I agree with Ald's general message, but I look at the mass-HaT-speccing community as an effect, rather than a cause. I hope Blizzard can analyze their spreadsheets and charts and realize that rogues are speccing HaT because they just aren't doing competitive damage otherwise (let's exclude full best-in-slot rogues please).

Pre 3.0, I usually finished in the top 3 DPS on any given melee friendly boss fight. I'm not at the level of some rogues on EJ, but I l2p a long time ago and felt I was earning those top spots. Both pre and post-3.0 I was pulling ~the same DPS as the spreadsheets were telling me I was capable of, and felt good doing it. Fast forward to the actual WotLK release and our first raid at 80. Same guild, same people, basically the same gear (SWP epics). I was finishing 6th in our 10 man Naxx runs overall, and usually forth or fifth on boss fights. I don't believe I got more stupider. I do believe that rogues scaled tremendously worse than most other classes. It's the only explanation.

Now fast forward a few weeks farther. I have a fair amount of 80 epics, but only one or two best-in-slots from current content. The speadsheet claims ~4200 dps as combat, ~4100 dps as mutilate for me, and only on extremely rare occasions do I reach those (in fact, I can't remember a single one). I still finish toward the bottom of the pack even on melee friendly fights and still refuse to believe I am totally to blame for it. Could I tighten up my rotation? Sure. Do I believe that's the reason I fail at DPS? No.

Finally today arrives and I realize I can do some significant DPS by running HaT with a few other guild rogues. Rather than all of us finishing near the bottom, we can finish near the top, help our guild down bosses easier/quicker, and help people gear up.

I feel bad taking advantage of a bugged build, and in fact really want to switch to something more enjoyable again, but it's hard to argue with results. That's how I hope Blizzard reads into this mass-HaT spec shift, and not that rogues are content as long as this HaT bug remains. And lastly, I don't need to finish first on the meters, I just think with a little work and some elbow grease we should be finishing near the top. That just isn't happening at my gear level with any other spec but HaT.

I am the only one HaT, actually I'm the last rogue left in the guild given our sorry state. Aldriana, you have bad players around you tbh I can easily outperform most, but there are several good players which with equivalent gear simply own me no matter how perfect the execution is (even mutilate needs only a day or so to adapt). HaT, on the other hand stands on its own too, true, it is dumb spec to play, but with it only I can get closer to top dps - hunter, enh shaman, lock.

ps: Blizzard said they have better spreadsheets than we have, can analyse the dps better and do not react over public QQ. So if this is not bullshit (it should not be, but the class disbalances that end up on live makes you wonder) no wws report or exploited bug should alter their decision what should do with the class

ps2: Professor Hurt, I'm regularry above 4k as single HaT, it is good spec, but the good and equal geared players I play for years with are easily besting 4.5k, can't beat that. And on the side note, put that Riding Crop in the bank, it is not working for you (read the tooltip).

I dont understand how that would allow me to right/left click the macro to switch my focus from tank to dps and back. That's what I was looking for essentially


Yeah Killing Spree seems to bug a few things out it has seemed and the rogue I normally focus is always specced combat and I drop my focus from time to time as well. I will assume this is indeed the reason why, because I have also noticed that if I have a raid mark above my head, and I hit killing spree, it drops the mark as well.

To make our damage better without making us overpowered in pvp?

How about chaning "humanoid" part in murder to "undead" and give there some percent boost + move the talent back up ? Although it might make us weaker in pvp ..

after doing 10 man naxx on monday i hit 1.8k dps as the only HAT rogue in the group
my gear is pretty average tbh, on monday going 25man with another hat rogue so should see the difference

also in pvp for example HAT rogues
disc priest& 4 hat rogues maybe less 1 & add a mage for the CC would be quite interesting which i'm also down for testing the weekend so i'll keep you updated on how it goes

I know that most discussion in this thread focuses around high-end raiding and 25-mans but I'm still struggling to get there and I take great pride in doing the best dps I can even in 10-man raids where I am right now. As I rarely have a perfect group setup or a group with another rogue for that matter, I am doomed to use hemo quite a bit. It is more or less constantly ticking on my target. Would it benefit me to use Glyph of Hemorrhage instead of s&d?

With a target that constantly has hemo ticking, how much would the difference in dps be with the s&d glyph compared to the hemo one?

I have a few questions about HAT speccing. I'm not sure about trusting the rogue spreadsheet to this stuff.

