Macblade

Hmmm, at first I was going to say, no way is poison going to be better than WF on your MH. But maybe with all the poison buffs and the fact that you'll be using daggers so WF procs might not mean as much. Still WFs can crit right? So it seems like you'd still have that feedback loop of hits procing more hits, though in this case it is crits procing more hits that can crit, etc. Also, its just poisons which aren't a huge portion of our damage, so even if the new talents doubled the amount of posion damage we're still only looking at 10% of a rogue's damage right?

Edit: Do you guys think that Blizz really wants 51/20 to be the new raiding spec? They have said in interviews that they want to get us back to using daggers, but I was still guessing a combat daggers buff. What will the combat tree be useful for now? Maybe that's just the way it has to be though, always one tree left out in a DPS class because one will be tops for PVP one for PVE and one will just be the leftover after the theorycrafting has all been done.

 

• Aldriana

Um, not even remotely.
1) As things currently stand, fast OH and slow OH are roughly equally good in terms of Mutilate due to poison application;
2) Focused Attacks provides a strong motivation to have a fast OH, as does the increased power of poisons;
3) Mutilate hits with both hands, so in the absence of WF, with equal speed weapons, your two hands hit exactly the same amount, meaning there's no selection pressure whatsoever to use one hand over the other.
4) OH can Shiv is you actually need poison for something

Hence, you most definitely want IP/DP on OH, and thus WF is still presumably the best option for MH.

 

Decklan

It seems that putting 51 points into combat will make a great AoE spec. If Fan of Knives and Murder Spree work with BF then that's a nice little chunk of AoE damage. Two minutes in between each cycle means that maybe Blizz wants to tune some encounters with rogues in mind. Maybe they intend rogues to burst down really deadly AoE packs. Packs that would destroy cloth AoE.

Did you notice the change to blade twisting by the way? 10 percent chance on ANY melee attack to daze for 8 seconds. That's pretty intense.

 

PSGarak

Who's to say that poison crits won't also proc energy return, in either its current or final form?

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Decklan

Poison Crits? X_x? 0.004 chance to crit poison I think.

On another note, I'm noticing that level 80 spells are going to use almost twice as much (sometimes more) mana then their level 70 counterpoints.

Since blizzard stated that they don't really want to inflate stamina so much that we have 20k hp rogues running around, does this mean they are spending the item budget on the other stats?

If items are supposedly going to get such a huge increase in attack power and agility, wouldn't this make sub a viable PvE spec?

This is all speculation though.

 

Mynea

Poisons (currently) crit based on your spell crit, which is crap. In Lich King, it will benefit from all of the crit rating on your gear, so while it won't be as good as your melee hit it will still be significant.

It's also possible that poisons would be moved to melee crit, which would give 200% crits and the RED benefit in addition to the better crit rate. Probably too much to hope for, though.

 

Macblade

I wasn't trying saying anything about poisons one way or the other.

Just pointing out that WF bonus strikes have a chance to proc combat potency right? So a WF crit would most likely have a chance to proc the new assassin regen talent. Just trying to point out that the same chain of WF -> to energy bonus proc could still happen, which I would guess makes WF totem on the MH still much stronger than even the newly buffed poison would be...

 

Ricard

Combat Potency is your offhand, and WF is on your main hand weapon proccing main hand hits. It wont proc Combat Potency. I don't know about the Assassination alpha talent, but WF certainly wont proc Combat Potency.

 

ildon

It probably works the same way it currently does: 100% of the killing blow damage is absorbed, the cheat death buff goes up, and all subsequent attacks behave "normally" ("normal" as in not absorbed or proccing cheat death). Now I guess it'll also absorb 100% of the attack that would have brought you under 10%. Honestly this seems like it could be a nerf in a lot of situations. I personally have healed plenty of people up that went under 10% without them dying in arena. The earlier cheat death procs the worse it is for a rogue that's receiving heals.

Also, it wouldn't make sense for resilience to cause cheat death to be worse. I think it's their fix to 4/5 4/8 glaive rogues with 200 res wrecking the top arena brackets (or at least their level 80 equivalents).

 

massacre

another thing that will help sub builds out a little bit, is the fact that premed no longer says it requires stealth. it also gives you 20 seconds to add to it instead of 10. probably not enough for it to make sub raid viable, though

 

• Aldriana

So, time for a little in-depth analysis on the new talents. Since Assassination is clearly the most promising for raid DPS in the expansion, I'm going to start with it.

As a baseline for these comparisons, I'm going to use level 70 stats. Yes, the numbers will change by 80; but it's at least vaguely plausible that they will scale in roughly the same proportion, so using level 70 stats is probably a decent baseline for comparison.

Lets assume, for the moment, that a level 70 Mutilate rogue does 2000 DPS and raid-buffed has 40% crit.

