Infraction for Previn: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

• Vulajin · 02/06/09, 12:08 AM

Post: 3.1 Rogue Changes - Early Preview
User: Previn
Infraction: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

If you could go ahead and not split quoted posts into a billion segments, that'd be great.

Original Post:

Originally Posted by Ashere

On all accounts: no.
- A HaT rogue does not require raid stacking, it requires raid sorting, which is still a different mechanism. Raid stacking is the practice of requiring specific classes and specs for the raid to even go, because certain buffs and debuffs are must-haves. Currently, with the exception of a certain place requiring 2 priests, raids require specific roles to be filled, but not classes. While HaT certainly favours being grouped with certain classes (pet-classes), even those are not required. The alternatives without pets aren't completely bad, and even then, it is very safe to assume that at least one or two pet classes are present anyway. But convenient groupmembers are *always* there, from any role you can think of.

I'd say it takes both. You can't tell me that having 3 hunters in the rogue's group isn't better than having 3 holy priests. The point is that HaT right now makes people arrange around the rogue (and yes even choose who to invite), which is a no-no from a design perspective.

- It's harder to tell a bad HaT rogue maybe, yes, but the exact same thing could be said for Combat and even Mutilate. But when half a HaT rogue's groupmembers die, you'll be able to pick up who are the good ones, they will simply handle their drop in CP generation better.

Really the drop in combo points doesn't have a recover method for HaT builds short of start spamming Hemo, and pick up a rotation. I suspect the difference will be minimal due to the % of damage that HaT provides, short of very good and very bad players. But the exact same thing can't be said as easily of combat, and especially not mutilate.

- If Blizz is fine with what it does, then it's upto them to decide whether it's overbudget or not. There is a known equation to evaluate budgetting of items. For talents, there is not. Blizz weighs trees and specs as a whole, depending on the specs possible with them.

Talents have an expected budget, this has been said by Blizzard several times. While yes, it's up to them if they want HaT or not, no other talent comes close to providing 800+ DPS for each talent point invested, and Deadly Brew was changed beta specifically because it provided too much DPS. That HaT provides such a disproportionate amount of DPS also hinders the rest of the tree in what can be done with it for increasing damage.

- PvP is not an issue, since this is a very obvious PvE orientated talent. It is very easy to make an effective PvE build without either MoD or Cheat Death. If you require those for PvP, then ditching HaT for either one should be no problem. There is no such thing as a PvP tree, if there ever was such a thing.

Sorry, let me clarify. HaT hurts Sub PvP by preventing useable DPS talents from being introduced because they would tip Sub over the top for DPS in PvE when combined with HaT. This goes back to HaT providing such an overwhelmingly large amount of Sub's DPS.

- Actually, it does not. HaT CP generation knows something called "dry-spells", moments where simply no CP's seem to be generated. This is not a bug or anything, it is simply a moment where none of your groupmembers crit, either because they simply don't, or because they use abilities that can't crit, or because they're repositioning, it can be anything. The skill in HaT lies with knowing what to do during these moments. "Just hemorrhage" is not always the best option available. Similarly, there is no energy regen other than Relentless Strikes available. Using too much energy kills your DPS, especially during these dry-spells, and easily sets you on hold for 3.5 seconds before you can Eviscerate again, which is not really efficient. Even the combomoves you use are a decision to make. There are times you can two button it, 1 for Evisc, and occasionally the second for SnD. There are also times when the CP flow is high enough to insert Ruptures without dropping in CP generation, or when Rupturing is a must because CP generation is constantly very low instead.

There are no real dry spells in raids, especially when grouped properly. Your only raid experience seems to be Sath on 10/25 man, so at that point, yes the combo points may not be ideal. With a stacked/sorted group in decent gear, there is no real shortage that requires combo moves to be done to fill in gaps.

In reference to buffing Sub, I don't expect Blizz to do much with HaT, but instead, to improve some on the deeper Sub talents: Slaughter from the Shadows and Shadowdance. Especially Slaughter, since they were considering turning Hemorrhage into a debuff from (for example) Backstab.

Except that HaT in raiding doesn't use Backstab, and only rarely uses Hemo right now. HaT negates the need for combo builders, and Backstab isn't better than Eviscerating. This also goes back to improving the deeper talents right now would be a mistake, and take HaT build further up in DPS in PvE, when it's already often above the other two trees.

The problem with the last 3 tiers of Sub is basically that each promotes a different part of the combopoint system:
HaT promotes the use of finishers, Slaughter promotes the use of Combomoves, Shadowdance promotes the use of openers. Since we can use only one of these moves at a time, these three talents make eachother almost redundant. Slaughter and Shadowdance will combine for dagger rogues, because Slaughter also affects Ambush. But currently, a non-dagger rogue, thus hemorrhage, may pick Slaughter, but will have little use for Shadowdance for example.

The only problem is the implementation of Shadowdance and the influence of HaT on the rest of the tree. If Shadowdance did something like, considered you stealthed for 3-4 seconds after Shadow Stepping, you could see the Master of Subtlety come into play and a general all around DPS increase for Sub in a controllable manner. At that point, remove HaT and tweak the tree some and everything falls back into line. You could easily end up with a combat daggers play style in Sub that would be augmented by the talents in the tree, rather than tossing them to the wayside in the rush to HaT. (Bit of a tangent there, sorry.)

Like it or not, HaT is basically using the rogue mechanics in an inverted way: use your finishers, add in the combomoves when applicable. A finisher like EA actually moved up in rank on my keybinds, since the opportunity cost for it went down quite noticably. It seems easier and more efficient for a HaT rogue to keep this buff up than for a warrior to sunder.

If you're using combo moves you're probably doing something wrong or your gear or party probably isn't up to snuff for HaT yet. HaT doesn't make combo moves a minor part of your rotation, it basically eliminates them, and does much the same thing with energy. This isn't inverting rogue mechanics, it's throwing them out the window, and laughing at it on the way down.