One of the better WoW forum Ideas has been to adjust imp backstab into a 2 pt talent
Increases your critical strike chance with back stab by 15%/30% and energy cost by 5/10.
A 50 energy cost would help with the finisher cycles (i think, but dont quote me cause i have not sat down with it, but we could do a 4/5 combo, which is better than a 3/5/5).
Farewell, remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.
~Paradise Lost (bk. IX, l. 171)
Do us all a favor and please stop asking for nerfs to sword spec. We are outputting nice damage us sword rogues and justifying have 2 -- and rarely but occasionally 3 -- rogues in the raid. You want to nerf our dps to solve a problem that could be solved by buffing dagger rogues?
Personally, my idea for fixing combat daggers would take a completely difference approach. I personally feel that the three principal problems for combat daggers are:
- 5/5 Opportunity essentially required, forcing points out of Assassination, preventing full Ruthlessness, full Lethality, and Murder
- Backstab cost prevents better cycles from being used
- Dagger spec, like fist spec, does not scale fully with stats; it scales with AP, but not crit rate or hit rate
I believe the first two issues could be addressed by two changes: add an energy reduction to Backstab to some talent in either Assassination or Combat, and push Opportunity back down to the second tier of Subtlety. In order to make up for the loss of 20% damage on Backstabs, its energy cost would need to be reduced by 10, to 50 -- this would increase Backstab DPE by 20%, basically the same effect as Opportunity, but achieved in a different manner.
Backstab DPE is already sufficiently high, but the 60 energy cost penalizes it too much relative to Sinister Strike. As a result, you lose more from your cycle than you're gaining from your Backstabs. Without doing a lot of analysis right now to support this, I feel like a 50-energy Backstab would reduce a great deal of the cycle burden on dagger builds. In addition, requiring only Assassination and Combat talents for a dagger build would mean a 19/42/0 build for daggers, such as this:
In this build, imagine that Dagger Specialization provides both 1% crit and 2 energy off Backstab per talent point. This build would be able to compete quite evenly with combat swords, thanks to a better cycle, full Ruthlessness, full Lethality, and Murder.
As far as fist and dagger specs are concerned, I'm not sure exactly how Blizzard can fix those. Extra attacks are an extremely powerful mechanic. One thing I know would scale with all stats, though, would be haste; changing one or both weapon specs to 1% haste per talent point would bring them into almost direct competition with swords. It would probably have to be fists, though, because dagger's superior DPE would have it surpassing swords by leaps and bounds if it had a 5% haste weapon spec.
Anyway, I'll stop this rambling right now, as this post is pretty much against the cardinal rules of the forum, blindly theorycrafting without doing any math. Still, I think I'm making fairly educated guesses. I like Aldriana's suggestions too, but I would rather see dagger builds freed from the burdens of the 5/5 Opportunity requirement and the 60 energy cost of Backstab.
Do us all a favor and please stop asking for nerfs to sword spec. We are outputting nice damage us sword rogues and justifying have 2 -- and rarely but occasionally 3 -- rogues in the raid. You want to nerf our dps to solve a problem that could be solved by buffing dagger rogues?
Please, stop asking for this.
I'm not asking for it. I'm just saying it's the best way to solve the current issue. If you don't mind the fact that every single rogue wants to be swords and all other weapon types might as well just be sharded as soon as they drop, then there is no problem right now. However, I think we would benefit more by having a couple of specs using different weapon types, thereby allowing all rogues in a raid to get weapons in a timely fashion since they're not all going for the same thing. And if you look at the changes I proposed, there are both buffs and nerfs, which would on the net put us about where we are on DPS.
My objection to solving the problem by buffing daggers is that it doesn't really strike at the core of the problem; as I've discussed before, the problem with Sword Spec is not scaling, it's that the benefit is assymetrically loaded on the two hands. You can't buff the other specs to match; all that's going to do is make hybrid XXX/sword specs tops. The problem that really needs to be solved is that every single rogue in existance wants to use a sword OH, which, coupled with the fact that there are very very few good OH swords from PvE, has led to the current situation where we're incredibly reliant on PvP weapons in order to itemize effectively.
