swelt

Not sure how useful it is to go through what buffs various classes bring now, given that there have been numerous blizzard posts on how they are trying to consolidate a lot of this stuff. Take this latest quote:
What I'm expecting is that some of these buffs that are similar now will be consolidated in the future. Much like wound poison, mortal strike and aimed shot serve pretty much the same function now, not stacking and you can use whichever is available, I would not be surprised if things like LOTP and Heart of the Crusader that grant +crit get merged... likewise with the haste effects that you mentioned, would be insane if they all just stacked. Makes you wonder about TSA and Battle Shout too. Obviously none of this has happened yet, looks like work in progress and maybe it won't get done this way, but their intentions have been stated a number of times.

 

tetracycloide

Affliction can't bring improved CoR (yes there's an improved talent in T2 affliction for it called frailty) and improved CoE at the same time. The way it looks now is that destruction will have the least to loose by specing into early affliction and picking up frailty. Demo requires a destruction spell as a spamable and will need to many talents in destruction to take frailty at the same time. Destro locks will also be adding the imps stam buff to the entire raid as the imp is, hopefully, no longer the affliction pet of choice and will almost certainly be the destruction pet of choice.

Editor's note - It should be noted that ebon plague and CoE do not stack.

My vanity is justified.

Multiple classes using the same gear is an excellent idea. Just the other day I was thinking to myself 'Not enough toons look identical with arena and tier sets looking the same, we need more appearance homogenization.'

 

◊ Shaker

Source it.

Consistency. It's only a virtue if you're not a screwup.

 

Redgerasimos

Hm...So the guide says that for the ring enchant Stats > striking with swords...This is actualy wrong as i have calculated but im not sure since every1 is using stats that i have looked...So here is what i calculated with t6 ep values...

Stats = 4agi*2.16 = 8.64EP 4str*1.10 = 4.4EP = 13.04ep

Striking = 2/2,6*14 = 10.77ap = 10.77ep + 2/1.4*14 = 20ap = 20ep = 30.77ep

So im i doing something wrong? (btw i calculated them with the spreadsheet values that have been posted in the original post but they dont differ so much than that post...)

 

• Aldriana

The issue is that based on your calculations, striking acts as 10 AP to your MH and 20 AP to your OH; this is not the same thing as acting as 10 + 20 AP on both hands. Instead, it's (roughly speaking) the average of those two numbers, weighted by the portion of your damage that comes from each hand. Since roughly 2/3 of your damage comes from your MH, the actually contribution of striking is closer to 10 * 2/3 + 20 * 1/3 = 13.3 EP; when you work the numbers out in full detail, it almost always works out that striking is a hair behind on raw damage, plus stats also gives a bit of dodge and some stamina, hence why it's usually considered to be superior.

 

Murr

Not bad..

 

• Maestroquark

If it's coded like Lethality, yes, it is bad. Crits are already doubled, so a 2% bonus is 202% damage for a crit. That's 1% increase in DPS on your crits. That's less than .6% dps increase per point even at 40% crit rate.

 

◊ Vulajin

Mace spec is known to function like RED.

 

impossible!

I was hopeful that the list from the beta forums was false. Not so much, apparently. These are the most boring and uninspired glyphs I have ever seen.

 

drumbum

Yeah, but live says: "Increases the damage dealt by your critical strikes with maces by 5%"

While the beta patch notes says: "increases critical damage bonus by 2/4/6/8/10%."

It may just be a typo, but if anything it's a nerf if it works the way it is written in the patch notes.

 

• Aldriana

Well, lets go down the list here:

