Fixing Rogues, Part 4: AoE
Posted 09/01/11 at 7:29 PM by Aldriana
Today I’d like to discuss rogue AoE. Its sort of a tricky subject, as its not that our AoE at current is precisely bad - in fact, Combat has quite possibly the strongest cleave in the game, and Assassination sustained AoE on large packs is quite strong as well. However, despite these clear strengths, our AoE as a whole is poorly designed and needs significant reworking.
The first problem is the large discrepancy between specs. Assassination is quite respectable at (some times of) large-group AoE, and Combat is fantastic at killing two adjacent targets... but Combat is useless at large groups, Assassination is weak at small groups, and Subtlety stinks at both. Its fine to have some differentiation between the specs - most melee classes have gaps in their AoE capabilities - but it seems like the discrepancies are a little too large. A gap of 20 or 30% between specs seems reasonable in the name of differentiation, but when one spec is the best in the game at a given role and another has absolutely no ability to contribute at all, that seems like a problem. Hence, in general, I’d like to see Blade Flurry brought more in line with the cleave abilities of other classes, and at least some degree of cleave functionality provided to Assassination (and Subtlety); and similarly, FoK should have some value beyond spreading poisons for an Assassination rogue, such that even if a Combat rogue isn’t a “good” AoEer, its at least worth hitting the button.
Second, the fact that FoKs damage scales strongly with our ranged weapon is rather bizarre. The fact that our melee weapons - the tools with which we do the majority of our damage - are reduced to mere stat sticks - and, if you believe current theories, might even want to be replaced with vastly inferior weapons purely on account of speed in some situations - while our damage primarily scales with a slot that’s normally itself a stat stick is sort of odd. It would be as if hunter AoE were determined primarily by their melee weapon, or caster AoE primarily determined by their wand. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that our AoE would be more sensible and balanced if it primarily depended on our melee weapons, just like the rest of our damage - good daggers for Mutilating should also be good daggers for AoEing, and right now, that’s really not true.
The other problem with our AoE arises from our resource system. If you look at the average DPS per target a Firelands-geared Assassination rogue does in a sustained AoE situation, its in the neighborhood of 6-7k DPS. And if you look at what comparably geared casters do, its in the same ballpark. Now, FoK costs 35 energy and in a sustained AoE situation you cast one every 3 seconds or so; hence, if all damage is being done by the FoK directly, each cast would want to do around 20k damage - simple math. But this is a problem, as it means that if you start with a full energy bar and cast FoK on 4 or 5 consecutive GCDs, you can create burst AoE on the order of 20k DPS per target, which is well beyond the capabilities of any other class. Hence, one of the following three things must be true:
a) Rogue burst AoE is overpowered.
b) Rogue sustained AoE is weak.
c) Rogue AoE has some manner of significant ramp-up mechanism.
For instance: if instead of all DPS coming from DoT casts, half of your damage comes from rolling DP on all targets, and you get (say) 3500 DPS from that, each FoK only needs to do 10k damage. Your initial spike is thus a far more reasonable 10k DPS without significantly reducing the sustained throughput. This is more or less what Assassination would be doing right now, were it not for poison stacking; the problem with the current system is that in addition to needing a ticking DoT to achieve full damage potential, each individual FoK does less damage during the stacking process, resulting in us doing markedly inferior damage for the first 5-10 seconds of AoE.
The problems with Blade Flurry are a bit more straightforward; in addition to being arguably too good, its more or less completely passive. You toggle it on and then do your normal rotation exactly the way you always do, and you get rewarded with significantly more damage. In addition to doing less damage, it would be more interesting if it required a more active adjustment of one’s play to switch from single-target to multi-target DPS. And, of course, its unique to Combat; ideally, Mutilate and Subtlety would have some ability to do increased damage on small numbers of targets, which, currently, they don’t.
So with that in mind, lets talk solutions; these ideas are, as with my last entry, somewhat speculative, as what changes are needed to fix AoE depend in some part on what changes are made to the base cycle; without definitive answers to the questions posed last time, its impossible to get either the balance or the feel of the AoE rotations correct.
I. Fan of Knives reverts to Wrath mechanics
FoK damage being tied to thrown weapons is a failure no matter how you look at it - it wreaks havoc with proper scaling, and simply doesn’t do enough damage. Performing a single MH strike and a single OH strike with each weapon made far more sense. Depending on the overall balance of the class it might be necessary to adjust the energy cost to get sustained damage in the right place - but its not far off. A single hit from our MH weapon doesn’t do that much more damage than our thrown weapons, and an OH hit does rather less; hence, this would less than double the damage per FoK. Given the low current damage of FoK for Combat and Subtelty, doubling the damage per cast doesn’t seem too unreasonable, and when coupled with the DP changes I proposed in an earlier entry, I think Assassination winds up in close to the right place as well.
The only hitch, of course, is that Assassination’s “competitive damage” will be because of rolling DP, which the other specs don’t have, so while all of them will have reasonable initial burst only Assassination will be able to sustain competitive DPS past the first 10 seconds of AoE. But given that most AoE doesn’t last much longer than that (Maloriak slimes excepted), I don’t know that that’s really a big deal. Between the three specs we’ll have both competitive burst AoE and competitive sustained AoE, and really, I think that’s all we can ask for.
II. Thrown Weapons have more stats than Bows and Guns of the same ilvl
It was always sort of a nuisance that BIS for rogue ranged slots overlapped BIS for Hunters. They attempted to fix this in Cataclysm by making our Thrown weapons more than just stat sticks, but it failed miserably; not just because of the unfortunate implications on FoK scaling, but also because we don’t need to AoE on most fights, and when we do we can weapon-swap. Hence, I’m of the opinion that a different solution should be considered, namely: if Thrown Weapons are just stat sticks, make them better at being stat sticks. If a thrown weapon had the stats of a bow 2 tiers higher, we’d no longer be competing with hunters for bows - problem solved.
III. Blade Flurry Fixed
Now, this one is nebulous, as it depends a lot on how Combat ends up working. If, for instance, the Eclipse-inspired model of Bandit’s Guile I proposed last time were implemented, Blade Flurry might not need any changes at all; simply make it apply only to physical damage, and the problem solves itself. As “normally” you’d be doing a lot of your damage with Shadow Strike, the amount of damage you transfer via Blade Flurry would be markedly reduced (bringing it closer to balance), and you could adjust the amount of damage you do to each target by pushing your cycle more or less towards physical damage (under the assumption that doing more physical damage means doing less total damage). If, however, an alternative approach to fixing the Combat cycle is adopted, the changes needed might be more dramatic, but without knowing what that is...
One thing I will say, though, is that I generally favor reducing the power of Blade Flurry but allowing it to keep high uptime over any reversion to the previous design, where it was every bit as powerful as it is now but had low uptime. On most fights, the ability to help out consistently on each wave of adds is more important than the ability to burst the crap out of something every once in a while, so I do favor solutions that lower Blade Flurry damage over ones that simply make it usable less of the time.
IV. Cleave for Assassination
There are probably a lot of ways to do this, but it seems to me that the natural way to do it - given the theme of the tree - is by duplicating our poison damage onto multiple targets. Depending on how you define Poison (i.e., whether you count Venomous Wounds and Envenom or not), its somewhere between 30 and 60% of our damage, which is a reasonable amount to be transferring to extra targets in a cleave-type situation. There are probably many ways to do this, but here’s one that I like: assume we have an ability that costs, say, 20 energy, and for the next 10 seconds, all poison damage you do is also dealt to that target. No cooldown, and can be put on more than one target at once.
Now, obviously the energy cost and duration would need some tweaking; it would be easy to make an ability like this too strong. But I like the fact that it allows you do transfer a reasonable amount of damage to additional targets, and each additional target you deal damage to lowers your damage on the initial target. It gives you a nice amount of control over how much stuff you want to cleave, versus how much damage you want to keep doing to your primary target.
