What is generaly hailed as a "correct" amount of expertise for a Combat rogue?

Somewhere between the range of 10 and 26.

It is 16 to cap with 2/2 Weapon Expertise

Whichever amount yields you the highest dps.

It's oftentimes recommended that you use a spreadsheet to figure that out. Furthermore, should you be interested in some more information about expertise rating, my suggestion would be to browse through The Wotlk Pocket Guide.

I'm very confused then, as if I change the gems out that would put me at 181 hit. That's awfully low, isn't it? So what I'm hearing about hit isn't always true? Everywhere you read you see "get to the hit cap first no matter what". This is what's confusing to me. So even though my hit would be at 181, I should stick to the spreadsheet? Is it the Naxx gear that's making the difference for me? Armory link to my character.

That was semi-valid thinking in 2.x but with the changes in WotLK, this is very much wrong. The only hit cap you should even consider is the specials hit cap for things like Sinister Strike, Mutilate, Eviscerate and Envenom. After that the value of hit drops significantly. After reaching the poison hit cap, the value of hit drops even more.

You're already familiar with the spreadsheet, you should also make yourself very familiar with http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t37183-pocket_guide_wotlk/ as well.

And there's no need to keep linking your character, we can all see it from the link by your name if we so choose.

I seriously doubt it based on how Warlock dots that can crit work, they are done on a per tick basis now.

Short answer is we won't really know how Cold Blood interacts with it (if at all) until someone gets the set bonus. Long answer, I find it hard to believe it will crit every tick. In fact if I had to guess I'd bet Cold Blood would have no effect on Rupture, even with the set bonus.

short time reader, first time poster here.

I use to play FFXI and didn't start to play WoW till this expansion. So that brings me to my question. I finally just got Cal Grasp and replaced my Silent Crusader. I have hailstorm for my offhand currently. So before i got CG i was doing like 4.5-5k dps on PW, then Tuesday my first time being able to use CG in a raid, i only did 3.9k... I also changed my neck to maly25 reward(prob going back to fools trial tho). I was already a little below the hit cap with food before so loosing the 31 hit from the sword +28 from neck, i figured would maybe make my dmg change but the added dmg from CG i thought would be enough to annul that and I would survive till i got either 2 drake legs or maly 25 hands. My hit at the time was about 240 and expertise was at 20. Now after doing some regeming, and getting some feet that have expertise im at 279 and 24 exp. Well I cant survive(now granted our maly25/OS run is tonight but who's to say it will drop finally?) I guess my ultimate question here is then does swordx2 really add that much dmg? I had been checking my dps chart to see how many procs i get from sword spec and its never really that insane that it jumps out at me.. not enough to cover an extra 5% crit i thought. Did i have one bad night or should i be worried?

Well the big thing is, GC is a higher item level than SC. So, with that along with 5% crit, it should be well above. But there's too little information to tell. Did you max your unarmed skill? Did you lose some raid buffs? Did you slime dip and screwed with Prey on the Weak? Did you stand too much on the side and got parried a lot? Did you have massive lag making you not hit buttons? Telling us stats mean very little. Obviously something went wrong in the raid.

Plus, you seemed a bit obsessed with hit and expertise. Read the pocket guide found around here and use the spreadsheets for real answers. Not magic ones where you gotta reach certain level of stats to achieve perfect dps.

unarmed is at 400, raid buffs were pretty much the same, had everything you can get really, we usually have a pretty well divided raid setup. No slime dip, always stand right behind PW, nope no lag... this is why i was concerned. Could the lack of hit/expertise made that big a difference? For the whole raid it was noticeably lower.. i even went from 7kish to 6.4k on Thad.

I'm confused by this. Are you speculating that:

(a) If rupture crits, only the first tick will crit?
(b) If rupture crits, all ticks of that rupture will crit?
(c) Each tick will get a "roll", and some will be crits?

I think only (c) is even possible based on the way such similar game mechanics work (e.g. Holy Nova, et al.). If there's a likelihood of (a) or (b) or something I've missed, please share what the thinking is.

Just from the "for what it's worth" file... The benefit of gemming AP over agility right now is small when raiding and generally negative when out in the world killing things. It's likely that come 3.1, agility gemming will be superior to AP gemming (in part because there is a crit chance on rupture, in part because combat will have more attacks that can crit, and perhaps other things). Some of us went the entire content cycle gemming agility over AP figuring that min-maxing wasn't as valuable as a dose of survivability. You might consider that with 3.1 imminent.

That said, the spreadsheet will indeed give you the best dps advice, the value of hit between the specials cap and the poison cap is solid, but not so high you can easily at a glance know whether hit or ap/agility is your best stat to boost without doing the calculations, etc. For that reason, if you are min-maxing or simply trying to get the absolute best dps you can, you are always well served by using the spreadsheet.