This is, similarly, my objection to the proposal of changing one of the other weapon effects to haste; while it would buff the spec, you'd still want to use a sword OH to get those procs, leading to a situation where fist/sword (or whatever) is clearly superior to all other specs. Fundamentally, the only possible specializations that are going to perform in a way that solves the OH-sword problem is proc-based ones; so a haste (or crit, or armor pen, or whatever) *proc* specialzation would be a better solution.
Really, though, this all becomes quite complicated and messy; the elegant solution is to simply nerf sword spec a bit, and then buff rogues through other means so that our DPS winds up in the same place with each of 4 or 5 different specs, rather than all of us winding up with one. That's all I'm proposing; at no time have I advocated that our damage should be reduced.
We'll agree to disagree. You are basically saying, "fix this by making sword spec worse... oh, by the way, while you are doing this please remember to buff all rogues."
My real fear is Blizzard reading the first half and not the second. And for that matter, I hardly see sword-spec rogues out of proportion on raid dps given the age-old, completely accurate fact that we bring nothing else besides our damage ouptut on single targets.
And quite frankly, I find your argument convoluted at best. The problem is that no matter what people will want to offhand a sword? How about a fix such that you can't logically take sword spec + mace or dagger or fist spec? You know, make something else worthwhile in the talent tree? How about you can only get procs from one spec period at a given time (e.g. your mainhand weapon determines the type of procs you get)? Then you'd only pick one spec and rogues could spend those points on other talents?
You don't have to take away OH sword procs from sword rogues, you can simply take away OH sword procs from people not mainhanding a sword. Fixed. Now sword rogues don't have lose dps to fix what is current, imo, a non-problem as I know plenty of dagger rogues who are not quitting WoW just cause they don't have the highest dps build/spec. Not everyone min/maxes like the people you know, I guess. We have a mace-spec rogue who simply chooses not to respec weekly for the arena.
In fact, if you take all 4 of the talents and compress them into 1 spot on the talent tree, each of which operates different, you'd end hybrid / dual spec-ing. And really, while I'm sure that spec-ing exists, I find the notion this a "problem" with sword spc to be completely absurd.
While you think it's logical, that's perfectly fine, you're entitled to you opinion. In the meantime, I'm going to say it again: Sword rogues don't need a nerf. Fix whatever parity problem exists elsewhere.
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.
To expand on this, I'd honestly like to know why we have swords and other weapons with 1.4 speed while many dagger offhands are 1.5. Daggers are supposed to be the faster weapons, so I'd actually like a change to all itemization to reflect this.
Then we'd actually have a similar ratio for weapon speeds based on the hand used. Another benefit is this would also level out the specs somewhat. Fists and maces could opt to use a dagger offhand for a decrease in damage from their specific spec while getting a boost in yellow damage, but swords would probably not see a gain due to the nature of offhand sword spec procs.
With normal basic slice and dice, for example:
1.6 hasted to 1.23, average 1 CP proc per 6.15 seconds - 15 / 61.5 ~ 24% extra energy
1.1 hasted to 0.85, average 1 CP proc per 4.25 seconds - 15 / 42.5 ~ 35% extra energy
Roughly a 10% yellow damage gain, so rougly a 3.5-4% overall gain. I believe that's about the advantage sword spec has currently, yes?
If this were paired with a change to a 3-point opportunity, I think the specs would finally be pretty balanced.
I don't think it's precisely fair to say that "most" daggers are 1.5 speed. There's, what, 2 of them? Tracker's Blade and Retainer's Blade? There's 2 1.5 speed daggers, 2 1.3 speed daggers, and the rest (Messenger of Fate, Dirge, Feltooth Eviscerator, the PvP daggers...) are 1.4 speed; hence, "most" daggers are 1.4 speed, while "most" swords are 1.5 speed (with three exceptions which are 1.4, and the Blacksmithing Swords which are 1.6). So the average dagger is faster than the average sword.
