Thanks for this, much appreciated.

After some time with my calculator, itemrankings and thinktanking I found myself facing a problem I really haven't seen being approached here (in detail).

some introductory information about my character:

Troll Mutilation Rogue
Enchanting/Mining as Tradeskills


With the gear-build I came up with, I could reach both the expertise and hitcap (@hit: 315 and 237 are both reachable without specific gems) and still look at ~3400AP and ~35%crit.

Problem: I would exchange [Valorous Bonescythe Gauntlets] with [Frosted Adroit Handguards], leaving me with only 3/5 T7.5 (Head, Legs, Shoulders) and therefore I'd miss out on the 4/5 Setbonus.

As a Mutilate Rogue, the only CP move I use is Mutilate which atm costs me, with 4/5, 57 Energy instead of 60.
I really have no idea how to value this. The most basic thing I came up with is that for every 20 Mutilates i can do 1 additional Mutilate, which translates to (with my current gear) ~3-5k yellow damage, possible 1k IP hit, possible DP hit and 2-3 Combo Points. Now I'd have to evaluate this with undodgable envenom/rupture and not poison resistances.

After the mandatory "run it through the spreadsheet" I saw that with my capped expertise/hit 3/5 gear I'd loose about ~180DPS from my normal 4/5 setup.

Now that should quit any pro 3/5 gear talk, but as I haven't found any detailed information about the 4/5 bonus I'm curious if anyone might argue that the spreadsheet is missing something here.

thanks!

You're thinking about it the wrong way.

With 5/5 relentless strikes, your Ruptures are free, and your Envenoms cost 10 energy. That means you spend almost your energy income on Mutilates. A 5% reduction in Mutilate cost is therefore almost 5% boost in your yellow damage, straight up. Where you're falling down is in only considering the boost to the Mutilate damage, and not the extra Envenom / Rupture damage you get from having the extra combo points.

I'm looking for some thoughts on weapon (and poison) choices given some assumptions about current mutilate and FoK's mechanics. I have a set of fast/fast weapons (Omen1.5/LPC1.3) and a set of slow weapons (Fleshshaper1.8/DoB1.8).

For trash pulls I assume that the vast majority of my damage is going to come from FoK and that pulls will generally be dead fast. Based on this my thinking is that high base weapon damage in both MH and OH is imperative assuming FoK looks to both MH and OH and does 150% weapon damage. I also assume there is no point using deadly poison as it wont have time to do its damage and, assuming FoK always procs the poison applied to MH and OH (is this the case or does it look to % chance to apply), double instant is the way to go. Focused attacks and so forth should be largely irrelevant as the huge majority of damage will be from FoK.

Conclusion for trash: use slow/slow weapons with IP/IP and spam FoK. I've also assumed blade flurry works with FoK though I haven't really looked into it.

For bosses and pulls involving only a few high HP targets that take a while my assumption is that my fastest weapon (LPC) should be in the MH with IP on it and second fastest (Omen) should be in the OH with DP on it to maximise mutilate DPS with FAttacks and poisons.

So - points of query/clarification are:

(1) for FoK is slow/slow the way to go for max DPS?
(2) does FoK always apply the poisons from both weapons?
(3) does blade flurry work with FoK?
(4) does FoK proc focused attacks?
(5) is fastest MH with IP and second fastest OH with DP the way to go now the poison bug has been fixed?

With my build I have been doing pretty obscene damage on trash but i'm looking to maximise it by clarifying some of these points. I'm spec'd 43/21/7 for decent mutilate DPS (though behind HfB builds on single targets) and outrageous damage on trash or two+ targets (Overkill with 120 energy (vigor and glyph) out of stealth opening with cold blood + blade flurry + FoK spam).

Im sure this was here billion times but i gotta ask again...

Gemming.

Mutilate=AP
but what about combat? agi or ap? or does it even matter? thanks

If I'm not mistaken, I see the effect of Savage Combat appear as a debuff on any mob I have poisoned. If the Master Poisoner talent works the same way, and if you are providing that benefit to your raid, you might consider Wound Poison on at least one of your trash daggers, because it has a good chance to be applied, does pretty decent damage, and will grant people 3% more crit chance against every mob hit by it. That said, since Envenom isn't as important to be using on trash, you might consider double Wound, or even Wound and Anesthetic for when that can be useful. I mean, the goal is for the raid to clear trash as quickly and effectively as possible... not for you as an individual to put out the best possible DPS. If you give up some of your own DPS to provide useful utility, it might be worth it. Just an idea...