*Sap. Useful for 5-10 mans. Maybe. A little. Still doesn't address the issue of Sap not being refreshable and thus weaker than most CCs.
*Evasion. Not precisely useless, but not the most broadly useful ability either.
*Backstab. Good for PvP and farming, I guess. Unless they're significantly changed boss mechanics, not that useful in PvE.
*Rupture. Okay, what does this even *mean*? Do we get an extra two and a half ticks of rupture? Like, this is potentially either really good or utterly useless - we'll have to wait and see which.
*Eviscerate. Definitely a significant boost to Eviscerate, but enough to compete with Envenom and/or Rupture? I'm doubtful.
*Expose Armor. Um, potentially useful for, well, one rogue per raid. Though even that's not clear, as having Expose duration significantly longer than SnD duration doesn't gain you much other than insurance it will never drop.
*Feint. Unless aggro is a lot more of an issue in WotLK than it has been so far, I don't see much use for this. Most of us rarely, if ever, need to feint.
*Shiv. So, first, those situations where you absolutely have to get/keep a poison up cost less, which is useful. By itself it's not enough to make Shiv-centric builds viable, but when you consider that the relative damage gained from a combo point seems to be going up, and possibly the damage from poison as well... it's probably worth reevaluating the viability of shiv builds once we have all the information.
*Deadly Throw. I can't honestly see anyone taking this, ever.
*Hemorrhage. A nice boost if you're specced hemo - whether it's enough to keep such builds in competition we'll have to wait and see.
*AR. So, 150 energy every 4 minutes instead of every 5. Hence, an extra energy every 8 seconds, on average, hence an overall damage contribution in the single digits. Better than nothing, I suppose, but not the most impressive thing ever.
*Gouge. Nice for PvP, I suppose.
*Slice and Dice. T4 2/5 in a Glyph, hence relatively useful, if history is indication. We'll have to wait and see what optimal cycles look like with and without it to be sure, but odds seem good that this will be used by almost all raiding rogues.
*Sprint. Handly, but not exactly good. The sort of thing you take only if there's nothing better to do.
* Garrote. A net buff to Garrote, to be sure, but given that you launch at most 2 per fight... not a major source of damage, except possibly for deep-sub builds.
*Ambush. Useful in PvP, I expect. Forgetable in PvE.
*Ghostly Strike. Makes it a lot burstier, so nice for PvP I guess. I suspect it's at best a trivial DPS gain for PvE.

So, in total: we have one actually good PvE inscription (SnD), one that might make a new build viable (Shiv), and a couple circumstantial ones (Hemo, EA), plus a couple ones with minimal PvE benefits that, while better than nothing, don't accomplish a whole lot... and that's about it.

Somehow, I was hoping for more, I have to say.

 

CoroHD

It appears that there were four more glyphs that wern't on that list but are on the wotlk-wiki. See: here

Glyph of Blade Flurry - Reduces the energy cost of Blade Flurry by 100%.
Glyph of Preparation - Decreases the cooldown of Preparation by 2 min.
Glyph of Crippling Poison - Increases the chance to trigger Crippling Poison by 10%.
Glyph of Sinister Strike - Your Sinister Strike critical strikes have a 40% chance to add an additional combo point.

Most interesting one that was missed seems to be glyph of SS. Maybe in combination with the t4 2p glyph, 5s rupture glyph, and a 30/41/0 build you would have enough time to run a 5s/5r/5 something rotation, but even if you could it wouldn't be a huge dps upgrade I imagine. Might be better to run a 5s/5r/5r rotation without the rupture glyph.

 

• Aldriana

Glyph of Blade Flurry - Note that this is a larger net energy increase than Glyph of Adrenaline Rush. I think that says something about the quality of Glyph of AR.
Glyph of Prep - Another nice PvP one of limited PvE utility.
Glyph of Crippling Poison - Likewise.
Glyph of SS - So, during a 35-sec SnD, you gain around 450 energy, hence do about 11 Sinister Stikes; hence, you gain about 4-5 CP per SnD from this, which is basically an extra finisher. Yeah, that's pretty good.

Looks to me like any SS rogue is going to run SS/SnD, and any nonSS rogue is going to wish they had a better 2nd option.

 

Zaniel

A mutilate rogue might benefit from the Glyph of Eviscerate, depending on if Cut to the Chase gets stronger and continues to rely on crits. Then again, even with this glyph would Evis outperform Envenom as the finisher of choice to refresh SnD?

 

• Aldriana

That all depends on whether or not we get a new rank of Envenom. My guess is that if we do, Envenom will still be better; but if we don't, Evis might catch up.

 

Sinzar

It's per sinister strike critical, not every sinister strike. Still decent, but not as good as 5 CP per 35 sec.

 

• Aldriana

Oh, right. Okay, so two CP per SnD. That's less impressive, though still good, I suspect. I'm guessing it's still the second best option - or perhaps third, depending on how the Rupture Glyph works.

 

◊ Shaker

The one saving grace of the AR glyph (and this is pretty minimal, but bears noting) is that with that glyph, it'll time up with every other BF perfectly, which in any dual-mob situation is a reasonable dps burst.

Consistency. It's only a virtue if you're not a screwup.

 

Vi|Bs

Is anyone too looking even more forward to the Rogue changes, after seeing through the Warrior DPS-Tree changes?

Blizz really did a great job there.

 

tessarji

I agree that the DPS warrior changes are jawdropping.