Also interesting is the question of range, both for casting and for the transfer of damage. If you make both short-range (say, 10 yards), it will function much like a cleave; but if you allow it to extend to, say, 30 yards, it will function a lot more like a caster multi-DoTing; when doing V+T, you could do most of your regular damage to the dragon on the ground and “cleave” the one in the air by copying your poison onto it. It can be debated whether multi-DoTs are good for the game or not, but given that many casters already have the ability, there’s something appealing about the notion of lessening the melee/ranged disparity by allowing melee some similar capabilities, and this seems like an intriguing way to do it. It certainly seems worth considering.
The problem, of course, is how that interacts with FoK. Putting this poison mark on a target and then FoKing a large pack of stuff is probably a recipe for some fairly ridiculous single-target DPS numbers, sort of like the old FoK/Blade Flurry shenanigans, but easier to pull off. Having Rhyolith consist of rogues marking both legs and then FoKing all the random adds down and thereby doing more damage to the legs than they could any other way would be a little bit odd. It seems like this should be limited, or fixed somehow. One solution might be to make it more of a "link" ability - i.e., you mark any number of targets, and any poison damage applied to one member of the link is applied to all. This still has problems, though - on a small pack the possibility of linking it all together and then FoKing it down results in some troublesome scaling issues - so I'm hoping there's a better solution out there somewhere. I just don't know what it is.
V. Cleave for Subtlety
And here, I run out of ideas. Given Sub’s general emphasis on bleeds and armor penetration it seems like it would be interesting to do something with one or both of those; but its not entirely clear to me how to do so in a fun and interesting way. If you have any ideas, let me know.
The first problem is the large discrepancy between specs. Assassination is quite respectable at (some times of) large-group AoE, and Combat is fantastic at killing two adjacent targets... but Combat is useless at large groups, Assassination is weak at small groups, and Subtlety stinks at both. Its fine to have some differentiation between the specs - most melee classes have gaps in their AoE capabilities - but it seems like the discrepancies are a little too large. A gap of 20 or 30% between specs seems reasonable in the name of differentiation, but when one spec is the best in the game at a given role and another has absolutely no ability to contribute at all, that seems like a problem. Hence, in general, I’d like to see Blade Flurry brought more in line with the cleave abilities of other classes, and at least some degree of cleave functionality provided to Assassination (and Subtlety); and similarly, FoK should have some value beyond spreading poisons for an Assassination rogue, such that even if a Combat rogue isn’t a “good” AoEer, its at least worth hitting the button.
Second, the fact that FoKs damage scales strongly with our ranged weapon is rather bizarre. The fact that our melee weapons - the tools with which we do the majority of our damage - are reduced to mere stat sticks - and, if you believe current theories, might even want to be replaced with vastly inferior weapons purely on account of speed in some situations - while our damage primarily scales with a slot that’s normally itself a stat stick is sort of odd. It would be as if hunter AoE were determined primarily by their melee weapon, or caster AoE primarily determined by their wand. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that our AoE would be more sensible and balanced if it primarily depended on our melee weapons, just like the rest of our damage - good daggers for Mutilating should also be good daggers for AoEing, and right now, that’s really not true.
The other problem with our AoE arises from our resource system. If you look at the average DPS per target a Firelands-geared Assassination rogue does in a sustained AoE situation, its in the neighborhood of 6-7k DPS. And if you look at what comparably geared casters do, its in the same ballpark. Now, FoK costs 35 energy and in a sustained AoE situation you cast one every 3 seconds or so; hence, if all damage is being done by the FoK directly, each cast would want to do around 20k damage - simple math. But this is a problem, as it means that if you start with a full energy bar and cast FoK on 4 or 5 consecutive GCDs, you can create burst AoE on the order of 20k DPS per target, which is well beyond the capabilities of any other class. Hence, one of the following three things must be true:
a) Rogue burst AoE is overpowered.
b) Rogue sustained AoE is weak.
c) Rogue AoE has some manner of significant ramp-up mechanism.
For instance: if instead of all DPS coming from DoT casts, half of your damage comes from rolling DP on all targets, and you get (say) 3500 DPS from that, each FoK only needs to do 10k damage. Your initial spike is thus a far more reasonable 10k DPS without significantly reducing the sustained throughput. This is more or less what Assassination would be doing right now, were it not for poison stacking; the problem with the current system is that in addition to needing a ticking DoT to achieve full damage potential, each individual FoK does less damage during the stacking process, resulting in us doing markedly inferior damage for the first 5-10 seconds of AoE.
The problems with Blade Flurry are a bit more straightforward; in addition to being arguably too good, its more or less completely passive. You toggle it on and then do your normal rotation exactly the way you always do, and you get rewarded with significantly more damage. In addition to doing less damage, it would be more interesting if it required a more active adjustment of one’s play to switch from single-target to multi-target DPS. And, of course, its unique to Combat; ideally, Mutilate and Subtlety would have some ability to do increased damage on small numbers of targets, which, currently, they don’t.
So with that in mind, lets talk solutions; these ideas are, as with my last entry, somewhat speculative, as what changes are needed to fix AoE depend in some part on what changes are made to the base cycle; without definitive answers to the questions posed last time, its impossible to get either the balance or the feel of the AoE rotations correct.
I. Fan of Knives reverts to Wrath mechanics
FoK damage being tied to thrown weapons is a failure no matter how you look at it - it wreaks havoc with proper scaling, and simply doesn’t do enough damage. Performing a single MH strike and a single OH strike with each weapon made far more sense. Depending on the overall balance of the class it might be necessary to adjust the energy cost to get sustained damage in the right place - but its not far off. A single hit from our MH weapon doesn’t do that much more damage than our thrown weapons, and an OH hit does rather less; hence, this would less than double the damage per FoK. Given the low current damage of FoK for Combat and Subtelty, doubling the damage per cast doesn’t seem too unreasonable, and when coupled with the DP changes I proposed in an earlier entry, I think Assassination winds up in close to the right place as well.
The only hitch, of course, is that Assassination’s “competitive damage” will be because of rolling DP, which the other specs don’t have, so while all of them will have reasonable initial burst only Assassination will be able to sustain competitive DPS past the first 10 seconds of AoE. But given that most AoE doesn’t last much longer than that (Maloriak slimes excepted), I don’t know that that’s really a big deal. Between the three specs we’ll have both competitive burst AoE and competitive sustained AoE, and really, I think that’s all we can ask for.
II. Thrown Weapons have more stats than Bows and Guns of the same ilvl
It was always sort of a nuisance that BIS for rogue ranged slots overlapped BIS for Hunters. They attempted to fix this in Cataclysm by making our Thrown weapons more than just stat sticks, but it failed miserably; not just because of the unfortunate implications on FoK scaling, but also because we don’t need to AoE on most fights, and when we do we can weapon-swap. Hence, I’m of the opinion that a different solution should be considered, namely: if Thrown Weapons are just stat sticks, make them better at being stat sticks. If a thrown weapon had the stats of a bow 2 tiers higher, we’d no longer be competing with hunters for bows - problem solved.
III. Blade Flurry Fixed
Now, this one is nebulous, as it depends a lot on how Combat ends up working. If, for instance, the Eclipse-inspired model of Bandit’s Guile I proposed last time were implemented, Blade Flurry might not need any changes at all; simply make it apply only to physical damage, and the problem solves itself. As “normally” you’d be doing a lot of your damage with Shadow Strike, the amount of damage you transfer via Blade Flurry would be markedly reduced (bringing it closer to balance), and you could adjust the amount of damage you do to each target by pushing your cycle more or less towards physical damage (under the assumption that doing more physical damage means doing less total damage). If, however, an alternative approach to fixing the Combat cycle is adopted, the changes needed might be more dramatic, but without knowing what that is...
One thing I will say, though, is that I generally favor reducing the power of Blade Flurry but allowing it to keep high uptime over any reversion to the previous design, where it was every bit as powerful as it is now but had low uptime. On most fights, the ability to help out consistently on each wave of adds is more important than the ability to burst the crap out of something every once in a while, so I do favor solutions that lower Blade Flurry damage over ones that simply make it usable less of the time.
