If the difference between IP/IP/Evis and IP/DP/Envenom is as small as it appears right now, then it's pretty much determined by your current gear setup and raid makeup.

If you don't have a Prot Warrior to Sunder, you can more or less assume that Envenom is going to slightly outscale it. However, if you have a Prot Warrior to Sunder, and happen to have some decent Armor Pen from other gear (Recluse/EoE neck/Grim Toll), then you may very well see an increase in IP/IP/Evis setups. Playing with your gear and setup in Aldriana's sheet is going to give you a better answer, so I'd still recommend that over anything else.

I"m having some trouble finding Aldriana's sheet. Where is that?

Did you try page 1 post 1?

I'm not sure if Aldriana dropped Murder for Improved Eviscerate or if he just traded Turn the Tables for it, but by doing so, the IP/IP setup is perhaps ahead of IP/DP (of course, for Naxxramas only, as Murder is clearly the superior talent). My hacked spreadsheet shows a gain of 1.4% DPS, or 76.31 DPS by taking points out of Murder and one point out of Turn the Tables for Improved Eviscerate.

I saw some chat a few pages back that was flirting with the idea of taking 3 points out of Ruthlessness and putting them into Improved Eviscerate. I'm going to look around to figure out what needs to be changed to reflect the 3.9 changes in Aldriana's spreadsheet, but in the meantime I'm kind of curious if you've tried that, Neto.

But taking points out of Ruthlessness means you'll always have to Mutilate twice before each finisher. I'd think that'd affect a rotation quite a bit.

One of the reasons why Ruthlesness might show up as a dps loss is because of the ip/ip setup using 5 cp finishers. Meaning with ruthlesness you get alot of wasted combo points.

I agree with that analysis, basically what I was thinking as well. 5pt finishers should be more important with Evis over Envenom due to the Envenoms poison proc buff giving more value to squeezing in extra 4pt finishers.

One of the reasons is because with 3/3 Ruthlesness your cttc 4e/4r cycle average length is 15~16s , but 4pt rupture uptime is 18s / 5pt rupture uptime is 20s. so you have to put more engery into Evis.

Without 3/3 Ruthlesness your cttc 4e/4r cycle average length is 20~21s ,so you get more rupture uptime ,and less energy put into Evis.

In vulajin's spreadsheet , if you drop 3/3 Ruthlesness in a IP/IP Evis build ,Rupture DPS + , Evis DPS -,but Total DPS +

In vulajin's spreadsheet , if you drop 3/3 Ruthlesness in a IP/DP Envenom build ,you will see dps lost. That is because Envenom has a higher DPE than Evis.

Another reason might be mentioned above. Your Mutilate is about 65% to be crit in raids.Without Ruthlesness ,you should always use two mutilates between your finishers .1.5% you will get a 4pt finisher , 98.5% you will get a 5pt finisher

Copy paste from my other post, lookin forsome feedback

i've been playing around with specs recently, and found a pretty sweet Mutilate build, which bases on the dual IP/IP formula. AND it does WONDERS. Eviserate and vigor glyph is all thats needed, and another rogue or hunters making sure Poisons are up on constant rotation for bosses.
Standard mutilate build with some changes:

1. Ruthlessness is not needed. All this is good for is for the offchance you dont crit on mutilate 2-3 times in a row. I found i was overburdended with 4/5 combo points A LOT. If your stuck at 2/5, Cold Blood should be saved for those times when i need the dps and cant afford not to hit the 5/5 because you want the last eviserate before you run out or target dies. or Cold Blood + FoK.

putting it into perspective, raid buff crit chance + 15% mutilate crit. if its over 55-60%, Ruthlessnes is a waste. that means youll more often MAKE 5/5 combo points with 2xMutilate then not. recieveing an extra combo point after finisher will be a waste in most cases. Ruthlessnes was much more viable with the old mutilate spec since you somtimes needed to get that 1 point envenom off last second sometimes on the Ruthlessnes proc to refresh SnD. Or it helped to keep a tight rotation. Even then it was more of a safety tool. Thats what i see it as now, a safety tool, either way the point of this spec is to spam 2 buttons, Evis and Mutilate. very rarely i need to spam 3 mut's for 1 evis. and even if i do, the dps increase was worth it.

