Thoughts on Ask The Devs #10: Damage Dealing

The dev response impressed and scared me. Impressed, because they all but said that rogues are intended to be the highest sustained single target damage in the game. Scared, because while that's not exactly contrary to their other stated design intent, it is surprising to hear it, especially when it is so far from the true.

Essentially, that makes it sound like we will be the kings of focusing a target down (top Patchwerk damage). This DOES make thematic sense: all our specs have at least one ability on top of combo points that heavily penalize switching away from them. The issue is that Blizzard clearly considered "top Pathwerk damage" to be this Shangri-la of class balance, this thing they have to keep shuffling and hiding from us, something to strive for but never achieve, possibly mythical.

I will say that if they deliver on this, and rogues are top single target sustained, and all melee gets buffed (they highlight being melee as being a disadvantage), then I suspect most of us would be fine with that. Not only was it the older stated intent at launch, it is an enviable position that most players find desirable.

But what reason do we have to suspect that they actually mean to do that? The buffs have already been accounted for, and on a fight where we punch a target dummy for however long, plenty of dudes are above us.

On the topic of sub (and lesser, of frost)... the problem is exactly as you say. The solution is harder. I mean, why would you want a sub rogue? Is it because the boss needs to be shadowstepped to? Wouldn't you prefer a hunter on that fight, or a warrior? I guess they figure they only need to make it better compared to mutilate and combat. Ultimately, there is one fight this tier where me being sub made a huge difference, and I guess they figure, that is fine. But it doesn't seem like something you would normally want to do.

I just don't know how they could improve the spec without buffing it- and with sub being the premier rogue pvp spec (with combat and assassination nerfs incoming with the stated reason being that sub rogues are too defensive), I think they are going to handle it with a very light touch indefinitely.


Anyway, good thoughts Aldrianna, thank you.

A good post, and I agree with most points, but I don't really understand where you are getting this 'geologic' ramp-up that Subtlety has from. I do agree that Subtlety needs a few mechanic changes (rather than damage buffs) to be truly PvE viable, however.

In the beginning of a fight you will open with a SnD from healer crits pre-pull, then with Premed/Ambush your first GCD out of Stealth will be putting Rupture up, and with Subtletys frankly insane CP generation, it only takes ~4 seconds more to get Recuperate up. I wouldn't consider that geologic. Infact, it's probably the fastest ramp-up of the 3 specs.

When target switching, it's easy to delay a Shadow Dance (since it has a short cooldown) to open on an add with 2-3 CP/second. Also, it might well be worth it to use Hemo glyph and not Rupture the adds (since Rupture isn't worth it unless you can make good use of Serrated Blades, and Evis is more DPE during Find Weakess (I assume, I know Evis is more DPE in Deep Insight)). Again, hardly geologic, especially when compared to Combat's Insight or Mutilate's DP stacks or need to refresh the initial Rupture/SnD very soon after opening (since you open with a 1pt Rupture generally).

As for the rotation in general, the only change I'd like to see is less of a need to constantly monitor Premeditation/ShS in order to use your CDs efficiently, especially when you chain CDs in the start of a fight. It's very distracting to have to time your Vanish/ShD with Shadowstep being at 5 second CD left and Find Weakness dropped.

I think that the finisher/CP generation is very well balanced now (never pressured to get a finisher out but at the same time you can't afford to slip up much). If a finisher was removed, it would feel very out of proportion, so I don't think that that's the area to make changes to the Subtlety rotation, but some QoL changes (Serrated Blades being 50%/100% regardless of CPs for example) would be very welcome.

Overall, I think that the most prominent issue for Subtlety in PvE is the positional requirement. At the end of the day a good Rogue will learn the rotation and be able to do it, but no amount of skill can negate the need to be behind the boss in order to do reasonable DPS. Unfortunately it has strong PvP ties, and I think that's the bane of Subtlety PvE.

