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Old 08/31/08, 7:18 PM   #1486
• Aldriana
Mike Tyson
 
Night Elf Rogue
 
Doomhammer
On the topic of EA:

1) Note that in WotLK, EA is being changed; Imp EA increases duration, rather than armor reduction, and the base reduction for EA has been upped to be identical to that of Sunder. Which, honestly, makes it less than wholly useful, since I'm willing to bet that a DPS Warrior dropping one sunder every 20 seconds to refresh the stack is a smaller DPS loss than a rogue keeping EA up.

2) At the moment, keeping EA up costs about 100 DPS - a bit less if you don't have a Feral on hand for Mangle. So the question is: how much damage does each person gain from switching from Sunder to EA? Well, you gain an extra 475 ArPen for everyone in the raid, which depending on your itemization level and the boss armor value, works out to somewhere between 150 and 200 EP for a rogue, which, in turn, depending on gear level, etc. works out to somewhere between 60 and 100 DPS. So even using the low end of that, if you have 2 rogues in the raid, EA is worth it. Assuming other classes get DPS benefits that are in any way comparable (which I'm pretty sure they do), it is thus likely worthwhile even with only 2 physical DPS classes, and almost certainly worthwhile with 3. So in a typical 10-man scenario, EA is going to be higher raid DPS than Sunders.

Note, however, that EA is reliant on having a reasonably sustained fight. If you have frequent interruptions that prevent you from just nuking the boss, or are switching targets frequently, Sunders may be better, as they can be stacked up more quickly. Alternately, you can have a warrior stack up sunders for the first 20 seconds or so until the rogue can get EA running - though again, if you're only attacking a target for a minute at a time, even that may not be worth it.

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Old 08/31/08, 7:32 PM   #1487
nuoHep
Von Kaiser
 
Undead Rogue
 
Magtheridon (EU)
Currently on beta there is a possiblity to bump EA duration to 1min (glyph + impea) so the dps loss by a rogue is less. Though you also have to consider other talent points and glyph choices.
But if the 80lvl instances is any indication to the boss encounters coming in raids, keeping EA will be a nightmare to be honest and not really worth it.

The thing I really dislike with this change is that EA is now exactly the same as SA. The minmaxer in me always liked that our armor reduction is just a little bit 'better' than the warriors one.

Last edited by nuoHep : 08/31/08 at 7:43 PM.

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Old 08/31/08, 7:45 PM   #1488
• Aldriana
Mike Tyson
 
Night Elf Rogue
 
Doomhammer
Well, I think this is just the eternal argument: everyone wants to be best. Not everyone can be. Also, having one class be clearly the best cuts down on the interchangability of raid spots, which is a stated goal of Blizzard. So while I agree, it would be nifty if our armor reduction were larger, it's also true that I don't think there's a particularly good chance of it happening - Blizzard's been pretty explicit that the benefits of the debuff for each class will be the same, and I think that's a good policy.

The only change I can see happening to EA is some way of making it easier to keep up; even at 1 min duration (which has it's own tradeoffs in terms of glyph slots and talent points), it still costs you a 5 CP finisher per minute; at the moment, a 5 CP Rupture is almost always at least 2000 damage. Meanwhile, in that same minute, a warrior only needs to throw a little over 2 sunders, and thus burns, say 35 rage for so doing. If it's a prot warrior, the damage loss of 35 rage is well under 2000; and even a DPS warrior shouldn't lose that much. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd be very surprised if each Heroic Strike is worth 800+ damage for a Fury Warrior. So even a fully Imp EA optimized rogue loses more DPS than a warrior, making the utility of Imp EA pretty small indeed. Perhaps CttC should refresh EA as well as SnD?

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Old 08/31/08, 8:22 PM   #1489
nuoHep
Von Kaiser
 
Undead Rogue
 
Magtheridon (EU)
About parity between (de)buffs. While I can somewhat agree here, you also have to look at some glyphs given to buffing classes, for example Glyph of BoM or any shaman totem Glyph. Totem of Wrath is also giving 160SP while Focus Magic is 150. And felhunter's buff (forgot its name) is quite inferior at this moment to both AI and DS. I think I can find other instances of small differences between buffs in a group.
So it's not really that 'set in stone' at this moment that every (de)buff in a group will be exactly the same.

