I can't duplicate the result you're describing. Switching to IP/IP results in a substantial drop since the sheet assumes the target is no longer poisoned. I manually changed it to assume the target was still poisoned; only then did I experience a DPS gain, and it was more on the order of 50 DPS.

About professions again... was thinking about best combo for pure raiding - both from financial and stats PoV and it looks it is JC/Alchemy. JC provides the best benefit, while alchemy being on par with all others saves you a flask per day which is a huge. It is sad to drop LW, but actually blue noted that there will be no more professions to give best items ingame so that put LW to roughly 64AP and from time to time - cheaper legs enchant, which can't outweight the benefit of alchemy even for 2 days. Thoughts? There is any reason LW should be kept?

At the moment the value of Leatherworking is no higher than any of about 5 other professions; however, I think a lot of people are holding onto it under the speculative notion that they may add LW BoPs akin to the ones in Sunwell, BT, and SSC/TK. They may not, of course, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that they may at some point.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of alchemy as an option just now as, lets be honest: if your guild doesn't have Naxx on farm yet, they probably will fairly soon, as it's not a hard instance; and once it's in farm, are you really going to flask all night every night? Personally, I've stopped using consumables for most fights in Naxx already - I save them mostly for achievement fights and the like. So while the benefit of Alchemy is comparable when one is flasked... there's likely to be weeks if not months of flask-free raiding between now and Ulduar - to say nothing of PvP, 5-mans, farming, and all the other things you don't flask for. So personally, I prefer to take one of the passive professions that gives me the benefit whether I'm flasked or not.

I believe Ghostcrawler or some blue already mentioned that they're not going to be doing high end BoP items anymore. It'll all be boe if anything. It's really no coincidence that pretty much all professions are balanced atm at around 64ish AP (cept JC atm, and maybe BS in the future). I think they intend to maintain the balance and BoP craftables will really tip scales depending on class you play.

Even still Vulajin, 50 dps is large enough to constitute using this in place of DP/IP in a raid setting is it not? The difference between Mutilate and combat is 115 or so at the gear level we are currently situated at, or you are situated at I should say. One would think that after you have yourself experienced even an increase of 50 dps that this might indeed be enough to tip the scales in the direction of IP/IP? Also, because this will only pull farther away with faster daggers, more haste, and although I know that speaking of hit is taboo, hit will also visibly increase the dps of this style.

I made no judgments concerning your analysis. I simply stated that I could not duplicate the results you described. I would also note that the 50 DPS gain I experienced required using Glyph of Eviscerate and trading 3/3 Turn the Tables for 3/3 Improved Eviscerate. And of course, it also requires the target to be poisoned by someone else, which isn't viable 100% of the time. Also, it assumes that the recent testing suggesting that Eviscerate receives a flat 7% of your AP per combo point (instead of the 3-7% range implied by the tooltip) is correct.

If these conditions are satisfied, then yes, it looks like IP/IP comes out on top, and yes, it would scale better with faster daggers, more haste, and more hit. I get an increase of about 79 DPS doing the same experiment with dual Webbed Death.

So im new here and i havent really had time to read alot on these forums but i could really use help about something ive been racking my brain with for about a week now. Im in a pretty good raiding guild and moderate gear. Ive been trying to figure out the best daggers i can for my spec. Ive got 4 different daggers in my bags and cant really decide what to use. I tried getting spreadsheets but i use a mac and they dont really work right. I would really aprreciate it if you guys could help figure which i should use. At this moment im using Knife of Incision MH/Omen of Ruin OH. In my bags i got a rolfsens ripper and another omen of ruin. I do have access to the stalactite from sons of hodir rep if thats better then what i have. Please let me know what you guys think.

2x Omen of Ruin

What is considered the best way to allocate points in Assass and Combat for a HAT build?

3/5 Malice, 5/5 Aggression + Blade Flurry

or

4/5 Malice, 5/5 Aggression

or

5/5 Malice, 4/5 Aggression

Thanks in advance.

I was wondering after reading all the replies in the state of rogues thread about tricks of the trade not being part of any rotation if I am wrong in exchanging Tricks with another rogue during bossfights.

I would think that 15% extra dmg for a few seconds isnt a bad trade off for 15 energie and to be honest threat is no issue for us anymore. But after reading about people not bothering I began to doubt myself so can you guys please shed some light?

I can't use a focusmacro for it at the moment since KillingSpree seems to clear your focus so I might lose dpstime because of this. So I am wondering if I'm not losing more then the 1,6% dps loss mentioned earlier.

I personally have a few macros made for Tricks of the Trade that I swap out depending on the fight. I have the standard one that throws it on the target of my target (meaning the tank in boss fights, obviously), and a few others that I sub out here and there. One puts it on a particular tank by name, because on certain fights like Malygos and Sapphiron you're not always within 20 yards of the tank to put it up on cooldown if necessary; thus, I put it up after vortex and ice blocks, respectively. Another is my dps-Tricks macro, that has its target=<name> macro set to another rogue, or potentially a mage/hunter. Whoever you can rely on to be in range and doing the most dps (and in possession of a reliable threat wipe!) is who you put it on, it doesn't necessarily have to be another rogue.

The reason I don't think it's in anyone's set rotation is that it's one of those things that sometimes needs to be used on the fly. It's almost certainly best to use it every cooldown, on whom is up to you depending on the situation at hand.

I'm having some troubles with my spreadsheet so I figured I'd ask since EP weights have me curious.

EP weights show that after specials hit cap, and before poison hit cap (as mute) that agi is valued higher than hit.

After looking at a few armories, I've noticed that many high end rogues are below poison hit cap.

