Combat: Marked for Death vs Anticipation

[monkwise]

Noob question, admittedly... but the Icy Veins combat rogue guide states, "Marked for Death is the recommended talent in all situations," so why does it appear that most combat rogues are using anticipation? Worldofwargraphs shows nearly 90% taking Anticipation over MfD... and looking at the rankings in HFC on Warcraftlogs for combat rogues, they're all using Anticipation.

Is the Icy Veins guide wrong or (more likely) am I missing something?

[Deleted]

Anticipation is a much safer bet on 99% of encounters.
IN THEORY, MfD gives you more dps but in reality the amount of combo points saved with anticipation is much greater than the amount of combo points gained from MfD, plus MfD requires a lot more effort to your playstyle.

It all comes down to preference, and Anticipation is much easier to play with and in many situations just simply better than MfD, thats why most people are using it even tho it's THEORETICALLY a dps loss

The only encounter i'd consider going MfD over anticipation is kilrogg mythic, but as I said, that requires you to change your playstyle a bit and put a lot more effort into the spec.

Plus, there arent many combat fights in HFC anyway. Hellfire assault, kilrogg, iskar,xhul and maybe archimonde. That's about it.


tl;dr
anticipation is easier to play with and better in most scenarios

[monkwise]

Very helpful, thanks so much!

[Mac223]

MfD is better. I've yet to see a sim or a convincing argument in favor of anticipation with HfC setbonuses.

[Barrin]

MfD is better. I've yet to see a sim or a convincing argument in favor of anticipation with HfC setbonuses.

You can pool more Combopoints for the next Bandits Guile Level. Basically having 2x Evis when reaching Red Insight

[GGcalamity]

tl;dr
anticipation is easier to play with and better in most scenarios

lolwat. Literally all the fights you listed give the ability for MfD to reset, which means it completely and utterly DESTROYS anticipation. MfD is = to anticipation if you can reset ONCE every THREE MINUTES. Needless to say, you'll be resetting MUCH more often in every fight you listed.

[Mac223]

You can pool more Combopoints for the next Bandits Guile Level. Basically having 2x Evis when reaching Red Insight

If memory serves, the combat apl implements exactly this idea, but the gain is insufficient. So it does increase DPS - but not by enough.

lolwat. Literally all the fights you listed give the ability for MfD to reset, which means it completely and utterly DESTROYS anticipation. MfD is = to anticipation if you can reset ONCE every THREE MINUTES. Needless to say, you'll be resetting MUCH more often in every fight you listed.

I'm pretty sure that result assumes BrF setbonuses.

[Deleted]

Anticipation is a much safer bet on 99% of encounters.
IN THEORY, MfD gives you more dps but in reality the amount of combo points saved with anticipation is much greater than the amount of combo points gained from MfD, plus MfD requires a lot more effort to your playstyle.

It all comes down to preference, and Anticipation is much easier to play with and in many situations just simply better than MfD, thats why most people are using it even tho it's THEORETICALLY a dps loss

The only encounter i'd consider going MfD over anticipation is kilrogg mythic, but as I said, that requires you to change your playstyle a bit and put a lot more effort into the spec.

Plus, there arent many combat fights in HFC anyway. Hellfire assault, kilrogg, iskar,xhul and maybe archimonde. That's about it.


tl;dr
anticipation is easier to play with and better in most scenarios

I strongly disagree with this. I find MfD much easier to play with once you get used to play with 5 max combo points again, since you don't have to track anticipation stacks and your insight level to optimize your dps. Also the potential number of resets on HfC encounters makes MfD generate a huge amount of cp when used properly

[Deleted]

I remember in Pandaria people were saying Anticipation was so much better then MfD? What happened, did I miss something? Or was this Just for other specs?

[Deleted]

What happened is the way combo points work in MoP you had to use redirect to spend your combo points on the most valuable target, which made MfD pretty annoying to play with. Now that our combo points stick to us instead of our target, we can truly use the full potential of this talent

[Larinnian]

It ends up coming down to personal preference as to why you'll see most of us still using Anticipation.

Personally I got so used to storing my combo points via Anticipation for red insight that it feels off to me to try playing with MfD.
As far as I know there's not THAT much of a difference between the damage outputs of the spec based on that talent choice.

[dnis]

Don't you loose a combo point when at 4 and SS generates 2?

Anticipation is much much easier to play and adapt to.
MfD takes more focus to play good, but pays back on certain fights.

Hellfire Assault, Kilrogg, Socretar, Xhul'horac, Archimonde - MfD is superior in all those fights.

[Deleted]

Anticipation for me is better with T17 since both tier bonuses involve random gain of CPs and simply too many of them would be lost if you're not playing with Anticipation.

But when you get T18 4p, I feel like Marked for Death pulls ahead by quite a lot. Since the only time you should waste a CP would be if your SS procs a bonus one off RvS on 4 CPs, the amount gained by MfD should easily compensate them. And with all the fights that involve many adds spawning during the encounters, with all the resetting MfD's value skyrockets. It basically feels like in addition to T18 4p, with MfD you got the T17 4p bonus too.

[Eazy]

Play Anticipation for fights where you don't see many low-HP Adds, play MfD otherwise.

I'm always playing with Anticipation because it helps me with the Combo Points and I'm not wasting them during Adrenalie Rush(sometimes I'm getting energy too fast and almost capping it).

[PessimiStick]

MfD is strictly superior for any fight where you would be playing Combat to begin with, it's just slightly harder to play.

[shaithis]

Anticipation is a much safer bet on 99% of encounters.
IN THEORY, MfD gives you more dps but in reality the amount of combo points saved with anticipation is much greater than the amount of combo points gained from MfD, plus MfD requires a lot more effort to your playstyle.

It all comes down to preference, and Anticipation is much easier to play with and in many situations just simply better than MfD, thats why most people are using it even tho it's THEORETICALLY a dps loss

The only encounter i'd consider going MfD over anticipation is kilrogg mythic, but as I said, that requires you to change your playstyle a bit and put a lot more effort into the spec.

Plus, there arent many combat fights in HFC anyway. Hellfire assault, kilrogg, iskar,xhul and maybe archimonde. That's about it.


tl;dr
anticipation is easier to play with and better in most scenarios

This is not correct. In fact, even with no cooldown resets, I believe you need something like 16 finishers used per minute just to break even between the two (spillover combo points from RvS). Don't forget that more eviscerates = more usage of AR / KS. MfD clearly gives you more eviscerates than Anticipation in every scenario where you should play combat.

The trouble with MfD though is that the rotation is a lot less forgiving. However, I fully recommend for all experienced rogues to take it, especially for fights that have adds.

[fierydemise]

MfD is strictly superior on single target unless you have an unreachable amount of energy regen and only becomes better as you gain MfD resets. If you want to see the math on CP waste I happened to just write it up in a blog post: http://ravenholdt.net/index.php/blog...nd-simple-math. You can repeat this math for T17 2pc and 4pc and you'll find that MfD was at least comparable to anticipation with those set bonuses.

If anyone has math to support anticipation being better I'd love to see it because right now all our theorycrafting tools as well as napkin math suggest that MfD is better than anticipation for combat in all situations.