Fan Of Knives and You!

If you've ever listened in to vent while I'm raiding with NO you've probably heard something about FOK (Fan of Knives).  Lets first take a look at the description of FOK.  There are a couple important bits to that description.  It states that both weapons are thrown with daggers doing more than the listed damage and all other weapons doing less.  The percentages listed don't really matter they are just there so that the high speed daggers do roughly the same amount of damage per hit as other slower harder hitting weapons. 

The really important info is that both weapons are thrown.  The information that is not there is that the poisons on those weapons also have the normal chance of being applied to the targets.  This means that you can start deadly poison ticks on a mob and if that mob is at 5 stacks of deadly poison your instant poison procs on them.  The regular Fan of Knives ability is limited in damage in the same way that all aoe attacks are.  It is capped to a certain amount, if more creatures are within the attack each creature is hit for less to maintain this cap.  It is important to note that crits are outside of this cap and any attack that crits will increase the overall damage.  Since FOK is technically 2 hits per creature you have double the chance to crit.  Also poisons from damage are not counted towards the AOE cap.  This information tells you how FOK circumvents the normal AOE rules and makes it one of the strongest aoe attacks in the game. 

Now for the insanity.  Combat rogues have access to two different cooldowns. Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush.  Fan of Knives is limited in use under normal circumstances due to a high energy cost.  Typically you can do 2 FOK attacks before you are out of energy and must wait 6 seconds or so before having enough energy to use it again.  With Adrenaline Rush you can pretty much use FOK constantly.  Now we combine this with Blade Flurry.  Blade Flurry will cause targets hit with the main hand portion of FOK to hit an additional target within melee range of the Rogue.  So if I have 2 targets and I use FOK I will hit 4 times one Main Hand and one Off Hand hit on each target.  With Blade Flurry up I will hit 6 times with one attack.  The regular 1 main hand and 1 offhand from FOK and then each main hand hit will proc a Blade Flurry hit on the other target.  The more creatures hit with the main hand the more extra Blade Flurry hits and the more chances for poison procs.  If you use this combo you have to make sure your ToTT (Tricks of the Trade) ability is not on cooldown and ToTT should be used after 2 FOK attacks or so.  I would also recommend having Vanish available to dump threat if you pull off of the tanks.

Topping charts on trash pulls is all well and good but FOK has quite a few good uses otherwise.   The most important part of these is combining FOK with ToTT.  Anytime the tank loses a couple mobs on an aoe pull or anytime adds come in to a  fight is a good time for this combo.  If you can add some quick threat  to the tank the other dps can unload on the adds quicker and you can take em down faster while making it much more likely that the adds won't stray into the healers.  Another fun use is in pvp.  Since the poisons on your weapons have a chance to go off you can FOK a group of enemies with Crippling Poison for an aoe snare combined with Wound Poison to make healing effect 50% less effective for those hit.  As with most rogue pvp make sure your Vanish and Sprint are available because you will get squashed otherwise.