Andeh

Like many others out there, I've become increasingly disappointed by the viability of dagger builds for Rogues. On top of having the positioning burden in solo play or PvP, the sustained damage of these builds is inferior to Combat Sword or Hemorrhage builds when comparing equal levels of gear. On top of that, Mutilate adds two more requirements: that the target be poisoned, and that you use a dagger offhand. I think that it is reasonable to assert that dagger based builds should have equal or slightly greater damage output to non-positional builds, to offset its additional requirements. This post is intended as a discussion on what exactly would need to change in order to make at least 1 raid viable Mutilate and Backstab build.

Mutilate
Two major issues Mutilate faces are poison-immune mobs, and Deadly Poison (our best damage poison) breaking Gouge, which is one of two ways we have to get behind a mob while in solo combat. Additional problems are the highly expensive Improved Poisons and Vile Poisons talents, and the Deadened Nerves talent, which simply does not make sense given the rest of the Assassination tree. I propose the following changes:
1) Change Improved Poisons to "Increases your chance to apply poisons by 3/6/9%."
2) Change Vile Poisons to "Increases the damage dealt by your poisons and Envenom by 6/12/18% and gives your poisons an additional 12/24/36% chance to resist dispel effects."
3) Add a new talent "Improved Deadly Poison" to tier 4 - "Your Deadly Poison has a 50/100% chance not to break Gouge or Blind."
4) Change Master Poisoner to "Gives your poisons a 50/100% chance to be effective against targets normally immune to poison and reduces the chance your poisons will be resisted by 5/10%." This talent is meant to let the Rogue poison targets such as Elementals, Mechanicals, and Stone-form Dwarves, but not something immune to all effects (Pally bubbles, etc.).
5) Replace Deadened Nerves with "Deftness" - "Your critical strikes of special abilities restore 1/2/3/4/5 energy."
Comments: The changes to the two existing tier 4 talents slightly decrease their individual power, but the cheaper cost allows for a slight net gain.

Backstab
The biggest issue "raid Backstab" builds face is having to spread talents across to tops of 3 trees, just to attain a minimal level of effectiveness. This removes the availability of other low-mid tier Assassination talents that Hemorrhage or Combat Swords builds get. Some people have proposed simply moving Opportunity to Assassination. I feel that doesn't make sense for three reasons. First, it would leave Subtlety with only 1 talent in tier 1. Second, Ambush and Garrote are effected by Opportunity, which typically fall under the "jurisdiction" of Subtlety. Third, it would excessively buff Combat Mutilate's damage. Instead, I propose:
1) Change Improved Backstab to "Increases the critical strike chance of your Backstab by 10/20/30% and its damage by 8/16/24%."
2) Remove Backstab from the abilities effected by Opportunity.
Comments: This frees up 5 talent points for Combat Backstab builds, most likely to be spent in talents normally available to Swords or Hemo builds. It also slightly buffs Backstab's damage, to offset its positioning requirement and very, very low combo point generation.

I'd like to hear opinions on these changes. Keep in mind the goal is to simply bring dagger builds up to par with sword builds, and reduce some of the excessively "un-fun" elements that currently exist for dagger builds in particular. Also, regrettably, I haven't actually run the numbers on how much damage would change with some of these, but I tried to make very small changes with respect to damage. If a math or modeling wiz like Aldriana wants to figure out whether any of these are excessive, that would be great. Please try to keep this reasonable and whining free.

 

• frmorrison

You can use Wounding Poison instead of deadly so you can Gouge but it is lost dps. The EJ Rogue Wodin is Mutilate spec, so some people have success with the build; note he does have the Illidan dagger. About the deep Assassin talents, some talents are meant to be bad.

Aggression helping backstab is likely not enough to help combat daggers.

I guess the good thing about buffing Hemo is the off-hand weapon type (unless Human) does not matter, so fast off-hand daggers can be of use.

 

Pyria

There's a very simple solution to the poison immune problem: Just add "Disrupting Poison" or something somesuch that only works on elemental/mechanical targets and applies a minor stacking debuff. The main effect is, of course, to allow Mutilate.