I think Sub's ramp-up time is longer than you give it credit for. For the sake of argument, lets consider a high-end Chimaeron Sub parse and look at when he finally gets everything up. Usually when I'm grabbing a high-end parse I take the #10 on WoL for the spec, but as that's foreign-language in this case, I've taken the #9 instead, found here.

First: in order to be considered fully ramped up, you need to have SnD, Recuperate, and Rupture up, and the ability to start weaving in Eviscerates. How long does this take him?

He had Recuperate ticking before the start of the fight; you can see a tick at 20:36:17.726. His first action of the fight is an Ambush at 20:36:16.400; he gets SnD up at 20:36:18.008, and Rupture at 20:36:24.116. His first Eviscerate then lands at 20:36:30.431 - just over 14 seconds into the fight.

So lets be clear: he got his important finishers up in 8 seconds, but merely having them up isn't really doing full damage; having to spend CP on Rupture instead of Eviscerate costs you a fair amount of damage relative to your ideal cycle (in particular, if you do a 5pt rupture, you've missed out on a 5pt Eviscerate which would hit for an expected ~30k damage). He doesn't actually enter full steady-state DPS mode until 14 seconds after the start of the fight, and that's despite starting the fight with Recuperate already going. So from a finisher perspective, the ramp-up time from zero is around 14 seconds. But that's not the only measure of rampup time.

For all that DP is primarily thought of as an Assassination problem, in reality it affects all 3 specs; the average IP proc in this case is 456069 / 139 = 3281 damage, so you lose over 16k damage in IP procs by stacking DP. Additionally, you lose quite a bit of DP damage over this period - look at the start of the fight:

20:36.16.400 First Attack
20:36:19.712 Deadly Poison (1)
20:36:20.456 Deadly Poison (2)
20:36:34.662 Stack Drops
20:36:40.502 Deadly Poison (1)
20:36:41.283 Deadly Poison (2)
20:36:47.309 Deadly Poison (3)
20:36:50.923 Deadly Poison (4)
20:36:58.545 Deadly Poison (5)

It took 42 seconds for DP to fully stack. Admittedly the stack dropping off is somewhat unusual and delayed it a bit, but even ignoring that - it took 24 seconds from when the old stack dropped for the new one to get ramped up. And given that each stack provides ~400 DPS, taking 24 seconds to ramp up costs another 24k damage past what we've already accounted for.

In short: between having to spend combo points on Rupture instead of Eviscerate and poison damage, you lose something like 70k damage every time you switch targets; and to do even that well, you're delaying Shadow Dance (which costs you damage), glyphing Hemo (which costs you damage) and so forth. Every time you have to stop on a target (say, to kite orbs on Sinestra, or for MC on Nef, or for any of a number of reasons on Ascendant Council), you have to restack poison and probably restart your rupture, SnD, and/or Recuperate as well. On a fight like Omnotron you won't always have Shadow Dance to get things up quickly. The list goes on and on.

In short: while Sub may or may not be worse at ramp-up time than the other rogue specs, its still quite long and quite painful compared to other classes. Even if its the best of the rogue specs (which I'm not convinced of) its still bad.

Aldriana, i'm totally with you on the comment about finishers. I mean it seems kind of logic, that the more conditionals a spell needs in order to pull it off, the more powerful it should be, right? But reality is very different.
Therefore i would be totally fine if our target switching damage would be sub par with other classes, as long as we would have this one strong suite with very high consistent single target dps as well.

As for sub: we can't deny, that there is a lot of utility in that tree. The major problem is only, that it does not really mater in PvE for the most part. I mean the super survivability is nice, but you have to do the encounter, till most of the people survive it, not just the sub rogue. therefore the trades for lesser damage compared to the other specs are meaningless imho. Unless you got a valiona type of fight.

It did not used to be that different. In the olden days, where deadly damage was poor and didn't scale much (and did not proc other poisons), target switching was mostly limited by combo points. When the game shipped, it shipped with a manual saying that rogues are top single target dps- that was the stated intent.

