He's talking about Cold Blood, that CD that gives your next attack 100% chance to crit. So as Rupture being the next attack, should it crit all the ticks, or just a tick, or none of it at all.

• Combat is lower.
• Target dummies are crap for dps benchmarking
• Weapon qualities might not be the same
• There is no rotation per se for Mut
• Better swords will be better than worse fists
• The 2% buff currently is already worth it for a typical raid (e.g. probably accounts for about 600-700 raid dps for mine's)

In 3.1 will the dps diff between combat and mut be very noticeable? Another reason I wanted to be combat was the burst dps control. Cooldowns will allow me to control the high dps on short parses (My guild clears stuff pretty damn fast).

Some fights yes, some fights maybe not. There's also dual spec'ing in 3.1 so go nuts with it.

i have a question regarding start up rotation for combat

the cycle recommended to me is 3/5/5....pocket guide would recommend to start up slice and dice as soon as possible...
so i assume 1 point ss, and then slice and dice
however would it be more benifical to ssx3 and then slice and dice considering i can do that before having to wait for energy to regenerate

im a little confused on this subject

If you don't like melee, you don't like melee and nothing anyone says is going to make it fun for you if you don't find it fun already.

That said, here's some tips I use to make leveling fast and easy with little downtime.

• Spec Combat and take talents like Endurance and Unfair Advantage.
• Use your cooldowns (AR/BF/Evasion/etc); there's really no point is saving them.
• Don't stealth around, pretend you're a fury warrior. The XP you get from not stealthing past mobs makes leveling faster than just skipping them... Plus, they drop stuff.
• You shouldn't need to eat much, but you will have to bandage. Shamans can heal themselves, rogues have to bandage. But you shouldn't have to eat much more than any other class.

As fight lengths increase, your method of startup becomes less and less important.

Ideally though, you would use SnD to consume those first CPs from your opener (be that either 1 or 2 CPs) and then begin 3s/5r/5e (or whatever your rotation is). SnD is your biggest damage boosting ability and the faster you can get it started, the higher your total damage.

In addition or as an alternative to Tinwhisker's otherwise very sound advice, a suggestion could be to pick up the three Camouflage talent points in Subtlety. Not as a means to stealthing past the mobs more quickly, but rather getting to them faster to Cheap Shot them. With this initial stun, followed by normal combat attack rotation, it's my experience that both damage input and, as a result thereof, down time can be minimized.

However, even with Camouflage, Stealth doesn't exactly speed things up. No secret there. So, in order for this approach to be efficient, it's very important to not use Stealth prematurely; put some effort into timing when to use Stealth in order to get as close as possible to the target mob while out of Stealth.

Also, if you've become a tad unfamiliar with the melee side of things, an additional advice could be to make sure your weapons are up to grade.

Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I remember, Cold Blood (buff) doesn't disappear after Garrote/Rupture like it does after Mutilate, Evis or Envenom. So until there are some hidden changes, it won't disappear in 3.1. I don't think that having or not particular item worn would change it.

I'm also levelling a Rogue who had been shelved for a while, currently Combat Swords (still using S1). I have found the advice given above to largely fit with what I have been finding. Stealth at the last possible second on approach, but go into it with more of a melee DPS mentality than a 'stealth around obstacles' one. I'll skip clusters I don't want to deal with but I largely wade in and hit stuff.

I do have a related question: I am considering making a change to my build to drop some DPS talents to add back in a bit of survivability. At the moment I'm looking at dropping the 3 points I have in Ruthlessness to pick back up Deflection and Riposte. More parries plus an additional counterattack that disarms. My hope is that it will add to survivability and allow less downtime between larger fights or multiple mobs. What is the general take on something like Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft with one floater point available as purely a solo leveling/questing build?

This is my first post here on EJ... so hello everyone!

I do apologize if this question has been asked before in the spreadsheet thread. I tried a couple searches, and skimmed as much of the 64 pages as I could... but did not find what I was looking for.

My raid lead has asked the class leads to put numbers behind evaluations of our raiders. To do that, I've been using Vulajin's spreadsheet (v0.4.7) for dps calculations for both myself and the rogues in my guild. Obviously, the spreadsheet is a "perfect world" calculation, and some percentage of deviation is expected. My question is what percentage would be considered good?

All of us run between -5.4% and -6.8% of the sheet's estimations on the basic 25 man Patchwerk fight. To put real numbers behind that... the sheet says I should be around 5200dps, but I'm consistently coming in 4900dps.

Granted... using Patch as a test of "is this person a good raider" isn't the best example. But what I'm looking for here is simply a way to measure how well someone understands and puts to use the basic mechanics of the class. I'm thinking anything within 10% could be considered decent and a good sign the player knows how to use the class to put out the damage expected given their gear and buffs.

I appreciate any and all responses. Thank you.

Given how much difference buffs from other players and precise timing on trinket/skill usage (e.g. using Cold Blood on a 5 point Envenom is going to be more dps than using it on a Mutilate), a difference that small is really to be expected in a real fight. It's just that difficult to have every buff up 100% of the time and to time everything perfectly. The spreadsheet gives you a goal. It does not tell you where you can expect to be all of the time. Even the best players will have a very hard time approaching the theoretical max dps. And if a particular raider is outside your proposed 10% threshold, look at why that is before you decide they need to improve. Perhaps they're doing something else that is necessary for the raid as a whole to do well. Perhaps they are assigned to apply Expose Armor, which will certainly drop their dps, while helping to improve everyone else's.