Glancing exists as a critcap now, and cannot be avoided. Also means weaponskill is horribly overpriced on itemisation and 2 whole talent points in a rogue tree which they ASKED for on the review are now worthless.

No emoticon can express my confusion.

Edit: Except psyduck. But this forum does not have it.

Glancing was ALWAYS a crit cap. It couldn't be avoided before hand...

Depending on how they scale the crit bonus' from +weapon skill, can make the talents (and stats) worthless or not.

0.1% per weapon skill.. so the wooping 5 from a very deep talent in the rogue tree adds .5 % crit... against higher level targets? when malice adds 1% for 1 point? I hope we can get a clarification :(

Yep.

They could have just come out and said "Hey rogues you're doing too much damage sorry about that."

Kalgan did say that the intention is to keep +skill as the "best stat" for boss level mobs... I'm inclined to believe there is some miscommunication here. At least I HOPE there is :(

Regardless, I think it's pretty safe to declare my ACLG banked as of this patch.

I think this is a misuse of the word "rating". Weapon skill being buffed from 0.04% chance to crit to 0.10% chance to crit per point makes more sense....

Sorry, should have been more clear - there's no way to mitgate the blocked portion of damage anymore, meaning it's now a critcap and a block modifier. Really confuses me. Even .1 crit per skill though isn't that fantastic, especially with aforementioned critcap. What's the hit modifier, the same?

If this is true, then +5 weapon skill is:
1.2% hit, 0.5% crit, -0.2% dodge/block/parry (effectively 0.6% hit when facing the front, and 0.2% hit facing the back).

Eh, you're right, that's still pretty weak...

It's about time they nerf weapon skill - just like I had predicted they would. Pretty retarded most rogues still had to wear ACLG for bosses - don't get me started on edgemasters. I admit the talent trees could use some work now (Mace spec and weaponX).

GG humans. :P

From the PTR notes:

This is such a stupid 'shoot the messenger' mentality.

"All rogues are using bizarre gear like ACLG/Mugger's, clearly the stat is overpowered in it's functionality."

The problem was never the bloody stat, it was the distribution. Blizzard was stuck on the idea of +5 per increment (which is functionally equivalent to a cloth item with +8% spell hit on it), and now we're getting brutally fucked over because of it.

I lose about 12% of my damage to glancing blow mitigation without +10 skill (combat daggers, Maexxna's fang, mostly t2.5). I am still out-damaged by a similiarly geared fury warrior who uses +7 skill and thunderfury, so I'm not sure what your point is about who got the better end of the deal. In the end, melee dps just got hit hard. At least warriors have another role to perform in raids. I don't see combat rogues retaining their position on the damage charts after this, unless I'm missing something. I just don't see that Rogues need to have their damage lowered significantly without compensation of some sort.

Additionally, I now have a talent 25 points into the Combat tree which is worse than Malice. What gives?

Since glancing blows come out to around to a 14% damage reduction, and Blizzard has been claiming that most people won't really notice the rage loss except at the absolute top-end, yeah, I think we got the short end of the stick.

12% of your white damage possibly - if you are a cheating human, but not total damage. Your fury warrior friend got nerfed more than you did was my point.

Rogues will still be on top of almost all fights.

You can plug it into the spreadsheet if you want, going to 0 weapon skill I personally only lose 4% of my total DPS.

I don't know where you come from with "only the top end warriors will notice the nerf". Over half this forum is probably in the top end and the effect may be quite noticeable.

I'm pretty sure 10 weapon skill would gain you ~20% on your white dmg, so ~12% total sounds pretty close to right. theres no doubt, unless they make some other changes this is a monumental nerf to melee dps.

What? I have +10 weapon skill, at which point it caps. I am not human, and you do not need to be to get +10 skill. Weapon Expertise + ACLG work just as well. The advantage Humans have is that they can wear a normal DPS item instead of ACLG.

Yes, it is 12% of my *total* damage including backstab. I know exactly how much damage I lose to glancing blows, it is not particularly difficult to compare average glance to average hit and extrapolate how much damage you would've done had they not glanced. There are a few addons that do this, and simple parsing of combatlogs with a perl script works as well. It's not rocket science. 10-12% for a well-geared combat dagger rogue is very typical.

