Keep up Slice and Dice and toss in constant Disembowels, with Shiv as necessary to keep Deadly Poison up. It could almost keep full uptime on Find Weakness, which is more appealing to me than the end Combat talents.
Anyone done the math on Deadliness + Sinister Calling? Would the bonus stats for a raiding rogue be enough to keep them ahead/on par with the pure DPS talents in the other trees (my gut instinct is going with no)?
Lethality isn't really needed if you just mutilate all the time. Infact, there will be a huge lack of useful talents for people that want to spec mutilate. You will need to 'waste' 3 points either in lethality/imp. evisc or murder+imp. expose armor.
Are we so sure though? One for one, yea I agree, but the extra CPs from using mutilate over backstab would mean more evisc/disembowels, which are now scaling too. My gut tells me it'll end up being pretty damn close.
If a SF/Mutilate builds are managing to keep a 100% Find Weakness uptime, that's a straight 10% increase to all damage you do.
Over 30 seconds, mutilate is generating 5 more CP's then backstab, which is an additional eviscerate/disembowel.
DW spec is adding 50% of your offhand white damage. So, a 50% decrease of half of my white damage for losing it. My white damage is 60-65% now, so 30-33% of that is my offhand white damage, all things being equal. So, about a 15% increase in overall damage from DW spec. If we're doing 800dps, over 30 seconds a 5% loss would be 1200 damage. That's a little bit less then a 5 pt evisc/disembowel, before crits. Let's say we're hitting 1k dps at lvl 70, then I'm losing something like 1500 damage over 30 seconds from not picking DW spec. But, the extra evisc/disembowl, with crit rate factor in, is roughly that much damage.
This is quick and dirty math, so I'm pretty positive I overlooked something. I agree DW spec is better then Find Weakness, but I think the synergy of Mutilate and SF is pretty interesting. I'd say a 41/20 build like http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...000000000#none
could be interesting. Mutilate being your primary attack, not backstab. Since it's not part of opportunity right now, forget opportunity and do DW spec AND find weakness. If you can use a sword OH with mutilate, it gets even better. Conversely, using slower daggers could make it more energy efficient then even the new backstab
It's all slightly pointless to dissect, with all the changes that will get made. I just like the idea of being able to throw out a 5 pt finisher every 10 seconds or so. It's the main reason I've avoided combat daggers, it seems too boring. I like the CPs management mechanic, but it's been getting pretty worthless. If you get lucky on crits, you can do two other 5 pt finishers before a 5 pt SnD wears off. That just seems fun as hell to me. More utility and options. More opportunity to use the utility finishers.
Really iTunes? Free downloads while supplies last?
I wrote a small program to basically simulate a rogue backstabbing for about a year and a half straight, and having the talent actually decreased backstab damage output by about 1.5%. So yeah, I won't be picking that one up.
Hey, I saw your program. I did the same thing in that thread using some basic math. The premise, though, comes from the original poster who claims that a dodged backstab costs 11 energy. I need to know if this is true, though. I'm not able to play at the moment. If this is true, then this talent will reduce your DPS. O_O If (as I suspect) a Dodged backstab costs more than 11 energy, it'll still probably be a marginal increase in DPS, but when you consider the 9 filler talents you need to get and compare them to what you can get out of Assassination, I have to wonder why you'd ever spec 41 combat.
Edit: I tested SS against a Rogue with Evasion up, and it consumed 8 energy every time (down from 40). Assuming energy cost on missed specials is a %, then Backstab very likely does only consume 11-12 energy. This talent will lower your sustained DPS. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You really have to wonder about the people employed by Blizzard.
Feel free to make corrections:
GIVENS:
base backstab: 600
crit backstab (4/5 lethality): 1344
backstab energy: landed = 60, dodged = 11
backstab critrate: 60% (30% spellbook, 30% from talents)
sample time: 3 hours (10800 seconds)
energy generated in this time: 108000
miss/block/parry factoring: attacking from behind, enough tohit to never miss
Blade Twisting works great with new Heroic Strike. My 41 combat sword self Shivs a few times, making your Mutilate crit more, meaning Find Weakness is up more. (Which is either a self-buff or a target debuff, which would be neato-keen.) Assuming that, all damage goes up. My Shiv/Deadly usage makes all of our Disembowels hit harder. Someone's spamming Hemo w/ 10% more agi and 10% more AP.
