Here is an argument that has nothing to do with math. Aren't daggers the weapon of choice for a rogue? A rogue is a kind of flexible, sneaky person that would rely on small, sharp weapons to do damage. Carrying around two big swords is frankly not practical or logical in that case. This is an important premise. Because if you agree with this, rogues should be more effective with daggers than swords. I would suggest Blizzard make sure daggers do 1% or so more damage than swords in a raid environment. This is because 1) daggers are IMO the weapon of choice for our class and the damage should reflect that 2) because of the positional disadvantage that you will suffer from once in a while regardless of how skilled you are. I'm not saying Blizzard needs to buff our damage us as a class, the only thing I'm interested in is to make daggers equal or slightly better compared to swords in raids.
Instead of playing around with Blind, a new 'Corrosive Poison' could be added and Envenom could then be slightly modified to use either deadly or corrosive poison charges, with deadly before corrosive in the order of precedence. Then, either deadly is used before corrosive separately, or they could work together (e.g. if a target has 3 deadly charges and 4 corrosive, a 5 point envenom would use the deadly charges first and 2 of the corrosive charges for full effect, leaving 2 corrosive charges behind).
'Corrosive Poison' - reduces target's armour by 89. Lasts 12 sec. Stacks up to 5 times. Also affects mechanical targets.
This would give a non-DOT poison for Envenom and also a poison which affects mechanical targets. Corrosive poison would also offer a small group buff.
I think Improved Poisons should be buffed to 3/../15% regardless of other changes. I also think Improved Backstab should be renamed 'Improved Daggers' and should incorporate Improved Ambush--thus giving combat daggers the choice of Ambush, making Improved BS/Ambush more appealing for Mutilate builds, and freeing up 3 talents for subtlety dagger builds.
To give subtlety daggers a further buff, and to encourage more people to try it, I suggest a deep subtlety talent called something like:
'Deep Gouge' - gives your Gouge ability a 50/100% chance not to break from your bleed effects. Also increases the damage dealt by the attack that breaks the Gouge by 5/10%.
This would distinguish subtlety daggers from other dagger specs by letting them use bleed attacks more freely. The added damage on the breaking attack is just an extra.
I disagree with OP's ideas about Opportunity. This talent is already pretty weak; removing the BS buff from it would make it obselete. To address combat daggers' DPS issue, I would suggest indirectly buffing Opportunity to also increase attack speed when using daggers by 1/../5%. This would give a buff to combat dagger spec, increase the appeal of this talent for Mutilate users (although DW spec would remain superior), and buff subtlety daggers too.
Furthermore, I think Lethality should be buffed for special abilities using daggers; something like:
'Lethality' - increases bonus crit dmg for SS/GS/Hemo/Gouge by 6/../30% and increases bonus crit dmg of BS/Muti by 10/../50%.
This would approach the problem that resilience affects daggers more than swords/maces/fists without unduly buffing those weapon-specs as well. This would help Mutilate specs a bit but would not solve the combat dagger issues since that spec can only afford 3 points in lethality--although it would give them 30% rather than 18% for those 3 points.
I raided from MC to Naxx with daggers and I certainly would not want to see the positional requirement removed.
Deadened nerves seems to make more sense in Combat, nothing about the talent really fits in the Assassination talent tree.
I disagree; an assassin, in my eyes, would want to tune his survival skills. I think some extra PVP sparkle should be given to the talent though:
'Deadened Nerves' - reduces physical damage taken by 2/../10% and reduces the chance that bleed effects on you will remove you from Stealth by 15/../75%.
What you would then have is a formidable survival talent for PVP, worthy of its place in the tree.
Anyway, I bundled these ideas into this talent tree, along with my ideas to buff the subtlety tree from a PVE point of view.
The sad thing is we can all discuss changes until we're blue in the face, but Blizzard doesn't seem interested at all. Over the years there have been a myriad good posts on new poisons that could be added, or ways to fix the gap between dagger and SinStr builds, but it always falls on deaf ears.
