Mojofabulous

at first glance it sounds like you either have the spreadsheet on defensive or weighted rather than offensive. Not at any point in time has agi ever come out on top of hit for my gear while under the offensive category. It's on the top left of your spreadsheet near your race.

 

JettJaguar

Perhaps it is just the way I am reading it, but there is no difference between 5% more damage on criticals and 5% critical damage. Did you mean to distinguish either of these from 5% more damage with maces or 5% critical rate?

 

Rogar_Nox

Thanks, that was it... apparently Office for the Mac treats that drop=down selection differently and I couldnt select any option other than Weighted.

 

• Aldriana

Having looked at your gear and played with the spreadsheet a bit, I think it fundamentally comes down to your OH Weapon.

1) Revenger is a vastly lower-DPS weapon than Talon of Azshara; hence, the overall value of white damage is lower relative to the overall value of yellow damage (as all yellow attacks are performed with a 95 DPS sword, and 40% of white damage is coming from a 70 DPS sword). Since yellow damage benefits not at all from hit, this lowers the value of hit to some extent.

2) A major contribution of hit is that it allows your procs to proc more often. Hence, the more procs you have, the better hit is; and, conversely, the fewer procs you have, the less valuable hit it. In your case, as you have 20 agi rather than mongoose on the OH, you have one fewer proc than a lot of rogues and, as such, the value of hit is also depressed.

In case you were wondering why 1) doesn't apply as strongly to Latro's, the answer is that it's mitigated by 2) as it related to Combat Potency.

Thanks. At the risk of turning this into a "grats on loot" thread, I suppose I should also commend you on your recent acquisition of the OH Warglaive. Hopefully the MH won't turn out like Death's Sting did for you back in the day.

Well, my to-do list for next release is back up to 15 items or so, meaning it's going to take a bit of time to work everything out. I would expect it to take a couple weeks to sort out everything, particularly since there's still some mechanics on PTR that need to be divined (to wit: what are the base miss/dodge rates of bosses? And is there any truth to the rumor that the Warglaive set bonus now has a hidden cooldown?). As such, I wouldn't expect anything before the end of the month, and it could easily take longer (particularly since I've started work on some other projects).

In the meantime, I would refer you to the assortment of posts made regarding the value of MH weapons over the last few pages, which, stated briefly, imply that the Season 3 Slicer is better than everything except Warglaive, but that it doesn't beat Talon or Infamy by very much. So if you don't have anything else to spend points on, it's a perfectly valid place to dump them; but if you're desirous of obtaining significant amounts of other PvP gear it may not be your top priority.

 

Tyran

About Warglaives on the 2.3 PTR: Yes, they definitely have a cooldown. I can go back and provide a log if you need one (I deleted mine).
After some testing it was pretty clear though that the cooldown is 45 seconds (!) and the procrate itself was probably unchanged (most procs would happen within 15 sec).

 

• Aldriana

If you're confident in that 45 sec number that's fine. If you're not, send me a combat log and I'll verify it.

Also, I might note that we never pinned down the proc rate of Warglaives in the first place, so a bit of additional testing might be in order.

 

Andeh

Any guess as to whether or not the Backstab buffs are enough to pull it up on par? (Aggression works on it as of today's PTR.)

 

• Aldriana

It helps. It's not enough. Backstab is usually about 30% of your damage, so gaining +6% on 30% of your damage is about a 2% damage buff on the whole. Given that daggers lose by 5-10% in practice, that's not going make the competitive.

Hemo, on the other hand, is starting to look somewhat more appealing.

 

Mojofabulous

How hard is it to rig up some basic figures for how much dps that'll add to an average raid? I have no idea how many times a hemo rogue can actually spam hemo say, every minute. Do all the charges get eaten up in it's newer version, just guessing I'd say yes.

 

• Vulajin

I happen to maintain a personal DPS spreadsheet which I have hacked up over the past several hours to estimate answers to just these questions. Conclusions are here:

http://elitistjerks.com/519653-post384.html

Summary: It seems that the Aggression change brings combat daggers up a little bit, but still not really by enough. However, it seems like the Hemorrhage change makes a build like 11/28/22 potentially a very useful asset in a raid.

