In what case would 7/51/13 be better than 15/51/5? The spreadsheet shows them very close for me but I'm wondering if there is a particular raid makeup that would allow 7/51/13 to exceed 15/51/5.

If you're only comparing FoK for those two weapons then SR would be yes superior, but ideally you'd be swapping them, for FoK: SR, for single-target dps: WD.

However if you're already swapping weapons for FoK, then you're much better off with a Angry Dread, Silent Crusader or The Stray (5% extra crit and a slower speed most likely outweighs the stat bonuses) due to the PPM Poisons procing more on a slow weapon.

If I remember correctly then 7/51/13 is only superior to 15/51/5 at a low gear-level, at Valorous-BiS level 15/51/5 should be superior to 7/51/13 in every case.
You can emulate this through enabling/disabling various buffs and debuffs in the spreadsheet. I'm sure at some point 7/51/13 might be superior (No Battleshout/Might perhaps).

In the "3.1 preview"-thread we have established that the 18/51/2 is the best combatspec if you have BiS gear, but its very close followed buy 15/51/5, but the later one seems to be prefered buy many due to it being more forgiving and not needing to keep as tight rotations.

Anyway, this leaves me as a total questionmark when it comes to Glyphs! SnD and SS glyphs seems to be a wise choice in my oppinion, but what to put in the 3rd slot? Killing Spree? Arush? Or use both of those and drop SnD or SS glyphs?

I read all forums on this page daily and even did a search for the this question so please forgive me if it has been addressed.

I understand that Expertise plays a vital role in standard mutilate build however I would like to "challenge" the need to place it above everything else. I am currently capped at 26 expertise and through the past week of watching WWS i have noticed a fellow HAT rogue who recently switched to MUT coming close to my DPS. His exp is only 13 and uses AP food. This now leads me to belive that I am wasting gem slots on EXP to reach cap for no reason when i could in fact replace them with 16AGI and replace my Prismatic 27EXP with 27AGI.

At first i was going to chop it up to a RNG factor and he was getting lucky but how can it consistantly be happening? I am still 50-120 DPS higher but i can't explain why something so vital as exp really is not making that much of a differense. My general idea is my DPS would go up if i dropped my EXP gems and replaced with agi (and still have higher exp than him). I would like to use the spreadsheet but my fear is the sheet is hardcoded that EXP will always trump anything else and yield less DPS.

I heard some rumors they had buffed Darkmoon Card: Death - Item - World of Warcraft in 3.1.

Does anyone have any testing on this?

They did. A 1750-2250 proc from the old 744-956 proc. Supposedly ICD the same as before at 45 sec.

I guess i was expecting such a important stat to have a much greater impact on numbers. Having 13 exp compared to 26 is a pretty big differense. I would expect since you have to sacrifice so much as far as gemming goes, that the DPS gain would not be so small. Going further, having better gear then the other rogue leads me to believe I could pull ahead if i focused more on AGI rather than expertise. I guess the real question is, Is 26 exp really optimal? Or would 16, 17,18,19 etc be better?

Right now i have to slot a 27EXP gem, 2x 16 EXP, and a 8 exp orange gem to become capped. This is also causing me to not wear the BIS belt because doing so drops me down to 21 exp.

Should note that the armory now shows me wearing Belt of the tortured, tunic of indulgance and Valorous gloves and my "optimal" gear is Val Chest, Frosted adroit gloves and Jorach's Crocolisk Skin Belt.

The simple answer is "use the spreadsheet." Whatever it tells you gives you the most DPS is the best gear / gemming you can do. There is no "hard coding" in the spreadsheets to say "Always do Expertise" or anything like that, it just models the rogue mechanics as best we know them and determines how much DPS you will do in an ideal situation with a given set of gear.

As for the difference with your gems between Agi and Exp, using the EP Weights from the http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t37183-pocket_guide_wotlk/, Expertise and Agility are equal, so you shouldn't see any major difference between gemming for Expertise or gemming for Agility, a few DPS up or down, but RNG factors on any given day have a much bigger impact than a change of gems would.

Gemming the best stat vs the 2nd best stat isn't a huge difference. Expertise for mutilate especially helps protects you from RNG that could break down your rotations.

25 is probably more optimal. Though the character sheet doesn't show it, expertise does not round. So when you're seeing 26, it's probably 26.x, so a bit overcapped. What'd you want go by is Expertise Rating, and the cap there is 214.


My initial guess is that though the proc is better, the passive stats still make it below [Bandit's Insignia]. So it's probably as good as any level 200 trinket (other than Greatness).

I'd like to expound on this if I could.

Right now if you run a very tight Mutilate cycle, dodges can really mess you up at a bad time. Waste enough energy on a dodged 5CP Envenom and the energy you expected to be returned so you could refresh HfB won't be there. Now you're dropping SnD or HfB or (God forbid) both. Simply put, if you're a tight cycle player it buys stability and the DPS itself that you gain from not having other attacks dodged is equal to or greater than the DPS lost from the lower Agi/AP (generally speaking).

In 3.1 though I don't see myself gem'ing as heavily for Expertise though. From what I can tell, I'll be Envenoming more often and the penalty for dropping HfB is orders of magnitude less. Dodges will still waste energy but by gem'ing for Agi/AP, I'll be more able to take advantage of dual spec'ing for Combat without wearing so much needless Expertise on my Combat set.

Hola! This is my first post. I have a few questions that I have been thinking of for the last few days.

A few days ago I was in Naxx 25 and a problem kept occurring. I was combat at the time but I'm now mutilate and see the same issue arise at times. Once into my rotation I will build 5cp and attempt to refresh rupture as to move on to building more cps and refreshing SnD. There are certain times that rupture will not reapply because it is currently a more powerful spell. This was happening to me with sometimes 10 seconds left on my current rupture. I'm fairly new to raiding and honestly I had no idea what to use in this situation. I was in a group with a prot warrior that wasn't sundering so I used my 5cp on expose thinking possibly it could help out the raid overall to up their dps quite a bit. I'm sure this was probably a bad idea and in hind site i should probably have used eviscerate. But for clarification what should I use when this problem comes up. Should I just keep Mutilating or SSing until I can refresh? Should I use the 5cp on evis, expose? If it is very close to rupture falling off I don't want to spend the 5cp and not be able to build 5 more while the target isn't bleeding. Any advise for this would be helpful.

A mutilate question I have... What do I open with? I read a couple of posts somewhere on this forum about opening with mut. I know a mut rogue that opens consistently with ambush but I don't think that serves any purpose except for in heroics considering the targets die so fast. Or should I garrote? Also, what should my third major glyph be? Garrote (if that should be my proper opener)? I've heard a lot of people trash Vigor.

Thanks again for your time. In advance I would also like to say thank you for the ample amount of information this site provides to people who are trying to get into raiding. It's much appreciated. Also I do not know how to use a spreadsheet. If there is a post telling me how to do this I'd be open to check it out. Sorry for the noobish post. We were all noobs once though right...? =D