Now, that said, it is true that they could make the difference larger, and that would certainly help; I'm not saying that I'd complain if they made some fixes via itemization. I just think this is somewhat unlikely since historically Blizzard has preferred to fix the underlying mechanics of the class and leave itemization alone, presumably because changing the itemization can have unintended consequences for other classes, while fixing the class itself cuts to the heart of the issue; item fixes are usually only done when it's a blanket problem across the board for all classes (as was true for both the Haste buff and the Haste nerf). So, without making any value judgements on which would work better in this case, I think it is more likely that they'll change the rogue mechanics rather than changing the items.
On the whole, I think this is a case of Blizzard not fully understanding how large the speed effect was at first; Instant attack normalization was introduced because speed on MH weapons was too important, but OH Weapon Speed matters more than MH Weapon speed ever did now. So my theory as to what happened is that they made a few fast weapons without fully appreciating how much of a difference it makes, and thus had to keep making fast weapons to allow the new itemization to remain competitive; hence, another change I might expect to see is Combat Potency changed to scale with weapon speed. If it granted, say, 10xWeaponSpeed instead of a flat 15 energy, it would reduce the massive influence of OH weapon speed to a more managable level. This would, unfortuantely, nerf combat daggers relative to it's current strength, and it can't really afford the hit, which is perhaps one of the reasons it hasn't happened yet.
Of course, for that matter, one could argue that Combat Daggers was a spec that Blizzard hadn't anticipated in the first place; looking at the trees, it seems to me that the original intent was that combat would get more use for SS builds, whereas dagger builds would tend to invest more deeply in assassination. Whether this is true or not, Blizzard has certainly made changes to accomodate it's existance (Opportunity being moved down a tier from it's original position, and the new Aggression change, among other things), but I am forced to wonder if Blizzard would actually mind if Combat Daggers faded away to be replaced with SF Hybrid and Mutilate builds.
If you don't mind the fact that every single rogue wants to be swords and all other weapon types might as well just be sharded as soon as they drop, then there is no problem right now. However, I think we would benefit more by having a couple of specs using different weapon types, thereby allowing all rogues in a raid to get weapons in a timely fashion since they're not all going for the same thing. And if you look at the changes I proposed, there are both buffs and nerfs, which would on the net put us about where we are on DPS.
I agree with you that it would be nice if all the specs were mathmatically even. However, you are overstating things just a bit :P The fury warrior in our raid was quite happy when the MH Fist off of Al'ar dropped. Also, there are still plenty of rogues running around with felsteel longblades, many of which aren't on RP servers (which is the only reason I could think of having one that's not pure stupidity). Finally, you've stated before that a rogues DPS can vary widely even on the same fight with the same gear. So other than the people that have really tried to put the time into the math, or taken advantage of other's work (thank you), most people will probably never put together a data set large enough to show that, say, swords is significantly different than daggers in DPS.
Originally Posted by Darien
Dagger offhands -> 1.1 speed (1.1/1.8 = 0.61)
Overall, I think the idea of messing with daggers and making them 1.1 speed would influence things besides CP procs. I can't remember the formula at the moment, but a shiv would be about 30 energy at that point? I can imagine weird things with Arena's and rogues running around shiving instant poison for the CP stacks.
Originally Posted by Aldriana
If it granted, say, 10xWeaponSpeed instead of a flat 15 energy, it would reduce the massive influence of OH weapon speed to a more managable level. This would, unfortuantely, nerf combat daggers relative to it's current strength, and it can't really afford the hit, which is perhaps one of the reasons it hasn't happened yet.
10xweapon speed is an interesting idea, I suppose that faster would still be better for poisons and shiving, but the change would make all the sword spec weaponsmiths happy I'm sure.
I wonder if part of the idea behind mutilate was to make that the new daggers build.
Not to get too RP or anything but I think that it is true that people have very different visions of what a rogue is when they roll one. I for one was thinking of a blademaster/fencing/swashbuckler type so I've always been happy with being swords. My main wish was that we got some of the graphics that caster blades got, the prime example being the lightsabre looking weapon. I've also read a post by someone that was playing an orc rogue that thought of his rogue as a thug and leveled maces. Finally, I'm sure that many people think of rogues as dagger in the back, thief sort of character. I happen to think of all of these a reason-able views of a rogue. To some extent that fact that combat daggers is no longer THE dagger spec actually helps identify combat rogues as more of the upfront fighter/blade dancer type and leaves the assassination and shadow step build to be the dagger in the back trees. In fact, given the current itemization (a pretty even mix of Maces, fists, daggers and swords) I would be quite upset if the only/best choice of weapon for all three trees was a dagger.