Opportunity has to go, period. I'm really not sure what it's supposed to prevent with it's ungainly placement in Subt. Limiting Combat Daggers makes absolutely no sense since other Combat specs don't share a similar restriction, and Muti . . . well, I'd definitely shed no tears if Muti became more viable than combat with Oppo/DW spec, it's only about three times as fun to play with.

 

• Wodin

I'm Mutilate because it's the best spec for my 3s team. You're completely right - without the gear advantage it would be pointless. I think that one of the major initiatives of patch 2.1 and 2.3 has been to fix the "bad" talents in everyone's tree and promote more intra-tree diversity. So there do need to be changes.

It puts it on par with non-sword specs, but it's still not as good as sword or 11/2x/2-3x hemo in 2.3. Viability will probably be a reduced backstab cost or increased CP generation somehow, and I'm really not sure how you fit those characteristics into the current talent tree.

 

Faytte

Agreed, which is why I'm confused why Mutilate and Combat daggers did not receive 'more'. I considered them in a worse overall position to combat/hemo. However the idea mutilate might receive similar treatment as hemo is exciting; I would ~love~ to raid dps with mutilate, and only don't due to its short comings with extended dps/scaling.

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

 

Faytte

To add, I think Master Poisoner might work very well as a "increases all damage to poisoned targets by 1/2%".

Vigor I think could be swaped to a "restore energy on crit" type talent. 10 energy was very nice for pre TBC pvp, but it seems far less valuable now.

Deadened nerves seems to make more sense in Combat, nothing about the talent really fits in the Assassination talent tree.

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

 

Ozzmar

A friend of mine suggested that maybe Mutilate just say "Damage increased by 50% when daggers are poisoned." That would sure seem to fix the problem, and if you're going up against poison-immune mobs, you can save cash and just put a Rank 1 Crippling poison on. It's a win/win.

I love the sugggestion to remove Backstab from the list of Opportunity skills. Seeing as you can do it out of Stealth, there isn't much "Opportune" about it.

 

Durus

If they did that, they might as well just increase mutilate's damage by 50% base and call it a day. I like the idea of master poisoner making poisons work on poison immune mobs, that fits the theme of the talent, as well.

 

PartNinja

I would think the only way to make backstab better is to decrease the energy cost. Mabey make imp.BS also decrease it's energy by 10-15? This would certainly fix the raiding aspect of it I think. For PvP some sort of resilience bebuff talent when using daggers would be nice. I know for me, it's not so much the 60 energy or position, it's the fact that resilience messed up daggers altogether as they are a 100% crit reliance weapon/spec ( save Mut ).

 

Squirl

Made up a talent chart that improves Combat Daggers, mostly. I don't know much about mutilate (never specced it, never will), so some help in that area would be good.

Changes:

Combat
-Changed Improved Sinister Strike to Efficient Blows, which applys the energy reduction to Backstab as well as Sinister Strike.

Assasination
-Gave Improved Backstab a chance (5%, 10%, 20%) to generate a combo point on hit.

-Added Opportunity to the Assassination Tree.

-Gave Master Poisoner the ability to poison otherwise posion-immune mobs.

Subtlety
-Removed Opportunity from the Subtlety Tree.

Debating whether or not to give Dagger Specialization some armor penetration. It also doesn't seem too fair to take Opportunity away from subtlety, but who speccs subtelty anyways, right? (jk, I was subt 1-70 and it still has a special place in my heart)

 

iuron

As a dagger-loving combat rogue (I know, it's not reasonable) I would really like to be on par with swords. But at least the aggression change grants a small improvement and reduces the difference. But I'm slightly worried as this change stays undocumented in the official patchnotes.

Trying out different builds in the spreadsheet, I found that at my equipment level (just past Kara/Gruul) combat daggers is still better than other dagger builds. And according to the DPS-spreadsheet, it seems to me, the changes to dirty deeds could lead to a revival of the 13/41/7 build, which might grant a slight improvement in overall DPS depending on equipment.

Thinking about possible future changes, imp. sinister strikes could be a good place for improving daggers, as it is one of those non-efficient talents which can be found in quite a lot of combat dagger builds. Rename it "efficient strikes (or else)" and just give the same energy reduction (3/5) to backstab as sinister strike gets right now. Daggers probably would not become overpowered, because we would gain less additional backstabs than other combat builds get "free" sinister strikes.