I think one of the reasons that blizzard hasn't taken any of them in, is that there's no unanymity in them. Every week you hear a new suggestion about daggers--one could reasonably conclude that none of them are really good because they're forgotten by next week. Contrast this with the reaction to combo point on shadowstep: very quickly the entire rogue community that gave a damn about shadowstep said this reduced mobility and the universal suggestion was that it provide a speed increase instead. After about two or three weeks of that suggestion, with very vocal support, no dissention, and no competing ideas, that change showed up on PTR and seems to be going strong. Contrasted with every tom dick and harry inventing a new assassination tree (no offense guys =P) and it becomes very easy to brush it all off. Not for lack of a problem, but for lack of a good idea of how to solve it. If you want to see something changed, just concentrate on how opportunity is a point-sink that kills the build, and try to keep the debate focused.
Am I wrong, but did Combat Daggers have the slowest accelleration to maximum DPS of any of the rogue builds? I presume this is because it has the slowest combo point generation. It's not really viable for any fight where you're having to run about a lot, or change targets (and forego those precious combo points).
If Combat Daggers was to change, I'd suggest something along the lines of:
- Combo point change for backstab
- Energy cost for backstab reduced
- Boss fight change for rogues!
I think one of the reasons that blizzard hasn't taken any of them in, is that there's no unanymity in them. Every week you hear a new suggestion about daggers--one could reasonably conclude that none of them are really good because they're forgotten by next week. Contrast this with the reaction to combo point on shadowstep: very quickly the entire rogue community that gave a damn about shadowstep said this reduced mobility and the universal suggestion was that it provide a speed increase instead. After about two or three weeks of that suggestion, with very vocal support, no dissention, and no competing ideas, that change showed up on PTR and seems to be going strong. Contrasted with every tom dick and harry inventing a new assassination tree (no offense guys =P) and it becomes very easy to brush it all off. Not for lack of a problem, but for lack of a good idea of how to solve it. If you want to see something changed, just concentrate on how opportunity is a point-sink that kills the build, and try to keep the debate focused.
I don't think that this is evidence of the community making Blizzard change their mind. There are countless examples of classes all wanting a change to one of their abilities and being 'unanimous' about it yet Blizzard seemed to do nothing. This change had been suggested and generally accepted as a good, non-OP change within a couple of weeks of Shadowstep being implemented at 2.0 but only in the 2.3.x PTR is it implemented due to 'unanimity' from the rogue community?
The type of reasoning presented in the post is very superstitious and akin to saying "Everyone post in this thread so Blizzard will implement X change." which never ever works.
Nobody knows what type of feedback or testing makes the developers do what they do, but I think that it's rarely the general consensus of the community.
I don't think that this is evidence of the community making Blizzard change their mind. There are countless examples of classes all wanting a change to one of their abilities and being 'unanimous' about it yet Blizzard seemed to do nothing. This change had been suggested and generally accepted as a good, non-OP change within a couple of weeks of Shadowstep being implemented at 2.0 but only in the 2.3.x PTR is it implemented due to 'unanimity' from the rogue community?
The type of reasoning presented in the post is very superstitious and akin to saying "Everyone post in this thread so Blizzard will implement X change." which never ever works.
Nobody knows what type of feedback or testing makes the developers do what they do, but I think that it's rarely the general consensus of the community.
Generally, my understanding is that they sort of make decisions on the basis of a reasonable suggestion from a united community; most commonly, they decide to test the change on their internal test systems and discard it because it has some unwanted side effect. The visibility that a united community brings to an idea shouldn't be completely discarded.
This isn't to say that a united community causes change, but rather that a reasonable suggestion from a united community is more likely to get to the prototype phase than a reasonable suggestion from a lone voice, mostly due to visibility to designers and CMs. Of course, 90% of suggestions that are made aren't reasonable; I doubt we're going to see remade Rogue trees, because of the amount of work needed to completely redesign the trees (Unless Bliz does full class revisions for WotLK). Adding in a situational poison to 'fix' mut doesn't seem likely either. At best I'd expect to see Imp. Backstab have some level of effect on Mut, and/or other Dagger synergy changes.