*Turn the Tables. No DPS contribution.
*Hunger for Blood. 15% of your DPS is about 300; but it also takes about 30% of your energy. Assuming your damage is, say, 35-40% from energy sources, this means it's also costs you about 210-240 dps due to that. So we're looking at somewhere around 60-90 dps per talent point - significantly more on fights with debuffs to cleanse.
*Focused Attacks. Well, lets see. With a 1.8 MH and a 1.3 OH, SnD, and a smattering of other haste, and Windfury, we have just over 2 attacks per second from white attacks and WF; with a 40% crit rate, we're talking about .8 crits per second. Additionally, we have 1 mutilate every 6 seconds, which generates 2 attacks, each with a 55% crit chance, or 1.1 crits per 6 seconds, or about another .2 crits per second. Hence, we're overall somewhere right around 1 crit per second - hence, each talent point gives about .3 energy per second, which, by our above estimate, works out to around 21-24 dps per talent point.
*Deadly Brew. Well, the nature of the talents trees imply that you should have at least 2 points in Improved Poisons, meaning your OH hits (of which you should have ~1 per second) have a 30% chance of proccing IP for 170 base damage, times 20% from 3/3 Vile, plus an extra, say, 5% past that from crits (assuming a 10% crit rate and +50% damage on crits), which puts us at around 210 damage per proc, hence the IP procs we gain from this talent give us about 63 DPS, with the full usual Deadly Poison uptime. Hence, this gives a bit over 30 DPS per point.
*Blood Spatter. Rupture damage for a Mutilate build is, optimistically, maybe 150 DPS; 20% of that is 30 DPS; divided by 2 talent points, we're at about 15 DPS.
*Devious Poisons. Well, we have around 90 DPS from Deadly Poison, and the above-estimated 60 DPS from Instant, which, depending on stacking, gives somewhere between 25 and 30 additional poison DPS. So we're at, minimally, around 12-15 DPS per point... and that will scale with more points in Improved Poisons
*Vile Poisons. Well, with our estimated base poison damage being about 125, 20% of that is another 25 DPS, or around 8 DPS per point. But if we, for instance, bump Improved Poisons up to 5 points, this goes up to more like 12 DPS per point.
*Improved Poisons. Well, lets see. Assuming you have full DP uptime pretty much regardless, this is basically giving you an extra IP proc every 20 seconds for each point; since we estimated an IP proc around 210 damage, that works out to a bit over 10 DPS per point.
*Cut to the Chase. Well, assuming that this totally negates your need to every Slice and Dice, you drop from needing to do, say, 1 5-pt SnD every 30 seconds to none. Thus, you gain, at the absolute most, 1 Eviscerate/Envenom every 30 seconds. An Envenom does 900 + .15*AP damage, so with a raid buffed 4000 AP, that's at most 1500 base damage; with Vile Poisons, 1800; with our 40% crit rate, 2500. So we gain at the absolute most 2500 damage every 30 seconds, or about 80 DPS. Thus, at the most, Cut to the Chase is about 16 DPS per point.

But, in practice, we don't get anywhere near that; we lose some damage to poison restacking, and SnD doesn't actually refresh every time, and so on. So, a bit more napkinmath: over the course of a 5 pt SnD (30 seconds), we regen 300 base energy, plus about 30 more from Focused Attacks is 330; of that we spend 90 on Hunger for Blood, giving us 240 for Mutilates and finishers. With Relentless Strikes, finishers are more or less free, so we basically get 4 Mutilates every 30 seconds. Each generates an expected 2.8 combo points, so we have something like 11 CP to spend. With ruthlessness, that's something like 3 4+pt finishers over the course of the SnD. Now, if all 3 of these are Envenoms, we have about a 80% chance that SnD will be refreshed by the Envenoms. But not all those refreshes give a full extra 30 seconds of uptime - a refresh 10 seconds in only gives you 10 seconds of uptime. So I suspect what you do in practice is Rupture the first time, Envenom the second, and the third goes to refresh SnD if it didn't proc. So in practice, we only eliminate about 60% of the SnDs, not all of them - thus the real benefit is closer to 10 DPS per point than 16.

So, next question: how much does this matter? Well, the full list of DPS talents in Assassination now is as follows:
5/5 Malice
2/2 Murder
3/3 Ruthlessness
3/3 Puncturing Wounds
1/1 Relentless Strikes
5/5 Lethality
3/3 Vile Poisons
5/5 Improved Poisons
2/2 Fleet Footed
1/1 Cold Blood
2/2 Quick Recovery
5/5 Seal Fate
1/1 Vigor
5/5 Find Weakness
1/1 Mutilate
2/2 Deadly Brew
2/2 Devious Poisons
2/2 Blood Spatter
3/3 Focused Attacks
5/5 Cut to the Chase
1/1 Hunger for Blood

By my count, that's 59 talent points, and as we want to put 20 in Combat for Precision, DW Spec, and Imp SnD, it looks to me like we really want to cut 8. And given that Cut to the Chase is among the lowest - with it's competitors being Poison talents that synergize each other nicely - it's not at all clear to me that we even *take* Cut to the Chase. Which makes it a pretty wretched 45 point talent, if you ask me.

