Can anyone offer insight into the backstab talent in the Assassination tree? I have not seen anything that would suggest you will want to use backstab. I briefly glanced through the thread and didn't really see anything about it. If I overlooked it, if you would be so kind to direct me to it and delete this post.

Here's some rough calculations, though as a note I'm neglecting crit and AP, and assuming heroic Ribspreader mainhand and Lungbreaker offhand. All numbers for damage and the like were pulled from Wowhead's Cataclysm database.

Mutilate: 1444.8 damage, 24.1 damage/energy, 0.033 combo points/energy
Glyphed Mutilate: 1444.8 damage, 26.3 damage/energy, 0.036 combo points/energy
Blackstab: 1194.0 damage, 19.9 damage/energy, 0.017 combo points/energy
Murderous Intent Backstab: 1194.0 damage, 39.8 damage/energy, 0.033 combo points/energy

So in normal situations, Mutilate would be a superior combo point builder, due to higher damage per energy and significantly higher combo points per energy. In the execute phase (under 35%), Backstab with 3/3 Murderous Intent has far higher damage per energy and the same combo points per energy as unglyphed Mutilate, which is quite possibly the more relevant of the two given the developer's comments that any glyphs that are currently there may not make it to live.

Cooljo's data in ratio form.

Ratio of Rupture damage unglyphed

CP	duration	dmg	dmg + RvS	ratio
1	8	686	809	1.179
2	10	1028	1438*	1.399
3	12	1405	1620	1.153
4	14	1818	2081	1.145
5	16	2268	2588	1.141

Ratio of Rupture damage glyphed

CP	duration	dmg	dmg + RvS	ratio
1	12	1029	1214	1.180
2	14	1439	1676	1.165
3	16	1873	2162	1.154
4	18	2338	2676	1.145
5	20	2835	3222	1.137

There's an outlier on the 2 CP unglyphed data, or at least it appears that way.
Edit: *I recieve a PM from Roywyn - "The tester miscalculated (or the tooltip did). They used total:=6*tick even though it's just 5*tick in reality for 10s." So, it sould read 1198, which is right in line with the glyphed data with a ratio of 1.165.

This is a strange behavior, if RvS lasts 15 seconds, then why are the damage numbers for durations less than 15 seconds not have the full 1.18 multiplier? You could understand some descrepancies for rupture durations near 15 seconds because of latency issues, but the damage seems to be independent of rupture to RvS duration by looking at the multipliers, since they are nearly identical. I think a log would be helpful, if someone could provide one.

Edit:

Looking at the change in mutipliers vs duration. You can clearly see an bias for short duration ruptures. I'm not sure if this is rounding errors or not. I don't know how the server calculates damage, and certainly not for rupture.

Glyphed Rupture

CP	duration	dmg	dmg + RvS	ratio	ratio change
1	12	1029	1214	1.180	NA
2	14	1439	1676	1.165	-0.015
3	16	1873	2162	1.154	-0.010
4	18	2338	2676	1.145	-0.010
5	20	2835	3222	1.137	-0.008

You can run the math, adding +20% damage to various numbers of ticks and the numbers still don't come out right.

So, I guess this a long wind way to confirm what Cooljo stated. It's bugged.

I'll assume the tester is level 80, since that makes both formulae work with 1772 AP. Both being Rupture - Spell - World of Warcraft at 80 and Rupture - Spell - World of Warcraft in general with the slider. Note that the Cata entry need another bracket, opening before the first number (tick base) and closing after AP. I.e. the (127+18*CP) part is per tick and needs to be multiplied by #ticks, or 0.5*time.

Revealing Strike adds +31/+34/+36/+38/+40 damage per tick. That seems pretty close to 20% of the base damage without the AP scaling, but still seems to be 1-3 points off. Not sure what't happening exactly, perhaps some more rounding issues at work?

Revealing Strike is consumed when you use Rupture (or any other finisher that works with it). It doesn't remain on the target increasing say all(multiple) finishers that you do during this time.

As of right now when you vanish in combat you only gain the vanish buff not the stealth buff, when that fades (after 3 seconds) you then gain the stealth buff, which in turn triggers overkill like normal. While the vanish buff is up you are able to use abilities like garrote and ambush as if it were stealth. You gain the move speed buff from the minor glyph as expected.

Wait, does this mean that offensive vanish is done unless you wait the 3 seconds for Overkill to appear?
Would Overkill be applied if you broke out of Vanish early, through the use of Mutilate or Ambush or whatever else people sometimes use?

I would consider this a bug since Vanish got reworked. Its likely that they've forgotten to add the Stealth application to the Vanish cast.

Which is why said as of right now its that way, but they also changed the wording on vanish or there was a blue post about it in the first couple of pages say that vanish forces you to stay stealthed, or something along those lines. Which might be what they trying to accomplish with it right now. Only time will tell

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that other external haste effects will be getting the haste -> energy direct conversion. I agree that it's most likely going to be only haste rating that gets the first order conversion (and obviously all haste effects will generate the second order one). My point was that as it is now, the haste being on BF allows us to separate that 2nd order energy return from the energy that AR gives by at least a couple globals depending on what order you hit everything in. However, once the haste is tied into AR and BF becomes a dps loss on single targets, that further complicates the issue of capping during AR, though admittedly by only a tiny amount. The real purpose of the post was more to illustrate that we're going to have the same energy returning effects that we have now (in total) along with the 1st order conversion of haste rating into energy. Now of course we won't have so much haste (in a relative sense) once we hit 85 and are in the first tier of content. So that will alleviate the concern to a fair degree, but once we hit top tier again, we're going to have basically what we have now during AR, plus some X haste rating to Y energy per second conversion. AR certainly isn't unmanageable at the moment, but I'd pretty much call anyone a liar who claimed they've never capped out with BF/AR/Lust/Gloves/Pot up. Heck even just AR and some good combat potency procs will cap you pretty easily.

Thank you! God, I've been twitching to get some info on this.

If the mechanic works like (or similar to) SW:P and Corruption then multipliers and crit would get refreshed; AP (including AP derived from stat increases) would not. So thank you for the (partial) confirmation.

This means that Serrated Blades is in fact pretty darned useful, and that we no longer need to synch Shadowstep with Rupture. The only tricky part is going to be getting all the buffs up again when Serrated Blades fails to proc. It's really a shame they won't give us 100% proc rate.

Edit: With 2 5-point Eviscerates there is a 84% chance of refresh; with 3 5-point Eviscerates that increases to 98.6% chance. The math to figure out whether the rupture/backstab glyphs make sense is beyond me, but if you could get Rupture rolling with Hysteria/Tricks/Shadowstep/MoS + a crit potion & crit trinket seems like the benefit of sustaining it the whole fight would be huge.