That would be a drop in the ocean for DPS, don't get me wrong it's a nice eviscerate but it wouldn't account for a great deal. More importantly it would force you to take MFD as a talent, which is a terrible design flaw, knowing blizz though..

I think one thing to add is that we know rogues population is already low, the class is boring for the most part and potentially they've taken one of the biggest assets. Rogues are/were awesome cleavers, but that seems to be gone now. So we are left with good soakers (feint on GCD/cloak and now prep baseline), which to an organized raiding team is important and gives us some value.

This is a slight misquote. Aldriana never said that running BF is going to be better than anything the other two specs can dish out. What was said was that running BF will be an increase of ~8% in ideal situations. It is assumed Aldriana meant it's an increase over Combat not using it.

Assassination right now actually has very decent multi-targeting damage. More than 8% as far as I know.

Also to take into account is that "in ideal situations" clause. Raids don't play out ideally. So that number in practice is going to be even lower.

Well, that's maybe one of the view, however kind of changes are definitely wrong turn for combat as unique play style, regarding two-targets scenario.

Options are already on table, depend on Blizz how much effort wanna invest to "new" combat rogue.

Assorted thoughts:
1) Multidotting as Assassination is probably better than straight single-target DPS, but not necessarily by very much. It might beat the 8% number we're projecting for Combat, but its not going to beat it by very much.

2) While its true that crippling Blade Flurry robs Combat of a lot of its identity, I think the fact that Combat's identity is so tightly coupled to its cleave says something about how lacking the spec is otherwise. In an ideal world I'd like to see more work done on giving combat a distinct and interesting playstyle beyond just being "the one that has Blade Flurry".

3) I'd also dispute the notion that Blade Flurry is "overpowered" in its current form. I mean, its very good, certainly, but functionally speaking there are a number of other classes that do nearly as well, and if I recall Blizzard specifically said something along the lines of "we want combat rogues to be excited about cleave fights as its something they're good at" (note that with the BF nerf this statement is no longer even remotely true). The power of BF is only a problem insofar as that the other specs have nothing comparable so we get railroaded into speccing combat on a fair number of fights.

4) Having thought about the changes a bit more: I applaud the effort to improve rogues, but the more I look at them the more I think they're not going to really change anything. Marked for Death and the new Shuriken Toss are clear improvements over the current options... but on most fights Anticipation is still likely the way to go. Cloak and Dagger and the new Burst of Speed are similarly improved, but, again, unlikely to dethrone Shadowstep in most cases. Shadow Focus may or may not still be the best level 15 talent, but the tier will still have a clear DPS winner. So in practice... I'm not sure this changes a whole lot in terms of how we spec and play. It has the advantage of being *interesting* and mostly useless, which is an improvement, but... I admit I'm hoping there are still more changes coming, as some stylistic improvments to abilities we rarely use and a massive cleave nerf is not exactly the recipe for my ideal balance patch.

Maybe none of you played it, but most of these changes sound exactly like guild wars 2's roguelike class, which is really fun by the way....also basically immune to CC. I'd bet some dev saw how fun rogue in GW2 was and said "How can we change wow rogue to be this kind of fun without breaking the game too much".

Also I fully expect to see most of these new changes nerfed. But I think some of the changes were to make pvp rogues less dependant on Shadowstep to open on classes with OP aoe's to break us. As well as making ambush easier to land for PVE purposes.

I expect the actual intent with the Blade flurry nerf was to figure out what the right numbers were to balance us on some new fights in the next tier. We already saw with garalon that special measures had to be taken to make us not OP on 2 target cleave fights, especially with damage buffs. And Ghostcrawler said at some point that being a little OP is ok, but being mandatory is not. So that's my perspective on that.

Short of some new raid mechanics (which haven't really been in the game since maybe BC) I doubt that even with the changes Burst of speed will ever be better than shadowstep. Spending energy and getting a 4 second sprint is just so much weaker than shadowstep. And the liklihood of any fight where you need a "get back to the target" buff more often than every 24 seconds is almost nonexistant.

Marked for death could potientially be useful for combat but, at least for me, not having anticipation (taking marked for death) would probably be a huge dps loss as assassination. Gear is already at the point where we have enough crit and haste that we can routinely go over 5 CP's even without shadow blades. I'm sure this only becomes more true as we enter the next tier. I'd only take this if we were swapping targets so often that anticipation was not that useful, in which case you'd probably want to play combat anyway.

