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Rogue Expertise for Dummies

By Uncleleo | December 23, 2009

I’ve been struggling with this topic as I have started to pick up some ICC gear these past couple weeks. The reason? There is almost no expertise on any of the new items. This brings a big problem for Mutilate Rogues. Envenom is the end all for Mutilate Rogues and if this starts missing your DPS drops faster then Tiger Wood’s pants (I kid I kid). The new rotation for Mutilate Rogues in 3.3 makes missing an Envenom on a boss a little less disrupting then it used to be. Your rotation now consists of Mutilate spam followed by an Envenom with no Ruptures. Meaning that you are doing Envenoms more often and thus refreshing Slice and Dice more often. So your doing a lot less Rupture/SnD watching and alot more combo point watching. The place a Rogue gets in trouble is when they miss 2-3 Envenom finishers in a row which will most likely throw off an already sensitive rotation.

Basically your first goal as a Mutilate Rogue is the poison hit cap (315). Being poison hit capped means your posions will never miss (be resisted). Expertise should then be your next focus. 26 is your Expertise cap. From there Attack Power/Agility and Crit are the next stats you are worried about. Mutilate should not worry about Armor Penetration even though most of the new gear has ArP instead of Expertise.

Let’s talk about the numbers behind Expertise. Assuming 6.5% dodge and 14% parry, a player would need 26 expertise (214 expertise rating) to negate a boss’s dodge chance, and 56 expertise (460 rating) to prevent parries. Attacking from behind negates parry chances therefore you don’t need to worry with the 460 rating number. These numbers are only for Yellow attacks (Mutilate, Envenom, Rupture, Poisons etc.) as your regular White melée attacks can still miss.

Ok. Currently with the new gear I picked up I am well below the Expertise cap at 13 and well above the hit cap at 408. There are a couple of things you can do to help aid yourself from getting into sticky situations while under the Expertise cap. First off throw two points into Quick Recovery as a talent. The healing bonus is great in raids but the main point is to make sure that when your Envenom does miss your being refunded most of that lost energy. Secondly, do yourself a favor and don’t gem Expertise. I know it’s an important stat, but unless you only need one or two gems to Cap yourself your going to be losing out on alot of DPS by filling your sockets with Expertise. Lastly it may be a bit of a hassle but if you are having trouble with Expertise look through the Atlasloot addon. Try to base some of your upgrade goals on items with Expertise on them. Having set goals on the gear you are after can make your life a whole lot easier when the time comes to trade in badges or roll on an item.

FYI here are the three newest additions to my gear and you will notice one very important stat missing from all of them.

Soulthief’s Braided Belt
Scourge Stranglers
Recovered Scarlet Onslaught Cape

And now back to looking for items with Expertise…

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