Yes, FoK is fun and all.. but compared to the Swipe: Cat ability coupled with Berserk that was given to druids, we are nothing. In 25 man Naxx, a fairly geared kitty pulls about 20k dps on aoe trash pulls which is ridiculous and nearly double any one else's aoe dmg output.

FoK is also more useful to Mut Rogues than it is to Combat Rogues, even further increasing the gap between Combat and Mut.

I wouldn't go that far. If you are talking about trash and aoe pulls, combat rogues will still dominate Muti in most cases. FoK just gives us something to actually do during those times. I still cant come close our combat rogue on pulls like that although it does allow us to do some kind of aoe now.

Well, "having something to do" is relative, as combat I was quite ready to get an autocasting mod on my mousewheel, bind it to FoK and go afk until we started the boss - using 1 button on 90% of the trash pulls is boring beyond comparison

That is only true when Combat Rogues have AR and/or BF available.
Otherwise Mutilate Rogues will out perform them, especially when there are large numbers of mobs to AoE down (like in Spider Wing Naxx).

The longer the AoE goes on for the better Mutilate will do too. The reason for that is that Focussed Attacks procs off MH crits. Combat does not enjoy energy regen from Combat Potency because it only procs off OH hits which do not work on FoK if I remember correctly. The greater the number of mobs in the pull the better too.

Mutilate Rogues also get a much greater proportion of poison damage from FoK as well, especially from IP.

Am I the only one wondering why so many are complaining about mutilate damage being too high versus combat?

I have raided a lot with both specs and in my opinion there are probably more situations you want to spec combat than mutilate.

In sustained tank'n'spank fights mutilate is better but in most of the encounters it's more important that you have good burst on demand (enrages, bursting down one drake etc) than having good sustained dps. Combat definately is better in these situations because of it's cooldowns. Combat also has some aoe abilities and killings spree that helps in some fights (Malygos and vortexes).

So mutilate is better in sustained situations but considering that there ain't (and probably won't come in future) many Brutallus/Patchwerk fights mutilate has to be better in these fights.

Combat has so much better utility that if it gets a buff compared to mutilate we are (again) soon in a situation that nobody wants to spec mutilate.

Now that the CD is off of Fan of Knives, I completely disagree -- it actually gave more reason to go Assassination. With 35% of my attacks critting, I have been able to get off as many as 4 consecutive or near consecutive FoKs in most pulls. It is now possible to have more DPS on trash than bosses as this WWS shows (only the DPS warrior is geared at my level, but the mage did have the boomkin aura). This WWS is here only to show rogue trash vs. boss DPS, nothing more (which was rather terrible from mostly-alt/new level 80 PuG).

There is no reason that this should open up a whole trash vs. boss debate either, because Assassination is better in both boss and trash fights.

However, having one combat rogue in a group almost certainly increases overall DPS thanks to Savage Combat (I am going to assume that the DPS decrease between Combat and Assassination is less than Arms versus Fury for Warriors).

So for those of you too stubborn to accept that combat is dethroned (just as I was way too stubborn to about Assassination previously), one Rogue per raid is probably better off going Combat. And if your guild, like mine, has a Pally and DK as main tanks, also expect also to be Exposing Armor, and being a utility player as opposed to pure DPS on boss fights.

Other than your argument for Malygos and Killing Spree, where else does combat have a clear advantage? Even on Malygos, I see Combat Rogues pull even, but not pass Assassination Rogues outright. Combine that with better AoE ability during trash (which makes the instance take less time), and Assassination wins out in a head to head fight.

Every time I see a pro-Combat post, I am convinced that people don't like it as much because it is harder to execute properly and is therefore "too-hard". In 2.x, I had my entire rotation macro'd, the only decision I make was when to use Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush. Otherwise it was macro mashing, and I would come out on or near top in this manner consistently. The biggest change to 3.x is that now you have Murder Spree to throw into your rotation as well. The ability to simplify is just simply not as easy with Assassination thanks mostly to Seal Fate and Hunger for Blood, and it really is a harder build to play successfully.

Without getting into trash discussion, I will state I believe minimizing time on trash is important.

That being said, in the simple questions thread i just posted a whole bunch of findings on having one combat rogue in a raid and the numbers to back it up.

FoK. It seems blizzard is actually changing rogues from what we are used to. It seems they want us to be more versitile and less of a top end single target dps class. I have mixed feelings about this but at the moment there has been no such thing stated by blizzard so I cannot say for sure. There is really only two conclusions to what blizzard did.