I don't see how it's conceptually illogical to be honest:
"Ouch, my eyes, I can't see"
*deadly poison ticks*
"Oh never mind, now that I've taken damage I can see again"
How come when I cast fireball, my hands don't light on fire? How come when I hit someone wearing full metal plate with a lightning bolt they don't get electrocuted and die? How come I can jump off a 60 yard high cliff and only *almost* die and then slap a band-aid on my self and keep going like it never happened. Need I go on? It's a video game, just throwing that out there.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
Yeah, it helps a lot that the proposed change was a reasonable and balanced correction to a recognized issue, and it was a redesign of a change that was already planned but not yet implimented. Given that blizzard already wanted to buff shadowstep, there was a reasonable and unanimous response to how it should be done. I'll scale back my statement and say that it's a necessary element, but not a sufficient one, and you have a point that it probably won't matter until blizzard decides on its own that daggers are underpowered. They already seem to admit so, with the change to aggression, so there's hope, but then again they might consider the issue over and done with.
I do still think it's the form of involvement that's most likely to get a response, much less enact a change, especially compared to custom trees.
Here is an argument that has nothing to do with math. Aren't daggers the weapon of choice for a rogue? A rogue is a kind of flexible, sneaky person that would rely on small, sharp weapons to do damage. Carrying around two big swords is frankly not practical or logical in that case. This is an important premise. Because if you agree with this, rogues should be more effective with daggers than swords.
Well you see the problem with opinions is: everybody has one. So in your case, its your perfectly viable opinion, that daggers should be the weapon of choice for a (your) rogue. Nevertheless my opinion completely differs from that. I hate daggers, I am playing my rogue for nearly 3 years now and I don't think I ever used daggers again past level 15 or 20.
Despite my personal dislike, I would never dare to impose that opinion on anyone else. I personally think my rogue is not the dagger-kind and wouldn't use them, others can be happy with them, but I would never want every rogue to use swords, just because I love to use them since early levels.
I think you have to re-think the role of a rogue. There is no single "style" of rogue. You can be the "sneaky" "attack from behind and vanish into the shadows" assassin, you can be the tricky thief, you can be the big bad thug, wielding a club, you can be a stealthy fighter more on the ninja-like way, or you can be the trained fighter used for special missions in a war - or maybe dozens of different other ways you imagine your rogue. But declaring that daggers should be better than any other weapon for a rogue, because it's supposed to be "the weapon of choice" for every rogue is taking it too far in my opinion.
Besides, there is one other thing I would like to contribute to the whole discussion: it might be so that under perfect conditions there are weapons with which a perfectly playing rogue might be able to produce better dps than with daggers (at least that's what current dps-sheet-models show). But we are not playing a game with perfect situations and perfect players.
I have a fellow rogue in my raid who is dagger-rogue for life and he has no problem keeping up with my damage or doing more damage than me lately. Of cause I could just play better, concentrate less on leading the raid (wich is in part my responsibility and he has no need to bother with) but thats not how this game works. There are so many reasons why someone does a few dps more than another person, let it be minor equipment differences, let it be socketing-decisions or enchantments or stats preferences, let it be different responsibilities in a fight or just bad timing.
You will never get two people to be so perfectly comparable that 1, 2 or even 5% of damage-difference in a live bossfight can be contributed simply to the choice of weapon-type. So in my opinion there is no need to be concerned about doing more or less damage as long as we are talking about the simple matter of different weapons with comparable talent-choices (combat swords against combat daggers).
As soon as you have different talent builds you have to keep in mind that different builds also offer different possibilities in the game besides pure dps. So you simply cant compare the dps done by a sword-combat-build with a dagger-mutilate-build weapon-efficiency and break down the different dps to the choice of weapon.
EDIT Dear lawd I need to read the thread before I post. And I thought I had something original :< Still, procentual ArP vs static?
Hiya!
Scrub here. I have a level 70 rogue though. I'm not dagger specced (19/42 combat maces for PVE, ShS for PVP), but I do have a cool idea for the
Corrosive Poison (rank 1 at level 70)
Reduces target's armor by 1%/2%/3%/4%/5%. Stacks up to five times. (percentages are not set in stone obviously). Works on Mechanical mobs.
Why?
1. It fits with all the Armor Penetration that we're seeing on new gear
2. Procentual, not static, ie will work well on very highly armored targets such as Fel reavers
3. Because of 2, stacks with all other forms of ArP.
Discuss OP or not? I first thought making this mechanical only but then again that's a bit too OP IMHO.
