior. ( t7.5/t8 geared)
am i missing something?
thnx.

First of all, if you were to spec Combat Daggers it wouldn't be the spec you listed. It's possible to spec Combat Daggers, but the DPS of it is lower than the three primary raiding specs. The reason you don't see people spec it is because it's strictly inferior.

There was some analysis which was done in early WotLK which suggested that prior to having 213 pieces for both of those slots, you were better off with 2p t6. Once you have a 213 or higher belt/boot, though, the vastly superior itemization overtakes that haste benefit.

Short answer is check the spreadsheet. Long answer is you're probably better off with the slow weapon in your MH. The increased Instant Poison procs will overtake the slightly lower Mutilate damage.

I've looked around, and can't seem to find information answering this rather simple question, at least not here...


What's with Wound poison going on the mainhand for raiding rogues?

I'm completely baffled. I hit 80 on my rogue and started raiding, and have been using Instant/wound as Combat. We're only doing 10 man content and have only just started doing ulduar attempts with Razorscale and the Furnace guy. Do I need to be in 25 mans to notice any difference?

The basis of Wound/Deadly is that without talents, Wound and Instant scale at the same exact rate - but Wound has higher base damage. It's not until Improved Poisons or Envenom are involved that IP takes over.

Has any math been run on the value of the pvp glove bonus, assuming kick is used on cooldown? Using Aldrianas combat spreadsheet, with the default gear (Except T8.25 shoulders swapped in for the Monolith to maintain 4 pc), and adding [Deadly Gladiator's Leather Gloves] for gloves, I put 4 points in Vitality to get a rough guesstimate, and found the spreadsheet marked it as break even on DPS - this of course doesn't account for the slightly easier play provided by the bonus, and of course, vitality is 8% extra regen, wheras the glove bonus, at 10 energy every 10 seconds is closer to 10% really. Since Aldriana's sheet doesn't model cycles including kick, this is hardly conclusive of course, but I was just curious if anyone had bothered to take a more than glancing look at this before, and search has failed me.

I'm assuming you're talking about Vezax here. I don't have 4pc T8 yet but can maintain 2pc T7/T8 with PvP gloves for the fight and do so because myself and a DK are on interrupt duty. We alternate turns because only one person on the interrupt can be a bit dodgy if they happen to come a little too quick (which they can).

The energy savings for me came out to around 0.4 EPS. Not to mention that the reduced cost makes it very easy to catch every interrupt.

It's almost the exact same scenario as wearing the rogue PvP gloves for Illidari Council in Black Temple in that it makes interrupts much easier... until Blizz hit that bonus with the nerf hammer and gave us the current kick bonus. I doubt they'll nerf this use of the gloves but you never know, we rogues are "very clever."

Hey all, i have a question which i asked in the spreadsheets thread, but it was only partly answered.
Because i dont want to offend Aldriana in any way, I decided to ask it here, in a different manner. Here it goes:

Using the newest combat spreadsheet, i came up with 6k dps for my gear/enchants.
Its ideal fight situation, and dps is maybe overstated. But from the spreadsheet thread i got a response by Aldriana that on fights such as XT, i should be doing even more then the 6k.

Well, i do only 5k on XT 25man. Moreover, I have yet to see a rogue beating me, including ppl with amazing gear/weapons/berserking. (on thaddius i do 8k but its irrelevant since its huge buff nonstop)
I understand, i am doing something wrong, but then all the other rogues i pug with, suck even more.

I guess my server sucks, but please share your experience with fights like XT in 25mans, Patch, Loatheb or Thadd (easy fights, with various dmg enhancing buffs) Also your experience on the Boss dummy, its important for me to see if i have some serious problem with rotations. (i do 3.2 there)

Also, do you exchange TotT with other rogue, or do u have frost DK for haste or any other not so PUG-common buff?
I almost never do, so this might be the reason for lower DPS.
Help me out here please, i am really casual player, but this doesnt change the fact that i like to be on top of dps
(i bet you all do)

Just to get these questions out of the way:
Is Slice and Dice dropping at all?
Are you DPS'ing the heart when it comes out or are you FoK'ing the little adds?
Are you using your cooldowns on the heart when it's under full armor debuff (Sunder/Expose) or just whenever you see the heart?
Are you timing Heroism with the heart exposure or is your raid leader just calling for it whenever?
Are you getting chain debuff'd by the light/dark bombs (you can't CloS them all)?

I've been assassination for a while but tonight we had an Insanity's Grip drop off mimi and I decided to take it and try out combat since all of our rogues are assassination. I threw beserking on it and tested it on a test dummy for a while with the recommended combat spec (15/51/5 gotten from these forums) and glyphs, using the recommended rough rotation (focusing on keeping snd and rupture up and sneaking an evis in here and there). Now, I know I'm not hitting the rotation perfect as I just started, but I'm a fairly competent player if I may say so, yet my dps on the training dummy as combat was literally 2/3 of the dps I put out as assassination on the same dummy. Thinking about it I'm wondering which of the possible might explain such a drastic difference:

1) Do raid buffs account for a far more significant dps boost to combat than to assassination?