1)Blizzard does indeed want us to have more raid utility and less single target damage in comparison to other classes. Even at the top end of our dps scale, we are still behind many other classes. You can put out 5500 dps and still place 8th for damage in your raid. This would be a big change to our thinking.

2)Blizzard realized that rogue single target damage at the gear levels availible to us now cannot keep up with other classes. The same thing happened in BC and took higher gear levels to sort us out. FoK buff may be a quick fix to the low single target damage until new gear is released and then it will be hotfixed.

Either way, its a wierd feeling on trash doing TotT>FoK>FoK>BF>KS>FoK... ect. and then coming out #1 on trash dps. At first I just laughed about it but if it helps us get to bosses quicker I will not complain.

Edit: Spelling

I'm sorry it wasn't meaning to be offensive. I should have been more clear.

I wasn't talking about trash dps, just boss dps. I don't hate combat but I hate if Blizz makes again that mistake that combat is only option to pve optimally. I didn't say that I think combat is better than mutilate, but what I tried to show is that combat isn't that bad and it has nearly as much use as mutilate, so Blizzard should be very careful if they are going to change relations of mutilate and combat dps wise.

I can say from my own experience that combat rocks compared to mutilate in 5/6 min Malygos now cause there is only one vortex and blade flurry is good in phase 2 to do scions quickly. In 3 drake Sartha it's important to nuke first drake fast and cooldown's have their advantages on that also.

"Enrage" cases I spoke about are currently for example Maexxna and KT (both have percentage enrages).

With aoe abilities I didn't mean trash aoe but boss aoe. Currently there ain't actually any bosses where you need ridiculous aoe quickly but think about M'uru and KJ where adrenaline rush + fok would have been very nice.

I'm sorry if I upset someone, but I'm just afraid that Blizzard f***s up again and everyone is forced to play combat because it definately have better utility on some encounters.

Don't forget that Combat also loses far less damage using Anesthetic on fights that require a tranq. There should absolutely be a single target dps benefit to mutilate over combat. If anything I think both specs are well balanced around each other at the moment, just not well balanced around other top tier damage classes.

One spec/tree will always be better than the others, there will always be one 'optimal' spec for PvE. By definition there cannot be two optimal specs.

Blizzard's stated goal is to have multiple trees be viable for PvE. The difference being that a non-optimal but still viable spec played by a good player will not be a barrier to beating enrage timers, etc.

I agree with Demi9OD. Both Combat and Mutilate have advantages and disadvantages with respect to different fights. One will always be optimal for any of them but both are currently viable for all of them. Rogues may currently lag behind some other classes in DPS and Combat may be the weaker in single target situations but they are both viable.

Yes, it is important to remember that DPS values estimated by spreadsheets -- as well as reported post hoc by summarizing the combat log -- show a mean rate of damage dealt. In reality, though, damage production is not linear through time but rather pulsed by, including but not limited to, cooldown usage and non-constant buffs and as such involves positive and negative acceleration of the damage rate. Energy and combo point income are also marked by a certain amount of stochasticity via talents and Glyphs. So, while using tools to either predict or recapitulate performance, keep in mind that these tools either 1) average possible outcomes to present a population mean of multiple performances; or 2) calculate a mean damage rate for the entire fight duration, respectively, which are both valuable but not without disadvantages.

That's exactly what I meant, sorry for using a bad term 'optimal' instead of using 'viable'.

I totally agree with other ppl here about combat length.

Sure means have thier advantages and disadvantages. In the end though the mean of the damage done will represent the value of your damage in comparison to someone else or another class depending on percentage of time in combat.

I wont argue that Combat is better because i know realistically its not. If i had the expertise and a combat rogue in the raid I would be Mutilate. But in most situations combat can compete and in extreme conditions such as fights where a higher percentage of time AR/BF/KS is engaged could actually edge out Mutilate.

For now depending on weapon and gear drops (because this is still an issue), there is an arguement for having a combat rogue in the raid if you have more than one rogue attending.

A blue post on MMO-Champion posted today states that combat is getting a boost and all rogues in general will be getting a single target damage buff. From all that I read and just putting the armor pen "working as intended but not as effective as intended" together they may be trying to fix rogues by giving them an ArPen buff. Thats just utter speculation though.

