I'm probably not totally qualified to answer this question with completeness and 100% solid math but the short version is and will likely remain: Yes.

(I've apologized a few times but I will do this so that everyone can understand why; I DO NOT use Aldriana's spreadsheet because I simply do not have the space on my computer right now to download the neccesary files to use his, not for any other reason than that one!)
This said, using Vulajin's sheet only as an example, mutilate is 5 - 6 % ahead depending on how you play it at WISHLIST gear levels on NON murderable mobs. It APPEARS that since it is a lower difference at lower gear levels that mutilate scales better... This would be expected in some ways being that mut generates much more damage from poisons which are proc based making haste more useful than for combat, also FA dualy scales with crit and haste. Combat does scale with crit but seemingly on a lower level ----------> Prey on the weak/Sinister Glyph. There is much more to be discussed here in the scaling department but again, I am not totally up to explaining all of it as I don't have the numbers in front of me and I don't have access to everything I SHOULD to begin quoting material. One more note to be sure of here though, the only thing combat surely does scale better with is armor pen, and I can't see a rogue of any spec or sort ever attempting to stack armor pen. for obvious reasons...

In any event, to reiterate and again clearly answer the question as best I can, YES mutilate is better, and it appears it will stay that way because it appears to scale better with gear. Also, little mention of murder was made, once murder comes into play mutilate beats out combat by a metric ton, and the spreadsheets show this so clearly that a few dps here and there should not be quarreled over.... Also, an astute rogue would notice a distinct lack of assassination glyphs at the moment, and would also note that that will probably be fixed eventually furthering mutilate's increase in dps over combat.

Ok, continuing on from my previous post -- in regards to a combat evis build doing better, for me at least, than a combat rupture build.

I think what I discovered was that when I raid, there is at least 2 warriors sundering. Now, with sundering always up, my eviscerates are hitting harder than the ruptures. Given that the ruptures ignore armour, when sunder is present - that is a benefit to eviscerate.

To put this in perspective. When I compared my DPS on the following bosses:

Patchwerk
Thadius
gluth

when I had a combat eviscerate build (removed points from blood splatter and put them in Imp. Eviscerate), on theses bosses I was doing rather well. The following week, same bosses but now I am using the regular Combat build with blood splatter. My dps put me 2 places lower than I was just a week prior. Now, what is interesting or more apt, telling, the same raiders who were in the top 5 the first week, where the same as the second week (in this example, I am just comparing 1st with evis, second with rupture). I was 2 places back from where I was the previous week. The only thing that changed was that I used rupture in the rotation and have valorous 2 piece bonus.

So, I am thinking that when there are no sunders, the rupture build could beat out the eviscerate build by a small margin. When sunder is present, eviscerate build clearly beats the combat rupture build. Also, if your running heroic dungeons (not raids), the eviscerate build still comes out ahead as you can't rupture the mobs (they die too fast), and the imp. eviscerate points is a dps gain on all encounters. The bosses die too fast to create an effective cycle. I feel in heroics, you are wasting those two points in blood splatter.

Do you have the bleed debuff? (Trauma/Mangle) Also, it is kind of hard to judge these things without WWS logs to be sure that you in fact are playing the way we assume.

Also, there are no DPS numbers stated. You are comparing yourself to using the DPS ranking within the group. This is very mercurial. The other members could have gotten upgrades, changed their rotations, changed glyphs, etc... which could have altered your ranking in regards to theirs.

I feel that Thaddius should be thrown out of your testing.

Because of the Polarity Shifts there is almost constantly a different number of damage boost charges on you. Depending on how much you have to switch sides and how many stacks you have on either side could greatly effect your dps on the fight.

For example if you get lucky enough to have almost exclusively a positive charge and always 11+ people on the positive side you'll do much more damage than if you had to switch sides repeatedlyhaving anywhere from 8 - 12 on the buff.

I'd reccomend testing on the target dummy so that you can control the environment.

Not to mention you can be forced to stand in front of Thaddius the whole fight. Very bad benchmark fight.

Well, lets take a look at the numbers for a moment, shall we?

A 5-pt rupture, according to wowhead, has a base damage of 217 + .0375 * AP per tick. This is modified by Blood Spatter (30%), Mangle (30%), and the tier bonus (10%), and with the glyph we get 10 ticks. Hence, the overall damage of a 5pt Rupture is (217+.0375*AP)*10*1.3*1.3*1.1 = 4024 + .697 * AP.