Also, fixing the Mechs still leaves us with poison immune elementals. I'm not too keen on trying to poison them too, surely rogues are allowed a weak spot. It's not like fire mages do too well versus fire elementals ;-)
* Dagger Specialization - Increase your damage done with daggers by 1/2/3/4/5%
Since white damage is the main source or damage for a rogue, improving it will probably make daggers viable again. Combat swords are 3% higher in dps according the roguecraft 101, this could make daggers 2% ahead.
* Find Weakness - Increases the rogue damage by 2/4/6/8/10% ( now including white dmg )
This talent is so deep on the assassination tree that almost only Mutilate builds will take it, this could make mutilate a viable raid build again.
Following the rule that Mutilate builds are 10% below combat swords ( unconfirmed ), this could make both builds equal.
* replace Vile poisons, Improved Poisons and master Poisoner by a 5/5 Master Poisoner Talent that combine the effects or all others 12 talent points.
( IMHO the same thing should be done with Master of deception, Camouflage and Heithened Senses )
This could free up some important points on a mutilate and combat/assassination builds.
Poisons are responsable for less then 5% of a rogue dps, and 12 talent points to enhance them a bit doesn't make them worth.
* The new 5/5 Master Poisoner Talent should be pre-requisite to a 1/1 lvl 31 talent, that should be a new poison.
This new poison should apply to any mob ( including elementals, bosses, etc ), and if it causes any damage, it should not break gouge or blind.
Some suggestions:
- Increases the raid/party/rogue melee chance to hit the target by 1/2/3/4/5%
- Increases the raid/party/rogue damage done on the boss by 0.5/1/1.5/2/2.5%
- Reduces the rogue total threat by 1/2/3/4/5%
- Allow the rogue to apply his poisons to other raid/party weapons ( same mechanism as an enchant )
With this i can see some raid utility plus a poison that allow mutilate specs viable on any boss encounter.
* Replace Improved Kidney shot by: During Stunned your attacks ignore the targets armor and/or resiliense by 33/66/100%.
Since resilience ( and high armored guys ) killed any crit based build, this could make crits viable again
* Vigor and Mutilate could swap places, and Vigor could become: Increases your energy regeneration by 5 ( making it 25 per tick instead of 20 ).
+10Energy helps on burst situations, but its not worth a 31 talent point, instead include any talent that increases the rogue energy regeneration rate in passive mode. Maybe, with a strong talent as this, assassination could compete with Combat Potency on the energy regen "market".
* Improved Backstab should also reduce its energy cost by 5/10
My backstab damage per energy is 16.5 ( according to Obart <Shadow Fate> Warsong )
Recuding its energy cost to 50, will make it something like 19.8 ( almost 20% dmg increase, since backstab is responsable for 30% of a rogue dps, this can increase the whole dps by 6.6% ).
Ok, i know, some of this changes are a little OP, but i am not suggesting all of them, just of few of them could help rogues a lot, and specially, improving daggers(backstab/mutilate) viability once more.
God some of those ideas are sexy. I love the resilience reduction when stunned. Some of the stuff is a bit OP but a lot of it synergises (woot, office bingo!) well with the concept of assassination.
Coming from combat daggers from MC-Naxx, then mutilate from TBC-now, I've always thought of swords/maces/claws as the easiest option. I just have a lot of problems with the "easiest" being "the best". Making dagger rogues jump through proverbial hoops should result in the absolute best dps but should be challenging to play.
Similar to AR/Hemo/Welfare S1 maces FOTM arena rogues. There is no skill involved running screaming at your target punching hemo as rapidly as possible while you have the finger on the key of your AR/Prep/AR castsequence. Yet that is(was?) the most common PvP spec until nerfed because it performed the best. No tricky "get behind them" crap, just wail on them and hope for lucky stuns.
I think, PvP wise, dagger rogues are still paying for 2 shotting cloth in AV at 60. Resilience hurts our spec more than any other. It's been said often, but some sort of deep assassination armour penetration would be nice. Resilience penetration would be too much to hope for. I also don't see much reason to keep dagger spec mid combat. Put it mid assassination near the poison talents and consolidate poison talents down. Combat daggers should still be able to reach it but combat/sealfate/backstab or combat mutilate would become a lot more viable.
Combat Dagger is not a viable spec because of several reasons;
1) Combat sword is just a buggy spec. Yes, it is. OH attacks generating MH extra swings is something they have tried to fix/change several times without much success. This of course helps increasing the gap between sword and dagger builds.