IV. Cleave for Assassination
There are probably a lot of ways to do this, but it seems to me that the natural way to do it - given the theme of the tree - is by duplicating our poison damage onto multiple targets. Depending on how you define Poison (i.e., whether you count Venomous Wounds and Envenom or not), its somewhere between 30 and 60% of our damage, which is a reasonable amount to be transferring to extra targets in a cleave-type situation. There are probably many ways to do this, but here’s one that I like: assume we have an ability that costs, say, 20 energy, and for the next 10 seconds, all poison damage you do is also dealt to that target. No cooldown, and can be put on more than one target at once.
Now, obviously the energy cost and duration would need some tweaking; it would be easy to make an ability like this too strong. But I like the fact that it allows you do transfer a reasonable amount of damage to additional targets, and each additional target you deal damage to lowers your damage on the initial target. It gives you a nice amount of control over how much stuff you want to cleave, versus how much damage you want to keep doing to your primary target.
Also interesting is the question of range, both for casting and for the transfer of damage. If you make both short-range (say, 10 yards), it will function much like a cleave; but if you allow it to extend to, say, 30 yards, it will function a lot more like a caster multi-DoTing; when doing V+T, you could do most of your regular damage to the dragon on the ground and “cleave” the one in the air by copying your poison onto it. It can be debated whether multi-DoTs are good for the game or not, but given that many casters already have the ability, there’s something appealing about the notion of lessening the melee/ranged disparity by allowing melee some similar capabilities, and this seems like an intriguing way to do it. It certainly seems worth considering.
The problem, of course, is how that interacts with FoK. Putting this poison mark on a target and then FoKing a large pack of stuff is probably a recipe for some fairly ridiculous single-target DPS numbers, sort of like the old FoK/Blade Flurry shenanigans, but easier to pull off. Having Rhyolith consist of rogues marking both legs and then FoKing all the random adds down and thereby doing more damage to the legs than they could any other way would be a little bit odd. It seems like this should be limited, or fixed somehow. One solution might be to make it more of a "link" ability - i.e., you mark any number of targets, and any poison damage applied to one member of the link is applied to all. This still has problems, though - on a small pack the possibility of linking it all together and then FoKing it down results in some troublesome scaling issues - so I'm hoping there's a better solution out there somewhere. I just don't know what it is.
V. Cleave for Subtlety
And here, I run out of ideas. Given Sub’s general emphasis on bleeds and armor penetration it seems like it would be interesting to do something with one or both of those; but its not entirely clear to me how to do so in a fun and interesting way. If you have any ideas, let me know.
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Ok, well...
Quote:
Combat has quite possibly the strongest cleave in the game, and Assassination sustained AoE on large packs is quite strong as well. However, despite these clear strengths, our AoE as a whole is poorly designed and needs significant reworking.
First, combat flurry- I believe this is the TOP SPEC on any fight that lets two things sit next to each other long enough, and "long enough" isn't that long. I love this. Being "top" at anything is pretty hard to do in this game, and normally you pay for it. Quite honestly, I think flurry is amazing, but, why do you think it should be toned down? Remember, this is the era of the multi-dot. There are plenty of situations, and here we have an ability designed for dominance in one specific situation, and it delivers. Blade Flurry is what is right about combat. I'm pretty pleased that this results in there being fights where you actually want a rogue, and it is because the rogue does the most damage there. I certainly want a fire mage or shadow priest on firebirdey, for instance- it's perfectly acceptable to want a combat rogue in some niche fights. Additionally, I really like that the majority of the challenge with blade flurry is simply finding a place where that little flurry cone hits them both correctly. Simply put, being the best at something is ok. It doesn't need to be tuned down to match the other classes, many of whom have very comparable and equally niche strengths. Have you been a rogue for so long that if you actually top a meter by a mile on a niche fight that you think crap, there's no way that's working as intended? You don't have to feel guilty! :P Now, on to Fan of Knives, our very strange aoe mechanic. Quote:
Hence, one of the following three things must be true:
a) Rogue burst AoE is overpowered. b) Rogue sustained AoE is weak. c) Rogue AoE has some manner of significant ramp-up mechanism. Now, I'll point out- fok didn't used to HAVE this problem. It had a damned timer when it first came out, which was going to let them balance around pressing it on cooldown (basically an aoe rotation would be fok every 10 seconds and cost about half your energy). When they removed the cooldown, they also made it vulnerable to energy pooling and AR, and as I'm sure you'll recall by exactly how much fun you were having in Ulduar, it was too good. The cooldown removal also expunged our awesome kick effect from it. Current dev thinking generally has moves like this, with a cooldown, as being out of favor, so I won't take that direction. Currently, fok costs 35 energy, and normally sucks. The easiest change would be to up the energy cost on it, and also up the damage of the move (probably up the damage per energy as well, as it is generally weak). I'm still not quite sure why they went the lower energy route instead of the buffed physical damage route. In any event, fok is a terrible move. It has a few things that modify it: 1- Combat can AR it, and gains a +75% damage buff to it. This makes the physical portion of it pretty decent under AR, compared to other rogue specs. The low cost of it makes it suffer from the same issue as the rest of combat, which is a flaccid move we slap around while our energy bar doesn't obey us. Certainly, aoe in this situation (under AR) is not poor, but nothing close to what many other classes and specs can pull off with equivalent cooldowns. In any event, certainly upping the physical damage of the move helps here, but combat is in a bizarre situation with a +75% damage from spec. 2- Mutilate can apply dots to a million hojillion things- mutilate instead applies three poisons at once (maybe). This lets at least one spec keep "mortal hamstring of tongues". It also interacts bizarrely with exceptionally large packs- I'm not positive, but if you had like 30+ targets in one area long enough, I think mutilate would be top dps in the game, because spreadable dots (and the instant poison that procs) aren't limited by the aoe cap. Again, a niche situation where rogues are top. However, I'm less attached to this one- it's very rare that we have more than 10 targets, and unheard of for there to be 20+ targets in a situation without it getting hotfixed. So this is actually top dps on buggy or undesirable situations. My solution is to change the talent to instead allow you to double poison your thrown weapon- it just has two poisons on it. Then it no longer scales with main and offhand weapon speed, still provides the same effect in pvp, and stacks slower in pve than the current 3x poison thing. If the physical damage goes up, that should address this to a degree. 3- Sub has a cheaper fok. First, again, a more powerful fok will help right away. Second, if the move is actually strong, making it cheaper might actually be good. Third, my idea would be that fok could apply a debuff that would weaken the target to additional foks by that same rogue- a ramp up mechanic that is in flavor. You couldn't come up with an aoe for sub for the same reason the devs couldn't- nothing in the spec concept screams 'throws knives in a circle'. Now, what about that poison bottle ability? That could go somewhere. What about making an actual rotation? If we ever get combo points on ourselves, we could even have an aoe finisher! Quote:
II. Thrown Weapons have more stats than Bows and Guns of the same ilvl
Another, similar suggestion would be amplify some of the stats on the thrown weapon with a talent (say, agility). This is functionally identical to your idea, but doesn't mess up the way the item reads. However, at the end of the day, if you think rogues should always have a thrown weapon, the right thing to do is to take away everything but that. Quote:
Fan of Knives reverts to Wrath mechanics
A return to Wrath mechanics here would probably be ok, but it removes one of the distinguishing features of assassination (the 3x apply, or as I have proposed, a 2x apply on just the thrown). I could go either way on this, you make some compelling points. Quote:
IV. Cleave for Assassination
Or maybe that's too hard for an aoe situation. Still, your idea is great, and I'll think about anything to add to it. In summary- I suspect a buff to fan could fix it for all specs, combined with tweaking to mutilate poison application if that ends up on it being too good. I don't think we need a redesign of aoe, or a nerf of flurry- however your Poison Fork idea is really great. |
Updated 09/02/11 at 12:52 AM by Verain |
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You're right - there's nothing wrong with being good at a particular function. There's nothing wrong with being the best at it. But I think there is such a thing as being too good at it. I'm not advocating making Combat mediocre at cleave; I merely suggest that the margin of our superiority probably could stand to be reduced. There's "clearly the best", and then there's this. When the gap between 1st and 2nd is larger than the gap from 2nd to 16th, its no longer a case of "this is something we're good at", but "this is something that is almost mandatory for beating the fight until you outgear it pretty significantly". And I think the game as a whole benefits by reducing the number of such mechanics as much as possible. So while I'm fine with Combat Rogues being everyone's first choice when it comes to killing two adjacent targets; but I think its important that if you don't have a Combat Rogue, you can use a Fury Warrior or a Ret Pally and not find the fight unreasonably harder. And - on a more directly relevant note - I think it would be good if you could do the fight as Assassination and not have that be a hindrance to your guild.
