Would 'Filthy Tricks' be worth the 2 talent points? (In exchange for blood splatter)

Assuming 2 rogue casting on each other my rough math shows it could be viable for the extra uptime of ToTT. Also on those occasional >5 minutes boss fights you get an extra preparation -> blade flurry

I made some rough calculations based on a wws log, and for me it's not worth it. However if your cp generation is through the roof, then this might be different.

According to my calculations, speccing in 3/3 ruthlessness is better than speccing in blood splatter or blade flurry in single target fights. You will gain around 100-150 dps from additional eviscerates over the dps increase of blade flurry or blood splatter.

Of course you will need 1 more talent point to make it 3/3 which you can either get from shadowstep or aggression which I have also included in the calculations.

Hey guys, it would be really helpful to the rest of the community, if when you made statements like, "According to my calculations, X talent is better than Y talent", you could include your basic calculations. Especially when it involves talents that have already been proven by others to be better. We can't verify your work or point out omissions in your math if we don't have any. Without any work, these assertions are no better than personal experiences to the community.

This isn't exactly true.

Since I've been seeing a lot of people using Wound/Wound lately, here's some math.

Wound Poison formula: [231 + 0.04 * AP] at 50% application rate.
Deadly Poison formula: [1480 + 0.40 * AP] over 12 seconds.

Assuming a 1.3 offhand (best case scenario for WP), Misery on the target, 15% miss rate on white hits and poison hit capped, 22% spell crit, with Improved Icy Talons and Slice and Dice, over 120 seconds, WP will have 70 expected procs, which is 54.6*[231 + 0.04 * AP] and 15.4*[(231 + 0.04 * AP)*1.545] damage.

Assuming 100% Deadly Poison uptime, over 120 seconds, it will do 10*[1480 + 0.40 * AP] damage.

With 5000 Attack Power, Wound Poison will do 54.6*[431] and 15.4*[(431)*1.545] damage, which is 33787.383 damage.
With 5000 Attack Power, Deadly Poison will do 10*[3480] damage, which is 34800 damage.

At that point, for a 1.3 OH and 5000 AP, Deadly Poison is 3% better than Wound.

For 4000 AP, 1.3 OH, Deadly Poison is 0.015% better than Wound poison. At 3000 AP, 1.3 OH, Wound Poison actually beats Deadly by 3%.

However, most people won't have a 1.3 OH anyways, and if you use, say, a 1.5 OH instead, Deadly will be almost 20% better (13.3 crits, 47 procs for 29113 damage). I think it's safe to say that Deadly Poison is pretty much always better than Wound if your weapon is slower than 1.3, and only better if your weapon speed is 1.3 and you have less than 4000 AP.

Also, going from 3000 AP to 5000 AP increases the Deadly Poison damage by 23%, whereas it increases the Wound Poison damage by 19%. Over those 120 seconds DP gets 400% of your ap, while WP gets 280%.

Please do note that my calculation assumes 100% Deadly Poison uptime, so it is very possible that in a lucky streak you do more damage using Wound instead, as Deadly can always underperform the damage expected, and Wound can both underperform or overperform.

Think you could post your macro in here? I currently have a macro setup as well, to automatically target my focus, cast TotT, and then /assist, and it works great, but I would love a way to essentially switch my focus mid-fight without the loss of targetting and such.

yeh, what I normally do is set my focus as the other rogue, and then make the MT my target when we're about to pull, so i can just click normal tott to tricks the tank off the get go, and then every 30 seconds hit my macro to target the other rogue, tricks, assist, and keep on going... I just like the idea of being able to have multiple focuses rolled into a single macro like that.

Has anyone found any further information or blues on the 2HaT rogue "bug"?

This thread for some basic explanation and a GC answer:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Nerf or fix rogue HAT spec

I don't know if it's because it's 3AM or what, but I can't tell if that posts means they're going to nerf it or if it's 'working as intended' what did everyone else get from that post?