2) Backstab is not a complete ability. The truth is, that backstab for itself is designed around improved backstab, while the later one is designed around lethality. Now again, sealfate is also designed as a syngery to backstab. Sinister Strike is a complete ability as soon as you put 2 points into first tier of combat. I won't even mention opportunity, which is in a third talent tree.
3) I have said it several times in the past, the right talent tree for seal fate is combat. Sealfate is the talent that takes SS and BS, and puts both of them on the equal ground when it comes to combo point generation. At the same time, seal fate is just overkill with mutilate. Why would an ability that needs 30 energy per combo point need yet another combo point generator? Honestly I believe they didn't have time or didn't pay enough attention or they would move SF out of assassination right after Mutilate got added to the game. (Mutilate wasn't the 41 point ability of assassination though initially, but a base spell. It got switched with the older version of surprise attack while that one got moved to combat and got the place of a talent which was supposed to do 10% shadow damage per swing, good times).
4) Backstab is worse than hemo because they seem to buff subtlety like every other patch, and "to increase the pve viability of it" been mentioned several times as a reason. Now someone gotta ask blizzard, why don't they actually fix the main combat ability of rogues, considering that every progress tier drops 3-4 daggers that nobody wants. Mid-instance drops aside, really who is supposed to use prince/vashj/illidan daggers? (Since ragnaros -nefarian aside- every final boss of a progression tier has droped daggers, apparently because a class in raids uses dagger as main weapon).
As a side note: considering that blizzard went ahead and did change opportunity's place from tier 2 to tier 1 after complains that SS would outdps backstab after the rogue patch, I would assume that blizzard does intend the backstab build to do more damage. They either don't know that it is not the case, or are waiting for the expansion.
Improved Backstab: Gives your Backstab ability a 33/66/100% chance of granting you an additional combo point.
Remove Backstab from Opportunity, increase Opportunity to 6% per point.
Fair and/or Balanced?
Assassination abilities should be better at granting combo points, not worse. Backstab only gets better than SS with the current Imp BS when you go down to Seal Fate. Even then, it's not particularly better. And once you take Seal Fate, you're losing out on Combat Potency and any reason to go deep into Combat, and thus might as well take Mutilate. Maybe things will be different at 80 when you can go 30/41, but even then you're losing out on Opportunity which in its current form is a nice damage boost.
4) Backstab is worse than hemo because they seem to buff subtlety like every other patch, and "to increase the pve viability of it" been mentioned several times as a reason. Now someone gotta ask blizzard, why don't they actually fix the main combat ability of rogues, considering that every progress tier drops 3-4 daggers that nobody wants. Mid-instance drops aside, really who is supposed to use prince/vashj/illidan daggers? (Since ragnaros -nefarian aside- every final boss of a progression tier has droped daggers, apparently because a class in raids uses dagger as main weapon).
QFT.
What are you talking about? My hunter loves Tracker's Blade! </sarcasm>
Us dagger rogues struggle with two problems. The first is the positionin which leads to less effective time in combat. This is a matter of concentration, training and probably already compensated by quite significant bonuses on backstab (including opportunity).
The second problem is the slow cp creation and - without ruthlessness which is dps wise less efficient than murder - a quite irregular cycle. It seems it got worse, since the hit cap was raised, due to a bit loss in energy. IMHO the major difference is not in the sword spec (or why would any other weapon spec be better than daggers) but in the "Imp sinister strike"-talent. Using less energy not allows more CP and more SS/BS, i.e. more yellow damage and more dot-uptime.
I just reduced the energy used for backstab in the rogue dps spreadsheet from 60 down to 55 which would be the effect of sinister strikes. For me it's something between 3.1% (buffed) and 3.6% (unbuffed) more damage. Most of it gained with the actual Backstab and thus rewarding positional play. This effect just around 3 % seems to match the difference between Swords and Daggers pointed out by Vujadin in the 101-thread.
Don't get me wrong, there are some good ideas in this thread, but I can't honestly see many dagger changes coming anytime soon (if ever).
