For Mutilate rogues, since the release of Wrath the general advice has been to use fast weapons to maximize poison damage. Also, if you had weapons of different speeds, you would keep your faster weapon with Instant Poison in your off-hand, and your slower weapon with Deadly Poison was in your main hand. The reason for that was
- Mutilate had a bug that was causing the off-hand poison to proc twice on Mutilate attacks, so you wanted Instant Poison on your off-hand to take advantage of that
- Wherever your Instant Poison goes, that’s where your fastest weapon should be to get the maximum number of IP procs. So, as a result, we were advised to keep our faster weapon in the off-hand.
As of today’s patch, that bug with Mutilate is fixed. No more double-poison-procs. So now, the new advice is
- You want the Instant Poison on your main hand, because then it has a chance to proc on special attacks as well as autoattacks.
- Since your Instant Poison is on your main hand, your faster weapon should go in your main hand as well.
Also in today’s patch – no more cooldown on Fan of Knives. That’s a minor improvement, since it costs a whopping 50 energy so we still can’t hit it more than once or twice in an AoE trash pull. But in a nice turn of events, using Fan of Knives with daggers equipped will do 150% weapon damage. Its a small concession to the fact that there are a lot more dagger rogues than there used to be.
Also make sure that you note the new Feint. The top rank of Feint (learned at level 78) not only reduces threat, but also reduces AoE damage by 50% for 6 seconds. What counts as an AoE attack, exactly? Will that work against the whirlwinds by the Dark Touched Warriors in Naxx Military Quarter? (even at 50% damage it will still kill us, so its a purely academic question)
The Saronite Shiv is having its stats reduced. For a crafted weapon, it was very powerful. It will have +35 hit (down from 55) +15 Expertise (down from 20) and +40 AP (down from 56). Its still a nice weapon, but not as amazing as it was. A number of other crafted weapons are being weakened as well.
One more thing in the patch – R.I.P. HaT bug. HaT will still be a good PvE spec, I think, if the raid is set up to maximize its use. But I’ll be waiting to see the new WWS parses from the rogues that had been putting up 6k dps before the bug fix.