A 5-pt Eviscerate, on the other hand, does an average of 2104 + .35 * AP. This is modified by Improved Eviscerate (20%), and Aggression (15%), bringing the base damage to (2104+.35*AP) * (1+.2+.15) = 2840.4 + .4725 AP.

Now, lets assume a raid buffed crit rate of 45% (which is pretty reasonable for a well-geared rogue), and 150 ArPen rating. With the Eviscerate glyph, Eviscerates will thus crit 55% of the time, and with Prey on the Weak they crit for 2.4x base damage; this means that the average Eviscerate will do 1+.55*(2.4-1) = 1.77 times as much damage as the base, noncrit value.

On the other hand, the mob has a base of 13083 armor, reduced by 3925 from Sunders and 1260 from Faerie Fire, plus another 9.74% from our 150 ArPen rating. This brings effective armor to 7128, and thus mitigation from armor reduces damage to 68.12% of raw damage dealt. So, we need to take the above Eviscerate damage estimate and multiply by 1.77 (for crits) and .6812 (for armor); this leaves us with total effective Eviscerate damage of 3424.8 + .5697 * AP

So: the base damage of Eviscerate (3424.8) is lower than the base damage for Rupture (4024), and the scaling value of Eviscerate (.5697) is lower than that for Rupture (.697). Hence, at all AP values, an Eviscerate does less damage than a Rupture outright... and costs more energy. Hence it's rather hard to see how it's going to result in higher DPS.

Now, one could argue that with more crit and ArPen, it would catch up; so lets add another 15% crit and bump the ArPen rating up to 400; this is well beyond what one would reasonably have in current gear, but we'll see what happens. This brings the damage estimate up to (2840.4 + .4725 AP) * 1.98 * .7227 = 4064 + .6761 * AP; now, while the scaling is still lower, the base damage is slightly higher, so at low enough AP Eviscerate would do more damage. Solving, we find the crossover point is at... 1435 AP. Which even a *naked* raid-buffed rogue has. So even with incredibly unrealistic crit and ArPen rates, Rupture does more damage at all reasonable attack powers; it also costs less energy. So it seems safe to say that any cycle replacing Eviscerate with Rupture is going to result in a damage loss.

So: if you have concrete evidence that the situation is otherwise, or that there is a problem with these calculations - great, lets see it. But if all you have is 2 WWS with unknown differences in gear and buffs, and potentially quite different amounts of RNG luck, discussing it further is not really productive.

If you take into account the energy cost, using the values that Ald showed for 70% Eviscerate crit rate and 400 ArPen, you'd get (116.1142 + .01931714 * AP) damage per energy for Eviscerate, versus Rupture's (160.96 + .02788 * AP) damage per energy. Hence, in any fight where energy is a limitation, Rupture is simply better.

Now, assuming a gimmick fight where you have 90% Eviscerate crit, like Loatheb, and with the same 400 ArPen, your Eviscerates will do (2840.4 + .4725 AP) * 2.24 * .7227 = (4598.17 + .7649 * AP) damage, or (131.37628 + 0.02185 * AP) damage per energy, against Rupture's (160.96 + .02788 * AP). Simply put, as long as energy is a limitation, Rupture will pretty much always be the best choice.

That's not quite an accurate assessment of the energy situation, because with combo moves you have to look at the energy efficiency in combination with the combo moves used to generate the finisher. It would be more accurate to add 1/4th of the damage of a Sinister Strike to the Rupture damage before comparing, but even that isn't wholly accurate. What you really want to do is reverse engineer how many Sinister Strikes it takes it takes to do a 5pt finisher (on average), and the compute (number * SS damage + finisher damage) / (number * SS cost + finisher cost) for each finisher. But that gets messy and, suffice it to say: the end result is that Rupture is just better.

I usually raid as mutilate using two paper cutters. Anyway, I wanted a change so I decided to try out combat fist/sword using tbc weapons, and I went to test it on a heroic training dummy. But that's not what this is about. I thought I noticed one Sinister strike being dodged and i checked recount - I was right. As i have read here, expertise cap is 26, and I get 22 expertise from gear which resulted in dropping one point in Weapon expertise, which puts me at 27. That one point was placed in sword spec to get 5/5. What I don't understand is how did Sinister strike fail to hit assuming I'm both above yellow hit cap and above Expertise cap? Not to mention I had been hitting the dummy for a short period of time (lets say 3 minutes), so that one dodge kinda bothers me. Did I do something wrong or expertise tables are incorrect?

