Combat Rogue Needing DPS Advice

[Marek]

I'm currently running at an ilvl 551 with Flex AoC. My DPS seems to be lower than expected across the board. I ran a log on Flex Iron Juggernaut, where I did about 175k DPS.

Here is my armory:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...n/Marek/simple


Here is the link to the WoL combat log from Iron Juggernaut.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/62rcvj6vl13a1cdi/

I'm not using the legendary meta gem right now, waiting for either Tier helm or the Ordos helm before committing to that, just to much money to swap it out.

Any advice is welcome, I've seen combat rogues with about 13 higher ilvl than me do 75-90k more than I'm doing, so something must be wrong w/ my playstyle. I have noticed that my dmg distribution has Melee higher than Sinister Strike, where other higher performing rogues do more dmg w/ SS than melee.

Thanks.

[Varabently]

I believe you are supposed to use a slow offhand, correct? Combat potency procs are better with slower weapon, per the tooltip.

[Deleted]

From my understanding that changed Combat potency, with a faster off hand you have more frequent procs but a reduced amount of energy than a slow off hand with less procs but with greater energy return per a proc.

As for the weapons until you can get your BiS items i would just use what ever weapon you consider an upgrade. You really need to use the meta gem asap, youre losing so much dps by not using it. Last night i say my meta gem critting for 298k, In a 6 minute fight my meta gem did 4.5 millions damage.

You should try to get the trinket from the first boss from ToT heroic since that trinket is still really good for combat rogues. Im also gemming straight 320 haste in any socket that has lower than a set bonus of 120.

[Varabently]

You're right, Icy Veins says you can use either one, my bad. The tooltip makes it seem like slower weapons are better.

[Terces]

As far as I can tell from your log your uptime on both Slice and Dice plus Revealing Strike is way too low. There's no reason you should ever be letting those fall off especially on a fight like Jugger where you're never off the boss. You're losing a lot by having low uptime on these. I also see that you're not running Rupture which does result in a dps loss, albeit a much smaller and harder to notice one. I think it's best to keep leaving Rupture out of your rotation until you can get used to having proper uptime on everything else.

Other than that everything else seems to be fine as far as your gear is concerned. Obviously having the 4 piece set bonus would help you out, but hey, if the gear doesn't drop you can't help that.

[Ukalnar]

Terces: He has over 93% uptime on RS and over 96% on SnD, you are probably looking at overall instead of only IronJugg fight.

Marek: You pulled a 190k on that fight, and Shadowcraft puts you on around 230k. That's quite a gap. But to be honest i can't really put my finger on what you are doing wrong, just some minor things : you never used Arcane Torrent, in a 4min fight that's 30 energy. You also Feinted 12 times, that's another 240 energy, which puts you to a total of 270 energy wasted. That's 5 sinister strikes you never used, that means you didn't take advantage of Restless Blades, and that may be an extra set of cooldowns KS/AR/SB. Also 5 less sinister strikes might mean lower uptime on Insight.
Also, do you cap on energy during SB+AR?

Other than that, i really don't know. Your uptimes are pretty good, so i suppose your rotation is good. I'm a mess at reading logs.

[Terces]

Terces: He has over 93% uptime on RS and over 96% on SnD, you are probably looking at overall instead of only IronJugg fight.

Marek: You pulled a 190k on that fight, and Shadowcraft puts you on around 230k. That's quite a gap. But to be honest i can't really put my finger on what you are doing wrong, just some minor things : you never used Arcane Torrent, in a 4min fight that's 30 energy. You also Feinted 12 times, that's another 240 energy, which puts you to a total of 270 energy wasted. That's 5 sinister strikes you never used, that means you didn't take advantage of Restless Blades, and that may be an extra set of cooldowns KS/AR/SB. Also 5 less sinister strikes might mean lower uptime on Insight.
Also, do you cap on energy during SB+AR?

Other than that, i really don't know. Your uptimes are pretty good, so i suppose your rotation is good. I'm a mess at reading logs.

Ah, okay my bad. Evidently World of Logs still confuses me. Sorry bout that!

[Demeia]

I'm less knowledgeable than most at logs.

But I can't find anyone using Expose armor and as far as I could tell only a rogue could put it on. I'm curious about buffs and whether a major one might be missing besides expose armor. I don't see a potion. This isn't a criticism it's just that one thing I'm sure of is that if you're missing things like flask/potion then you're going to get a different dps result than shadowcraft. Of course, the more knowledgeable folks claim that shadowcraft's "dps" is less reliable than a simcraft.

It seemed to me--again, I'm-a-stupido at logs--that you're crit for eviscerate was low (seemed it was 25% and it should have been 35%) and I was wondering if that's another problem: rng.

We'll see if someone better at logs and combat can shed some more light.

