Alright, kids, I'm back in WoW full-swing. Of course, having been out of things for a few months now, I come back to find a lot has changed.

Is Muti still king for Rogue DPS?

For a DK, is DW Tanking viable or should I stick to single weapon?
For the same DK, what would you recommend as a DPS build? I'm leveling blood but I feel I might not be getting the DPS I could in groups, despite my crappy gear.

Armory info:

Server is Aggramar
Rogue is Vaudeville
DK is Valkrinne

Any and all suggestions are appreciated, even the inevitable 'quit WoW' or 'die in a fire'.

DW tanking is viable on bosses who don't parry gib.

look at www.skeletonjack.com for specs for raiding, leveling -- who gives a crap.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Last I knew they were discussing ruptureless rotations for mutilate with the envenom buffs. No idea since I quit tho. Standard 51/13/7 build.

At this point in the game, Combat is destroying mutilate, so much that with the expac or sooner the dev's are going to try to even the playing field again and get assasination tree another end all be all talent that mutilate was suppose to be.

I'm not holding my breath, but we'll see.

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"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

Yeah our *one* raiding rogue has been destroying the dps charts lately and I believe he's swords combat.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Personally, I do a Blood Spec I got from an old friend for tanking. I still 2-Hander tank, mainly due to the fact that I'm in a mashup of tanking gear. I pretty much only do Heroics with friends though, haven't done any real raid tanking aside from damage soaking on Koralon.

My Tanking Spec
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#jcEGVh0I ... cgh:GpdV0M

As for DPS. Currently, the Unholy builds are the king of the hill. There are 2 ways to do it...2-Hander or DW. I personally use the DW spec. The 2 main things that make either super awesome is the Sigil of Virulence (25 Emblems of Triumph) and 2 or 4 Piece Tier 9. 2 piece is pretty much a requirement, 4 piece is godlike. Yes, 4 piece is getting nerfed with 3.3...but only by about a 5% overall nerf. If you don't have those, it would be better to go with the old faceroller Blood DPS spec.

Elitist Jerk's Blood DPS post
http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t61176-bloo ... dps_guide/

Elitist Jerk's Unholy DPS post
http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t72364-unho ... _ordinary/

Cheating by posting those, but its easier to just read them then to have me copy/paste it.

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Much obliged. Will stick with Combat on Vaude and look into the other builds for Valk.

Maybe it's just bad combat specced rogues on my server, but I haven't been behind a combat rogue in DPS a single time the entire expansion. Usually I'm 1 or 2 on the DPS meters as a mutilate rogue and I don't use weapon swap for the instant poison buff on envenom (dps increase is marginal for a big pita). Just follow a simple rotation of get slice and dice and rupture up, HfB and then just time envenoms to maximize the time the poison buff is us. When rupture falls off, replace it, and slice and dice will stay up in most fights unless there is a ton of running or long breaks in combat. In that case, reapplying SnD is key.

Noted. I second-specced the cookie-cutter mut onto Vaud, and once I enchant my other dagger with 'zerk I'll get some DPS recordings with both rotations.

In my experience, Mutilate seemed a little better than Combat in general, but there were some boss fights where Blade Flurry gave combat the advantage with regards to DPS (Kologarn, for instance). This was more a product of doing damage to multiple targets at once than it was to the spec itself doing more damage, of course. Bottom line is either spec works. I'd choose based on the weapons I had available.

Yeah, single target DPS is important, but right now - assuming you're planning on doing a lot of ToC - that cleave damage is pretty important too.

Kinda like cat swipe...it might be important for only one fight, but that's the only important fight anyway and it's pretty hugely important for it!

Drajeck,

I hate the guys at EJ with a passion, because they are a bunch of pricks, probably worse than anyone on these boards. With that being said however, I can not stress enough to you to use Aldriana's spreadsheet. Your spec is going to be completely dependant on your gear level, and when I finally swallowed my pride long enough to download it and plug in my gear, the results were worth it.

People tell you to do this do that, go with your gut blah blah blah. I call 100% bullshit, math does not lie, period.

Use the spreadsheet. http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t39136-comb ... eadsheets/

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"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

Fighting against the people who create those spreadsheets is *exactly* analogous to the people in IT who claim that open source software can never work.

100 people working on something > 2 people working on something

As an aside, the best way to gauge how to spec is not just on EJ. Look at public logs on worldoflogs.com. You can look at the highest dps players of your class, at random raids, or even scope out raids from other guilds on your server. Look at the players of your class doing higher dps, figure out if it's spec, gear, or rotation.

If it were worth putting stock in, it wouldn't be in Excel. A spreadsheet only tells you what a robot's dps would be. The warlock one in particular.

With the wealth of data out there, and all of the effort put in to stuff like this, I'm surprised no one has written an actual statistical model. Hell it could probably even be a thesis.

Something like that would at least tell you a) what spec is best for an individual, and b) what spec is best for each individual fight.

There is a statistic model, Sarissa, it's called Rawr, also available on the EJ forums, and 95% of the time it gives the same results of the spreadsheet.

And yes, the spreadsheets are based on the perfect scenario, but, they are a tool to inform you on how to fix your spec in regards to your gear as well as your rotation.

And joxur, most of people doing the highest dps, started out with the information from EJ.

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"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

Sola, I'm fully on the EJ bandwagon. As a matter of fact, I've mocked the fuck out of people who looked own on players who have to "get their strat from a message board". My point was that you should also look at real world numbers, and the public nature of WoL is a nice place to do that.

oh forgive me, i thought i was going to have to smack you!

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"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

The way I understand it, Rawr uses different weights but still uses weights. What I'm talking about is taking the massive amount of data floating out there and seeing what uptime really is when you have to move, dodge flames, change targets, etc. Most people, who care to know, just figure this out in their head. Nothing's out there yet to really look at whether spec A is > spec B on a non-Patchwerk fight.

They're interesting, but is it the time invested on them that's making the improvement? Or is it simply the fact that it's a route through which you're trying different things and still figuring it out yourself?

I've used the warlock one, and it seemed that no matter what I changed the difference (aff to destro) is ~200-400dps. In game, never saw a boost from one over the other.

Oh, ok I see what you're saying Sarissa. I'm not sure a simulator like that could even be built. The sheer amount of probability that would have to go into it would be staggering and not worth it.

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"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

The Theorycraftomatic or whatever it was called was a pretty good attempt at an actual simulator. Just for mages though. It'd take your stats, rotation, an encounter length, certain variables like bloodlust and then simulate your damage and spells and optimal times to do X and Y over the course of the fight. All with a spiffy line graph!

Took forever to spit out results, though.

thx 4 phd thesis kbai