Since you're dealing with set numbers of expertise on gems and gear, you can't always gem perfectly for the cap. I usually gem for it but don't bother burning too many stats trying to reach it if I'm say only 4 away. It also works the other way for me in that I don't mind spending one or two rating over the cap for like songster says, the "peace of mind."

So it's more just personal preferance, as opposed to a min-max choice then? Thanks for the feedback.

It has more to do with your play style at this point than anything else. In 3.0, if you were running a very tight cycle where you were often counting on energy returns from finishers, a dodge could cost you a refresh on SnD or HfB if you ran your cycle very tight.

While the penalty for SnD is the same in 3.1, the penalty for HfB isn't nearly as steep (not by a long shot). I used to run a very tight cycle as mutilate but have since switched to a looser and more flexible cycle and have dropped most of my expertise for Agility.

When I have 4pc T8, I may go back to the higher Rupture uptime of a tighter cycle but for now this is working well for me.

I've pondered how much Expertise is really worth as well, but I haven't gotten the hang of a 3.1 spreadsheet just yet.

Have you tried Quick Recovery in your spreadsheet with this low Expertise? I imagine it'd become a lot more valuable.

After most fights I check to see just how many Envenoms were dodged and how much it cost me. So far, almost every fight has been well inside what the RNG could do.

The only fights where more expertise would make a noticeable difference would be the ones where the tank is constantly moving the boss around and I'm in danger of being parried as well as dodged. However, these situations will become fewer and fewer as my guild learns all the fights.

As for QR, it's an attractive talent but I'm not prepared to give up Murder in my main spec or the usefulness of Combat as my secondary for it (at least not right now).

So by looser cycle, what percent of uptime do you get on Rupture? I don't see how giving up a non-trivial amount of Rupture uptime can be a DPS increase.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to stack Expertise to cap. It's already proven that for Mutilate, Expertise has an EP value that's basically equivalent to Agi/AP, even without taking into account the cycle stability upside. So given that, what benefit do you gain from shirking Expertise? It's not like it's hard to get to the cap anyways, you only need a couple of pieces and a couple of gems.

Ah, okay. I can see that logic if you plan on swapping to Combat quite a bit for your guild. Our Combat rogue should have basically 100% attendance so I don't have to worry about that (and to be honest, after going through most of the fights I really don't think Combat has a huge advantage on any of the fights...other than maybe Freya -- which I haven't experienced yet?)

EDIT: Although, on the other hand you could just switch to a Combat spec that doesn't have weapon ex and your expertise isn't necessarily "wasted."

Or you could pick up extra T7 pants/helm, gem it with Expertise, and keep an Agility version for Combat. Hell, you can even spend some of your pile of Valor badges on an extra pair of legs if you want to do it right away. I swap about 5 items when I go from Combat to Mutilate. The way I see it, unless your gear is optimally gemmed/enchanted for each spec, you have a good chance of wiping out almost or all of the DPS advantage a particular spec has for a fight.

We have a Ret Pally and a (now) Arms Warrior with extrememly high attendance, so either debuff is always covered. I simply swap for the use of Combat's cooldowns.

I've found Combat to be very useful on Razorscale and XT-002, once you get tot he keepers and beyond though I always did better with Mutilate. Although after doing Mimiron as Mutilate last night, I'll probably go Combat for him in the future.

The other piece of the puzzle that I forgot to mention is that a dodged Envenom isn't the worst thing ever; you still get the buff. If you run your cycle fast enough that you don't have to worry about SnD falling off then having a dodged Envenom means you can simply pool energy and wait for the buff to run out again. In essence, you paid 35 Energy for an extra Envenom buff. Two dodges in a row at low Expertise isn't any more likely than a single dodge at much higher Expertise (if you're below the cap).

I'm not going to take the time to do the math but the loss of damage from 1-2 Envenoms per fight might be made up for by having 10-12 seconds more of the Envenom buff; I really don't know for sure on that though.

What would be the best cycle for 51/18/2 spec. Any ideas. My current cycle or rotation is open with garrote, HfB, 1 mut=2 or 3 pts SnD, 4-5 pts rupture, 1 mut, refresh SnD with envenom.. then build up for rupture again and pretty much at the point what i do is keeping up rupture and refreshing SnD with envenom and refreshing HfB. How can i make my cycle tighter? Cos sometimes i see myself not been able to refresh rupture and having 4 pts up while SnD and HfB is good.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe these questions are supposed to be asked in the Rogue: Simple Questions/Simple Answers thread.

We are almost always talking about optimizing rDPS, or Raid DPS. In many cases we accomplish this by maximizing our personal DPS contributions. In this case, TotT is obviously intended to increase rDPS, not personal DPS.

The amount of the rDPS increase will, of course, depend on the starting DPS of the person you Tricks. Assuming it is another raid member doing approximately the same DPS as you are doing (say, another rogue) is our general practice. Alternately, if your tank is threat-capping other DPS members, increasing Tank thread via DPS increase will have an even larger rDPS increase as 60+% of your raid will now be able to increase their threat-capped damage by that same amount, rather than just a single recipient.

I've been running this spec this week and enjoying it a lot, Unless there will be no other bleed on the target, opening with garrote is going to hurt you a lot. I open with mutilate giving a chance to proc a DP + give more time to the first SND, as well as it being cheaper then garrote via the glyph. Also, unless you have no other bleeds, rupture isn't going to be worth while with the lack of relentless strikes, just keep H4B up and envenom with 5 DP stacked after using a mutilate.

Why would it not be worthwhile to rupture just because you don't have relentless strikes? It's the most damage per energy so wouldn't it be even more important to use it? You might be energy-starved sometimes that you can't use it without risking a drop in your cycle. But whenever you have the free energy you'd be hurting your DPS to never include it.

