We haven't used mind numbing for either of our kills, but we also don't interrupt reactively--we have the warrior tanking the adds Shockwave or one of our holy paladins Holy Wrath right as the Shadowstrike timer comes up.

how about using victors call heroic + victors call normal mode trinket. you ll get 40s of 1.2k+ ap in every add phase. most other trinkets procc in the beginning and run out just before the aoe fight begins. the problem with that trinket is the static expertise on it what will overcap most rogues by far when they use both versions, nevertheless i think on-use-trinkets are the best choice in that encounter.

Do people recon it is worth equipping a slower dagger in the offhand as combat fists for the FoK spamming phase? I have the choice between the heroic 25 1.8 and 1.4 daggers. The slower one has 77 higher average damage, but will generate 23% less offhand hits, which would translate in about 5 less energy per 10 seconds.

We've had great success by doing the following on Anub'arak:

1. Face Anub'arak's behind, rotate your camera with the left mouse button to get ready for your add. We assign 1 add per Rogue for white hits.
2. When the adds pop, make sure you at that time, have 5CP ready for use. As soon as you see the add, pop SnD and target your add while also turning away from Anub'arak.
3. Trigger TotT, BF and lastly, AR, while the adds are moving your way. Their traveltime is roughly 6-7 seconds, so that should fit with your WCD's.
4. Bring the pain. Right after TotT runs out you can target the add with the highest HP or simply target Anub'arak and still FoK the adds until they are down.

I personally use a Combat-Axes (2.6/1.5 wpn speeds) with 2x WP setup. We've focused a lot more on getting the above exactly right, than we have on weapon swapping and other techniques. This quickly changed the outcome of the fight for us, so this is where our focus is at the moment.

I find this method is the best for us. You lose some white-hit DPS time on Anub'arak when you turn around to avoid triggering TotT too early, but this means you will have the full 5 seconds for transferring aggro onto the adds tank, which is by far the most important in this fight.

Using this method with 4 Rogues, we consistently bring down the 4 adds very fast, without aggro issues. We found that assigning targets for each rogue for the white hits, made a significant difference for us. Optimizing when we turned around and how we triggered our CD's, also had a noticeable effect on the speed at which the adds went down and these things came together and made the fight doable for us.

I don't mean to discount your way of doing this, as I feel there are several ways to accomplish this encounter. I do feel, however, this method has a few things to consider. Securing agro of the adds is definitely important. The main drawback with the way you describe will become apparent to you in phase 3. I refer mostly to passive healing. I really think this is overlooked. We designed our group comps with passive healing for p3 in mind. Judgement of light is sufficient to maintain a low health pool during this time. Due to the speed at which a rogue hits healing is very steady and smooth. We asked our druids to spec out of imp lotp because we found that the melee group was healing too much from it. It is also a much more random since it is dependent upon crits and has a 6 second ICD. The method that you describe, while excellent in establishing solid agro on the adds will leave you without Judgement of Light procs and can allow your health to dip dangerously low. You also lose vital dps on Anub. In addition white attacking one add will put you out of FoK range of the other adds. I am making the assumption you are using a 2 add tank strat. If you use a 1 tank strat the DPS inefficiency is obviously irrelevant. The passive healing issue will still be problematic for you.

If you are somehow able to use 1 add tank and are having threat issues one option is to use a prot paladin and a holy paladin healing with righteous fury. Have the holy paladin stand behind the prot paladin who taunts off the holy. That coupled with 4 rogues ToTing and a call from the paladin to commence AoE will solve any threat issues you may have and allow you to maximize both AoE dps and single target dps to Anub.

We are using a 1 tank strategy, so all mobs are being FoK'ed.

A solution to this could be to simply maintain Anub'arak as your target and live with the slightly more fragile aggro on the adds.

With regards to the DPS on Anub'arak, currently, we aren't seeing a problem. It could change for phase 3 though.

We just use 3-4 Rogues, doing TotT all at once when they are in range. I see the benefits of both methods though.
One at a time would make sure all TotT's get used to their full potential.

