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Well, I've already gotten a lot of flak for my build and I haven't gotten the gear to test it yet, but I'd like to explain a lot of the theorycrafting behind it and behind the reason I chose my MH wep instead of a slower, higher dmg wep.
For starters, here's the build I'm using: 3/40/18
The general idea behind this is simple; rogues kill casters. Very well. On the other hand, vs an equal gear/skill pally or warrior, they do very badly. So, in turn, I wanted to create a build that could rectify this situation into a more balanced char for world pvp. To that end, I explored a lot of skills and firstly found out that Ruthlessness, while not actually broken, has been nerfed so badly that the skill's advertised 60% proc rate is a complete lie, with the actual proc rate being around 5%. IE useless. Needing combo points in order for relentless strikes to work well, I turned to Setup, which I found worked exactly as advertised. I also found this to be THE BEST WAY to get combo points on a constantly blocking/dodging warrior, pally, or even other rogue, to the point that the better your dodge and the faster they attack, the more damage you can toss out. To suppliment this, I chose combat potency to generate energy. I had been using it before with a more purist combat build and I was extremely impressed with it. In fact, so impressed that when I tried a hemo build I couldn't stand to play it at all because of how slow hemo builds get energy. So we come to my conclusion. Energy + combo points = damage. When those combo points come from a crapton of damage avoidance you get this:
Energy + combo points + damage avoidance = WIN.
The logical end to this, oddly enough, is more or less a rogue wearing tanking gear. Ridiculous, but sound in theory at least. Keep in mind that the majority of my gems are planned to be +12 agl, and if you want to argue against that let me break it down for you why you're wrong. There is NO OTHER CHOICE for a rogue:
1 agl = .5 crit rating + .5 dodge rating + (some unconfirmed amount of parry) + .99 or so attack power, +.5 hit rating and +2 armor. All in one stat. Considering the extremely dinky amounts of all of those things on your other gem choices, delicate fire rubies are for the win. That and while going for any other stat (cough crappy crit/stam gems) compromises all others, while on the other hand it's possible to get some pretty ridiculous agl on gear.
Now onto the main point of contention. What the hell am I doing with an unbreakable will? Well that leads us into the argument of slow vs fast MH weps for rogue. For any other class the choice is simple. Other classes do lots of yellow dmg and relatively little white dmg. For them big slow huge dmg weps are the way to go. Rogues, on the other hand, get most of their dmg as white dmg. However, most of our abilities (all except shiv and mutilate) use ONLY the MH wep, so the preferred choice is mostly the same, a big slow MH for yellow dmg with a fast OH for white dmg and CP procs. This, again, brings us to warglaives as being the 'best' weapons for a rogue hands down. The distinction is not nearly so black and white, however, as I will explain.
Big Slow MH Wep:
Let me first say that there is NO DIFFERENCE between a big slow high dmg wep and a fast lower dmg one of the same dps rating in terms of rogue white dmg. The advantage gained from a hard hitting slow mh wep is that your yellow dmg goes up along with the raw dmg figure of your MH wep. In terms of PPM procs (generally mongoose being the subject thereof), there have been arguments that it enhances your proc rate in some fashion, however this is not true. Mongoose procs only for the weapon it's on, and gives an independent proc chance for each wep that it's on. Also, attack speed in general does not affect this in any way as blizzard has assured that PPM scales with attack speed to give just that: A specified number of procs per minute.
Fast MH Wep:
Well, the other argument for using a big slow MH is that, hey, if my OH is fast, then I'll get more procs of CP, right? Wrong. Tell me this, when's the last time your char attacked twice in a row with their OH wep? The correct answer is NEVER (well, unless you do something silly like shiv twice in a row). You will always attack the same. MH swing, OH swing. So the total time of the two swings is directly related to the total speed of both weapons together. Given that, if you want a LOT more CP procs, then the big slow MH weapon isn't gonna cut it. Additionally, it's MUCH easier to get that golden 1.0/1.0 using weapons that are less than 2.8 *cough* to begin with. Let me give an idea of what I mean. In order to get 1.0 out of a 2.8 warglaive, you'd need:
Slice n Dice
Blade Flurry
Abacus of Violent Odds
Dragonspine Trophy (proc)
Thundering Skyfire Diamond (proc)
AND the azzinoth proc to occur ALL AT ONCE.
Not only that, but the azzinoth proc, which is the largest contributor, is also the one that procs the least.
