Why slower weapon on main hand for rogue?

[warwaffle]

I was in a group with a rogue today and was showing off his new sword (sword of omen) but said too bad it isn't slower. I don't understand why...

[surodat]

For regular attacks when you have a slow weapon, you have higher "damage per swing" hits spaced further apart. For a fast weapon, you have lower "damage per swing" hits spaced closer together.

When you use certain attacks (like Sinister Strike) they are Instant attacks that ignore the speed of the weapon and use only the "damage per swing" in the formula to calculate damage. So a slow weapon would have a higher damage potential for these special attacks.

[Clavina]

Not much to add to the above answer. All I'll say is that you can see what abilities this affects because it will say 'causes weapon damage + x' in the tooltip.

[Baboon]

Yep, it's not so much important that it's slow, it needs to have high min/max damage. That's usually found on a slow weapon.

For offhand it's important to be fast, for applying poisons, for sword spec to proc (if you have that) and combat potency to proc (if you have that).

[Wintrow]

In Patch 1.8 instant attacks were normalized so that the damage is more dependent on the dps and not the min/max dmg of a weapon. There is still some difference, but not that much.