Now that skills/talents are a bit stable, can anyone provide answers/hints for the following questions:

Which spec should perform the best in the following situations:
- Long (>20 seconds) AoE (>5 mobs) fight
- Short (< 10 seconds) AoE (>5 mobs) fight
- Long ranged fight, with Shuriken Toss/Deadly Throw


I have tried Crimson Tempest a bit and I like the way it plays a lot, but I have no idea if it's good enough to make other specs catch up to Assassination. I don't even know if using CT is a DPS gain for Assassination. Another unknown is whether (for each spec) we should keep on doing our single-target rotation on the boss, replacing finishers with CT (if the fight allows), or if we should go full FoK with CT finisher.
I have not tried Shuriken Toss/Deadly Throw at all yet. With current numbers, what can we expect from it?

Assuming it does work out like it did for caster dots - it's only one, next tick that gets transfered to Your next envenom buff and extends it by that. There's no other limit than that. Sorry for the pinch!

Besides, the interval on Envenom is just one second, so unless they've also changed the tick length, we're not talking about a situation in which we can hit a second 5CP Envenom with 2.5 seconds left on the existing one and have the following Envenom buff last 8.5 seconds.

So I was doing up a post for my guild talking about talents and such in 5.0 and I ended up coming up with the following analysis for Ultraxion and talents.

Leeching Poison or Elusiveness is actually a pretty hard choice since you're either going to be almost completely self-sufficient for the first little while (or potentially forever), or you could just have all your rogues taking 80% less damage the entire fight by feinting every 5 seconds at the low low cost of 4 energy per second.
As combat my energy regen is (approximately) 15 eps just from gear and spec, so that's a dps loss of about 25% of my active damage. On my last Ultra kill about 40% of my damage stemmed from energy based sources (rounding up quite a bit), however since I get a ton of energy regen from finishers and combat potency, let's call it 35%. So, long story short, I could take 80% less damage for all of Ultraxion at the cost of 9% of my total dps (25% of 35%) and that's a "worst case cost" scenario.


As I said above, all of my *very rough* math was rounded to make the dps loss worse since I'm assuming I'm missing something significant. As a better test I'm going to (with permission) do Ultraxion as combat with BF on the whole time (unlgyphed) just to assuage my own curiosity.

Did I miss something really obvious? Or is Elusiveness really going to be that good on any fight that has constant large amounts of raid wide damage?

Edit: I am aware that the existence of Leeching Poison as an alternative means that this is probably a non-starter since it entails *any* sort of a dps loss, however LP scales with our gear where Elusiveness scales with encounter damage, so my gut feeling is that Elusiveness will be stronger at launch depending on encounter design with LP catching up quickly in later tiers.

Well, it's not 80% AOE mitigation since Elusiveness stacks multiplicatively. It's 65% mitigation. So the question ends up being does mitigating 15% of the damage (when I would use feint) beat out healing myself for up to 10% of my DPS? Alternatively, you could look at it from the perspective where you use the 30% mitigation on CD to reduce single target damage (#ohyeahroguetanking), and there you would consider it 30% mitigation rather than 15 at the expense of 20 energy.

Assassination, is getting very low HPS since poisons don't appear to trigger it. I want to say that they were originally, but they no longer are?

Fair points all and it does look an awful lot like it won't be nearly as meaningful a choice compared to LP as I'd initially concluded.

I have been wondering what does trigger LP since the tooltip seems to strongly indicate that it's weapon swings, but I don't know if it's normalized or not for weapon speed as well as if it procs off of Rupture ticks, eviscerate/envenom and combat's mastery.

No matter how you look at it, Leeching Poison will (ironically in my opinion) be weakest for Assassination rogues if it doesn't proc off poison since the "poison" tree doesn't actually rely as heavily on the number of weapon strikes. Combat has more energy as well as a mastery that likely procs LP, Sub has the improved Slice and Dice to generate more white swings as well as being more finisher based (assuming LP procs off eviscerate).

Which isn't to say it'll be bad, just less good.