 

• Aldriana

Well, Hemo costs 35 energy, your typical cycle is 5s/5r or some close kin of that, and you have Relentless Strikes but not Combat Potency. So, off the top of my head, that sounds like your finishers are free and you just get a Hemo every 3.5 seconds. Now, my understanding is that that damage then gets fed through the multipliers of each person - it does double that on a crit, and, in particular, it gets mitigated by armor. My best guess it that when you average out all those multipliers accross the tanks, hunters, rogues, etc. you wind up getting less than 36 damage out of the debuff in practice - I suspect 85% of that or so is more typical. So each debuff adds something like 300-310 damage, or in the ballpark of 85 DPS.

So, the question is: is this enough to make up the difference between Hemo and Combat? Well, with my current gear and full raid buffs, the spreadsheet is reporting 1734 DPS for my combat swords build. If I spec 11/27/23 Hemo and adjust my equipment to make better use of the new spec (still using items I actually have), it reports 1607 DPS.

Now, with the new Dirty Deeds in 2.3, I would do 20% more than than that while the mob was sub-35%. Now, in practice, given that everyone else does more damage at low%, one is sometimes dead by the time you get to 35%, and, if your guild is like mine, Heroism tends to get popped earlier in that fight more often than later, one probably doesn't actually do 35% of your damage to mobs that are sub-35%. In practice, one probably only does 25-30% of one's damage in this period. For the sake of argument, lets say 25%. Thus, Dirty Deeds increases one damage by about 5% on the whole; hence that 1607 now becomes 1688. Throw in the 85 DPS we estimated for the Hemo debuff, and all of a sudden this isn't looking too bad.

 

Macblade

Where are people getting info about these changes? The most that I have heard about the change to Hemo and the change to Dirty deeds is a blue post saying that they they should be put in the patch notes soon. However, that was a week or so ago and I just checked the patch notes and there is no note about either Hemo or Dirty Deeds. I think that it would be fun to try a combat hemo build but it still seems a bit early to really be considering it.

 

Dampfbrumsel

It's on World of Raids and MMO-Champion.

 

Cottonface

This is a slight buff for dagger rogues. It allows them to use Aggression as a "filler" to get to Combat Potency, while increasing their BS by avg. 4%, which is a 1.2% to 1.4% dps increase.

This is a nerf PvE-wise, as it is reduced from 30 to 10 charges, which are going to be eaten up extremely fast in a normal 25-man pvp raid, that the hemo-buff will be basically non-existing in PvE. Alone a hunter can take 3-5 charges per second. So for PvE it is now not only useless, but practically non present, hence a nerf of aprx 6-7% DpS vs. current Hemo situation in PvE.

For PvP, however, where +1 dam equals 0.1 to 0.125 additional dps, this is a apprx 3.25% dps increase.

 

baldycenarius

Maybe im missing something here, but what are you dropping a point out of to pick up both 2 points in Dirty Deeds and 1 in Relentless Strikes, are you only taking 1 point in weapon expertise? or none?

 

Trazhenko

I'm looking at the Dirty Deeds tooltip and it says "Your special abilities" cause 20% more damage against targets under 35. That's a hell of a lot less than an actual 20% boost.

I haven't raided with hemo, so I don't knw how the damage splits, but I doubt hemo is more than 25-30% of your damage to begin with. That takes your 5% overall boost down to 1.25-1.5%

 

songster

"Special abilities" means all yeloow damage - i.e. about 40% of your DPS. So effectively this is an 8% boost to your damage against targets with <35% health. Something like a 2.8% damage boost overall. That puts it pretty much on line with other talent points.

 

• Aldriana

Oh, damn, you're right, I misread Dirty Deeds. That makes it a lot less useful. Those numbers were with 1/2 WEx and 2/2 Dirty Deeds (no Prep, since from a raid DPS perspective it doesn't do much unless you also have AR, which you don't). Sounds like it's probably better to go 11/28/22 with 2/2 WEx and 1/2 Dirty Deeds, which ups the base DPS to 1619, which is increased by about 1% by Dirty Deeds to 1635. Even with the 85 from Hemo, that doesn't match combat; and, moreover, it strikes me as more circumstantial; you're getting a larger fraction of your damage from Rupture, so on unrupturable mobs you'll do significantly less; additionally, your survivability is a bit lower from the loss of Vitality, and your burst damage suffers from the lack of AR. Plus, you're using an extra debuff slot, which, depending on your guild, may be an issue.

On the whole, it sounds like Hemo is closer to combat, but I'm not seeing a fundamental reason to bring a hemo rogue over a combat rogue from a DPS perspective.

 

Faytte

I was expecting more of a buff for dagger rogues. With similar itemization this still places them behind the dps of swords. Hopefully this is not the last round of 'changes' on the PTR.

