The thing is if it was .1% crit per rating then the scaling they have changed all items to introduce would not really exist.

I would place my money at the moment on those gloves giving .3% crit for higher level mobs, however i don't think this level makes it worth choosing over one that has an equivalent amount of crit/hit which will be in use all the time.


I had a look on thottbot beta to see how those gloves compare to others around the same item level and came up with a couple of comparisons.

Teir 4 gloves http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=13941
Cobrascale http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=14363

T4 ones are 5 ilevels higher, cobrascale are 5 lower.

For me it looks like Gloves of deftness would fit somewhere in between, assuming they give an additional .3 crit on bosses.

I still don't think I would spend 2 talent points for what would now amount to half a crit on boss mobs though, and there will be a lot less ebaying just to get the orc/human racials.

On a side note, what are the agility/crit conversions at 70? Makes it hard to get a decent comparison without the formulas.

Weapon skill gave much, much, greater benefits than its various "costs" would indicate it should, yup. In one very particular setting, namely, fighting mobs at +3 levels. Which for all intents and purposes made it a raid only stat. Having stats like this, and having them vastly underpriced is a very good tool for balancing PvE versus PvP. Noone in their right mind really wants to hand rogues even more PvP dps, I presume? Now, rogues dont really have a pvp problem, they may not be warlocks, but they do bring lots to the pvp side of the equation Mainly, control, and damage. Rogues only really bring one thing to the current raidgame, and that is damage, and giving them a stat that gives them more damage (relative to other classes) in raids than in the rest of the game is a fairly neat solution to the near-complete uselessness of the rest of the rogue arsenal in raids.

So why nerf it? My hope for the rogue class is that this was wholly deliberate, and a part of a plan to dramatically increase the use of rogue utility in all future raids. Basically, having very, very few things being immune to stuns, kicks, poisons, and so on will make rogues a good raid class even if they do not dominate damagemeters, and further, it will make the rogue a much more interesting class to play, because it will involve much more situational awareness, timing, and tactical choices, in other words - Being a good rogue will take more skill.

So, assuming this is true. What of the raidgame untill the crusade comes out? Sorry, you are boned, go get a r 14 dagger or something <,<

Why would those gloves be good? I realize it would be cheaper than the equivalent in crit rating but my assumption is that item is paying for the skill rating 3 times over (swords, daggers, maces). How many rogues need all three? Maybe a straight up +weapon skill (not designated for any particular weapon type) might be a smart way to do itemization.

These being level 70 epic gloves I assume you could probably get a raw crit rating greater than 24 on them given their other stats (this guessed by looking at the arena set items).

Current itemisation (Edgemasters, the hunter polearm from Naxx) suggests that additional +skill mods after the first don't seem to carry an additional cost.

Thats interesting.

If that is the case then why would Fist weapons/unarmed skill not be included on the items?

I suppose with http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=11024 there wont be as much need for them to have the gloves, but there once again looks to be a lack of epic fist weapons.

That's assuming that rogues don't need more DPS in pvp, and maybe they do.

Warlocks are another can of worms entirely though.

It *does* bring something unique to the table in that it brings +crit specifically against mobs of higher level than you. That allows the team to give rewards that will improve raid DPS without being overpowering in PvP. It's *very* nicely tuned to let them balance the two parts of the game separately. In that regard it's like caster +hit% (for any % over 3 or so).

However, the problem is that the previous implementation was OP, capped weirdly, and made certain racials unbelievably desirable (even essential in a min/maxing guild). The new implementation is better, and will allow them the flexibility to balance the game properly.

The only remaining wrinkle is that talents which were designed according to the previous implementation need to be re-designed for the new implementation. Possibly some itemisation needs re-working, but that's much less critical as there's a wide variety of itemisation already.

Yeah, introducing weapon expertise as a 5-point talent at the top of the paladin prot tree at the same time as nerfing the heck out of +weapon skill suggests that they aren't completely meshed together. I don't know that the itemisation team is as far out of the loop. Weapon skill seems to be spread liberally around even before we get to raid-level itemisation, it would be really easy for anyone to max out under the current system with the sort of items we're seeing (especially once raid gear starts coming in).

Dont want to sound ignorant, but what was doing +skill before TBC? exactly boost dps in PVE with doing like nothing in PVP. e.g. you would never see me pulling out a maladath in pvp, but as i got no iblis, i am a happy rogue using maladath in +3 fights

Pre-TBC/2.0, weapon skill restored the damage lost to a glancing blow. When a white melee attack glances(this occurs on 40% of all white melee swings vs. a +3 or Boss monster), it deals at maximum .7 *(hit damage range) and is guaranteed not to crit. The old incarnation of weapon skill reduced this penalty by .03 per point of weapon skill, such that if you had 10 your multiplier on a glancing blow went back to 1 * hit damage.