I was running 8/20/43 and kept up slice and spammed eviscerate, which ended up being 70% of my damage. This was in a 25 man where I couldn't spam eviscerate fast enough.

Is it worth dropping a point in crit for blade flurry? It will cost energy (unlike the refund you're basically guaranteed to get from SND) and does less and doesn't last as long. How does it compare to 1% crit? Assuming it is worth getting, I guess it would be time to get glyph of preparation as well.

I saw a 7% miss rate on eviscerate. Is it worth dropping 2 points of crit to get 5/5 precision instead of 3/5?

Are other enchants now better than mongoose? It seems like minor haste it adds will do so little with a HAT build. Around 29% of my damage was white or poison. Would an enchant like accuracy (25 hit, 25 crit) beat mongoose? Regardless, I have berserking and I'm assuming this is the best by a large margin.

Assuming you are adequately geared (ie; above the specials hit cap) then those 7% eviscerate misses are dodges, not misses. You don't have the protection of a talent like surprise attacks, this is why expertise gems are, or at least should be, weighted slightly heavier on mutilate/HAT builds until cap.

Drop imp. Slice and Dice for the extra points in Precision. You don't need the extra duration, you're swimming in combo points anyway. The only real reason to take imp. Slice is if you're trying to run HAT w/ swords and need to get up the tree.

The on demand burst of Blade Flurry, and additional AE utility make it worth a talent point. Probably NOT worth the prep glyph however. Slice and Dice, Rupture, and Evisc glyphs are the way to go.

Really, HAT builds are pretty hard to fuck up. Get HAT. Get max aggression and Imp. Evisc. Put points into anything else that gives you more crit or more damage. Click at shit randomly to let you get higher in the tree since most of the points do anything for you anyway.

Blade Flurry is worth 1pt in crit if you use it correctly. You want to pop BF + AP trinket (if you have one) immediately after an evisc, then once you get 5CPs, Vanish for the MoS buff and eviscerate immediately after vanish. This will stack the 10% MoS buff with 20% haste and AP buff. Needless to say 1pt in BF is always better than 1pt in malice if multiple targets are involved.

Your primary concerns as a HaT rogue are making sure your eviscs land. You need to obtain 8% total hit, so your first goal is to get 3% hit from gear, then maximize precision, taking points out of CQC. As your hit from gear increases to 5%, you can drop points in precision for CQC. Berzerking is probably the best HaT enchant, but mongoose is still decent, it adds AP and crit to your eviscs. If you cannot afford Zerking and the accuracy enchant will allow you to drop 1pt in precision for CQC, it may be your best choice. Do not forget expertise in your gear setup, dodged eviscs hurt HaT just as badly as misses.

edit: I don't agree with skipping imp snd under any situation. Yes you have plenty of CP, but using them 50% more often on snd is straight decrease in the total number of eviscs.

I haven't seen it discussed much yet, but are there any benefits to DPS as a Solo-Hat Rogue? It seems like it would be more a waste of time without the buggy combo point boosters.

There are 3 scenarios where I COULD POSSIBLY see hat as causing lag, and these involve either faulty hardware, drivers, or game files.

If the sound that HAT makes or the graphic that it makes, were somehow corrupted, yeah it could cause game stuttering lag, if your video card or sound card were faulty, yeah, you could have the same kind of problem HOWEVER you would probably experience this in other facets of the game. The same could be said if it were a driver. As for the HAT build itself causing lag I don't think blizzard is stupid enough to make an ability that is simply performing at 3-4x what it "normally" would cause a server to be brought to it's knees. Not even the Rampage bug did this and people were hitting mobs for 400k damage or more.

Edit: on a similar note, our lag almost always seems to reach a head when we get to Thaddius, I think coupled with the other 2 top guilds on the server arriving at roughly the same time, and the later starting guilds starting around that time, just puts too much stress on the server. I'm actually gonna start suggesting that my guild do Abom wing first from now on.

I have 3 weapons to choose from with this specc.
Calamity's Grasp
Sinister Revenge
The Hand of Nerub

Ofc 2 fast weapons would be a nice way to go with the HAT spec.
But shouldent this be the best option for me? :
MH Calamity's Grasp (Wound poision)
OH Sinister Revenge (Deadly poision)

or am im totaly lost here?