Now, for the last couple years, the dev intent has sort of been to have pures have one tier of damage, and hybrids are some unstated small amount below that- whether this has been achieved has been the subject of endless debates, etc. It has been hinted that melee should maybe top ranged if the boss has to move (and melee can stay on target, but ranged can't stand still and cast), and now if the boss holds exactly still and let melee drill into his ankles straight up.

We currently exist in a situation where being melee doesn't seem to get you anything (that you might want at least)- but the dev blog just said it should. And the dev blog just said that combo points are a disadvantage that should have a compensating advantage- so presumably cats and rogues should be performing more on a single target focus stationary situation (and the dev blog says that this is ideal for rogues, but that rogues are underperforming).

The dev blog squarely responds to the kinds of target swapping points being made by raiding rogues, and stated most prominently by Aldrianna in previous entries on this blog, and basically says "nope, not gonna get that, but you aren't doing well enough at your current job and we are going to fix that". So rogues will continue to have a separate role from warriors, and be terrible at swapping- and now there is the implication that we should top dps on a Patchwerk.

To be clear, rogues aren't the only class that has to deal with combo points, aren't the only class that has to deal with an effect that has to stack to 5 to then proc a second trick, and sub isn't the only spec with an auto-refresh dot- but each rogue spec individually has more to deal with than any non-rogue spec, when it comes to target switching. Bandit's Guile and Vendetta are particularly punishing, and both are brand new mechanics. The extra empasis on poison damage as mutilate reforged for mastery means that our 5 stack means a hell of a lot compared to others in a similar boat (one wonders if we reforged for haste, would that make target swapping easier? Questions most classes never have to ask). Rupture being a baby dot means that you would never, as a sub rogue, run up to a bunch of targets and rupture each of them- multi-dotting like this isn't a valid strategy. But you definitely spend talent points to let you eviscerate at least every 20 seconds such that you only have to 5 point rupture each target (preferably only ONE target) just the once. Which incurs a target swap penalty.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is the dps sub spec, presumably the only one that produces raid viable damage. Where do you see utility in that tree? Prep for second sprint and vanish? Shadowstep? Rolling recup? If you move any of those points to a utility talent (such as reduced aoe damage) you lose damage. Maybe it is worth it to you to drop a bit of dps for survival. But other classes get such options as well (hell, most specs don't have every single talent point spent for dps in the first place), and unless they will need them for a fight, it's not normally optimal for the raid success to go and get them.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is the "V+T" sub spec. They also mention dropping premed and prep for 10% extra damage to bleeding targets, and use the hemo glyph to ensure a bleed. Remember that this encounter has the following situation:

1)- A bunch of targets with low hit points, such that you can use the T1 leveling assassination talent to refresh your S+D and recup at no cost to you.
2)- Oh, and they are casting so they can't parry or dodge, nor do they attack you in any way
3)- Or even move
4)- A lot of aoe damage, that you can mitigate the majority of if you are sub
5)- Some bad on the ground you can shadowstep over
6)- A stacking debuff that will kill anyone if it goes to high. Immunity effects and cloak clear it though, and cloak sure has a short cooldown compared with immunity effects.
7)- Damage taken ramps up, but is recupable.

That is a LOT of tailor made. It sure is fun, and it probably makes Blizzard of facepalm when rogues say on the forum that they are "forgotten", but at the same time this situation is not a common one, nor can it be conquered with a common spec- or even, for that matter, the common sub spec.

There are a fair number of specs that take 14 seconds into a fight before you'd reasonably say they're into their stride rotation wise. Off the top of my head a shadow priest probably takes about that long before they have a set of empowered dots up (a lot of RNG there) and a balance druid is about that far in before they've hit an eclipse and gotten a proper set of dots rolling as well. While there are certainly a fair number of specs out there who aren't facing any really big drawbacks as DPS and deadly poison is turning out to be a crappy mechanic, there are also a lot out there who have a lot of similarly large problems, even if they aren't always exactly the same problems. There's generally a lot of posts here assuming rogues are the only ones in a crappy situation or are worse off than anyone else and that's far from the truth.

