Given the new that Icecrown Posting Guidelines don't explicitly lock out encounter discussion, it seems appropriate to me to try to make a thread specifically dor the discussion of Rogue specific concerns, optimizations, and techniques in the new tier of content. In the past, various notes on whether to go Combat or Mutilate for a particular bossfight, or whether Feint reduces the damage of a particular ability, or whether Fan of Knives will hit Mim's head in Phase 3, etc. etc. have been scattered across half a dozen unrelated threads in this forum, much to the detriment of any raiding rogue seeking some of the more specific information that might be relevant.

Suggested topics of discussion to keep reigned in here include specific talent variations for various encounters (Deadly Brew for Saurfang, dropping poison talents for Deathwhisper?), optimal cooldown usage on various fights, or questions pertaining to those or similar subjects. Lets try to get all of that stuff out of the Simple Questions and various gear threads, because really, it's just clutter in those and belongs here. As always, the rules apply with regards to discussion of new content. Have some kind of basis for anything you propose, don't just post a link to your combat log parse of a Saurfang kill where you did 12,000 DPS as Mutilate.

On that note, I'll open the discussion with a note regarding ICC trash for those who are looking to farm it for rep, or just clear it more efficiently, who may not have noticed it: Along the corridor leading up to Lord Marrowgar, there are Spirit Alarms, visible to rogues at Medium-short range via Detect Traps. These alarms, when triggered (by proximity), will cause Deathbound Wards to activate - pulling one of these while fighting one of the larger trash packs can be troublesome - they hit hard, they cleave, and they interrupt casters. Aggroing two when you've just engaged a large pack of mobs is a recipe for a wipe for many runs.

So what to do? Well, you can Disarm them if you're not concerned with gaining reputation and just want a quick clear, or, if you want the (substantial) Ashen Verdict rep, you can toss a Smoke Flare on the trap from range, to warn your raid, and particularly your tanks, to stay away from the Alarm until other mobs are clear - using a flare does not break stealth, so you can sneak in and mark traps as your raid is dealing with the first set of mobs and just getting started with each room. Be advised that sometimes the traps spawn late, or do not spawn until others have been either activated or disarmed.

I'd like to add that since it's likely you haven't disarmed anything in some time, it's been changed to require stealth, but you can disarm from a longer range than before (20 yd). In fact, I tried to get close to disarm one, and triggered it due to being too close. They also do not de-spawn, they just go inactive, so make sure you don't get a gear icon when you mouseover.

As an aside, It's great to have something like this in a raid again.

We just did the first three bosses of ICC 25 tonight, and it's pretty trivial.

Off the top of my head though:
1) Standing inside the hitbox of Marrowgar seems to prevent you getting hit by the flames during his normal phase. I believe you can still be targeted but you won't take any damage.
2) On Deathwhisper, we'd just tricks the add tanks before each spawn and throw out some FoKs on the adds to help round them up faster before blowing up the Adherents.
3) The Deathwhisper adds can be Dismantled and stunned, which can help with some of the damage and avoiding cleaves if they get spun around.

One thing worth mentioning regarding the traps is that they reactivate 1 hour after being disarmed.

Do they do that even after Marrowgar is dead, ie his thrash in general doesn't respawn anymore?

On Lady Deathwhisper my guild has split the melee up into two groups to take care of the adds and have assigned specific range to help out when the Fanatics get reanimated. Usually we down adds with 20-25 secs remaining till the next spawn and if there is only reanimated fanatics up, the assigned range will nuke them and as a result free up our melee to run over to LDW and dps her shield with the rest of the range. This cuts the length of P1 significantly and allows our melee to be constantly busy instead of waiting for the next spawn of adds.

Also by pure coincidence we discovered that having cloak up when she is about to MC someone makes you immune. Her cast will be wasted should you be the lucky recipient.

- Marrowgar's bone spike cannot be removed with KS/Vanish or Shadowmeld.
- Melee will "go down with the ship" on the gunboat battle unless they jump back over.
- Deathwhisper's adds are also susceptible to blind. We tend to put two rogues on the adherents spawning on the right for CCs while melee chew up any adherent on the left or the possible stair-spawn.

I'll edit this post when I next get a chance to run ICC but in the meantime can someone find out whether or not the spawns on Sarufang can be slowed using an application of crippling poison?

