backstab vs mutilate damage Follow

I assume you're only talking about he main hand on your mutilate crits, not your total.. otherwise your mutilates suck lol. Anyway I'm not really sure what you're asking here but if you're trying to compare mutilate to backstab let's think about it for a second.. you get backstab as one of the first abilities in the game, ranking up as you level. Mutilate is a 41 point talent, again, ranking as you leve. I would hope mutilate would be doing more damage not only because of the prerequisites alone, but aslo because you're attacking with both weapons, not just one as with backstab.

...Mutilate is a 41 point assassination talent and you're wondering why it does more damage than backstab?

Come on bro...

Yes mutilate outdamages backstab by far, however you swing it. It's supposed to.

Your crit's aren't going to out damage Mutilate if you compare them swing for swing...

Try and see what your damage over a 5 minute fight was. Then compare the two.

I hate combat daggers but AR + BS + SnD is pretty secksi from what people were telling me.

the question isnt which one is better... the question is whether or not those numbers are typical of the skills.... it just doesnt feel right

That would be true if mutilate and backstab were both single hit attacks. One mutilate hit critting is equivalent of a backstab crit, and a double crit is where all the hurt comes from. Since mutilate is two attacks, it has roughly a 51% crit chance whereas BS would have a 60% crit. In other words, its only realistically about 9% lower crit, plus the sweet sweet double crits and massive CP generation on top of Find Weakness Imp Kidney shot and ridiculous crit modifiers is what makes it quite more damaging indeed.

The strength of combat daggers comes from white attacks. Although your bs's and finishers will be lower, your hits from AR and white attacks will be where your damage comes into play. For short raid encounters (>3 mins) mutilate wins out (especially if a person energy bursts to where they always have FW up when they throw their 5 point envenom)) but in long term fights combat daggers will start to shine.

He said he had about 1500ap unbuffed (1600 was his BS crit). As for the numbers, they seem very reasonable. I have 1520ap unbuffed and am using the same MH weapon as him (and a riftmaker in my OH for mute). I know when I was combat daggers my average, unbuffed BS crits on normal mobs were around where he's saying his are. I know as playing 41/20/0 my average mutilate crits are around what he's getting. Remember, unlike most posters who are like "yeah I usually ambush for like 4.2k," you know because that one time during a solar eclipse, when they had every buff avaliable, they managed to crit an ambush for that.

In any case, yes mutilate generally will outdamage BS by a decent amount crit vs crit. As far as sustained damage, both of your builds are generally good. On pure tank and spank fights combat daggers still has the potential to do more sustained damage mathematically (at the crit rates and gear levels avaliable to us right now). However, 41/20/0 is a sustained damage build... it's quite good for raiding. On a damage per energy basis, mutilate generally does still outdamage BS even with the crit boost BS gets. It also generates more CP. However, it does do better at higher crit levels as we saw at level 60 (when 41/0/10 was beating 15/31/5 in raids). At lower crit levels, CD might be a better choices (but is boring as hell :/).