Reread, but I'll try to explain.

No no, that damage is a lie! Say the leg has 30 trillion times as much health. If you deal 100,000 damage and the leg multiplies it by 30 trillion, but the dead leg is still the same (3% iirc?) to the boss, then the meter skew would be much more obvious. You'd be like, holy crap, this meter is getting in the way of seeing how much damage is really being done! The point is that the leg has to die, and that the multiplier confuses things.

The question isn't "should the leg get hit". The question is "how does that happen". And then that becomes "who loses the least boss (aka, real) damage by hitting the leg". That answer is normally "the guy who can blade flurry, or cleave, or whatever else", because some of his damage goes back to the boss. If no one in the entire raid had a cleave at all (like, it wasn't even in the game as a thing), then this wouldn't be a question.

And that's why it's relevant to the blade flurry nerf. What the multiplier is doesn't matter- Blizzard planned the backlash to the boss around the legs dying. The damage taken is not the damage dealt. The map is not the territory!


You aren't using the fight mechanic, the fight mechanic is using you! The meter is broken because there's a damage inflation mechanic! The leg has to die either way, whether it records your damage properly, skewed by a factor of 2 for some reason, or skewed by 1/10th, you would still execute the fight the same way.



I think you might be missing mine. The point is that you're trying to optimize raid damage to kill the boss, right? I mean, if your guild doesn't need that, then fine, but that's not really my point. Many guilds do have to worry about that, and certainly mine whenever we hit a boss where an enrage time is tight. If garalon's leg says "I take 1/4 damage" and being close meant "I take 1/2 damage", you'd still EXECUTE the fight the same way. Combat would be as valuable as it is on live, but it would be behind a lot of other specs on the meters. Because execution and boss death is what matters. Multiplying dps to the leg by 2 (or 1/2 in my example) is why the meter is broken. On live, you put combat rogues on legs, you do what is best for the raid. A healthy blade flurry normally means that what is best for the raid is what puts numbers on the meters. When Blizzard does crazy stuff like Rhyolith or Garalon, it causes a lot of confusion because they are screwing with the thing we need for feedback and analysis. You even saw Aldrianna even use the multiplier, and he above everyone knows that effective dps is what matters. That's how insidious it is when our numbers are messed with!

Hell, you even think I'm coming at this from some anti-rogue perspective. I want rogues to rule man!

My assumption is that the leg will eventually die, and that in general you want to lose as little boss damage as possible while killing it.

On the more interesting note of it overperforming the average case, I brought this up- on live, you want to keep blade flurry up full time when you can. It's my conjecture that during low damage cases, you won't want it up, as the payoff will be lower- the 1/4 forked white damage might not make up for the lost energy. So, for instance, once red ends, assume you switch it off, and then turn it on around yellow- would that reasonably simple trick result in a general damage increase? Or would it require further tweaking to beat the "leave it on" case?

That's a somewhat confusing way to think about killings legs. The point of killing them *is* boss damage - assuming the leg dies, damage to the leg is totally equivalent to damage to the boss - as in, the amount of damage it takes to kill a leg is exactly equivalent to the amount of damage the boss takes from a leg dying. Hence, the entire point of DPSing the legs is to maximize total damage done to all available targets - be that through multiDoTing, cleaving, or simply melee standing near them and thus doing double damage. If there were an arbitrarily large number of legs available to be killed, optimal strategy would be entirely equivalent to maximizing DPS. The only reason its not is because legs are a finite resource - they only respawn so fast, so you want to prioritize killing them with those attacks that gain the largest damage multiplier by so doing. So in that sense, yes, you want to take as little damage off the boss as possible in order to kill them. However, in practice, this generally involves melee full time on legs, so (subject to minor constraints on which legs you can/should kill) we can simply optimize total damage done - certainly in terms of deciding whether to Blade Flurry or not.

In terms of Blade Flurry toggle-optimization: you can probably increase damage *efficiency* through such techniques, but you're not going to increase total damage done. As such... it sort of depends on what you're trying to maximize, now doesn't it.

This is the dominating factor. What 5.2 would mean for combat on Garalon is that you would prefer to leave rogues on the boss full time, as per Aldriana's math. The only reason you wouldn't do that is because it takes a full melee team to kill the legs in a timely fashion. Given that this is the case, the proper way to attack the legs would be to single target them. Flurry could be used to throw a bit of dps at the boss if you are killing the legs just barely too quickly, but this makes no sense. You would be better off simply pulling off the leg a bit early and throwing a 5cp rupture on the boss before moving to the next leg.

I'm not sure if I understand what the argument about Garalon is even about, honestly. Everyone seems to realize/agree on the basic facts. 1) Total damage = boss damage. 2) Combat rogues on live are very strong at cleaving off the legs. 3) You put your best cleavers on the legs to maximize efficeincy, as killing legs faster is irrelevant as long as they die fast enough. 4) Combat rogues on PTR would not choose to cleave at all.