[Ukalnar]

Demeia : I run his raid into raidcomp to check for buffs and debuffs and they were all there. My mistake was that i directly assumed that those raid members actually used those buffs and debuffs, which was a mistake. Only buffs that Marek had was mastery with 87% uptime and the default Bloodlust with Stormlash totem. And maybe, MAYBE, 5% crit from mage. I don't see it on boss-kill log, but i do see it on overall as being cast. And of course, attack speed from rogues and attack power from hunters. Dunno if they got any Stats from monk.

As for debuffs on the boss, there's spell damage taken with 99% uptime, 4% damage taken from Ravager pet with 95% uptime ....aaand that's about it. No armor reduction.

So let's say he had no Crit buff, no Stats buffs, he was not using Flask or Agi Food, and no armor reduction on boss, also no use of Arcane Torrent, we remove all those from Shadowcraft and we get a 200k DPS simulation. Considering you only did one CloS and also used a sprint and no Shadowsteps, save to assume you ate some of those nasty pushbacks so your uptime on boss was not 100%, and also you feinted quite alot, I'd say your 190k DPS is pretty much spot on.

I hope I didn't mess anything up in my assumptions.

Marek : As in improving your DPS, there's nothing much you can do without some good drops and lucky coins. Get legendary meta gem as fast as possible because is well over 10k DPS increase, try to get 4set and couple that with a slow offhand for hard hitting Killing Sprees.

Also try to get a RPPM trinket, like Renataki Heroic or Haromm Flex or better. Couple that with legendary cape proc and legendary meta gem and your Haste EP will jump a bit and you can switch those pure Agility gems with Agi/Haste for a better energy flow.

[Deleted]

According to the log for the bosses debuffs, there was no armor buff present throughout the entire duration of the fight.

So that would definitely bring down your dps a bit. However I think it's worth noting that most sims tend to run with "Patchwerk settings" and "optimal conditions" meaning pre-pots, near perfect rotation execution and no breaks in being behind the boss at any point.

[Jerboa]

Combat DPS is simple at first glance, but because of Insight, there's a lot of micromanagement and decision-making mid-fight that you can do to improve your DPS.

On single-target, Rupture is best used at Deep Insight. Rupture is still more DPE than Eviscerate, and since it now snapshots correctly with Insight, it's always better to try and refresh it with that high damage bonus. Past any decent level of haste, you will never use Rupture during Adrenaline Rush because you will more than likely energy cap. To prevent this, when possible, I've started using Adrenaline Rush in Moderate Insight when the NEXT Sinister/Revealing Strike will push me into Deep Insight. You get almost the entirety of AR during Deep Insight, and then a grace period of 1/2 seconds at the end to refresh Rupture before Insight drops off, without fear of capping.

If you're Blade Flurrying adds that will live a fairly long time, such as on Galakras, Thok Heroic, or Garrosh, Glyph of Sharpened Knives is a more than viable glyph option. Before switching on Blade Flurry, use 3 globals to cast 3xFoK (this will also apply Deadly Poison to the majority of the adds), then turn on Blade Flurry and hammer whichever target is highest priority. This is a pretty niche situation, but since rogues are the only class that can apply AoE Expose Armor, it's also a very nice raid DPS increase if you have other melee (especially a prot warrior tank, holy hell...)

If you have a trinket with a definitive ICD like Assurance of Consequence, track the cooldown with an addon like WeakAuras. Keeping an eye on powerful trinket procs to use them with cooldowns is something almost every DPS class in the game should do to increase their output.

You're right, Icy Veins says you can use either one, my bad. The tooltip makes it seem like slower weapons are better.

I believe that if you can use your Killing Spree optimally, 2 slow weapons comes out on top. The value of a fast off-hand is also reduced with increasing gear (haste) levels.

[Fluorescent0]

On single-target, Rupture is best used at Deep Insight. Rupture is still more DPE than Eviscerate, and since it now snapshots correctly with Insight, it's always better to try and refresh it with that high damage bonus. Past any decent level of haste, you will never use Rupture during Adrenaline Rush because you will more than likely energy cap.

Wrong, you'd still use Rupture during adrenaline rush. Rupture isn't only higher DPE than eviscerate but actually higher damage per cast.

[no19]

At ~13500 haste with a flex AoC, you should have ~135 Sinister Strike and 6 AR/SB for a 4:30 long fight. You had 107 and 4. Sometimes the simplest reason is often overlooked - press buttons faster...

Besides that, you don't have the meta, main hand ilvl is lower than avg ilvl, and you didn't use ShS->Cloak->ShS to avoid all knockbacks.

[shadowboy]

As a combat rogue, you want to expose. It's not a dps loss. It's a dps gain to put it up--even if someone else can.