Right now Combat does something like 1.7x its single target damage while DPSing two targets, while a Fury warrior does (say) 1.4x, and everyone else 1.3x or less (and Assassination 1x, as there's nothing they can do that's useful right now). I'm merely suggesting making Combat 1.5, Fury 1.4, and everyone else - Assassination and Subtlety included - 1.3. Still the best, still something you want to bring - but not crippling if you can't. Admittedly that does reduce some of the fun factor of being overpowered at times, but provided its compensated by a reduction in the number of fights where we're underpowered, I think that's a trade worth making. You are, of course, welcome to disagree. As for removing the ability to use bows, crossbows, and guns... given some of the major cuts to the class I've proposed, you really think I'd balk at cutting weapon types if I felt it was the best solution? I suggested what I did because I think its better. It might be a bit more complicated (although the point is highly debatable, based on the implications toward leveling itemization if for no other reason). My goal is not to make thrown weapons the only thing we ever use; I simply like the notion of having them be BIS to cut down competition with hunters. Heck, they probably don't even need to bump the overall stats - they could just itemize them more towards agility and get the same effect. Ultimately, I suppose its a matter of personal preference, but I'm of the opinion that having more options is almost always better than having fewer options - even if you don't expect to use those options very often. |
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Reading your post Aldriana keeps me thinking that you like Combat, but much more you are a fan of Mutilate. About Sub - you don't like it at all.
The mechanism of the AOE attached to our thrown weapon seems to me very logical. And I hope that if Blizz will develop the AOE for rogues they will continue this route. I have some ideas: Assassination: change the part of the 'Vile Poisons' talent - 'and gives you 33/67/100% of the normal chance of applying poisons from your equipped melee weapons when you use the Fan of knives ability’ by 'and gives you a 33/67/100% cost reduce of the Fan of knives ability while the Envenom buff is up’. Subtlety: change the ‘Serrated Blades’ talent a way that using FoK will apply a bleeding dot that will stack 3 times dealing 50% damage of the thrown weapon per stack. Combat: I like the current BG mechanics and it will would be awesome if it will play some role on using FoK: FoK will have the same increased damage to other targets as your current target depending of the BG phase on it. |
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Updated 09/02/11 at 4:35 AM by Duze |
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So, let me put together some thoughts I have spreaded all over the room:
Having an aoe rotation of sorts As assassination we already have it: put bleeds in up to three targets and use fok to maintain the poison stacks. It's a bit annoying and hinders the damage-on-demand we usually strive for, I'll give you that. But I think something could be made out of it, taking the garrote change proposed last week: say we don't get garrote out of stealth, but instead get hemorrhage glyphed baseline for every spec; this way we could put double bleeds up (hemorrhage>rup) in no time. Now, I know hemo was the signature strike of subtlety, but it's been iterated in so many ways already, that I doubt this could harm it in any way: if anything it'd consolidate the ability. I could tie this with my previous proposal of an increased number of combo points for assassination. I'm not entirely sure how many extra points we should have: the ideal would be 6 since it'd mean a mere 20% increase (in line with current 20% energy increase of vigor or te 30% runic power increase of frost); but 7 leaves some more room for decision making (as I covered before), and 10, ultimately would completely let us perform full back to back finishers as a different burst on demand. Regardless of the final amount, this could let us (even if the hemorrhage baseline gets scraped) put up longer ruptures on different targets (through redirect), the combinations are far too many to enumerate so I'll leave it there. Assassination cleave This is, genuinely, a unique and very interesting proposal: it leaks 'win' all over the place, if I may say. I'd suggest linking it to throw in a talent: when you use your thrown, you apply a poison spear[...]. I don't fully understand the energy cost: flurry has an energy penalty because it's too powerful, but I don't think this should cost any energy if properly balanced (thus my linkage to throw); I suspect you edited some stuff out somewhere: being able to cleave comes at the cost of something (casters pay in global cool downs, we pay in energy regen), however, you word the ability like it lowers the damage dealt to your main target, so there's a cost in place already (or is it to avoid having binary decisions?); I imagine we could design it so that we transfer all damage (it'd need a cost) or we share all our damage among all our speared targets; the duration has some tricky aspects to it too but they could certainly lead to some interesting situations: if it last for too long we could face situations where your speared targets don't die (for some reason) but you need to regain full power over your main target. The implications are rough in both the PVP and RP ends though: -RP: poison linkage in the distance is weird, but I'd say 'throwing infinite knives in a circle' or 'magicaly applying some weapon poison on dp applications of the other' is no better. -PVP: The range limit you posit may be to stop us from putting spears up and run somewhere to beat some flag carrier while damaging, for free, the unsuspecting healer. In any case, this could be easily prevented (nullifying the effect in pvp), but ultimately it could help a bit the very shallow role of assassination in arenas. AOE debuffs Spreading CoE was a pain until death knights got the ability to do it in two clicks. Assassination and combat Rogues spread debuffs with point blank abilities (fok). Subtlety could use some help in this department, and I think having the possibility to apply sunder to every target in sight could be nice; I admit rogues are known for doing stuff to their targets one by one: rupturing or eviscerating every target in one go doesn't sound very RP friendly but I'm yet to fully understand how do we 'expose' some one's armor other than having them drop it in admiration of our sexy moves, so making it an aoe strikes me as being within the realm of what's plausible. AOE finishers The poison bomb was already brought up; I may add to it the possibility to implement it ala old unholy blight (first iteration): a cloud of poison surrounds the rogue dealing damage over time to anything that comes in contact with him or her. I could see this backed into envenom; in fact I could see subtlety performing it more than I see assassination (especially after the poison spear master-piece): granted, sub is the powerhouse of subtle stuff (bleeds and arpen), but the mastery is finishers, so having it perform some finishers aoe-style (expose ans mentioned before and envenom) could be interesting. Fun AOE Aoe-ing stuff is rarely 'deep' in scope, but it usually is fun. Some specs are complaining about how hard it is to aoe for them so I don't think we should add too much depth into it: having a simple rotation like the one assassination could have is nice and all, but I'd consider the one we have right now (vanish>garrote>redirect>mut>rupture>rupture with ruthlessness) as a bit too far into what's too much complicated (or too programmatic even). But, there's more to aoe than execution: -I'd say the throwing spec (interrupt on fok) was a fun thing: at least it had a deeper meaning than 'kill stuff in a circle'; having to respec to for Thorim was not a whole lot of fun per-se, but I'm sure something could have been made to it so the fight was more than fok-spam. Let's not forget that one of the key components to alone in the darkness where rogues in interrupt duty: that was fun for we also needed to stagger tricks on the tanks so they could hold every mob. The talent got nerfed because of the pvp aspect: we were running compos of 4 or 5 rogues that could easily cheese some (not many) fights. -One other aspect related to aoe that I enjoyed, a lot, was the tier8 bonus: you gained energy on dp ticks or something like that. This passed mostly unnoticed (other than Freya packs) until Onyxia: rolling DP on the whelps energy capped us even when fok cost was 50 energy. Now, this was deeply imbalanced at the time but the mechanic was fun nevertheless. I think something could be made nowadays along those lines for combat, since current flurry doesn't really feel anything especial (you simply do more damage and get to extend the life of your keyboard). Say combat (the energy spec?) has this tier8 bonus instead of vitality (so we have a way to balance energy regen without a flat increase): gaining more energy with every target forces you to do more stuff so the cycle gets more frantic when it feels like it should. Ranged slot I suspect we are yet to see some more development done in this area. Cata shipped with some clear ideas about it: if it's a weapon, it should matter, otherwise it's a stat token. They merged totems, sigils, librams into a relic; if that stuff is still around it's primarily to compensate for those classes that do have a ranged weapon. Now, thrown as an item could very well disappear (thus ending the very weird aspect of them not being a consumable) and so could wands: much like we carried totems around, we'd keep the ability to use them at our leisure but without the need for an equipment item. The only class that is left is hunters so, lets make bows/xbows/guns something you equip on your non ranged weapon slots; in all fairness this whole thing is little more than a legacy issue with melee hunters (raptor strike and the like) which never got to be a thing in itself, so fixing hunters fixes all problems; competition for gear pieces is good, but devaluing or bastardizing them into stat tokens is not (and hunters had to that a whole lot more than we did: double daggers, useless pole-arms, you name it). |
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merely suggest that the margin of our superiority probably could stand to be reduced. There's "clearly the best", and then there's this.
