Well as to Scaling IP w/ Weapon damage, doesn't that push us to slow/slow as a weapon setup? And isn't that just as problematic (for combat anyway) as the current fast/fast situation is for Mutilate?

The fact that Evisc is competitive with Envenom in the absence of Deadly Poison is comforting for needing to run utility poisons though - only rogue on Gluth is the best example.

Not necessarily, if it is done right. If you make IP scale with weapon damage, you would hit for more using slow weapons, yes, but when using fast weapons you get more applications. However, we would still prefer fast weapons due to Focused Attacks, which would also need to be normalized, but frankly, I don't know if it would be the best approach instead of just "make more fast daggers".

I personally think that IP scaling directly off weapon damage is unlikely, as at that point it's basically sword spec (but doing elemental damage), which seems to be a little off flavor, somehow. And again, I'm really not convinced to what extent the superiority of fast weapons is actually an issue - I think the shift towards fast weapons is sort of a nice change from the slow weapon obsession we've had for 3 years. The only issue, of course, being that they need to start itemizing for it. I guess one could make the case that fast weapons are a little *too* important right now - but then, it's no more important than combat OH weapon speed, which we've been dealing with for almost 2 years.

Frankly, I think the more central issue here is that Deadly just doesn't do enough damage. We're finding double IP to be competitive with IP/DP for Mutilate builds, and for some people it appears that double WP competes with WP/DP for Combat. If DP did 20% more damage, both of these problems would be solved pretty handily without increasing our overall DPS to an unreasonable extent.

It would certainly be interesting to hack up one of the spreadsheets to investigate normalising IP damage to weapon damage. Or, alternatively, normalising IP proc rate to weapon speed. The latter seems the more likely approach for Blizzard to take given that we *know* they have the underlying tech to do this (e.g. weapon enchant procs).

If poisons were normalised for weapon speed, that leaves two opposing effects.
(1) Specials hit harder with slower weapons
(2) CP and Focused Attacks proc more with slow weapons

For Combat, that will even out to MH slow / OH fast as always, while for Mutilate it's much less clear. At the very least it would be a more meaningful choice. Base weapon DPS would become the dominant factor, with weapon speed only mattering for weapons with very similar ilvl / stats.

However, that doesn't get rid of Wound/IP eventually outscaling DP because of haste/weapon speeds. I'd guess just downright increasing the damage might be good for a bandage fix for now and if the next itemization tiers don't include as much haste as the current tier of raiding gear, but I doubt removing haste from gear is likely to happen; increasing DP's scaling, or lack thereof, sounds like the most plausible idea.

I will point out that the AR glyph is currently fixed on the PTR.

Two points:

1) Yes, IP scales with haste and attack power and so forth. However, if the buff were the 20% number I tossed out there off the top of my head, it would require 20% haste (or 10% haste and 20% spell crit, or... well, you get the idea) before it caught up, which seems unlikely even with Icecrown gear. So a straight 20% increase might be a bandaid... but it'd be a very long-lived bandaid and thus probably okay.

2) However, the much larger problem is not the simple crit/haste scaling; it's the AP scaling. Consider: Deadly poison (neglecting the various multipliers, which apply equally to IP), scales at .08*AP; this is spread across 4 ticks, so each tick gains .02*AP; thus, a 5-stack scales as .1*AP per tick. Compare to Instant Poison, which scales at .1 per *proc* - this means that as long as you proc more than once per 3 seconds, IP outscales DP on AP alone. And a well-geared Mutilate rogue right now averages an IP proc every 2.5 seconds or so, per hand, even without the Envenom buff. So even on AP alone, IP outscales DP.

So, we have two problems: 1) DP doesn't do enough damage and 2) DP scaling with AP is too slow. Fortunately, these have a convenient common solution; one can simply increase the scaling on DP until it's 1) ahead of IP and 2) does enough damage. Sure, eventually you could get enough hit, haste, and crit to let IP catch up... but as long as you set the numbers such that it doesn't happen until after the end of the expansion, that's not really an issue.

Now, there are of course some issues with this; if you up DP damage enough that it outscales IP solidly, you risk getting into a situatioon where it's optimal to run IP/DP and Eviscerate because the lost DP uptime costs too much damage; but there's myriad ways to fix that, and frankly it's just not as much of an issue in the first place.

I'm not arguing that there aren't other ways to fix the problem, as a note; I'm just pointing out that a direct buff of DP AP scaling (or a nerf to AP scaling of IP/WP) is going to be a necessary part of any long-term solution; it won't do any good to fix IP's scaling with crit/haste if it still outscales DP on AP alone.

Yes you do Dirty .

Ok in anycase, thankyou Aldriana for taking another look at that, your time, and the time of everyone who has entertained the idea is appreciated. One last note is that I know my monologue posts can be boring and somethings are easy to miss/skip altogether, so as a point of fact I would like to point this out in a very short concise post so that everyone who may try ip/ip can see it:

Do not spec into imp evis!
As vulajin had said previously, it may not be a 7% flat ap bonus increase, but rather a 3-7%, but even assuming that it is in fact a 7% increase, TtT still comes out ahead by 6.5 dps at Vulajin's gear level and (strangely enough) scales better with gear than imp. evis.

This means that using 2x IP will allow for the same exact spec! You do not have to spec differently to make this work, if one was working through naxx and not planning on doing sarth, or malygos, and not already thinking about Ulduar, he/she could take 2 points out of murder again, and put those into imp evis for the 25.68 overall dps increase that it would yield. On the other hand, I would prefer to leave the spec the same, and lose the extra 26 or so dps in exchange for murder which will yield significantly higher dps on certain bosses.

