I've been asked by many people to put up something about Mutilate. I will preface this by saying that the goal of my recent Mutilate experience was to gauge how it performed vs. an equally geared and skilled combat swords rogue.

First, one intriguing thing that I was hoping to test was a rotation posed by Left at EJ that 3-5s/5r would be a superior rotation to a "3 finisher" cycle. Essentially you end up cutting a lot of SnD time, but your Rupture uptime is pretty high, and all of your Ruptures fall pretty easily under Find Weakness. I ran this cycle on Illidari Council, and Brutallus.

On Brutallus I parsed about 2200 DPS with 1 Bloodlust. I was using WSC and AToL for trinkets. Deadheadd out dpsed me by around 150 dps, and I out dpsed myself the following week as combat swords with the same gear. Perhaps a "3 finisher" cycle could have been better, or perhaps combat swords is really that much better on a stand still fight.

On Illidari Council I got one of my more impressive parses of 2324 DPS. Now I can't really attribute this all to Mutilate spec. I believe that having Fleet Footed upped my DPS by quite a bit on such a movement intensive fight, but honestly I was in a stacked group and got all of the Bloodlusts. I also used the 3-5s/5r cycle here.

As far as gearing for Mutilate if you're anything like me all of the Sunwell items have red sockets meaning that I have Glinting Pyrestones in every slot. I believe Glinting Pyrestone to be the superior gem for Mutilate as well. In fact, the only gear I changed was my trinkets. I was using WSC / AToL for every fight I did as Mutilate.

I think that the next time I go Mutilate I will try a 3-5s/5r cycle and when I get a lucky Ruthlessness proc followed by a critical Mutilate switch over to a "3 finisher" for the rest of that cycle. Hopefully this will optimize my damage while lowering my wasted SnD uptime.

The sum of my experiences as Mutilate have lead me to the conclusion that the spec is still not where it needs to be. A couple suggestions of how to bring it in line with everything else would be:

• Swap Opportunity with Lightning Reflexes. The first tier of Combat is pretty bad, and dodge fits more with the theme of Subtlety anyways. This would strengthen both Mutilate, and Combat Dagger builds.
• Make Find Weakness last for 15 seconds. This would alleviate some of the stress when cycling with an agressive "3 finisher" cycle.
• Allow rogues to Mutilate from the front in PvE. This could also be applied to Backstab. Honestly, there are a lot of position intensive fights in Sunwell Plateau where attacking from behind just doesn't always happen. It can be frustrating on the Eredar Twins, and I can only imagine that Kil'jaeden would be a nightmare as Mutilate. I don't see anything particularly overpowered by removing the "behind the enemy" component in a PvE setting.

That being said I had a lot of fun during my time as Mutilate. It is definitely the most fun spec to play, and feels the most immersive. I hope that it can be brought up in line with Combat Swords so that we don't have to hurt the raid to play an enjoyable spec.

If you have any questions feel free to post a comment.