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.
I really like this idea, the only problem I see is that it would be a nerf to sword rogues that do have 2pc t4. I suppose you could run a 3s/5e/3r cycle or something, but I suspect it would still be a dps loss. If they went through with this, hopefully they'd change the set bonus to something more useful.
One other idea I saw floating around is to have the backstab portion of opportunity been integrated into the Imp Backstab talent and increase it to 5 points (makes sense also because tier 2 in assassination tree is the only one out of all trees without a 5 point talent). That will free the two talent points needed to max both Ruthlessness and Lethality.
I agree with you that it would be nice if all the specs were mathmatically even. However, you are overstating things just a bit :P The fury warrior in our raid was quite happy when the MH Fist off of Al'ar dropped. Also, there are still plenty of rogues running around with felsteel longblades, many of which aren't on RP servers (which is the only reason I could think of having one that's not pure stupidity). Finally, you've stated before that a rogues DPS can vary widely even on the same fight with the same gear. So other than the people that have really tried to put the time into the math, or taken advantage of other's work (thank you), most people will probably never put together a data set large enough to show that, say, swords is significantly different than daggers in DPS.
It's true, some weapons can also be used by other classes, particularly fists and maces. However, daggers seem to be primarily the province of rogues; they're too fast for shaman and fury warriors can only use them in the OH (and rarely do even there) because they're normalized at a faster speed than other weapons, thus gimping their instant attacks. Rogues are really the only class that makes good use of daggers. Consider:
In Black Temple, there are 3 swords and 2 daggers
In Hyjal, there is 1 sword and 2 daggers
In SSC/TK, there is 1 sword and 2 daggers
In Karazhan, there is 1 sword and 3 daggers
In ZA, there are 2 swords and 3 daggers
In every instance other than BT, there are twice as many dagger drops as sword drops - and even in BT, given that 2 of those swords are legendary drops off Illidan, the daggers are probably easier to come by. How much more quickly could we upgrade our weapons if we could make use of all those daggers?
Regarding your point: it's true that not everyone is an avid theorycrafter. Yet, in my experience, it's still true that they know some of these things. The other rogues in my guild are utterly disdainful of spreadsheets, and yet, lets look at what weapons they're using:
1) Warglaive/MG Quickblade
2) Infamy/Savagery
3) Infamy/Savagery
4) Infamy/G Quickblade (recently having respecced from daggers with Shard of Azzinoth/Messenger of Fate)
5) ToA/MG Quickblade (<--me)
For all their disdain of spreadsheets, they've universally decided to use swords over daggers. So, clearly, they've realized something of the difference.
My main wish was that we got some of the graphics that caster blades got, the prime example being the lightsabre looking weapon.
You sound like a man in need of a Teebu's.
Originally Posted by Rerolled
I really like this idea, the only problem I see is that it would be a nerf to sword rogues that do have 2pc t4. I suppose you could run a 3s/5e/3r cycle or something, but I suspect it would still be a dps loss. If they went through with this, hopefully they'd change the set bonus to something more useful.
Honestly, the 2/5 set bonus isn't really that useful to sword rogues as it is; it's a convenience, to be sure, but in terms of actual DPS output it doesn't help much. As such, I'm not that concerned about it.
Originally Posted by elandriel
One other idea I saw floating around is to have the backstab portion of opportunity been integrated into the Imp Backstab talent and increase it to 5 points (makes sense also because tier 2 in assassination tree is the only one out of all trees without a 5 point talent). That will free the two talent points needed to max both Ruthlessness and Lethality.
Your thoughts on that suggestion?
So, there's been a couple different proposals to free up a couple talent points for a rogue to allow us to get 5/5 Lethality, 3/3 Ruthlessness, and all the benefits from Imp Backstab and Opportunity. Plugging this into the spreadsheet, I come up with a DPS number of 1670 (as compared to fists which were 1639/1682... and swords, which are 1662/1705. So this would put daggers ahead of fists, but still behind swords for most purposes. And, as discussed, buffing fist spec directly doesn't quite work, at that just leads to the dominance of fist/sword hybrid builds.
