FL!

4.2 is live, first raids are tonight for us so I'll keep you posted on how it goes. I'll step by step some bosses and/or video some in the near future as well.

WHERE AM I UGH!?

If you know where I am, you are more than likely making massive amounts of gold.
Talk to you soon.

-Correct

Quick intro on Assassination

Testing out FRAPS and Video editing in Windows Live Movie Maker. Here is a short guide on how to intro as an Assassination rogue for PvE, and how to maintain the rotation. Pretty simple, feel free to comment or msg/mail me if you have any questions about Assassination this did not address.

-Correct

Updated

Since MMO is back up and functional I was able to finish the previous post with the actual item list for Assassination. Enjoy. I'll be doing combat and sub hopefully sometime soon. Right now I'm working on learning to FRAPS and video edit. Should be a video of a firelands boss or two from rogue PoV a bit down the road unless I run into too many complications.

Best in Slot. Firelands.

MMO-Champ is down and they have the most comprehensive loot list I've seen so I'll edit this up with the proper items and links as soon as curse stops having issues.

I need to do this for myself anyway so I might as well post on it and share. I'll start with Assassination because it is what I hope to be playing in FL, however I might play combat if it is better. Though I'll do that one another time. Non-base stat priorities are still the same as far as I know; yellow hit > spell hit > mastery > haste > expertise > crit > white hit.

Recently Rectangle (SW rogue) told me that Combat is currently outperforming Assassination on Patchwerk. I don't know what tools whoever is using to test that. It seems to me it would be hard to have all of the BiS gear even on PTR and do that kind of testing? Anyway he said they're quite close still, and it will of course be fight dependent. If there are adds or cleave ability, target swaps etc. We'll see when we get there I imagine, I'll build all 3 sets and test all 3 specs eventually as I always do.

4pc is going to be quite incredible so I would recommend getting that as quickly as you are able.

Helm - Dark Phoenix Helmet
Neck - Choker of the Vanquished Lord
Shoulders - Dark Phoenix Spaulders
Back - Dreadfire Drape
Chest - Breastplate of the Incendiary Soul
Bracer - Flamebinder Bracers
Gloves - Dark Phoenix Gloves
Belt - Flamebinding Girdle
Legs - Dark Phoenix Legguards
Boots - Treads of the Craft
Ring1 - Viridian Signet of the Avengers
Ring2 - Splintered Brimstone Seal
Trinket1 The Hungerer
Trinket2 - Matrix Restabilizer
Weapon1 - Feeding Frenzy>
Weapon2 - Entrail Disgorger
Ranged - Morningstar Shard

I find it odd that The Hungerer says equip proc, but also says 2 minute cooldown, was that a mistake or are they coming out and telling us the ICD for once? I'm going with the former.

For thrown, if you don't need to fan there is a FL trash bow that is considerably better.

If you have the Sinestra belt it is largely better than the new one from trash in FL one. At least until you get the item to upgrade it to its heroic version.

I'm also not sure what "random enchantment" the wrists off Alysrazor will be, so those may be added into the list over the current. I really hope these are for us since our other option is crit and expertise, vomit.

Now the 4pc + chest can easily be subbed with 4pc + Cinderweb Leggings if you can't manage the chest and happen upon the legs rather easily. The tier legs are better for Assassination than the chest however. Tier chest has expertise where as the tier legs have hit, that is the only difference really. Both "off" set pieces have mastery haste and red/red, red/yellow with +20agi bonuses. Depending how lucky you are it might be easiest to get the tier chest to make your 4pc fastest so just aim for 4pc however you can. After 4pc fit in your off piece choice once it is convenient to optimize. Another suitable substitute for your off set piece could be the crafted gloves, Clutches of Evil, but those take mats to craft, and a raid pattern drop perhaps. The gloves are mastery + haste with an agi bonus on a red socket so they are quite nice as well. Once you get into the heroic loot though the gloves don't have a heroic version since they are crafted.