2. No Rupture.

3. From the savings of talent points, they go to Murder, ImpEviserate/Vigor/ and 1 Fleet Footed.

4. Dual IP on weps. i have SR/WD currently, dont have a 2nd WD to play with.

5. Massive burst damage to being fights, Vigor Glyph, 120 energy + 6 seconds of 10energy savings = heaven.
mutilate from stealth, SnD, mutilate evis. Then the standard mutilate mutilate evis, rinse repeat.

I should have recorded the numbers, i will try for next week, but Thaddius i pushed about 7.3k dps with no "Leader of the Pack" buff and no Heroism due to raid lag issues on patch day. On 25Archavon I was pushing well over 5k dps before heroism and before the stuns/jumps started to push down my dps to about 4.5. I died on Patchwerk due to random fkup, but i would have loved to see those figures.

ANYways this is just to those Mutilate testers out there, give this a try, im sure youll love it. also AMAZING for FoK on trash, i push 20-25k dps on the bigger packs in naxx. not to mention great for 2D/3D Sarth elementals and whelps.

very interesting, and yes i do concur about the ruthlessness.
If you can, try this out: no rupture, and spec to murder (Malygos, sarth dps, and which might be what we want for Ulduar in 3.1)

Why no rupture? You should have plenty of room in your cycles to use both rupture and eviscerate... even without ruthlessness.

I cannot find a way in the sheet to make 4+Evis (CttC) higher DPS, nor do I see the logic in cutting Rupture out of the cycle. I also personally always spec Murder and leave points our of QR as I am near Exp cap.

Seems like a decent trash dps spec.
On bosses I can't see what use you would have of Vigor.

On the Ruthlessness point: the cycle modeling in the sheet presupposes that you have Ruthlessness. It is not really intended to function without it. So the gains by dropping it may or may not be real - they could just be an artifact of the sheet. Now, that said: it's also possible that, for the Eviscerate/IP build, it is worth using 5-pt finishers rather than 4-pt finishers, which would mean the difference is real. In order to figure out which it is, significant sheet upgrades would be needed.

Now, this is something I may do - I do have some ideas of the problems and how to fix them - but I'm somewhat disinclined to put too much work into them without knowing what's going to change in 3.1. As such, I will probably wait a week or two before getting started on said changes.

Have a WWS or any proof of that kind of dmg?

I'd be much more inclined to agree with Aldriana in the sense that modeling specs/gear at this point is somewhat moot since 3.1 is most likely to sway all specs in a different direction then what we are used to. For all we know, DP and Envenom damage is getting buffed, which would negate the effort of changing the current spreadsheet.

Either way, common sense seems to say that dropping Ruthlessness for Improved Eviscerate is the better option. Like someone a few posts up said, using Evis as a finisher pretty much requires it to be a 5 point finisher, and without Ruthlessness you're pretty much guaranteed those 5 point finishers for your rotation.

Also, with the assumption that you are going into Improved Eviscerate builds, I was thinking about the other trees. Do you think their could be some benefit of taking 5 points out of Combat (dropping 3/5 CQC and two points in Precision) and dropping them into Sub to pick up Serrated Blades? I ask because awhile back I was playing around with the specs, and noticed that even after dropping 3% crit and 2 points in Precision, the spec was only roughly 100 DPS loss to the typical spec. Assuming that you're going with an 5 Evis/5 Rupture rotation, I'd be curious to see if this build setup overtakes the typical Mutilate build. Again, I wish I understood the spreadsheets a little more intimately to play with this by myself, but I sadly don't.

Yes, the metagem is assumed. This is because almost any helm with a meta gem is better than almost any helm without. And I mean that very literally.