They clearly state it's a bug, and that it's not supposed to be what's making our DPS high-end. Hence, it's clearly not "working as intended" and it will likely get fixed at some point - though whether it makes it into 3.0.8 is debatable. This basically says they're planning to fix the bug, and then evaluate how well the various specs hold up against other classes at that point.

Hello everyone ! I'm currently testing the HaT spec. during our Naxx25-session. Even if there are some other rogues in the squad, I'm the only one using HaT with a group composed generally of a Enh-Shaman, a Feral druid, a warrior and another rogue which allows me to judge this spec' without the exploit.

Currently my spec is this one : 7/20/44
With a rather good gear for a rogue playing in a soft-HL guild ^^

My question is : Would it be better to aim at using Fist Weapons and this spec with 5/5 in CQC and therefore not wasting any point in the process ?
8/20/43

Any of you tested that ?

I don't want to go off on too deep a tangent, but right now this bug is essentially the only way to keep rogue dps competitive. And most of us are not even spec-ing this way. The linked thread contains a fair amount of ranting, but amidst it all is the larger truth. In the meantime, it'd be interesting to see how this spec did un-bugged versus the other specs. Clearly, every rogue spec needs a buff. And it's not just the AoE issue. But perhaps Honor Among Thieves was underrated and a rogue/hunter focused group would at least make the spec interesting.

I think saying that HaT is the only way we remain competitive is misleading at best. I think the simple fact of the matter is that there just aren't that many rogues in high-end guilds that *aren't* exploiting the HaT bug, so it's sort of hard to assess whether they're doing good DPS or not. I can say that in my own experience, myself and the other well-geared rogue in my guild are perpetually near the top in DPS on single targets (Patchwerk, and the like), with the only person beating us by any margin of significance on Patchwerk being a hunter. Simply put: rogue DPS *might* be bad, but until they get some top rogues using non-bugged specs, they really have no basis for comparison. Which, I suspect, is exactly why rogue changes in 3.0.8 are sparse - the bug is dominating rogue theorycraft, so all they can say for sure is "rogue AoE DPS is weak, who knows about single target" - so they're fixing the part they know. Once they've gotten the other classes squared away and the bug fixed, they'll take a look at our DPS and see how it stacks up.

If you want my personal recommendation for making sure the class gets tuned correctly in a timely fashion? Don't spec HaT. The more rogue there are using real DPS specs posting realistic DPS numbers for those specs, the faster they will be able to assess the balance of the class.

Stacking rogues with Honor Among Thieves is and always was bug, quite big one actually. If it was working as intended it would be really bad game mechanic and I think Blizzard is actually trying to avoid those type of issues (stacking classes). So it will be definitely changed at some point.

From my point of view rogue damage in raids is "almost there". We most likely need some type of buff but not much.

When I try this, I periodically lose the focus - is it Vanish doing that?

Sure. Before that it owed somewhat to the fact that we had all been playing combat swords for a year and a half and needed a little time to get used to Mutilate - I know I did. But once I got a decent Mutilate set put together and practiced with it for a week or two, I quickly found myself back among the top DPS in the guild in terms of single-target DPS. Now, maybe my experience is not typical. Maybe my guild has weak DPS on the whole, or I've gotten extraordinarily lucky with gear, or whatever. All I can say is that, in my experience, good rogues have no trouble holding their own against good members of other classes. We don't always win anymore - nor should we. Previously we were tops on the meter by virtue of being rogues - now, rogues are supposed to win only if they outplay the other DPS.

Regardless: it may be that rogue DPS is low. It may be that we need a buff. But as ekval said a few posts up: if we need a buff, it's not a large one. We're in the right ballpark. Sure, maybe we need to be tuned upwards by a couple percent, but it's not like rogues are going to instantly lose their raid spots once HaT is fixed, and while we might need a little tweaking to make sure that stays true, I don't think we're talking a major overhaul. And I do think the fact that so many rogues are playing HaT these days is among the reasons why we haven't seen as many changes to rogues in 3.0.8 so far; once the bug is fixed and they can get a better feeling for where we fit relative to other classes, I'm sure we'll see whatever changes need to be made get made.