The theoretical half damage vs. double damage "thought experiment" is extremely uninteresting. As Aldraina said earlier, either (a) killing a leg still does 3% boss health, in which case 50k damage to a leg is 200k damage to the boss, which means nothing changes at all, or (b) killing a leg transfer's the leg's health as damage to the boss, in which case 50k damage to the leg would have been 100k damage to the boss if you simply attacked the boss instead, and you would want to kill as few legs as possible. You would still put your best cleavers on the legs; you would simply leave 1-3 legs alive the whole time, depending on your needs. Nothing would change. As far as I can tell this is simply a critique of linking dps meters on gimmick fights.

The interesting argument is about whether doing 10% less damage to your primary target is worth doing 18% of your damage to a secondary target. This decision depends on many factors, and I don't see how it can ever be completely separated from talking about specific encounters. I agree with Aldriana's assertion that more dps is generally better. If the main target is a very high priority, you simply don't flurry. In fact, the nerf makes this decision easier, as you aren't losing out on 60k dps to accomplish the immediate goal.

Where things get really interesting is when you consider dual spec. If you spend half the fight flurrying, and combat/assassination do equal single target damage, combat will do 104% of assassination's single target damage. However, assassination will be gaining a few percent by running a second rupture, pulling close to even. Add to this the fact that different gearing is worth a few percent, and it's likely that assassination-geared rogues would do more damage in assassination than in combat. Only on fights where flurry uptime is extremely high would it be worthwhile to spec combat. Only 2 fights like that exist in t14, and on Garalon in 5.2 assassination should be better than combat due to other mechanics. (I would either be rupturing the boss and killing legs, or rupturing legs and killing boss.)

Perhaps not everyone thinks as I do, that an important strong point of pure dps classes is the ability to raid with 2 specs and increase their damage compared to, say, a ret paladin, based on versatility. Even assuming that we are intended to play 1 spec, though, AoE situations will likely be important in any tier. If combat and assassination do equal single target damage, and roughly equal cleave, and there exist any important AoE situations, then playing assassination will be preferred.

I've long said that BF needed a nerf, even a big one. 75% is too far, though. I'd be fine with 50-60%, or perhaps the full 75% and reducing/removing the energy penalty. The current state of 5.2 is pretty simple to summarize. Assassination brings strong aoe; combat brings a crappy cleave.

So, instead of making us choose between 3 good cleave mechanics/styles, we have to choose between 2 mediocre ones and one spec that really has no cleave at all.

Seems legit.

One spec that really has no PVE role at all * (Meaning subelty before and after said nerfs).

While I certainly understand the disappointment - getting nerfed is never fun - I'd appreciate it if we could keep the conversation constructive. I think we're pretty clear on the the "Blade Flurry will suck when/if this goes live" point by now.

The main problem with them tuning sub PVE is that it really isn't that far behind....in the numbers. Player skill with the spec and its much greater dependancy on target uptime are what really keeps it behind. They'll blame player skill, or the lack of people playing it. But the real problem is that anytime you have to come off a boss as sub your dps takes a huge hit immediately since you almost always need to be doing something.

But that's the thing, I want to play it but I can't justify it at all. I would lose dps and be less aware as the rotation requires more concentration. If it was the other way round the numbers would be more evenly spread. I could drop 5% DPS if it meant coordinating the raid team, but the way it is now I can sit back hit 2 buttons and call everything out still.

Blizz are just seemingly out of touch with what rogues want, these 5.2 changes are nice for PVP and i'm looking forward to the new talents but they don't justify the core problems in PVE. The class is exceptionally boring but easy to bring along for their ludicrous def CDs and high DPS.

I feel like I want more to do then sit there.

Your post confuses me, theherecy. You're frustrated that Subtlety requires too much concentration, and yet you're also frustrated that the other specs are too boring? For you, where is the happy medium between these two extremes?

The class design team chooses to balance around a spec's DPS potential. The higher the so-called "skill cap" of a given spec, or the more complex/difficult the optimal rotation is to execute, the fewer people will be able to play it near its maximum potential, the less popular it will be. If you do that to all of the specs, you risk further depressing an already-depressed class population. But I'm not sure it's realistic to balance a spec around anything less than its maximum potential, because as soon as you cross an invisible threshold between the extremes of "too complex" and "too easy," you have a huge number of people flock to that spec because it's overpowered compared to the others. I'm not sure full spec balance can ever win in this scenario, not if we want to maintain even the illusion of difference between the specs.

I never said it was too complex, I said it was more complex. To me all classes should feel as difficult as sub. Take assassination and remove the whole enveneom refreshes snd. You basically hit it once during the fight; it's meaningless dps.

The problem I tried to convey was that sub's potential is less than assassination and it's much harder to attain. If they balance using your theories then surely this needs to be addressed. Each spec should have nuances that give them distinction; to me all of them share:

hit snd, hit rupture, hit hemo/RVS/dispatch when procs and dont let them drop off
hit generic CP builder and use finisher.