At this point, the changes have not gone live on either US or EU PTR servers, and the patch notes do not specify how much the debuff will be increased. People have been throwing out imagined debuff numbers, but it is pure speculation. One thing is certain, the 15% reduction on weapon damage will seriously gimp AR/Prep for PvP, simply because this build is much more reliant on direct Hemo damage than on the debuff (which is mostly wasted during the AR Hemo spam anyways). We know that personal raid dps for Tri-Spec will also be lower. However, if the debuff increase is large enough, this could actually be a buff to Tri-Spec overall raid dps. We just don't know at this point, because no one knows what the new debuff numbers will be.

One thing is for certain regarding Tri-Spec, this will mean lower personal dps in exchange for some degree of higher debuff dps. When we get a firm number on the debuff increase, we will be able to calculate whether the increase in overall dps is significant enough to offset the nerf to personal dps.

If the debuff increase is in fact substantial, AR/Prep will surely still suffer, but Tri-Spec could come out unscathed or even improved. I would not mind having my personal dps drop a bit, as long as the debuff increase is enough to increase overall dps.

All we can do is wait for hard numbers on the debuff change. Until then, the fate of Tri-Spec will be a up in the air.

Actually that is not true at all. We have enough information where someone can determine exactly how much personal damage they will lose and, if they wanted to, calculate how much the debuff would need to increase as total damage to compensate for it.

The DPS nerf of tri-spec is around 2.5-3% without counting the debuff damage increase. The real problem about this nerf is the scaling part. As your AP increases or your weapon speed is slower(or both)the difference between the unnormalized hemorrhage and the new 110% hemorrhage gets dangerously closer. In example with ToA and 2100 AP the difference between the old Hemorrhage and the new is 2.5%(In favor of the new one, not counting the debuff). For the same rogue the debuff needs to be increased to 45.4 per charge to provide the same raid DPS(not exactly but close one)as in 2.3.

So yes, we should wait until we have news about the debuff damage increase. Hopefully it won't be a joke number. Don't forget that hemo gets fixed in 2.3.2 and this means more raid DPS in game.

Well, this is really irrelevant, but wouldn't it be cool if they increased the + damage debuff and gave it unlimited charges? Only one hemo rogue needed because it would be extremely useful. Almost as much as a Survival hunter. Survival rogues

Edit: After some quick research, I found out that an increase of ~2-4 damage is all that is required for Hemo to be better than most Survival hunters if hemo had unlimited charges. Very interesting. I'm hopeful that if they increase it by more than 3 times that amount that hemo would be better provided there were 2 rogues and hemo didn't have unlimited charges.

When do you have this exactly? At the start of a fight and on "run in" after a transition phase (e.g. Hydross swap, Leotheras swap, whatever). You want to argue that you should not spam on transition when your bar is full? Fine. Once you start engaging, you don't have a full bar. You don't have 70 energy. So it's completely unrealistic to spam two hemos within 1 second. Sorry, I don't see how you can get your energy up there. And this hypothecial gaming the system you keep espousing assumes you actually know when the hemo charges are used at your client. You don't.

I'm going to keep spamming because I'm quite certain there are no charges to be saved by not spamming. Someone did fine math showing that the charges will be gone in a second anyway. On transitions or fight starts you can wait to let the charges expire if you wish. I'd say you are >>still<< better off spamming since slice will be up sooner that way. And the sooner slice is up, the more your white attacks are accelerated by 30%.

At that point, you begin to consume your own hemo charges faster and you're already energy starved by getting slice up. I don't see why you'd want to delay this to save some small number of hemo charges. It's just not really worth it when other priorities are stronger.

And by the way, those 1-2 seconds if a cycle is actually over and you're waiting to reapply hemo to "conserve charge"? Those are lost dps. Cycles that are over and not refreshed cost you damage you cannot get back. So you now are stuck waiting those 1-2 second if and only if cycles are not in jeopady. Again, wth static charges, bat good, spirit bolts, whatever running around, I'm not interested in trying to save some ephemera when other priorities are so much more important.

You can't actually guarantee that all the charges are always going to be ate up in less than a second. If you want, I can model a poison distribution of incoming hits and we can see what the variance is, but this sort of stuff also depends on weapon-swing asynchronicity and raid composition. I'm just going to come down and categorically say about using all the charges: "probably, but not always" and further go on to say that assuming it always is, is going to lose you some damage.