Summary -- Talents for: Mortal Strike debuff on normal attacks, +5% crit chance to all raid melee, +15% damage enrage proc, two talents to trigger Bloodthirst and Overpower instants, and Titans Grip is 1pt talent with no attack speed decrease.

I'm totally aware that a couple pages back I was insinuating that melee classes (including fury wars) have gotten the shaft for a long time, and I like the way this is going.

I was thinking more about this old post.

It does seem like there's a fundamental balance problem regarding rogues and their Stealth ability - basically, that they have a very powerful solo/PvP ability that is useless in raiding, so they are generally balanced with scaling buffs so that their DPS ramps up much faster as the group size increases.

Aldriana concludes that the weakness to this approach is how to balance them in 5/10 man groups, where stealth is generally unimportant but there is not a full complement of raid buffs.

The best I could come up with would be an ability like the following - Add to Instant Poison a 10s debuff (Noxious Wound) that ticks once when it expires for ~600 damage. It doesn't stack and the enemy can only have one debuff. This ability wouldn't have any effect in PvP, since rogues generally gravitate towards other poisons, and would have a diminished effect in 25 mans since it can't stack. But it could be tuned to be a significant DPS benefit in small groups and raids.

 

Hildegard

Instant poison will be used by Mutilate builds when fighting melee classes, as it will apply Deadly poison, too. Combined with the shiv glyph this could potentially become a nice frontal attack for dagger rogues.

29 Energy for an attack - assuming a fast offhand dagger -, that procs instant poison and one charge of Deadly poison and adds 50% or 75% weapon damage 1+1*(chance to crit) combo points and is landing 100% of the time. With all the poison boni this could actually become interesting. We will know more once we see the exact numbers of the new ranks. On the other hand the normalisation of daggers will diminish the effect.

Deep Assasination 51-20 with two fast weapons, but not daggers, using an hopefully improved version of Focussed Attacks. Sounds to weird, doesn't it ?

Edit:
One question: Do glyphes stack ? Would it be possible to reduce the energy cost of shiv by 10 or with three major glyphs, when having the profession, by 15 energy ?

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Ulthwithian

I know this seems silly, but the Ghostly Strike damage increase seems rather large. I'm currently trying to do some 'napkin math' on the subject, and I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas for some baselines for comparison.

I plan to look at Ghostly Strike vs. Hemo mainly, since that's the only build I can think of that might use it, even with the bonus.


Okay, here's my initial impressions.

The baseline scenario has Ghostly Strike inferior to Hemorrhage's base damage in a weapon-damage-per-energy view. That is, if w is your weapon damage,

(1.25/40)w < (1.1/35)w

Now, what about the glyphed Ghostly Strike vs. Glyphed Hemorrhage? For this, I am going to assume that the 50% extra damage for Ghostly Strike is additive (to 1.75) rather than multiplicative.

(1.75/40)w > (1.1w + d)/35

where d is the damage from Hemorrhage's debuff.

Simplying this equation a little,

w > 2.319d

Thus, Ghostly Strike becomes better than Hemorrhage when your weapon damage is greater than 2.319 times the amount of damage that Hemorrhage's debuff can do. From Wowhead, lvl80 Hemorrhage's debuff is 75 damage. The Glyph gives an extra 40% damage, for 105 damage. Since this is extra damage, it should be affected by everything that can increase this damage, such as crits. Let us assume that the crit chance is the only major factor that can change the damage that Hemorrhage's debuff deals, and that the average crit multiplier is 2.1 for an attack that consumes a charge. We can therefore look at an equation for the damage from the debuff.

d = n * (p * (105 * 2.1) + (1-p) * (105))

where

n = number of charges consumed before Hemorrhage is reapplied (maximum 10)
p = probability of a critical

Simplifying,

d = n * (115.5p + 105)

Thus,

w > 2.319n * (115.5p + 105)

is our new equation with two degrees of freedom. Let us choose 0.3 for p. That gives an equation of

w > 323.848n (crit rate: 30%)

where n is the average number of charges of the Hemorrhage debuff consumed before reapplication.

Now, I believe in a 25-man raid situation, n normally approaches 10. This would mean that your average weapon damage would need to be impossibly large to make Ghostly Strike better than Hemorrhage. However, in other situations, the situation is less clear. In any case, I believe that this relation can be helpful to determine whether any particular Rogue could benefit from using Ghostly Strike.

 

tessarji

I hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a problem since my impression was Mutilate PvP needed a little love anyways.

The reason for the long duration and single tick was to give it the maximum chance for it to be dispelled or cleansed, to further reduce its value in PvP.

 

sp00n