I don't understand this "if you don't use Tricks" argument. You could just as easily use it against Rupture. If I don't use Rupture, then my damage from Rupture would go down! Unless you're dwarfing everyone's DPS, it will be an overall DPS increase. Obviously if you don't like to use Tricks because it's a hassle or you're just bad at following the CD, the glyph is pointless for you. But if we're talking about optimal play and the math is right, why wouldn't use what's best for the raid? That said, there might be fights where it's not the best one to use so I'm sure people will be swapping their glyphs between fights. Just another cost to raiding.

I'm also surprised about your thought about rupture, Ravnos. I've had plenty of moments where I wish my rupture was done so I could continue my cycle. If I just overwrite my original rupture so I can, which you can't always anyways, don't I lose the benefit of the rupture glyph? From the anecdotal complaints on these forums, there's been similar posts with people complaining the same, especially for combat.

Overwriting your rupture loses you the last tick and is a very bad idea. Unless you're about to cap out on energy, you should always let the rupture tick out before refreshing.

ToTT should always be used on cooldown. Either your DPS are threat capped, in which case you need to ToTT the tank, or they are not, in which case you should ToTT a DPS. I freely admit that I don't always do so, largely because I'm not in the habit of it, but it's something I'm working on improving. Once I've got it down cold, I'll certainly be glyphing for it. In fact, you don't even need to use it on cooldown to come out ahead - 2% compared to ~0.9% is a large margin. Even allowing for Rupture crits taking that up to ~1.3%, it's still a large margin. As long as you use ToTT at least every 45 seconds, you should probably glyph it.

ToTT will always be interesting to model because it involves a second party. Theoretically ToTT should be used on every cd, but there are some situations where you can't. Here's one situation: all the good dps in my guild are always threat capped because our tanks can't out-threat them. In this situation I'd have to be ToTTing the tank most of the time, resulting in a dps loss. Ideally this shouldn't happen, and in most raiding guilds it doesn't, but in some it does.

Also, with regards to overwriting ruptures: if I'm using ToTT on every cd this never really happens to me. The amount of energy consumed by that alone (15 energy/30 seconds = 0.5 energy/second) is enough to keep a mutilate cycle on the fringes. I'm just saying that I personally have never really had a problem with overwriting ruptures unless I'm not using ToTT at all. even if I'm at 5 cp and my energy is climbing while I'm waiting for a rupture to tick off, I can just do a quick ToTT which eats up approximately one second worth of energy regeneration.

In a situation where your DPS are threat-capped due to low tank threat, ToTTing the tank should still be valuable from a raid DPS point of view, though more indirectly. If the tank is putting out more threat due to being the ToTT target, that will also allow the DPS to increase their damage output without fear of pulling aggro. This would increase the raid DPS by some degree, though maybe not as much as if you were able to ToTT a high DPSer without fear of him or her pulling aggro. How this compares to the rupture argument I don't know but it isn't useless from a raid DPS point of view to be ToTTing the MT.

That's actually probably the best case scenario.. for each threat capped dps, you're effectively giving them a much larger increase than the increase from ToTT just by giving 20% of your threat to the tank and giving non-warrior tanks 3% more damage (1% for warriors) which is even more threat.

Actually, in that situation it's much better to ToTT the tank. If you ToTT a DPSer, you increase their personal DPS by ~3%. If you ToTT the tank, you increase their threat by ~3% from their DPS alone (since threat is proportional to damage), an in addition you transfer some of your threat to them. That then allows every threat-capped DPSer to increase their DPS by as much as 5%. If you have 3-4 threatcapped DPSers, the benefit multiplies up accordingly.

The total raid benefit could easily be five or more times the benefit you'd get from ToTTing a DPSer. If there's the least suggestion that your DPS is threat capped, ToTT the tank.

I'm just going to play devil's advocate at this point. You guys are absolutely right about the indirect benefit from ToTTing the tank with threat capped dpsers. I can still think of a couple scenarios that complicate things, so just humor me.

#1 - The ToTT target and tank build threat at very nearly the same rate. In this case if you ToTT the dps, he/she will pass the tank in threat and pull agro. Assuming that their agro dump is on cooldown, if they have one, this isn't a good situation.

#2 - All other dps are under the dps threshold at which the constant use of ToTT will be beneficial to the raid. Yes, this is more unlikely than #1, but, it is possible. One situation where this could happen is in an intense resist gear fight.

Those are the only two I can think of at the moment. My point is basically that the conditions aren't always going to favor using ToTT on every cd. The commonality of these circumstances needs to be determined in order to correctly model ToTT. Also I mentioned a dps threshold; we should probably figure out the rough area where that resides, maybe rounded to the nearest thousand or so.

I was doing some mutilate testing on the PTR with the goal of seeing how certain changes were going to effect my dps.

(all tests were over the course of 3.5 million damage on the heroic dummy)

WD/WD IDN with master poisoner - 3116.6
Anarchy/WD IDN with master poisoner - 3200.0

then i specced in to lightning reflexes (5/5 cqc 3/3 LR and 0/5 relentless), dps dropped down to 2900 running WD/WD. The rotation seemed a lot tighter without RS and LR instead...I didn't like it, and also the dps was lower. Is anyone having similar results?

Where is the line between playing devil's advocate and just being argumentative?

1. If the relative threat between dps and tank is as close as this, then the dps is on the verge of pulling aggro regardless, to the point where RNG could very possibly trigger a aggro transition. Obviously if there is a significant chance of this occurring it would be in the favor of the raid to use ToTT to increase the tank's threat to reduce this chance.