I sometimes sim my raid comp (the exact characters of the dps makeup of my raid) while unchecking every buff/debuff to see who should put up what debuff. What I found was that it was a personal dps gain for me (as a combat rogue) to use expose armor, even relative to someone else putting up the debuff. We had a balance druid as dps, my combat rogue's dps was higher if I exposed than if the druid FF'd. I'd attribute the observation to the fact that expose armor is a cheap combo point every 30 seconds. The damage loss of not advancing BG or dealing damage directly (from half a sinister strike) was offset (and then some) by the fact that sunder was applied and the restless blades cost of 2sec off cds every 30 sec for only 25 energy.

[Jerboa]

Wrong, you'd still use Rupture during adrenaline rush. Rupture isn't only higher DPE than eviscerate but actually higher damage per cast.

Deep Insight is the period of your rotation when you want to squeeze out as much pure damage as you can. Assuming you're not derping around and using two Ruptures within the same Deep Insight, it doesn't make much difference at all when you cast that Rupture, as long as you cast it with Deep Insight up. Even if Rupture falls off for a whopping 10 seconds, you're only losing a few ticks, which are made up for by the extra Eviscerates you'd cast instead. Since Rupture is energy-neutral, it is mostly wasted by casting it during AR when you have a surplus of energy. Hence, waiting till the last second of Deep Insight, after AR runs out, to refresh. By the time Rupture is then falling off, you should be midway through Deep Insight again, ready to reapply, since the 24 second duration of Rupture fits the Insight cycle almost perfectly.

[Fluorescent0]

Deep Insight is the period of your rotation when you want to squeeze out as much pure damage as you can. Assuming you're not derping around and using two Ruptures within the same Deep Insight, it doesn't make much difference at all when you cast that Rupture, as long as you cast it with Deep Insight up. Even if Rupture falls off for a whopping 10 seconds, you're only losing a few ticks, which are made up for by the extra Eviscerates you'd cast instead. Since Rupture is energy-neutral, it is mostly wasted by casting it during AR when you have a surplus of energy. Hence, waiting till the last second of Deep Insight, after AR runs out, to refresh. By the time Rupture is then falling off, you should be midway through Deep Insight again, ready to reapply, since the 24 second duration of Rupture fits the Insight cycle almost perfectly.

Again, wrong. You're not gaining anything by delaying that Rupture to cast an Eviscerate provided both are in Deep Insight. Sure, it may be a 'few ticks', but it's still a damage loss. Capping energy isn't a DPS loss as long as you use your most damaging ability on every global you have, and by delaying Rupture for Eviscerate you're effectively delaying a more damaging ability for a less damaging one.

[Marek]

Thanks everyone for all of the feedback.

1. MH ilvl lower than Avg, the Legendary Cloak and Ordos items push my avg ilvl higher, but I really only raid Flex, so at 548, that's about as high as it will get.
2. Good point on the ShS/Cloak/ShS for the knockback, I'm spec'd into CnD, because I like the quick launch on pull w/ the ambush to start the fight, ShS would make more sense on this particular fight.
3. The Slow OH vs Fast OH is a great point for KS, unfortunately I don't have a good slow OH yet, RNG. My KS MH dmg was 700k higher than OH, so 2.6k dps right there.
4. The 107 vs 135 SS's looks like a huge contributor to my mediocre dps. Just going off Avg SS, that is 8.7k dps there.

I do throw feint a fair bit, just to help the healers, since I usually raid x-realm flex, anything to lighten the load on other roles usually gets a lower wipe-rate, not that Jugg is much of a wipe-fest, just habit.

Looks like I need to focus on Slow OH, Gem heavier into Haste, Replace Trink w/ Haromms, Get Helm for Legendary Gem, 4pc Tier, hit AR on CD (Potentially 2 more cycles), figure out why I'm getting 25% fewer SS's than I potentially could.

Thanks again everyone!

[Avengerx]

Thanks everyone for all of the feedback.

1. MH ilvl lower than Avg, the Legendary Cloak and Ordos items push my avg ilvl higher, but I really only raid Flex, so at 548, that's about as high as it will get.
2. Good point on the ShS/Cloak/ShS for the knockback, I'm spec'd into CnD, because I like the quick launch on pull w/ the ambush to start the fight, ShS would make more sense on this particular fight.
3. The Slow OH vs Fast OH is a great point for KS, unfortunately I don't have a good slow OH yet, RNG. My KS MH dmg was 700k higher than OH, so 2.6k dps right there.
4. The 107 vs 135 SS's looks like a huge contributor to my mediocre dps. Just going off Avg SS, that is 8.7k dps there.

I do throw feint a fair bit, just to help the healers, since I usually raid x-realm flex, anything to lighten the load on other roles usually gets a lower wipe-rate, not that Jugg is much of a wipe-fest, just habit.

Looks like I need to focus on Slow OH, Gem heavier into Haste, Replace Trink w/ Haromms, Get Helm for Legendary Gem, 4pc Tier, hit AR on CD (Potentially 2 more cycles), figure out why I'm getting 25% fewer SS's than I potentially could.

Thanks again everyone!

The 2 missing sb/ar combinations and your time being off the boss is probably the reason for all those missing SS's.