So, while that would work for bringing daggers closer to swords, 1) it's not enough, 2) it doesn't solve the issue that all SS/Hemo rogues want an OH sword, and 3) It still leaves daggers with a rather miserably long cycle. So it's certainly a partial fix, but I don't think it's a total one.
Hmm, is s3 MH actually better than ToA or Infamy? To me it seems like it. Pretty stupid tbh, you should be able to get better weap for raiding by raiding not by pvping. Well yea you get better MH, but it's a legendary :p They rly need to buff Infamy, and maybe the other bt/hyjal weaps aswell...
I used to raid as swords with Spiteblade and S2 offhand, and I switched to daggers the day 2.2 was released. Part of the reason was that I noticed my DPS had inexplicably tanked by about 200 points, and another part was I think it's ridiculous that every rogue wants to be swords. I enjoy taking a spec that is widely considered to be second-rate and making it work well.
Having successfully played combat daggers for a while now, in a guild dominated by sword rogues, I can think of a few small fixes that would work wonders for combat daggers.
First, adding 40-50 armor penetration to each rank of Opportunity would provide a healthy damage increase that wouldn't really do anything to swords. Sword builds can't squeeze that in, even Mutilate wouldn't take it; it's exclusively a combat dagger talent (in a raiding context) and so buffing it would all but guarantee its benefits would remain restricted to a single spec.
Secondly, adding another component to Dagger Specialization (as was previously discussed) is a good idea. A combat dagger rogue really can't squeeze sword spec into a build, so there's no fear of dual-speccing. I wouldn't mind seeing some armor penetration on this talent also, or maybe even some expertise. Dodged Backstabs are the bane of any combat dagger rogue, because they completely dismantle the combat rotations we use. Fewer dodged Backstabs adds even more energy efficiency to a build already known for it, and allows it to improve upon its core advantage.
Thirdly, a buff to Improved Backstab that incorporates a reduced energy cost component would be incredible. Enough has been said about this already, so I won't elaborate.
With regard to fists, I don't really know what can be done to fix it. I do think that all specializations should be retooled such that the bonuses they provide only take effect if the rogue wields two weapons of the same type as their specialization.
On a side note, I originally tried rationalizing that Blizzard hadn't given up on combat daggers because the Combat Potency graphic was a dagger. I soon abandoned this belief, however, when I realized that the graphic for Sinister Strike is also a dagger :/
So, there's been a couple different proposals to free up a couple talent points for a rogue to allow us to get 5/5 Lethality, 3/3 Ruthlessness, and all the benefits from Imp Backstab and Opportunity. Plugging this into the spreadsheet, I come up with a DPS number of 1670 (as compared to fists which were 1639/1682... and swords, which are 1662/1705. So this would put daggers ahead of fists, but still behind swords for most purposes. And, as discussed, buffing fist spec directly doesn't quite work, at that just leads to the dominance of fist/sword hybrid builds.
So, while that would work for bringing daggers closer to swords, 1) it's not enough, 2) it doesn't solve the issue that all SS/Hemo rogues want an OH sword, and 3) It still leaves daggers with a rather miserably long cycle. So it's certainly a partial fix, but I don't think it's a total one.
I think that the above change coupled with the release of a 1.3 OH with stats and dps similar to those of Tracker's for example will push Combat Daggers to a comfortable place with swords.
(Unfortunately for the life of me i can't make dps spreadsheets work on this PC so if any of you brave souls can make the talent changes mentioned above and plug in a 1.3 Tracker's Blade, I would be more than interested to see your results.)
Sword spec is obviously broken since offhand swordspec procs circumvents off-hand penalities. If that would nerf swords to much I'm sure it could be balanced one way or another, but having one type of weapon spec so clearly superior for offhand choice can't be considered anything but a broken mechanic.