Choosing a spec and playstyle is about weighing your sacrifices made against the benefits you gain. Just by nature, dagger specs (Mutilate in particular) are great for short, bursty fights where a lot of damage is needed quickly. What do we sacrifice? Sustained damage. Likewise, a PoM-Pyro mage sacrifices a ton of sustained damage in the upper tiers of the Fire tree for the ability to deal thousands of damage almost instantly. Warlocks also trade longevity for the ability to front-load tons of damage (Destruction spec).
Yes, Combat Daggers used to be the spec to raid with, but those days are gone, and I think there's a good reason for that. Our non-positional Combat specs are running away with the sustained damage trophy at the moment while daggers are becoming increasingly popular to burst down opponents in Arena. I think the more we sit and wish that daggers did what swords, fists, and maces were doing right now, the more we're just going to be disappointed.
Of course, this is all speculative, but it's something to think about.
Unfortunately, PvP opponents have enough longevity now that the daggers-burst of a few thousand damage over 2-4 seconds, isn't enough to get the job done like it used to be. Even the burst-friendly area of PvP is starting to favor sustained damage specs more than burst damage specs, and combat's burst from adrenaline rush is a more useful form of burst damage than two mutilates and a CB evis (it's more damage overall even though it takes longer to get it). Daggers still does what it was supposed to, it's just that that purpose is no longer useful.
Seal Fate is an assassination talent because the assassination tree is, thematically, the finishing-move tree, while the combat tree is the white-damage and sustained-damage tree. Extra combo points do not belong in the combat tree. Seal Fate and mutilate together synergize less well than they should because you cap out at 5 combo points (maybe if you could raise it to 6?), but seal fate still does its work when you're using other combo point moves like shiv or gouge instead of just 1-2 mutilates in between finishers. What the assassination tree really needs is a new finishing move--some way of using all these extra combo points that it's swimming in, beyond shitty extra eviscerates. Probably something crit-related. A debuff on the target increasing damage from crits, perhaps? It would help get past the resilience barrier without having an explicit "ignores resilience" mechanic, and it would give muta a role in group situations.
Combat could definitely make use of an on-yellow-crit ability to help balance out daggers as a viable spec, and I think it's the best way to do so that doesn't involve an explicit backstab-only benefit (which would further bloat daggers compared to swords). I just don't think that seal fate's specific combo-point bonus is the way to do it, because combo point generation is combat's weakness, and should probably stay that way. A haste or bleed effect would probably be more appropriate.
Unfortunately, PvP opponents have enough longevity now that the daggers-burst of a few thousand damage over 2-4 seconds, isn't enough to get the job done like it used to be. Even the burst-friendly area of PvP is starting to favor sustained damage specs more than burst damage specs, and combat's burst from adrenaline rush is a more useful form of burst damage than two mutilates and a CB evis (it's more damage overall even though it takes longer to get it). Daggers still does what it was supposed to, it's just that that purpose is no longer useful.
Eh? Do you even play a rogue. I'm sorry but saying that Daggers and burst offered by Mutilate (Only current viable PvP spec for daggers) is no longer useful is erroneous at best.
While Combat specs have their benefits and might be better in a group that is build around outlasting the opposition, in "Burst" teams, where primary winning strategy is based on spike damage that kills the target, Mutilate is just that much stronger.
For that matter I would say that from a PvP point of view, mutilate is somewhat well off, lacking somewhat on mobility (which can be remedied by getting Improved Sprint in a 41/20 or some variant spec).
Staying on topic. For PvE I'd like to see Dual-Wield Specialization moved up a tree (Which wouldn't change much to unbalance Shadowstep or Pure Combat specs). Deadened Nerves should also be removed all together or transfered to a different tree and in it's stead something new, preferably something that increases sustained dps (Ie People would have to choose between 46/15 or 41/20, depending if they want the extra crit or the new "Deadened Nerves").
I don't see that happening though.
Old 15/41/5 is dead unless they decide to alter the way Backstab scales/gains from talents.
I'd much prefer mutilate changes over it though.
Fans glory to the Gladiators,
Gods glory to the Heroes.
Unfortunately, PvP opponents have enough longevity now that the daggers-burst of a few thousand damage over 2-4 seconds, isn't enough to get the job done like it used to be. Even the burst-friendly area of PvP is starting to favor sustained damage specs more than burst damage specs, and combat's burst from adrenaline rush is a more useful form of burst damage than two mutilates and a CB evis (it's more damage overall even though it takes longer to get it). Daggers still does what it was supposed to, it's just that that purpose is no longer useful.
