Of course there's also the bizarre nature of the side effect of the enchant. Anyone is going to have to think about getting an enchant that screws you over for solo and pvp. Do they expect us all to get two sets of weapons? I'm not sure what the thinking behind this "upgrade" to mongoose was. Caster enchants don't carry similar penaltys do they?

Going from an enchant that actualy makes you dodge more when solo to an enchant that actualy makes you take more damage is strange.

My guess is they want it to be the DPS enchant, not the DPS and tank enchant like Mongoose turned into.

I'm not sure, exactly, but I'd say that doing nothing and potentially wasting a little energy, or doing one more combo builder and potentially wasting one cp proves to be more efficient than a one point eviscerate (small damage at the cost of 1cp and 35 energy) over time.

e: 35 energy, hurr

more e: we're talking averages (as is the spreadsheet) here, there are undoubtedly some cases where what I said is incorrect. These days I just let my cycle smoothly vary over the course of a fight depending on how the rng is treating me. I need to sit down and do the math on that at some point. I suspect that while it may be locally better it averages out worse.

According to Vulajin's spreadsheet, hit rating seems to be better than crit EVEN above poison hit cap, and AP better than agi

Those are only rough estimates of the EP values for people to start with. They may not be tailored specifically for your particular set of gear/stats.

I've started using Pawn and AEP values to determine the value of my gear and the value of relevant upgrades. For the pawn numbers I've used those suggested at the first page. By chance I found other numbers at shadowpanther.net and i'm wondering which of the two are correct. I know many people here don't have a high regard for his site, but according to him these numbers are updated for LK and for Mutilate raiding.

I'm finding that mutilate does significantly more damage than combat fists(with comparable weapons). With my gear, the spreadsheet seems to back this up to the tune of a 200 dps difference. Is my case isolated, or are you guys finding that mutilate is pulling away as the dominate spec?

Have you selected a murderable mob type?

What do you have the fight duration set to?

Combat is most powerful when it can make the most out of it's cooldowns, and when the mob is not affected by murder. It also provides significant 'off the sheet' advantages that allow it to compete with mutilate by providing more utility, better burst, more AoE, and more reliable quick target changing.

Undead target and six minute duration.

Changing from combat to mutilate resulted for me in an increase of 150 dps, certainly not marginal.

I tried using the Wowhead gem stat links in the OP and to my surprise found the AGI gems rated on the top when everything else points me to AP gems as being the best for me with my current gear. After tweaking the weight stats even beyond normal (setting AP to five or even 10 times that of other stats) I realised that the pure AP gems aren't shown at all when using weight stats on Wowhead. Not sure why this is the case, but something to have in mind I guess.

Edit: Fixed it. It seems that using "Melee attack power" produces no results when filtering on gems/items. Using "Attack power" found under Offensive stats worked. Might want to update the links in the OP accordingly.

Please don't. Addon selection is a completely different topic, and warrants its own thread for interested parties - either here or in the UI forums.

Being the standard thought most gave prior to WotLK was "white dmg is king" is there any point or reason now to go past the poison hit cap?

For example I sit at 380 hit rating atm. For boots I have the Argent Crusade Boots of the Never Ending Path which offer a good amount of HR. Am I better served using a lower lvl item that gives a tiny bit more AR, Crit or Exp?

Downloaded OpenOffice and am going to try and get the hang of spreadsheets but even with the numerous pages in this thread I tend to remain a little lost in how HR has changed since BC and fret about dropping it too much.

Also concerning Mutilate weapon use. I am currently at a 10-man lvl and my options seem to be Librarian Paper Cutters, Titansteel Shanker and Namlak's Sticker. I assume the Paper Cutter is the best match for OH but is it the ideal for MH given the weapon dmg of the other two?

Thank you.

Take gear upgrades as they come, gem for AP/Agi paying attention to socket bonuses. If you use the spreadsheets, they may not give you the perfect answer but they certainly won't give the wrong answer.