Individual possible losses making for possible net gains in raid DPS. They're either intending things to work this well together between specs, or it's the weirdest coincidence I've seen in a while, and I'm completely up a tree.
We'll see. Lord knows I wouldn't mind more involvement than watching a DM. Lord also knows I'm very very good at being incredibly, utterly, remarkably wrong.
Yeah, all the new talents / abilties involving daze makes it look like Blizz are aiming to have classes combine their skills to enhance overall dps. Right now a mage could care less about how a rogue is dpsing, but talents like like burnout mean that your mages will be seeing a damage boost every time you daze something.
Being able to use mutilate with a sword offhand is going to be pretty insane... Though really, without getting the bonus from oppo or lethality, I don't really see how good its going to be. I guess you'll get tons of CPs, and maybe with disembowl it will really start to scale up well, but...
I'm just not impressed. Mutilate seems ok. Surprise attacks seems (mathematically) horrible unless maybe the replaced dodge can crit as well. I guess in PvP it will be powerful vs other rogues but thats about it. Subtlety remains the tree of talents that sound cool but leave you more or less hitting like a girl. A few % more agility? Who cares! Rogues that are smart stack attack power in most cases anyways because we get so much more dps gains from pure attack power than from agility.
Here's an important question though. Will mutilate be counted as a normalized instant attack? Or will it become something like hemo where your itemization is insanely important?
To me, its really looking like seal fate with AR, or possibly 41 assassination with the finisher spam. Overall though, it seems like the trees are entirely lackluster.
BUT! At least I can ninja kill some kids with throwning knives in PvP. That makes it all better, right?
I love my rogue, but I hope that these talents are less...less...god, where's the giant psyduck barfing smaller psyducks when you need it? That perfectly sums up my opinions here. Like I said, I love my rogue, but making that pally I planned on rolling my main is looking somewhat attractive. :| We'll see how it changes by release, I suppose.
Anyone else notice that a ridiculous amount of the new talents they've added are dedicated purely to improving our survivability?
I've got a sinking feeling that a majority of expansion raids will feature massive amounts of melee-range AoE rape :(
On a more general note, i'm feeling distinctly underwhelmed by it all. Pretty much every single build i can put together for raiding with daggers consists of my current build, +/- a few already existing mid-/low-tier talents (most interesting thing i can come up with is 30/26/5 seal fate+combat daggers, but that requires giving up WeapEx, which probably isn't a worthwhile tradeoff).
honestly looking at the trees, I don't see anything really worth taking from the upper tiers. MAYBE the +stam talent but only because you've got some extra points to play with.
Will have to do some math to check on the damage added by all the finishers you can spam, but with backstab being 210% damage in TBC with oppo, and 2.3x crits as well, I really do not see mutilate making up for that lost damage. On top of that, find weakness, even if up ALL the time, isn't going to beat a build with dagger spec, weapon expertise, and AR for combat daggers. Seal Fate is nice and gives you more things to play around with, but the damage simply isn't there, though I'm sure right at level 70 we'll have some new ranks and it'll be competitive until we start to get the better gear that scales so well with the combat tree.
I'm currently liking some combination of AR, CB (for those disembowls during AR, AND ambushes in PvP!!1) combat daggers. All the super good scaling talents, as well as a few PvP toys if you want. I took elusiveness, imp kick, imp sprint, and murder just to kind of use up some talents and they will give me a nice boost during PvP and then grinding as well.
Augh no. The more tools you're given to manage threat, the more you can assume that they'll be necessary.
That really can't effectively happen without giving other classes more aggro management than they already have. Rogues already completely surpass any non-Hunter in aggro management, so if they go back to making aggro super important (like BWL was when it first opened), then they go back to having some classes sitting around doing nothing, and that's simply bad design. More to the point, they've shown they think its bad design by getting away from it.
