For the gear I'm wearing right now, the spreadsheet says that my optimal cycle would be 4s/5r/4e, and I haven't had any trouble keeping it up in raids lately. There are even times that I still have a few seconds left on my slice where I can pool some energy before refreshing to a new 4 point slice and dice. I don't have the best gear yet, I'm sitting in mostly 10 man and heroic gear, with only a few pieces of 25 man, so at least for Combat spec (which I am) I can't see people in better gear not being able to sustain a similar 3 finisher cycle. However, I am pretty new to rogue theorycrafting, so somebody please correct me if I have a flawed point of view.

The relevant point being if you're not getting Berserking because of price (and I definitely fall into this category, Berserking is not worth the mat cost to me with Abyss Crystals as expensive as they are currently on Dark Iron), you're probably not looking at Accuracy either. Mongoose is cheap as hell for similar benefits.

In the talent link for the Mutilate spec above: Why take Close Quarter Combat when Master Poisoner seems to be doing the same thing but for all types of attacks whereas the 3% in CQC only affect the melee attacks?
From what I can gather Master Poisoner will affect the whole raid and also affect the chance to poison crit?
Is the master poisoner +12% crit bug still around?
Am I missing something here?

The reason is that Master Poisoner does not stack with Heart of the Crusader, which is a Paladin buff. If your raid composition doesn't have a Paladin with that talent, feel free to take MP instead. And no.

Well, most raids *will* have a Paladin with Heart of the Crusader, which is why the cookie-cutter spec has it; they are interchangeable as long as you don't have a paladin with Heart of the Crusader. As the pocket guide is mostly aimed at raiders, it's a given that the 3% crit buff will be taken care of by a Paladin.

Hi all, my first post here in EJ.
I have been a Rogue for a while, but mostly PvP and some lite 10 raids, Kara, things like that. Im planing on taking my Rogue to more of a PvE endgame style of play. Im currently 15/51/5 Combat/Swords raid spec. I plan on switching back to 51/13/7 Ass/Mut spec once I get a decent dagger. I say all this just to give a little back, and to explain Im about to ask something that might seem somewhat noobish to some, but stick with me. Here goes:

I get you want to be at 26/26 to close the gap on raid boss dodge rating, but what does the number in parenthesis mean?

Now, hit is something Im having trouble completely wrapping my head around. How do you see what your "Special", "Poison" and "White" Hit Rating is currently? When I open my Character Info screen, I look under melee and I only see one Hit Rating. Maybe Im just over-complicating this or over-looking something. Then there is the possiblity that Im just down right dumb. But if someone wouldnt mind clearing these couple of questions up for me, it would be greatly appericated. Thanks and happy posting.

Expertise is a tricky statistic.
Every point of expertise removes 0.25% of dodge from boss attack table. When attacking from behind the boss level mob, it dodges about 6.25% - 6.5% of attacks (white attacks - autoattack , combo moves - e.g. sinister strike, or finishers e.g. rupture), to overcome it (and avoid dodged sinister strikes) you need 26 points of expertise (26*0.25 = 6.5).

Numbers in parenthesis are rating values. You can have only so much expertise from Your race abilities/talents. After that You need expertise from gear. It comes as expertise rating. At level 80 , 8.1974973675 expertise rating points give one expertise point.


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About hit. Your melee panel shows only Your hit rating. Since You are 15/51/5 sword combat rogue, You probably have 5 points in precision talent. Every point there converts into one percent of hit. Those percents are not shown in Your melee tab, but You can count with them.
Now you have different damage abilities,
1. White attacks , which are your normal weapon autoattack damage (and shows as white numbers in blizzard default user interface, thus the name white)
2. Yellow special attacks ( combo moves and finishers, like sinister strike, mutilate, eviscerate, rupture) which are called yellow.
3. Poisons which are also yellow but follow different rules, since they are not physical but poison damage.

Your hit rating and percent is same for all of them. For example, if You have 5pt precision and 200 hit rating (about 6% melee hit, and 7-8% spellhit) Your hit value for melee attacks (white and special) is about 11% , which means that Your special attacks will not miss (since their hitcap is 8% - people are still arguing about exact value for wotlk) but Your white attacks will have 16% miss chance (latest theory tells that base miss chance is 27% for dual wielding , 8% base + 19% dual wield penalty)

Your poisons follow spellcasters hit calculations, their hitcap is somewhere at 16% (or 17?) so with 200 rating after precision You will have some 12.6% hit with poisons which makes Your miss about 3.4% or 4.4%. Of course in raids You might have 3% spellhit buff from shadowpriests or druids so reaching poison hit cap is not very hard to achieve.

Yes it is. A ret pally OR elemental shaman can provide the buff, but elemental shaman are not all that common these days because enhancement does more DPS. Hopefully the upcoming patch makes elemental more appealing with its buffs.


Also, I don't think 54/10/7 is the best way to go if you want to get MP. I'd rather take points out of Ruthlessness or Turn the Tables, rather than CQC. I might even opt to take some of those points from Blood Spatter if I had to. There are all pretty close, but don't just assume that those points have to come out of CQC.

I would never suggest taking 3 points out of Close-Quarters Combat for Master Poisoner. You're taking 3% melee crit that is always present, and instead replacing it with 3% crit that is only present when your target is poisoned. If there is an Elemental Shaman or Ret Pally in your group, that extra 3% crit is gone. So much for those talent points.

Well, I guess I'm still a bit uncertain here and, honestly, the spreadsheet offers up a lot of maybes to me. I sure don't see myself trying out 3-point eviscerates and for the time being I dropped the SnD glyph for the AR glyph. Now, that's easily reversed. (Note, I did so because having Killing Spree on a 1-min cooldown makes a rogue feel somewhat less irrelevant on trash and in 5-mans, nevermind the benefit of having AR come back up a minute faster).

I'll go back to the 3-finisher cycle this week; it just felt... terrible. The dps seemed awful and untalented, un-glyphed eviscerates seem like an absolutely awful use of 5 combo points. I realize I'm probably missing some sort of 2nd order effect here, but a 2-finisher cycle would seem to have an awful lot more rupture uptime than a 3-finisher cycle. And rupture gets dual-talented in my current build, while eviscerate gets no boosts. Adding a 5-point eviscerate to the cycle would seem to hack rupture uptime.

That said, cycle clipping has been the issue of great discomfort that Aldriana identified. The 2s5r doesn't work. Eventually there are too many combo points. So then it's 4s5r and now here we are sitting around with a longer slice than expected and refreshing it quite a bit too soon, or SS-ing again at the end of the rupture cycle because we can't refresh it early (either we don't want to, we're not permitted to by the game mechanics, or both).

Perhaps if the 3-finisher cycle were just consistent, that'd be worth something. But if it's replacing quality rupture uptime with low quality eviscerates, then is it really? Or do I have to adopt to a much more dynamic cycle to do high dps at this point? These are the tricky questions.

There's clearly something weird going on with the cycle calculations regarding two-finisher and three-finisher cycles for Combat. For example, the sheet is showing a loss of 80 Rupture DPS going from 3s/5r to 3s/5r/1e, although it's pretty clear that you generate more than enough extra combo points (and have the extra ~28 energy to do a 1pt Eviscerate) without losing any Rupture uptime.