Right, but "fast enough" is a highly relative term. Those 5 Deadly Poison procs that go to restacking would instead be extra Instant Poison procs if we hadn't dropped our stacked. And while it's true we get somewhat more poison procs due to the envenom buff, we certainly don't get *5* extra IP procs to make up for the procs we "waste" restacking Deadly Poison. As such, we lose poison damage by envenoming (as opposed to Mutilate, which gains poison damage by Envenoming thanks to Master Poisoner). As such, Combat simply can't afford to use Envenom primary without Master Poisoner; and while I won't totally rule out the possibility of some manner of 43/28 type combat/envenom build, it seems exceedingly likely to competitive, given that by the time you're 43 points deep in assassination, it's hard to argue against taking the last 8 points for an 18% damage boost plus assorted other nice things; and once you're 51 points deep, you're almost certainly better off using Mutilate (since you have it).

I think it should also be mentioned that should you choose to use envenom as combat you will also have a chance of losing savage combat on your target for a second or two (assuming instant on your mainhand) which would also turn out to be a small personal and raid damage loss.

Except you have another combat rogue, who does not use envenom, or an arms warrior.

If you had those you wouldn't be combat if the changes in 3.3 stick and go to live. Unless you just plain don't have two daggers. Or the fight really REALLY calls for a need of blade flurry or Adr+fok spam.

To some extent this is true, but it really depends on how far you go when you define "viable"?
Sure mutilate was viable in Ulduar, but it wasn't as good as Combat.

I guess it's a question of what are you looking to get out of raiding: enjoying a spec, killing bosses, being the top of the meter, teabaging the dead in the end, etc.

If you enjoy playing combat and then are forced into mutilate, I can see that not being very fun.
If you enjoy killing bosses or being at the top of the meter, you'll be probably playing the FoTM spec.

Also, it depends what kind of a guild you're in.
If they think it's fine that you're trailing the other rogues by a few thousand dps, then that's that.
Most "hardcore" guilds however, will present you with a option: Shape up, or get benched (or worse).

So we know that the Savage Combat debuff makes Combat a bit more "viable". I am trying to do an analysis of the breakeven point where, "Mutilate has to do x more DPS than Combat to make up for the Savage Combat debuff" (assuming no arms warrior in the group). What I am having trouble with is figuring out what actual makes up "Physical Damage"? I know that pretty much all Rogue, Hunter, & Warrior attacks are physical, but I assume that there are a % of DK's, Pally's, Enhancement Shammies, Hunters attacks that are physical too.

Does anyone have any ballpark figures of what constitutes physical damage for these other classes?

I did a basic analysis that came back with ~1,500 being the breakeven point for when to switch, but this can change significantly due to raid comp. I just want to make sure I am on the right track.

You can view it here:

Savage Combat

The bottom line question is does at point do we say that the Savage Combat debuff is not enough to make up for the disparity in DPS? Will it be desirable to have a Mut Rogue and a Combat Rogue in raid?

Or you could just bring an Arms warrior.

As for rogue attacks being all physical, that's not entirely true for combat, and especially not for mutilate. Poisons count as spell damage, as does Envenom. The bleeds applied by Rupture and various other abilities do not count as physical attacks, either.

I did a quick rundown of my own raid's melee DPS for this week's clear of ToC25 + ToGC25. The rough numbers, as a percentage of total DPS, by class:

We ran with: 2 DKs, 2 Rogues, 1 Feral, 1 Warrior, 1 MM Hunter, 1 Enh. Shaman, and 1 Ret. Paly, for a total of 9 Melee DPS, along with 8 Caster DPS. Assuming every one of our Melee have the same DPS, which of course isn't completely accurate, but still gives a good estimate, the percentage of each player's DPS due to Savage Combat is roughly

.68% + .68% + 3.2% + 3.2% + 4% + 4% + 2.9% + 2.1% + 1.6% = 22% of one person's Melee DPS.

Now, say the raid has no Arms Warrior and its lone Combat Rogue went Mutilate. If that Rogue normally pulls 10K DPS as Combat, and could do 12.2K DPS as Mutilate, there would be no difference in raid DPS.

Of course, the numbers change slightly with the addition of classes that are mostly Melee damage (Warriors/Ferals/Combat Rogues) or additional melee in general, but would change in the other direction with additional DKs, Combat Rogues switching to Mutilate, or casters, so you'd have to check the numbers for your own guild's raid setup.

For your warrior/feral/MM hunter numbers, I didn't think bleeds were affected by Savage Combat. Was I wrong?

Also of note is that DKs--especially 3.3 Unholy DKs--do a significant amount of magical damage that will nevertheless be buffed by Savage Combat. In particular, Necrosis and Scourge Strike (shadow portion) both scale based off physical damage done by autoattacks and Scourge Strike (physical portion), respectively, so those numbers also need to be taken into account for the rDPS comparison of Savage Combat. I don't know if other classes have similar mechanics, but it's significant for DKs.

I've tested on target dummies that seem to show rupture individual ticks are affected by savage combat (375 ticks without, 390 with). Wouldn't their bleeds work out the same?

Also another thing to consider is the time on target. If hunters are switching off, or the raid is split up for even less physical dps on the target the rogue would be on.

I should warn that I'd be hard-pressed to come up with the original testing that showed that Savage Combat effects bleeds; all recent sheets are grabbing formula from earlier sheets, which, in turn, are grabbing them from still earlier sheets, and so on. It's entirely possible I haven't done any external verification since the warrior ability initially came out in... TBC, I guess it was?

Basically, there are formulas in the spreadsheet that I stand behind - where I'm quite sure that it works that way. And there are others that I haven't verified in a long time; Savage Combat on bleeds would be one of those. Which is not to say it does or doesn't - I merely advise caution in asserting something must be so because that's what the spreadsheet does. It's often a fair assumption, but there are some of these weird exceptions.