◊ chalon

Well, assuming Hunter pets count for HaT, you'd pretty much want to stack your group with Hunters and Rogues.

 

PessimiStick

They do. That was always the group setup I went for in Sunwell. Rogue + 4 Hunters.

 

zabuza6

From personal experience pre-WotLK, and from some simple math, capping expertise seems easily like the best stat, then followed by agility.

Unlike combo point building attacks, a dodged eviscerate costs full energy(Without quick recovery obviously). I forget what fraction of energy you get back from a dodged SS/hemo/etc, but it's well over half I think. If you are spamming eviscerate nearly every GCD, and usually get a relentless strikes proc, the difference in energy cost to you is 25 (-10 from hit/crit, and -35 from dodge). So not only do you not get the damage from that eviscerate, it costs you the equivalent of the energy of another ~2 eviscerates, depending on your average RS proc rate from how many CP you have when you eviscerate.

Expertise is a very solid stat for combat still, where dodges hurt your white damage more than your yellow damage. Then consider the larger fraction of yellow damage from HaT, and also how much larger the opportunity cost of a dodged eviscerate is compared to a dodged SS, and it simply has to beat agility.

Your hack into the spreadsheet must not take into account things like this.

 

Amerilina

If you read, I said assuming you can not Miss the finisher I was implying dodge/missed, I was probably to unclear on this. With the gear out there in T7 25mans you will almost by default be Expertise capped. With expertise off the table Agi was king.

 

zabuza6

Yeah, sorry, I missed that on the first read. But yeah, I'm way over the cap at the moment until I can find some replacements, doubt it's an issue for most people.

 

mprsx

I was wondering how all this is affected by 4-piece Assassination (10 energy off evisc.) bonus. You lose a significant amount of stats, but if you have 2 hunters + 3 rogue group, combo points will VERY rarely be an issue and unlimited energy for eviscerates. Even if they nerf the HaT bug, 2-3 hunters/raid is enough to give a rogue massive amounts of CP.

I havn't tested HaT with this (don't have assassination pieces anymore, and I doubt anyone else does). However I'm not sure anyone can sustain 5 CP /s no matter what the group is. If anyone has the 4pc set, I'd be interested in seeing the result.

 

drumbum

The energy refund for any combo move that fails to land is 80%.

 

Kireiray

Is there a macro to use vanish and instantly break it? I was wondering if this would be of use for Overkill and Master of Subtlety, or if the lost of white hits made it useless.

 

Xaoc

I cant find the posts on it, but it was determined that there is very little (if any) loss of white hits if you use a vanish+cancel/opener macro.

 

• Vulajin

Specifically, I recall that it was determined that Vanish does not reset your swing timer, so as long as your swing timer doesn't hit zero in the brief instant between Vanishing and resuming auto attack, you are not losing any DPS.

 

Davidvilla

So I'm really interested in trying this spec out. The only question I have about it is what CP building ability should be used with whatever extra energy you MAY have. I mean... 5-pt eviscerates only cost 10 energy, and you're probably not gonna get 5 more cp's before you regain that 10 energy. So I'm sure there is time for at least 1 CP special ability to be used in your cycle for extra DPS. I'm just wondering what the best choice would be.

Obviously, fast weps (daggers) are the preferred weapon choices, but of course SS and hemo hits would suck with them. I assume that little difference doesn't matter in your overall DPS. But just for optimal DPS, if you're already wielding daggers, would it be best to use backstab? I mean, with a backstab at max energy, you still have enough for that eviscerate when you got the cp's. So what do you guys think?

 

ekval

Using special attack (Hemorrhage/Backstab/SS) triggers global cooldown which you do not want to trigger outside finishers. If you sometimes really need to spend energy (which I don't think is good idea), my bet would be that just do Hemorrhage for debuff, even with daggers.

But in the end I would rather let energy cap and wait for 5CP than waste the energy for Backstab. Or even do < 4CP finisher. This is atleast now when the "bug" is in place and CP's are flying.