We're also not saying that waiting for the hemo debuff to get used should be the absolute number-one priority when determining whether to hit the button. You have successfully disproven that straw-man arguement, and I congratulate you on your acuity. In general, I would say that wasting energy > finishing cycles > hemo debuff > spam. Yes, if the hemo debuff is up and you ticked to 80 1.5 seconds ago you should waste the charges. Yes, if S&D is about to fall off and there are two charges left and you have 4 CP's you should bite the bullet and spam*, and yes there's even odds those two charges will get eaten up in the intervening lag.
HOWEVER
In the event that you are at <3 combo points, and energy ticks and dodges and whatnot conspire against you to have 5 charges sitting on the debuff when you have 35 energy, there is no concievable reason not to wait a tick or two and see if those charges will get used up before refreshing.
The point is, it's perfectly possible to not miss your cycles or lose energy while simultaneously making a concious effort to minimize debuff wastage. I should add, this is also much more apparent when you have another rogue doing hemo. If you have any sort of raid unit-frame that displays buffs and durations, you can perfectly anticipate when he is going to be hemoing and try to wait, *within reason*, until after his debuff has faded before you apply yours.


*Maybe. Maybe not, actually. Two hemo charges is a flat 72 damage. 1 second of S&D uptime is 3/13 of a second of autoattacks, which has a very large chance of being zero damage. While the S&D probably wins on average, the difference is smaller than you would think. Similarly, half a tick of rupture is peanuts.

The power of an ability in PvP strikes raiders again (the winners of the last 3v3 Arena was resto Druid plus 2 Hemo Rogues).

It sucks that Hemo will be nerfed, but PvP is a huge part of Blizzard's causal player base. It is almost certain that it will be worth it to bring one "Hemo Bitch" for raid dps after the change.

Well, it was a fun PVE spec while it lasted. I doubt Blizzard will buff it enough to make it viable. And even if it is, I dont know if most players in most guilds would be well served by speccing into it. With the prevalence of damage meter mods like Recount and SWS Stats, its likely that your average guild will likely only remember those that perform well, they guy who takes the job as a 'buff bitch' will most likely be quickly forgotten.

I am slightly annoyed by this change, it was well known how well hemo was performing, if that was too much, it certain could have been changed before it made it to live. It feels like I basically paid to beta test hemo for a few weeks. This feels very much like an arena nerf affecting PvE yet again.

In case you're referring to the latest Dreamhack-matches: They were only played with 2 rogues because the enemy team (MoB Turtlepower) was playing a drain-team, so the most effective counter was to use non-mana classes. This does not by default make hemo that powerful. None of the other games were played with 2 Rogues as far as I know.
(If you're not referring to Dreamhack, ignore this post).

The ongoing ability of warlocks to solo 2 people in 2v2 arenas apparently is not an issue. But the fact that some rogues, when spec-ed AR/Prep, can lock down some cloth wearers could not stand. This is apparently the Blizzlogic (tm) at issue here. I have heard further talk of simply making AR/Prep unbuild-able by moving prep down to the bottom of subtlety. Rogues are still pretty useless in 5s and pretty much can't kill anything with high armor or high health.

Of course, the shaman earthshield change is equailly hostile.

The overarching question is how many more times the PVE game is going to be attacked in order to solve some PVP imbalances while others are allowed to persist indefinitely.

Hemo is fun and compared to combat, I like it more for PVP right now. it allows me a single spec that works decently enough in both (Dirty Deeds in particular is PVP friendly). It's too bad this is happening. Hard to get excited about returning to Combat Potnecy, a wonderful talent that begs for stacking hit, which is also harder than before thanks to the gigantic increase in the hit cap.

One point is that this tiny change swifts the balance of rogue/healer vs. warrior/healer again too far to the warrior side. While it was possible to do 40/60 against warriors, all these matches were very, close now many of these will be lost and the ratio changes again to 20/80 or even worse.

Please stop shitting this thread up with speculation, whining, and other assorted wastes of space. When we know the full details of the nerf, including whether Hemo is normalized or non-normalized in 2.3.2, we can resume discussion in earnest. Until then, there's nothing useful to be said here.

There's no way that it will become un-normalized. Staying un-normalized was a (heinously large) oversight. Blizzard had very good reasons for introducing wepaon speed normalization, and no good ones for undoing them. I guarantee that if the damage needs to be increased it will be done through percent modifiers and debuff damage, not through the changing of the normalization mechanic.

