In a series of raids where our guild ran progression attempts on Deathbringer Saurfang, I had the opportunity after numerous other recent trials to run the last remaining tests on my ‘work-list’ so that I could conclude how well the different Assassination (Mutilate) specs operate at the moment and with what weapon combination I could maximise my DPS. All the collected data from my recent tests is available to all via our World of Logs reports for the next calendar month or so.

The two specs being debated at the moment are the more standard 51/13/7 spec and the more haste-oriented 51/18/2 spec. In the latter, we sacrifice some of the energy regen and damage boosting talents in the first tier of the subtlety tree to gain additional crit and haste for our standard attacks in the combat tree.

The second debate being held concerns whether it is currently better (all other things being equal) to use a slow main-hand dagger and a fast off-hand dagger as normal or to use a fast dagger in each hand. Faster equals more white melee damage attacks and generally lower damage from specials like mutilate but offers an increased number of Instant Poison procs which can more than compensate potentially due to the good damage it does currently.

With these questions in mind, I have therefore now fully modelled and subsequently raid tested to satisfaction the following combinations:

1) 51/13/7 with Slow-MH and Fast-OH weapons.
2) 51/13/7 with Fast-MH and Fast-OH weapons.
3) 51/18/2 with Slow-MH and Fast-OH weapons.
4) 51/18/2 with Fast-MH and Fast-OH weapons.

Please note, ALL of these specs are using a rupture-free cycle because there are no circumstances with assassination builds now where rupture does damage worth its energy cost in normal rogue usage. There is a very slim possibility that the use of rupture could offer a DPS increase where the rogue is off-target so often that the ticking DoT of Rupture is a benefit. However, I’ve tested the rupture-inclusive builds and none of them were really even close in the DPS stakes. Instant Poison is far more potent at the moment.

Of the above specs tested, with MY gear, the best combination was…

4) 51/18/2 with Fast-MH and Fast-OH weapons.

Again, please note that this was with MY gear and the balance of which of the two specs is more powerful for you will be gear dependent. However, in both cases, I found the 51/18/2 spec was more DPS whatever weapon combination I used. But, to any rogues going down this route, once you’ve gemmed for this spec, it’s simple enough to use your Dual Talent Spec option to have each spec available in a raid, run some real world tests (the ONLY kind that really matter) and see for yourselves.

The other very important point is to attempt wherever possible to maintain the uptime on the Envenom buff. Thus, if you have Classtimer or a similar mod, I suggest adding a custom buff-timer/monitor for “Envenom” (that’s the buff’s name as well) so that you can more easily keep track of it.

I’ve also tested the CP variations and can report that the best DPS lies with the use of 4CP and 5CP envenoms and that the use of 3CP envenoms is normally a DPS loss – the only exception to this is during a Heroism if you are trying to keep/put-up the Envenom buff to take advantage of the burst period.

Rotation from the opening of a fight is roughly:

1) Begin in Stealth. Garotte.
2) Put up Hunger for Blood and Slice and Dice.
3) Mutilate to 4+ CPs, Envenom. Repeat this basic cycle throughout the fight.

4) As soon as the initial Garotte is complete, work another Vanish/Garotte into the rotation.
—- Pool energy via Overkill if you have the chance, it’s 30% improved when stealthed.
—- Use Cloak of Shadows if needed (eg: You have a debuff like Mark of the Champion) to get the garotte out.

5) Hold Potion of Speed for Heroism. Keep Envenom buff up during Heroism without question.

If you can do that, you can easily run consistent high DPS on many fights that favour rogues. Now that weapon swapping is no longer needed, you have plenty of time to get every detail of your rotation correct.

-B-

Following the recent release of patch 3.2, many rogues have been playing with various forms of weapon-swapping macros in order to attempt to gain a small boost to their DPS. The premise is that whatever spec you are raiding with, and currently this should really be a standard Assassination-Mutilate build or a standard Combat build, you’ll typically be running with Deadly Poison (DP) on your off-hand weapon.

