Monday, December 14, 2009

A Pugger Rogue Alt's Mutilate Rotation

Patch 3.3

Disclaimer: I don't really do rogue theorycraft. My rogue is not my main. I do, however, like to do semi-decent damage when I play my alt, and have spent some time at the dummies, reading a few guides, and in 5-mans seeing what results in the most DPS.

  1. Open with Garrote. Or maybe just Mutilate. Depends on how fast your tank is pulling; stealth is slow.
  2. Slice N Dice.
  3. HfB if Bleeding. Rupture if not Bleeding, then HfB.
  4. Mutilate.
  5. Envenom.
  6. Mutilate.
  7. Envenom.
  8. Mutilate.
  9. Envenom.
  10. It's not dead yet? Return to step 4.

  • Use Tricks of the Trade whenever it's up; toss it on the tank when entering combat, especially in a PuG. Use it whenever aggro is looking... scary. Your healer will love you for it, and you can freak out the tank by entering combat ahead of him and attacking mobs he hasn't touched, which is good for an evil little roguely giggle. Kae, evil? Nahhhh.
  • Use kick, gouge, kidney shot, and/or arcane torrent to interrupt anything that they cast.
  • Use Feint to lower damage you take from AoE.
  • Use Cloak of Shadows to become temporarily immune to spell effects.
  • Use Vanish if you pull aggro around ToT.
  • Use Evasion if vanish is down; grats, you're a tank.
  • Use Fan of Knives if there are 3-4+ targets. If you feel like it. In a pug, aggro is not guaranteed, so make sure you hit ToT first.
  • Make the warrior or combat rogue sunder; Expose Armor hurts your dps rotation and requires you to actually build Combo Points to use. ;) If it's a boss and neither are available... may as well hit an expose armor early, once your SnD is established. If you remember.
  • Love your dps warriors/feral druids/combat rogues/hunter pets that cast bleeds. They take the Rupture out of your HfB juggle!

I think assassination spec is in for a nerf. My rogue feels OP right now : / I run with Deadly Poison on offhand (which is needed for mut/envenom, and stacks to 5) and Instant Poison on mainhand (insta-damage). The patch introduced a "small" poison change: when I have a full 5-stack of deadly poison on my target (which is pretty much always), it'll proc my instant poison instead when it tries to add to my deadly poison stack, effectively giving me a free insta-poison hit where previously I had no effect. I'm doing huge amounts of damage, all while wearing a blue offhand dagger (due to the 1.3 attack speed). It's frightening.

You go, little rogue alt.

Granted, they did swing out the nerf bat late last week with reducing HfB to a 10% damage increase, down from 15%. The tooltip (last I checked) still says 15%, and I still feel like I'm doing far more damage than I should for my gear level, but hey, it's made my alt fun to play recently :)

(any raiding mutilate-rogue mains that wish to give tips/pointers, of course, are welcome)

5 comments:

Wiggen said...

Thx for the uppdate on rouges.. but i would like a uppdate for a lone feral druid pls (a) what to do and so on.

and yeah one more thing, Why Whont u answer my email about macros? =(

Kae said...

Ah, I haven't checked email in a while :) Feral druids haven't changed, fyi; their rotation is the same as before.

Will go answer your macro question if I can :)

Anonymous said...

Very good tips, although I find the utility of combat to be better for pug 5 mans. I usually raid as Mutilate for its OP damage, then switch specs/gear for 5's when I do my random. Nothing beats a ToT, Blade flurry, and Killing spree for massive aoe and threat generation.
The single target of mut is unrivaled currently in the game. Raiding as combat pre 3.3 I frequently fluctuated within the top 10 dps'ers. Post 3.3 I am steadily on top of the meters in most fights unless I make major errors (Dying or letting HfB drop). It is not uncommon for raiding mut rogues to break 10k dps on single target boss fights and I am close to that myself. For this reason I will often switch specs to Mut on 5 man bosses if I know that aoe is unnecessary and I have the time to do so.
Tinyassassin of Failure - Greymane (US)

Kae said...

Cool :) I tried out combat but I found I preferred playing mutilate on my rogue, as it was different enough from feral dps to feel worth playing a different character for. Plus, I like daggers (and I hear combat dagger isn't all that great anymore? hehe).

I slip up a lot on overall dps when it comes to AoE against competent dpsers (which are unfortunately less common than not in pugs), but I haven't worried about it too much, given the trade-off with the sheer amounts of single-target damage.

I may try out combat at some point when I get bored, and play with killing spree + blade flurry. Dual spec ftw :)

Krazze said...

*LOL* Im pretty close to the same... (My Rogue is my main.) Only differences:

1) Will manuevere for a Ambush if possible*, SnD off of that or a Mut if not. I find ANY SnD is usually enough to get it started... Refresh to 20 secs on finishers means that SnD rarely ever falls off.

2) Mut to at least 3 pts, Rupture, 3x HfB.

3) Mut / Envenom till dead unless fight goes longer than 60 secs of HfB, then go to 2.

* = Seems like you rarely get a chance to setup an ambush in 5 mans as tanks are hell bent on getting in there and proving they can compete on DPS meters (or something). This usually throws your dps overall off a good 100 or so pts.

Krazze / Andorhal