1) Hemo as it is works for pve and pvp. Speculating on changes is useless until we actually see what the entire change is, not just part of it.

2) Moving prep down to make AR/Prep impossible to build isn't going to happen. They can (if this is really a concern) simply remove the reset of AR from it like they did with cloak when it was changed to be 90% resist with a 1 minute cooldown. I CAN, however, see them moving the subtlety talents around to make shadowstep more "mainstream", but that's pure speculation and not worth discussing in this thread, in my opinion.

3) Changing hemo in the manner speculated above will more than likely promote the single top dps raid spec of combat swords, doing quite the opposite of promoting raid spec variety. Again, this is my speculation, but if spec variety is the goal then they need to revisit dagger talents and mechanics.

This is almost certainly incorrect. Hemo in the past was probably purposefully unnormalised (and not overlooked as you state) as it was just a MH attack with a buff and combo point. There'd have been no point in normalizing it and having it hit a bunch less 'instantly' than a normal hit for the energy cost.

At 110% weapon damage it barely undoes the normalization effect for most MH's (-7.7% -> -14.3% for 2.6-2.8 speed) - and as such is a nerf for the better MH weapons vs. the original instant 'Hemo' damage in the past. IMO it's too much to change from 125% -> 110% (even with the corresponding buff change) due to the effect on PvP . In this case it is worth some speculation as there is the opportunity to provide some feedback, and 'perhaps' the devs will take that into account and move the 110% -> 115%-120% with a correcting buff change.

I do agree that further speculation is not warranted beyond that though.

Ratak

I dont get it. When something is broken, why does the fix always have to be the most idiotic? Nerf Hemo and you nerf the entire Sub tree all over again making it useless. Back to square one. If the problem is AR/Prep then just fix that.

Swap prep with premed.

finished. Whats the problem? At least this way 30/0/31 or 21/0/40 is still somewhat viable

No - the part that you are NOT understanding is that 2 hemo rogues do not = 2 hemo debuffs. Only 1 hemo debuff can be on a mob at a time. Rogue A applies hemo (10 charges). Five charges are used by the raid, rogue B applies hemo (refreshed to 10 charges), 5 charges are wasted and unavailable for use by the raid, reducing the effectiveness of rogue A's hemo. It takes about 1.5 seconds to use 10 hemo charges in a 25 man raid. It takes about 3.8 seconds in a normal cycle between hemo applications. In theory, two rogues who did nothing but stare at hemo debuffs might be able to time them such that neither rogue refreshed the hemo debuff until the charges were used. However, on average, 39.5% of the hemo charges will be wasted by reapplication of hemo by one or the other of the rogues. The best possible hemo uptime with 2 hemo rogues and charges consumed as intended would be 78.9% uptime. The real world uptime if rogues are not staring at the hemo debuff might be more in the 50-70% range.

It is not true that there is exact synchronicity in application of hemo between 2 rogues in a raid (I reviewed actual hemo uptime and application of by 2 different rogues in a 25 man raid this week). However, once the hemo debuff is fixed such that magical spells are not consuming the charges, there would be overlap. Neither myself or the other rogue in my raid were actively trying to not overlap charges, but we still did not overlap much. Differences in hit, weapon expertise, his lack of sword spec (he's assass/shadowstep with no points in combat for whatever reason) - all meant that we did have glitches in the cycle that desynched attacks. We also didn't begin attacking at exactly the same moment, generally, and on certain fights were not attacking the same mob.

Well, as of currently, hemorrhage has not been changed on the PTR. I'm not sure whether this is an oversight, or if they decided to not actually change it, but so far it still does 125% damage and 36 per debuff charge.

Was there a PTR patch today? I checked that on Monday as well and can verify that despite the 2.3.2 PTR patch notes, I was also getting 125% and 36 damage to the debuff

They announced a PTR restart on Dec 5th but also mentioned they wouldn't push a new build.

I find it rather hard to believe that it was an oversight when they introduced normalization, and haven't noticed it since then.
Maybe though it was an oversight right when they introduced the normalization, and later on purposely didn't change hemo, recognizing that it would become too weak if they changed it (without changing the mechanic of hemo itself, as they have done with the 125% patch).

New hemo is live. 110% weapon damage as promised and a debuff of +42 to physical damage. Two things are obvious: personal damage will take a hit, especially as gear scales; and raid damage will improve. We all need to know by how much. New math, GO!