Is the new NapkinMath(TM) somewhere in this thread now? I skimmed it the other day and didn't see anything solid ... seen numbers saying it nerfs us anywhere from 1.5% to 5% depending on the person working at it.

The Compendium math for GOA should still hold true, so that means like 18.5dps added for GOA I think it was. I wonder how much it adds for a Druid or Shaman?

And yes, the other 2 rogues in the raid tonight were going ballistic on the shaman, so I had to apologize for them. Even if they had a right to be annoyed, they went a bit overboard But I was definitely also annoyed that the app was trying to argue with us, especially since his gear was only Mag level and we're currently working on Kael'thas.

What really aggravates me about all this is that Blizzard has no qualms with making PVP changes that have widespread impact on Raiding, despite Arena being like 1-2hrs a week, while we're raiding 20-40hrs a week. And it affects kills a lot if your entire raidDPS just fell by like 4% ... that can be the difference between a kill and a wipe.

You may play the arena 1-2 hours a week, but there are plenty of people only playing the arena, to the same extent you raid. Maybe not on your server, but these people tend to gather in groups in the same server and/or battlegroup.

Welcome to the burning crusade where alot of people don't give a crap about PvE at all.

It's not my problem if people on some servers like wasting their time playing rated games 10x longer than they should. And if they are only skirmishes then who cares. I invest a ton of money and time into raiding that is never a concern in Arena. So forgive me if I'm a bit angry at knee-jerk changes that nerf my total damage output by 5% for the sake of MS warriors pulling cheap cheese strats in Arena.

Between all the Rogues, MS warriors, etc. in the raid it adds up to a significant loss of raid DPS that can mean the difference between a kill and a wipe. Not to mention that warriors already struggle in raid DPS, and Rogues don't pull ahead by an amount worth their offering no group or raid utility.

We all like different things, what can I say.

How much impact do you think the armor penetration stat (melee vs cloth) and spellhaste (manaburn, cc) have when put in a PvP perspective? Armor penetration negates a good deal of what resilience accomplishes, cloth get's really squishy again, and we're back a square 1. A spellhasted priest with heroism dealing those 1 second mana burns...

Yes you are overly angry, get some perspective.

What perspective is that? That short-sighted PVP changes should have far-reaching and drastic effects on PVE, and I should just accept that so you can have fun at the expense of mine?

Either Hamstring only should have been taken off WF totem, or Blizzard needs to completely come up with different combat rules for PVP and PVE. They've already gone halfway with the creation of Resilience/PVP armor. And you have things like the Rogue PVP gloves make their Deadly throw have Silence. They need to go all the way and do things like the Deadly throw change across everyones abilities so we can truly balance the game. Trying to do both at once has never worked, and this current change only cripples classes that were already struggling to prove their viability to earn their raid spot over other classes.

A rogue struggling to prove their viability in raids?
I'm pulling out of this thread right now. Have a nice day.

Perhaps it is not absolutely needed in all fights, but I am a perfectionist and I am unhappy if I cannot generate the maximum possible amount of threat. That means that I'm not happy if I can't Heroic Strike, I'm not happy if I have to switch to sunder over devastate because my rage income is too low, and I'm not happy when I either have to skip shield blocking or give up threat moves just to keep shield block up.

All of these scenarios happen frequently when you lack WF totem in the main tank group, and they happen almost never if you do have it. Most tanks have 25 % dodge, 20 % parry and 7-8 % opponent miss chance. That means 50 % total evasion, more if you use agi totem, dodge enchants and when Mongoose is active. This means that one in eight times, sequences of three attacks are going to be missed. One in sixteen times, sequences of four attacks will be missed, and so on. On mobs that hit fast, this is not a big deal, but when their swing timer is 2+ seconds, it means you are deprived of rage. Autoattack is enough to sustain shield block spam and not much more.
It is during these periods, which happen very often during a fight, that your dps catches up on your threat.

And I have many fights in which I tank mobs that do not hit appropriately hard or where every bit of threat counts. Prime example is weapons on Kael. If I do not have both WF and Bloodlust there, I am not able to hold the weapons no matter what I do.

For this particular group, after the windfury nerf, he's right. Well, that or the info I posted earlier on rogue totem choice is inaccurate.

The DPS advantage the rogues would gain from new WF over GoA is minimal unless you're fighting a poison-immune mob. WF is slightly better for the 3 rogues, but not by enough to make up for not having GoA on the druid and the shaman. If you swapped the druid for a warrior, WF would be better.