Thank you for al the great analysing done here, im a big reader but so far not a poster. Playing as a happy user of the common 51 13 7 mutilate build so far. What I last week been trying to work out is a working specc/rotation for keep expose up and somehow manage the standard rotation of a mutilate build. Reason in that we dont have a warrior tank in guild and I been asked to test keep expose up to compare to the personal dps loss for me compared to the dps warrior who feel rage drained quite often.

The problem i come up with so far has been.

1. Quite often end up with 4 CP and time to renew expose.
2. Ending up in situations when snd is about to drop and a cuple of second later HFB when its time to renew expose.
3. Energy drained not cause Expose, rupture or enevenom but more of the energy used to generate the CP needed

Atm I solved it by specc sHAT with is a specc I dont like or even find usfull in many situations.

So what can be done as a Mutilate specced rogue to keep expose up? Or is the dps loss so bigg that its better the warrior try manage it?

A problem solver for the CP unbalace would be not specc into ruthlessness and at worst get end up with 1 owercapped CP, ofc this would leed to situations when you not critting mutilate two times in a row but in a raid it shuld be rare.

About the rotation and not get CP and/or energy drained would leav out rupture be a sulution? This would cost more than it taste I feel thu as rupture still is a considerable part of a mutilate rogues dps.

The first question I would pose Osicat is are you running a glyph of expose armor when specced 51/13/7? The extra time it grants really helps in the stability of keeping a 5 point expose up on the target.

Now, if you are then my next question is are you perhaps trying too hard to squeeze in ruptures into your rotation? More often than not, you will be just using Envenom/Eviscerate (oh the joys of 3.0.9) and expose and tossing in the odd rupture if you have a LOT of time left on SnD/Expose. In this day and age, you may want to consider running the expose glyph in place of the rupture glyph, since you won't be getting a lot of mileage out of it anyhow and thus getting the eviscerate glyph which at least you will get some bang for the buck (and run IP/IP).

The HfB timing issue is another matter, and could be tied to trying too squeeze in ruptures when you probably shouldn't risk it. I usually find myself running an expose rotation on Instructor Razuvious since our prot warriors are off doing their own thing and from my admittedly anecdotal experience find I only really run into trouble with HfB after taking a gamble and using a rupture when my SnD or Expose timers are a little tight. Though, as has been pointed out elsewhere, from a raid dps standpoint the effect of your dropping SnD or HfB pales by comparison to letting Expose armor drop off. So when choosing your finisher, make sure that you've got more than enough time to pop 3 mutilates on your expose timer before choosing any other finisher. I also find that energy pooling before using a finisher also helps to be able to whip off a finisher and refresh HfB on the next GCD. In dire emergencies remember to use the Vanish/Overkill effect to buy you some breathing room or to bail you out from a bad decision.

All that said, it would be much better for a warrior to put up the major armor debuff. The dps cost to them maintaining the effect is significantly lower than it is for you.

Let me put it a little blunt. Stuff it to the warrior, if he cant spend 15 rage every 30 seconds you probably need to replace him. It has been discussed more than once that the opportunity cost of Expose armor is through the roof compare to Sunder armor.

edit: not refreshing a thread for 5 hours before posting is stupid.

I did actually get around to making the changes, by the way.

I took 3 points out of Ruthlessness and put them into Improved Eviscerate and changed all the other variables. It gave me a 100 DPS increase over IP/DP and Envenom. If I move those 3 back to Ruthlessness, and take 2 out of Murder and 1 out of TtT, it gave me a loss of about 20 DPS. I am running Webbed Death/Murder, 4 piece T7.5, Recluse, and the "normal" off set pieces. Have you tried moving 3 out of Ruthlessness?

I believe both spreadsheets' Cut to the Chase modeling wouldn't be accurate without Ruthlessness, so I'm not so sure about how trustworthy these results are. I'd say you'd probably be better off dropping Murder or Turn the Tables; though I think Vulajin's 0.5 spreadsheet will feature non-Ruthlessness CttC cycles, so maybe it ends up being better - for now, however, we can't really tell.