Has anyone tried something like 8/20/43 w/ FoK, Hemo, and SnD glyphed? This fight seems like a perfect one for honor among thieves as your CP generator. Maintain FoK spam while dumping eviscerates into Anub and maintaining SnD solely off of HaT. I think that I'll offspec this for my next 25 anub HM night and see how it performs.

Lethality is mostly useless due to most of your damage being white hits and FoK spam and prey on the weak is 100% useless in p3 which is the only phase that matters... on paper 8/20/43 seems far superior for Anub hard mode. I'm not sure if trying to keep the hemo debuff would really be beneficial though. And most importantly dirty deeds would kick in for p3.

Technically you could also run a 2.6 offhand w/ wound as 8/20/43 since you have no need to use deadly (no 2 piece t8 and no combat potency).

At first glance I would think subtlety does not have the energy regeneration to keep up with combat, or even assassination for FoK spam.

I does have somewhat increased agility and attack power, but I doubt that would push it over the edge.

It also lacks vile poisons, which is a pretty major contribution to any rogue AoE spec.

Both Combat and Mutilate have some fairly powerful tools buffing AoE damage - Vitality, Combat Potency, and (throughout the first half of the fight, if not the second) Prey on the Weak for the former, and Focused Attacks, Hunger for Blood, and various Poison talents for the latter. My suspicion is that a spec with neither is going to struggle in the AoE department.

Also note that AoE is no better than any other source of combo point generation for HAT these days - in fact, it's probably subpar, given the way the timing works out. So I'm pretty dubious that such a spec will be good for much.

Well, during p1 the only time that you should be FoK spamming are the first set of adds of each ground phase. The very first set AR+BF is used, the second set you ignore the adds entirely until he burrows, first kite phase commences, he unburrows, and BF is now back up to FoK the 3rd set of adds, 4th set is once again ignored and AR is back up to burn Anub until he burrows, 5th set gets BF'ed + Fok'ed, and now you are in p3 where prey on the weak is 95% useless.

FoK only ends up at 10% of my total damage on a given night. I would also contest that 10% AP and 15% agility make up the 20% poison damage from vile poisons. Given that you have no need to use a fast OH you would also gain more OH wound poison damage equipping a 2.6.

I'll not debate it further until I test it myself. I received multiple infractions during Ulduar for stating that 18/51/2 was the best rogue spec... low and behold it is. So I'll bite my tongue here and return in a week with definitive numbers.

I just removed the combat talent energy regen component from my spreadsheet, and it looks like subtlety would have to hit 45% harder per fok (including poisons) than combat to match the dps of combat FoK. Note that is combat without snd compared to subt with snd, and you'd likely be able to keep snd up on anub with downtime between add spawns.

Now depending on your guild's strat, it might be more optimal to use a combat/assn build focused on aoe damage if you can ensure you would be aoeing non-stop (aside from burrow phase), but I have no idea if going that route would be worth it.

I've been toying with the idea of using a mutilate spec on this fight, something like this.

From my analysis of FoK, it looks like mutilate would do about 500 less sustained dps to 5 targets than combat, but 500 more than when PotW is not active.

The key for anub however is how focus attacks scales. Mutilate FoK dmg is burstier, which would make it more effective the less time you spend FoKing. I am considering an overall aoe strategy where most of our rogues only FoK the adds when tricks is up, then continue to dps anub. With energy pooling, my numbers indicate both combat(with adren rush up) and mutilate(with overkill up) can generally cast 4(maybe 5 with good rng) FoK's in 6 seconds. With the same number of FoKs, mutilate should do more damage, especially if you envenom right before you FoK so the envenom buff is up.

I think it would clearly do more aoe dmg than combat phase 3, since you may not even FoK the adds in the short amount of time their health % is lower than yours.

Mutilate also has more room for filler talents -- I chose fleet footed and deadly brew(to slow scarabs reliably), but blood spatter may be worth picking up instead depending on how much time you spend solely on anub. Master poisoner also debuffs all the mobs if you do not have an ele shaman present.


