In the first of an occasional series of Rogue Q&As, I’ll be fielding my guildie Dagobert’s questions about how to play Assassination in PvE. This time around, he asks about when to overwrite Rupture and when to spam your Mutilate key. N.B. The answers assume my current 51/13/7 spec.
Dagobert:
i actually did have a question for you morth, something ive noticed on my rogue, when im doing the envenom rupture rotation sometimes i cant pop rupture on the mob because its saying a more powerful spell is active, im assuming thats because i had more AP due to a proc or something last time round, so my question is, when this happens should i wait for the previous rupture to run out then rupture or should i envenom and rebuild? i have been doing the envenom and rebuild at the moment as it seems standing around doing nothing, even tho regen energy is happening, standing around would lower the DPS ?
Answer after the break…
Morthax
You’re absolutely right – you can’t overwrite a high AP rupture with a low AP rupture, and you can’t overwrite a 5CP rupture with a 4CP rupture. So as you say, you either wait for it to tick out and then rupture again, or you envenom and rebuild, possibly losing some rupture uptime.
The decision comes down to whether or not waiting for rupture will make your energy cap out. Obviously, once your energy hits 100, any gains are wasted, and since energy is the sole limiting factor in rogue dps, you never want your energy to be wasted. On the other hand, if you can pool energy to 90* while rupture expires and then rupture again, you have a nice pool to mutilate and envenom and thus don’t lose anything.
If you look at world of logs, you’ll see that my rupture uptime is never at 100% – partly this is because I open with Garrote > HfB > SnD > Mutilate (possibly x2) > Envenom > Mutilate to 4/5 > Rupture, so it takes time to get going, but this is also due to sometimes having to decide that energy capping out is worse than a few seconds of rupture downtime.
I don’t have time to run the exact numbers for you, but that’s the basic thinking. Possibly, with 4 pieces of t8 and the serrated blades spec, it might make sense to let energy cap out for 1 or 2 seconds before rupturing to assure close to 100% uptime, but I’d be surprised.
*Pooling any higher is risky, since Relentless Strikes will probably give you 25 energy back, meaning you have limited time to react with a mutilate and stop your energy capping out.
Dagobert
yeah i tend to notice that i tend to be quite low on energy when i find myself unable to rupture, so maybe im best just waiting a little, because i wont lose my SnD because i will be able to muti back up quickly due to my energy being high again, so maybe i will just wait and rupture, if my DPS drops then maybe the insta envenom is the trick, another thing aswell is when i read forums i tend to see that people spam muti, where as i tend not to as its not really spamable as you can only cast 2 befor your out of energy so i tend to just click things when i need them, is it best to be slow and controlled or be a spam bot ?
Morthax
Spam muti? As in always do 2? Ridiculous thing to do, since you can get to 4 CP with 1 muti most of the time.
If you mean that they spam it when on 1 combo point so that it fires off as soon as they have 52/55/60 energy (depending on glyphs and talents) then that’s absolutely the right thing to do. Remember, assassination is all about getting as many 4/5 point finishers in as you can, and mutilate opens up those finishers. If you can save even a fifth of a second on getting to 4/5 by spamming mutilate, within 5 mutilates you’ve gained an extra finisher. This is very much “squeezing the last 50 dps out” though, and while personally I’m all about that, I know others want a more relaxed experience. In this case, it’s perfectly possible to play with a relaxed style and not lose out signficantly.
But never, never, blindly mutilate to 5CP when you can get to 4CP with one. And never, almost never, eviscerate*.
Also, you click?! Instaroguefail. All of the following need to be keybound, in order of importance:
- Mutilate
- Envenom
- Rupture
- Hunger for Blood
- Trinket use (if applicable)
- Slice and Dice
- Vanish (for Overkill – if you don’t use this mechanic, you should.)
- Garrote
- /cast [target=focus] Tricks of the Trade
- Cloak of Shadows
- Eviscerate (in case for some reason your SnD is about to drop and you don’t have DP on the target)
- Feint
- Evasion
* For any rogue using deadly poison, Envenom gives more dps than Eviscerate, since it ignores the opponent’s armour, and buffs Instant Poison applications after use.
