Mists of Pandaria: All Specs - Page 12

Anachon · 03/28/12, 6:05 PM

You can also refresh this hemo debuff with your own hemo debuff still active on the target, meaning you can 'roll' it without having rupture up at all, but we will miss out on the last tick of the debuff.

If the hemo debuff is refreshable it sounds like it could work similar to the current mechanic of refreshing a MoS buffed rupture via eviscerate. Which means PvE Sub would mainly be about refreshing our two bleed dots + SnD.

Since arena PvP was mentioned i also wanted to add that besides from sneaking by trash packs in raids shroud of concealment (SoC? or is this abbreviation already in use?) could be used to hide your group at the start of an arena match to begin the fight with an all-out burst attack at one enemy player.

Midnight08 · 03/29/12, 2:06 AM

Rogue (Forums)
Skills
Fan of Knives: This attack has a chance of applying your active poisons at their normal rate.
Master Poisoner: New. Increases the spell damage taken by any target you have poisoned by 5%.

Combat
Ambidexterity: Reworked: Increases the damage you deal with your off-hand weapon by 75%.
Combat Potency: Slower off-hand weapons have a proportionally higher chance to trigger Combat Potency.
Killing Spree: Now does 7 assaults, up from 5.

Assassination
Blindside: New. Performing a successful Mutilate has a 30% chance of leaving you in an advantageous position, enabling a single use of Dispatch regardless of the enemy target's health.
Dispatch: Now does 225% weapon damage plus 859.5, up from 195% weapon damage plus 744.9.
Mutilate: Now does 130% weapon damage, down from 140%.

Subtlety
Hemorrhage: Reworked: An instant strike that deals 100% weapon damage (145% if a dagger is equipped), causing profuse bleeding that deals an additional 40% of the direct strike's damage over 24 sec. Awards 1 combo point. Awards 1 combo point.
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Latest MoP patch items... My question here is what does the Combat Potency change mean for Combat rogues? Could this help Slow/Slow become viable? Or are the poison procs being % based still too important?

fierydemise · 03/29/12, 2:13 AM

It will really depend on poison mechanics. If poison procs remain normalized then slow/slow will be optimal for AOE. Killing Spree also biases toward a slow/slow setup.

I respect what Blizzard is trying to do but keeping slow/slow and slow/fast balanced is going to be really tricky.

Neru · 03/29/12, 2:18 AM

Originally Posted by Midnight08

Subtlety
Hemorrhage: Reworked: An instant strike that deals 100% weapon damage (145% if a dagger is equipped), causing profuse bleeding that deals an additional 40% of the direct strike's damage over 24 sec. Awards 1 combo point. Awards 1 combo point.

fitting to this change, there is also a glyph-change:

Glyph of Hemorrhage: Reworked: Your Hemorrhage ability only causes lingering damage over time to targets that were already afflicted by a Bleed effect.

- Am I reading something wrong or is this the most useless glyph ever, thinking about the fact that the hemo-bleed should be baseline now anyhow ? shouldn't this "effect" rather be in the tooltip ?

SleepySlug · 03/29/12, 2:56 AM

Originally Posted by Neru

fitting to this change, there is also a glyph-change:

Glyph of Hemorrhage: Reworked: Your Hemorrhage ability only causes lingering damage over time to targets that were already afflicted by a Bleed effect.

- Am I reading something wrong or is this the most useless glyph ever, thinking about the fact that the hemo-bleed should be baseline now anyhow ? shouldn't this "effect" rather be in the tooltip ?

I believe this is more of a PVP change with regards to CC viability. Since Hemo now replaces Sinister Strike altogether, if you wanted to CC something that you'd hemo'd in the last 24 seconds, you were SOL. This glyph allows you to continue to build CPs on a target and still have the option of CCing them should situations change or whatnot.

Not the WORST glyph, though I will admit that it is quite niche and therefore I don't know how much play it will actually get.

• Aldriana · 03/29/12, 3:17 AM

Originally Posted by Midnight08

Latest MoP patch items... My question here is what does the Combat Potency change mean for Combat rogues? Could this help Slow/Slow become viable? Or are the poison procs being % based still too important?

Combat is probably still going to favor fast OH weapons to some extent, but certainly by less than it currently does. I suspect this change isn't aimed so much at enabling slow/slow (although it may do that as well if there's an ilvl difference in play) as making sure old fast weapons don't persist for longer than intended. As I recall, the plan in Mists is to remove 1.4 daggers and only itemize ~1.8 daggers and slow weapons; if Combat Potency remained in its current form, there would be a risk of the best 1.4 speed OHs remaining optimal for the first tier or two of Mists raiding until the ilvl difference finally overwhelmed them. With the importance of speed now reduced, they're far more likely to have the existing 1.4 weapons become obsolete on a reasonable timescale, and thereby prevent the need to go back change the speed of every 1.3 and 1.4 weapon that has ever been created.

That said, it will also depend on the exact tuning of Killing Spree. If the direct weapon hits are a sufficiently large source of damage the higher base damage (and higher normalization speed) might offset the loss of poison procs from switching to a slower weapon. I suspect the effect is not large enough to swing the balance, but its something to watch.

Its also interesting to see that they're attempting to add a little more complexity to the Assassination cycle via Blindside; that said, I don't know how effective its going to be. The fundamental problem is that under most circumstances you'll have Anticipation, meaning you can just hit the button whenever it lights up and always be optimal. In the absence of Anticipation it'd be a little more interesting - you can imagine wanting to save it for a move or two depending on your current combo point total - but as it is, its likely to be somewhat mindless. There needs to be some reason - a (de)buff or bleed, perhaps - why you might want to delay your use of the proc for it to be a particularly interesting mechanic.