So, if you're fighting a warrior or rogue, and dodging a lot, and you need energy to be able to toss those dodges back at them as 5CP eviscerate damage, and you want to do this at GCD, warglaives simply aren't a very good option. Sure, I lose some yellow damage with a quicker wep, but it's not like it's a fruitless tradeoff, it just means that my character's damage will be predictably dominated by white hits most of the time.
So why unbreakable will? Well, for one, they fuglied up the blade of savagery with 2.3, which put me off that wep. Secondly, defense = damage avoidance = more procs of setup = more damage done and less damage taken and more life to take it with. Basically the reason I'm using tanking gear is cause I'm TANKING to generate combo points. Vs casters I've got all the nasty rogue tricks; poison, stun, kick, cloak of shadows, vanish, and a crapton of haste cooldowns that I can pull to start tossing out white damage like it's free candy and I'm a child molester. Vs the tanking classes you couldn't keep them stunned long enough to take down their life if you tried your best and built your char around it. As soon as they turn around it becomes a block fest and you're at the losing end, and all that crit amounts to exactly zero vs all their anti-crit and crit-dmg-reduction in addition to like 25k hp for the real elite ones. Rather than coming up with some other elaborate strategy to counter that, I'm simply fighting fire with fire. Also, in RvR, all that life keeps you in the fight if they manage to "oh ****" and stun/get behind you, while if you keep them in front of you their attacks simply feed your damage, making a very irritating character for any melee to face as well as a pretty well rounded char overall.
I like to relate this to my melee sorc from d2. "OMG NOOB SORC HITTING WITH SWORD". Yep, for 60k dmg a hit at high AR and like 90 res all and max block, with a decent amount of life on top of that and the ability to tele all over the place. Yeah, a rogue wearing tanking gear is definitely unusual, but that doesn't mean it can't kill you outright like you're nothing. Of course, whether this will work in practice is yet to be seen, but from my current experience (limited though I admit) this should work as intended, and so far I have yet to see any quirks in skills or gear that should prevent it.
For starters, here's the build I'm using: 3/40/18
The general idea behind this is simple; rogues kill casters. Very well. On the other hand, vs an equal gear/skill pally or warrior, they do very badly. So, in turn, I wanted to create a build that could rectify this situation into a more balanced char for world pvp. To that end, I explored a lot of skills and firstly found out that Ruthlessness, while not actually broken, has been nerfed so badly that the skill's advertised 60% proc rate is a complete lie, with the actual proc rate being around 5%. IE useless. Needing combo points in order for relentless strikes to work well, I turned to Setup, which I found worked exactly as advertised. I also found this to be THE BEST WAY to get combo points on a constantly blocking/dodging warrior, pally, or even other rogue, to the point that the better your dodge and the faster they attack, the more damage you can toss out. To suppliment this, I chose combat potency to generate energy. I had been using it before with a more purist combat build and I was extremely impressed with it. In fact, so impressed that when I tried a hemo build I couldn't stand to play it at all because of how slow hemo builds get energy. So we come to my conclusion. Energy + combo points = damage. When those combo points come from a crapton of damage avoidance you get this:
Energy + combo points + damage avoidance = WIN.
The logical end to this, oddly enough, is more or less a rogue wearing tanking gear. Ridiculous, but sound in theory at least. Keep in mind that the majority of my gems are planned to be +12 agl, and if you want to argue against that let me break it down for you why you're wrong. There is NO OTHER CHOICE for a rogue:
1 agl = .5 crit rating + .5 dodge rating + (some unconfirmed amount of parry) + .99 or so attack power, +.5 hit rating and +2 armor. All in one stat. Considering the extremely dinky amounts of all of those things on your other gem choices, delicate fire rubies are for the win. That and while going for any other stat (cough crappy crit/stam gems) compromises all others, while on the other hand it's possible to get some pretty ridiculous agl on gear.
Now onto the main point of contention. What the hell am I doing with an unbreakable will? Well that leads us into the argument of slow vs fast MH weps for rogue. For any other class the choice is simple. Other classes do lots of yellow dmg and relatively little white dmg. For them big slow huge dmg weps are the way to go. Rogues, on the other hand, get most of their dmg as white dmg. However, most of our abilities (all except shiv and mutilate) use ONLY the MH wep, so the preferred choice is mostly the same, a big slow MH for yellow dmg with a fast OH for white dmg and CP procs. This, again, brings us to warglaives as being the 'best' weapons for a rogue hands down. The distinction is not nearly so black and white, however, as I will explain.
