I've been reading the last posts, but it seems like people are resigned to 15/51/5 for combat. I've been running 18/51/2 since 3.1 went live and haven't seen anything to suggest a switch to 15/51/5. Is the 5/5 relentless strikes combat build the standard now, or is it only better than vile poisons at a certain gear level? I have used a 5s/5r/5e rotation, I am assuming 15/51/5 with a 2s/5r/4e or 3s/5r/5e rotation would be more optimal granted a 4pc t8 bonus, but perhaps not if you did not have 4pc. Am I wrong with my thinking?

Has anyone ran any numbers on wether you should use WP MH, DP OH or WP on both as combat? I'm starting to think that the t8 2pc bonus energy proc doesn't rly make up for the dmg you loose with changing WP to DP.

I don't believe numbers have been run in BIS Ulduar gear, but for end Naxx gear in 3.0.x, WP wasn't honestly beating Deadly by that much on the OH - it was ahead, but not ridiculously so. With the buff to DP, the assumption - confirmed by napkinmath if not detailed modeling - was that DP would pull ahead.

That said: somewhat independent of the 2/5 set bonus, T8 is worth stacking for the 4-piece bonus, so you *will* have the two-piece bonus as well; and once you have it, the damage gains from using DP aren't inconsiderable, so even if DP weren't worth using based purely on it's own merits (which, I'm pretty sure, it is), the set bonus would very likely push it over the top.

Yes the numbers have been ran. Entire spreadsheets have been made with those numbers. Check them out.

Edit: Oops too slow.

We can agree to disagree about whether this is "meter posing" or not. Stuff needs to die, someone needs to kill it. The faster it's dead, the faster you can move on to the next phase or win the encounter.

I'm not going to argue about hard modes, having not done them. Nor will I dispute your claim that, for instance, Thorim and Razorscale are well served by the Kidney Shot glyph to beat them in the quickest fashion. Right now, however, I can help us win both of those fights with Fan of Knives. And it is doing 20% more damage vs. having, what, 1 additional killing spree in the entire fight?

To me the former is currently more valuable.

The question to keep in mind is where the hard parts of the fight lie. There are certainly fights - Thorim arena, Razorscale adds, Auriya, and (arguably) one of the YS mind rooms for which there is significant stuff to FoK, and the ability to kill it more quickly is certainly advantageous. However, these tend not to be the hard parts of the encounter. Quick AoE on the lasher packs on Freya helps... but fast DPS on the Conservators also helps. Thorim arena is no joke... but killing him before his stacks get high is important to. And while fast DPS on the mind tentacles is valuable for Yogg, there's a lot of other places - including two other mind rooms - where single-target DPS is more important.

I guess my point is this: yes, to the extent that you're AoEing on bosses, optimizing for it makes a certain amount of sense. However, the AoE components tend not to be the hardest portion of the fight, and they only appear in a minority of fights. Thus, in my opinion, at least, it makes more sense to optimize for single-target DPS and let FoK DPS wind up where it will - we're not the main engines of AoE destruction for anything that isn't dying within seconds anyway. In particular, I'd never glyph for FoK - the extra KSp (or 2, or 3) is just more important in most cases.

Spreadsheet shows combat 750 dps better than mutilate single target in BIS gear. Why does the notion that mutilate is a single target raid spec persist?

Ald's mutilate sheet considers the boss murderable, yet the combat yields higher dps. Besides that Hodir is not a mutilate fight, if you are doing normal it is okay, but if you need to free the adds after every freeze it gets a horribly interrupted fight which mutilate does not like. Another thing on Hodir - there are extremely powerful buffs you get from time to time, combat stacking these with ks/bf/ar makes wonders.

Freya: combat again - the adds that spawn enjoy being BF-ed. Fight is very interrupted, mutilate have problems keeping hfb up
YS: combat - not only badly interrupted fight, problems getting snd and hfb inside the brain as mutilate, but stacking cooldowns on the brain is mad

I think it's only recently with updated sheets that we've seen such a large gap between the two specs. Before when we were comparing t7 loot and the partially revealed Ulduar loot, it wasn't as big of a difference. Now that we have access to seemingly everything and configured BiS gear combinations, we're seeing this disparity. Also, fundamentally since Mut has no spec-specific multi-mob moves, we just considered it the single target raid spec.

I'm hoping we get some tweaks to Mut in the form of a CD that pulls it closer. But I'm not holding my breath as I don't think they can really think of anything without it getting abused in PvP, or further packing the bottom of the tree.

No, Ald's Mutilate sheet does not assume Murder. It assumes a nonmurderable target, so against a target that can be Murdered the DPS number will be perhaps 5-6% higher. Thus, a sustained fight on a Murderable target does - according to my best estimates - favor Mutilate ever so slightly...

,,,maybe. And I say "maybe" because the finite length of real fights (as opposed to the endless ones of the spreadsheet) do favor the class with cooldowns, and that's Combat. Plus, there are synergies (like KSp during a double trinket proc) which are not well modeled. As such, Combat likely outperforms the speadsheet slightly, whereas Mutilate might not. So I think it's fair to say that longer fights against Murderable targets do favor combat. On the other hand: there aren't that many of those. So from a pure DPS perspective, I think Combat does have a slight edge.

On the other hand, there are some fights - such as Hodir - where the raid buffs probably favor Mutilate more than Combat. And there are fights where KSp is not usable on cooldown (or at all) which favor Mutilate as well. Thus, across the instance as a whole, while I do think Combat holds an overall edge - particularly when the ArPen cascade kicks in - Mutilate is still viable, particularly if your loot luck favors it.

For blue sockets for non JC's, [Enchanted Tear] is higher than either the 8agi/12stm or the 16ap/12 stm gems if you weigh str at 1.1 using the rough agility weight.