In TBC, weapon skill has the utility described above, and does not reduce the glancing multiplier at all. However, empirical testing suggests that the multiplier has been lowered, so it's now .76 * (hit damage range) on a glance. There are a couple of problems with the new solution. The first is that white melee attacks are performed on a 1-roll system, unlike specials. That is to say, when you hit a monster with your sword, the game runs one calculation to find out what happened. When you have no gear and 15% crit, you can imagine a bingo board with the results - 1-40 are glance, 41-65 are miss, 66-85 are hit, and 86-100 are crit. When you get +hit gear, it subtracts misses and replaces them with hits. When you get +crit gear, it subtracts hits from the original pool(66-85) and replaces them with crits. But whatever you can do, you can never make that 1-40 glance go away. So you hit a point where it's actually not beneficial to get more hit and crit(for white melee attacks) because the table is already full up with either misses converted to hits, or hits converted to crits. And the table gets more filled up if you're in front of a monster, because now it gets parry and block preempting your hit and crit as well.

That's why people are reacting so poorly to "well it gives you more crit vs. high level monsters." I suspect if it reduced armor or had some other interesting effect, people would be much more accepting of the whole thing.

just +crit limited against bosses is basically the same thing in green. It is still just +crit. The reduction of glancing blows definatly was something unique and I'd rather keep that bonus instead of just making +skill a third stat for more crit chance. Maybe they can come up with something interesting to solve the +5 skill racial problem

Then yes, it did just come down to semantics because I consider a nerf to +weapon skill as being changing what the value does.

The way Blizzard implemented this "fix" was to take something away from rogues.

That was the wrong way to go about it. All they had to do was make it "rarer" and allow top end rogues to still attain it with ideal equipment. Its not a game breaking change to the rogue class, but it did just seem to be an unnecessary nerf that could have been resolved as I have suggested above.

Its the difference between taking my $100 away and giving me a rock, or taking $90 away now, and saying I can get the $90 back in $10 increments if I work for it.

I am in 2 minds about the philosophy behind the perceived nerf to weapon skill that we will be seeing in the near future.

I have always considered it boring and a bit of a joke that we as rogues (on horde side at least) do as high as 65-70% white damage (depending on spec) on static fights and still around 60% when a little 'in and out' movement is involved.

The problem however comes that to rebalence things in favour of yellow damage it would imbalence pvp because of the on-demand nature of rogues yellow damage which is why in terms of balence +skill was a the perfect get out of jail free card for the game developers.

The new assassination talents are the kind of things which make this pretty well balenced (find weakness is a great example) and also the poison talents but the problem is that a heavy combat spec will always beat a heavy assassination spec because even after the +skill change, maximizing white damage will be the best option.

Not sure what i'm trying to say but hopefully it makes some kind of sense :)

This is exactly why I have a problem with the new +skill mechanics. Unlike partial resists with spells, we had a crit cap prior to wow 2.0 due to the one-roll system (my understanding is that partial resists can crit). Adding more crit to a person who is already at the cap adds 0 benefit. Unless they've changed the mechanics, there will be situations (albeit rare) where you'll hit the cap.

Just an idea, would glancing blows allowed to be crits be a solution? Or would the result be too overpowered?
Similar to the partially resisted magic crits, they would still suffer a 0.76 damage penalty.

How would you work it though?

Would you implement a 2 roll system where you run a second roll to see if you get a 24% chance of a glancing?

Or do you have it where everything up to the glancing mark is a crit, then additional becomes a glancing crit?

In order to do that you'd need a two-roll system. My guess is the reason white hits are on a one-roll system while specials and spells get two rolls is for performance reasons. Frequency of yellow hits is not that high, but imagine doubling the server load for white hits when you've got dagger rogues wielding 1.6-1.8 speed weapons popping S&D, Blade Flurry and Kiss of the Spider.

edit: or maybe you wouldn't need 2 rolls. Could be a good idea

Maybe out of the pool of 40 values (from the d100) which glance, make your crit rate % of those 40 an glancing "crit". So someone with a 10% crit rate would glance normally on the first 36 possible glances and crit on the last 4.

Hm, no need for a two roll system there.
Just split up the glancing blows into glancing blow (normal) and glancing blow (crit) and that's it. Glancing crit being a % value of glancing blow chance * crit chance.

Of course it *would* raise server load by adding one additional outcome to calculate, but by far less than a second roll.

// edit
Pretty much the same as Faytte just said *twice* without me properly reading it. -.-