There has been a lot of debate on how to gem your rogue to maximize your dps for endgame content. Players have many views on this issue and from reading forums and other blogs the majority base their claims on personal experience and trial and error. I think the most important thing to note before gemming or regemming your gear is to consult a spreadsheet, such as this one which is freely available on Elitist Jerks. elitistjerks.com

 

These dps spreadsheets are put together by theory crafters that are very likely to know much more about rogue mechanics than you, as they spend a heap of time analyzing player data to create them. So even if you think that you are the most experienced rogue out there, the chances of you being correct and the spreadsheet being wrong about theoretical dps is very low. I definitely recommend grabbing the one from the link above before spending hundreds of gold on gems and enchants and see if it can help you maximize your dps. It is very easy to use and pretty much only requires you to type your character name, realm and zone. It then imports your character information from the armoury and spits out a bunch of results for you to work with.

 

Another good reason why you should always use a spreadsheet first is because it takes into account things like Crit cap and ArPen cap which are not very obvious to the average player. Also implementing major build changes such as going from a rupture cycle to eviscerate only cycle isn’t obvious if you don’t use a spreadsheet.

 

Please remember that a spreadsheet will NOT make you a better player or tell you how to play. It will help you hit your theoretical highest sustained dps, and you will only hit this theoretical dps if you know how to play your character. So if you are having problems with things such as keeping your S&D up then it probably won’t help you too much and you first need to learn your character better and your character’s rotation.

 

Spreadsheets aside the general understanding about stacking a stat is mainly to do with the gear that you are currently wearing and also your build to some degree.

 

Firstly and foremost get to the yellow hit cap if you aren’t already there. You are in bad shape if you are missing special attacks. Now with the poison changes in 3.3 some believe that AP surpasses agility gems. The reasoning is that AP gems will push the poison damage by more than the Crit we would gain with AGI gems. A lot of rogues are gemming 40 AP gems for this reason. Furthermore with the high end ICC gear it has been determined that we are actually capping on Crit and coupled with the fact that the Crit from agility doesn’t increase poisons Crit rate (only pure Crit rating does), straight AP seems to be best when it’s a choice between AP and agility currently.

 

Now ArPen has been thrown in the mix (just to make things even more confusing). Gemming ArPen is very dependant on your gear and a lot of ICC geared rogues are gemming ArPen. One thing to note is that ArPen is really only a viable option if you can get close to the cap. So if you have over 500 passive ArPen (ICC gear is stacked with ArPen) and a trinket that procs ArPen like Mjolnir Runestone it may be worth regemming.

 

Being an ICC geared rogue myself I am currently gemming 40 ap for red and blue sockets, and 20 ap 10 haste for yellow.

Tags: gemming, Rogue

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at and is filed under PVE, Pre Patch 4.0.1, Rogue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.