Noxxic's guide for Madness Assassin - another epic fail

Starting our next series articles with a look on the Madness Assassin guide that Noxxic has.

1. Stat priority

There is plenty wrong about what Noxxic says about stats. I mentioned some of it on my previous text, so not going to repeat it all here.
http://noxxicsucks.blogspot.fi/2014/04/noxxic-and-dps-stats.html

Power and critical rating use same itemization points. A Madness Assassin will want about 300 critical rating and the rest power.
Obviously you should not even look at the total critical chance percentage as that is useless in determining how much critical rating to put in your gear. Even if the actual total critical chance at some gear levels did get close to the 25% that Noxxic tells every class to get, it is out of pure coincidence.

Surge and Accuracy use same itemization points. You will want to put accuracy as close to 435 as possible and put surge on all the rest of the gear that have accuracy or surge, no matter how much that ends up being. Neither of them should be 395 at this point like Noxxic falsely claims.

Now for the more interesting part...

2. Skill tree build

Just what the hell is this? I have no words to describe how bad this is. This looks like it is made by someone who just blindly clicks all over the skill tree without paying any attention to what he ends up putting the points on.

It would take too long to explain everything wrong with it so just pointing out few of the most obvious mistakes.
- Why so many talents with 2/3 or 1/2 points? Seriously, in some rare cases I would understand it in some filler points needed to get higher up in the tree or just spending the last leftover point somewhere, but this does not appear to be the case here, especially not with that many. This is just someone spending points completely randomly without even looking at it.
- There is one unspent point left there!!! Whoever made this was so lazy that they did not even bother to check if they had spent all the points they have to spend.
- There is no point in Creeping Terror (we'll get to that shortly)
- In a PVE dps build they suggest wasting points on useless talents such as Shapeless Spirit, which does nothing to help your dps and is almost completely useless in PVE in any sense, even while they are missing points in several talents that would affect your dps. There are number of other talents that you should not have such as Chain Shock, but not going to list them all.

moving on...

ROTATIONS

Would it be too much to ask to just remove this piece of text or at least remove the part that says "maximum threat" when you have a guide for a DPS spec? 

And the rotation itself... Not sure which is worse, this or their randomly generated skill tree build.

Where to even begin? Just going to list few of the most obvious mistakes.

- Discharge is way too far down the list. It should be just on the second place just after Death Field. To make matters worse, they even put it below some melee attacks. One of the main points of the Madness Assassin rotation is to hit melee attacks on targets that have the dot from Discharge on them first, to proc Raze.

- The "key to the spec" part tells to to "maintain Crushing Darkness and Creeping Terror dots, but neglects to say Discharge dot needs to be maintained 100% uptime too. (also Crushing Darkness can't be maintained 100% uptime)

- This rotations lists Creeping Terror even though their skill tree build does not even put point into Creeping Terror. (and yes I know it had one unspent point which could be put there but with so many talents with 2/3 or 1/2 points in them it is not at all clear where, whoever made the skill tree build, even intended to put that last point)

- And the worst of all: Noxxic tells us to use Maul when exploit weakness procs from Duplicity, which is a talent so up in the Deception skill tree. Duplicity is unavailable for any kind of full Madness spec build and has been unavailable since the game changes in the Patch 2.0 over a year ago. Maul has no place in the Madness rotation under normal circumstances.

- Shock should not be there either.

Overall Noxxic only ever describes any rotations only as a simple priority list. In many cases listing also and example of the actual order in which abilities are used would be more useful.

Moving on...

Ok, again with the nonsense about "optimal threat or healing" on a dps guide. Is it really that hard to make different templates for different roles?

Normally I mock Noxxic for listing knockback abilities like Overload in their guides for dps rotation, but I admit using Overload can be ok for a DPS Assassin, since their other AoE moves are crap if, and only if, the targets are all immune to knockbacks, which should be at least mentioned if you are going to list it.

Well offensive cooldowns are not always "used on every single cooldown" as there are situations where it is better save them for a phase where you need to do a lot of damage in a short amount of time.

The way this tells to use Recklessness is also wrong since it is telling one to use it to buff Shock, which should not even be part of the rotation.

"Survivability cooldowns"

This is again just a list of defensive cooldowns and also other utility abilities. It doesn't really tell anything about how to use them best, as it should.

The only thing where Noxxic suggests something about how these abilities should be used is when they list Force Cloak + Force Shroud together as if these two abilities should be used together, which is just wrong and a huge mistake.
While there could be some (extremely rare) situations where they could be used at the same time, these abilities are used separately and independently far more often than they are used together.
Force Cloak is used to remove yourself from combat to be able to stealth ress or to reset your threat if you happen to overaggro or in some cases for Dark Embrace buff, often at times when there is no need to use Force Shroud at the same time but it would be important to save Shroud for later use.
Force Shroud is used to cleanse yourself to remove any dots or debuffs on yourself or alternatively to resist all damage from an incoming force/tech attack, and often used at times when there is no need to use Force Cloak at the same time, but that should be saved for later use.

I've given Noxxic some feedback countless times telling them to list these abilities separately, not together connected with a plus sign. They have nothing to do with each-other. After months of spamming them with messages, Noxxic eventually gave in and agreed to correct this mistake in their Assassin tank guide, but they still insist keeping this nonsense in their dps guides.

Update:

Few weeks after patch 2.7 Noxxic did "update their guide for patch 2.7" but unlike their usual rutine of just writing "updated for patch 2.7" on their guide, they actually did one more change.

They "fixed" their "talent build" to no longer have a one unspent point. However the end result is worse than I thought it would be:

So they did not even put the missing point to Creeping Terror which would have at least made some sense as they tell us to use it in the attack rotation.

Overall this spec is total nonsense with several useless talents taken, and points missing in talents that would have been important for dps.

And the rotation Noxxic presents is still exactly the same as seen above.
The rotation is of course completely impossible for any kind of build as it is not possible to have Creeping Terror and Duplicity at the same time. Duplicity is only available to Deception or some kind of Deception/Madness hybrid spec. Creeping Terror is only available to full Madness spec.

To make it worse Noxxic tells you to spec into a build that does not have either of these and still in the same guide tells you to use both of them.

So basically the guide tells you to use 2 abilities in your attack rotation that you do not even have.