He's talking about Cold Blood, that CD that gives your next attack 100% chance to crit. So as Rupture being the next attack, should it crit all the ticks, or just a tick, or none of it at all.

Hey guys, I've been mut for all of WoTLK thus far and it's been great. I've managed to get some great gear and I pull 3-5k dps on raids depending on what buffs there are.

My question to you guys is, how does combat compare to mut? I know it's been asked before, but the answer given wasnt what I was looking for.

My question is, what is the dps difference between combat and mut ? I tried combat for the heck of it and could barely stay at 2k dps (heroic target dummy) yet with mut I hit 3k sustained on same target. So far combat is dissapointing me, my rotation for mut is 4/5/4. My rotation for combat was 2/5/5. I dont think the rotation is the problem, and my gear is fine. Why did I pull alot less dps as combat? Is mut really that much better?

Also, assuming that there are high dps swords in Ulduar (for ex, 170 dps MH and a 1.4 speed OH) will sword be as viable as the CG/WD setup? Which would do more damage? My calcs said that in the end the damage would be the same assuming same dps weapons but I dont know.

I want to go combat because there are no dps warriors in my guild, next patch the 4% dmg buff will help raid. And I want to give a viable buff. But I dont think it is worth it if mut is outshining it by more than 500

• Combat is lower.
• Target dummies are crap for dps benchmarking
• Weapon qualities might not be the same
• There is no rotation per se for Mut
• Better swords will be better than worse fists
• The 2% buff currently is already worth it for a typical raid (e.g. probably accounts for about 600-700 raid dps for mine's)

Some fights yes, some fights maybe not. There's also dual spec'ing in 3.1 so go nuts with it.

I have a semi-abandoned Rogue alt (level 62) whom I haven't really played since early BC, thought it might be fun to level him up now as a change from caster (ele / resto shaman main.) After playing a bit today and finding I was eating / bandaging a heck of a lot thought I might ask the community if there are any useful threads / links to fast / efficient levelling specs? Once i hit 80 there's a wealth of information in this subforum but i'm hoping to get there without going 'screw this melee crap' and abandoning him again :-P

i have a question regarding start up rotation for combat

the cycle recommended to me is 3/5/5....pocket guide would recommend to start up slice and dice as soon as possible...
so i assume 1 point ss, and then slice and dice
however would it be more benifical to ssx3 and then slice and dice considering i can do that before having to wait for energy to regenerate

im a little confused on this subject

If you don't like melee, you don't like melee and nothing anyone says is going to make it fun for you if you don't find it fun already.

That said, here's some tips I use to make leveling fast and easy with little downtime.

• Spec Combat and take talents like Endurance and Unfair Advantage.
• Use your cooldowns (AR/BF/Evasion/etc); there's really no point is saving them.
• Don't stealth around, pretend you're a fury warrior. The XP you get from not stealthing past mobs makes leveling faster than just skipping them... Plus, they drop stuff.
• You shouldn't need to eat much, but you will have to bandage. Shamans can heal themselves, rogues have to bandage. But you shouldn't have to eat much more than any other class.

As fight lengths increase, your method of startup becomes less and less important.

Ideally though, you would use SnD to consume those first CPs from your opener (be that either 1 or 2 CPs) and then begin 3s/5r/5e (or whatever your rotation is). SnD is your biggest damage boosting ability and the faster you can get it started, the higher your total damage.

In addition or as an alternative to Tinwhisker's otherwise very sound advice, a suggestion could be to pick up the three Camouflage talent points in Subtlety. Not as a means to stealthing past the mobs more quickly, but rather getting to them faster to Cheap Shot them. With this initial stun, followed by normal combat attack rotation, it's my experience that both damage input and, as a result thereof, down time can be minimized.

However, even with Camouflage, Stealth doesn't exactly speed things up. No secret there. So, in order for this approach to be efficient, it's very important to not use Stealth prematurely; put some effort into timing when to use Stealth in order to get as close as possible to the target mob while out of Stealth.

Also, if you've become a tad unfamiliar with the melee side of things, an additional advice could be to make sure your weapons are up to grade.

I actually found Mut/Sub to take a lot less damage than Combat while leveling. Things died in the space of a Cheap Shot -> Kidney Shot with the BoA daggers. I still pretty much kept bandage on cooldown but didn't have to stop to eat. By 58 you can get Mutilate and Camouflage which makes things move pretty quickly. Combat was probably faster overall due to superior AOE but Mut/Sub was a lot more interesting and helps train your stunlock skills if you want to PVP at 80.