That's from the 3.2 patch notes. Now from how I read it and thinking of weapon swapping, we're basically screwing ourselves over from an entire Berserking enchant proc.

That is, if we're swapping weapons less than 45seconds apart from one another. (which I think we are in this situation).

Would we have to then have the +50 ap enchant to 2 off hand daggers? Wouldn't be that bad except it would hurt dual spec's for combat/mut switching. Also, I'd feel odd replacing my zerking enchant with 50ap. But I guess that's what farm content is for.

Unless I'm mistaken, Berserking does not have an internal cooldown, so swapping would not impact its uptime from that perspective.

EDIT: I'm slow

That is stating that the hidden cooldown on a trinket or proc will be reset when the item is changed. Considering the berserking enchant, this is a non-issue. The only loss in proc is related to the potential of losing a berserking proc while you are creating the swing timer reset (if an attack would have proced Berserk it would theoretically be a /lost/ proc). The Berserk proc has no hidden cooldown so this loss is essentially non-existent.

It's unlikely that Berserking would be affected by this given that it also applies a debuff which Blizzard wouldn't want so easily dismissed / abused.

The Berserking referred to above is the weapon enchant. The Berserk you're referring to is the horde Shaman ability. They are completely separate.

No, the berserking weapon proc also applies a "debuff" in the form of reduced armor.

Enchant Weapon - Berserking - Spell - World of Warcraft

For rogues? Gouge. Fixed damage range makes the math easy. Just be careful account for talents that modify gouge damage when working out the numbers.

Edit: Logged on PTR and did some testing. Damage done is consistent with tooltip, and represents about a 13% nerf relative to live realms (specifically, the 25% ArPen buff has been scaled back to 10%). Details of testing are available in combat rating thread. It remains to be seen if this is an intentional change or not.

Edit 2: And assuming this change goes live, Axe setups appear to strictly top mace/dagger ones, and mjolnir/agi setups are virtually identical to all-arpen setups in damage output (best number I get with Mjolnir is 9551.9, versus 9550 with Comet's Trail + socketing towards hard cap). Which means that, realistically, the Mjolnir setup is probably superior due to increased defensive stats. But I'd wait till we get official confirmation of the change (or it goes live) before making any radical changes to one's gear.

I'm a little confused on what warranted the Mutilate buffs. I, myself, have been a Mutilate rogue ever since I rerolled in Wrath, so I am very experienced with it. Anyways, lately I've been looking at many, many parses of guilds kills compared to my guilds' and have been seeing that I am not only keeping up with Combat rogues, but surpassing them. It's not only me, but also the other Mut rogue in my guild (Huggable) which can be found in the parses also.

Tonight, I pulled 8.6k DPS on Iron Council Hardmode and 7.6k on Ignis. Granted, I do have two weapons out of 25man ToC, but even before, I was only about 400-500 DPS behind what I am at now with Daschel's Bite/Combatant's Bootblade. Even accounting for Murder doesn't put me close to the Combat rogues.

So, to reiterate, why exactly did Blizzard buff Mutilate when Mutilate Rogues can keep up with Combat Rogues, at least from what I've seen. I've compared dozens of parses with mine. I guess I shouldn't complain, but it's just making me wonder what made them think that Mut needed a buff.

Mutilate is far inferior to Combat unless the target is (a) Murderable AND (b) is a 5-9.99 minute duration fight AND (c) there is only one target that takes damage. Sorry, this is a fact. Hard mode Hodir is the one WotLK encounter (that matters) where I would ever consider going Mutilate; however combat can still pull ahead if it can get some moonbeam + BF + lust uptime.

I have a quick question for the thread: has anyone done any calculations to determine the new sweet spot for deciding when to FoK? Currently it is 3 targets. Also, any word on whether the BF FoK glitch still works?

I cannot confirm this fact with hard data, but from my experiences last night with FoK + BF, it is still working the same. (Tested on Kologarn, Auriaya and Thorim)

I'm assuming you're talking about live, and that would be correct since nothing has changed yet. Fan should still interact with Blade Flurry the way it has thus far and fan will still be doing the normal damage it has been doing. Any real change won't be until the release of the next patch, which is currently 3.2.2 .

The ArP nerf was just confirmed for Patch 3.2.2

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Armor pen nerf in 3.2.2

Not entirely sure what this will mean for us, if it will just take a little more work to reach the ArP cap or if it will become unrealistic, i'll leave that to the theorycrafters.

ArP Changed from 12.3 rating per 1%, to 14 rating per 1% by my math.