The whole frost/sub thing seems to speak to this sense that devs seem to have that a lot of people have a spec they prefer for reasons independent of it's power or ease of play, and if they could just work out the balance you'd see a spread of specs based on random distributions. That whole idea seems silly to me. When damage is balanced, people look to what is easy to play or maybe has particularly strong utility. As it stands, sub has a couple of ridiculously powerful utility talents sitting in the tree. If things were fixed so the spec was similarly easy to play as combat or assassination and had some free points to pick up cheat or shadows, all the rogues would just be sub.

Comparison to the dot-y casters is rather perilous here, since as a tradeoff to ramp-up time they have the ability to multi-dot for increased throughput. And well, be casters, which seems to be a huge benefit by itself. Not to mention your example cases will still be able to do, say, 70-87% of their "full" dps within 3 globals or so, whereas an assassination rogue will basically do no respectable damage before DP and Rupture are up and running, as a vast majority of our eggs lie in that basket, so to speak.

Moreover, for the unideal situations, many other specs that have successfully gotten a facelift recently now possess a variety of tools to alleviate target switches, AoE and so on. The question here is that with rogues (and cats, but I think assassination is the worst case here) having a resource so strictly bound to one target, why don't we get our Soul Swap, Lunar Shower etc.? Assassination has, well, Redirect. It has a long cooldown considering the standard target swapping frequency (glyphed Soul Swap is 15 seconds, for reference), and only works for the resource assassination cares the least about. Combat got some love with the addition of Bandit's Guile in it (though swapping back is another problem), and sub is the least crippled on target swaps or time off target to begin with (though Redirect clashes pretty badly with HaT, still). I reckon these are the type of situations where the 'improvement' is called for.

Addendum: Fun fact - top assassiation parse on Omnotron? Does not cast Redirect once.

Couldn't agree more with this. The fact that our finishers don't hit for really alot of damage in the gam is disappointing, added, the dev's said before cata were released that they wanted more of our damage to come from finishers.
The fact that alone isn't happening, and the dev who wrote that reply stating that we "unleash some great force" is just a joke upon the Rogue community in general. When other classes attacks can do a great deal more damage than our finishers with little to no required ramp-up time. Please make our finishers hit like trucks and not like pillows.
I'd also love to see these so called "strengths" mentioned the Rogue class supposedly has to counterbalance our weaknesses, for sure, since all I'm seeing is bad spots with Rogues in the current raiding enviroment that could be improved if they actually looked at these flaws and did something about it.
Maybe you should post your stuff to the Dev's Aldriana and let them see the reality of Rogues in the game which isn't simmed around Patchwerk-style encounters.

I've been regularly playing Subtlety on heroic content for months now. It started as idol boredom with the tier, and I've since come to enjoy the complexity of the spec. As such, my concerns about the spec are a bit different from the ones posted by Aldriana and subsequent replies. That's not to say that you guys don't have some good points.

My first concern is regarding Subtlety's difficulty: it definitely has a higher learning curve and more to monitor than the other two specs, but I'd hardly describe it as masochistic. The problem with the difficulty is not that it's more difficult; it's that there is little to no incentive to bother tackling the learning curve in the first place. If the difficulty of the spec remained the same, but utility and/or output were buffed to the point where Subtlety were the clear winner of the three specs, I guarantee people would learn to play it.

The one thing about the spec that I find contributes to more head-aches, complexity, and lost utility is Shadowstep. Its primary purpose of instantly putting you on the back of your target is a great utility tool. But the secondary purpose (+30% to Ambush) completely negates that usefulness by forcing us to use it as a DPS ability. Not only that, but it increases the complexity of our cooldowns significantly since we will want Shadowstep up for both Shadow Dance and Vanish, meaning we have to monitor three CDs of 24s, 60s, and 120s (not to mention Prep). The complexity of SD in particular goes from using it on CD and getting as many Ambush->Eviscerates in as possible to ensuring that Shadowstep will be up for it, Ambushing to get Find Weakness up, Eviscerating those CP, then Shadowstep->Ambush->Eviscerate, etc.. While it is possible to become fairly fluid with this, it is needlessly complex. I would much rather use Shadowstep for its utility than its DPS.