Honestly one of the things I've really enjoyed about our talent options is that they aren't generally dps related. At first I was irritated that we weren't getting the "cool talents" that other classes were, and then I realized that we won't be balanced around said cooldowns/talents which should be a good thing. Being balanced without regard for talents means we may be the only dps class that has almost total flexibility to customize our talents on a fight by fight basis. Yes Shadow Focus, Nightstalker. and Anticipation are some form of dps increase, but they aren't going to be nearly as significant as the options that hunters have where, in my opinion, every tier has some form of dps increase in it that will need to be balanced around.

In essence I'd rather be balanced around doing 50k dps on a fight because I executed my rotation, and not because I executed my rotation and also depending on which of the three dps increasing talents I took at 60/75/90. Yes this does mean that there will be many times when I just don't care what talent I take (my rundown on Dragon Soul has me not caring about the level 75 talents on any fight except Madness) but it also means that I have almost perfect freedom to adapt my spec to each specific fight.

For example, the combination of Elusiveness + Combat Readiness + Preperation + Paralytic Poison = a surprisingly solid add tank every 2 mins so long as you are the first person on it and the raid doesn't blow by your threat. Basically you're looking at 20 seconds taking 80% reduced damage with a double evasion chaser. Alternately you could combine Deadly Throw with Shuriken with Deadly Brew to kite a mob if needed.

Would you be very good at these tasks? Not really. But the key to our talent tree is that you wouldn't be leaving any dps on the table by taking these combinations. You could take the tank spec for any fight with adds simply because you wanted to be able to round up any adds that the tank missed without having to stress the healers, and you'd still do basically the same damage as a rogue who didn't take that combination.

Silver lining!

Well while on the subject of rogues as off tanks, I think the potential for Symbiosis should be discussed.

Nothing there that is going to increase individual damage, but having more than one rogue/druid per raid could eliminate the need for an off tank, meaning a raid could bring another dps class and increase dps output significantly. Okay the effect only lasts for 30 seconds but with Prep/Elusiveness/Combat Readiness/Glyphed CoS a rogue could comfortably hold a bosses attention for up to 80 seconds.

One way of doing this would be to use growl to taunt the target and have any other hunters/rogues cycle their MD's to assist in keeping aggro. About 5 seconds before the growl effect is ending pop Combat Readiness to build up some stacks while damage is still being mitigated by the growl effect. You then have 15 seconds of CR remaining which can be stacked with feints "Elusiveness" talent to keep up an 80% reduction in damage for those 15 seconds. As CR is ending evasion can be used and as that evasion is ending you can prep and get another 15 seconds of evasion from that. If you needed to go even further you could use a glyphed cloak of shadows with feints elusiveness to get 70% reduction after the evasion ends.

I don't know how viable this is in practice, obviously it will depend on the boss mechanics. But for a patchwerk type fight this has crazy potential.

I think it is worth noting that Growl will, like any taunt, put you at the top of the aggro table which should be a country mile ahead of any dps. I think the only person that will take aggro off you once you are there is another tank.

However, rotating misdirects is still a good idea to avoid this happening.

So build 15983 brings us:

A significantly stronger ambush. Definite buff for Sub, and makes the first tier of talents more interesting for assassination and combat.

Slightly buffed eviscerate for combat and sub. Looks like they just increased the base damage, not the AP scaling.

Dispatch damage almost doubled. Certainly improves our execute phase, but also improves damage over the course of the fight since mutilates proc dispatches. The logs I'm looking at have dispatch at ~10%+ of overall damage, so we're looking at about a 10% overall dps increase there.

Killing spree damage increased from 20% to 100%. Adds to burst in a tasty way, and reinforces having dual slow weapons. Looks like about a 5% overall increase in damage there? How do I maths

I actually wonder if the dispatch change would make expertise worth more overall above the execute phase since if it misses we just can't hit it again unlike sub 35% or if it won't change the value much overall, I'm just not that familiar with how much damage we receive from it.

I can see that for combat and sub but currently poisons are going off the yellow hit cap only at 7.5% hit since we still get the refund when skills are dodged unless I'm under estimating the amount of white hits that expertise would reduce.