 

neg^

Fix sword spec offhand procs give offhand attacks.

Let all mobs be afflicted by deadly poison, but resist the damage ticks if they are immune.

Add 1/2/3 extra seconds to Imp SnD, and/or 1%/2%/3% if need be(t4 2 piece bonus makes a bigger difference for Combat Daggers and Mutilate).

Adding specific boosts to either backstab, mutilate or dagger spec will most likely create a similair situation as today with sword spec. Seeing as sword spec is pretty much the defacto standard for raid dps, fixing it would of course be a small nerf. Necessary in my opinion to bring to bring all specs up to par.

Boosting low tier combat would help all specs without creating weird pvp synergies.

Not sure if combat mutilate would need anything more. Last time i raided with it was with Malch+Emerald ripper. Excellent single target dps well on par with other specs at the time as I recall as long as you focused on managing all those combopoints. I'm sure there are a few decent rogues who have tried it out with alot better daggers/gear and can give more input.

 

Aarcani

Give us a new poison, acid, that does less dmg than deadly poison but works against poison immune mobs. Works for mutilate and envenom the same as DP.

 

KasumiRevy

Most rogues agree, the required positioning to use backstab/mutilate is not given a large enough advantage in pvp or pve.

They require more finesse and control, but also for some odd reason seem to do less damage then the easier combat builds. It just doesn't make sense. Personally I've always felt the damage from mutilate and backstab should both be significantly buffed (perhaps on the low end damage range of the attack so not to become OP).

Backstab I feel needs a large buff because, it still should be a fairly common rogue attack, and today it sees, very few uses in builds today (resilance may be playing a factor here).

For as long as I can remember combat swords has always been the real dps king.

 

galzohar

I thought backstab (and mutilate) always did and still do more damage per energy? And that the reason sword wins is sword spec, aggression and the 5 more talent points? All these suggestions seem to ask for daggers to have the same white DPS and combo point generation of combat swords, however would that really be balanced? Or am I completely off here and backstab actually doesn't deal the dmg/energy I think it does?

What is *really* the reason for combat swords to be better than combat daggers, and how many of those factors that make combat swords would actually need to be negated in order to make daggers equal? For now what I see combat swords has over daggers:
-More finishers.
-Stronger finishers.
-slightly higher white damage due to OH procs proccing MH attacks.

Note I'm not counting mutilate because that would be a lot more complicated comparison. I was wondering what really made swords better than daggers as I remember daggers used to always win at least pre-bc.

 

Darien

Whatever they do to daggers, it needs to address the large amount of DPS lost from the finisher cycle disparity - I ran some calculations a while back but misplaced them, but I think it was on the order of 50-100 DPS.

Everyone suggests the energy cost or combo points, but that would just homogenize the build with swords for the most part. I'd actually like to see the attack scaled to do more DPE. This would fix 2 things at the same time: combat dagger raid viability AND backstab PVP viability.

 

jmlowry

One way you could give rogues a buff in PvP would be to add a new poison. The new poison would essentially be a "resilience breaker", increasing the chance the target is critically hit by 2/4/6/8/10%. (Just throwing up numbers) Without above average gear, resilience has really nerfed the burst damage of Mutliate rogues into the ground. This would also be a reason to include rogues on top tier 5's teams.

As more and more people are reaching the resilience cap, Blizzard needs to think of something to help out the classes that don't wear plate, can't switch into bear form, and can't absorb a lot of damange in general that rely heavily on burst damage. (They are already doing that by buffing the Frost tree for mages.)

If you need proof to realize that rogues have little to no burst damage any more, try to duel a warrior or resto druid with 300-400 resilience. It's a total joke.

 

glowacks

I always saw backstab as an absolutely horrible ability on its own since it barely did any more damage than Sinister Strike (per energy) but its combo point generation was 50% worse. In order to make up for this, you absolutely need to take Opportunity and Imp Backstab and thus Sword/other builds have 8 more points to distribute. Dagger builds have to give up 2 points total in Lethality and/or Ruthlessness just because of how spread around better talents are; any other weapon has so many more points to spend that they can afford to do neat things like taking two weapon specs and lose less damage than you gain, especially fist/sword. It's bad enough that swords has a weapon spec that is so much better than any other that hybrid builds not only exist but produce similar damage. What is it about swords that makes them so much more deserving? I would think that daggers would receive this sort of treatment, given they're harder to make best use of.