Now, DP has an uptime of 12 seconds and can stack up to five times on a single target. The idea therefore is to begin a fight with an off-hand weapon coated with DP, wait until DP has stacked five times and has a full 12 seconds or so of uptime remaining and then to switch your off-hand weapon to a good alternative/equivalent that has been coated with Instant Poison (IP). You then continue as normal until your DP stack has about 5 seconds of uptime remaining at which point you perform another weapon-swap to reequip the DP coated weapon so that you can refresh the stack before it drops.

If all goes well, you’ll have gained some additional DPS due to the extra DPS that IP can provide on top of the DPS that DP is already providing as it continues to tick. This whole concept relies very much on you being able to stand relatively still and maintain DPS on a single target only – it does not work on mobile fights or on fights where you are required to switch targets regularly.

Depending upon your spec (Assassination or Combat) and what gear you have will determine how easy it will be for you to perform the weapon-swapping due to the 1 second enforced cooldown (CD) that occurs after each weapon-swap. Additionally, you ideally should have a second off-hand weapon comparable in terms of DPS and speed to the normal weapon you use in your off-hand so that when you switch you don’t lose a significant amount of DPS through raw weapon-stat reductions.

We’ve included a trio of simple macros below and to use them, simply replace the “Dagger of BLAH Poison” with the name of the weapons you are off-handing in each case. And no, they don’t have to be daggers! Once you have some macros, we’ll assume you can cover the basics of keybinding them and of using a simple addon like class-timer to track the points when your DP stack is full and refreshed and when it’s getting close to expiry such that you need to swap back. If you pop on over to Elitist Jerks (EJ) then you’ll find some people there are creating automated weapon-swap macros that run in addons like Outfitter.

The Deadly Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Deadly Poison

The Instant Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Instant Poison

The Wound Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Wound Poison

However, we’d suggest that if you can’t at the very least track your DP stack yourself and manually select when to switch weapons using macros like these, then you’re essentially letting the addons make your decisions for you and frankly you then neither deserve nor should you be swapping weapons. Do it manually by yourself or leave well alone. Blizzard already made their position clear on who should be thinking on behalf of your character when they locked addons down previously, meaning decursive users had to learn to do more than simply stab a single bright red button labelled “Decurse the cursed person please!”

In ideal circumstances where you are able to fit the weapon-swapping into your rotation, have an identical OH weapon to switch to and are on the ball with the changes so that you don’t let the DP stack expire, you can expect to see anywhere up to a 500 DPS increase from doing this. It’s likely going to be a smaller proportion of this figure for the “average you or me” once all non-ideal parameters are factored in but from our early experiments, it’s certainly worth doing on those “stand still and fight me” encounters.

-B-

Prior to the release of patch 3.1, the highest reliable raiding specs for a rogue were the mutilate based assassination builds. These builds however were some of the more involved to play – the rotations were sufficiently tight that getting unlucky just once with the random number generator (RNG) or being forced to step away from the target to avoid a void zone, fire wall or a raging marshmallow-man could, and generally would, cause something in the rotation to drop and that was generally expensive, both in terms of the DPS lost and the time it took to restart the rotation again.

Then along came patch 3.1 and with it came a number of changes and alterations that have made assassination a much more streamlined build to play. No longer must the budding mutilate rogue buff themselves three times before every single pull and then keep one eye on the 15 second timer just to remain even remotely competitive on DPS. No more will the dagger based rogue cry to the heavens as their envenom misses causing Slice and Dice to expire. In short, no more will the assassination rogues feel like life is just too short for all this!

Hunger for Blood (HfB) is now a single-stacking buff that can be applied to the rogue as soon as the target has sustained a bleed-effect debuff. The buff gives the rogue 15% increased dps for a duration of one minute. It can be glyphed to give an additional 3% dps (making 18% in total) making HfB the most potent use of a single talent point in any of the three rogue talent trees.

In addition to the HfB change, the switch-over of staple rogue poisons to a Procs-Per-Minute (PPM) modality from their earlier ‘chance of application upon hit’ standard has had rogues revising their weapon choices whilst the improvement to Envenom that allows it to now increase both the chance and the PPM of applying deadly poison means that building and maintaining a ’5-stack’ of deadly poison on a target is now relatively easy and quick.

