Well since the T9 sets don't have the snazzy T8 4+ bonus and this lowering our need for the crit cap or near that, should our gemming resort back to AP over Agility or am I keeping my gems delicate?

It's pheasable that the T9 4 set could change in the next few builds as we have seen in the last build with other classes, thus a little too early to even consider what the best gemming choice would be. I would hold those thoughts and look forward to what Blizzard has in store for our set.

Has anyone been able to test the Envenom changes and how much of a damage increase we are likely to see from the buff?

It's a tooltip fix. No actual damage gain.

This change posted on MMO Champ looks like it will increase the benefit of Engineering even more.

While this is true, ArP becomes much more likely as the choice of gemming come 3.2 with Epic and upgraded JC arp gems allowing you to get to 567 faster.

I'm just wondering what happens with the T9 2pc bonus if your next attack costs less than 40 energy (eg finishers), I assume that the extra free energy is wasted. Would it be better to use a finisher with 4 cp rather than risk wasting some of the free energy if you got a free finisher? If the bonus is working properly on the PTR, maybe someone can test whether you do indeed waste energy if you use a finisher on the proc, I can't see how it would be implemented any other way, but you never know.

If I'm thinking about this correctly, you're not really wasting energy anyway, since you'll get a relentless strikes proc out of the finisher if you're using 5 points. Sure, 5 to 15 energy that could've been "gained" by the proc is "lost," but you still gain 25 "real" energy without the normal cost.

It's more likely considered 'wasted' when compared to a mutilate spec who can apply a mutilate after the proc.

Mutilate will be using the full 40 energy and gaining better effeciency than a sinister strike or finisher from a combat rogue.

Depending upon proc rate, repeating a 5-15 energy loss will be costly. In ~2-3 procs, you've lost the cost of an additional Sinister Strike while Mutilate may get the full use of the energy for finishers.

Unless you are using 4 piece T7 (which you obviously can't with 2 piece T9 as well), Sinister Strike costs 40 energy, so using that won't be any less efficient than Mutilate. Also, what is to say that Mutilate won't be in the same position as combat with a proc that happens right before you are going to do a finisher? In fact, since Mutilate does significantly more finishers than Combat, I would argue that it is more likely to run into the situation where the set bonus procs before you are going to do a finisher, and you are left with the choice of doing a free finisher or a 20 energy Mutilate and then the finisher.

For some reason, my brain tricked me into thinking that Sinister Strike was reduced to 30 (instead of 40) energy by the Imp Talent. Good catch---my bad.

And while I'd agree that there are more finishers with mutilate, the reality is that Combat still loses more energy because it must reapply SnD on a regular basis.

Mutilate uses two primary finishers (with the potential for HfB to eat the occasional 2-pc proc): Envenom and Rupture. At 35 and 25 energy, respectively. Meaning a regular waste of 5 points or 15 points when the 2-pc T9 procs.

Combat has three primary finishers (with the potential for BF to eat the occasional proc): SnD, Rupture, and Eviscerate. SnD and Rupture are both 25 energy, meaning that wasting 15 points will happen much more frequently than in a Muti build. The Eviscerates will be just a 5 point wash and equivilent to an Envenom (though with less damage per energy).

Let me be clear, here. I don't think that the difference will be overwhelming and phase combat rogues out. But I do think that PvE Mutilate rogues will stand to benefit more from the set bonus.

If the 2 piece T9 set bonus remains the same it opens up the possibility of dropping Relentless Strikes for Mutilate Rogues, those 5 points can then be invested in the Combat Tree to get Lightning Reflexes without having to invest points in any non-DPS Talents: 51/18/2.
Granted, the effectiveness of the build relies totally on Rupture uptime and the proc rate.
I guess it would also pretty jerky to play, without an AddOn telling you about the Rupture proc happening it might be difficult to tell when you can use an attack at the cheaper cost.
But the additional crit from CQC and the 10% Haste from LR are certainly DPS buffs.

I fail to see how the 2/5 T9 would reduce the value of Relentless Strikes - just because you (occasionally) perform a finisher for free doesn't mean there isn't still significant value in getting 25 energy for doing it. Thus, I see no immediate reason why 51/18/2 would be any better than it currently is (which is to say, vastly inferior to other options).

Because, for the moment at least, the Rupture proc benefits the next ability not just finishers.

Like I said, the build depends on the frequency of the Rupture proc, obviously if it is not high enough to at least equal the energy gain from Relentless Strikes then it would not make sense to use the 51/15/2.

But that's my point. Even if the energy regen matches what you get from Relentless Strikes... why not do both, for even more energy?

A pvp perspective on the 2pc makes it very desirable to time with a full energy bar of mutilates.


On the combat note, it might be more beneficial to use up the proc on an extra SS than do your finisher.
TBH for combat the proc is going to be almost a waste under AR, or Bloodlust/BF/haste pot circumstances. Or imagine it proccing during a killing spree. There are enough times you have to try to not cap energy =/, hopefully the 4pc is changed to something much better. (Though for FoK spam the 2pc might be full of lulz)

Well, I guess my argument is that I see no particular reason why the T9 2/5 would tip the balance from the current situation; and, if anything, the loss of the T8 4/5 will reduce the value of the 2 points of CQC that you take en route to 51/18/2. I mean, we can check it again once things are finalized, but my initial impression is that 51/18/2 has never really been competitive and I don't see any particular reason to believe that it's going to start now.

