Warning for Parra: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

• Vulajin · 02/09/09, 3:00 PM

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

Originally Posted by Aldriana

The relevant point is, all of these change your gameplay in some significant way. You have a new spell to work into your rotation, or a new cooldown to pop when you need burst damage, or are looking for different itemization, or whatever. Somehow, the notion of an ability that doesn't change anything you do but simply does slightly more damage seems like a pretty boring 51-point talent. And in particular, I don't think it lives up to the preview billing:

I don't think it's entirely fair to judge HfB in that light. The assassination tree already has a talent like that, in the form of mutilate. It's our defining ability, just like titan's grip is for fury warriors. It doesn't make sense to add a 'second' ability like that. I do agree that it's fairly boring however and that CttC would have been a better 51 pointer, all things considering.

1) Weapon speed - on both weapons, but particularly the MH - is too important, leading to rogues using 130 DPS blues over Naxx epics. Well, there's a number of things that would help here, but one of the simplest changes that would make itemization a bit more intuitive would be to make finishers have a chance to proc effects from both hands. Suddenly, the slower and/or higher DPS weapon now wants to be back in the MH. However, this also gives a 1% damage boost - which isn't a bad thing, but if the majority of our DPS benefit is going to come from HFB, there's not a lot of room for this sort of tweak.

That wouldn't address the issue (and I think it is an issue) of being forced into the fastest possible offhand, leaving for very little variation/choice. For instance, murder and WB should both be valid offhand choices, but one is clearly superior to the other based on a stat that isn't even weighed into the item budget. Adjusting poison proc chance to the weapon speed would probably be better so that poison DPS is the same regardless of weapon choice.

2) Master Poisoner costs too much, and sucks. Blizzard has stated they want to do something about talented raid buffs to make those that cost a lot less painful to get. Master Poisoner would seem to fall under that heading. The problems here are twofold - it provides no DPS benefit, and it doesn't have full uptime. But if, for instance, it also gave a 33/66/100% chance for Envenom to not clear your Deadly Poison stacks, that would address both problems. Not to mention helping with the previous point on weapon speed. But this would also give a 1-2% damage buff... and again, you can't add too many 1 and 2 percent damage buffs if you're going to lump the majority of our DPS buff into HFB.

I think that is only viable if the 50% poison time reduction on the talent were dropped, else it would be much too valuable for 3 talent points I guess.