Seliathan · 03/29/12, 4:42 AM

Originally Posted by Anachon

If the hemo debuff is refreshable it sounds like it could work similar to the current mechanic of refreshing a MoS buffed rupture via eviscerate. Which means PvE Sub would mainly be about refreshing our two bleed dots + SnD.

Kinda moot at this point, but it was a poor choice of words. You couldn't roll it per se, but instead refresh it with new damage and considering all the factors like if hemo did crit, if any other buffs were available and so on. But you didn't need another bleed.

For the current patch, I don't think that they changed much. Most things are just flat damage buffs or the aforementioned change to remove the need for having 2 kind of daggers with different speed.

As for the new proc for Assassinaton, I guess they just want to give Rogues the same RNG'ish stuff other classes have, with Spriests getting a free SWD above 20% due to dot-ticks for example. I don't think they had some nifty mechanic in mind forcing you to look out for a particular situation. If you could stack the buff you might save it for some burst or something along that line, but since its' duration ain't that long we are probably gonna hit that button the moment it pops up.

Edit: In the current build you still need to have a bleed on the target before the Hemo DoT appears. It might either be a bug, or a very confusing tooltip change. You can still put the dot up again without having rupture on the target as long as you got the old hemo DoT up though. Still works with other bleeds like a hunter-crit aswell.

On a sidenote: The legendary dagger proc rate is still abnormally high on the beta servers.

Neru · 03/29/12, 5:24 AM

found interesting new changes on mmo-champion.com:

Shadowstep: Now also grants movement speed increased by 70% for 2 sec afterwards.
Preparation: No longer works with Smoke Bomb.
Deadly Throw: Now also prevents any spell in that school from being cast. [when used wit 5CPs]

I think this change to smoke-bomb and the improvement to shadowstep should give the "preparation vs shadowstep"-discussion a whole new dimension, instead of just saying "prep > all", don't you think ? (at least in PvP, in PvE prep should still be better for stationary fights because of another CoS and Vanish...)

Verain · 03/29/12, 7:03 AM

Wow, I had not seen those changes as regards prep. Please don't take this the wrong way, as I love both prep and smoke bomb, but I have felt that smoke bomb should never have been on prep, and that it substantially mutated our arena and rbg experience this expac. I think it is good for us (seriously) and good for the game that it not be on prep in general.

And yes, it will definitely change the tone of that tier- prep becomes what it has classically been, and thus you will be able to select the other talents without hurting your comp (you may want the defenses and utility brought by prep, but your hands are no longer behind your back because of second smoke bomb on this decision).

The return of the mini-sprint on shadowstep is EXTREMELY heartening. I had not heard any plan to handle the fact that an opponent with a functional W key wasn't always steppable, and this reversion fixes that issue. I still suspect burst of speed will prove itself better than shs in most pvp (and vice versa in pvp), but that is probably still ok.

Anachon · 03/29/12, 10:24 AM

I suspect this change isn't aimed so much at enabling slow/slow (although it may do that as well if there's an ilvl difference in play) as making sure old fast weapons don't persist for longer than intended.

The other (mostly cosmetical) reason could be the big community Q&A they did. Pretty much every combat rogue out there wrote they want PvE offhand swords/maces/axes/fists back like in the old days of BC and WotLK.
Really hope they get the balance right, would be a shame to use 1.8 daggers in the offhand despite these changes.

Omanko · 03/29/12, 12:21 PM

Not to mention it would streamline itemization if you could just pop any potential MH into your OH as well, eliminating an entire class of items (fast daggers) from already clogged loot tables. And no more MH/OH specific shenanigans either, please!

• Aldriana · 03/29/12, 12:28 PM

Except that Assassination - and quite possibly Sub - will still need daggers, even if they eliminate them from Combat. And it seems unlikely that that's going to change. They're taking the step of getting rid of fast daggers, but I think use daggers in general is too much of an iconic rogue thing for them to completely abolish it.

I can, however, see them tweaking Enh shamans to make daggers viable, to cut down on the "item only rogues can use" factor.

Brotherbear · 03/29/12, 2:35 PM

Originally Posted by Neru

found interesting new changes on mmo-champion.com:

Shadowstep: Now also grants movement speed increased by 70% for 2 sec afterwards.
Preparation: No longer works with Smoke Bomb.
Deadly Throw: Now also prevents any spell in that school from being cast. [when used wit 5CPs]

I think this change to smoke-bomb and the improvement to shadowstep should give the "preparation vs shadowstep"-discussion a whole new dimension, instead of just saying "prep > all", don't you think ? (at least in PvP, in PvE prep should still be better for stationary fights because of another CoS and Vanish...)

According to MMO-Champ, Shadowstep also now works on "a target" instead of "an enemy target" which I think is a pretty solid improvement. It likely still won't beat Prep for PvE, but it certainly increases the potential of the talent.

• Aldriana · 03/29/12, 2:48 PM

I think that right there tells us that there's a problem with that tier of talents. The fact that there's a fun, interesting ability that many PvE rogues would like to take, but can't (or at least, won't) because the ability to sneak in an extra DPS vanish will win on most fights is exactly the sort of thing that's wrong with the tree. Two of the three talents in that tier are movement tools with various degrees of utility. Why can't the third one be the same?

yanhero · 03/29/12, 5:51 PM

Because for pvp, prep is sort of a movement tool in a way. Vanish removes roots, cloak can remove slows or roots, and you get an extra sprint. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I like that current talent tier, I wish they would make a 3rd movement ability too. But there is a bit of logic to it.