So to recap shortly, essentially, you want to keep the same spec.
3 points in TtT (assuming you run with a paladin/elemental shaman) and probably keep your 2 points in murder. It will still be roughly 25 or so dps ahead of dp/ip, and this will be larger on murderable fights. This will also allow for the quick changing of poisons mid run if by some measure of a chance, poisons aren't being applied for whatever reason.
The only other change needs to be envenom ----------> eviscerate, actually apply IP to both weapons, and hopefully see a noticable damage increase!

EDIT:
I just now after I finished post got to see what you had written Aldriana, and I agree. DP does need some sort of buff, there has been some blue indication that I know of that has stated that the first thing on the list to do next patch is altering rogue dps. When I heard this I questioned, "Altering?" don't you mean fixing? Well apparently blizzard is 'considering' it, and the first thing they are going to do to us is add assassination glyphs, of which I would assume some poisons will recieve glyphs. It will be interesting to see how this affects, if it does at all, the current state of dual IP.

1) I actually find 3 points of Improved Eviscerate and 2 in TtT to be better than the other way around, by about 6 DPS. Not a big deal, but as long as we're optimizing...
2) I found another glitch in my calculations, dropping the DPS estimate to 5141. This is still ahead of DP/Envenom, but by a lesser margin.

Regarding the edit: it's not clear to me how much fixing rogue DPS actually needs. Again, it might be a little low, but it's not like our shortcomings are large enough to necessitate the word "fix" rather than "adjust" or "alter". I suspect the implication of their statement is that there's going to be some manner of adjustment to the distribution of our damage, the first part of which, I suspect, is our vastly improved AoE in the next patch. We may also at some point see adjustments to our damage breakdowns - more or less elemental damage, more or less reliance on rupture, simplified cycles, or the like. I think the point is that the damage tweak is not going to simply be "rogues do 3% more damage now" but, rather, some slightly more in-depth adjustments to certain abilities to bring the class more in line with their vision in ways that go beyond simple damage output.

I'd like to point out something that most people seem to be missing: Murder will most likely affect bosses in Ulduar. Of course, I'm assuming here, but I'd call it a pretty safe assumption, since, well, it's a titan instance.

I did 2210 DPS on Patchwerk 10-man last night, spec'd 7/51/13 into Combat.

Granted, my weapons are somewhat crap right now, but is that even respectable or did I ruin more rotations than I realized?

I was out-DPS'd by a Shadow Priest (2369). /facepalm

I just have a question about the mechanics of Rupture:

Is the attack power bonus to this based on unbuffed AP or is it based on your AP at the time of each tick?

For example:

My base AP is 3083...if I start a Rupture, then Mirror of Truth procs, will the next Rupture tick still tick based on my 3083 or will it be based on 4083?

Your Rupture will do damage as if you had 4083 AP for the entire duration. You will even get "a more powerful spell is already active" if you try to Rupture again with lower attack power. Deadly Poison, on the other hand, will refresh to your current AP every time you get a new application (or an application refresh - say, you already have 5 DP on the target and it applies again, when that happens the damage will be calculated for your AP at the time it reapplied).

Edit: as clarified by Drumbum later in this thread, I misread your post as if your Mirror of Truth procced and *then* you Rupture. Apologies for any confusion.

It's based on your stats at the moment of application.

Signet for trash, ive noticed mine procs right at the start of any combat together with my trinkets, Circle for bosses unless it puts you a ways over expertise cap.

edit: oh wow, there was a whole nother page after that >.< sorry menz

Just for clarification here, since I assume Neto either misread the original post or made a typo in his response:

The Rupture would behave as if you had 3083 AP (not 4083 AP) for the entire duration, because that is the amount of attack power you had when Rupture was applied. The trinket proc occurring after the application will have no effect on Rupture, unless you overwrote the previous Rupture while that buff was active.

Yes.

Yes. I'm not sure what quote the OP is referencing: the closest I can find is this from GC.

Other posts in the same thread here. MMO-Champion BlueTracker - WTB Blue Responses

What that thread says to me is that the problems they have identified are

1) Damage slightly too low on stand-and-nuke fights
2) Damage too dependent on specific itemisation and on raid buffs (thus performs poorly at low gear levels and smaller groups)
3) Assassination is weak on shorter fights where other classes have long cooldowns to blow.

That looks pretty close to the informed consensus in this thread. The only commonly-voiced concern he's not acknowledged so far as I can see is that HfB can be seen as plain boring along the lines of Warrior Rampage - and they previously changed that precisely because it degenerated into "hit this button every 30 seconds or have your damage nerfed".

Dirtydeeds, I have experienced several trinkets like the [Oracle Talisman of Ablution], including the [Skyguard Silver Cross] and [Darkmoon Card: Madness] and I can confirm that you do need the Killing Blow for the trinket to Procure. The text in the [Darkmoon Card: Madness] clearly states you need the killing blow, but it should be worded like that for the [Oracle Talisman of Ablution] too. Unfortunately the requirement for the Proc means this is redundant in Instances and Raids, as it is not an easy task to just get the killing blow each time, and also due to time between pulls this is further redundant.

Thank you. This is disappointing but I really appreciate the information.

I have a question, and I can't currently check the spreadsheet


but if IP/IP Evis is competative with DP/IP Envenom


might it possibly be a DPS increase to drop the 5 points in improved poisons, but 3 into improved Evisc and 2 into CQC to finish it off and then go WP/WP?

You can't put the last 2 in CQC since you still need 51 points to get HFB. And there's not really any good DPS talents to take in Assassination instead of the poison ones. So I don't think that's going to work.