Combat potency is also in need of a change, since it makes upgrades very confusing for the rogues who doesn't know exactly how it works(warp-splinter > retainers, latros > bs offhand sword). Exactly what they fixed with normalization so that Shanker wasn't better then several other supposedly clear upgrades. I would even argue that they already have tried to itemize around it by making pvp weapons very easily accessible. Still doesn't fix the underlying problem though.
I'm sorry but I completely disagree with nerfing any rogue spec's dps. If you nerf Sword rogues, you are just making it so Fury warriors are equal or back on top again. This is something I am 100% against.
No to fix the problem, you need to buff dagger rogues and not abilities that influence swords.
In addition you have to be careful as to not just buff combat daggers because the gap between them and mutilate rogues is already large enough.
Buff daggers in general so that it positively impacts both Mutilate and Combat Daggers. And they need to not forget about Subtlety rogues who are already leaps and bounds behind warriors, shamans, and druids in terms of single target dps.
My ideas are:
1) Change dagger normalization from 1.7 to 1.8. This is about a small but easily manageable upgrade.
2) Reduce the penalty on Mutilate when mobs arent poisoned and buff the base dmg. Currently its 100% dmg + 50% more against poisoned targets. Change it to 125% dmg + 25% against poisoned targets. Same max dmg, but smaller gap. You don't want to really increase the max dmg of Mutilate because it might overbalance things in PvP.
3) Change Hemo to be based off AP, not wpn dmg. That way it scales just as well with dagger rogues as it does sword rogues.
4) Reduce Opportunity to be 2 ranks instead of 5 with the same max value. 10% per rank.
5) Reduce Lethality to be 3 ranks instead of 5 with the same max value. 10% per rank.
(Sword rogues already can easily get 5/5 Lethality but CD rogues cant. This would allow them to max Opp and Lethality without losing Ruth/Relent).
I am against moving Opp to the Combat or Assasination tree because it is a major part of Subtlety builds.
Edit: Changing the normalization, whether its 1.7 to 1.8 or even 1.9 would help with the scaling problems of BS vs SS and would have a small enough impact so you wouldnt have to worry about overpowering one build over another.
End goal is to make this the order of best dps specs:
1) Combat Daggers
2) Combat Swords/Fists/Maces = Mutilate
3) Subtlety
The difference between CD and CS should be small, like 2%. Mutilate should be within 5%. Subtlety should be within 10%.
To be perfectly honest, sword specialization needs to be fixed. With offhand procs causing main hand swings, Blizzard has created a great imbalance. This is the biggest problem with it. The gains by having a very fast weapon to proc Combat Potency is one thing, but swords gets to double-dip since the fast off-hand gets to also proc the majority of main hand swings. With say a 1.5 speed offhand and a 2.5 speed main hand 62.5% of your sword spec procs are coming from the offhand. This is the main reason why Latro's, being a relatively crappy weapon dps-wise, in combination with anything decent, rates as good as two decent daggers.
As long as you have crazy interactions where offhands are proccing main hands outside of the energy generation cycle, you will never be able to properly balance the specs. Maces and fists, using roughly the same combat techniques, will never be able to catch up as long as this inequity remains. Sword spec needs to be fixed to balance things. It's also not like combat daggers doesn't beat fury warriors already.
The class I'm more worried about are hunters who seem to get buffs every patch and adding pet dps to their own are almost up there in dps. They get that being able to stay at ranged, with mail armor, with a pet to keep mobs off them and able to deaggro with great frequency.
I would much rather see Sword Spec being left alone and being treated as the benchmark for Combat Fist/Dagger in DPS terms.
Changes proposed by Vulajin would do just that, in fact they might even make Combat Daggers the benchmark again. For what it is worth such changes would be much welcomed by me.
Proposing nerfs is -not- the way forward.
Noone likes to be nerfed, I am surprised that people who play Rogues are proposing that Rogues get nerfed. Change spec if you are unhappy about the way Daggers play, it is what I am most likely going to do.
I would much rather see Sword Spec being left alone and being treated as the benchmark for Combat Fist/Dagger in DPS terms.
Changes proposed by Vulajin would do just that, in fact they might even make Combat Daggers the benchmark again. For what it is worth such changes would be much welcomed by me.
Proposing nerfs is -not- the way forward.