2) Does combat only begin to shine after your gear hits a certain threshold? My gear is currently a mix of naxx 25 and naxx 10, with combat weapons being IG/WD and assass weapons being SR/WD. I wouldn't say I'm geared out by any means but I'm a far stretch from a fresh 80 with 3/5 T7.5 and 2 T7

3) My rotation is generally to keep snd up at all times, rupture up nearly full time, cooldowns early and when available permitting snd and rupture. Could there still be such a significant error in my rotation to account for such a large dps difference?

4) Anything else that I'm too ignorant to see


I was planning on trying the spec out in Uld 25 this week, and I certainly want to give it a fair shot (after all, training dummies can obviously be very misleading), but I don't want to look completely incompetent with my dps either. If I need to wait to go combat until I get some ArP gear or just better gear in general, that's better than making myself look like a fool right now. For the record, the numbers I was putting out on the boss level training dummy was roughly 2800 dps as assassination and 1900 dps as combat -- this was with no buffs or debuffs whatsoever though, save poisons of course. I don't mind harsh criticism if it leads to me performing better.

Testing anything but mechanics on a dummy is pointless. You already seem to know this but somehow don't believe it. Mutilate is very heavy on poison damage, combat is heavier on physical damage; dummies are not armor debuffed. There are probably a hundred other reasons as well.


Try the spec out in the real world. The absolute worst that can happen is:

"Hey Escariot, your DPS is low this week."

Yeah, I'm trying out a new spec with the drop I got. If it keeps underperforming I'll go back next week after we finish this week.

"Ok."

If you're derided for having low DPS one week for trying out something new, you are in a guild of tools.

Ok, these are not exactly simple questions... but I'm gonna ask them anyway because they are interesting (to me, at least). Also, they require a bit of storytime:

So, my Ulduar 10 group is doing Flame Leviathan and I'm riding a chopper. My chopper breaks down right before the very last System Overload, so knowing that Flame Leviathan can't do anything to me, I literally Sprint over to it and start to melee the damn thing. I get 5CP and throw up an Expose Armor... a couple seconds later, before the System Overload ends, it's destroyed. Yay! Loot and the server first for having done it with three towers still up.

Now, my questions: How useful is Expose Armor on Flame Leviathan? Ignoring the risk from towers, is it worth jumping off my chopper during System Overloads throughout the fight to throw an EA on this boss? For that matter, does Savage Combat affect any of the damage being dealt to it enough to make it a worthwhile contribution, assuming FL is not immune to poison? (I wish I had taken notice of this much, but it all happened so quickly.)

The only time the test dummy will ever yield accurate results is when you can get everyone who buffs you in a raid to give you those buffs, stand near you, and attack the dummy too, to trigger any proc effects that might affect your damage. In short, unless you all literally raid the test dummy, don't expect what you do to it to be an accurate assessment of what you can do to a raid boss.

It was a pretty common tactic on 6min-Malygos to have a warlock hop off his drake in P3 to apply CoE to Malygos on the way down for the 13% increased spell damage. All damage to him in P3 was fire-based (magical) and benefited from the CoE debuff.

I would imagine Expose Armor would probably work on Leviathan but I'm not sure how much of the damage done to him by the vehicles is physical. I'm sure the ranged attacks aren't and that just leaves the two "ram" abilities which are on cooldowns.

Edit:
Just looked at the WWS of our last Leviathan kill and it was about 17% FIRE, 40% PHYSICAL, and 44% UNKNOWN. I can only assume that "UNKNOWN" is siege-type damage.

The portion of physical dmg depends entirely on your strategy. On our 4 tower kill (10 man) for example, only 9% of the dmg done to FL was physical, with 88% from unknown (blue pyrite).

Also, I'd imagine the expose uptime would be fairly low... 30% max considering it's duration and time between overloads... such that it wouldn't be worth the risk of jumping out to debuff it.

My own experience switching from mutilate to combat is that I was so used to having big number finishers as a part of my cycle that I, like you sound to be, was squeezing in Eviscerates even when they wouldn't really fit, and it hurt my dps.

What I've learned since then is that the fast and flawed advice is actually pretty good:

1.) Keep Slice and Dice up 100% (the 5% downtime you're seeing is a big hit to your dps)
2.) Keep Rupture up as close to 100% as you can
3.) Only eviscerate when it doesn't cause you to violate 1 and 2 (I use ~10-11 seconds on both timers as a guide)

This sometimes means you will dump energy on "extra" Sinister Strikes while having 5 CP's to avoid energy capping, but it is higher dps overall than doing a 5-pt Evisc and then dropping SnD and/or Rupture.

2 questions:

1. Haste Rating: Is there a cap?
2. PPM = Procs per Minute?

I'm not sure about the haste, but PPM is procs per minute!

My question today is this. My guild recently did general in ulduar with a successful kill. My dps was around 4.4k dps >.>

Needless to say I was a little discouraged, but I had thrown on the pvp gloves for the kick bonus. Is this lost energy THAT much of a dps nerf, or am I just doing something wrong. I'm usually top 3 dps on every fight, but on that one it was a bit bad .

ALSO, in response to the flame leviathan expose thread, if you can drop an oil slick under him durring overload, hop off and expose, and hop back on and pick up the people ejected from flame leviathan, I don't see the harm in exposing. The choppers just don't do enough damage to flame leviathan to not do this.

EDIT: Since they're changing Malice/Remorse, with remorse being 1.5 speed, will these surpass the cqc spec with similar ilevel weapons? Hopefully spreadsheets will be updated to account for these changes