Also, I remember reading that Blade Flurry does work with FoK, but my understanding is that it will only trigger on the mobs close enough to be hit by a normal melee attack. [On that note, but not totally related: I've got a cycle for trash that works very well for me, as Combat. TotT to the tank, FoK, BF, KS, FoK, FoK... shit is dead. When I have my cooldowns, even without popping Adrenaline Rush, I can put out even more AoE DPS than most casters I have run with.]

Lastly, why spec for trash? I mean, as nice as it is to blast through trash a bit faster, are you ever really chewing class on the trash pulls leading up to a boss? Spec to kill the bosses... inflating your numbers on trash is silly if it means doing less on the boss that actually drops loot.

Follow up FoK Question:
Exactly, HOW does it work with Blade Flurry? If only the main hand hit from FoK is applied to the flurry target (as opposed to the MH and OH hits), does that mean only 1 of my main-hand hits if I FoK 50 targets? Is it the biggest MH hit of all the FoKed targets? A random one? Do we know how that "decision" is made?

I'm assuming this is the way it is (only 1 hit is blade flurried to the secondary target) otherwise the target that got the BF'd damage from FoK would get NUKED if your FoK hit a lot of targets.

My understanding is as follows:

1) ALL mainhand FoK hits proc a Blade Flurry hit
2) Blade flurry hits can only hit a target within melee range (as compared to the 8yd range of FoK)

This does mean that if there is only one target in melee range of you, it will get pretty much gibbed (and/or you'll pull aggro), however that is a fairly unlikely scenario. It is much more likely that the majority of mobs in the pull will be within melee range of you, since they tend to clump up on the tank unless they're casters.

I'm going to do some testing and post the results if no one beats me to it.

Is this true? Will all of the BF procs hit one target, or will they be "wasted" to invalid targets?

It would make for an interesting tactic. Keep up all of Noth's trash, have add tank pull them out of melee range then BF FoK and proc all of the MH hits to the boss. Would probably work on any fight with a lot of trash adds if you could coordinate it with the tanks.

I tested this a couple weeks ago, and yes, songster is exactly correct.

However, I'd like to point out that Blade Flurry does not pick a random target in melee range. It has some sort of method for determining which target to transfer hits to if there are more than one target in melee range. I'm not sure what exactly it uses to make the decision (perhaps closest or something of that nature).

As such, even if there are many targets in your melee range when you use it, every hit duplicated by Blade Flurry will hit the same target, except for one (because the FoK hit that landed on that target must be transferred to another mob). So, still, the result of using Blade Flurry is that it will always gimp one target, not spread them out randomly.

Unless, as he suggests, it's the only target in melee range. The bigger problem is how you manage to keep the boss in melee range and all the adds between 5 and 8 yards away - positioning at that level of detail is a bit tricky. And to be perfectly frank, it's not clear how much this would help your single-target DPS anyway - it's probably better than using normal cycles, but not necessarily by a huge margin. I think this gets filed in the category of "good ideas that aren't worth the effort".

So, this is some rather old discussion, but now that the Mutilate double proc OH bug has been fixed, does that make IP/IP even better in comparison to IP/DP?

I gave it a try this week, dropping Murder for 2/3 Imp Eviscerate (obviously, it's not the optimal spec except for Naxx), but the difference is notable on short fight duration bosses such as Faerlina, due to Bloodlust uptime and better haste scaling of running double IP.

Your gems and enchants are fine, all though it's kinda pointless to swap back and forth between agi and ap gems. You should probably look into gaining some expertise though.

You should probably look into getting another paper cutter and just duel wield two of them until you can get a webbed death or a murder. You may also be able to simple put your MH in your oh slot and increase your dps, depending on the answer to my question.


What is the deal with people doing fast OH slow MH now? What is the change to make that more appealing? With that idea would you still put Instant on the MH and Deadly on the OH?

If they're going fast OH slow MH they're doing it wrong. Raid PvE anyways, MH the faster of the daggers for more poison procs off finishers. Maybe it's pvp/grinding if you're just looking at armory. But either way, you put instant on the faster of your daggers, deadly on the slower one.

Also depending of the speed of your daggers, you would put IP in your offhand if it was 1.4, or deadly if it was greater than that.