 

Davidvilla

Well, I also only do 10-mans for the most part, and my group will usually have me as the only rogue, 2 dps warriors, a mage and a warlock. Therefore, I'm not sure how fast the CP's will be flying in. I'm also unsure if this spec will be worth it with such a group setup, but I still wanna try it out.

 

MasterDinadan

The best time to pop a non-finisher is after a finisher when you have few or no combo points. If you pop a finisher, wait a few seconds for energy, you probably already have too many combo points to make a non-finisher worth it. Instead, you wait for combo points (let energy cap for a little while if necessary) and then pop your non-finisher after your finisher to dump the energy. For this reason, it's sometimes useful to think about which skill does the most damage overall, ignoring energy efficiency. Since your using fast weapons for poison procs, I'd use backstab. If you happen to using a fast sword then go ahead and hemo. If both your weapons are fast swords, I'm almost inclined to say Fan of Knives is the best option. It scales better with AP than hemo, and you don't really care that you aren't getting combo points since they are flooding in.

 

Nooc

I just messed around with HaT with a 2nd HaT rogue, a hunter and a druid on the target dummies. The other rogue and myself would not generate any combo points from the druids mangle crits, but our own and the hunters crits each generated and extra 2 combo points. Are there any other classes or abilities out there that do not work with HaT? We are going to try this out tomorrow on KT 25 with 2 bm hunters and a fury warrior.

 

Previn

Just a thought I had while reading this over, but wouldn't a HaT build be benefit on some of the more movement intense fights using Deadly Throw to keep energy from capping and combo points from being wasted?

 

MasterDinadan

I used Vulajin's spreadsheet to attempt to model HaT. I changed hemo's damage to match eviscerates damage at 3 CP, and set the energy cost to 20 (it's the average cost of evis if you have 3 combo points). I set the cycle to 5s/5r to model 100% uptime on both. This should be a reasonable model for HaT assuming you are eviscerating every 2 seconds and averaging 5 CP per evis (which is of course far from ideal). Even under these conditions, the spreadsheet is giving numbers about equal to mutilate spec (which comes slightly ahead of combat for my gear). In other words, if you can expect to evis for at least 3 combo points and do it at least once every 2 seconds, this model suggests that you should do fine damage. Now this isn't a perfect model of course, I don't claim to know everything about how Vulajin's sheet works and I'm sure the way I handled the cycle was not optimal, but regardless I feel that this is a close enough estimate to show that HaT is theoritically raid viable.

As for how it works out in practice, I believe there is a WWS circulating of rogues pulling of 5.5k and 6k DPS in naxx. I haven't seen them for myself, but if this is true then it is pretty good evidence of the strength of HaT (I find it hard to believe that an optimally geared fully buffed combat or muti rogue could pull those kinds of numbers for any extended length of time).

 

Kireiray

Yes, but deadly throw spam isn't really good damage. I guess for Heigan it'd be nice.

 

Ashere

On top of that DT doesn't give a Combo Point on crit. Something the developers seem to have prevented on purpose. Interesting detail on top of that: FoK does give Combo Points on crit, and those who visited the rats in vanilla Stratholme might have noticed that it (occasionally?) seems to give 1 Combo Point per target it crits on!
We definitely need more data/testing on this though.

 

x1tiger1x

DT behaves like that more so because of PVP than anything and the reason why DT was removed from Relentless strikes was because you used to be able to lock down casters with DT spam.

FoK isn't really spammable (well not yet anyway).

 

Kireiray

They changed that after they realized RS allowed you upwards of at 11 DT's if you were lucky on a poor caster.

 

Aranea

Tried HAT tonight, and although I didn't give it a shot at Patchwerk (already down) I noticed a significant increase in DPS on bossfights compared to mutilate and combat. Grouped with 3 rogues, kitty druid and mage, due to lack of hunters. Though it's nice to finally be "up there" on the meters again, I must say it's probably the most boring spec to play.

 

Kireiray

I also tried it today but gave up do to not optimal group/raid. (No crit buff, 2 hunters, dk + prot warrior). I have another rogue specing into it for 25's on tuesday and will try it out again.