Screenshot:

Is your fist skill capped?

I know that Mutilate build needs two fast daggers or slow MH / fast OH if [Sinister Revenge]. But since burst damage is so important on trashes (blessed [Glyph of Vigor]) I wonder if slow OH wouldn't be better for that dull parts of raid.
After all, in the world of AoE, we can't rely on poisons and/or Envenom on mobs who don't live long enough to let us maintain any rotation.
What do Elitists think of swapping daggers depending on target's type (or HP left)?

Well trash is aoed now with rogues doing literally nothing - AoErs will drop the pack in same amount of time no matter if you were able to nuke down 1 of the targets or making heavy borean leathers as ghostcralwer put it.
With patch 3.0.8 when FoK gets some normalized dmg + no cooldown we may actually take part in trash clearing, but the normalization will make useless to take slower weapons anyway, so I guess no is the answer to the question.

FoK is not being normalized, it simply changes to a 150% damage buff when using daggers (as in; 50% more damage done if using daggers). This means that Kwinto is right in that a set of slow daggers will do more damage in a FoK spam situation then 2 x [Webbed Death]. If it's feasible and what sort of damage increase it'll result in is something I haven't done any calculations on, but presuming lucky drops I guess it could be handy for those trash packs to have a set of slow, hard hitting daggers.

I'm also guessing the best enchant for a FoK set on weapons is different then what's best for a boss.

To extrapolate with a quote:

FoK is not normalised damage, it's simply a 1.5x multiplier for daggers (unless something changed unannounced). That means you'll still want to swap in slower weapons for AoE. Combat will only need to swap the offhand, Mutilate will want to swap both.

The "normalization" effect (want to be careful here since it's NOT the same as what we usually call "normalization", i.e., attack power normalization) actually makes it more advantageous to use slow daggers, not less advantageous. Fan of Knives will still be unnormalized with respect to attack power, unless of course they are making an additional unannounced change to normalize to attack power as well.

But I do agree that overall, it's probably not going to be that significant of a difference. If you really want to min/max, though, then sure, swap to slow/slow for AOE trash.

Edit: I post too slow.

No, speed is VERY relevant. Like you yourself just said, it's unnormalized. A weapon with a lower base damage can easily be superior to one of higher base damage, if the first dagger is significantly slower. A 1.8 dagger gets nearly 30% more damage from attack power than a 1.4 dagger.

Hello, first time poster long time reader >.>. I've been searching all morning for a post about what gem is better for mutilate AGI or AP. I'm hit caped also am expertised cap actually im .50% over the cap soo all my sockets on my gear should be filled with one or the other yah know? Well I have JC and ENCH. and since blizzard is dumb and didnt feel the need to put in a shifting I can stick 27 AGI gems in blue or yellow sockets if need be. So the question is which is better dmg? I read a post saying that AP is slightly better, then I read another post saying AGI is marginaly better then AP. They also said having slower and faster weapons also changes this as well, having slower weapons would make AP stronger stat and having faster leans twords AGI is this true? Well currently im using Murder and WD, but I will be using Sinister Revenge and WD when I get a hold of it. Thx.

Use the spreadsheet.

I would love to, but this computer doesnt have anything cept for games on it my other computer is the one with excel on it and its under construction. Just looking for someone who knows the answer of the top of there head. If I dont get a reply I can try to download a temporary Excel trial I guess.

There isn't an answer off the top of anyone's head. Agi or AP can both be the best stat, depending on what your other stats currently are.

Generally they're pretty close though, so I prefer agi since the crit helps smooth out cycles, but they are still close regardless.

Because EP weights for Agi and AP can flip flop with each other even to the point where you're using both at the same time for max DPS, any answer we give won't be accurate. The spreadsheets are the only real way to get an accurate answer.

If you just want an answer though: Go Agility, Aldriana stated once that any DPS lost by using Agi over AP when they're so close would easily be made up by the time you gain with a single dodge. (Dead DPS is no DPS.)

Download OpenOffice. It's free and works just as good as Excel in most situations, and both the major sheets at the moment are compatible.