Noone likes to be nerfed, I am surprised that people who play Rogues are proposing that Rogues get nerfed. Change spec if you are unhappy about the way Daggers play, it is what I am most likely going to do.
The problem with moving forward with sword spec as it is is that there is simply no way to bring other specs up to par without somehow invalidating the offhand penalty for them too. I sincerely doubt that the current situation with sword spec is intended, and in my opinion even if there weren't rogues suggesting it as a course of action, we would still be seeing them nerf offhand sword spec sometime in the near future.
The best fix I can think of that will bring all rogue specs on par with one another would be to make Dual Wield Specialization reduce the offhand penalty to nothing and then to change offhand sword spec to only proc offhand attacks. This way, offhand sword spec doesn't scale so wildly out of control, but at the same time, doesn't lose huge amounts of damage and fall behind other specs.
Of course, removing the 25% offhand penalty would be a pretty significant damage boost for all rogue specs (for my current gear, it would be a boost of ~107 DPS). For sword rogues, however, this would be tempered by the change to offhand sword spec; for */sword hybrid rogues, it would also be tempered by the loss of offhand sword spec; and for other single-spec rogues, it would be tempered by the fact that they are already lagging behind the top DPS spec. Perhaps I'm being short-sighted, but I don't necessarily see these things as being out of control.
Its not just the MH procs for Sword Spec creating the gap. Its also the increased number of finishing moves due to the lower scaling of BS vs SS compared to the dps increase on finishing moves as your gear gets better.
As your AP/Crit goes up, BS does scale better than SS. But when you compare BS + Finisher to SS + Finisher, the gain for SS is even higher. This is another reason why as your gear gets better, Combat Swords outpaces Combat Daggers.
This is a bit aside the subject, but i think it should be also considereted that beside raids, combat dagger is barely ok for farming / pvping, far behind the smoothness of a combat sword/fist/mace build.
In my opinion, combat dagger spec should have the edge by a clear 3-5% margin in raids over swords, not only be in line of combat swords which would let them at the most appealing weapons.
To answer Rupp, preBC when we were speculating on the 61 talents templates, SF combat dagger could have be the answer for the finishers. But with combat potency, 30-26-5 has been sent to hell.
It seems that, aside for Hemo and Ghostly Strike, subtlety wants to be a dagger tree primarily (Opportunity, Imp Ambush, pre 2.3 Shadowstep), but it's defining skill (Hemo) is exclusively effective with very, very slow MH. Given the normalized nature of Hemo and it's set energy cost, would changing it to a variable energy cost (similar to shiv, but with perhaps a lower energy cost) make it a viable for use with daggers? You'd still end up with a higher damage per energy from a slow weapon, but you'd gain combo points at a higher rate with a fast weapon. By changing it to a variable energy cost you'd lose damage/energy with slow weapons so I'm propose chanigng the attack to 125% weapon damage.
If you set the energy cost to 15 + 10 * weapon speed a 2.8 attack speed will do 20% more damage per energy than a 1.8 attack speed dagger, but the dagger would accumulate 5 combo points 23% faster. I'm not sure how it'd then compare to the damage of combat builds and mutilate, but would free the tree up for a wider variety of weapons.
The theorycrafting on daggers vs. swords isn't very useful for those of us who are just looking for updates on the gear spreadsheet. Perhaps it needs its own thread?
I'm sorry but I completely disagree with nerfing any rogue spec's dps. If you nerf Sword rogues, you are just making it so Fury warriors are equal or back on top again. This is something I am 100% against.
No to fix the problem, you need to buff dagger rogues and not abilities that influence swords.
Originally Posted by Krollin
Proposing nerfs is -not- the way forward.
Noone likes to be nerfed, I am surprised that people who play Rogues are proposing that Rogues get nerfed. Change spec if you are unhappy about the way Daggers play, it is what I am most likely going to do.
