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……

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.