They can be. I specced Deadly Brew for our first kill, since I was running Mutilate anyway and didn't exactly need Fleet Footed for the fight. When the adds were about to spawn, I'd pool energy, Tricks the hunter that was running in to drop Frost Traps, Envenom (for application rate), and spam FoK a few times, with Thistle Tea/Overkill to get an extra FoK out. It worked pretty well, but on the whole, we found that, for normal mode, the extra slowing wasn't exactly needed.

In my experience on the LDW encounter mutilate rogues are best off facerolling on the mana shield due to the time it takes for mutilate to get into the right rotation. Also classes with split damage between physical and magical is mediocre at best at both types of adds when they go immune to one of them.

Also on Saurfang i would never tell any of my rogues to do FoK when the adds spawn for one simple reason: the damage rogues put out this patch. We used a boomkin, a frost mage with imp blizzard, and a hunter to slow the adds in 25 man and he went down quite easily with top 3 dps beeing rogue, rogue and rogue.

On that fight i was close to pulling my maximum theoretical dps as a mutilate rogue.

I should be clear, I wasn't FoKing the adds until they died - it was 1-2 FoK's under the envenom buff, and back to single target, to get a quick AE Cripple up.

Yea i got that, sorry if i made some confusion. What i meant was that that 55-110 energy is better off in dps on the boss.

Regarding Lady Deathwhisper's adds: those immune to physical damage still take full poison damage, so Mutilate rogues are not entirely useless at killing them if your raid leader opts to put you on add duty. Obviously you want to kill those that are susceptible to physical damage first, but you can still contribute to the others once they are out of the way.

Honestly, it seems a little silly to put a mutilate rogue on any of the physical damage adds. The majority of mutilate's damage is poison based, so it would make more sense to just have mutilate rogues on adds immune to phsyical damage. But the entire premise of this seems a little absurd, if you're a rogue and on adds it make much more sense to go combat in the first place. Keeping HfB and SnD running is quite a task when the adds drop at the rate they do, so you're losing a lot of damage just by trying to keep those up. Given the high single-target damage output of a mutilate rogue, it just doesn't make any sense to me why you would put a mutilate rogue on adds.

I'm with Joig on this as well: unless your raid is so unbalanced on the melee-spellcasters ratio that the casters are having a hard time cleaning up their adds, going onto deal with the melee mobs as a mutilate rogue in and of itself seems counter-productive, let alone difficult and cumbersome.

The optimal rotation (so far as I can see it) for LDW is to have melee & spellcasters finish up their respective targets during each wave and to then go straight over to deal damage to the shield before the next wave can come on in time. This is more a raid tactic than a rogue specific comment, but the long and short of it is that at no point should we be even going near to those melee mobs.

Unless you let loose your rangeds on boss and leave the adds completely to the melee (as alll adds can be taken down by melee (some melee do more magic damage than physical and in general don't have to worry about spell reflects when picking up a wrong add). In that case mutilate can be more usefull on adds as it's physical/"magical" damage is somewhat more balanced.

That seems like a pretty odd strategy given that most melee classes have some mix of magic/physical damage (except warriors). If you were to do that you would essentially be wasting any physical/magic damage on the adds that have their respective immunities, thereby lengthening the encounter and adding room for errors, mistakes, and ultimately wipes. Each guild is going to have a strategy that works best for them, but wasting dps is never going to be a good idea, and should be avoided as best as possible. In cases where wasted dps in unavoidable, the best idea is to minimize that wasted damage, and sticking a mutilate rogue (with a potential for 10k+ single target dps on LDW) on adds to do only 5-7k is quite a bit of waste.

Wound on Saurfang does indeed reduce his heals, however on normal mode it wasn't a issue we simply dps'ed through it.

For heroic, you'd also be probably better off by making sure you have another source for MS for 10man.

In 25, there shouldn't be a MS problem ever.

You can feint the Mark of the Fallen Champion debuff on Saurfang.

Not only that, but you can vanish immune it as well.

Do you per chance run with any hunters in your 25 man raids? I haven't kept up to date on the survival tree shot rotation but I know that for Marksmanship, aimed shot (which places a healing reduction debuff on the target) is up more or less full time.

It may seem unusual for a 25 man raid guild, but we generally run with no dps warrior and no hunter, leaving MS duty up to one of the three or four rogues, depending on who shows up. Seeing as how the poison talents are even more important for combat than they used to be, this is eventually going to have to be addressed.

Do you mean as it's being cast like you can do with fears?