To be perfectly clear: no one here is suggesting that rogues be nerfed. No one here wants rogues to do less damage than fury warriors. What I (and others) are proposing is a rebalancing. When you look at the rogue specializations and abilities, there are certain elements - like OH sword spec procs - that are more powerful than one might expect; these mechanics prove exceedingly difficult to balance around. Thus, the proposal is not to make rogues do less damage; the proposal is to spread the damage potential currently loaded into one talent and spread it among abilities that can be taken by most raiding rogues, to level the playing field. I fail to see the problem with suggesting a balanced set of changes with some buffs and some nerfs that will ultimately allow half a dozen different specs to realize the damage potential that currently is the sole province of sword rogues, but apparently there's quite a few people here who object to it.
So, returning to my fundamental points:
1) Fist spec, dagger spec, mace spec, and combat hemo builds are relatively well-balanced against each other at the moment.
2) Sword spec is significantly more powerful than any of these options.
3) The source of Sword Spec's power is that while it is extremely well balanced for MH attacks; for a single weapon, 5% chance of an extra attack with that weapon is very comparable to 5% crit with that weapon. However, your OH weapon generates MH procs, which a) harnesses the speed differential of your weapons causing these procs to do almost twice as much damage as they otherwise would, and b) ignores the OH damage penalty. Hence, while OH sword spec would be of comparable power to the other specs on the OH if each OH proc with a 1.5 speed weapon did .75 times the damage of a 1.5 speed weapon, instead it is doing the full damage of a 2.7 speed weapon, and hence 2.4 times as much damage as would reasonably be defined as balanced.
Thus, the fundamental solution to the above is that sword spec it 2.5 times better on the OH than any other weapon specialization; this is why sword spec beats all other specs. At the moment, there are two solutions proposed to resolve this:
1) Cause OH sword spec to proc OH attacks, and increase Imp SnD to 20%/40%/60%
or
2) Make some permutation of changes to talent specs that allow daggers rogues to get full Ruthlessness and Lethality, and reitemize a bunch of OH daggers, and make some change that no one is quite sure about that somehow brings OH fists and maces up to spec without imbalancing MH fist/mace spec, and, oh, Hemo will probably need a buff too to keep up. Oh, and all those changes are probably going to have some consequences for other classes and for PvP, so we'll probably need to tweak the mechanics of some other talents to keep things balanced for PvP, and...
Now, I'm not going to say that option 2 doesn't work. There probably is a way to do it... but it's certainly a heck of a lot messier. So my question would be:
If both of the above solutions yield the same endpoint, i.e., bringing all combat specs plus hemo into rough balance without significantly decreasing rogue DPS as a whole, which is the more elegant solution and, hence, which is Blizzard more likely to do?
Originally Posted by Rupp
Its not just the MH procs for Sword Spec creating the gap. Its also the increased number of finishing moves due to the lower scaling of BS vs SS compared to the dps increase on finishing moves as your gear gets better.
As your AP/Crit goes up, BS does scale better than SS. But when you compare BS + Finisher to SS + Finisher, the gain for SS is even higher. This is another reason why as your gear gets better, Combat Swords outpaces Combat Daggers.
I'm going to have to call BS on this one. The only reason swords scale better than daggers is sword spec. My proof?
I entered into the spreadsheet a set of pre-25man gear. Every single item was from Karazhan or earlier; the weapons used are Arena Season 1. The damage numbers for Combat Daggers versus Combat Fists are as follows:
Combat Fists: 1391
Combat Daggers: 1381
So, 10 DPS different. Then, keeping the same buffs, I replaced the Arena 1 weapons with Arena 2 weapons, and upgraded all the gear from best-in-Kara to best-in-BT. The single best item in every slot - 4/5 T6, the works. The damage numbers for that?
Combat Fists: 1767
Combat Daggers: 1757
...*still* 10 DPS different. There is no appreciable scaling difference between SS builds and BS builds. Sword spec scales a little better since it benefits from hit and crit as well as just AP; but that's purely an artifact of Sword Spec itself, and has little to nothing to do with the fundamentals of SS builds versus BS builds.
Wow, why are your rogues so scared of them making Sword Spec work correctly? No other spec currently gains benefits to the main when when that spec is only used with the offhand. You can't get 5% crit with a MH sword and an offhand Dagger/Fist. So why should sword spec work that way? It isn't a nerf when you are fixing a broken mechanic. I would think most of you here would realize that, but i guess not.
10/20/07, 10:58 PM
Similar Threads