Concerning the uptime and warriors. I'm not really arguing about prot warriors here (I'm not really arguing at all).
But your numbers on fury warriors are a little bit off. Every fury warrior gets impHS, so that's already 3 rage advantage on HS over SA. Next, the damage. Currently a warrior with 3k AP (it's not that high) and Muramasa (as thats what I have, numbers with a glaive will be obviously higher) will be getting 987-1156 noncrit heroics. With crit factored in it'll be even higher. You also have to consider that in wrath warriors will be running with 2 handers, so heroics will be much higher damage than they are now. So all in all I think that on a 'static' fight without prot warrior tanking it'll be better to let the rogue debuff EA.

Edited in to not spawn posts:
I've seen some arguing somewhere about how Opportunity and Puncturing Wounds affect 'new' Mutilate.
I've tested it on a dummie in stormwind (the ones in SI:7) using 2 Poniards (7-15 damage range), 2186AP and 41/25/5 build. I made around 10 crit mutialtes from behind and 10 from the front and the difference between them was around 10 damage max. So Opportunity affects mutilate no matter what your position is. I haven't tested PW yet. But considering that a talent that uses words 'from behind' works no matter what the facing is I'm quite sure that PW also works from the front. I guess 'from behind' is jaust a flavor 'rp' text since none of the abilities it affects could not be really used from the front before.

Last edited by nuoHep : 08/31/08 at 8:39 PM.

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Old 08/31/08, 8:30 PM   #1490
• Aldriana
Mike Tyson
 
Night Elf Rogue
 
Doomhammer
Right, a Heroic Strike hits for over 1000 damage easily - but that's not the question. The question is how much damage you're gaining from converting a regular hit to a Heroic Strike. You'd be getting the white hit and thus both some damage and some rage were you not Heroic Striking; and I'd be quite happy to wager that the damage-per-rage efficiency of Heroic Strike is well under the 60 damage per rage it would need to be to warrant having a rogue cover EA.

Also note that that's an EA-optimized rogue compared to any old Fury Warrior; you lose some DPS by speccing Imp EA and taking the Glyph, while the warrior needs to make no such trade-offs.

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Old 08/31/08, 8:31 PM   #1491
Valen
Don Flamenco
 
Valen's Avatar
 
Human Rogue
 
Stormrage (EU)
Originally Posted by nuoHep View Post
About parity between (de)buffs. While I can somewhat agree here, you also have to look at some glyphs given to buffing classes, for example Glyph of BoM or any shaman totem Glyph. Totem of Wrath is also giving 160SP while Focus Magic is 150. And felhunter's buff (forgot its name) is quite inferior at this moment to both AI and DS. I think I can find other instances of small differences between buffs in a group.
So it's not really that 'set in stone' at this moment that every (de)buff in a group will be exactly the same.

Concerning the uptime and warriors. I'm not really arguing about prot warriors here (I'm not really arguing at all).
But your numbers on fury warriors are a little bit off. Every fury warrior gets impHS, so that's already 3 rage advantage on HS over SA. Next, the damage. Currently a warrior with 3k AP (it's not that high) and Muramasa (as thats what I have, numbers with a glaive will be obviously higher) will be getting 987-1156 noncrit heroics. With crit factored in it'll be even higher. You also have to consider that in wrath warriors will be running with 2 handers, so heroics will be much higher damage than they are now. So all in all I think that on a 'static' fight without prot warrior tanking it'll be better to let the rogue debuff EA.
Isn't heroic strike just static 176 extra damage + glancing factor + 20% crit damage modifier, for 12 rage (if improved)? That shouldn't pass 200-300 extra damage in average.

Sorry if I totally miss something.