I'm partly glad Opportunity wasn't left to rot in the 2nd tier of subtlety, but it really has no business affecting backstab. The rest of subtlety is about stealth, attacks from stealth, and not getting hit/not dying. That's the reason it's so bad in raids, and blizzards attempts to make it better by giving them stat increasing talents deep in the tree I find mystifying. They seem only there as a way of increasing damage to deep subtlety, something that the talent tree really shouldn't be caring about. The tree really needs some help in terms of doing some potentially neat things with possibly restealthing for a short period of time to get another opener in - Shadowstep fails miserably.

But back to daggers.

I concur with the moving of Opportunity's backstab damage over to Improved Backstab and would add an energy restore on crit to help with CP generation. I would suggest giving the latter part a separate 2-point talent that requires 3 ranks in Imp BS and would give x/2x energy on crit (I leave it to Blizzard to "balance" the numbers). This way it wouldn't overlap with any of the other CP/energy generators (SF/ruth/relentless/cp), stay true to the assassination model (energy regen, crits), and would hopefully bring up Dagger damage by allowing them to not be forced into a 3/5/5 cycle.

A sword build gets relatively little assistance to its SS beyond the obvious energy reduction, so yes, Backstab is far more damage per energy once fully talented. The problem is that daggers do far less white damage because sword spec is stupidly good, and generates 50% less combo points. I believe the rogue community can stand by with higher white damage for swords as long as they get more BS damage, but daggers has huge problems with finisher cycles due to paying 50% more energy per combo point. I would venture that Blizzard has tuned the trees so that they do the same basic damage, but neglected to look at the fact that Dagger finisher damage is far lower than other weapons and I would say is the main source of its damage deficit to swords.

 

Milano

Link: Unleashed Gaming

Own suggested talent trees to fix some of the problems. Taken some of the suggestions from this board and added some of my ideas.

Improved Backstab: Now increases damage dealth by Backstab by 10%/20%/30% in addition to the crit bonus
Improved Poisons: Reduced down to 3%/6%/9%.
New Talent Prudence in Tier 4: Allowes the use of deadly poison together with blind and gouge.
Mutilate: Added 50% damage bonus against elementals and mechanical machines.
Weapon Expertise: Added 50% disarm reduction like the warrior warrior talent in Fury.
Vitality: Increased the stamina and agility bonus to 3%/6% and 4%/8%.
Opportunity: Removed Backstab
Camouflage: Reduced to 3 talent points and moved back down to tier 1.
Master of Deception: Reduced to 3 talent points with same bonus as before.
New Talent Improved Vanish Tier 2: Added new talent to replace the talent points taken from tier 1
Sleight of Hand: Traded the secondary bonus with a armor penetration based on 10% of your own personal armor, triggered by feint for 10 seconds.
Shadowstep: Added removal of moving imparing effects and roots for the greater good

 

PSGarak

I think the purpose of Backstab being affected by opportunity is to make opportunity a "good" tier-1 subtlety talent, ie one that provides a significant benefit to a common ability. The problem with this, of course, is that dagger-subtelty quite simply sucks, and it ends up spreading out the points for a dagger build to an unreachable degree, without serving its original purpose.

The idea that I've been tossing around in my head for a while is that, since Subtlety is the "opener" build, shadowstep should let you use an opener mid-fight (and get rid of the rest of the riders, including bonus damage--make it set off Master of Subtelty instead). This makes shadowstep into sort of the capstone of the subtlety tree, in much the same way that UA is the capstone of the affliction tree: after spending all these points in buffing your openers you can now actually use them in most fights more than once. What this has to do with dagger builds: Opportunity doesn't need to affect backstab anymore, because Garrote (or ambush) become more than once-a-fight abilities, so backstab can be taken off of opportunity while still retaining opportunity as the worthwhile damage tier-1 sub talent. Where you would put the opportunity backstab/muta damage is up to you.