So, how do you setup your rogue to go raiding post 3.1 as an Assassination-Mutilate specced rogue? Well, we’re glad you asked and if you settle yourself in comfortably, we’ll begin.

Talent Specs for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

There are a number of variations on the same basic talent spec but the key thing to note for any rogues that raided with an Assassination-Mutilate build before 3.1 is that Murder is now a viable talent (assuming you are moving into Ulduar where the mobs are not Undead by majority) and that Master Poisoner (MP) is now generally preferred over Turn the Tables (TtT) due to the improvements and changes made to poison mechanics and Envenom.

You can view many different specs at Talentchic’s Rogue Table but for quickness, the build that yours truly is running at the moment is this one which you’ll see has taken Murder, switched TtT for MP and dropped two points from Precision in order to invest two points in Improved Slice and Dice (Imp.SnD).

If you have not already reached the necessary hit-cap, you may benefit more from keeping those two points in Precision but since Broliant does not need the hit, the remaining options were investing the two points in Imp.SnD or filling up Close Quarters Combat (CQC) for an extra 2% crit. Although 2% crit is never a bad thing, prior experience of Wrath raiding has shown us that the melee are expected to run away from their targets on a regular basis to avoid fire and snow and all other hurtful things.

Whilst outside of melee range, our ability to maintain our self-buffs (HfB and SnD) is greatly reduced and therefore the extra margin of flexibility provided by Imp.SnD generally pays for itself by reducing the amount of energy lost when we’re forced to restart an interrupted raid rotation. As with all things, although there are the basic cookie-cutter builds, you should always evaluate them in context with your own gear and experience to ensure that you find the best mesh between the two.

Glyphs for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

Glyphs go hand-in-hand with talent specs and the choices for an assassination mutilate rogue are fairly straightforward. For major glyphs, simply get one each of the following:

• Glyph of Hunger for Blood
• Glyph of Mutilate
• Glyph of Rupture

Minor glyphs are less influential on your performance therefore you do have reasonable freedom to choose whichever you prefer. However, in order of raid usefulness, you might want to consider the following:

• Glyph of Safe Fall
• Glyph of Vanish
• Glyph of Blurred Speed

Of these, the Glyph of Safe Fall is the only one that offers regular benefit in raids since there are a number of bosses that throw you into the air. Anything that can add to a rogue’s inbuilt Safe Fall ability and thus help us to avoid taking further damage is a gift to your healers and an opportunity to continue fighting and doing dps.

Gear for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:
The obvious gear requirement for an Assassination-Mutilate specced rogue is that you need two daggers in order to be able to use Mutilate. At the time of writing, most regular raiders will be heading into Ulduar after having spent a few months running through Naxxramas. If you have been lucky, you’ll have been able to win the following two daggers from Naxxramas bosses which respectively represent the Best in Slot (BiS) daggers available pre-Ulduar to rogues.

• Main Hand: Sinister Revenge
• Off Hand: Webbed Death

Aside from these daggers, you’ll generally just want to gather the best gear you can depending upon where you are running, what your looting chances are and so forth. As always, I’ll recommend the inimitable ShadowPanther.net site as the resource you should use to get some understanding of how each piece of gear stacks up against other pieces of gear for the same slot.

If you’re feeling especially brave and are technically competant, you should also lookup the main rogue spread-sheets available from the dedicated thread at Elitist Jerks which gives you a much more detailed insight into the effect of each item of loot against your overall wardrobe and typical raid composition.

Poisons for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

Now that poisons have had their fundamental mechanics changed, the selection of poisons for an assassination-mutilate rogue is more familiar to the old-school players among us. Simply setup your poisons as follows:

• Main Hand: Instant Poison IX
• Off Hand: Deadly Poison IX

Instant poison will become one of the higher contributors to your overall DPS whilst deadly poison on the off-hand ensures that you have the ability to Envenom whenever you can work it into your rotation.

Rotations for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

Ideally, you’ll begin every new encounter from stealth and with full energy. Of course, in a multi-mob fight you’ll move from target to target and simply have to adjust to ensure you preserve your rotation as best you can. Assuming the ideal scenario however, this is the standard rotation you should be looking to perform.

