I was wondering about the differences between the tools available for rogues. Is it just implementation? Is there a real variance in how people think things work? I'm asking because I plugged all my gear into both the Java App, Rawr and Ald's sheet and got some significantly different suggestions (entire gemming schemes, what weapons to use, etc). Do you just take the differences with a grain of salt or is one more accurate than the others?

Edit: Kaidagar beat me to it. I would simply also add that aldriana's sheet has not been updated in a little while because for most scenarios it is still highly accurate. Lich king weapon stats and rupture critting are two things it will not model properly though.

I too had this question a few months ago. I'll see what I can do to clarify for you.

As Kaidagar is quoted above, EP = Equivalence Points. More specifically, 1 EP = 1 Attack Power. So, if the spreadsheets/tools value a stat at 2.07 EP, let's say haste, then 1 point of haste would be worth 2.07 Attack Power to you. AE and AEP would be the same idea, except comparing everything to Agility instead of Attack Power.

These EP, AEP, AE values are used to help decide A) which stats are worth gemming with your gear setup, and B) which pieces are actually better than others, especially on the same item level. All these values do is give us a scale to compare the other stats to so that we can make better decisions regarding gearing and gemming.

At least that's my understanding of it, please correct me if I'm wrong.

This may sound perhaps like a stupid question but why does combat pool to 60 energy before an evisc. I've been trying to find why for the past 30 minutes and cannot find why. I can find that it's what I should do, but I'd like to understand why.

My own personal attempts of understanding this / making sense of it has been in the way of hitting a target dummy which is obviously not going to give me anything too conclusive. But I saw a loss of dps when pooling to 60 energy on the dummy. I'm sure there is a good reason for the pooling... I just don't know what reason that is and would appreciate being enlightened. Thanks

I know that for a while I was getting much different gemming suggestions from Rawr than from the spreadsheet available here. The main reason being that the gemming template on Rawr is terrible as of now. But if you take 10 min or so to go through it and add in a lot of the possible combinations you'll find that they really do come very close to one another.

Hi all,

I want to first say that I love this forum and have depended on it for years (as I come in and out of the game) for the cutting edge in rogue dps information.

I just starting raiding (after returning to the game from a long hiatus) and went mutilate. After a couple of weeks of gearing, today, Gutbuster (ilvl 264 mace) dropped in IC10-H and I assumed it would be an upgrade to my 245 MH dagger. So my plan was to respec to Combat Maces (using my 245 1.4 MH Muti dagger in the OH). That plan got trashed when, to my surprise, the spreadsheets told me that mutilate with my old daggers outperformed combat with the 264 mace. I played around with buffs but with my gear, mutilate held a consistent 100-300 dps margin (depending on buffs) over combat. I did see that I am not optimally gemmed for combat (the combat spreadsheet advises Agi vs the AP the mutilate spreadsheet advises), but the dps difference is peanuts (they're very close). That's not the issue. Also, putting a mace in the offhand (to reap the full benefits of the combat mace spec) isn't the issue either (I played with that, even putting another 264 mace in the OH). I even tried equipping a 264 sword instead of a mace and speccing Hack and Slash (to see if maybe combat mace spec was the problem) and mutilate still comes out ahead. Since this seems to defy logic, I feel like I am making a very simple mistake and was wondering if anyone could shed any light on this.

One comment about my enchants: I have a titanium weapon chain on one weapon (instead of Berserker) because I use the same weapon for PvP and can't afford to alternate enchants every other day; anyway, that is irrelevant to my issue in this post.

@Brone
What combat and mutilate boil down to these day's is just a matter of preference. From my understanding they are pretty close with equal gear on tank 'n spanks, but ofc you have to keep in mind that when there is movement and or add's involved to a fight is when that changes. Combat has all of these magnificent skills that help's it get an edge over Mutilate.... And ofc we now have a 25% dmg buff meaning that fight's become shorter and combat gain's even a more of an edge.

But really you should just play the spec that you feel most comfortable in, be it mutilate with it's watching out for envenom buff's or combat with it's cooldown management.

edit: and ofc you can't spec into 2 different weapon specialization's with combat so you loose the arp gained from mace spec on your offhand, thus reducing your dps.

It is worth keeping in mind that the spreadsheets are only talking about tank and spank, and in my experience Mut rogues fall by several thousand dps on fights like BPC, Rotface, LK compared to combat rogues, and that combat is a more forgiving and capable spec if you are having to do anything weird like help tricks a beast to a ranged member on Saurfang.

I am very close to the crit cap (with procs) in my current gear. I also have glyph of evisc, which gives 10% extra crit for evisc. If I pop an evisc while agility procs from DBW, will it be as if I am crit capped? Thanks

No, when people talk about crit capping it has to do with white swings and it's mainly due to glancing blows, neither of which affects yellow attacks. You have a long way to go before you crit cap your specials.

For 25 LK, definitely, on 10 keeping the 1 valk slowed is pretty trivial, and while I hadn't thought about the run speed side (Engineer) my experience is that combat comes back faster if you get knocked back or if there are Keleseth threat issues or w/e because of the focused threat gen of tricks combined with a cooldown blow. If people weren't messing up I can see mut doing as well, but from my experience the faster start up speed favors combat. I don't have as solid an argument on Rotface, it may just be that our mut rogue isn't as good as our combat rogues, but the combat rogues always seem to pull substantially ahead on this encounter.