Backstab builds have problems in PvE because of energy cycles and PvP because of resilience. You really only need to fix one of these. Note every spec needs to be viable in every application, it just needs to be viable in one application so it's not completely useless. So, what should combat-daggers be for? That will tell you what needs to be solved. As the game stands right now it's much easier and effective to respec between raiding and PvP so it can't be a half-and-half build without a change to the respec system, but I'm a heretic and think that such an option might be the way to go.
Personally I think that combat-daggers, and daggers in general, are historically and thematically a PvP build so I would rather solve the resilience problem, to the exclusion of the cycles problem if need be.


I should point out that thematically, backstab does belong on opportunity because opportunity affects attack-from-behind abilites, not out-of-stealth abilities... currently. That needs to be worked on.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Evy

I've played as a dagger rogue since TBC started out. It used to hold up pretty well, but now it's getting to be very underwhelming even though I have almost the best gear possible. This post will mainly concern PvE, as that's what I spend most of my time doing, but I'm certainly welcoming criticism to my suggestions if they unbalance PvP.

A few changes that I think would help dagger builds are:

1) Reducing Backstab to 50 energy (or some other non arbitrary value). Nobody really uses BS as a PvP ability (because of Mut) so I don't foresee this affecting PvP too much. Using more than half my energy bar for one combo point really sucks, especially when the sword rogues have higher white damage AND much higher rupture uptime. No matter how much Backstab's DPE gets buffed via increased %damage, it will still be supbar just because of it's CP generation since we have to use 8/13 CP just to keep SnD up, whereas a sword rogue is using between 4/9 to 5/9 CP on SnD and the rest on Rupture or even Evis.

2a) Add the backstab bonus of Opportunity to Dagger Specialization.

OR

2b) Change Dagger Specialization to provide a certain amount armor ignore (maybe 100 per point?). Correct me if I'm wrong, but armor ignore is the one stat that works better for dagger rogues than sword rogues because we scale pretty nicely with it. I'm against having daggers ignore some amount of resilience, because that would overpower it versus undergeared players and make it almost useless against those with 400+.

Results: 2a would give us 5 freed up talent points which could be used for poison talents and/or Murder, which has always been one of the reasons why sword builds had an edge once we had access to 51 talent points. 2b would give daggers a unique aspect to the spec. Also, it would make dagger spec more viable for Mutilate, since most people ignore it in favor of DW spec.

As has been said in this thread before, daggers mostly suck because of the fact you need at least 8 talent points spread out over two trees to be effective at all. The fact that Imp BS is in 2nd tier Ass makes it impossible for us to get Murder, which is a very nice boost in raid damage. Sword builds only need Imp SS to be effective (not counting sword spec since dag spec is the counterpart), which is only two points and this allows them to go for poison talents.

Maybe I'm biased, but I don't think that daggers should be outperformed by sword builds of equivalent gear because of the positional requirements that occasionally bite you in the ass, like bosses turning their backs and energy being wasted at 100. That's not to say a dagger rogue should outperform a sword rogue with glaives or anything, but I feel they need to find a way to balance the raid damage of the two specs somehow.

 

Ozzmar

Several people have mentioned somehow making it so that Deadly Poison won't break Gouge or Blind. To be perfectly honest, that conceptually makes even less sense than Deadened Nerves being in Assassination.

What if Deadly Poison, instead of a stacking DoT, added a debuff that increased damage done to a target by X amount?
What if Hemorrhage actually did what the name implies and put a bleeding DoT on the target?

This would effectively make Deadly Poison more usable in PvP, and it would discourage the plethora of people I see from using Hemo with daggers.

 

Tinkerfizzle

Well, to Deadly Poison's credit, the stacking debuff is one of its selling points in PvP against Druid/Warrior teams in 2v2 - to hinder Abolish Poison.

 

Ozzmar

Sure, I guess you could say that a single application of the poison would put Y number of "charges" on the target (similar to how Hemo works now). I could see that getting out of hand with poison removal though.

 

Wodahs

They have to simplify things as well. Aside from dealing with dagger disparities, they need to remove/condense some talents. We have more talent points available in the combat tree than any other class. Condense a couple weapon specializations, make talents use less points but give the same affect, but do something.