I didn't take the item choices from anywhere, I used referencing from wowhead and mmmo-champ for the item stats and did my own evaluations.

-Correct

Edit: grammar, added items names in, removed roll over comment, added roll over links, thx Lega. Found a 2nd ring. Added trash bow for "thrown".

Coming soon!

Hopefully I'll manage to post tomorrow, sorry for the delay in new posting, it has been really busy here.

Something Wicked + Assassination in upcoming 4.2

I am happy to report today I was accepted into the guild Something Wicked. I look forward to many enjoyable raids. During my application process they downed their final 25 man boss on heroic mode, Al'akir. Congratulations to them for finishing all current content. Moshne, thanks for taking care of the application, I know how busy you must be.

Here is their Wowprogress and guild site.

Wow progress Something Wicked
Something Wicked Home

Recently I was trying to math out upcoming changes to Assassination for 4.2.

Assassin's Resolve damage bonus has been increased to 20%, up from 15%.
Vile Poisons now increases poison damage by 12/24/36%, up from 7/14/20%.

This looks quite massive on first glance, but then you need to take into consideration Vile Poison only effects Instant Poison, and Deadly Poison. Not Envenom, or Venomous wounds even though they are nature based damage. Envenom even says "Poison Damage" on it. Envenom is actually melee classified but nature damage, and Venomous wounds gets neither bonus, confusing isn't it? Anyway the change would actually apply 16% damage increase to your IP+DP damage. So I did some wowlog browsing (my own records and others), did the math and came up with roughly 7.4% damage increase (that includes the Assassin's Resolve math). Then as usual I read on EJ to see if any other results were around to confirm or deny my findings. What I found was that, like Antiarc, my calculations were based on Vile Poisons being multiplicative, not additive. Prior to his post on the calculations Aldriana pointed out that Vile Poisons are calculated additively. So instead of just multiplying the upcoming bonuses to your % of damage done by the applicable abilities you need to do this:

Aldriana said "Vile Poisons stacks additively with Mastery so (assuming you have ~20 mastery, which is typical for near-BIS) its a 2.06/1.9 = 8.4% boost to your IP/DP damage," - EJ

For those who don't read his math exactly well, he's assuming 20 mastery = .7 (70% poison dmg bonus increase) so 1.7+.2(current modifier for VP, 20%) so 1.9 and then add another .16 (16% VP dmg increase) for 2.06. Take the upcoming # (2.06) divide by the current # (1.9) and it is 1.0842 which is 8.42% increase. So I take that 8.42% and multiply it to my records for IP+DP % to find how much of a % increase it is with the poison change. For me it is ~3% for poisons and ~2% for melee giving Assassination a rough 5% dmg increase from now to 4.2.

I was less excited once I found out my math wasn't correct. My original findings make me happier :(

Sub Raiding PvE

The epic duel between 2pc PvP and 4pc PvE!

Happy Fathers Day those of you who are fathers and read this blog. As usual thanks for stopping by I appreciate the views. Please leave any feedback or questions in the comments section at the end.

I want to point out I don't have endless time to do all calculations possible and the data available is pretty low for Sub, especially when it comes to 4pc. The data I gather may not be perfect but should be reasonably close.

Recently I was examining the Vicious PvP gear for Rogues and noticed the 2pc bonus was 70 agility. The item level of the PvP set pieces (365) are higher than that of regular PvE pieces (359) therefore giving it more base agility as well. Since Sub has the highest agility stat weight of all rogue specs I started to math out the EP values to see what the difference was between using 2pc PvP set instead of 2pc(4pc bonus) PvE. I also calculated the PvE non-set agi leather items. This of course being an attempt to better your PvE quality in a raid situation. There are also 365 il leather boots which essentially is the same comparison, however they take 2200 rating, where as the set just takes Conquest points and are much easier to acquire.