 

Eowyndra

We tried HaT today at Sartharion (3 Drakes) with a 3 Rogue, Warrior, Enhancer group setup. For our builds we pretty much decided to skip Blade Flurry and Blood Spatter to max out Malice as it seemed to us that crit (in combination with Eviscerate) is the most important factor in the "bug". We used this Spec because we noticed that leaving Rupture out of the cycle significantly improved our DPS and ended up opening the fight with premeditation -> Garrote, 4s, 1-5e, 1-5e, ... keeping up Snd while using every other GCD on Eviscerate . This may be due to the nature of the encounter (a lot of movement) or due to the 200-500ms lag we experienced on our server. All I can say is that HaT with 3 Rogues blows away all other specs at the moment, so use it until it gets fixed.

 

SlithStep

The Build im using for hat at the moment is HaT

I actually do less dmg on my eviscerate then i do with my combat spec but i am constantly spamming it. It is effective in 25 man raiding but seems pretty useless for 10 man. In 25 man in most fights my dps is up to 3,750-3,900 depending on raid buffs and boss variables. Even on boss's that i have to run in and out on combat as long as i can pop a rupture and then spam deadly throw my dmg still stays up pretty high. Right now Kyden and Me really can't get rid of our CP and we are usualy at 75/50% energy even with the miss's. My guild still dosn't have the hunters to stack together for the group yet but this works just fine with 2 rogue's 1 enh sham 1 furry war 1 hunter. Though on some fights it makes sense to still move the groups around so we get more ranged in our group. Ie ele sham, holy pal, fire mage.

My Evi dmg went from 11k+ max to about 8kish max but the output is still a lot higher then it originally was. The white dmg % isn't nearly as high as it originally was but that dosn't matter much with this build. Right now i keep full Combo Point SD, and Rupture up along with spamming Evi. The t7/7.5 2 piece bonus is 10% more dmg on Rupture so if you are speced the way i have mine set up you are getting 60% more dmg on rupture and it becomes a major dmg source. Between Rupture and poison dmg *i don't use envenom anymore* The dot dmg done by each rogue is significantly increased.

I do notice that in 10 man's the dmg output was significantly less without full raid buffs but more so without the right party setup. Usually don't have the second Hat Rogue in the group for the extra point per crit too. So for 10 mans i still spec back to combat. I use Glyph of Snd SS and Evi. Still debating on taking out the glyph of SD for the Rupture glyph since the full point SnD is still nice but the white dmg regardless of how much you spec for hat seems to still do a decent % of overall dmg source. I was changing my Glyph's each time i respec But i decided to settle on this Glyph setup right now and not change them around for now.

I actually really like having the cheat death in the build right now since you can stand on top of Patchwork without caring about getting hit. 2 Hat rogues can usually stay in on the fight with this ability and live through the entire fight. Right now im in a new guild on my server our progression is moving fairly quick as an overall but we are mostly starting from scratch, still in a scramble to get healers and whatnot so we don't have things as set as we would like yet. This leads to Various changes in our healing lineup so i believe this ability right now is a must for 25 man Nax. Keeping up 2 dps on Nax from an internal ability makes this fight easier and negates the need for battle res on 2 dps.

Right now it still looks like Combat Swords is the best build imo but till you get your main hand/offhand swords i would say that HaT is a viable 25 man spec. Also you would have to make sure that you could get your hit up around atleast 500 or higher before redoing all your gems and enchants. Even if you lose out on the ap you still gain alot of dps. *the hit needed for HaT is a lot lower then what is needed for Combat so u could do fine hitting the yellow and poison cap, also HaT is mostly about having high ap so you want to get as much agi/ap gear as u possibly can along hitting the expertise cap if possible*

Overall i believe that this is like the poor pers end game rogue'ing for right now. It takes a lot less makeup to do a higher % of dps in fist/dagger/mace that are more available then the main hand/offhand swords *mace spec u have 3 toss around points that i would put into assassination for Vile poisons or imp snd and endurance* that you have to seek out and usually roll against a bunch of players for.