Poison Proc Basics

Your poisons can be split into two categories depending on how their proc mechanic. Crippling, mind-numbing and deadly poisons have a %chance to proc on all your hits. Instant and wound are limited to the number of times a minute they can proc (PPM) and are normalized around a 1.4 speed weapon. With a typical 1.8 speed dagger, Instant poison will proc around 25% of the time from auto-attacks alone and wound should be proccing 65% of the time. For this reason, you want to put the %chance poisons on a fast weapon and the PPM poisons on a slow weapon (the slower the weapon, the higher the chance of applying poison with hemo/mutilate/etc).

Subtlety

Unless you’re playing with a frost mage and have the Waylay talent, it’s best to use crippling on your offhand and either crippling, mind-numbing or wound poison on your mainhand.
Most subtlety rogues I’ve spoken to are finding either mind-numbing/crippling or crippling/crippling the most reliable choice in PVP, with wound/crippling being viable for duels. Running with double crippling may sound like overkill, but you’re almost guaranteeing that your target will be waddling around, unable to break away and get too far from you. As your role in the team is to provide massive control with the occasional burst, the lack of sustained damage from wound procs shouldn’t cause you too many problems.

Assassination

There’s not much debate about which poisons to use with an assassination spec – with the buff from Improved Poisons instant poison outdamages wound poison even when taking the 10% MS into consideration. Damage wise, the obvious choice is to run with instant on your mainhand and deadly on the offhand. The downside to this is that you won’t be able to shiv instant poison onto your target (which would then proc crippling poison through Deadly Brew).

The alternative is to have deadly poison on your MH dagger, but this would result in fewer deadly poison procs. What could work well is to get the best of both worlds via a 1.4speed mainhand dagger from PVE. This would let you play with deadly/instant, giving a normal rate of deadly procs plus the ability to shiv crippling poison. The reduction in mainhand mutilate damage isn’t worth worrying about as it no longer forms a large part of our damage output. I’d love to test this out, but I won’t be able to unless Blizzard make the PVP shivs usable in either hand. I’m not even sure if there are any PVE MH 1.4 daggers available yet…

Thrown Weapons

Being able to apply poisons to a thrown weapon is a pretty nice change to the rogue class, especially for assassination specs. As subtlety, crippling or mind-numbing are the usual choices. If you don’t have mind-numbing on your mainhand, you can distribute it via a well-timed Fan of Knives.

For assassination, mind-numbing is a strong choice for arenas and rated BGs. Another alternative is to put deadly poison onto your thrown weapon. FoKing in BGs and Tol Barad can be insanely powerful – thanks to Vile Poisons I’ve seen deadly poison hitting for a combined total of 60000 damage every tick.

Season Progress

On a personal note, so far this has been the most disasterous start to a season we’ve had yet – our 3s MMR hasn’t gone past 1.9k yet due to combinations of really bad target calls, over-aggresive playstyle and awful connection problems (last night our warlock had DCs in exactly half the games we played – we clawed a few wins back thanks to Blizz letting him rejoin, but meh!). We’ve played multiple chars together for a long time so we’re far from giving up – we’ll get there, it’s just pretty frustrating at the moment! Resto-druid/affliction/assassination seems to have potential and I can see it becomming pretty strong as Cata progresses.

Oh totally unrelated but easily my ‘Tip of the Week’ – don’t try and clear your AFK flag while waiting for the gates to open – being teleported back to Orgrimmar will affect your dps/control and may cause Skype to hurt your ears.

Additionally, if anyone complains to you about recuperate being overpowered (yes it is), the perfect answer I’ve come up with for comedy value is – “It’s not overpowered, you have to remember to use it”. It gets interesting reactions…

Warning, pre-cataclysm content detected!

This article was written before patch 4 went live and will contain information that may no longer be relevant.

Wound poison and Deadly poison may be the staple poisons for a rogue, but there are a couple of situations where it can pay to make a quick switch to anesthetic poison. You will naturally need an extra weapon handy (with a weapon chain if needed), but if anything, it’s a way of getting a bit more life out of an old dagger.

I’m currently swapping my deadly-poisoned offhand for one with anesthetic. Swapping weapons does trigger the GCD, so make sure you don’t swap with full energy – use it as a way of pooling energy instead. With a 50% proc rate, you (hopefully) shouldn’t need to have it equipped for too long before swapping back to your normal offhand.