Won't it make arpen MORE valuable? If we need more to reach the cap, won't it just cause us to get more of it to reach that point? Unless it's been nerfed so far that only trinket procs get you close, but then will we see mjolnir and GT pairing again?

I feel bad telling my rogues in the guild to gem arp now. I finally got them to understand where the sweet spot is and now it's moot.

No. A stat becoming less valuable per point does not make that stat more valuable. That's like saying that if Blizzard decided to make Agility give us less crit, that we would then want more Agility than we did before.

In my opinion, this is another one of the "oops we made stuff too good" moments. They've made a couple of comments recently about how player stats were scaling faster than they were anticipating, which would end up potentially causing issues with encounter design when the final raid instance drops. Oh well -- at least this isn't an enormous nerf.

I was thinking last night about the idea of weapon swapping when the master poisoner change happens. I was wondering if it would be worth it to run two 1.8 speed weapons with instant poison on them, and a 1.4 weapon with deadly on it. Two slow weapons isn't worth it if you're running IP/DP, but would it be worth it to run double IP with two slow weapons, due to the extra poison damage added to the extra mutilate damage?

Not quite. ArP, as you likely know, gets better the more you have. There's enough ArP available to us that we can pick and choose which pieces to use. I believe his point is that even if they lower the effectiveness of each point, we could incorporate a few extra pieces and probably still reach the cap (or at least the point of inflection were ArP outweighs agility in EP).

As far as I can tell, the change only pushes back the agility/ArP point of inflection. Is it beyond the cap? Will agility now always be more valuable than ArP? Or is there still a point (below cap) were ArP can still become more valuable? Those are questions I'll leave up to the folks who run with ArP gear...

Right, but the point is that while you may still be able to reach the ArPen hard cap, you end up spending an extra 170 ArPen to get there, which is 170 points of agi you no longer have; as such, your DPS is lower by the loss of those 170 points of agility. It *is* a straight nerf.

Also, as it turns out, reach the hard cap is no longer practical or useful, so even neglecting that fact it's a nerf anyway, as our ArPen winds up lower. Or rather, we end up switching to softcap setups, which exhibit a similar problem and were previously inferior. All in all this ArPen change is a 300+ DPS nerf to high-end combat rogues. It also pushes off the crossover point of agility vs ArPen, such that many people who are in mostly Ulduar gear at the moment may find themselves needing to socket back to Agility if they'd already switched to ArPen.

How far off is that crossover point though, Aldriana? In reasonable 25 man ToC and 10 man ToC hardmode gear should we expect to reach it? I know that as long as I am in the ballpark I don't mind sacrificing ~20 dps on the spreadsheets to not have to regem two more times.. -_-

I think the strategy is to socket for soft cap arp, assuming you have the MR trinket. Which means you are going to have to socket a few slots with armor penetration not only with "reasonable 25 man TOC" loot, but even with Ulduar loot. Basically as soon as you get the MR trinket, it should be beneficial to socket for armor pen soft cap.

No, actually. If you're mostly Ulduar geared, I'm finding it generally superior to socket agility. Once you get a certain amount of ToC loot, it can be more advantageous to socket for ArPen instead; but if you're in purely Uld gear, even if it's full BIS, it is not necessarily the case that you want to be socketing ArPen.

For instance, in my current gear, socketed the way it currently is (Fractured and Deadly), making no additional optimizations to account for the nerf, I do 7888.5 after the nerf. However, my ArPen EP value is only 1.88; as such, it's more advantageous to go back to Agility socketing (2.03). Doing so raises my DPS to 7925.8 - and it'd be higher were it not for the fact that doing so causes me to crit cap. If I additionally substitute Glinting gems for Deadly until I no longer cap, it goes up to 7930.8.

So, by resocketing Delicate/Glinting/Deadly from Fractued/Deadly, I gain over 40 DPS. Now, you can debate whether 40 DPS (and a bunch of dodge) is worth the cost of full resocketing, but suffice it to say it *is* optimal to socket agility with my gear (4/5 T8 + ToC10 Hard Chest).

So at what point is it no longer optimal to do so? Well, that's sort of a hard question. It certainly seems to be the case that when I get enough gear to break 4/5 T8, it becomes optimal to switch over to ArPen socketing. But is that condition necessary? Sufficient? Hard to say. I think the problem is too complex to easily distill to a simple rule of which is going to be better. The only advice I can give is to spreadsheet it out for yourself, and figure out which is better for your personal situation, and by how much, and decide what you want to do from there.

You are right, in fact I do find that for BiS 3.1 gemming agility even with MR trinket gives around 80 more dps. I guess the armor pen change had a bigger effect on soft cap armor pen EP values than I thought.