Last tier had plenty of fights where multi-dotting was highly beneficial, and several fights where you would correctly bring all ranged if you could. Rogues can do none of those things, and presumably never will. Much like Blizzard has chosen some situations where warriors operate in a high-rage mode throughout the whole fight, they have chosen some fights where a flurry favorable situation is possible. Basically, Blizzard has some fights where they say, "If you don't bring a rogue/enough rogues, you're gonna have a hell of a time on this". Given that we've had that same message for a wide variety of specs spread out amongst the non-rogue classes, I believe that this is consistent with their design goals, and maybe it will combat the wide spread number of skilled rogue mains that reroll, never to be seen again (and never to be replaced). As for respeccing? Well, I tend to hearth, respec, and reforge multiple times through the night. Obviously combat for reg-Fandral (and H this would be more important), but I think I'm having better single target dps as sub versus muti on h-shannox, as well as r-Baleroc (and h, before we realized we need a bit more dps from our offspecced guys), and also h-bird, and the remaining regs I'm just whatever spec I was last (r-Rag I often go muti because I like making the casters kill adds faster, but it's definitely not required). I will readily agree that our toolkit is spread out so much, and classes that only have one dps spec, such as spriests and pallies, tend to have a bigger toolkit in one spec (spriests more than rets) than we have in any one of ours. I also consider reforging quite the blight because I'm dropping like 250ish per reforge, and I have to hearth to do it, taking me firmly back to level 60. But I think the spec issue is a different one. I think that is a pure versus hybrid design issue, and one where pures maybe should have that philosophy changed some- we should be able to stick with a spec without having whole broad swaths of it entirely neglected, such as Sub's nonexistent aoe, or fire's general lack of single target this tier. But the existence of blade flurry to me doesn't say, all rogues need flurry, or, flurry is too good, to me it says, "combat hella rules at this, respect". Quote:
Admittedly that does reduce some of the fun factor of being overpowered at times, but provided its compensated by a reduction in the number of fights where we're underpowered, I think that's a trade worth making.
So, if we lost flurry, or lost flurry being awesome? I don't think we'd get anything. I don't think Blizzard looks at combat and says, well sure, it can be frustrating to play, but it has blade flurry, so we're good. I mean, frost mages don't have blade flurry... do they get something that makes you want to bring them to ANY fight? I submit that after nerfs, we would just be left in that universe. I also comment that a fury warrior's single target is generally strong, and the fact that a warrior doesn't need to spec dance for his dps roles (but might if he has to tank) might be considered a selling point for him over a rogue. Unless I'm mistaken, fury tends to top combat on dynamic add fights such as Beth, right? Part of this might be the fact that the 1.7x multiplier only holds if you are actually on target-prime and target-two for that whole time. If the second target walks out of range, or is otherwise not present, the fury warrior simply doesn't press cleave, but you might have a choice as regards toggling flurry. Additionally, when a mob passes by, the fury warrior simply says hello with well timed special attacks- meanwhile, unless we predicted it and have an eviscerate, the mob simply eats a couple forked autoattacks and maybe a sinister, if we are lucky. Your 1.7 and 1.4 assumptions assume a situation optimal for combat- in more dynamic ones, plenty of other classes have abilities that are far shinier than flurry. Quote:
Reading your post Aldriana keeps me thinking that you like Combat, but much more you are a fan of Mutilate. About Sub - you don't like it at all.
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The mechanism of the AOE attached to our thrown weapon seems to me very logical. And I hope that if Blizz will develop the AOE for rogues they will continue this route.
Your idea for mutilate (free fans during envenom) would tie mutilate aoe to having a target in range that is having single target performed on it. I believe that would be poor, and do not like your idea. Your idea for subtlety (bleeds based on thrown weapon damage) is a very nice one, and would go well. It's similar but more straightforward than the one I proposed earlier. Your combat idea could work, but honestly, simply buffing fok's physical damage would help combat more than tying something else to BG. This also relies on having one big target that you are hurting, and a bunch of little ones to take damage (and heaven forbid your selected target die first). In other words, this turns fan into blade flurry, for when you have multiple targets instead of just one, while not helping sustained aoe where you actually are turning all your energy into fans for an extended period of time. Quote:
One other aspect related to aoe that I enjoyed, a lot, was the tier8 bonus: you gained energy on dp ticks or something like that.
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To make my position on the various specs in this series of posts clear: it is important to me that both Combat and Assassination wind up balanced, interesting, and fun. I have played both specs, I have enjoyed both specs, and would like to see both specs persist. Any differences in the way I approach them should not be construed as favoritism towards one spec or the other, but as a reflection of the fact that Combat needs a lot more work than Assassination. Assassination mostly works; it has a consistent theme and mostly does good damage; it needs a more interesting cycle and a bit more damage from active sources, but there's not really any mechanics where you say "this is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced with something completely different". Combat, on the other hand, does - its a terribly designed spec propped up by high energy regen, +AP% and +Damage% multipliers, and a passive mastery. If you drop Combat Potency, Vitality, Main Gauche, and Bandit's Guile and nerf AR down to something reasonable, you wind up with a spec that does literally half as much damage as it does now. And a spec that wouldn't be any less interesting if you replaced all of those with just "you do double damage to everything". So - in my estimation - all those things need to be dropped entirely, and replaced with mechanics that actually do enough damage to start with in interesting ways. And that requires a rather more substantive overhaul than what Assassination needs.
