The idea of weapon swapping, especially using Outfitter, intrigues, me. I'm just uncertain how practical it will be for me to use, considering I'm using Hack and Slash with Hellscream/Blood Fury and have Sygian Bladebreaker as my best OH to swap in (all 245 level).

My concern lies in the mixed-weapon nature of this setup. I'm going to do some dummy-testing on it just to see how it flows, using a standard 15/51/5 setup with the 1 extra point switched over to CQC instead of Endurance, to get at least a little benefit from the time I have the dagger in.

Simming, I saw about 250 dps increase, though I understand from a few pages back that it's obviously not going to be modelling things exactly, since the dagger that's actually swapped in has slightly different stat values from the axe it replaces each swap. I'm still wary of the time spent with mixed weapons talents cancelling out the benefit.

I also assume that in this setup I'd have Deadly on the dagger and Wound on the axe, which should be equipped about twice as often as the dagger each fight, and cooldowns would ideally be timed during Dual-Wound periods?
(edited out simsheet correction recommendation - losing track of where discussions are. I agree the Weapon Swapping topic could use its own thread)

You're misunderstanding what a weapon swap does, exactly. Try a simple swap macro outside of combat, something like:

/equip MyBestDagger
/equip MySecondBestDagger
/mutilate

and press this button with non-daggers on (note macro code is pseudo-code for example only). What you'll see happen is that both weapons equip and mutilate fires out instantly (assuming you're near a dummy or something). Now put yourself into combat and hit the same thing, you'll notice that the mutilate doesn't fire. Swapping weapons while *in combat* incurs a GCD loss, as you've noticed, but also, and this is the important part, it incurs a swing timer loss. So if your big slow MH fist is swinging once every 1 seconds after haste, and you push the macro half a second after your last MH hit (to swap a dagger in) what you've *actually* lost was the potential damage that half-second of swing time was going to give you. Your swing timer will then reset to whatever it should be (something under 1s after haste on a fast dagger, or whatever) and some time later that dagger will land a hit. Since our class is one of if not the only class that isn't GCD capped (dps wars are debatable, cats obviously are not also) you aren't losing 6k damage at all. Weapon swapping incurs the 1s GCD if done in combat, which in itself should almost never be a dps loss. I can click my iron boot flask at nearly any time I want and not miss a drop of damage, because of the way our mechanics work. You are simply pooling energy (and thus your yellow damage) while your GCD is firing on something that isn't damage; your weapon swap macro, my iron boot flask, etc. So what you're actually weighing is the slight loss in auto-swing time (because unless you swap with infinite accuracy after a weapon hit, you're losing some fraction of time) and the (increased) possibility of dropping your DP stack against the (entirely bonus) damage your new OH poison is doing. So to give you an idea of what napkin math you'd actually be looking at, consider this:

- OH hits every 1 second exactly
- OH hits average 1500 damage
- MH hits every 2 seconds exactly
- MH hits average 3000 damage
- You swap exactly half way between white swings when relevant to swap
- You're swapping twice every 12 seconds (the duration of a DP stack) once to swap into instant/wound and once to swap back

These are pretty loose numbers, but all in a reasonable ballpark for the sake of argument. Over a 12 second duration you're going to swap twice, and assuming you don't cap out on energy (which you shouldn't) you're only going to be losing white damage, which note is only around 40% of your total damage, not 100%, so right off the bat you're not missing 6 thousand damage just for pushing the macro, it's far less. Note that with these numbers your white damage is exactly 3k dps so over the course of 12 seconds, you would be doing 36,000 white damage without the macro. Pushing the macro, however, is a rough loss of (.5 * 1500) + (.5 * [3000 / 2]) = 1,500 damage, because of the potential white-swing timer you've lost by initiating the weapon swap (exactly half-way through the swing, as noted in assumptions). So you need to make up 3,000 (1,500 * 2 presses) damage every 12 seconds. The last rough number I recall hearing is swapping with 3 seconds left on your stack. So stack your DP to 5 and get in the "steady state". Then you'll get a DP tick, swap to instant/wound for 9 seconds, and then back to DP for 3 seconds (and hope for a proc). That means in these 9 seconds of OH white swings (or 8 to be fair) you need to make up that 3,000 damage just to break even. Wound poison hits for about 700 average coming from a decent set of gear, so you'll need just over 4 procs to make this remotely considerable. Proc rate on a 1.4 speed OH is 50% baseline on wound, and your haste on top of that is pure profit, so you're (worst case) gambling for 4 procs out of 8 swings at 50% proc chance. But that's before all buffs and debuffs that increase chance to hit, damage, haste, chance to crit, etc, etc. Again, these are excessively rounded numbers, but they should give you a very real idea of what you're weighing against what here. As has been said, this is a far more favorable process for mutilate than combat, but is still calculated to be a net increase overall. Note that this is slightly misleading in the sense that you are increasing your chance to drop your DP stack, which is something to weigh in also, but the overall verdict is that it's just simply worth it.