There are several optimal 25-man gear sets theorized and posted in these forums in prominent places but as you gear up don't worry about stat minimums or stacking one stat over another. Concerning +hit specifically, being at the specials hit cap is a good idea, being at the poison hit cap is good but hardly required.

As for your weapons, that's a spreadsheet answer based on you current gear.

I personally found for myself as going to combat from my mut spec I'm doing more consistent DPS and on almost all bosses I'm doing more dps because now instead of having to focus on keeping hfb and snd up 100%, I can focus on the fights more and my rotations and I'm pulling more dmg then my mut, not to mention the extra 2% physical dmg that everyone else is getting since we are a heavy melee dps guild. This most likely won't be the case for everyone but I'm loving being combat again, oh and I love accuracy. I enchanted them the other day since after getting beserking I died way too much and took a lot more dmg, and I think it works best for me overall, but granted it is a little pricey but well worth it in my opinion for the crit and hit. On the calculator mut vs combat only shows about a 200dps loss for me but I think because of the utility of the spec it actually for me comes out on top.

On a side note beserking is expensive to do on my server as well so thats the main reason I'm not looking at it right now until maybe later on down the road.

First you said that you do more DPS as Combat than Mut, but then you said that your spreadsheet shows Mut beign 200 DPS higher.

If you did your cycles/rotations right then you would have done more damage as Mut.

You also said that youre not looking at getting Berserking, but before that you said you had it and you were taking too much damage. Which is should have no affect on you for raid damage.

Shenanigans I say.

Hey, if you play better as combat, you're of course going to do more DPS as combat; regardless of spreadsheets.

But, if you are willing to learn muti properly, and don't drop your HfB stacks, you will do more damage.

By the way, mongoose > accuracy.

There are three fights in Naxx where it's possible for HfB to drop, and all are avoidable (the last one not so much so, but to some extent). Maexxna, Sapphiron, and KT. There are timers for the first two, so you can have your HfB fully refreshed before you lose control of your character. The last one can be solved by refreshing HfB <6 seconds and it won't matter when you get tombed.

Berserking drops your armor by 25% for each weapon. Since we don't run with more than even 9k armor, I have to cry foul here. First of all, we shouldn't be taking extra physical damage almost ever (most raid damage is magical if I'm remembering right), and second, 25% less armor on a rogue isn't going to be the end all and be all. That's akin to getting a lucky dodge when you moved in front of a cleaving boss (or an unlucky one, for that matter).

As for your statement about hit caps, this further verifies my opinion that you probably just have to re-read the first post in a few of these threads, and maybe practice on a training dummy for a bit. There is no magic number for hit that you need to have.

This might actually not be worth doing. By refreshing HfB at >6 seconds (I assume that's what you mean), you'd HfB once every 23 seconds instead of once every 30 seconds, therefore, you spend 1.3 energy per second to do this. The only time HfB would drop if you get Frost Blasted would be if it is below 7 seconds. So, if you refresh HfB normally at 29.x seconds, and you happen to get frost tombed, there's a 23% chance that when you get blasted, it's below 7 seconds. If it happens anyway, you can Vanish and, while under Overkill, restack it up, spending a total of 60 extra energy. That's still less than the 391 energy you would spend just refreshing HfB >6 seconds. I don't think I got hit by Frost Blast any time on my guild's last KT, but it's admittedly totally based on luck.

I usually recover from this pretty easily by doing Vanish -> HfBx3 and you're back on track.

I was taking a look at the new Wowhead links for gem weightings, and noticed a problem with the versions of hit/crit/haste ratings. The original link uses the melee version of these, for example:

Gems - Items - World of Warcraft

However, in the offensive stats section, there's also the raw hit/crit/haste ratings, which dramatically change the results:

Gems - Items - World of Warcraft

Those are more in line with what I'd expect, but maybe I'm missing something.

Cally, I love your work, but would it be possible to post this on the official forums so we could get a sticky perhaps? Every day the forums are clogged with people asking simple questions which would be answered very effectively by the guide. With the guide, maybe some of that could be trimmed down.