---DPS and gear decisions--- ---DPS at 80--- Link to Aldriana's 3.1 Mut and 3.2 Combat spreadsheets Plug in your current gear (only blues/epics from 80ish supported) and your rotation, spec and raid buffs and get a realistic DPS quote. Note that even over a five minute DPS parse, a few out-of-place crits can offset your DPS by a few hundred, so if you just can't seem to pull as much dps as the spreadsheet says you should, try parsing for a longer time.
MAEP stands for Maximum Agility Equivalence Points. It's a term used for maximizing your raid DPS, and this is a good way short of ShadowPanther's website and a spreadsheet to determine if gear is an upgrade or not. It's a good thing to memorize loosely. This is stolen from ShadowPanther, who is cited in my links bibliography.
Note: I have a slight beef with this list, because Strength is rated as .55 because of Blessing of Kings, but Agility benefits from kings as well, which should offset the entire list a little bit. I'm unsure whether ShadowPanther made a mistake on Strength, or if he made a mistake on Agility, so I readjusted the strength because the rest of the list is harder to balance.
1 Agility = 1 MAEP
1 Strength = .5
0 MAEP (rated .55 originally, read above)
1 Stamina = .01 MAEP
1 Hit Rating = .83 MAEP
1 Crit Rating = .81 MAEP
1 Attack Power = .
45 MAEP (thanks!)
1 Expertise Rating = .87 MAEP
1 Haste Rating = .64 MAEP
1 Armor Penetration Rating = .65 MAEP
1 Resilience = .001 MAEP
1 Blue Socket = 16 MAEP (with no socket bonus)
1 Red Socket = 16 MAEP (plus socket bonus)
1 Yellow Socket = 15 MAEP (plus socket bonus)
1 Meta Socket = 80 MAEP
.1 MH Speed = -9 MAEP per .1 faster than 1.8
.1 OH Speed = -8 MAEP per .1 slower than 1.4
1 MH DPS = 2 MAEP
1 OH DPS = 1.4 MAEP
Mut 51/13/7 Note- Some rogues find that their eviscerate does more damage than Rupture, and may switch out two points to imp Evis. As a general rule, especially with the 4/5 t7, 4/5 t8 and 2/5 t9 set bonuses (Respectively: 10% bonus rupture damage, Rupture can crit, your Rupture ticks have a 2% chance to make your next ability cost 40 less energy), rupture is far superior to eviscerate. Some people have proposed that since a 4/5 conquerors rogue with ~40% crit buffed gains ~40% damage on rupture, it would be beneficial to talent Serrated Blades and go 51/7/13. However, this is regarded on EJ as a dps loss, so don't do it. The only intelligent talent switch you might make from that spec is to drop Murder or 2 points in Turn the Tables to pick up Fleet Footed, because the movement impairing reduce and speed buff is useful not only on fights like Grobb but good to have all around.
Combat 15/51/5 Obviously, switch out Close Quarters Combat for the appropriate weapon spec. Fist/Dagger > Fist/Fist > Sword/Sword > everything else. Never, ever, ever go combat daggers. The DPS is horrid.
These are the two main pve dps specs. I'm not going to go into HaT here.
Pre-Raid gearing at 80:
Do ToC. A lot. Really, trust me. The leather gear from there is good. At this amount of time into WotLK, it's really easy to pug 10 man raids other than Uld/Trial of the Crusader. So do it. For questions about gear, use the spreadsheet and ShadowPanther and the MAEP list.
--- Rogue Levelling --- Just remember to have a slow (2.4, 2.5, 2.6) speed mainhand and a fast (1.4-1.8) speed offhand to maximize your DPS. put on double instant poison, and the rest is pretty easy. At level 50, you probably want to respec Mutilate, and get two slow (1.6-1.8) speed daggers.
Here's a spec for level 49, with combat swords or axes: (If you are using fists, change to Close Quarters Combat. Never use Combat spec with Daggers, and only uses maces if you have to- the mace specialization talent is kinda mediocre.)
Combat Swords - l49 Once you ding 50, start using those daggers! If you don't have any good ones from quests, you might consider picking up some from the AH if they're cheap, but remember you get to Outland at 58 (8 levels later) and the upgrades there are incredible compared to old world gear. (what you're using right now most likely.)
Mutilate - l50 By the time you're 80 your spec should look something like this:
Mutilate Levelling - l80 Of course, a lot of this isn't set in stone. You might want to swap Camoflage and Master of Deception out for the crit bonus from Master Poisoner, but personally when you kill things in 3-4 seconds as mutilate, having a 6 second cooldown (instead of 10) on stealth can add up to save you a lot of time. I don't know if you have any gathering professions, but Master of Deception is useful for sneaking past mobs, sapping and gathering, as well as some quests where you don't want to kill loads of mobs just to get to 1 quest mob. That's personal preference- you can switch that out for Focused Attacks, or keep Camoflage and switch that into Master Poisoner. (For levelling, Master Poisoner>Focused Attacks, because you have a chance to let your energy regen to 100% in between each mob fight, and Overkill basically increases your energy regen by 30% all the time, because you should be stealthing more than once every 20 seconds.
Edited, Sep 10th 2009 1:06am by morgorg Edited, Sep 14th 2009 9:48pm by morgorg Edited, Sep 14th 2009 9:49pm by morgorg Edited, Sep 15th 2009 9:43pm by morgorg