In my opinion Anticipation will still be the best choice for the current rogue gameplay since it enables us to improve on our resource management, which has always been and hopefully will be a huge factor in increasing our DPS. Yet I am still concerned that we kind of HAVE to choose a talent like Anticipation, especially now that the other choices aren't horrible either. Not taking Anticipation is a DPS loss because we are more likely to lose out on one or even both of our primary resources - something no other class has to cope with as far as I know and this still bugs me (especially when Paladins, who only got a combo-point like mechanic for a single addon now, got the functionality for free with MoP). Having valuable other choices in this talent tier now makes it even worse. There will or might be fights where taking Shuriken Toss or Marked for Death will provide more DPS than Anticipation does, but I honestly don't believe that anyone would like to bring a rogue to these types of encounters anyway, since they would have to favor low ramp-up times and/or parts where you cannot meleehit at all.

As far as the BF nerf goes, I am glad to see that we are finally going to move away from that "Cleave? -> Combat, AoE? -> Assassination" mentality the two specs have been in for way too long. Bladeflurry was too strong (or was it?) but other classes have nearly identical if not stronger possibilities to efficiently deal major damage to two targets and none of them were touched yet. Maybe and hopefully Blizzard wants to show the direction they want to go with combat, but combat in and by itself has now lost its identity which is something I am hugely uncomfortable with. Every other spec in this game has this one defining mechanic, and while Assassination has poisons and Subtlety has finishers/HaT working for them, Combat is just basic rogue-mechanics, with 30% AP and several percentage based DPS-increasements here and there. With Bladeflurry being almost no DPS-Gain whatsoever anymore there has to be something else to make up for it (and I hope it will be something else than that 5% increased Attack Power).

On an unrelated non-ranty note, is Marked for Death going to work with Restless Blades?

I think it's VERY important to point out that all damage is not created equal. While everyone's mind is on Stone Dogs and Garalon because they are current tier, only Stone Dogs out of the whole tier actually is a fight where you would give up 100 points of damage on your primary target to deal even 101 points of damage on your secondary target. In the cases of add fights, you would, if you could magically distribute the damage perfectly, actually opt to kill each add in order- all the raid dps goes to add #1, then #2, etc. Mass AoE and cleave are effective because they offer the raid something better than single target, but they don't change the logistics- it's almost always better to have one dead add than two living adds, because the one dead add doesn't do any more damage, CC, or healing. AoE, and cleave in particular, has to actually be worth enough to overcome this hump.

Garalon has a special mechanic- the leg itself (and only the leg) takes double damage. So you put people on the leg whose secondary damage doesn't suffer too much, because you really want to kill the boss. On live, this is a combat rogue- his secondary damage is very strong, so it's worth him doing that, and then the other characters, who don't have that trick, focus the boss. You only bring them over if the leg is not dying fast enough. This means that post nerf, a rogue would very likely not want to even switch to the leg, as this would be lower raid damage than if a warrior does that job.

Most cleave fights are "organic" or "free form"- there are several adds, in varying states of control, moving about. Some are close, and are good for cleaves. Others are just all over the place and are good for multidots. Normally these fights work best when the raid dps is high enough to eliminate them efficiently, but some members of the raid opt to deal single target damage, or eliminate high priority targets. Rogues will lose any reason to not be in the last group with this change, because our cleave is already a small cone that enemies quickly dance in and out of. Add some fire on the floor and you'll not be able to stand in the right spot often enough to risk blade flurry, except for tricks like "blade flurry on, 5 point eviscerate, sinister a bit, blade flurry off to refill energy pool", which is a lot of micromanaging for a small amount of payback.

Note also that this "toggle dancing", balancing of your energy pool, your blade flurry cooldown, and your current set of combo points, will be a high skill trick with very little payout. Right now, it's beneficial to keep flurry up full time, because the forked white attacks and mastery make up for the energy penalty, even at 5 energy with black-1 BG status. In the future, you'll want to disable blade flurry for that time period, as the anemic white attacks being forked at 25% strength won't be enough to make up for the energy starvation. I don't believe this trick will be fun, and am not looking forward to trying to optimize for it.


You touched on this in an earlier post- rogues don't have much spec distinction, and Ghostcrawler told us that we would be disappointed if we wanted that. Why we don't have the same philosophy as the warlocks I have no idea, but I guess it is different. I'm sure everyone by now has noticed that assassination has balls for burst, but has a strong amount of sustained, and that sub has more burst with a low cooldown, and combat has strong burst over a decently sized window- but combat's real trick is blade flurry, and if the nerf goes live at this magnitude, it's fair to say that it is gone.

