Combat Rogues and You!

Why Combat?

The theoretical damage cap for Combat specs is about the same as the max for mutilate.  At lower gear levels (ilvl 200ish) mutilate outperforms combat but as you gain the ability to stack armor pen combat catches up and maintains.  The advantages of combat are that it is not as reliant on setup to achieve good damage.  Mutilate requires quite a few different bleeds/poisons to be on the target before they can really output the damage.  This means on movement type fights mutilate loses alot of potential dps.  Combat has several strong cooldowns that allow you to spread out your damage to multiple targets as well as having very strong "burn phase" dps.

What about Gearing

Love em or hate em information on rogues on Elitist Jerks seems to be very thorough and for the most part correct.  Beginning information can be found here.  Gearing for combat is fairly simple.  Make sure you are hit and exp capped and stack as much armor pen as you can manage.  You should be using a slow weapon in your main hand for hard hitting Eviscerates and Sinister Strikes, and a fast weapon in your offhand for more poison procs.  Using an addon like Pawn can help make choosing gear much easier.  Combining the information from pawn with your own class knowledge is the key.  For starting weapons I recommend Nighttime in the Main hand and Liar's Tongue in your off hand.  They are available through the new heroic 5 mans.  Nighttime drops off of the first boss in Forge of Souls and Liars Tongue is in the last chest of Halls of Reflection.

Hit and Expertise Cap

Most combat rogues spec for Precision and Weapon Expertise.  The Experise cap is 26 unless you have a racial ability that adds to expertise with your weapons.   Hit cap is 99 for your specials and 315 for your poisons assuming your have 5 points in precision.  Going over the expertise cap does nothing for you but let you dps raid bosses from the front (not advisable).  Going over the hit cap has benefits, especially at high crit levels, but should not be stacked past 315 intenionally.  Note that poisons are considered spells and you should look at your spell hit for the poison hit cap. 

Talent Spec

The standard combat spec can be found here.  The people who came up with this spec have spent a ridiculous amount of time comparing many possibilities and have broken the talents down to how much dps increase you should see per talent point spent.   This spec combines the power of  deadly poison to proc instant poison with the amazing combat cooldowns.  I generally run the cookie cutter spec until I get used to it and how the various talent points interact.  After I have a strong grasp I may switch some points around, for expample in my spec I took 1 point out of Vile Poisons and added it to Improved Poisons.  The standard spec uses Hack and Slash which requires swords or axes to be used.  For this reason your main and off hand should be one of these weapons.  Variations are possible using maces or daggers.  If your best weapons are daggers you should be using a mutilate spec instead until you aquire a good set of swords and axes or maces.  Hack and Slash is considered the highest dps for combat and should be sought after.  Much of that is based on having heavy arpen on your gear making maces less useful due to capping armor pen, combat daggers has much the same issue with crit capping.  

I am currently trying a new talent build for combat that focuses on keeping rupture up.  With the changes to allow rupture ticks to crit it is becoming a dps increase over eviscerate.  This makes the combat rotation slightly more difficult to pull off and makes target switching fights a bit harder but so far my findings have been positive.