So you think that people should aim less for the mastery and just take it as a bonus for when they have to use a slower offhand?

I posted this separately by accident, just vote the other one down:
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I'm not promoting, say, going back to a 2.2 offhand. But I'm saying that the mastery should narrow the gap between 1.5 and 1.6 so that .1 speed no longer equals a weapon tier. Right now the rule of thumb is that (for example) a 1.5 T8 weapon is the same or better than a 1.6 T9, due to CP and poison mechanics.

While slower weapons proc those less, they do more damage with the mastery extra attack. But the mastery should also proc off your instant attacks, imo. That would help make the stat more valuable.

The alternative is also true. A 2.5 MH won't be immediately cast aside in favor of a 2.6, due to more mastery procs.

Also, I'm at work and can't test, but are the Main Gauche strikes yellow damage? If so, they would have a 9% miss rate, can never glance and may or may not be normalized. This info is probably on EJ somewhere, I'll try and find it. If they were normalized that would favor wielding a non-dagger in the OH.

Or maybe they are moving to a slow/slow model, ala enhance shaman? I'm searching the wowhead cataclysm site on the 1-handed weapons...

...and all of the +agility 1h weapons with ilevel 300 and up are 2.6 speed.

So what it looks like to me is that combat rogues will be going slow/slow in cataclysm, at least based on available weapons. The mechanics for level 80 and Wrath of the Lich King just don't work for what they have planned.

I can follow your logic, but there's one thing I hate about MG.

We're spending gear points on mastery JUST so we can facilitate a slightly slower OH? With rogues being one of the few DW specs, why not just build us fast OHs and call it a day? The variance of 1.5-1.7 speed weapons is silly. We would lose Combat Potency procs from having a quick OH but regain them via mastery... when we could just have no mastery, keep Combat Potency, use a quick OH (which is better for poison), and have a great stat instead of mastery. The issue is that combat rogues have NO great 2nd stat, we have haste and then the terrible duo of crit/mastery. Even crit scales better for mutilate than it does for combat.

It's going to be almost impossible to avoid the Mastery stat. It's all over the place. Instead, call for a change to Combat's mastery mechanic. Proccing off yellow attacks is a good start. Upping the base percentage or percentage per point of Mastery would also increase its value.

As for building fast OHs, they probably don't want to put items in drop tables for one class. Think about their reasoning for giving Rogues axes ... it's a similar philosophy. Enh Shaman, who use Agility weapons (they still do that right?) want slow offhands. Hunters don't care.

So it's either make Enh Shaman want fast offhands, or make Combat Rogues want slow. They sort of chose slow for Rogues, but didn't take it far enough. Sigh. But it's not so broken it can't be fixed. Really, I'd call Combat's overreliance on weapon speed the broken mechanic. Sub and Assassination care, but not nearly as much as Combat. They can also use fast daggers.

They should make CP a PPM, drop only slow Combat weapons and go from there. That'd lower poison damage, but so what? We're not the poison tree. Adjust damage elsewhere. I'd suggest making DP a PPM, but that would hurt Assassination so I won't.

BTW, as a follow up from before, EJ says Main Gauche is normalized, which should mean it's a yellow attack.

I don't mind talents that encourage going slow/slow if it meant I could use an offhand sword and do competitive damage. When I play combat, I wanna swing big flashy swords and axes, not a puny dagger.

However, I think Chase nailed the problem when he described Main Gauche as "anti-synergistic". Take a look at the Mage fire tree and marvel at how all the different talents and abilities interact and feed into each other. That sort of interplay is part of what makes optimizing your spec and gear so much fun. It's not that Main Gauche is a bad mastery, it's just that it clashes with all the other rogue talents and pulls you in a different direction rather than supporting your build. Dealing with Main Gauche is like drinking a steak-flavored milkshake. The flavors are nice, but they just don't go together at all.

Why would blizz waste their time itemising 1.5,1.6 and 1.8 offhands, and then introducing complex calculations to balance them all, when combat rogues are the only class/spec that uses fast agi based non-dagger weapons (except for hunters who might use it as a stat stick where speed doesn't matter). And if they introduced 2.4 and 2.5 agi based mainhands just because MG allows them to balance them better they still have the problem that they are suboptimal for the other spec that uses them, enh shaman.

This is the same reason they pretty much only itemise 2.6 agi based off-hands for enhancement shamans, and 2.6 speed str based weapons for SMF wars/ frost DKs