There are several buffs you can dispel with anesthetic poison, with the most important being the following;

Savage Roar

A 30% damage buff is pretty impressive, and being able to dispel it is a nice way of wasting a feral druid’s combo points. You won’t be able to put out much pressure using wound+anesthetic, but it can be a nice way of helping out your partner to survive a feral druids initial OTT burst. As well as reducing their damage you’re also keeping them free of dots to allow a defensive gouge. Switch back to wound+deadly when you’re back on-top of the situation.

Berserker Rage

Dispelling their Berserker Rage isn’t too devastating to a warrior, but removing it stops some of their rage generation and leaves them vulnerable to gouge, fears and even saps. It will also dispel their enrage buff, though that is likely to be reapplied immediately.

Hunger for Blood

You’ll probably never see a HfB rogue at all nowadays (unless they forget to respec before a BG or arena match). You may want to switch to wound+anesthetic for the comedy value – watching them energy-starve themselves as they spam HfB is kind of cute.

Anesthetic Poison isn’t a necessity for PVP, but it can be pretty useful at times. I’m currently playing 2v2 with a low geared priest – being able to slow down a feral druid’s opening burst on him can really help.

Warning, pre-cataclysm content detected!

This article was written before patch 4 went live and will contain information that may no longer be relevant.

Envenom vs Eviscerate

With envenom putting out massive damage in comparison to eviscerate, you may be tempted to rely entirely on envenom as your finishing move. With 100% armor mitigation you should be hitting cloth and plate targets for similar amounts, but a couple of classes have abilities which will reduce this damage. The following guide assumes 3/3pts in Vile Poisons (essential talent).

Deadly Poison Doses (DPs)

While an envenom with 5DP does more damage than it does with 1DP, the difference is not horrendous and in most cases it can still output more damage than an eviscerate. The duration of the envenom debuff is based on the number of combo points you used, rather than the number of doses, so a 5CP envenom with 1DP will give you six seconds of +15% deadly poison application. This will help you reach 5/5DP doses faster, at which point your damage will hopefully shoot through the roof.

The following tests were done on a 0-resilience, unbuffed stationary target (ok, 30mins of hitting a training dummy while I watched TV). While the numbers themselves don’t mean too much, it does show the differences between doses/attacks, and why opening with a 1DP envenom can be more beneficial than eviscerating.

Eviscerate
Normal: 2548
Crit: 5377

Eviscerate with 3pts in Improved Eviscerate
Normal: 3058
Crit: 6452

Envenom with 1DP
Normal: 3183
Crit: 6550

Envenom with 5DP
Normal: 4314
Crit: 8904

Envenom with 5 doses of Deadly Poison, minus Nether Protection
Normal: 3020
Crit: 6232

Even with three talent points spent improving the damage, an eviscerate was not hitting harder than a 1DP envenom.

Eviscerate beats Envenom when….

Death Knight

Anti Magic Shell. Not exactly hard to miss – any target under this purple dome will take 75% less damage from your envenoms. Spamming envenoms onto the DK will cap his runic power, so either pool your energy or try another finishing move (bear in mind that a 1.2k eviscerate probably won’t stress his healer too much).

Destruction Warlocks

Despite a lot of forum posts saying the opposite, Nether Protection DOES NOT proc from your envenoms or poison applications. The only time Nether Protection could be an issue is if you have a partner casting nature spells onto the warlock (which could trigger a 30% damage reduction on envenom).

Rogues

With most rogues playing with 3pts in Master Poisoner, your deadly poison needs to be reapplied every six seconds before it drops off. Combine this with their stuns, evasions plus cloak of shadow, and you’ll have problems keeping a stack alive on any decent rogue. While this DPS loss is annoying, what can be even more fatal is not being able to shiv wound/crippling poison (unless you’re playing with deadly on your main hand, which requires a 1.4speed mainhand dagger to be truely viable). Not being able to shiv wound poison onto a rogue with evasion can cancel out the dps advantage of your envenoms. If you can stunlock the rogue then deadly poison/envenoms are useful, but once the rogue leaves the stun it’s worth weapon-swapping to another offhand dagger with wound poison applied.

Appologies for the slackness with updates, the last month has been chaos with barely enough time to play. Things are quietening down now and our new 3v3 seems decent enough (despite having scary amounts of furious gear!).