Yes and no. Mean damage/second is a useful statistic for comparison depending on one's question. The point I was making is that there is much more going on than can be seen by comparing theorectical or actual mean DPS and that these are often not considered. It is interesting, for example, to think about how the distribution of damage amongst and between classes would change by manipulating combat duration only. One would expect classes to wax and wane, in terms of overall mean damage rate, along the combat duration scale as the periodicity of their cooldowns becomes more or less optimal (resembling something like a EKG of a heartbeat if graphed in two dimensions).

In my experience, while the spreadsheet difference between combat and mutilate seems small, in reality, mutilate moves even farther ahead on actual raid dps than combat. While there is some repeated notion that mutilate is harder to play, the reality is that combat has a choice between running a "better" 2 finisher cycle that sometimes flat out breaks due to inability to refresh rupture, or has to play a 3 finisher cycle that is always worse on the spreadsheet (at least while spec-ing serrated blades over lethality).

Honestly, I'm combat, and I think it's terrible. And the fan change makes me more want to spec mutilate. But I'm the lone consistent rogue and it's ridiculous to take savage combat away from our raids given our huge physical dps corps.

Agreed but how long do you expect an AoE pull to last huh? I mean a half descent guilds plows through quarters as Arachnid pretty fast thus you don't get the required amount of time to do that massive FoK damage. Seeing that a Mutilate rogue won't have AR nor do they have KS/BF combination. So relatively short lasting AoE pulls will always be in the benefit of Combat Rogues.

Only if you've got an overpull and the fight lasts a bit longer, something that could happen in let us say Military quarter because people tned to stand in the middle of the mobs and get cleaved all the way back to Karazhan... than Mutilate might have the time to dish out the extra 50 % weapon damage bonus they have on their FoK with daggers. Assuming he isn't pigheaded and stood in the middle off the pack rather than and the outer edge of the group in some Fat Tauren DKs back.

Actually no - Mutilate rogues get the benefit of Overkill on any pull where they can start from stealth, they also have a short cooldown (Cold Blood) which is extremely powerful with FoK, and they maximise the effect of the starting 100 energy because of the 50% extra weapon damage. Overall I wouldn't like to speculate how those play out against each other without much more detailed modelling.

I'll also note that it may be a moot point after the dual spec feature comes in. If you don't care about PvP, you may as well use your second spec as an AoE spec, at which point you can construct a build that gets Cold Blood, Overkill, 2/3 Focused Attacks, Blade Flurry, Adrenaline Rush and Vitality.

I have to disagree on mutilate being better than combat on trash pulls, I've tried both and combat makes me top the charts easier and more often so maybe in theory its better for mutilate combined with your fantasy trash pull with infinite adds but in naxx it's not.

Starting from stealth? Most of the time you won't be starting from stealth or your tanks are slow and not chain pulling, you'll have a vanish every now and then but that's it.

Cold Blood? Blade Flurry is the same but better.

Focused Attacks? The trash packs are not big enough, plus if you combine your Fan of Knives with /startattack in a macro and position yourself properly in a trash pack you will have Combat Potency procs to give you extra energy.

What about hunger for blood? Do you keep it up or not? If you do you waste energy that could be used for FoK, if you don't you lose dps near the end of the trash pack when there are only 1 or 2 adds left. combat doesn't have this problem.

Then there is also Adrenaline Rush... Killing Spree...

Feel free to prove me wrong but right now I don't see it.

I think it's more that Assassination allows for very high burst initially due to Overkill and Focused Attacks. Higher than Combat anyway. That, and trash pulls are fast enough that you probably will end up higher on the meter than a combat rogue on these pulls.

But past that initial burst, I do believe Combat has the edge, with Blade Flurry and Killing Spree (not to mention AR if available). It also takes an Assassination rogue a bit longer to start up the rotation afterwards, due to combo moves being more expensive. At least it seems that way to me.

Either way, we're not AoE classes, but Combat does have the edge in that respect, in my opinion.

I have to agree with eric. I havnt tried assassination yet due to lack of a decent 2nd dagger, but I speccd sub for plague quarter tonight & noted the devistingly slow energy regen. I understand the potents for FA but is it really effective enough to overcome the loss of the Vitality ability from the Combat side?

False. If two specs are exactly equivalent, then they are both optima. There are plenty of examples of functions that have multiple optima; sine curves have an infinite number.

In addition, it's impossible for us to come up with exact numbers for DPS that a spec should be doing with all of the variables involved, some of which are random. So since we can only come up with an approximation of best DPS with some confidence level, it's even more plausible for us to have multiple optima when two could be equal within a certain confidence level.

So there may always be one optimal spec, and history tells us that there probably always will be one, but it is by no means a mathematical necessity.