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Old 08/31/08, 9:02 PM   #1492
PSGarak
Bald Bull
 
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Undead Warlock
 
Hyjal
On a one-handed weapon, it also removes the 19% hit penalty. On a realistically-geared DWing warrior that will be less than a 19% improvement, but more than 0. It also has the "hidden" rage cost of not generating rage on that swing.

Wouldn't it be awesome if Exposed Armor was a stack-based debuff like Sunder? If EA gave one sunder per combo point and you could refresh the duration with a 1-point EA, that would put the opportunity costs much more in parity. If the stacks counted for Devestate, there's also some sneaky snap-agro stuff a subtlety rogue could for a warrior by giving him a 5-stack on the pull.
It's an open question how much of an opportunity costs there is supposed to be for different classes supporting different buffs. I think the tradeoff for EA is probably the highest I've seen, but it's sort of comparable to how a warlock, when proving the spellpower or AC debuffs, does so at the cost of personal DPS by the loss of his damaging curse. I'm not going to say the EA cost is unreasonable, because that's a design decision, but it is currently incomparable to anything else, except perhaps Focus Magic, and the DPS costs of a few hybrid max-utility specs (retadins with BoS, blood/frost DKs).


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Old 08/31/08, 9:15 PM   #1493
nuoHep
Von Kaiser
 
Undead Rogue
 
Magtheridon (EU)
Yeah, I totally forgot that Heroic is an on next swing ability :/
I guess all my expectations of debuffing expose are ruined then (yeah, I actually was looking forward to it for some reason).
Or we'll just have to wait and see how the 'new' fury warriors with 2handers will function (rage and damage wise).

About the glyph, by the way. There is not much else a mutilate rogue can slot at this time actually. 1 slot goes to SnD. And I'm already not sure what to put in the next one. While Rupture may be a good choice it's not really that usefull judging by my expirience with mutilate in the last 3 weeks I've been running ZA. Sometimes I even would've liked that my Ruptures were shorter then they are. For example, landing a rupture under double mongoose/SoC proc, then doing 'quick' SnD 'cycle' (ruthlessness proc + crit muti) and finding myself unable to use Rupture because 'a more powerfull debuff is already in effect'; witch sometimes messes with a cycle in a bad way for me. And from all the current dps Glyphs this leaves us (for a muti build) with a Garrote one. That we use at most 2 times in a typical boss fight.
So at this moment a mutilate build is strugling to fill more than 1 Glyph slot for raid dps. And we have 2 more. But things may change and we may actually get a Mutilate Glyph or some poisons/Envenom Glyphs.

@Valen: Current wrath rank 10 Heroic is 234 extra and functions just like an ordinary yellow attack (no glancings, 9% miss rate and 20% crit damage from Impale).

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Old 09/01/08, 12:03 AM   #1494
Arindelest
Piston Honda
 
Night Elf Rogue
 
Garona
On the topic of Cut to the Chase:

- Cut to the Chase: No longer requires a critical Eviscerate or Envenom. The finisher just has to land.
It doesn't say anything here about changing it from its current wording. That means that even a low-CP Eviscerate would refresh SnD to its full, 5 combo point, duration. I'm not sure if that would change anything -- because a 5CP Eviscerate/Envenom refresh might still be better -- but could we see rogues using low CP finisher to refresh SnD?

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Old 09/01/08, 12:07 AM   #1495
• Aldriana
Mike Tyson
 
Night Elf Rogue
 
Doomhammer
I suspect it'll be used more for ramp up and emergencies than as part of regular cycles. A 1cp SnD followed by the largest Envenom you can do before the SnD drops is probably the fastest SnD ramp-up available; similarly, if you get energy-starved, popping a sub-5 point finisher to keep it up seems useful. But unless I quite miss my guess, we're going to be doing mostly 5-pt finishers for the regular cycles.

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Old 09/01/08, 12:27 AM   #1496
Valen
Don Flamenco
 
Valen's Avatar
 
Human Rogue
 
Stormrage (EU)
The beauty of this new Cut to the chase, aside from the extra dps from a finisher every 25-30sec (That should be around ~100dps at 70?), is that it also replaces improved snd and saves 3 talent points there, making it perhaps one of the best talents, point for point, even at this stage.