I believe that Killing Spree is a known culprit for causing target/focus to be cleared. (It is supposed to do that to enemy players, but apparently it does it to friendly players as well.) Is the rogue that you use as a focus target specced into Killing Spree?

I think that's a tiny bit simplistic - it's looking only at raiding DPS, only at boss fights, and only at high end 25-man gear levels. As you say, that's not where the majority of the problems lie.

Looking at the "raid DPS" part - it seems that rogue DPS scales more with raid buffs than other classes. That has always been the case, and necessarily so because of PvP balance. However, in small group PvE situations - 5 and 10-man - all the PvP tricks become useless, and yet our damage is still comparatively low. You and I may not care about Heroic 5-man DPS, but I guarantee you the majority of the playerbase will, and Blizzard should. One of the reasons we scale so much with raid buffs is that our peak output relies on having both the physical and spell buffs/debuffs present, because we use physical damage and spell damage. HaT spec shifts the damage output more towards physical damage rather than poison damage, which may mitigate this effect in part.

Looking at the "boss fights" part: again, our problem has never been stand-and-nuke fights. Right now we're doing comparable damage to ranged classes on Patchwerk - however mobility fights tend to penalise melee more than ranged. That drops us back down the table on fights that aren't stand-and-nuke. One of the attractions of HaT stacking abuse is the minimal wind-up time: as soon as one of the party crits, you're back to full output.

Looking at the "gear levels" part: one of the issues with Mutilate is the reliance on fast weapons due to poison proc scaling. That means that a lot of the supposed rogue gear available from quests, rep and instances is severely sub-optimal. I'm not sure how this is altered in HaT spec, but it's one reason why Mutilate underperforms until you get lucky with Webbed Death drops.

The needed fixes are quite a lot larger than just "fix HaT bug and maybe buff single-target by a couple of percent". To wit:

1) Make our damage output less dependent on having every single raid buff (necessary or we'll be marginalised in small groups). It's not clear how to do this without unbalancing PvP though, which is probably why they're being cautious.

2) Penalise Mutilate (and possibly Combat) less on mobility / target-switching fights. Make AoE less painful (waiting to see on FoK changes).

3) Change our dependence on fast weapons. It's ludicrous that [Librarian's Paper Cutter] is pretty much equivalent to [Omen of Ruin] and almost as good as [Twilight Mist] (figures from latest spreadsheet, may not be exact, but they're very close). Normalising poison proc rate based on weapon speed would be one option, but would require a lot of other balancing changes, which again is one reason for them to be cautious.

As curious as I am about HAT spec and what kind of crazy numbers I could get with it I never spec'd it for the reasons Aldriana stated above. We all knew it was a bug and now that we have confirmation from Ghostcrawler to that effect it can't be argued otherwise.

As much as some players like to composite the WWS logs and wave those numbers around to say one thing or the other, Blizzard has access to all the logs and Rogues that spec HAT are really doing a disservice to every one of us. It muddies the water and if we are behind on DPS it's for this reason.

I know it's probably not my place to suggest this but since it has been confirmed that this is a bug I really think that this thread and any posts related to HAT should be removed. When we had no comment, using HAT was kind of a gray area but since the confirmation it can now be called an exploit and I'm not comfortable with the idea that EJ has posts and a full thread that outlines how rogues can exploit a bug in WoW.

It's kind of sad that rogues have to exploit a broken game mechanic in order to do the most damage on a fight like Patchwerk which, for all intents and purposes, is where we should outshine everyone and everything.

I've never really understood why it would be a huge problem to just add "NPC" and "Player" to the whole "giant, undead, dragonkin" etc mix (most of which are fairly uninteresting these days anyway with the notable exception of Murder in our case) and make Murder do +15% or whatever (not a suggestion, merely trying to make a point) damage done to "NPC".

I know they want to have PvE and PvP "the same" but it's never going to happen and has already started changing with the "not usable in arena" items.

If you are the only rogue spec HaT in your group, there is no problem theoricrafting about this spec and the scaling don't you think so ?