Theophany on allakhazam preaches to get over poison hit cap, and that hit even though EP weights show otherwise, should be taken first and gemmed for even, until comfortably above poison cap.

After my guild broke around muru in TBC, I stayed far from this site (aside from pocketguide and spreadsheets) so forgive me if I lack the knowledge since I made the leap to casual. I was following the ideal of getting above poison hit cap, but last night after some EP and Armory studying I dropped my hit from 330ish down to 230ish, and reggemed almost entirely for AGI. I can't tell in my spreadsheet if this is good or bad for me because of the full buffs that are set on in spreadsheet, and only having done a few 10/25mans I can't tell if there is an increase in dps.

According to EP weights and my broken spreadsheet, I should only need 99hit+precision and then I can go full out agi and whatnot, ignoring hit since it's valued less. But with people preaching the poison hit cap is a must, and armory's showing that to be false, I've become confused.

Also - Spreadsheet is showing Librarians Paper Cutters x2 to be the best non-naxx daggers pretty much, is this correct?

I'm not sure why someone would acknowledge that agility has a higher EP value than hit rating below the poison hit cap, yet still recommend gemming for hit rating over agility. That just doesn't make any sense. Are you sure you understood his comments correctly? Perhaps a link would help.

In any case, you should always gem for whatever has the best EP value. If gemming for the poison hit cap was the superior choice for raid DPS, then the spreadsheets would have indicated that, but as you have already indicated, that isn't the case.

Blue said it won't happen ever again aand... we shall believe blizz

Aw that's slacking! :p Yes, we have it on farm and got the Undying, Immortals next on target. But I'm flasked every raid no matter how farm is it and using elixirs on 5mans. Would be flasked for pvp too if I played one, every bit helps
So thanks, just wanted to make sure there is nothing I missed about LW, gathering the mats and switching over, bye LW :p

Ok gemming for best EP value which is what I'm doing, however does that mean that the 315poison cap is not a necessity as mute? And that as long as you are special capped you are fine?

This is the part where DPS variability matters as well as the average. I'll take 3500+/-200 DPS over 3510+/-500. Or in other words, I'll take the extremely minor DPS hit from gemming for expertise up to the cap, and hit up to the yellow cap, in exchange for the cycle stability and more robustness to bad luck. You really shouldn't need to re-gem much though, most of the time you can sort it out by using the appropriate food buff. If your last few upgrades have all been light on hit, use hit food.

I've been having some trouble lately choosing which spec to stick to.
I've only raided in BC as combat.

I've tried mutilate and HaT out in our Naxx raids but I feel that I do more dps in combat than in either of those two specs.
But I've had a mutilate rogue outdps me with lower gear.

I'm currently using Silent Crusader/Murder combination in the aim of acquiring Calamity's Grasp for Fist/Dagger spec.

I've played around using the Crimson Steel instead of the Silent Crusader but found the results rather disappointing.

At this point in time I'm so confused as to what I should be looking at hit/exp/crit/ap/agi...

Any advice is appreciated.

If you're combat, you should be running deadly/wound (long boss fights) or wound/wound (trash/lots of target switching). Instant poison is more or less the exclusive domain of the Mutilate rogue these days.

For those people thinking about IP/IP: What about Wound/IP or IP/Wound? If you don't have someone to poison the target, would that still be better than DP/IP? If so... does anyone know what AP you would need for it to be better than DP/IP?

To better answer your question Hallegenic, no instant poison will not be viable as combat or HaT for two major reasons:

A). Without Improved Poisons, instant poison lags behind wounding poison.

B). Because of the slower mainhand, instant poison procs are cut significantly, and as Vulajin's sheet shows, even a .1 speed increase or decrease can shift the dps that instant poison puts out by as much as 16 dps. This will only get larger as gear levels get higher.

note: So take a 2.5 for combat, versus a 1.4 for mutilate and as a VERY rough comparison using napkin math, let us calculate the difference. The combat weapon speed is 1.1 higher and lets set the dps change per point to the average which was approximately 15 per .1 speed increase or decrease. An increase of 1.1 from 1.4 would cause the combat rogue to lose 165 dps from what the mutilate rogue would see.

Even with these very rigid numbers its relatively clear that this is not yet viable.

And to answer your question Trey, no IP/Wounding nor Wounding/IP will be viable either. Again, with improved poisons wounding doesn't compare to deadly poisons.

Although, as a point of fact; IF you had no one to poison the mob, i.e no hunter or other rogue in the group/raid then this would be viable on TRASH, only because the mobs likely wouldn't live long enough for DP to out damage wounding and instant obviously doesn't debuff the target mob and therefore you would lose mut damage. However, in an encounter with a mob who will live to see 25 seconds, DP > wounding.

I'd be careful about using the word "necessary", because it's really not "necessary" to reach any sort of value for any stat. However, based on the availability of gear at level 80, a Mutilate rogue should expect to be above 99 hit rating without trying very hard. If the best gear available to you does not contain this much hit rating, it is advisable to gem for hit rating until you reach that value. Above this value, it is instead advisable to gem for agility and/or AP, depending on whatever the spreadsheet suggests at your gear level.

And, to be fair, even if you did gem for hit rating above the special hit cap, it's not really a significant difference in the grand scheme of things. This community is notorious for min/maxing, but in the overall picture, the DPS contribution from gems is just a small portion of your overall DPS. Gems only receive as much scrutiny as they do because it is something that we have a lot of control over. If your goal is simply to make sure you are not putting yourself at a disadvantage by gearing poorly, then just pick any of these gems and don't worry so much about it.

edit: nvm