With that said: I am less attached to the notion of Subtlety viability. It would be nice if it could be done, but I consider it less essential, for three reasons. First, Sub is harder to rebalance in this way, because of its PvP viability. With the other specs, I can propose massive changes without worrying overly about the PvP implications, because they're not currently PvP viable anyway. With Sub, changes must be made far more carefully, as a lot of stuff that's useless in PvE is actually pretty important to PvP. Second, I don't think we actually need 3 raid-viable specs. Blizzard has set it as a goal, but I just don't find it to be a particularly worthwhile way to spend development effort. If we wound up with two good PvE specs and 2 good PvP specs, I'd be fine with that. So while I'm perfectly fine with Sub winding up as a viable PvE spec, I don't consider it to be a priority. As long as the damage winds up in roughly the right place I'm a little less worried about fixing all the picky details of its playstyle. And finally: as near as I can tell no one likes my ideas on Sub anyway. Every time I propose a change to Sub rogues the response is "you must be changing that because you haven't played Sub enough to know how awesome it is". The feedback I see indicates that most Sub rogues would be fine leaving the spec completely untouched, except possibly for fixing the positional dependence thing. And given points 1 and 2, I don't really find it worthwhile to spend a lot of time arguing with them over it. So when I think of an idea I like for Sub, I'll post it; but if we conclude this process with really awesome overhauls for Combat and Assassination and Sub more or less where it is now, I'm sort of okay with that. Poison cleave has an energy cost, as cleaves should not be free damage. Tying it to throw might have the same effect (although I suspect that would get really annoying in a hurry, particularly since throw has a minimum range), but if you look at the cleaves of other classes, almost all of them exchange a modest amount of single-target damage for a larger amount of splash damage. Multi-DoTing comes at the expense of casting nukes on your primary target, and Whirlwind is not part of the warrior single-target rotation. This is because, roughly speaking, cleaving should be a decision. If you assume the ability I proposed is simply a cast spell - all it takes to apply is a GCD - there's nothing stopping you from putting it on a mouseover macro and DoTing up everything in the room while still doing your full single-target rotation - and that'd be stupid. The goal of the energy cost (and relatively short duration) is to encourage people to only use it when its actually helpful, rather than spamming it all over the place because they have free GCDs. There are other ways to give it an opportunity cost, to be sure, but energy seemed like the obvious one. A splash finisher would be another option for cleave-type damage, although I think it works out to be sort of weak on its own merits. For instance: Envenom does maybe 15% of your damage to a single target. Whatever you replaced it with to AoE would do less single-target (per the above discussion). Hence, you're looking at transferring perhaps 10% of your single-target damage to a second target. That's not really enough - its barely relevant. If you also replaced Rupture in your cycle that would give you a little more, but you're still talking less than 20% - and giving up quite a bit of your single-target damage to do it. Its not a bad idea, but there needs to be more to it if its actually going to be a viable cleave. Yes, mage dominance on Alysrazor (and Cho'gall) is also excessive. And multi-DoTing was very strong on a number of fights as well. But that's a general "casters vs melee" (and to a lesser extent, a "mages go nuts with caster buffs") problem, and I anticipate (or at least, hope) that Blizzard will address it more broadly. My goal here is to make us balanced against other melee, and trust Blizzard to sort out the larger global issues. Its true that you can respec multiple times per night if you want to min-max, or if you like the variety. But you shouldn't *have* to. More generally what happens when one spec dominates a particular fight is that most people just play that spec for the entire instance. Combat representation is very high in Firelands not because its clearly better on any fight other than Domo, but purely because its better on Domo. It would be preferable if multiple specs were viable on each fight, so you could pick the one you liked best rather than being stuck with the one you need to be. Yes, Blade Flurry is very specialized - brilliant where it shines, weak otherwise (though a lot of that is the general rogue target-swapping issues). So wouldn't it be better to rebalance it to be good everywhere instead of circumstantially overpowered? Blizzard may or may not think in terms of "we made you weaker in area X so will make you stronger in area Y" - but Blizzard isn't writing these opinions. I am. More to the point, I suspect Blizzard *does* think "well, we already think you're balanced, so if we're going to buff you and fix some of these problems you perceive, there needs to be a compromise elsewhere". And I rather suspect they also look at one spec completely dominating a certain class of fights and think "gee, we should fix that". Regardless: if you think Blade Flurry should remain overpowered, that's fine. I don't - I don't think it should, and I don't think it will. Lets agree to disagree and move on. |
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Updated 09/02/11 at 3:35 PM by Aldriana |
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Yes, you need some kind of penalty for switching to aoe mode; but you were designing two for this poison fork: the energy cost, and the single-target damage decrease. The problem I see here is that energy expenditure is always tied with combo point generation, that's the name of the game: we have a continuous income source (energy) that we invest to get another resource (cps) to transform in combat events; we can interact with energy generation by different means, but directly expending it produces or consumes combo points (even shiv does that). I would expect combo points to, at least, drop from my target when using this poison fork (if not actually produce new combo points in the off target).
I think having it share the poison damage is punishment enough. If the compound of all your speared targets and the main target adds up to 100% poison damage (say, having two off-targets, they get 20% poison damage and you deal only 60% to your main target) the system balances out: you deal the same damage but you put it where you want it (you then fok the spears for added bonus). But we could balance it so you effectively deal more than 100% damage (because dealing 20% damage to off targets is not sufficient, really): we could deal 10% less poison damage per spear and redirect full diminished damage to the off-targets (we'd deal 180% with two targets, 210% with 3, 240% with 4); this collapses once we get past 5 targets, so it'd be a real cleave. Alternatively we could do it so it scales exponentially with fok (ala fire shock> fire nova). As for how to implement it, well: a new strike is something I don't personally like, and throw (or shiv, even) are places where it could fit. We are revisiting the ranged slot too, so redesigning throw is not out range. I was never a fan of ninjas (pirates are a lot better), so I could bare swaping the shuriken for a real dart or a spear of sorts, or a set of knives we hide in the sleeve (this ties in with the notion of assassination being the really subtle spec, and not subtlety). Well, the possibilities are endless as of now, but I think this could be balanced without an energy cost. Having an ability that is always good to use without thinking is not bad as long as there's a penalty somewhere: flurry is just that and, regardless of its current balance, we could say that the toggle is the only really good choice they made with combat in this x-pack from a purely design stand point. As for subtlety: I personally despise the spec; I enjoy the complexity only for the problem-solving it poses. It simply is the hodgepodge of everything that didn't fit into combat or assassination. I have the strong feeling people like it for all the wrong reasons and the approach some of us are taking is to debunk its complexity game-wise: it's not complex, nor deep, and it's just as predictable as the other two; it's only complicated to describe, for it doesn't fit nicely into how we describe cycles and when described in priority-list-fashion it simply gets too long. We've discussed in the past things like shiv in combat cycles, or weapon swaps, or dp tick timing, or the merits of taking less than 5 (now 3) points in cttc, or the rounding of stats after kings; now it's hemo weaving and find weakness up-time: all those things are nice to have around but, when a spec is a continuous of those little things, it makes up for lousy game development. So, with that in mind, I welcome everything you post in here regarding its design. |
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So, it sounds like I did a poor job of explaining the poison cleave idea, as what you describe isn't quite what I had in mind. I was thinking of it as a poison *copy*, not a poison *split*. A poison split is completely pointless - the whole idea behind a cleave is that its a way to do more damage to 2 (or 3, or 4) targets than you can to one. So the idea was that all poison damage dealt to your primary target is still dealt 100% to your primary target, but also 100% to any marked targets - thus creating more total damage than you can get on one target. However, it takes (assuming the numbers I put forward) about 2 energy per second to keep up on a target. So if you're just keeping it up on a single target, you can more or less do your regular cycle and be fine - you'll get fewer envenoms, but you should be able to get enough to sustain both Rupture and SnD. However, as you add additional targets, you have less and less energy (and thus do less and less damage) to your primary target (and thus to all the cleave targets as well). In the extreme case, if you're trying to keep it up on 5 targets, you basically have no energy for anything else, so all you're doing is autoattacking and transferring your autoattack poison damage to additional targets, which is presumably weaker than FoKing. Hence: on 1 target it does nothing, the first two additional targets (or so) give you some nice bonus damage at the expense of a slight reduction in single-target damage, and after that you switch to FoK. And under this design - where it copies poison damage rather than splitting it - the energy cost is the only thing keeping you from spamming it on everything in sight.
Now, what you describe, in terms of developing multi-target scaling by splitting the poison damage and imposing the multi-target scaling somewhat more manually by tweaking the exact sharing could also work; its simply not what I had in mind. I do think it has a slight disadvantage of being a bit harder to explain (try to write a tooltip of any reasonably length that describes what it does), but that's not an insurmountable problem; and it probably is a bit easier to fix the "mark a single target and AoE a pack of crap to nuke the hell out of it" problem that my original proposal has. |
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A minor concern is that mastery would likely exceed all other stats in those situations, or rather, all stats besides agility (and maybe even that eventually).
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Actually it's just me: for some reason I overlooked the 10'' duration, so I simply assumed the cost to not be enough to have any deep impact on the cycle. I'm still not sold on the energy cost though: the only ability that I can think of with an energy cost and no combo points involved is HfB; I have some memories of this very same issue being discussed at some point: it was weird at the time and, to me, it still is.