2. If we assume that using ToTT on cooldown costs about 1% of the rogue's dps and increases another player's dps by 3%, then yes - if your rogue does more than 3 times as much as the 2nd highest dps, it would not be advantageous to use ToTT.

So with these numbers right here...I saw earlier in the thread you're not saying that the 18/51/2 rotation you used is the end all be all optimal rotation for that spec, but it's obviously a little more of a leg up than the other two, but still a tad behind mutilte. Is there a significant room for improvement on that spec to maybe make it more on par with Mutilate if not a little bit more, or do you feel that the rotation used is pretty close to what will be THE rotation to use. I mean obviously it won't change too much, but I would think 3s/5r/5e would yield more?

Actually with a bug fix related to wound poison, the table now looks like this:

So it's slightly ahead of mutilate and now behind 15/51/5 and 7/51/13. There is room for improvement in each spec, I haven't even started playing with various cycles and just used a more or less common set up for each build. You can play with the spreadsheet yourself and test if 3s/5r/5e gives you more dps.

Why are we using agi gems and not AP gems now?

I assume mutilate value is without murder on those calculations?
If this is true then mutilate will easily outperform combat on single fight bosses on ulduar where almost every boss is murderable

Did i miss something here?

WD/DP instead of WD/WD?

-Deadly Poison: The amount of damage this poison generates from the rogue’s attack power has been increased from 8% per application to 12%.

Hello, im new to posting but have been following this forum since i started playing rogue.

I can't find any explanation to what Mavanas means in his last graph:

Whats vHAT with LR ??

I know what vHAT is since i have tried that specc out myself but what is vHAT with LR??

nm...i found it in HAT thread ( i should have thought of it myself ofc its Lightning Reflexes )

Here we go


Deadly Poison: The amount of damage this poison generates from the rogue’s attack power has been increased from 8% per application to 12%.
Deadly Throw: Missile speed increased.
Instant Poison: Redesigned to have its chance to be applied based on the speed of the weapon (frequency-based).
Shiv: This ability can no longer generate a critical strike, and the poisons it applies cannot be critical strikes either.
Tricks of the Trade: Will now begin following the first damaging attack.
Wound Poison: Redesigned to have its chance to be applied based on the speed of the weapon (frequency-based).

Talents

Assassination
Hunger For Blood: No longer stacks. Damage bonus changed to 15% for a single application. Requires a bleed effect active on the rogue’s target. No longer removes bleeds from the rogue. Now costs 15 energy and lasts for 60 seconds.
Master Poisoner: Now also increases the bonus to apply Deadly Poison when Envenom is used by an additional 15/30/45%.

Combat

Adrenaline Rush cooldown reduced to 3 minutes.
Killing Spree: Now also increases all damage done by the rogue while active by 20%.
Savage Combat improved to 2/4% increased damage against poisoned targets.
Lightning Reflexes reduced to 3 ranks for 2/4/6% dodge and 4/7/10% melee haste.

Subtlety

Shadow Dance now opens a new action bar when used.

So I know this may have been answered in posts preceding this (but I get a headache sifting through the 50+ pages of posts for one specific answer for my questions), but has anybody done enough Muti Spec testing to conclusively answer what weapon speeds are best for maximizing dps (slow MH-fast OH, etc.)?

I figure since poisons are becoming PPM, weapon speed doesn't play as important a role in poison dps as it did in 3.0 patch. Is slow-slow dagger combo for pve mut making it's way onto the scene? Or is at least 1 fast dagger preffered for Focused Attacks (or two for that matter)?

I saw that Songster did some testing on slow-fast combinations on post page #11:

"Mutilate 51/13/7: MH IP, OH DP
DPS with unnormalised poisons: 4733 (WD mainhand / SR offhand)
DPS with unnormalised poisons: 4733 (WD mainhand / WD offhand)
DPS with unnormalised poisons: 4639 (SR mainhand / WD offhand)
DPS with normalised poisons: 4680 (WD mainhand / SR offhand)
DPS with normalised poisons: 4680 (WD mainhand / WD offhand)
DPS with normalised poisons: 4769 (SR mainhand / WD offhand)"

Can anyone else confirm this?

I am definitely a Mut enthusiast and refuse to play other specs due to it's challenging and most entertaining (imo) rotation.

Thanks!

Remember that DP isn't having its proc rate normalized, so there is benefit in having a fast OH to refresh the stacks asap after an envenom as well as FA procs. And slower MHs benefit from a higher poison proc rate on specials, though not as much as I was hoping based on the numbers you quoted.

And thanks for information on losing your focus, ButterzzDrenden. I ran with another rogue for the first time last week and kept losing him as my focus target on boss fights. He was combat and I imagine his Killing Sprees were removing him from my focus target. I ended up changing my macro to /cast [target=name] like the others suggested and it worked like a charm after that.

I never guessed it was Killing Spree, I was thinking it was something to do with the fact that he was TotTing me at the same time since I had never had that problem with any other classes.

I would assume fast / fast would still be good for Mutilate, due to Focused Attacks.

Maybe the numbers say otherwise?

Looking at this chart, I see that under "Gear Notes", there is a comment saying "poison hit capped, AG gems" for combat. Does this mean that we should not care about the extpertise rating at all when running as combat?

The patch is going live tomorrow and I am speccing combat, 15/51/5 to be more exact, and I am trying to see how to change my current gems/enchants.

Expertise is still a great stat of course. It is however less vital to a combat spec as it is for a HaT spec or Mutilate as you rely less tightly on finishers and have Surprise Attacks. With a HaT spec or Mutilate the chance of destroying your cycle with a missed finisher is higher.