Really, I don't think the T9 2/5 as written is likely to affect our cycles very much unless it's tuned to be *way* overpowered. I mean, the natural assumption to make is that with 100% rupture uptime it will give a benefit somewhere between the T8 2/5 and the T7 4/5 - probably on the order of 1 energy per 2 seconds average case, meaning around one proc per minute or less. Is this a reasonable DPS boost? Yes. Is it going to massively change our spec or cycles? Doubtful. Basically, anything that has far-reaching effects on our cycle structure tends to be too powerful for a set bonus, particularly a 2/5.

The other way it might affect our cycles is by increasing the value of rupture, but given that we have to drop T8 4/5 to get it, I doubt that's going to be a major effect either.

Again: we'll have to look again once things are finalized, but my instinct is to say that our specs and cycles will be much the same as they are currently, even with the T9 2/5.

The T8 4pc bonus is quite possibly the strongest bonus we've ever had. In my mind it was put in place (at least partially) to keep rupture in rogue DPS rotations.

I'm with Aldriana on this one and am fairly sure Blizzard is going to put the value of the T9 2pc just above that of the T8 2pc with the T9's great stats making it attractive enough that two to three pieces of T9 becomes the break point where we can drop the T8 4pc bonus. Although with the stat allocation on T9 being more stam heavy it's probably more likely that three will be the minimum.

The question still remains in my mind what they're going to do with the T9 4pc. They've so far updated all classes with the "+5% crit" 4pc bonus to something less "universal" except for mages and rogues. Currently, both classes are doing fine as far as DPS goes and frankly I just don't see them giving us a bonus as strong as the T8 4pc bonus.

The T9 2pc does it's job, it keeps rupture in our rotations once the T8 4pc bonus is gone. With that accomplished though, there's no reason to give us something more than mediocre. I hope they don't just go with mediocre of course, but I'm not holding out for a "Wow!" bonus.

I dare saying, the only resource limiting rogue dps is energy. So why do you argue that more energy is bad?
It allows you to do more cp generators which allows you to do more/higher cp finishers which results in more dps with the same spec.

I might be missing something though....

To make the question clear.

At what proc rate, if any, would a 51/18/2 build with the 2 set T9 bonus have the same DPS potential as 51/13/7 with the 2 set T9 bonus?

I am not arguing any point, in case I appeared to be.

I do side with Aldriana's comment on this though especially "wait and see".
I must confess to not being fit enough on the maths to be confident of providing myself with the answer I am looking for, the approach looking for the rate at which the ability cost reduction would allow an equal number of ability usage with RS already looks horribly complicated to me.

3/3 Lightning Reflexes and +2 CQC would contribute additional energy from Focussed Attacks being one of the things that is likely to trip me up totally.

Okay, let's be clear. Their may be some second or third order effect that skews the balance between these two specs. And I'm not even going to bother trying to predict that until we have the final numbers. But in terms of the direct effects - i.e., the question as to when one's energy regen starts exceeding one's ability to spend it, rendering Relentless Strikes potentially moot - that, we can answer.

Currently, baseline Mutilate regen tends to be something like 12.5 energy per second. In order to cap out on energy regen, we'd need to be able to do, in effect, 2xMutilate followed by a finisher (costing, with Relentless Strikes, 10 energy), on GCD. That is, our energy expenditure would need to be, average case, 60 + 60 + 10 = 130 energy every 3 seconds, or 43 energy per second. Thus, we'd need to gain a bit over 30 energy per second before Relentless Strikes became truly useless.

Note that the theoretical limit of regen possibly via the 2/5 T9 bonus is 40 energy per rupture tick - or 20 energy per second. Thus, even if the proc rate of the 2/5 bonus was 100% - which would be absurdly broken - we'd still benefit from Relentless Strikes.

More energy is always better. As Mutilate it's patently impossible to be GCD limited rather than energy limited. Even combat has issues with it only during AR. As such, there is no obvious reason to believe that we'll be moving away from Relentless Strikes.

Your energy can cap if 2-piece t9 procs when you are at 60+ energy, so with that set bonus you will have to learn to keep your energy at no more than 60. Better yet, if you want to account for Focused Attacks, keep it below 58.

If you do that, then even if you consider the worst case scenario for energy capping, i.e. you start at 58 energy, your ruthlessness from previous envenom procs, your previous envenom crits, your single mutilate crits, and relentless strikes procs off the 5pt envenoms, then your maximum energy gain in the first second (counting base regen, focused attacks and 2-piece t9 proc) is 10+2+40=52 less 10 energy spent on envenom will keep you under the energy cap. Next second you lose 60 energy on mutilate and can gain up to 14 energy from regen and Focused Attacks, so your highest energy will be 100-60+14=54. When you envenom next, even if 2-piece t9 procs again, you are guaranted to be below the energy cap.

So the main effect of two-piece t9 bonus will be a change to energy pooling. It can also affect our ability to time envenoms to deadly poison ticks. But neither of these changes benefit 51/18/2 more than 51/13/7, so there is no reason to believe 51/18/2 will start to outdps 51/13/7.

Also if you consider damage scaling with gear, 51/18/2 gains some white and poison damage at the expense of yellow damage. However yellow damage scales a lot better with both crit (due to lethality) and attack power increases (AP multipliers for envenom and mutilate are much higher than for white autoattacks and poisons), so there is no further reason to believe, 51/18/2 will eventually pull ahead as gear keeps improving.