Go to AH , buy 2x Librarians paper cutters , put mongoose on them, wound poison on both and You should be fine.

As of lag, we did raid with 3 HAT rogues in offhours (16.00 CET-17.00) for malygos and sartharian with no lag at all, but after 20.00 in 10 man (already in 15/51/5 swords) the lag was quite bad .. so the reason doesn't seem to be HAT but population in instance servers.

I question dropping the imp snd, like the other poster said.

What I'm wondering now is if rupture is worth it. I've read this thread and saw two conclusions. One was that the 2/2 in blood spatter would top the 2 points in malice. However, if we abuse the hat bug (and we were) wouldn't this gimp our DPS as a group? Seems to me like rupture is only worthwhile if you're flying solo. Having 3 other hat rogues + random DPS probably means rupture isn't worthwhile.

I guess I'll get the point in BF though.

As for the 7% miss on evis, I wish I SSed the recount, because dodge was something like 2%, parry something like 1%, (those values seemed low) with evis missing at 7%. I have almost exactly 5% (it's like 5.08 or something) hit from items and had 3/5 precision. I don't remember which fight it was, but it was an early naxx boss or the wintersgrasp boss.

I'm fully aware that the parry SHOULD be 0, but in some fights it's very difficult to stay behind the target the entire time.

Thanks for all the feedback though.

I've seen little discussion on expertise and hit rating. Maybe it's blatantly obvious, but because in HaT we don't have 2/2 wep expertise, I would assume priority #1 in gemming/enchants would be to reach the 26/26 or 214 rating in expertise. Another obvious statement... we want the special attack hit rating covered at 99. No problem. The next hit cap is the poison cap at 315. Are people going after the 315 mark in a HaT spec or are you taking care of expertise, the 99 hit rating, and then going agi/ap? These hit rating numbers take into account 5/5 precision, which doesn't seem the way to go anyway. A lot of people are doing 3/5 precision.

OK... i guess my question is... after expertise cap, what are people doing with hit rating?

Gotta be that, thanks. Didn't even know what the debuff did other than that I should get out..

Call it what you want, but we were able to "toggle" the lag on the Loatheb encounter by having the two HAT rogues log in and out. It was raid-wide lag and ridiculously bad. Also, we'd never lagged so bad in an instance as we had last Tuesday either on the encounters/trash leading up to the Loatheb kill while we were carrying 2 HAT rogues.

After Loatheb, the other rogue and I respec'd and the complaints/lag disappeared. We ran through construct and military wings without issue.

I don't want to be the scapegoat for everyone's lag complaints in the future either, but HAT definitely seems like it played a part in the lag we had that night.

From Blue poster Thundgot, via: World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> 17/12 Instance Performance

Please stop this - it is NOT due to HaT. More than likely while you were respeccing, a couple guilds on your server finished their raid night. There are so may talents in so many other trees that require the same types of calculations as HaT does for giving other classes energy/combo points/rage etc. No matter how it seemed, there are so many variables here to consider.

Correlation =/= Causation, did you consider that after you respec'ed it was later in the evening and there were probably fewer people raiding? Same thing with raiding later in the week. Servers are lagging due to having too many people in Naxx, there are blue posts saying they know it is an issue, that is the source of the issue and they are trying to find a solution. I have done Naxx on a Tuesday with 0 HAT rogues and lagged the whole night, I have also done Naxx on Sunday with 3 HAT rogues and never saw even a stutter.

The servers are lagging more and more as more groups get into Naxx, and while most people have now hit 80, they are now doing additional runs with alts etc. For example last week my guild rand not one, not two, but three full Naxx 25's, we ran 4 or 5 Naxx 10's... so we ran upwards of 8 full clears for one guild... you want to know what is causing lag, it is LOTS and LOTS of people in the same zone at the same time, and the fact that you noticed a correlation means nothing at all.

Considering how much data your client would send to the server, and the server back, in a full group of 5 hat specced rogues with 80% crit (loatheb), I can't imagine that alone would lag a server even 10 years ago, even if there were 500 people all doing the same thing at the same time there would be very little data and/or processing power that wouldn't have occurred and been calculated regardless of HAT or not.

Stop these baseless rumors, I have had no problems with lag as HAT that I did not have before I was HAT.

During AQ we were successfully able to lag the hell out of the server by having 20 people in the raid with disgusting oozling macros. That being said, HaT doesn't cause lag, a badly written program causes lag.