So, why don't we have a spec that bursts harder than a ret? Or a spec that executes better than a warrior? Or a spec that can glean extra damage from a raid damage fight like a warrior can? Or the ability to spew out healing like several talents provide hybrids? I was under the impression that "strong single target long term sustained" was a pretty ok niche, as was "really good flurry with one spec". But everyone wants that first thing, and in general they don't think that being able to burst three times as hard as the other classes should result in lower overall damage, even though that is massive utility. The second thing made waves because in a 16 boss tier, two of the fights make heavy use of it, and it's pretty ok on other fights.


What is combat about? When do you run it? I recall for years, combat's cooldowns gave it a shocking amount of damage, and any fight that had periods of off-phase was pretty much going to be great for combat. Mimiron resting between phases pretty much gave you a lot more burst than other classes and specs. But the current wave of modern cooldowns not only are more powerful than anything rogues have, but they can be stacked in multiplicative ways- for instance, a druid can turn on a period of percent extra damage (similar to vendetta), and stack that with an incarnation cooldown that either changes their rotation or rewards some aspect of it intensely. These are from TALENTS, mind you, so they can choose sustained damage talents instead. We have to choose that with entire specs.

We also SHOULD have UI support for bandit's guile. I should not need bandit's guile helper to see that I'm at yellow 3 and should pool a bit. Anticipation should be on the UI as another row of combo points, not swimming in the buff ocean begging you to make a power aura for it. We should have a bigger reward for being in red, or putting cooldowns there, or have a cooldown that transitions us around that we can use differently for a sustained fight than a burst fight.

On the bright side, killing spree rules, and adrenaline rush is a very pleasing cooldown, and shadow blades works excellently with combat. I do enjoy the combat spec, and I like optimizing stuff on it.



Amen. Blade Flurry is more raid utility than anything else. Rogues being very powerful on a few fights this tier makes up for our shocking lack of raid utility, damage reduction, healing, damage redirection, and mandatory position in melee. Since melee is a contested and desired position and any rogue you get automatically is a melee dps, you already are dealing with a situation where you bought a sports car and your wife is angry about it.

Blade Flurry is not overpowered. I wouldn't be surprised if they nerf it, but at 25% of current damage... it's bad.


Anyway, I'll stop QQing about this now, because your last point is up and I've written a mile of tears already.

These things are game changing in pvp. The position of rogues in pvp is garbage heap at the moment- we are in competition with monks for worstest baddie, and no one has been playing a monk for 8 years. In PvP at the moment, you normally want Shuriken Toss, but you can pack a bit more damage into a burst cycle with anticipation. With Marked for Death, I believe you will have that as a viable choice next to shuriken toss if you like the burst setup, because you'll be able to get your second five point finisher- but this time without having to pool CPs and anticipation charges. You won't have to earn them. Meanwhile, ST, if it actually does what it says, will greatly reduce the currently massive reward for peeling a rogue- if we can continue to full strength autoattacks from both weapons as shuriken, our status as a white-attack focused class will stop working against us. Every trivial short term escape cooldown will not be nearly as devastating as it is now with the ability to go ninja-berserk at hunters and mages who have "hoppity-hop" on a sub 20 second timer.

Now, if it isn't full strength autoattacks, then suddenly pressing it becomes this crazy choice- like you would lose damage if you manage to get back on target, but you otherwise deal sub white hits to them, or whatever- then the move would lose its pve utility entirely, and in some cases be worse in pvp than live. The wording isn't super clear yet, so we'll see. If it's what it sounds like, I'm very excited about it.

Cloak and Dagger needs some clarifications. Does it break roots? If so, they will have recreated avatar- shadowdance will become Teleportation Spree, and sub will become even more mandatory in pvp because of this. I honestly liked the sound of Hit and Run much more than this- while this sounds very powerful, it does two things that I don't like- creates an unpeelable damage machine during the cooldown, and leaves you kited around the rest of the time.


Baseline prep is, I believe, the single greatest change to pvp. I think this season has shown that we've always been balanced around having prep, and the few times that prepless specs have succeeded it has been either unintended (and immediately nerfed) synergy with items or other classes, such as the Renataki Twins, or asking "do you want your right arm, or your right hand?" like the current talent tier- where you still end up taking prep versus a good number of matches, and when you don't have it, the strategy is normally "sit the rogue". Our rankings show that this is fully effective, and requires no more thought than this. I personally have no regard for opinions such as "they'll balance us without it" or "cooldowns that reset cooldowns are lame". Rogues have had poorly repped seasons, seasons where they could and did give us buffs to fix us. But at no point have these buffs EVER been aimed at fixing the non prep specs. When muti-prep got destroyed going into cata, what compensation was offered to mutilate? Did cata's combat rogue bring anything worth speccing for? It even lost undodgeable kidney! This is easily my favorite move, and one that defines the WoW rogue versus all the other games rogue-copies.