Here is what I found when comparing:

I will be linking these items via Wowhead.com, however I'll list out the main stat comps and differences so you don't have to view each one and/or open a bajillion windows to confirm. If the socket bonus isn't a positive PvE stat I'm not going to list it. Unless the socket bonus is 20 or more agi I'm also not going to list it. You won't want to match the socket even for yellow (haste agi/hit agi) even though they are your best non agi stats, as even 20 more of either of those vs 10 agi is a loss (28 v 36 best case).

Wind Dancer's set
Vicious Gladiator's set


PvE stats v Agility PvP stats:

HELM - PvE set helm, 281 agi, blue 30 agi bonus, 168 hit, 228 crit vs PvP set helm. 301 agi, 181 mastery PvE helm with socket bonus is -10 agi overall, gain 168 hit 228 crit vs PvP helm, 10 agi gain 181 mastery. 2pc bonus consideration (70agi) for 1pc would be 35 agi. 45agi and 181 mastery gain EP is 325. Compared to 168 hit 228 crit (assuming you're already yellow hit capped since it is so easily attainable elsewhere) is worth 427.2 EP. This is pre-reforge, which in this case the PvE item would reforge higher since 40% of 228 is more than 40% of 181. This is one of the worst examples since the PvP item has the worst stat (mastery) for Sub as its non resilience stat.

In the doc posted (ss and link) it shows you that the PvP item can be better than both or at least 1 of the PvE items as for EP value. You may lose the 4pc (if you have and are using it) for the 359 set, and this is factoring the 2pc PvP bonus gain already.



As you can see using legs and shoulders 2pc PvP perhaps would gain you a considerable amount of EP value. These statistics are all pre-reforging however so the statistical EP gain would be somewhat smaller in most instances.

It comes down to marginal amounts depending on your gear availability, and goes away once you get heroic quality gear. It may be easier for you to obtain 2pc PvP than the PvE loot depending on your luck and availability to raid/grind heroics. I felt it was worth mentioning so as a community we can keep our eyes out for something like this in the future (post 4.2 and further).

There is a much smaller pool of data available out there for Subtlety specced rogues so I had to rely on my own calculations via high end Sub raiding rogues (25 man data gathered mostly) while using Worldoflogs.com. I was doing this to try to get a gauge on the value of 4pc for Sub raiding PvE rogues, since you may or may not be choosing to not use it or lose it and use 2pc PvP instead. There would be an EP loss from whatever 4pc value is, and it may or may not be greater than the gain from your EP stats on the PvP gear.

What I found after analyzing and doing calculations on what I thought would be the most "stand still" bosses (Magmaw, Chimaeron, etc.) is that Sub rogues have very few Eviscerates during a boss fight, and a low amount of white hits comparatively. I chose stand still fight data since it would have the cleanest rotation, Sub PvE rotation is quite challenging to execute perfectly, or even properly. The average amount of Eviscerates per fight is roughly 25. From the data I was referencing about 40% of those are actually crits, even though the players crit rating is a bit lower than that. The 4pc PvE set bonus is Deadly Scheme. The average amount of "white hits" a Subtle rogue was landing on any given fight was ~300, give or take about 30. So on average 1% proc rate on 300 hits means 3 procs right? When 40% of those Eviscerates are already critting that means 60% of the 3 procs you gain a benefit from the actual proc (a 100% crit), so roughly 2 Eviscerates (rounding up). So you know, Eviscerate is ~10% of the Sub rogues damage. So you gain 2 auto crit Eviscerates on any given fight, those land for an average of 24k (above a typical hit from evi). You are therefor given ~48k dmg gain, say over a 5 minute duration fight (varrying). 5 minutes x 60 seconds = 300 seconds. 48,000/300 = ~160 dps gain from the 4pc. Unfortunately I don't know the relation between EP to DPS. The gain from 2pc PvP depending on your slot choices can be near that value in EP. You can use your personal preferences when choosing to use 2/2 or 4pc when Sub. I find it interesting and different to be using 2/2.


Credit Luisiuil for Chart Formulas.
Edited: Added chart and description of it. Removed chart w/incorrect data.