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Old 09/01/08, 1:00 AM   #1497
• Vulajin
Vula'jin the Void, blessed by the loa
 
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Undead Mage
 
Mal'Ganis
Originally Posted by Valen View Post
The beauty of this new Cut to the chase, aside from the extra dps from a finisher every 25-30sec (That should be around ~100dps at 70?), is that it also replaces improved snd and saves 3 talent points there, making it perhaps one of the best talents, point for point, even at this stage.
No it doesn't. 21 seconds is enough to Eviscerate/Envenom, but it's not enough to perform two finishers, so you'd be forced to spam Eviscerate/Envenom repeatedly. If Eviscerate/Envenom become strictly superior to Rupture, then this is fine, but I anticipate Rupture still being worth weaving between Eviscerates/Envenoms.

Originally Posted by Enervate
Yep, still a fucking idiot.

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Old 09/01/08, 1:20 AM   #1498
Valen
Don Flamenco
 
Valen's Avatar
 
Human Rogue
 
Stormrage (EU)
Originally Posted by Vulajin View Post
No it doesn't. 21 seconds is enough to Eviscerate/Envenom, but it's not enough to perform two finishers, so you'd be forced to spam Eviscerate/Envenom repeatedly. If Eviscerate/Envenom become strictly superior to Rupture, then this is fine, but I anticipate Rupture still being worth weaving between Eviscerates/Envenoms.
You don't have to do 5 point finishers. Also the combo point generation of mutilate has gone up by quite a bit, due to higher crit from dagger spec and extra energy.

On top of it, it's not easy to get the rupture talent with 51 points spent, without missing some other good talents, and with the new envenom (25% higher chance of 2 weapons doing instant poison for 6 sec, along with deadly), combined with 11% higher crit rate of finishers compared to now, I wouldn't be surprised if it passes rupture by quite a bit.

There is also a glyph that increases SND up time by 3 sec.

Regardless, I think it's pretty obvious that the goal of cut of the chase is to replace improved snd and it will. Question is under which circumstances and cycles. I don't see anyone missing out on 3% extra hit or crit on tier 2/3 of combat, just to do 5 point rupture finishers. (even if its needed).

Last edited by Valen : 09/01/08 at 1:34 AM.

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Old 09/01/08, 2:43 AM   #1499
• Aldriana
Mike Tyson
 
Night Elf Rogue
 
Doomhammer
Well, I think it's true that CttC will reduce the importance of Imp SnD, but I don't think it's going to be a straight replacement. There will still be circumstances where the extra SnD uptime is valuable. How valuable? Well, that's kind of hard to say, of course; we'll have to see what you'd do with the talent points if you didn't put them in Imp SnD. But I think it's too early to say that CttC saves you the points in Imp SnD - it might, it might not.

If it turns out that it does allow you to skip Imp SnD and do something better instead, that does make the talent a bit more competitive; but it stil seems a bit underwhelming for something so late in the tree. I'd like to see it made 3 points and moved to where Focused Attacks is now, with Focused Attacks moving up to CttC's current spot and gaining 2 more ranks.

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Old 09/01/08, 3:15 AM   #1500
Valen
Don Flamenco
 
Valen's Avatar
 
Human Rogue
 
Stormrage (EU)
The problem with deep assassination at the moment, in my opinion, is the number of good talents. What i really would like to see is find weakness reduced to 3 points so you can get more talents in deep assassination without sacrificing combat or whatever they come up with at first tier of subtlety. Right now, It's hard to decide between find weakness, turn the table and 20% extra poison damage.

Also master poisoner is fairly useless now that hit works for spells. I think Infectious Poisons should be moved there and combined with that talent.

Seal fate is another candidate of 3 points talent. It's weaker than druid one at the moment by far. Blood Spatter doesn't seem to quite fit there at all either. I don't see a point of suddenly having a rupture talent in assassination.

Generally, the offensive talents could be combined and then replaced with some defensive ones for pvp builds.

Last edited by Valen : 09/01/08 at 3:21 AM.

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