Seal Fate is an assassination talent because the assassination tree is, thematically, the finishing-move tree, while the combat tree is the white-damage and sustained-damage tree. Extra combo points do not belong in the combat tree. Seal Fate and mutilate together synergize less well than they should because you cap out at 5 combo points (maybe if you could raise it to 6?), but seal fate still does its work when you're using other combo point moves like shiv or gouge instead of just 1-2 mutilates in between finishers. What the assassination tree really needs is a new finishing move--some way of using all these extra combo points that it's swimming in, beyond shitty extra eviscerates. Probably something crit-related. A debuff on the target increasing damage from crits, perhaps? It would help get past the resilience barrier without having an explicit "ignores resilience" mechanic, and it would give muta a role in group situations.
Combat could definitely make use of an on-yellow-crit ability to help balance out daggers as a viable spec, and I think it's the best way to do so that doesn't involve an explicit backstab-only benefit (which would further bloat daggers compared to swords). I just don't think that seal fate's specific combo-point bonus is the way to do it, because combo point generation is combat's weakness, and should probably stay that way. A haste or bleed effect would probably be more appropriate.
In today's wow it is not relevant what purpose a tree had back in vanilla wow. Sinister strike and combat potency already compete with Hemo when it comes to combo points generation and I do not see a reason why backstab should be 100% less effective than any other rogue move when it comes to combo points (unless you go for a very unpopular and fairly ineffective BS/SF build). It's simply a design mistake pre-wow launch that assumed most Backstab rogues will pick sealfate and stay competative while underestimating the power of SnD and white damage, based on the itemization available back in the day. Yes, Sealfate rogues did outdps everyone in pre MC gear back then.
Later on, Mutilate was introduced as a competative combo point generator for backstab rogues. The move would do less damage than backstab, but generate 2 CPs. That design idea got scrapped and mutilate was moved to assassination as a talent, and also was buffed to serve as a stand-alone ability. Combat potency got added into the game later in alpha, and was based on the fact that daggers hit faster. Unfortunately the lack of consistence in design allowed fast swords to spawn left and right. Now this is the situation we have. Something that was supposed to get fixed before expansion is basically forgotten now a year later.
To go back to sealfate: The issue is Sealfate as a very strong talent serves no real purpose in assassination tree, during TBC at least.
PS: Those who post stuff like "well backstab does more burst", please do more research in other rogue threads. the extra little burst backstab can do in the short time has no real purpose in today's raiding, (yes little. backstab won't give you much more damage than SS in 10 sec, infact it can do less if it doesn't crit) and pvp is another story.
Discussing dagger viability we take it for granted that the 15/41/5 build as it is posted in the 101 is the most effective build for combat daggers. I'd like to argue that Ruthlessness is a handicap in that build at least at T5 level with all the humanoids and beasts.
Of course Ruthlessness works best for keeping SnD and rupture up. But numbers in the mutilate thread show, that the dps loss of SnD drops is not too bad. That goes in line with my personal experience with the spreadsheet: Skilling murder instead of ruthlessness leads to a huge 3% dps gain (buffed) for me. Of course it is not viable with every boss but with Ruthlessnes itself only providing for a 0,5% dps increase the advantage is big enough for arguing that Murder definitely should be in a dagger built at least at T5 level.
Skilling murder instead of ruthlessness leads to a huge 3% dps gain (buffed) for me.
Not remotely possible. Either you or whatever spreadsheet you're using is doing something wrong.
This is trivially obvious from the fact that murder is by definition a 2% increase in damage. Even if Ruthlessness does nothing for you at all, the maximum possible benefit from speccing Murder is 2%. In practice, Ruthlessness will give you at least something for any spec, so the net benefit must be less than 2%.
@songster. Yes, your argument is absolutely logical. Only the numbers in RogueDPS_2_3_2_9NA (and as far as I remember in all of its predecessors) state something different. It might be a formula problem or indeed an effect resulting out of a combination of many dmg-modifiers. It - very roughly - looks like 1.02 * backstab boni.
12/27/07, 9:47 PM
OP or not? I first thought making this mechanical only but then again that's a bit too OP IMHO.
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