Usage of Ambush and Vanish at boss fights

[Ilwe 0]

Hello, I was wondering;

Firstly, why should we use Mutilate instead of Ambush at the start of the fight to get out of stealth, doesn't it provide more damage and the same combo points as Mutilate? (As the passive enables 3 combo point on critical hits)

Secondly, if i do not remember wrong, i used to use vanish(at cataclysm) to provide a passive energy generation buff for about 10 secs or something. So i would break out of stealth and after 10 seconds i would use vanish to regain the passive energy regeneration buff. However now that it has been removed, how and when can i use vanish to benefit my dps the most during the boss fights?

Thank you for your consideration.

[omicron 3]

With enough mastery and crit, Mutilate becomes mathematically better to do from hiding because of the two chances to proc poison, ppm trinkets, and chances for those poisons to crit.

For example, I grabbed a random very high end log and his average deadly poison hit was 43k. This is very high item level, so let's viciously cut it down to say 30k, which would make a best-case scenario of deadly poison proccing and critting very appealing. The doubled chance to proc means a lot, since so much of your itemization is going towards boosting poison damage.

As far as I can tell though, the difference isn't huge. The best rogues seem to use Mutilate from hiding because it's simply a little bit better for their mastery levels. I don't think the average player would even notice without scouring over several logs.

Edited June 25, 2013 by omicron

[Dreamrogue 2]

I suggest doing mutilate for reasons omicrom said and just for the fact that it has no positional requirements. Doing ambush instead of mutilate gives me around 50dps (according to shadowcraft) increase which is like 0.0002% increase. Don't do it, and do it even less with higher gear.

Regarding why using vanish is a dps cooldown, is that you have talent which you MUST TAKE: Shadow Focus and it gives you pretty much free mutilate. And free skill = more dps. Use premeditation to reset cooldown of vanish to get a second almost-free mutilate.

Edited June 25, 2013 by Dreamrogue

[Omolu 0]

For all I know, the 30% chance to procc Blindside makes mutilate slightly better than ambush.

[Dreamrogue 2]

For all I know, the 30% chance to procc Blindside makes mutilate slightly better than ambush.

And yes. This is one of the many reasons why to use mutilate over ambush. Forgot to say it :)

[intrinsc 5]

Mutilate over Ambush for the Bindside proc like above.