I borrowed a shaman to test the multi fire shock (which is the closest we can get to this poison cleave in terms of execution: switch target, cast shock, switch back and do your thing). Not surprisingly, the cycle is annoying with more than 2 targets: not as much as some try to make it out to be, but certainly something I wouldn't try without fortexorcist. Now, what we are discussing here is different: we'd still have fok to rely on for larger packs, while enhance is stuck with multidot>nova. In any case, this could very well be the kind of thing that assassination is lacking: some juggling other than envenom uptime. However, with your scenario, I'm worried it could lead to fun/not-fun problems when cleaving for longer than 10-15 secs: cleaving as a warrior doesn't require much attention, other than using the ability when you see some mobs nearby; this fork requires full awareness, debuff timing and spends energy without a short term reward. Rephrasing Chris Hanel on blood tanking: the 'spinning plate problem' happens when you feel you are not achieving anything through debuff juggling, but rather you're are trying to maintain a situation, so eventually it becomes a negative reinforcement instead of a reward. All in all, I'm more inclined to a fire-and-forget cleave, but I'd be more than willing to explore your implementation too. |
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I'm still not sold on the energy cost though: the only ability that I can think of with an energy cost and no combo points involved is HfB
That said, the annoyance of juggling it is a legitimate concern; when i first started thinking about the problem I was contemplating just having Assassination multi-DoT for small numbers of targets, but the incessant complaints of Enh Shaman have convinced me that that's probably a bad idea (also the fact that it doesn't really do enough damage). That said, I'm a little less worried about it, for two reasons. First, as you note, it only applies to small numbers of targets. For the most common case - your primary target and one add - a focus macro is more than sufficient to deal with it - its just one extra timer to watch and a single button to hit. It would admittedly be somewhat obnoxious to maintain it (along with a proper cycle) on two adds, but past that I suspect its not worth bothering with anyway. And realistically, I think the notion of a cleave that most rogues can do pretty easily on two targets but good rogues can distinguish themselves by managing 3... isn't entirely bad. Only question is whether its more "annoying" than "hard", and as to that I can't comment. Second is the fact that Assassination isn't really designed as our primary "cleave" spec. If you want a more straightforward (and probably better) cleave, there's always Combat and Blade Flurry. Much as Arcane and Fire have rather different AoE potential for mages, I think its okay if Combat and Assassination have different strengths in that respect as well. The point is not to make every spec good at everything, its merely to narrow the gap. So instead of the current situation where Combat can't AoE and Assassination can't cleave, we wind up with Combat having a good cleave and decent burst AoE but no sustained AoE, while Assassination has a so-so cleave but good AoE. That seems somewhat reasonable to me. All that said: poison sharing as a cleave is certainly not without its problems, and if you have better ideas I welcome them; this is the best I've come up with so far, but I'm totally willing to believe that there's something better out there. I will, however, note that Mastery scaling isn't really a major problem, in my opinion, as poison damage - whether delivered via autoattack, regular cycles, or FoK - scales fully with Haste and pretty well with Agility; and with 100% poison crits (which we all know I'm going to add to Assassination at some point in this series), crit will provide a decent damage benefit as well. Mastery will be the best AoE damage stat, to be sure, but as its gains per point are linear and all the other stats also provide decent scaling I think we should be safe from any runaway stat values. |
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Subtlety CLEAVE
I'd imagine as a subtlety rogue myself, that a proper way for a subtelty cleave would be either in ways of a bleed or a finisher. Like a new finisher called: Twin-blades or something along those lines that damages an area infront of the rogue and also applies the poison and bleed that is on the target on to the other enemies (so you will have a full DP stack AND bleed on those guys for additional sustained dps while ramping up for your next finisher again) < I think this is good as subtlety also emphasizes single target-dps. This way, the "cleave" finisher will only be done every like 10/15s or so as to maximize total damage as the DP stack AND bleed overtime will be more beneficial in damage/energy than repeating the twin-blades finisher again while the DP stack AND bleed are still up. Note: This is assuming a cleave situation wherein you generally want to keep massive damage on about 2 to 3 enemies that will not go down anytime soon |
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Updated 09/03/11 at 9:34 AM by omnimon3000 |
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I was thinking more about the poison fork idea. Aldriana has it be a low energy move with low duration (by default he sets it as 10 seconds, with a 20 energy initial cost). He has you pick targets, and for this to be anything but terrible you would probably want a mouseover ability macro for this. It is for this reason that I think it needs to change. Since the purpose of this blog entry seems to come up with ideas that the devs might find palatable (as witnessed by the part where he throws combat under the bus :P ), I will say that the devs won't go for this idea in rogues as written.
Here's why: Right now, all the classes whose mechanics OVERTLY reward "switch to a new target, put up an ability or two, switch to a new target" for up to some optimum number of targets are not melee. I don't think this is because of some story reason- I think it's because melee lose autoattacks when they do this, and casters don't. Yes, plenty of healers target the boss and then heal with mouseovers, and certainly offensive casters can do funky macro things. But, entirely without macros, these classes can do their normal jobs. The poison fork would really punish anyone not macroing it in some fashion by autoattack stopping completely. Option 1- The rogue actually CASTS the ability. In this case, the assassination rogue has a baseline two second cast to put the ability up, during which he can't be autoattacking. In this case, we can probably up both the energy cost and the duration of the move because the activation cost went higher. Option 2- The rogue gets a small reticule when the move is activated. When he clicks, a tiny poison bottle is thrown at the reticule, hitting ONE target. This requires tech upgrades, sadly. Option 3- The rogue places a poison bomb on the ground. Poison damage is dealt into the poison bomb cloud based upon poison damage dealt to the primary target. This has a lot of overlap with fan of knives- it's not a multi-dot (which Aldriana is pushing for rogues to get), nor is it a flurry (or a cleave as you heathens call it) that chooses based on a small cone, nor is it target limited. I think Option 1 is the only way using mechanics we have right now, and keeping the multi-dot idea pure- it has to actually be a cast that turns off our autoattack while casting. With a cast, you could pick the target (with macro or actually target) press the cast button, and then switch the target back to the main target, and use an instant, the attack button, or more likely an instant tied to startattack to get back on the boss. This would still function without a macro. But, more fundamentally- this would make us the only melee with multi-dot. Right now, we have two aoe niches for two of our specs. If you can arrange two enemies to stand inside a small area for an extended period, you don't just have a great recipe for reality TV- you have the ideal setup for blade flurry, which will outperform everything else in the game in that one narrow reality. For the rest of multi targets, the passive nature of it makes it contribute, but not zip up meters. Meanwhile, over in assassination, you have the ability to spread serious debuffs easily- an aoe curse of tongues can be swapped in if that ever matters, an amazing aoe slow will be brought to bear with our normal spec (and can be enhanced), and, of course, if the enemies are numerous and long lived enough and in the same area for long enough, the deadly stacks can get high and deliver what I believe to be the highest sustained aoe damage in the game. Alternatively, triple instant poison plus the slowest weapons available plus envenom plus a full pool of energy allows for rather serious burst damage (though some other specs have similar tricks without such setup, they have to blow real cooldowns for this). So, combat has one trick that is rarely useful, but makes beautiful gold rise to the top, as the gods intended. It has little to nothing for real aoe. Assassination has several things for real aoe, all of which can be useful in some situations, but none of which seem irreplaceable. Its sustained damage on several targets being top dog would make the shiny gold meters, but Blizzard just hasn't implemented that (unlike the tiers where nothing stands next to each other but there are many adds, tiers we haven't had for some time). As an aside, I will point out that if assassination had "poison flurry", which was identical or similar to blade flurry but only affected poison damage being dealt to the primary target, but using the same tiny-invisible-cone mechanic that blade flurry does, assassination would do very similar to combat in those situations. Now, I won't leave sub out. Sub absolutely needs to be pve viable, just as combat and assassination need to be pvp viable (numerous changes were made to assure this, in fact, but then it sort of stopped for the expansion, thoroughly breaking the promises that were made when preparation was ripped from the clutches of mutilate and combat). This is Blizzard's stated intention, and yes, they have whole classes that this is true of right now. It's good that you are willing to make do with a fractional class, but that's not what we were told was the design goal, back when they had the balls to state things like design goals! Sub and Combat lack true aoe. Combat masks this with the amazing blade flurry, but put a bunch of little guys running around and combat doesn't even want to leave the boss anymore normally. The only reason mutilate counts is because of its powerful and odd abilities that turn fok into a free-for-all distributor of debuffs, one of which can do excessive damage. So why not just fan? Fan answered most of these questions nicely at level 80. Very clearly, the devs feel that our aoe should be much more niche (or entirely nonexistent, in the case of sub). We weren't told why- perhaps they felt that fan was too easy. In any event, I think a substantial fan buff would answer most questions here. |
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I don't find it particularly painful to have abilities that require certain macros or addons: tricks is handled that way by most rogues; a point could be made about the proficiency of each method to do it, leading to skill and versatility distinctions among our peers, which is a good thing as Aldriana pointed out.
