Hey guys,

I'm new to these forums, been reading a while now, but I can't figure out or can't find why it is better for a mutilate spec
to have 3% increased crit (close quarters combat) than the imp SnD + 1% crit, isn't the 50% more duration worth it?
I know evi and envenom reset the counter but in some situations I can't keep rupture up because i have to Envenom to reset the SnD counter..

Thanks and sorry for this noobquestion :P

As you mention, it's because Envenom/Eviscerate give you a full refresh of SnD.

Rupture uptime is great, but SnD uptime is better. If you have to let Rupture drop in order to keep SnD up, do it.

You really don't need 50% longer SnD if you can refresh your buff at a cost of 35 energy after performing 1 Mutliate (ok, so 95 total) compared to the expected (40 * 4 + 25, expecting one free combo point proc) 185 for a full buff refresh as Combat.

Are you pooling energy before ruptures?

I find sometimes snd and rupture will be ticking down at the same time, but it's fairly rare, and is usually a case of timers just happening to sync up randomly. It would still happen with imp snd.

Count the number of ticks, multiply by 2 and divide by the total fight length in seconds.

So for your Patchwerk fight there, 83 ticks is 166 seconds Rupture uptime. Fight length was 247 seconds so total uptime of the fight was 67.2%.

I just switched to combat to help my guild on progression, but I am not nearly as familiar with combat cycles.

The pocket guide suggests this for a rotation:

but the spreadsheet lists the optimal rotation for me to be 3s/5r/5e.

Combat rogues out there, do you find something like 3s/5r/5e easy to maintain, or do you simply do 5s/5r and fit in however many eviscerates as your cp allows.

I assume 3s/5r/5e would be more optimal, but requires more luck with the RNG for ss glyph procs, but I haven't gotten the chance to test out rotations in a fully raid buffed situation.

For reference, my spec is 15/51/5 with only cqc.

I've found 5s/5r/5e, shortchanging the Evisc or the Slice as needed for cycle stability to be the most reliable and maintainable cycle. Like mutilate, it'll take a bit of time to get a feel for your energy regen and CP generation to be ready to improvise as needed.

Wait, so you'll do a < 4 cp evisc sometimes?

In general I don't use Garrote. My typical opening cycle goes like this:

Full HfB stacks, Tricks of the Trade on MT before fight starts.

Stealth in with Sprint to keep up with tank.

Tank gets first hit, then I mutilate to 4+ CP.

SnD.

Mutilate to 4+ CP

Rupture

Mutilate to 4+ CP

Envenom, Refresh HfB.

I find that after a solid opening cycle like that I can easily keep up SnD 100% of the time and Rupture 90% of the time. If there's a time off boss for a fight (like splitting for sartharion lava waves) I'll use whatever CPs I have left to refresh SnD to make sure it stays up for the time off target.

Hope this helps!

Rarely, if combat potency and the sinister strike glyph both aren't cooperating, rupture is doing great, and slice and dice has a decent but not exceptional amount of time left, I'll Evisc at 4 rather than 5 CP's or just skip an Evisc to refresh slice at an appropriate time.

If I skip an Evisc, I'll usually end up pooling energy for a while, spending some on cooldown abilities that cost energy like Tricks of the Trade or Blade Flurry if either is up, trying to hold off the slice and cycle restart as long as posisble.

Yea, pooling til I can snd again is what I have been doing in that case, but I'm finding it a lot more difficult to pool energy, since it regens so much faster than what I'm used to. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually.

Since you don't use Rupture, do you open with Ambush, or just de-stealth and Mutilate? The latter seems inefficient, but I guess it could work.

<...snip the rest...>

Having just specced to Mutilate, 90% Rupture uptime seems high, but it could very well be that I'm still adjusting to the cycle. (Also, I could just be not that great.) If that is attainable, awesome.

Keeping HfB up is the obviously the biggest change from playing combat, I'm guessing it takes at least a few instance runs for that to become more automatic.

B'oh.

I'm so used to using Garrote (or Cheap Shot while farming) as Combat, I completely didn't realize you could Mutilate from stealth. It all makes sense now.

I'm simultaneously intrigued and frustrated by the variety in Mutilate play.

Starting with those extra combo points would help my rotation...I've been starting with Garrote/Ambush, 1 point SnD, Mut 4+, Env/Evis to get SnD refresh, then start working on Rupture.

I'm fairly new to mut, (since 3.0 and cttc anyway) and I have terrible daggers atm (dual omen of ruin), but my gear is pretty decentish (obviously you can see in my armory if you care), my main question is, there have been times where SnD and HFB align well enough and I guess I don't catch it soon enough, that when it comes down to it, I'm choosing between dropping 1 or the other, do I just need to pay closer attention to my bars, or is there some kind of mod that could alert me to this ahead of time?

I've only been playing this spec for basically a day and ran into this problem many times on the boss target dummy, and at least once on malygos. I do have snd glyph.

Relentless Strikes makes this very easy to deal with.