The first is nice and simple yet seems to work remarkably well (thx Tamatar for posting this macro);

/equipslot 16 IP_DAGGER_1
/equipslot 17 IP_DAGGER_2
/equipslot 16 WOUND_DAGGER_1
/equipslot 17 DEADLY_DAGGER_2

Each time you run this macro it equips the pair of daggers you don’t have equipped at that moment. Use it to toggle between
IP/IP and WD/Deadly (replacing IP_DAGGER_1 etc with the names of your daggers).

I’ll have a look at making a version of this that swaps your MH when wound is applied/about to run out, but I can’t tell if that would give a DPS boost or not.

You need to create two sets of gear (with just the daggers selected for changing), one with your Wound/Deadly daggers, the other with your IP daggers. Right-click on the IP set and click ‘scripts>custom’ – paste in the following code;

– $EVENTS TIMER UNIT_COMBAT
local dp_name=”Deadly Poison IX”
local switch_time = 5
if UnitAffectingCombat(“player”) then
for i=1,40 do
local n,_,_,s,_,_,x,c,_=UnitDebuff(“target”,i);
if n==dp_name and c==”player” then
equip = not ( x-GetTime() > switch_time and s == 5 )
end
end
else
equip = false
end

Replace “Deadly Poison IX” with the localised name of the poison, and replace the local_switch_time number with the number of seconds before the poison stack wears off before you swap back to your Wound/Deadly daggers. If all goes well, your daggers will be automatically swapped once you get 5 stacks of DP, then swap back.

http://worldofwarcraft.com – Assassination: Weapon Swap Gimmick
http://arenajunkies.com – 3.2.2 patch, Instant Poison weapon swap idea

The idea behind it is to get a stack of 5 Deadly Poison on your target, then swap to a pair of daggers with Instant Poison on. As long as your target isn’t a rogue with the same spec (-50% poison duration), you have 12 seconds to do as much damage as you can before deadly poison wears off. With 3 seconds remaining on the Deadly stack, switch back to your original daggers to shiv.

While that doesn’t sound like it would cause too much extra damage, the poison proc boost given by Envenom dramatically increases the likelyhood of IP proccing. I’ve had it proc 7 times and still been able to change back in time to shiv Deadly and keep the stack alive. The ideal rotation for maximum DPS would be something like; Weapon swap, 5pt Envenom, Mutilate, Mutilate, 5pt Envenom, Weapon swap.

As usual, this tactic has it’s pros and cons.

Swapping weapons has a GCD, so you need to swap weapons immediately after the previous attack (so the GCD is shared with the one from your attack). When swapping back, you will need to leave enough time for the weapon swap GCD before shiving, so don’t leave it too late (3 seconds before the stack expires should be safe).

As well as having to worry about keeping deadly on your target, you also need to keep an eye on wound/crippling as well. The whole point of this weapon swap is to maximise burst, but all that is wasted if their healer can cast a full strength heal immediately after. Ideally you want to have the healer CC’d during this phase, (well, ideally you want to set this up so you get the kill), but nothing can be guaranteed in PVP.

A Druid’s ‘Abolish Poison’ and a Shaman’s ‘Cleansing Totem’ are your enemies – unless you can dispel/kill them, your stack will lose doses before you can do your second Envenom. Not too much of a problem if you play with a priest, but this can really mess up your cycle/dps otherwise.

Another downside is that you do need to have four decent daggers, but on the good side this means any Master Poisoner who bought the Relentless Mutilator before 3.2.2 will now have a use for it again!

However, all that negativity aside, if you do manage to set up your target with a full stack of deadly and can keep the healer tied up, this weapon swap should get you an additional burst of 4k+ damage compared to not swapping. It’s a situational tactic you won’t be able to use in every game, but anything that can give that sort of bonus should not be ignored.

The macros to swap weapons are very easy to setup; use /equipslot followed by 16 (Mainhand) or 17 (Offhand) then the name of your dagger.

#show NAME_OF_WEAPON
/equipslot 16 NAME_OF_WEAPON
/equipslot 17 NAME_OF_WEAPON

Setup two macros, one to swap to your IP weapons, and one to swap to your Deadly weapons.

A variation of this macro (used by Stealthma on AJ) combines the envenoms/shivs with the weapon swaps. This saves you two buttons on your bars, but does mean you won’t be able to Envenom without changing to your IP weapons. Personally I’d rather have the option of being able to envenom without swapping weapons, but you might find this works well for your own playstyle.