...but pve...

Your summary is correct. Marked for Death offers us an interesting multi target spec, and a small amount of extra burst at the cost of sustained. It is not of the magnitude of other dps specs/classes, but it is a start. Nothing will dethrone shadowstep in pve, but that is honestly because shadowstep is really damned good at its job. Shadowstep takes you directly to the butt of the target you want. Pretty much the only time you'd think it isn't good enough is if you have to switch to a target, then switch back, very quickly (adds on Elegon, for instance). "Hit and Run" would have offered this, but even then... would you really have taken it much? I think shadowstep is just too great in pve. Other classes with mobility choices end up making the same choice in pve. Warriors pick the double charges, druids take wild charge.



Sorry for the pvp aside, but I think it's fair to say that most of our changes are for pvp, as that is where we need the most changes.

Well, in that specific case there's often a benefit to dragging them apart. We only do that fight reg thus far, and I'm normally mutilate on it, but if I shiv cripple an add so he's not able to reach the tank so easily, he can easily fall out of a flurry cone. Same as if someone stuns or yanks. But yea, spread is about the same as otherwise. But there's plenty of time where that is not the case- for instance, pretend that the adds don't occasionally throw out a mechanic that is needed to win (amber whatever). Most adds need to be killed, not spared until they have done their job, and killing them fast is normally correct.


I'm going to take exception with the philosophy behind your math. Pretend that the legs had one quarter their current life, and a buff that made them take one quarter damage at all times. Then, if you stand in the circle, the buff changes to only reduce damage by one half. This would be the exact same fight as today, but your math would predict a different strategy- even though the strategy SHOULD remain the same. If Blizzard had gone this way (instead of inflating damage done to legs, deflating it), the meters would look totally different. You'd still need to kill the legs, of course, and it would still be in your best interest to only have cleave guys on it if that's enough, and then ramp up from there until the legs die, just as it is on live.



Well, yes, but...
Would you do it on healy dragon in ICC? Would you run it for Halfus? Zon'ozz? Rhyolith (assuming your Rhyo strategy allowed blade flurry)? In all those cases, the actually assigned target has a higher priority than anything you would be cleaving into, so the cleave has to not be crap to be worth it. 25% blade flurry is crap. You might do a bit higher dps with it, but it would be functionally incorrect from an execution standpoint. If the cleave matters you bring a warrior. If the main target needs to die, you don't press the pad-the-meter button, and you are also whatever the single target spec is, which may not even be combat.

I think you're missing the point. Aldriana was saying that some of the fights you were pointing out as examples, your math and logic were incorrect on. He was not disagreeing with you that blade flurry has been a meter-padding button in the past (though in this exact tier that is not the case), and will continue to be so in the future assuming this nerf wasn't intended to be so extreme.

I don't really want to get into a fight about relative DPS priority on every single cleave fight since Tier 1. Suffice it to say that there are some fights where there's a clear primary DPS target, and cleaving is mostly (or entirely) meter-padding; but there are also a lot where it isn't - its not "everything but Stone Dogs" as you've asserted.

So, without going into great gory detail: while I was slightly wrong about the mechanics on Empress, I maintain cleave is still almost universally worth it. Most of the other fights you mention, it depends rather a lot of your specific guild's strategy; their are strats where it makes sense, and strats where it doesn't. Historically it almost always did make sense on account of the way Blade Flurry worked with damage multipliers, but with that changed it is, admittedly, far more ambiguous.

And with regards to your Garalon thought experiment: does killing a leg still do 3% boss HP? If it does, then the amount of effective boss damage done by attacking a leg is the same as at current, meaning the strategy is as well. If it only does 1/4 as much (based on its lower HP), then you don't switch to the legs at all, as they're no longer damage-efficient to kill. Either way, my analysis above applies.

Regardless of whatever other logical fallacies you may be spewing all over the thread...I have no idea where you learned to math, but please try again. If you do 200000 to the leg because you get a double damage buff, and then the leg dies, you have done 200000 to the boss + your cleave damage. At least in my world, 300k to the boss is quite a bit more than 100k (granted those numbers are not quite accurate, and have nothing to do with the BF nerf). I don't know why you think that taking advantage of a fight mechanic is a broken meter.....but ok. Let's run with that and rogues are never allowed to take advantage of any fight mechanics for dps purposes ever again. Good luck killing heroic wind lord, or lei shi, or protectors, or amber shaper, or....I think you get the point.