I see many mut specced rogues out there - some with fast/fast and some with slow/fast. Most of them though are slow/fast.

You also really need to work on your expertise rating - 4 is quite low. 19 is a good number to start to aim for, but you just need to see about swapping out gear until you find the balance that you need to succeed. As with BC - +hit is what needed to be worked upon, but balancing between +hit, expertise, AP and crit is the challenge for rogues out there

No. If your offhand was 1.4 spd. Your MH should be 1.3-1.4 speed then. By that mechanic, IP goes to your main hand.

By one mechanic, you want to IP the faster of the daggers.
By another mechanic, you want to main hand the faster of the daggers.

Finishers can proc MH poisons. So main handing the faster dagger with IP gives the best amount of procs. That additional poison dps more than offsets the slightly lower mutilate damage.

Sorry if this has been answered, but what would be the second best current OH weapon enchant for raid mutilate rogue. Does this change with respect to poison hit cap? What would the dps difference be between berserking OH vs. 2nd best weapon enchant?

Most of those questions would best be answered through Spreadsheet testing.



As of late, I've found myself pondering cycle theory. My current optimal cycle of 3s/5r/5e has an average cycle length of 24.54 seconds. I find this to be problematic, as it seems current gear levels do not allow for a fixed combat cycle that achieves 100%, or theoretically close to it, rupture uptime.

The question then is, would a variable cycle that works within 5-pt slice and dice cycles to refresh rupture immediately as it drops while weaving eviscerates in between critical SnD and rupture refreshes be a significant dps gain over the traditional fixed cycles, due to the vastly improved rupture uptime. especially due to not relying on SS-glyph procs to speed the cycle fast enough to refresh rupture ASAP?

The other day I had a thought.

DoTs in WoW can be categorized into two major types.

The first kind is the much more common kind. These are the DoTs that are refreshed manually (e.g. warlock DoTs). When refreshing DoTs this way, absolutely everything about the DoT is recalculated, SP, Crit, +% damage bonuses, everything. When DoTs are refreshed in this way you can "clip" the next tick - If you refresh a dot that ticks every 3 seconds when it has 1 second left until its next tick, it will be four seconds before it ticks.

There exists, however, a second means of refreshing DoTs. When a DoT is refreshed by a means out of the players direct control, the "tick timer" so to speak, is not reset (otherwise deadly poison would never tick.)

The idea I had is this: When Shadow Word: Pain is refreshed via Mind Flay, +% based damage bonuses (see: Tricks of the Trade) are not recalculated; so, if you tricks a Shadow Priest and then he puts up the SW:P it will get +15% damage forever.

...is this true of Deadly Poison, and if so can it be exploited to increase dps?

In summation my questions are the following:

1) Does Deadly Poison function like Shadow Word: Pain in that if it gets a Tricks of the Trade damage bonus when applied it will keep that bonus forever?

2) If it does behave in that way, will it continue to if the number of stacks changes.

3) Assuming the answers to questions 1 & 2 are yes, can we exploit this to increase our dps? If we can, we would need to look at cycles in which deadly poison never drops to 0 stacks. The thoughts I had on the matter were we could: A) use a regular cycle substituting eviscerate for envenom at 5cp if rupture is already on the boss or B) envenom aftert the first mutilate if rupture isn't on the boss and only allow ourselves the "luxury" of mutilating twice if rupture is off the boss.

Question three probably merits its own thread, but first I need one and two answered. If no rogue knows the answers off the top of their head, I'll be able to sit down with a rogue buddy and try it on a dummy after my raid tonight but thats half a day hence.

You forgot question (4) Will it be remotely worth it?

DP is something less than 10% of your damage. A 15% boost to that, if sustained perfectly, is therefore less than a 1.5% boost to your total DPS. And to get even that you would have to never use a 5 point Envenom. i.e. drop to Eviscerate any time the procs happened to give you 5 CPs. That will outweigh any benefit you might get.

What you're talking about is the same bug as rolling Lifeblooms and Scorpid Poison. They were fixed. Also, warlocks have a DoT-refresh mechanism, Everlasting Affliction causes Haunt to refresh Corruption. The auto-refresh mechanism re-calculates all damage effects. There were times in Beta were it didn't recalculate, and where it would not refresh when a stronger effect was in place, but I think both of those effects are fixed now.