Ever since Mutilate’s positional requirement was dropped I wanted to utilize mutilate as my rogue’s main spec. Between not having great daggers and just the ease of leveling as a combat rogue I kind of left the idea of being a true rogue behind and embraced the brigand’sh ways of punching/smashing/slashing things in the face.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love the combat spec. The cooldowns you get as a combat rogue are absolutely incredible and extremely useful in AoE situations: pop blade flurry and let the fan of knives fly. For those situations alone I will not abandon combat. It’s just that with my current level of gear my combat spec cannot keep up with the obscene amount of poison damage produced from my mutilate build. At best my combat build puts out somewhere between 3k-3.4k dps on single target encounters but I was able to pull off 5.6k dps with lower ilvl weapons as mutilate.
Fortunately I can embrace both builds being dual-spec’d and switch as needed while continuing to gear up my rogue. I am salivating over the [Blood Weeper] that the Devourer of Souls drops which would be a fairly sizable upgrade for me. While I would love to get the Quel’Delar for my combat build, I am planning on giving the first battered hilt I win, should that ever happen, to my DK. I’m completely okay with letting my combat spec trail behind my mutilate build so as long as the deadly poison change isn’t reverted and/or nerfed to the ground.
There’s still some DPS to pull out of my gear with some small talent build tweaks which I could make and it appears that I should start focusing on picking up more +haste gear and less on armor penetration if I stick with mutilate. That should make any physical dps’ers in my guild happy since I’ll happily pass on the ArPen trinket so they can have it.
Now I need to look at what gear I should be attempting to pick up with triumph badges and what I can pick up out of the normal and heroic versions of the Frozen Halls. Thank you Blizzard for making the iconic weapon for rogues useful again. ❤