well the true beauty of it is that if we could turn all our HIT backstabs into dodges, we'd actually do a LOT more damage.
Also please note that I don't think anyone has looked at the fact that to just GET the 41 talent with daggers you'll have to take 4/5 lethality, which makes your damage with the talent even worse.
Of course they can always make the backstabs cost more, or change the atomic roll, but option 1 is a -stupid- nerf designed to make themselves look better, and option 2 isn't going to happen at this stage of the game.
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.
I'm in the top 10 or 15 equipped rogues on our server, Horde-side, I would guess :P (young server, ya see!).
The thing is, I'm not claiming SF even competes with Combat Daggers for dps really. I'm saying that I imagine, and hope, that in the completely new 60-70 TBC content, other, non-pure DPS rogue specs will have some use.
I'm also not arguing that Suprise Attacks isn't obviously completely worthless and I have no doubt it'll be changed before go-live.
If every rogue in Naxx REALLY absolutely HAS to spec Combat Daggers(/Swords) to enable progression, then I can see myself waiting until I'm level 62+ anyway, where it'll be considerably less important what spec I am! Combat Daggers is just so HORRIBLY dull outisde of raiding. And to be honest, pretty dull to min/max IN raids too!
Also please note that I don't think anyone has looked at the fact that to just GET the 41 talent with daggers you'll have to take 4/5 lethality, which makes your damage with the talent even worse.
Heh. I hadn't even thought of that.
It is true that speccing 41 pts in any tree (for any class) gives you relatively less depth in the other trees than before. 41/20 is self evidently more heavily invested in one tree, in relative terms, than 31/20 was.
Essentially if the 41pt talents aren't INCREDIBLY good/role defining, why bother with them?
To be honest, even Cloak Of Shadows looks a little weak by that rationale. Mutilate (even assuming Lethality/Opportunity work with it) also looks lacklustre, it's better than Backstab in some situations, but that's not 41pt-worthy. In fact, Find Weakness would be the real reason to spec that deep into Assassination anyway.
If every rogue in Naxx REALLY absolutely HAS to spec Combat Daggers(/Swords) to enable progression
I'm not saying this, I'm saying that the nature of these fights are such that maximum raid DPS is important. Will you fail if one of your Rogues is Seal Fate? Nah. But then again, you're not going to fail in AQ40 if all your Rogues are combat daggers, just because they can't stun stuff as fast.
But: Would you fail if every player in your raid had a sub-optimal spec? Yeah, undoubtedly. So while it's easy to say "this is good enough", if you have 40 people doing that you're not getting very far. I think the safest and most valuable course if you care mostly about progression is to take an optimal spec and hope enough of the rest of your raid is doing the same so that you can actually progress. I'm not going to glide by with a pvp spec if other people can't do that too, it's not really fair.
Of course, that's exactly what I intend to do while leveling from 60-70. ;)
Essentially if the 41pt talents aren't INCREDIBLY good/role defining, why bother with them?
Well this was really Blizzard's point, was that "Oh well, the 31+ talents will be SO good that you won't want to go some old boring hybrid spec with the old talents" However for rogues its really not true. Even with opportunity and lethality affecting mutilate, it will still only do 180% weapon damage (150% from your two weapons, assuming the same weapon, with 120% modifier from oppo) which is the damage of the old backstab. So compared to Backstab rank 9, yes mutilate will be better because its the same damage but 2 cps instead of 1. Worth noting is that if you take mutilate and opportunity you CANNOT get DW spec which will actually increase your dps by a good bit more than oppo will. If you take DW spec instead of opportunity though, you've stuck with 175% weapon damage per mutilate, but then backstab will be doing the same without oppo and even more with it.
However once you get the new rank of backstab (datamined at 175% base damage) you can do 210% weapon damage with BS and oppo. If you could use a sword somehow in the offhand for mutilate, it might start to catch up depending on what you offhand, but then your shiv ability will be -really- crappy because it will cost more energy and you won't get many poison procs from that hand either. It could, possibly, be a good use for a misplaced servo arm or something...
Overall there are very few talents that I think will be any good, and for sure I don't really see 41 assassination beating out something like 31/8/22 for PvP. For PvE find weakness sounds good on paper but since it applies to so little it really is completely horrible.
As for seal fate vs combat daggers, I'd say you've got to learn to pick your fights better. You give up a good opener and some of your strong hits in exchange for some of the combat toys, and now with 1.12 you get AR as well.... I used to think combat daggers would be horrible for PvP but now I've got both imp kick and imp sprint, and really until you've killed two people at once with blade flurry + backstab (or better yet, a whole crew of people in the WSG base tunnel with BF + AR backstabs) you really haven't enjoyed what combat has to offer.