Farewell, remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.
~Paradise Lost (bk. IX, l. 171)

 

Tenge

Same here, yeah. It's a step in the right direction, but not enough to tip the scales (or even to balance the scales...). If Opp went to 2/2 or 3/3, it'd let CD rogues pick up Murder/etc. But I think the true "fix" to balance daggers again would be to do something interesting with dagger spec, in addition to the 5% crit.

 

Waldar

The thing i'd like to see as a combat dagger rogue is having more 1.3 or even some 1.2 offhand PVE daggers.

I mean, in BT (in which i'm not yet), there is the nice [Messenger of Fate], but damn those 31 sta could have been used on other stats.

[Tracker's Blade] has nice stats, but why the 1.5 speed ?

Depending on your gear level, the faster one may become the best choise due to only combat potency, even with much much worse stats (dps wise).

 

• Latito

Not really.. Yes they nerfed it from 30 charges to a third of that.. but they also MORE than tripled the dmg per charge. Instead of 30 * 10 extra damage, you now get 10 * 36. Also, 10 charges are virtually GAURENTEED to be all eaten up in 3.5 seconds - 30 charges weren't always.

So.. you are now more likely to be able to use all of the charges, and you gain more damage per hemo than before.

 

• Aldriana

I don't see that that's particularly necessary, and, more to the point, I don't think Blizzard is going to implement daggers faster than 1.3 anytime soon. Besides which, that's not really the problem.

The problem, particularly after these new changes is not that dagger spec is too weak; it's that sword spec is too good. With my current armor and Arena 2 Daggers, with the Aggression change, the spreadsheet estimates 1651 DPS (buffed). Switching to combat fists (that is, fist/fist spec, not fist/sword hybrid), I show 1682 DPS... against Murderable targets. Against non-Murderable targets, that goes down to 1639 DPS. Given that fully half of BT and all of Hyjal is not Murderable, that's really not too bad a tradeoff - 2% less damage against Murderable targets, 1% more vs non-Murderable targets. So I would argue that with the new changes, combat daggers is reasonably well-matched in terms of sustained DPS relative to Combat Fists (and hence Combat Maces). The problem is that Combat Swords is just plain better, due to the power of OH sword spec.

Now, this still leaves the problem that Combat Daggers cycles suck; what I would like to see to fix this is a new rank of slice and dice with a 3 second longer duration. This would allow combat daggers to use the far more efficient 1s3r cycle without needing to resort to T4 2/5. It would also increase rogue DPS a bit, to compsate for the overall loss DPS we'd suffer from having Sword Spec nerfed.

Hence, my proposal for bringing the specs closer to balance is:

1) Have OH Sword Spec proc OH hits instead of MH. This would bring Sword Spec into balance with the other specs.
2) Add SnD Rank 3, with base duration 12/15/18/21/24 seconds. This would allow Dagger rogues to use a more efficient, less disruptable cycle.

This would, coincidentally, also give Hemo rogues a better cycle (as currently they can't quite sustain 5s5r) - they could use 4s5r, which would also make them a slightly more stable spec for raiding.

On the whole, it seems to me that this would address many of the current issues with spec balance. I'm sure there are other ways of doing so, but this seems like the simplest way to me.

Edit:
The alternative to #2 would be to bump Imp SnD up to 20/40/60%, which would have approximately the same effect overall; it would mean daggers would end up using a cycle more like 3s/3r, but that's acceptable.

 

elandriel

My thoughts on the combat daggers is that the one change which would benefit the specc more is to have opp lowered to 3 ranks with same effects. CD are much more affected by lethality than any other specc (35% more than swords) and so 3/3 ruthlessness + 5/5 lethality coupled with the extra 6% of new aggression will put CD back to the top with swords.

Adrianna: is it possible to run the numbers again on your spreadsheet with the above change (opp 3 talents and thus full ruthlessness + lethality)?

Thanks in advance

-Ela

p.s. Also the release of a 1.2-1.3 OH dagger with the stats/dps of Tracker's for example would improve end combat dagger rogues' dps ...

 

Waldar

I fully agree with your analysis, my purpose was helping the spec via items instead of modifing talents.
As you said in a previous post, pre-bc combat dagger were competitive with swords due to the lack of MH sword between Fankriss / Rank 14 and Kel'Thuzad.

Since [Searing Sunblade], there is no longer 1.3 dagger, and this could help combat dagger spec.