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-