1. From stealth, get behind the target and Garotte.
2. Activate Hunger for Blood to buff your dps.
3. Activate Slice and Dice with the Combo Points (CPs) from Garotte.
4. Mutilate Twice. If you don’t have 5CPs, use Shiv to get that last one.
5. Activate Rupture.
6. Mutilate Twice. If you don’t have 5CPs, use Shiv to get that last one.
7. Envenom, to consume CPs and to maximally refresh the SnD timer.
8. You rotation is now primed, maintain it as follows.
9. Mutilate to 5CPs and refresh Rupture as it expires.
10. Mutilate to 5CPs and Envenom to refresh the SnD timer.
11. Monitor HfB and refresh it as it expires.
12. Repeat the last three steps to maintain your rotation. **

** The only other thing to monitor here is the amount of ‘slack’ you have after your first Envenom. In some fights, you may be able to squeeze an additional Envenom into the cycle before building CPs to refresh Rupture. This is something you’ll need to adjust according to the circumstances of the fight you are in and the specifics of your own performance, your gear, your buffs and so on.

In addition to the above, you will sometimes need to squeeze other abilities into your rotation cycle such as Cold Blood(CB), Tricks of the Trade (TotT), Feint and so forth. The following tips should help you do that in the most beneficial way.

• Cold Blood – In some fights you will want to use this as many times as possible therefore simply hold it until you are ready to do a 5CP Envenom and then use it thereafter each time it comes off cooldown. In other fights, it can benefit you more to hold it until a certain event happens.

  Two Ulduar examples that spring to mind are when doing DPS on the Heart in the XT-002 Deconstructor fight and when doing DPS on Hodir after receiving the 165% DPS crit-buff from the Non Player Character (NPC). In both of these cases your Cold Blood ensures a very nice increase in damage done. At the time of writing, a 40K Envenom crit against Hodir with the buff active is my best Envenom strike and that was made in the normal (10-man) mode. Imagine what could be achieved with buffs from another 15 players!

• Tricks of the Trade: – This is of more use to you as a means of either boosting someone else’s DPS or of building a larger gap between you and (say) your tank so that you can continue doing as much personal DPS as possible.

  On my rogue I have macros setup to set any of my raid’s tanks as my “Focus Target” at the push of a single button. I then have another macro that casts TotT on my focus target at the press of another button. With this all pre-configured, as an encounter begins I can then engage the first kill target and start to build my rotation. If energy allows within the time-frame, I then use TotT on my tank just before my first 5CP Envenom. (NB: By ‘time-frame’, we mean before the SnD timer expires. Refreshing this via Envenom is your first priority here.) If I don’t have time to put TotT onto my tank on the first time round – which is a common occurrance due to the tighter constraints that are in place as the rotation is being launched – then I simply hold off on using it until the second time around.

  Of course, in such cases I also pay much closer attention to my threat vs the threat built by the tank because if the tank happens to have an unlucky streak of misses/blocks/dodges etc, our respective threat-levels could become dangerously close.

• Feint: – There are not many occasions now in which Feint really is needed as part of a standard rotation. Gurtogg Bloodboil in Black Temple is probably the last fight I can easily remember where our tanks had sufficient difficulty building a good threat margin between themselves and the dps that feint was brought into the standard mix.

  Feint gained a new trick however in Patch 3.0.8. in that it also reduces all Area of Effect (AoE) damage taken by 50% for six seconds. During encounters where sizeable amounts of AoE are being done, slipping a quick Feint into the mix at an appropriate time gives your healers an easier time in keeping you alive and thus enables you to keep on keeping on.

  The first obvious use for this in Ulduar is in the XT-002 Deconstuctor fight when the boss does its Timpanic Tantrum effect. The first couple of times your raid group meets this effect you’ll be able to hear the high-pitched whistle of air as your healers squeal in pain at the work they need to do. Pop feint as the effect begins and you’ll hardly notice what all the fuss is about.

Summary:

And that’s about it for the moment for our summary of how to go raiding as an Assassination-Mutilate specced rogue post patch 3.1. We hope you’ve found the above information of use and as with all things, remember to have fun!

-B-