Hopefully this helps. You sure aren't losing 6k damage every time you push it, or even close.

Moving away from weapon swapping for a moment, since 3.2.2 I have found letting rupture drop and stringing in more envenoms does more dps. So I was wondering since envenom scales with attack power by an extra 2% wouldn't it be better to go gemming AP over agil even with 4pc T8?

Has anyone managed to get Weapon swapping working in the real world yet, and give anywhere near the 'estimated' DPS? From the tests i've done, it's a cute mathematical model, but just doesn't translate to the real World properly.

I am primarily mutilate specced. Every test in the real world I've managed to do, from grinding on dummy's to XT hardmode stand and nuke partys has resulted in loss of between 400 and 900 DPS.

Deadly Poison regularly drops even with the latency 'setting' in the script turned up to 5. Anywhere beyond that and the game becomes practically unplayable. On top of that, I am often finding myself GCD Locked at inopportune times. Energy Capping, Unable to Mutilate, and what not. On top of that it breaks the natural rhythm of Mutilate cycles, making a previously graceful attack pattern feel ugly and clunky.

I'm more than happy to admit i'm wrong, but does any body have real solid evidence (WWS parses) of it doing what has been predicted by this model ?

I have only tested it on a dummy because real combat RNG and variation in raid buffs can swing dps by 1000+ so it's extremely hard to do a controlled test. Basically for mutilate you would need to do a fight without weapon swapping and then next week it would have to be with weapon swapping under same conditions, same fight length, same buffs and their uptimes,and even then your own standard deviation can be of the order of 200 dps. It's just not feasible to test it in a real fight, which is why we have models.

However, when I was testing the macro, I did spend hours attacking the dummy and I saw around 150 dps increase, which I did not record since it was done without all the raid buffs that increase the effectiveness of the strategy, i.e. windfury and druid haste buff.

I've seen an overall dps increase from weapon swapping, however, I am not using that Outfitter script, I'm just using a macro that consists of:

/equipslot 17 Stygian Bladebreaker
/equipslot 17 Orcish Deathblade

I just bound it to my old Rupture key, and press it when I have ~4secs remaining on DP, sometimes, I just get unlucky and DP drops anyway, but most of the time it refreshes on the next melee attack.

I have outfitter addon, and tbh i copy paste this into a custom script and nothing happens.

Could someone please please make a simple tutorial on how i could get this to work. I have been struggling with it for 2 days and my gear is pretty descent I have a 245 lvl orcish deathblade to switch with and the 245 orcish deatblade heroic one as i usually use as OH. Main hand is Nemesis blade heroic 10m one. Im muti spec'd aswell.

Im really confused and very eager to try this out.

I do descent dps and would really really like to try this out so i can improve my dps as much as i can.

I appreciate any reply to this.

Thanks in advance.

1. create a gear set with your normal gear and your 2nd best offhand
2. create a gear set with your best offhand only
3. attach the script to the best offhand

4. apply deadly poison to the second best offhand
5. apply wound/instant to your mainhand and best offhand

Start combat with your normal gear set which uses your 2nd best offhand to stack DP, once you get a 5 stack it will switch to the offhand with WP/IP and back to your normal gear set once the threshold of left time on your DP stack is met.

DISCLAIMER: You better don't ask this in any post after this again. Because then you obviously didn't read the thread.

Thanks for the reply, i really appreciate it.

I have read the thread but i couldnt find this answer anywhere, sorry if i did something wrong.