Before you start to drift, and your soul begins to scream.
I just wanted to tell you, that you're listening to a dream.
Augh no. The more tools you're given to manage threat, the more you can assume that they'll be necessary.
That really can't effectively happen without giving other classes more aggro management than they already have. Rogues already completely surpass any non-Hunter in aggro management, so if they go back to making aggro super important (like BWL was when it first opened), then they go back to having some classes sitting around doing nothing, and that's simply bad design. More to the point, they've shown they think its bad design by getting away from it.
You mean like mages -threat talents, and warlocks getting a 50% aggro wipe on a 5 minute cooldown?
There's no reason to believe threat management *won't* be a necessary part of the xpac.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
I realise EJ is a PvE forum, really. So it is perfectly valid to say that the expansion talents/skills are lacklustre from a pure PvE raid dps perspective.
As someone extremely keen on PvP however - I PvE to equip me for PvP, really - I think there are a lot of interesting builds. I'll be trying 41 Assassination first off, for sure, I think. How all the new stuff works vs all the new mage/warlock stuff will be interesting, especially in an Arena setting.
I just hope rogues aren't trash in arena fights as they would be with current lvl60 builds.
I'm hoping full subt rogues will be very useful, and cheat death alone should add a good measure of survivability in those situations.
I'm also hoping that as Blizzard hybridizes classes more, there's a rogue impact too. At the moment, really, every raiding rogue 'should' be Combat Daggers. I hope in the expansion that full poison spec Assass rogues or full avoidance spec Subt rogues are going to have uses, in the same way that full Enh and full Ele shamans will be useful (where now full (or at least 21 pt) Resto are the 'best' for raiding).
I really think Blizzard would hate to see everyone in this thread saying "well, my old spec is still max DPS and that's all that matters so I'll stick with it".
I really think Blizzard would hate to see everyone in this thread saying "well, my old spec is still max DPS and that's all that matters so I'll stick with it".
I haven't seen any serious effort on their part to make Rogues be anything more than damage dealers, is the problem. It's true some recent encounters involve some stunnable adds or things that can be kicked, but for the most part DPS is what they do. I don't necessarily mind the idea of homogenizing all the classes and allowing them to be useful with different specs for highly complex encounters, I just don't see any evidence they're going to really do this. Who knows though.
What I do know is that when BC comes out, I will be spending more time leveling 60-70 than raiding obsolete dungeons. Being on a pvp server, I will be sporting a pvp spec without a doubt, and I'm really excited about the pvp changes they made. There's some really, really good stuff there. It's almost too good to be true so I'm not even creating my dream talent build until I have the expansion installed on my computer and hit level 61. Although I haven't really looked that hard on what OTHER classes are getting pvp-wise. Perhaps Rogues will be even worse off when you have mages running around invisble and having pets, etc. It's too much to take in right now, but the Rogue talents and new skills by themselves look great (for pvp).
When 70 comes around my currently exciting T2.5 gear will probably be pretty meh and I could see SF builds still being viable raiding alternatives. When the time really comes to spec into a scaling raiding spec, I'll cross that bridge. Right now it does look very bland, with somehow Fury Warriors getting more of a pve dps boost than Rogues (like they need that..??). I guess if the game went live today and I were level 70, I'd take my current 15/31/5 combat dagger build and toss the other 10 points in Assassination.
Everything we can see so far in the talents for all classes DOES imply they're trying to hybridize out a lot of the different 'sides' to different classes. Shamans becoming uber dps buffers, Paladins viable tanks, etc. I think and hope this will apply to rogues too. I love the idea that Assassination is the tree with super-poisons, Subtlety has mega survivability, etc.
Also ignoring TBC completely: SF IS a viable raiding spec and it scales perfectly well. Combat Daggers is better, but not out-of-this-world better. I've spent all my raiding life as SF daggers and was easily top 5 dps when I made an effort. In 1.12 I've now gone Hemo PvP, and I'll STILL be attending (and I suspect, doing ok) with that, even on 'progression' content - which is Twin Emps for us. I'm pretty sure my 176 per tick serrated blades rupture will be quite nice...