The main ability difference that I am having difficulty valuing is blade flurry. One way I can think about it is evaluate the usefulness of the damage it does. If you are targeting anub, blade flurry damage will hit an add, but not all of them, so the damage done to the add simply reduces the efficiency of subsequent aoe if that add dies sooner than the others. This wouldn't apply if enough adds die quickly enough that the raid stops using aoes and cleaves the rest of the adds down, but it's a small difference either way.

If you autoattack an add to make the blade flurry damage hit anub, I'd imagine it is a wash, since I doubt blade flurry damage would do more to anub than autoattacking him, and the white autoattack damage into the one add would suffer from the same diminished value as in my previous example.


One issue with mutilate though is I am unsure of the complexity that weapon swapping would add to the fight. I am thinking if I weapon swap right after a refresh before I tricks, I should be done aoe'ing with plenty of time to swap back to the deadly off hand and refresh before the stack drops.


I'll try it out this week and report back.

I thought Blade Flurry made you hit your melee target for all of the FoK damage as well? If true, then meleeing Anub while FoKing adds would be a lot of extra damage to Anub.

I believe that is only true for targets in range of FoK, but out of melee range. So I guess it is dependent on your strat and positioning.

If I'm not mistaken, the "blade flurry damage" doesn't hit your current target, it hits a nearby secondary target in melee range. If you're targeting anub, that damage would go to an add.

ive read this thread, to specify, the last posts with blade flurry, and leto came up with the idea of mutilate with FoK on anub...and i thought about a way to combine those.

the idea is to keep as much talents of the standard mutilate spec as you can, but spent those 21 points in combat for BF.
it would look like this.

most likely im talking nonsense, cause the gain of BF doesnt make up the loss of hfb. i think its pretty clear that, when it comes to single target dps, that the spec IS nonsense, but maybe in a fight like anub hard, where FoK is important, that spec could be better.

i would have done those calculations by myself, but my knowledge is far away from the point, where i could have done this.
maybe someone else had the same idea of combining BF with muti and has done the calculations.

if this idea is nonsense, cut me into pieces or something like that :o

The point of mutilate anub is only if you aren't using FoK nonstop. It's probably fine either way, but my tailored intentions were for maximizing FoK dmg while tricks is up and not other times.

Also, HfB is a big dps increase for FoK.

Ald that's correct re: Blade Flurry, with the addition that the targetting of BF's hits is determined by proximity. The npc closest to the rogue's center will receive the BF hits.

Do you know if the second closest mob would receive the FoK hit on the closest mob, or would it be wasted?

Because of this, you should try shifting if possible so that BF hits a different add during your aoe cycle. This usually results in extremely high threat, even when you used tricks during BF/AR, and considering the tank and other misdirects your raid may have.

Of course you also have vanish, which should be up everytime you use BF/AR.

I would also assume BF targetting would also involve closest target that did not proc the BF hit in the first place. So if your FoK hit the closest mob, it would BF the second closest mob. I am just speculating this because based on my combat text, my BF dmg and FoK dmg has always been the same numbers, I could be wrong though.

Okay I'm going to try something here and please let me know if my math is wrong or if I'm just getting the wrong idea entirely.

According to Leto's above post you should be able to get off roughly 4 FoK's in a 6 sec duration. With AR lasting 15 sec total thats 10 FoK's during AR. (15/6*4) Also, BF lasts 15 sec as well so lets do some extra damage calculation if this discussion on wether or not the BF hits from FoK will hit Anub. Also, so for the sake of simple numbers I'm going to be using a low 5000 AP for my calculations and Ald's current equiped weapons for a number to work with, these weapons are not daggers.

(5000 AP/14)(2.4)+605(0.70)=1281 MH damage per FoK hit
(5000 AP/14)(2.4)+423(0.70)(0.75)=1281 OH damage per FoK hit

In the Anub fight FoK will optimaly hit 4 targets and at 10 FoK's per AR/BF cycle that equals to 102,480 extra damage on Anub. (4*10*1281*2) Keep in mind that this does not include crits or ArP. It goes without saying that that's a ton of extra damage within a 15 sec period.

Please let me know if there is any error in my calculation, which is very possible considering this is my first time doing game mechanic calculations.