But ultimately your spec is up to you, I was seal fate for a long timed but swapped because I think combat makes more sense once you're getting into deep AQ, but our guild still has a seal fate rogue or two simply because they add some stun utility that I cannot. But I think Zerianne really puts it best, while its good to have a couple offspecs for their strengths, if everyone in a raid goes 21/8/22 you're not going to get very far, even with a lot of skill and very good gear. You stack the game against you, and it makes things unnecessarily harder.
I'm looking at them, and really... I can find lots of reasons to go 40 combat. I like combat, I like swords, and Blade Twisting is good stuff. Easy to get. Really nice. Synergistic with at least two other classes, including the tank threat generation.
41? Um.
21/40 is sounding kinda nice, as combat sword. Always wanted to mess around with CB...
The new talents don't overwhelm me at all.
At the moment im in favour of a 29/27/5 build, with 80% sealfate and 2 WE.
Yet these talents are still alpha, and we don't know yet how much damage a rogue has to suffer raiding in BC.
Somehow I share the feeling that you will need some of those survivability talents for successful raiding. Most likely Blizzard will add 360° cleaves that spread and also do magical damage and add a poison dot that is not dispellable.
The way I read it, I was sure that Mutilate will do 200% weapon damage straight off. Full instant damage from both weapons, not 150%. I do think they will both need to be daggers though. Equally I expect Shiv to do full OH weapon damage, otherwise the scaling energy cost wouldn't make that much sense either?
It's still not as good as Backstab for damage though because Backstab has 230% crits and is 180%+hefty flat amount. Perhaps 210%+hefty flat amount with new talents if true.
I don't see why DW spec would affect mutilate, it ties together two quite random talent specs if so.
Re-reading them though, you could be right. In which case DW spec becomes that much better since it improves Shiv/Mutilate a lot...
Err, you forget that the offhand weapon only does 50% damage by default. That's a modifier when you equip the weapon - if you mouse over your tooltip you'll see the damage range is half what you would expect it to be when mainhanded(or 75% if you have DW spec).
So either Mutilate is doing 150%(100% of mainhand, 50% of offhand) or 175%(100% of mainhand, 75% of offhand).
Err, you forget that the offhand weapon only does 50% damage by default. That's a modifier when you equip the weapon - if you mouse over your tooltip you'll see the damage range is half what you would expect it to be when mainhanded(or 75% if you have DW spec).
So either Mutilate is doing 150%(100% of mainhand, 50% of offhand) or 175%(100% of mainhand, 75% of offhand).
Yeah, as per my edit, you could be right. In which case that's a lot of talent points tied up in making Mutilate worthwhile it seems. As mentioned I tend to look at specs from a PvP perspective, so I normally completely ignore DW spec- since white damage doesn't figure much in group PvP. This could certainly change that though, since it makes those talent points affect a fair bit of yellow damage too.
Honestly I'm still confused with the whole rogue tanking issue, mainly because they spread out the survivability talents over three trees (sort of). Deadened nerves and quick recovery both seem to be great tanking talents (somewhat), but rather lackluster in their placements. Similarly vitality and nerves of steel (maybe not so much nerves of steal) seem good for tanking as well. Then there's all the stuff in sub tree which seems more like a crapshoot. I guess what I'm trying to say is that things look more like they're trying to add survivability to all three trees rather than make a consolidated "rogue tanking" tree.
Additionally, I can't help but dislike the idea of rogue [evasion] tanking, especially if you rotate rogues. On the first few days of patchwerk we tried this and in my experiences it was... bad. If one of the rogues got unlucky and got hit not only was he dead, but the next person in the rotation wouldn't have enough time to put evasion up, and thusly got killed, so on and so forth. On the other hand I'm probably jumping the gun on this one, and I should wait and see what kind of encounters they make before I throw the entire idea out the window.
Lastly, the whole daze thing... whereupon rogues can daze in order to help mages & warriors do more damage. At first it seems like "great, now we should have a rogue with blade twisting to get some synergy with the warriors & mages", but wouldn't the effects of a boss that could be effected by daze (and therefore probably other movement impairing effects) lend itself more to being kited than anything else? Furthermore, and I know we havn't seen the expansion bosses yet, etc. but when's the last time any boss has been able to be dazed? I get a funny feeling that blade twisting and surprise attacks are made to be yet more pvp related talents.
Err, you forget that the offhand weapon only does 50% damage by default. That's a modifier when you equip the weapon - if you mouse over your tooltip you'll see the damage range is half what you would expect it to be when mainhanded(or 75% if you have DW spec).
So either Mutilate is doing 150%(100% of mainhand, 50% of offhand) or 175%(100% of mainhand, 75% of offhand).
We don't know that, to be fair. It may well be 200% damage when performing Mutilate.