So it should work if i use:

-- $EVENTS TIMER UNIT_COMBAT
local dp_name="Deadly Poison IX"
local switch_time = 5
local dp_detected = false;
for i=1,40 do
local n,_,_,s,_,_,x,c,_=UnitDebuff("target",i);
if n==dp_name and c=="player" then
dp_detected = ( x-GetTime() > switch_time and s == 5 )
end
end
equip = dp_detected;


?

Thanks a bunch again

I have been using this since it was posted a few days ago. Things can get a little messy on multiple target fights like Beasts or really any targets changes, if you were mid Dual IP weapon set when you swap you just have to remember to switch.

I think we can all agree there is at least a 500 dps increase from weapon swapping. So how do we all think blizzard will change it so we dont weapon swap?

I think what iteken said will happen in some shape or form:

Post number #414 is all you need. Works perfect. Thanks

Patch 3.3 Patch notes are up Here .

Rogue changes are listed as :



* Dual Wield: Rogues now know this ability upon logging into the game at level 1.

* Stealth: This ability no longer has multiple ranks. While active, the single rank of this ability (available at level 1) allows rogues to move at 70% movement speed.

* Vanish: For the first second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.



Seems you will still take damage but remain in stealth, the one second should still allow you to always get a garotte of on bosses though, plus of course all the five man and pvp niceness of an actual working vanish.

Hello everyone

just wanna ask about which dps cycle with weapon swapping is optimal (maybe i miss something in that theme )

1. use Envenom before second OH swap on 5 CP for better IP proks
2. use Envenom after swapping


p.s. sorry for crapy English

This could be interesting.

I shortened and reorganized the autoswap script into two macros which fit under the default Blizzard UI macro limit. In the embedded Blizzard equipment manager, set up weapon set "DP" with only your Deadly Poison weapon in the offhand and weapon set "IP" with only your Instant Poison weapon in the offhand (mark all other slots in the sets with the "Ignore this slot" red circle to reduce overhead). This cuts out the Outfitter glitches.

Initialization macro - Activate this macro once after you log in to "load" the autoswap script:
Toggle macro - Activate this macro to toggle "autoswap" mode on and off:
You can insert "u("IP")" right after "UnregisterEvent("UNIT_COMBAT")" to swap to your Instant Poison weapon when you toggle off autoswap, of course.

I can't seem to get the macros to work. I assume it's because copying the macro posts the entire macro into one line. Is it possible someone could format the macro?

Each macro has to be in one line. If you split them into multiple lines they won't work. I was posting from memory, but had tested the macros to make sure they worked. I had a chunk of code missing in the Toggle Macro in the original post. I corrected it in my first edit 5 minutes later. Try re-entering the Toggle Macro in case you got the code with the missing chunk in those 5 minutes. My second edit was not code-related.

I notice vigor was 20 energy when i was on the PTR last night. I did not actually get to spec it because when i was on the server was kicking me every 20 seconds. I still had my glyph of vigor also on my pvp dual spec. I doubt this is very usefull but a undocumented change non the less.

The initialization macro is missing a 2nd "end", the following should work:

I also can't get that weaponswap-macro to work. I did everything exactly like you said, I don't know what went wrong there :/

e: works now! thx caffein

I've been using the outfitter swap macro with a lot of success. I set the swap time at 4 seconds because of the delay and only rarely drop DP. It may not work as well if you have lower levels of hit and haste. The rotation becomes much easier to sustain, especially on target swapping fights because it seems that if your gear can handle weapon swapping (assassination) then you may well be able to drop rupture from the cycle.

The only fight I've had problems with the script becoming stuck on the IP daggers is during icehowl, I'm guessing because of the stun. When that happens I just toggle the IP set at which point the script seems to kick back in and correct.
I'm not clear whether your asking if you should envenom before switching to the DP dagger or before switching to the IP dagger. When you're on your DP dagger your best bet would probably be a mutilate to increase the chance of DP application, though if you're already at 4cp you may just want to envenom anyways. You'll want the envenom buff up for as much of the time you have 2 IP daggers on as possible which would mean an envenom as soon as your DP gets reapplied.

Blizzard just made tooltips change on the basis of whether you have a glyph or not.