The key difference in TBC I hope will be that non-max-dps spec X won't just be 'best' in non-raiding, but actually have a raid role too. I think Blizz HAS shown intent to do this too- with the amount of stunnable mobs in AQ and beyond. I almost think that bugs are unsheepable /seducable specifically to allow rogue stuns to become more important.
I guess I don't mean to imply that Seal Fate isn't viable, just that depending on what your current focus is, maximum sustained DPS is more important, and Combat Daggers provides more of it. I would say that Seal Fate is indeed very nice in a lot of AQ40 encounters. I'd say it outperforms Combat Daggers on many of the fights in terms of utility: Stunning in Sartura, killing/stunning eye tentacle spawns on C'Thun, and pretty helpful for possibly enraged snakes on Fankriss. For Emps, it's pretty much equal IMO -- it has a pretty predictable aggro ceiling that both SF and CD builds can reach if they try. Even on the vulnerability period of C'Thun, Combat Daggers doesn't have the time to do what they do best since it doesn't last that long (although getting AR in 1.12 throws that into doubt now).
If they design even more encounters like AQ40, Seal Fate will be decent. From what I've seen in Naxx so far (5 bosses), maximum sustained DPS is just more useful. WAY more useful. I don't see any benefit for a SF build on any of the fights I've done, and if you look at the first gear check in the place (Patchwerk), maximum sustained DPS from every DPS-focused class is a must. If their intention is to focus on hybridization/utility, why is the latest generation of raid dungeons veering from that? Timed enrage fights against mobs that just sit there naturally favor Combat Daggers, and so far there are a lot of 'em. I guess Noth would favor a Seal Fate build, since like Emps it has an aggro reset, as well as periods where you have to deal with stunnable adds. But this fight hardly defines the instance.
Plus, I just like doing a lot of damage, half the fun of raiding as a Rogue (IMO) is competing on the damage meters. :D You only need to do a "little" more DPS to eventually pull a huge lead on damage charts.
No offense Tiiki, but the reason why seal fate seems viable to you is because your gear isn't all that great. Seal fate is a very fun, high damage build for a long time, and against mid AQ rogues I could see it doing good damage. However as you get into Naxx and you really start to skyrocket with gear and weapon dps, combat dagger will only continue to improve in a LOT of aspects while seal fate remains fairly stagnated. When seal fate got a boost by scaling evi, combat dagger got 1 or 2% to crit from dagger spec, weapon expertise, and possibly AR, which in my opinion tips the scales strongly towards CD.
I will say that seal fate has utility for rogues, which is nice for one or two rogues in a raid to have. In many current fights you can stun things so imp KS is valuable, and imp poisons means you can more easily keep mind numbing on various targets that are vulnerable to it. But to say it competes for pure damage very quickly falls to the wayside. And this is coming from a rogue that was #1 on the damage meters for a long time as seal fate thanks to gear and itemization (Go go 40 dps distracting dagger on Naxx bosses!)
Also I posted up the math about surprise attacks on the EU board, hopefully some blue will see it and fire the guy who came up with that idea. As we could assume, damage loss holds true for a SS rogue with a decent crit rate, and funnily enough if surprise attacks actually INCREASED a bosses dodge rate, it would make us do more damage.
It probably shouldn't surprise me that the first applications of one of the coolest creature designers ever made is going to be cockmonsters and titwalkers.
Originally Posted by Zyla
I mean christ, cunnilingus is much like being a resto shaman, you spam the button and let it do the work. So long as you change targets as appropriate you don't need to put any thought into it.
Also I posted up the math about surprise attacks on the EU board, hopefully some blue will see it and fire the guy who came up with that idea. As we could assume, damage loss holds true for a SS rogue with a decent crit rate, and funnily enough if surprise attacks actually INCREASED a bosses dodge rate, it would make us do more damage.
Either that, or make dodged backstabs cost more energy. :P You have to admit, a 5% dodge increasing your DPS is pretty busted. I never realized it worked that way until they gave a talent to remove it and I did the math to see how valuable it was. What a surprise..
08/28/06, 7:39 PM
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