A guide to Mutilate Pve DPS

I had some spare time at school for some reason, and i decided to use it for something constructive. Ever since I hit 78 i've been mutilate specced, and I love it. Its fun to use and it is supposedly the best dps specc for a rogue (depending on your gear obviously)

Anyways, I figured I could make a short guide to explain the basics of it all.

Basics:

1. Don't die.
2. Don't do anything that risks wiping the raid.
3. Maximize your time on target.
4. Don't let your energy cap out.
5. Don't let SnD drop.
6. Use your cooldowns.


Gear:

First of all, you are looking for two fast daggers both for your mainhand and offhand. Poisons have been buffed since tbc and assasination is the specc boosting poison damage the most. Fast daggers equal more poison proccs and more Focused Attacks proccs. If you have two daggers with almost equal speed and you debate which to use in MH/OH, always go for the fastest in you MH.

Posions:

Instant poison MH, Deadly poison OH. end of story


Talents:

Raidspecced your talent build should be looking like this:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=f0ef0exoi0oIuVo0xV0hZxb
the 3 points in Master Poisoner can be put somewhere else, like Turn the Tables, it depends on what other classes are in the same raid as you. If an other rogue with 3/3 Master Poisoner is present, your 3 points will be wasted as they dont stack. There is also a couple of other classes that have a similair debuff to the target, Retri paladins and elemental shamans if im not mistaken. If there is no class supplying this debuff however, this is a must for you. It increases the full raid's crit chance against the target, giving us rogues a raidbuff for the first time.

Rotations:

Unlike combat, where you mash your head against sinister strike untill 5 CPs, hit rupture, mash head against SS untill 5 CPs, hit SnD rince repeat, you have a couple more buttons to push here. As you get between 2 and 3 CP's from each mutilate, depending on wether or not it crits, you have no guarantee that you will reach 5 CP's every cycle. Therefor the general rotation looks like this: (copied from elitistjerks)

* Before combat, get 3 stacks of Hunger for Blood up.
* Start up Slice and Dice however you please, really.

1. Mutilate to 4+ Combo Points
2. Make sure Hunger for Blood isn't going to drop soon. Refresh it if it will.
3. Is Rupture up? If yes, Envenom. Go to step 1.
4. Does Slice and Dice have >12 seconds left? If no, Envenom. Go to Step 1.
5. Rupture. Go to Step 1.

The point here being that you will try to keep rupture up as much as possible while never dropping Hunger For Blood and Slice and Dice.

Stats:

Hitrating:

Right, there will always be people asking: "How much hitrating do I need?"

There is no magic number. Some classes try to be hit-capped, meaning that they will never miss. For rogues (and fury warriors, ret paladins, and dual-wielding shamans) that’s out of reach for now. Get as much as you can without making huge sacrifices to Agility, Attack Power, Crit Rating, Haste, etc..

Assuming that you have maxed your weapon skill at 400 when you get to level 80, then…

1. The first +hit milestone is to reduce your chance to miss by 8%. That will mean that your special attacks never miss on raid bosses. To do that you need 262 hit rating. However, many (if not all) rogues will take 5/5 in Precision. If so, it reduces that required hit rating to 99. Easy enough. You’ll get that much hit rating without even trying if you have decent gear.
2. Next is the Poison cap. This means that your poisons will never miss (be resisted). You need 17% for that. However, this uses the hit rating conversion for spells rather than melee. That conversion is 26.23 hit rating = 1% at level 80. So we would need 446 hit rating without Precision, or 315 with Precision.
3. The next one is to never miss with auto-attacks (white damage). You would need 27% for that, which is a whopping 885 hit rating if you have not taken any points in Precision. With the Precision talent factored in, it drops to a still-high value of 721. You could eat some Snapper Extreme to get 40 points toward that total, but you still aren’t going to be hit-capped any time soon.

The best advice is make sure you are above the “special attacks” cap, and try to be above the “poison cap” if possible (especially for Mutilate rogues). After you reach the "poison cap", hitrating becomes a less valuable stat, and you should focus on boosting the other stats instead.

(More to come)

Links:
http://foreveranoob.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/hit-rating-for-rogues-in-wrath/

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