#showtooltip envenom
/equipslot 17 NAME_OF_IP_DAGGER
/equipslot 16 NAME_OF_IP_DAGGER
/cast envenom

#showtooltip shiv
/equipslot 17 NAME_OF_DEADLY_WEAPON
/equipslot 16 NAME_OF_DEADLY_WEAPON
/cast shiv

You will need to press each macro twice, the first time to swap weapons, the second to envenom or shiv.

For a rough idea of PPM with the different weapon speeds, I spent 30mins auto-attacking a training dummy with three different weapons. The test is far from ideal as it doesn’t factor in time you spend kiting, (and I didn’t use Slice’n'Dice or Mutilate) but the results are enough to make me consider swapping my Mutilator for a Murder. The faster the speed the better, as your shivs will cost less energy and Focused Attacks will proc more often from the extra chances you get to crit.

1.4 speed – 12 procs per minute
1.6 speed – 9.2 procs per minute
1.8 speed – 6.8 procs per minute

If running with a 1.4 dagger means not having to shiv at all, it might be worth main-handing deadly and keeping wound on the offhand instead. This would give back the ability to shiv crippling when you’re peeling (or chasing form-switching druids), but unfortunately this is probably something better suited to high-level raiders, as there are no fast mainhand daggers available from PVP. If someone is able to try this out, please let me know how you get on with keeping 5/5 deadly doses applied!

All in all, I’m more than happy with the buffs to Master Poisoner and Envenom – with a full stack of deadly and plenty of combo points you can really burn peoples HP. Who needs ArP when you can put out 7k crits on plate!

Apologies for the wierd post I made earlier today – I was playing around with Spotify and accidentally created a tweet for a random album, which was picked up by WordPress and inserted into this blog……

Master Poisoner – Increases the critical hit chance of all attacks made against any target you have poisoned by 3%, reduces the duration of all Poison effects applied to you by 50%, increases the bonus chance to apply Deadly Poison when Envenom is used by an additional 45%, and gives Envenom a 33/66/100% chance to not consume Deadly Poison.

The ‘massive’ buff that has got me feeling pretty hopeful for HfB in PVP during S7 is the little amendment to the end. 100% chance to not consume deadly poison!

I play as HfB at the moment since it makes a very big difference against plate teams. Not only will this new buff mean more damage from having DP tick (and hopefully let you envenom much more often), all those doses of DP should help your wound poisons avoid being dispelled.

To make this even more attractive, damage from envenom is also being buffed a little as well.

Envenom’s scaling has been increased from 7% to 9% of attack power per combo point.

I’m currently playing with Master Poisoner and Vile Poisons so I guess I have more benefit from deadly than the traditional 41/5/25 build.

I use four daggers and keep poisons on all of them. On the mainhand (Sinister Revenge) I swap between wound/deadly depending on what the opposition is (not hard to reapply when the gates go up) and I swap my offhand dagger with a macro. I use mind-numbing+berserker (Murder), wound+weapon chain (Anarchy) and wound+berserker (Webbed Death). If you feel confident about swapping weapons mid combat, you can swap a weapon-chained dagger with another one as soon as your opponent disarms you, just take care to swap back when the next disarm is due.

I’m using deadly poison mostly because of the huge number of plate teams that we’re facing. Envenom rips through DKs/palas/warriors/bears and as far as I know it gives wound poison a better chance to survive through cleanse. The only downside is the reduction in CC that deadly poison gives. Being able to gouge when your healer is feared to the otherside of the arena is often a lifesaver – having gouge break immediately, that hurts. A tough call really, extra damage vs less damage avoidance, though that seems to be the underlying theme of PVP.

Mind-numbing against warlocks, paladins and shamans is something i’ve been trying out and it looks pretty useful. The only issue is that 99% of the warlocks we’ve come up against so far in this 2v2 combo have been laughably terrible. One ‘memorable’ warlock only managed to cast curse of elements onto the paladin before dying, the other forgot to seduce and let me interupt three fears in a row before figuring out that something was wrong. We could have played naked and still won, so it’s hard to assess just how useful mind-numbing really was.

If playing as 52/5/14 starts to fail as we get a higher rating I’ll probably drop deadly poison completely and take 41/5/25 – with the deadly procs and envenom being unbuffed I’d prefer to take the extra CC abilities. We’ll see.