Based on what? If one class gets a DPS buff, and another gets a (significant) DPS nerf, you cannot possibly say who will be "on top" afterwards. What I do know is that it's awfully close now if gear/spec/skill are top-notch, with the premier tanking class actually coming out #1. The only thing I can think of that would set this straight is for the endgame raid mobs to be level 70, not level 73. That may very well be their intention, I do not know. But I haven't heard anything about +spell tohit gear being removed, so I think it's safe to assume they expect players to be fighting +3 mobs in expansion. Having loads of +spell hit against mobs that max at 5% resist rate wouldn't make much sense really, considering they can get 6% from talents.

Anyway, this still leaves the fact that a talent which takes 27 points to max is much worst than one that takes 5 points to max. I do not see any changes in the patch notes regarding Weapon Expertise. It was only worth taking because of the glancing blow mechanic it countered. It's useless now.

It's per weapon skill, not per weapon skill rating. Also, ACLG is only 4 skill at 60 now. Is this a good thing? I dunno, if it makes it so upgrading from ACLG to even Bloodfang is actually an upgrade, then yes it's a good change. ACLG, and weapon skill in general was far too powerful than it should have been. That said, this also makes Weapon Expertise fairly underpowered now.

The thing that mostly disappoints me about the change is that I'd recently purchased a pair of Edgemaster's on the AH for 10g which I was hoping to resell at a steep profit, but alas the people that know the value of +weapon skill are also those whom are likely to read through theorycraft and patch notes.

I can't think of much constructive to say. My DPS will go down by about 85, and a 25-point talent will provide less crit than a 5-point one. The only positive thing I can think of saying is that Blizzard hopefully replace the talent with something new -- but if they plan on it, they are being silent.

I'm not sure I understand the point of weapon skill rating actually. If it's being changed to only provide crit%, why does it need to exist at all? Near as I can tell, Critical Strike Rating already does this, and provides more. I'm hoping the patch note is poorly written and that it is much better than it sounds.

And I agree the stat was broken, it should not be necessary to acquire level 45-55 items to use over T2-3 raid gear to maximize DPS. But the problem is this is being fixed with no apparent compensation. It's just a melee dps nerf, plain and simple. Assuming you bring 5 rogues to your raids, and they are smart enough to roll with +10 weapon skill, your raid just lost something close to 500dps.

I imagine Fury warriors will take less of a hit. Looking at a damage breakdown from patchwerk kills, our top fury warrior (who sustains over 800dps) only has 38% of his damage from normal white swings; a combat dagger rogue on the other hand is nearly 65% white damage. Of course, Warriors have rage normalization to look forward to as well, but I don't know much about this.

I completely agree with the sentiment, using ACLGs all the way into Naxx is idiotic, the itemization made a couple of items grossly over powered. This just goes back to the argument that the issue is not the items, but the itemization.

If +skill remained as it is, reducing glancing blow damage loss, and was spread out so that it occurred in small amounts across a variety of weapons and armor, this change might not have occurred. The change just seems awfully short-sighted, especially considering how underwhelming +skill now seems to be, especially given the inane logic used to justify this change.

Hell, even the talent strikes me as overpowered (considering current +skill use), especially at as a 2/2 talent.

No it isnt.
40% glancing doing 30% less damage means (assuming attacking from the back with a 5% miss and 5% dodge chance and 40% crit chance),

you are doing 0.4*0.7+0.1*1+0.4*2+0.1*0=1.18 (with glancing)

instead of

0.5*1+0.4*2+0.1*0=1.3 (without glancing)

white Damagecoefficient.

Which is (in this case) less than 12% white Damage lost.

I have no BetaKey, but Fury Warriors were not f**** less than Rogues. Considering that e.g. on Loatheb ragegeneration is a major part of my total DPS, i expect nothing less than a MAJOR nerf (not that it was not due ... the balancing of the scale of the nerf is the critical part ... we'll have to see).

regards

You have that one backwards.
In not to so heavy rage fights (farming, trash mobs, not fully potted/buffed) the white damage portion of a good geared fury warrior is in the range of 60%.

Only when the rage is flowing in abundance (Loatheb, Patchwerk, Thaddius ... all with Edgemasters), you use "heroic strikes" (=yellow damage) instead of autoattacks. Hereby totally bypassing the glancing blow penalty (at a steep rage cost though -> which is the reason you see that only on encounters with a gazillion of rage). Thats the reason that your furry buddy does so few white damage on Patchwerk. Expect ttah to change when glancing blows penalty und rage normalization is in place.

Couple the fact that edgemasters are useless now with the reduced rage from doing damage I anticipate nothing than a major DPS loss of fury warriors. If i had to guess i would say a DPS loss of 100-150 DPS range.

regards