-Using the most basic target name macro for tricks, you can set yourself in a position where your target dies and you find no target to use tricks on. -A rogue that thinks ahead of this will have multiple macros for each of his or her potential targets (one of which is usually a tank) -An even better one will have a way to decide his target on the fly: grid/clique or having macros to set the focus on mouse over raid frames. Fact is, this fork ability is way easier to handle than tricks (since the targets for this ability are always alive): the second a raid is shipped, the forums will get flooded with macros, that will have a list with the optimal target for evey fight to place the debuff on; if more than one target is needed, I'm sure Spoon or someone else will swiftly write an addon to handle it: having new clickable frames for every new target or something along those lines. Or even better, we'll see an improvement in the way the game deals with targeting (which wouldn't surprise me one bit, seeing as that's a very needed feature in modern mmo). I would certainly like the whole switch target routine to feel less annoying, but I think this ability could work without casts. Targeting areas in the field with the mouse is something I don't personaly dislike, but that may be due to beign very used to using bombs, so I'm inclined to believe that kind of targeting should not be mainstream -distract aside- but rather be exclusive to engineering. |
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Updated 09/05/11 at 3:20 PM by nextormento |
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Maybe I'm alone on this one, but I'm sort of ok with Subtlety having little-no multi target damage. With the way things are looking, it could come out as the top single target spec and I would much prefer that to strong AoE.
However, I certainly think the spec can facilitate a cleave, or even burst AoE (not via Fan of Knives). Given Subtletys high finisher rate and finisher based Mastery, it feels natural to me for this to be finisher based. There's two base ways to make this possible: a finisher that does straight damage to 2 targets totaling more than a single Eviscerate or a finisher that does damage to a potentially unlimited amount of nearby targets. I think that's too bland. Given Subtletys relative emphasis on bleeds, I think a Thrash model could be employed, essentially giving us a finisher based AoE bleed. Given the fact that Assassination already fits the bill for sustained AoE, the niche for strong Burst AoE is left empty. It should be fairly easy to balance this around short term AoE. My idea is something like: [Name of ability] Instant 60 Energy You do something interesting, consuming all of your Bleed effects on the current target and causing all nearby targets to bleed for X damage every second for 1/2/3/4/5 seconds. Damage based on bleed effects consumed. Could also do some initial damage on application, perhaps? I'm sure there's flaws with the idea, but AoE (especially burst AoE) should come at a hefty cost, and losing your bleeds should suit, given they are fairly important for Sub. It shouldn't be sustainable at 5CP and shouldn't be efficient enough at lower than that. You would also need to spend 1 GCD on Hemo and one finisher on Rupture before using this again, so it should stay strictly as a burst AoE ability. The idea could also be applied to Assassination Poisons or Combat in the same fashion. |
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I'm of the opinion that having one spec be the definitive leader in single-target DPS is poor design - assuming its true right now (which isn't obvious to me), I would view that as something to be fixed. And if you posit that all three specs do comparable single-target DPS, that leaves Sub as the spec with minimal utility and no AoE, which would put it at a clear disadvantage relative to the other specs. Hence, if Sub is to by viable without being obligatory for simple fights, both its raw DPS output and its available utility should be brought it line with existing specs.
You're welcome to favor an alternative design, of course, but that's the goal I'd build towards. |
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A suggestion for an AoE finisher could be created relatively simply as creating a new glyph.
Glyph of Toxic Smoke When Smoke Bomb is cast it creates a toxic cloud damaging all enemy targets for X damage per second. Smoke Bomb keeps its 1.5min CD, damage can be attuned to keep it from being too OP. PvP usage is limited as it is circumstantial. As Smoke Bomb is a current mechanic, it should not require too much work (perhaps change the cloud green??). And it adds a fun little button to consider in mass AoE. |
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I don't find it particularly painful to have abilities that require certain macros or addons:
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Maybe I'm alone on this one, but I'm sort of ok with Subtlety having little-no multi target damage. With the way things are looking, it could come out as the top single target spec and I would much prefer that to strong AoE.
If Blizzard was stating "Sub should be top single target damage and bad at everything else", I, like you, would be thrilled. In fact, I've been running sub on some fights because, well, I can outdamage my other specs on, say, Baleroc with sub. But I don't think it's good to leave out a part of a class on an assumption. Your finisher ideas are pretty good. I will say that a thrash-based one will be rather situational, but in combination with large enough buff to fan for it to be worth using for small burst aoe, I would agree that such a thing could make for an interesting sustained mechanic! Quote:
I'm of the opinion that having one spec be the definitive leader in single-target DPS is poor design - assuming its true right now (which isn't obvious to me), I would view that as something to be fixed.
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Hence, if Sub is to by viable without being obligatory for simple fights, both its raw DPS output and its available utility should be brought it line with existing specs.
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Glyph of Toxic Smoke
When Smoke Bomb is cast it creates a toxic cloud damaging all enemy targets for X damage per second. It's also not a "finisher" as you wrote it. I would like to see us throw a poison bottle at some point. Every time that happened in ToC I was like, DO WANT. |
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I agree that sub is very much hamstrung by the PvP cross over issues. Though I'd say there are some avenues still open for helping the PvE utility of the spec without making PvP balance impossible. Finishing moves is one possible route.
I'm very much interested in this idea of tying an aoe and/or cleave finisher to Sub. It fits well with the mastery and general concept of the tree, and requiring combo points helps keep it in control in the PVP setting. It's also far more interesting to have an aoe ability that requires a hair more thought than "spam button now", or even "spam button on cool down". Seemingly the combo point generation in raids vs arena settings would also be a positive limiting factor. That said it would be best if it served a slightly different role and needed to be managed in a different way than the one we already have. Why not make it targetable? This would give it some nice contrast to FoK and it would certainly fill a different niche. If moving out of it quickly negated most of the damage it would lessen it's pvp usefulness, though still probably be strategically employed. This still leaves a fairly wide window to play with balancing the amount of up front damage. Sustained damage could be kept in check either by making it less than optimal to overwrite the ability, or if all else fails, giving it a short cool down. |
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I agree on what Aldriana said for assassination.
For the combat spec, I think it is illusive to think about a remodelling of the whole combat spec without a new expansion. And why should every specialisation be at the same level when speaking about AoE ? I think that people would be happy if combat could do only a decent AoE while keeping a dynamic and strong rotation on its main target. I agree, the AoE damages as combat are too low and should be a bit higher to be really worth pushing the FoK button. An idea is to give FoK a capability similar to the Divine storm (retribution paladin). If it hits 4 or more target it will grant "insight" (independently from the target switch) and/or combo points. It could easily be merged in the talent "throwing specialisation" and/or in a glyph. And of course to increase the direct damages of FoK. |
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Recent Blog Entries by Aldriana
- Ten Things Blizzard Should Change About Rogues Before Mists (08/30/12)
- Mists Beta Thoughts: Feint (03/29/12)
- 5.0 Talents (11/13/11)
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- Fixing Rogues, Part 5: Filler (09/24/11)