I've been messing around with excluding rupture from my rotation and using well-timed envenoms instead and I've noticed an increase in dps. Even with rupture in the rotation, instant poison accounts for a significantly larger percentage of overall damage than rupture does. Has anyone else played around with doing this? (3+ finishers with this to maximize envenom buff uptime). This is, of course, without the 4pc T8 bonus.

4p T8 and your droping rupture from your rotation? Rupture is energy efficent damge even more so with the 4P T8 with a Rentless Strikes proc its free. If your not going to use the set bonus you might as well use off tier gear.

I know spreadsheets are correct. I also know they are very theoretical.

I am trying to figure out now whether (realistically) double Instant Poison and not speccing Master Poisoner would result in more effective damage.

Fact is, this is the damage composition for a long raid:

Instant Poison: 17%
Deadly Poison: 11%
Envenom: 7%


Now Eviscerate deals around 5.5 critdmg (nonspecced as Mutilate-Raid) and Envenom around 9.1k crit average.
If I specced Evis, it would deal 6.5k. This means that Evis deals 29% less damage than Envenom.

However, if I would dual-Instant Poison, I would get 6% more totaldmg and using specced Evis instead of Envenom, I would lose only 2% totaldmg.

In addition, assuming I get the 3% crit from Master Poisoner from someone else (Retri / Ele Shammy), I could spec into Turn the Tables without losing anything.

The envenom Buff doesn't too much since Improved Poisons gives already a 50% bonus chance for Instant all the time, in addition to spellhit this should already result in a nigh 100% procchance (20% + 50% + 17% spellhit + X)

I know this can't touch the pure spreadsheeters, but has anyone experience in using this?

Incorrect - keep in mind your Eviscerates and Ruptures (in your case) will only proc your MH poison - so you wouldn't gain as much as you think you would.

It actually does a fair bit. I'd pull out the number for you - but I need to run off now. I'll update this post in a few hours when I get back near a computer with the real numbers, if no one else has beaten me to the punch.

This is not even remotely accurate.
Base Instant PPM is 8.57. Improved Poisons raises that by 50%, to 12.9. Spellhit has nothing to do with procrate at all, and merely prevents actual procs from being resisted (aka spellmiss).

oh you're right there... I really mixed that up.

So basically I'll lose a LOT of IP procs without envenom... a procrate of 12,9 is one proc every 4,6sec... so the envenom buff should actually buff this quite a bit.

The other problem with using zero-sum percentage values to calculate a potentially-expansive increase in personal DPS is the relationship of the percentage values in deference to each other.

As has been said before, not only will the expected relative contribution of your MH Instant Poison drop rather precipitously by dint of 0% Envenom uptime, but as can be expected, a rotation running IP/DP but using Eviscerate (isolating variables for the sake of argument) will see a greater DPS contribution from Deadly Poison than your current setup does, making % value - DPS values not only worthwhile, but necessary to avoid ambiguity.



The three things wrong with this argument are that:

1. Your calculations of Eviscerate and Envenom do not adequately take the Envenom buff (a significant contribution to personal DPS) into account.

2. Unfortunately, most generally speaking, there aren't 3 filler points in our Assassination tree to arbitrarily spec 3/3 Improved Eviscerate.

3. Once again, as I alluded to above, your 6% figure for Instant Poison's edge over Deadly Poison is extremely misleading, due to Instant Poison's entry's pronounced inflation as a consequence of the Envenom buff and the overall augmentation of these percentage-based values that would arise upon any sort of internal alteration.



With the 3.1 change of Instant/Wound Poison working off a PPM system (and even before, really, but the numbers were different,) the tooltips for both Improved Poisons and Envenom have become somewhat confusing in regards to the assumption that 100% increased frequency (or some weighted derivation thereof) will constitute a guaranteed frequency of applying Instant Poison.

What that 100% figure actually does is feed into the pre-existing PPM framework for determining Instant Poison reliability as augmented by that percentage value.

Given Instant Poison's base PPM of 8.53 procs per minute, 5/5 Improved Poisons increases that application process by 50%, which is definitely not 50% of your potential applications of poisons but rather a 50% increase of the base PPM factor, giving us (8.57 x 1.5) = 12.855 PPM.

Far from being redundant, therefore, the Envenom buff increases that number by another 75%, making your PPM basis somewhat below 100% frequency, but significantly higher than running IP/IP.






Finally, it is not always guaranteed that you will be running with another Rogue or Hunter, making the increased damage from Mutilate on a poisoned target a tenuous certainty at best.

I have to confess I didn't read the whole thread, so please forgive me if this came up before, but thinking about the proposed fixed 2m/n/2m/r cycle, i wondered if we could get rid of the "risk wasting combo points problem".

if you're going to use a fixed 2m/n/2m/r cycle, you could theoretically let go of Ruthlessness. 2 Mutilates are pretty much guaranteed to give 5+ CP at even mediocre raiding gear level (i.e. ilvl200+). At 5 CP Finishers, Relentless Strikes is guaranteed to refund 25 energy. It seems to me that going that route could dramatically increase the predictability of a mutilate cycle (granted, in a relatively movement free battle).

In addition to this predictability, you gain 3 extra talent points for free use in the Assassination tree, and looking at the Talent Tree, i decided to put those in Vigor and Fleet Footed. Basically, you shouldn't see a whole lot of a difference compared to the "classic mutilate build" regarding playstyle.

But 10 added energy to pool on without wasting energy plus the increased running speed sounds like a good trade-in.

I'm no math guru, so i am not able to really tell the "effectiveness" of semi-guaranteed Relentless Procs compared to the fixed 2x Mutilates/Finisher, maybe someone else can do it.

Anyway, thought i'd share my thoughts.