On the issue of target swapping and burst: Assassination and Combat's shortcomings are fairly well documented, but Subtlety is rarely discussed. It strikes me as the premiere rogue burst spec, and even target swapping isn't punished terribly since you carry SnD and Recup with you, can SD->Premed Ambush->Rupture onto the new target in as little as 2s, and be back up to speed. Deadly Poison definitely stacks slowly, but Subtlety has the distinction of being the spec that requires poisons for burst the least (10-15% of Sub damage is poisons), so not having DP stacked right away on a new target doesn't hurt Sub as much as it does the other two specs.

Well, here's what I mean by masochistic: it provides no benefit, and is more painful. Why choose more painful when less painful is an option? No real reason, unless you like pain. Hence, masochistic. I certainly agree that its not the worst spec in the history of the game - and probably not even the game at current - there's just no reason to put up with it when you don't have to.

Shadowstep: Many of the PvE problems of the tree could be resolved by removing all reliance on Ambush for DPS. It would free up filler points, enable greater use of existing utility, and so forth. How to actually do that is of course a tricky question, but it'd be a starting point.

The other major thing it needs, of course, is one less finisher to juggle to reduce the interruption penalty. I think it would be interesting to rebalance the spec such that SnD is no longer optimal to use, and perhaps reduce Eviscerate to a Rupture extender instead of a Rupture refresher to maintain a 3 finisher cycle; however, getting the balance on this correct without breaking PvP would prove rather challenging, and regardless this is the sort of rework that will not happen prior to 5.0.

Totally agree with what you're saying - I do so much more damage much faster, with less effort and lower gear levels on my DK than I do with my Rogue.

I don't object to ramp-up, I think it's a good idea, but when you have a class that has multiple ramp-up mechanics then it just gets silly. For example, as a Combat Rogue I could count poisons, combo points and bandit's guile as ramp-ups and if you were pushing it a little further you could even say that getting S&D and Rupture running are also a kind of ramp-up, although they are tied into the whole combo points mechanic. That's five different things before you can be outputting maximum damage.

Compare that to perhaps a one-button disease application (for DKs) and, apart from setting off rune regeneration in a sensible manner, you don't really have to think about any other kind of ramp-up. Plus Obliterate (especially with a Killing Machine proc, which is quite common) seems to hit for way harder than a 5-point Eviscerate and is infinitely easier to do.

It has been not "addressed" as such, but noted that this is a bit silly in this post/reply:
Please get rid of Deadly Poison Stacking - MMO-Champion BlueTracker

But they just don't go into really how bad it is.

Another ramp-up related annoyance is on adds/phases where your combo points disappear and you can't even redirect them. I know it's only a dungeon but e.g. Ohgan in ZG - whenever he dies, combo points disappear although he is still there. Also on Magmaw - head and body - combo points are reset despite the actual body part not disappearing. It's just little things like that which make an irritating amount of ramp-up downright frustrating at times.

I'm starting to feel that Combat is as masochist as Sub. I've gotten the rhythm down with Bandit's Guile, it's just that there are so many times when it's untenable. KSing into shards on Baleroc, onto Alysrazor when she's molting, KS putting you exactly into the center of where Sulfuras Smash lands, etc. There are a lot of times in the content where I need to skip a Deep Insight/KS because I'm just not able to safely hit the button. On top of that, I've been so conditioned from years of playing a rogue to spend my combo points before leaving a target, that even if Redirect is up, I am unable to move over my Moderate/Deep Insight as Redirect only works if there are combo points left on your target.

There are a select few fights that can cheese BF in t12, but at least on normal I haven't found it compelling enough to deal with the added headaches and I loath to switch to assassination as I prefer Combat.