As for him wanting to drop flametongue... yeah, that's poor understanding of class mechanics. Unless you were fighting a poison-immune mob, flametongue wouldn't benefit a single person in that group.

As I'm Alliance and stopped playing my Rogue as my main char when BC was released I'm not sure about it, but wouldn't the Flametongue buff be slightly better than untalented Instant Poison for Sword and Fist Rogues?

That is the challenge: managing crush immunity and maximum threat even though you don't have infinite rage all the time. Anyone could do it if they just had to keep mashing a few hotkeys without thinking about it.
There are some avoidance streaks where you run low on rage, but long-term threat generation on current raid bosses is just fine, even without (the old) WF totem.


Kael's weapons are tauntable.

Flametongue Totem scales at (roughly, based on my observation in-game) <14.7 x Weapon Speed>, from 1.0 to 4.0 for the speed. Accounting for talents and raid buffs - Talent - 15%, Scorch - 15%, Misery - 5%, CoE - 10%.

For a 2.6 speed weapon each swing yields 58.4 damage or 22.5 DPS.

Well it is indeed true that the lack of aggro scaling is a far bigger issue than WF.
And do I really look like a person who doesn't know weapons can't be taunted ?

Threat scaling is a problem for another thread I suppose, but it's really quite awful.

Can anyone confirm this? Going to try queuing for some practice games later today if I can find a bored Shaman, since I don't think in the middle of a competitive 5v5 is the best time to be testing this.

I can only assume your earlier info was inaccurate, because Grace of Air will most certainly still not even approach the DPS of Windfury for a rogue, even counting Instant Poison. It's a big difference, at least 50 DPS assuming typical raid buffs and SSC/TK gear and weapons and ignoring the effects of Windfury on other procs the rogues can get.

As for whether the DPS gain for the three rogues is greater than the potential gain from all five of them having Grace of Air, I could not answer that question adequately for you.

I haven't played Arena with a Shaman since the hotfix but I've heard of quite a few Shaman/Warrior teams losing a bunch of points in the last days so I'd assume it's not true.

well if it was true a few days ago it might not be true now. Sometimes hotfixes take a while to propagate across every server, the arenas might have just been hosted elsewhere

It's a hotfix, not a nerf. If you read the various blizzard posts concerning the totem hotfix -- WF totem was never intended to proc from instant attacks, but there were various technical issues that prevented this fix from being applied earlier.

One can only surmise that this is simply a case of Blizz having fixed the core technical issue with WF totem mechanics and they are simply moving forward with applying the bugfix.

It never struck me as reasonable that hamstring should be proccing WFs anyway.

It only happened to work this way for the last 30 months.

As a programmer, I find that hard to believe.
I wouldn't be surprised if this fix was 3 lines of code. Two of those lines being a single curly bracket.

Making it so that WF didn't proc from hamstring would have been a more reasonable fix than preventing it to proc from almost all yellow attacks from all melee classes. That fix would also have been only 3 lines of code.

You might want to try reading time stamps next time you reply to things, the post you quote of mine was from at least a day prior to Blizz releasing info on why the hotfix went through, and was on page 6 of a 13 page thread. Way to go.

Just because you call it a fix doesn't stop it from being a nerf.

Hotfix: Slice and Dice no longer effects all off-hand weapons. This was never intended behavior, and we have corrected the core technical issues that prevented us from implementing it when TBC launched.
Hotfix: Druid ability "Mangle" will no longer increase Shred damage by 30%. This was never intended behavior, and we have corrected the core technical issues that prevented us from implementing it while laughing maniacially and dancing in the rain.
Hotfix: Deathcoil renamed "Happycoil", now grants a portion of your HP to target enemy and makes you run in a circle for three seconds, gathering flowers to give them in a pretty bouquet.

The 'technical issues' line is pure crap, and hotfixing in a nerf like this without testing the impact it's going to have on all those nifty DPS race bosses was... well, let's go with 'ill-advised'

These are the same Blizzard posters that said post 2.0 release that there were currently "no plans to alter WF totem from it's current form."

I find the fact they hotfixed it pretty interesting considering they have a current and active PTR where they could have got feedback on the changes and see if it had the impact they intended.

It just seems a little backhanded to suddenly change something without a patch note a mechanic which has been the same for 30 months, sure they intended to change it but when they realised this fact they should have made it into a patch.

If windfury totem was doing excessive damage than normal and lets say generating 2 attacks instead of 1 that would be a hotfixable issue, but something which the totem has done pretty much forever is not something which should be under the "hotfix" umbrella.