Simply envenom, and use the relentless energy to hunger.

If you can see it coming, this is a good time to use a CB Mutilate to force a 5 pt finisher.

That's the way I've been trying to deal with it, however I think one of my issues is having come from a combat gearing direction, I'm lacking expertise and more than once I've had a dodge which if I don't catch, causes me to misstep and drop snd all together and sometimes hfb as well if I was low energy to start with. but thanks, I think if I get a couple more pieces (still wearing Cursed Vision of Sargeras, gg never seeing a helm with a meta drop) and if/when I get a good set of daggers i'll re-gem my gear and that will probably help considerably. I'll definitely have to keep on practicing on the target dummies till I get it down pat.

I have been noticing a problem at positioning bosses at the beginning of fights that I have been talking to my tanks with recently. It can sometimes take them 10-12 seconds to position the boss because of a seemingly buggy facing mechanic from what they tell me. The boss seems to get behind them more often then not right at the run in and they are experienced and knowledgeable players. The problem with this is im pretty much right on the heels of the OT in most situations and have been killed / near death from tail swipes / breath attack type abilites because of this intial facing problem. Should I give the tanks a couple more seconds postition him correctly, the problem with this being less damage and less intial threat from TotT, or rush in still with maybe sprint to help correct my position faster and evasion up to potentially avoid tail-swipe type damage?

Also, the change in Feint that gives 50% reduced aoe damage could help the rush in early stratgey later on. Any suggestions would be helpful.

ok hi guys,

my 2nd post here, first one got removed for a useless post... alright so here goes

I currently have 43 expertise rating ~ 5 Exp and i realised that my rotations get slightly screwed up due to dodged finishers from which i end up losing energy or the loss of the snd renewal. Previously with my blues i did not have this problem as i had 24 Expertise and had 0 dodged specials. Thus should i cap my expertise by replacing all my red gems? the only expertise gear i can think of is the ring from Gun drak.

Ps. i hope this wont become another useless post lol

I didn't find reliable information about the crit cap for rogues after searching the forums for quite some time nor have I enough theorycrafting knowledge to calculate it myself yet. Is there a formula to calculate crit cap for us (or melee in general)? How does yellow and white damage crit cap differ?
However I did found some old thread mentioning yellow attacks do not have crit cap but I wonder has that already changed after WotLK.

Assuming you are attacking a boss mob from behind, the worse case scenario (no hit rating or expertise) would still let you reach a crit chance of 42.5% for white attacks (100% - 27% miss - 6.5% dodge - 24% glancing). If you are, say, at the poison hit cap (17%) and are expertise capped, you could then go as high as 66% (100% - 10% - 24%). Yellow attacks would not be bound by this at all and could theoretically benefit from crit chance all the way to 100%.

What this basically means is that there is no real situation in which you should be concerned about capping crit chance, and it therefore can be ignored for all practical purposes.

Rogues get crit capped when you no longer can remove any hits from the combat table, or rather, turn them into crits.

The crit cap varies. It depends on your combat table, hence, it depends on your hit rating / expertise rating.

For a rogue with 0 hit rating, 0 expertise rating, you will only actually hit with 66.5% of your attacks, of which 25% of them will be glancing blows; therefore, your crit cap is 41.5%, because that's how many of your hits will "hit". For example, if you have 30% crit, your combat table will be, then: 30% crit, 11.5% hit, 25% glancing blow, 27% miss, 6.5% dodge. For specials, as glancing blows don't apply to them, your crit cap will be way higher - as in, unreachable. For what it's worth, specials are also in a two-roll system, as in, you can only crit if your special actually lands.

However, no rogue will have 0 hit rating and 0 expertise rating. Using realistic numbers, such as 237 hit rating, 5/5 precision, capped expertise, your combat table for white attacks will be 12.2% miss, 0% dodge, 25% glancing blows, therefore your crit cap for white attacks will be 62.8%. Your crit cap for specials will be 100%.

Read this if you would like to know more about the combat table: Melee Combat Mechanics

Capping crit is pretty hard to do with current itemization - to cap yellow attacks, you'd need to have 100% crit, which is, as far as I know, not possible except on Loatheb. Capping out on white hits isn't an issue at current, but may become one by the end of this expansion; with a glancing rate in the 25% range and most rogues running upwards of 10% miss, one would need to get a buffed white crit rate around 60-65% to run into problems with the cap, which is, again, somewhat impractical for the moment. However, as we're already around 50% crit with ideal gear, it's not inconceivable that that number will become an issue. Recall, however, that adding additional hit rating raises this cap to as high as 75%, which, again, is probably safely out of reach for the forseeable future.

Was lucky enough to get Calamity's Grasp last night now I am wondering about my offhand. I have both the papercutter and Sinister Revenge as offhand options. Being 15/51/5 I guess papercutter still wins out even over the higher dps Sinister Revenge till I guess I can grab Webbed death. But is it by a huge margin? Also wondering about poisons. I should still be doing Deadly MH and wound offhand?