Big Slow MH Wep:
Let me first say that there is NO DIFFERENCE between a big slow high dmg wep and a fast lower dmg one of the same dps rating in terms of rogue white dmg. The advantage gained from a hard hitting slow mh wep is that your yellow dmg goes up along with the raw dmg figure of your MH wep. In terms of PPM procs (generally mongoose being the subject thereof), there have been arguments that it enhances your proc rate in some fashion, however this is not true. Mongoose procs only for the weapon it's on, and gives an independent proc chance for each wep that it's on. Also, attack speed in general does not affect this in any way as blizzard has assured that PPM scales with attack speed to give just that: A specified number of procs per minute.
Fast MH Wep:
Well, the other argument for using a big slow MH is that, hey, if my OH is fast, then I'll get more procs of CP, right? Wrong. Tell me this, when's the last time your char attacked twice in a row with their OH wep? The correct answer is NEVER (well, unless you do something silly like shiv twice in a row). You will always attack the same. MH swing, OH swing. So the total time of the two swings is directly related to the total speed of both weapons together. Given that, if you want a LOT more CP procs, then the big slow MH weapon isn't gonna cut it. Additionally, it's MUCH easier to get that golden 1.0/1.0 using weapons that are less than 2.8 *cough* to begin with. Let me give an idea of what I mean. In order to get 1.0 out of a 2.8 warglaive, you'd need:
Slice n Dice
Blade Flurry
Abacus of Violent Odds
Dragonspine Trophy (proc)
Thundering Skyfire Diamond (proc)
AND the azzinoth proc to occur ALL AT ONCE.
Not only that, but the azzinoth proc, which is the largest contributor, is also the one that procs the least.
So, if you're fighting a warrior or rogue, and dodging a lot, and you need energy to be able to toss those dodges back at them as 5CP eviscerate damage, and you want to do this at GCD, warglaives simply aren't a very good option. Sure, I lose some yellow damage with a quicker wep, but it's not like it's a fruitless tradeoff, it just means that my character's damage will be predictably dominated by white hits most of the time.
So why unbreakable will? Well, for one, they fuglied up the blade of savagery with 2.3, which put me off that wep. Secondly, defense = damage avoidance = more procs of setup = more damage done and less damage taken and more life to take it with. Basically the reason I'm using tanking gear is cause I'm TANKING to generate combo points. Vs casters I've got all the nasty rogue tricks; poison, stun, kick, cloak of shadows, vanish, and a crapton of haste cooldowns that I can pull to start tossing out white damage like it's free candy and I'm a child molester. Vs the tanking classes you couldn't keep them stunned long enough to take down their life if you tried your best and built your char around it. As soon as they turn around it becomes a block fest and you're at the losing end, and all that crit amounts to exactly zero vs all their anti-crit and crit-dmg-reduction in addition to like 25k hp for the real elite ones. Rather than coming up with some other elaborate strategy to counter that, I'm simply fighting fire with fire. Also, in RvR, all that life keeps you in the fight if they manage to "oh ****" and stun/get behind you, while if you keep them in front of you their attacks simply feed your damage, making a very irritating character for any melee to face as well as a pretty well rounded char overall.
I like to relate this to my melee sorc from d2. "OMG NOOB SORC HITTING WITH SWORD". Yep, for 60k dmg a hit at high AR and like 90 res all and max block, with a decent amount of life on top of that and the ability to tele all over the place. Yeah, a rogue wearing tanking gear is definitely unusual, but that doesn't mean it can't kill you outright like you're nothing. Of course, whether this will work in practice is yet to be seen, but from my current experience (limited though I admit) this should work as intended, and so far I have yet to see any quirks in skills or gear that should prevent it.
Now, I'm incredibly tempted to kick him from the guild just for posting this, but since he's not an idiot and is just inexperienced, I really feel the need to help him learn about his class before letting another guild deal with him. I'm not incredibly experienced with Rogues either, but I can tell that he is theorycrafting about something he knows nothing about, I posted arguing against him but he's so stubborn that he sticks by what he said.
I'd like it if you guys could point out exactly what is wrong with what he is saying, without being rude, so I could maybe forward him here or just pass on what you say to help him learn.