We don't know anywhere near enough about some of these mechanics to predict anything about them.
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.
Let me be clear. Rogues cannot tank under the current mechanics of the game. They can't hold agro, get critted and crushed, and have low stamina from itemization. Living for 15 secs with evasion, or tanking Onyxia isn't really tanking, its an emergancy or a gimmick that your guild has to help you out with.
What Celandro and I have been talking about (and I just updated my post here), is that with all the new survivablity skills in subtley, rogues are almost there as viable offtank. We would need itemization (tons of stamina, high armor and defense), as well as threat generation to make it work. The point is having a rogue tanking spec would be an interesting choice, and that is what gaming is all about.
As a separate side note, does anybody think it would be worth it for me to repost what I put on the rogue forums here, as a separate thread? Rogue tanking is a speculative role, so I'm not sure it makes sense to interweave it into this thread.
Let me be clear. Rogues cannot tank under the current mechanics of the game. They can't hold agro, get critted and crushed, and have low stamina from itemization. Living for 15 secs with evasion, or tanking Onyxia isn't really tanking, its an emergancy or a gimmick that your guild has to help you out with.
What Celandro and I have been talking about (and I just updated my post here), is that with all the new survivablity skills in subtley, rogues are almost there as viable offtank. We would need itemization (tons of stamina, high armor and defense), as well as threat generation to make it work. The point is having a rogue tanking spec would be an interesting choice, and that is what gaming is all about.
As a separate side note, does anybody think it would be worth it for me to repost what I put on the rogue forums here, as a separate thread? Rogue tanking is a speculative role, so I'm not sure it makes sense to interweave it into this thread.
Go for it, as long as you don't mind flames and stupidity. I'm all for rogues picking up a viable role as evasion/fullmitigation based offtanks.
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.
Threat generation is the alpha omega, and with the innate -29% threat thats going to be rough IMO. Anything that can hold aggro and doesn't get one-shotted, can theoretically tank. I remember we used an Enchanter to tank Rallos Zek the god of war in EverQuest, cloth-wearing fragile class; We were able to keep him alive, he was able to hold aggro through various spells, so it was fine.
Honestly I'm still confused with the whole rogue tanking issue, mainly because they spread out the survivability talents over three trees (sort of). Deadened nerves and quick recovery both seem to be great tanking talents (somewhat), but rather lackluster in their placements. Similarly vitality and nerves of steel (maybe not so much nerves of steal) seem good for tanking as well. Then there's all the stuff in sub tree which seems more like a crapshoot. I guess what I'm trying to say is that things look more like they're trying to add survivability to all three trees rather than make a consolidated "rogue tanking" tree.
Additionally, I can't help but dislike the idea of rogue [evasion] tanking, especially if you rotate rogues. On the first few days of patchwerk we tried this and in my experiences it was... bad. If one of the rogues got unlucky and got hit not only was he dead, but the next person in the rotation wouldn't have enough time to put evasion up, and thusly got killed, so on and so forth. On the other hand I'm probably jumping the gun on this one, and I should wait and see what kind of encounters they make before I throw the entire idea out the window.
There is certainly some wasted points in the subtlety tree if you want to be a rogue tank but its not too horrible if you plan on pvping as well. However I think you are taking the rogue tanking thing a bit too far. Noone is suggesting rogues should replace warriors in the MT role, especially in high burst damage situations like patch. But on a fight like Anub, there are adds that need to be tanked for a short period of time that dont hit rediculously hard, and are stunnable. If you look at AQ20 or ZG there are plenty of situations where a rogue could offtank. Turning hemo build into a light tank spec isnt such a bad thing, especially since the new rank of hemo is 14 dmg per hit. You are going to want 1 MS spec warrior in your 25 man raids for that excellent debuff. That only leaves 2 more warriors for tanking which is not going to be enough in many situations. Wether a rogue can fill the gap depends on how blizzard deals with the itemization and agro holding issues.
As a separate side note, does anybody think it would be worth it for me to repost what I put on the rogue forums here, as a separate thread? Rogue tanking is a speculative role, so I'm not sure it makes sense to interweave it into this thread.
I think it would be better here.. the wow forums are very slow these days :(.
I have a high tolerence. Anyway, I will copy what I put up on the WoW Rogue forums, and make a new post here in EJ's forums after lunch. I think Chipotle is calling my name.
I think my maths are correct, but if someone wants to double check:
GIVENS:
base SS: 400
crit SS (4/5 lethality): 896
SS energy: landed = 40, dodged = 8
SS critrate: 30%
sample time: 3 hours (10800 seconds)
energy generated in this time: 108000
miss/block/parry factoring: attacking from behind, enough to hit to never miss
08/29/06, 2:17 AM
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