So in terms of overall balance:
*Hunger for Blood is a bit weak for a 51 point talent from a pure DPS standpoint, but with the utility it gives it might be okay - though a small buff might be nice - perhaps stacking to 5 instead of 3, or only costing 20 or 25 energy instead of 30.
*Cut to the Chase is crap in it's current form. At the 45 point level it seems a bit weak as a 2 point talent - as a 5 point talent it's just dumb. I would argue that it should be on all Evis/Envenom rather than just crits, reduced to 3 or even 2 points, or even both.
*Focused Attacks is about right. It wouldn't hurt for the proc rate to be bumped up to 40 or maybe even 50%, but it's in the right ballpark.
*Blood Spatter. Yeah, it's weak, but they can't all be winners... 15/30 might be a bit better, but I think it's fine how it is.
*Devious Poisons. Again, not the best talent there is, but synergizes well with other stuff, and there's plenty of other good options at this level of the Talent tree. Only comment is that it'd be nice if it also applied to Envenom. And, really, there's no reason for it not to apply to Wound and Anaesthetic Poison as well.
*Deadly Brew. A definite gem in the new talent tree.
*Imp Poison/Vile Poisons are now pretty well balanced at each other, and 10 DPS per point is totally reasonable for 15-point talents.

So, in summary: A lot of them could use some tuning, and I really really hope they buff Cut to the Chase to be not quite so useless.

 

Aéquitas

TBH they should change that talent. If they would double the duration so 18 seconds and make you go into stealth every 6 seconds it would provide real nice synergie with "Master of Subtelity".

I would basicly be 18 seconds of 10% dmg increase every 2 minutes which isnt that bad I think?


EDIT: BTW are quick recovery and fleet footed really that great dps increases? Else you could just throw out bloodsplatter and be at 51 talentpoints Or change cut to the chase to 3 point talent and take them both.

 

• Aldriana

Quick Recovery and Fleet Footed aren't necessarily huge DPS increases (though they do provide some benefit) - but I'd be willing to bet they're not significantly less than 10 DPS, either. For instance, the crossover point for Fleet Footed (where it's worth 10 DPS per point) is down around 5 seconds movement per minute - which certainly isn't all fights, but, for instance, in Sunwell includes, um, everything except Brutallus, basically. And there's also survivability benefits as well. Similarly, Quick Recovery may not be the world's greatest talent... but it's still probably on the order of 10 DPS.

The point is simply this: while there are other valid options in terms of swapping talents out to get down to 51, the fact that the 45 point talent in the tree is even a leading candidate for weakest talent in the tree is sttupid - particularly since the 50 point talent in the tree is somewhat marginal in it's own right. Frankly, it's not even remotely clear to me that 51/20 beats 41/25/5. And, if so, that would mean that no viable top-end melee build is going to be using any of the 41+ point talents, which strikes me as a pretty clear indication that the new high-end talents need some work. Admittedly the deep sub ones are pretty good, but the fact that they're, well, deep-sub - and deep sub daggers, at that - just cripples them from the get-go.

Basically: Deep Sub either needs to be able to utilize Hemo, or it needs a new dagger attack as the 51 point talent if it's going to go anywhere, I suspect; and the top-end combat and assassination talents need to be boosted so they're potentially worth taking, because I don't think they're there yet.

 

KasumiRevy

I think this just proves that Blizzard is not sure what the next step for rogues should be.

Of course we don't have the spectrum of 71+ rogue abilities, but just looking at these talents I was completely underwhelmed. Sure I see 2 or 3 that I thought , okay that is a good idea. For the most part I found them rather uninspired and uncreative.

Rogue has been a base class since the creation of Roleplay, I just can't understand how they are lacking ideas. You could just pick up some books and get inspired.

My major concerns

Not anything new to bring to the raid. We still just DPS at this point? Then they really need to give us some damage.

Which brings us to PvP, rogues too much damage? Nerf stick, lower damage output.

^^ This will vex our class until we can bring something else to the table for raids. You can't balance PvP and not effect PvE in a big way.

PvP I will say, looks fairly interesting spec wise, Shadow Dance I thought was one of the more interesting talents.

Yet, I am a PvE at heart, and I really hope they vastly improve combat/assassination.

 

Hildegard

Assasination will be really strong for the arena. Removing hamstring for 0 energy and increasing damage by 5%. Reflecting 15% of all stuns, saps, hamstrings, scatter shots etc. back is huge. Using three poisons without weapon swichting is really, really strong. If two points in devious poisons reflects all the 3 dispelled poisons back on the dispeller this opens a lot possibilites like fast target switches for Mutilate.

In my humble opinion Assasination looks stronger than Sublety for arena at the moment.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Prinsesa

Hildegard, the tooltip says it removes magic and bleeds. Hamstring is physical, but I don't think it's a bleed; as opposed to say Rend, Rake, etc.

Also, the wording of Devious Poisons suggests that the dispeller gets the poison reflected at him one at a time. That is, he'd have to remove all three poisons with three dispels to get all three on him.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Hildegard

Ok my bad. But still... it assures a safe vanish or restealth.

Druids are a candidate for that.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Maltese

Its not only possible... its happening. Melee and spell crit/haste are no longer separate.. they are one and the same stat.

EDIT: just realized what you were saying... as far as I know poisons are still considered a spell, but the fact that they will crit more is definitely nothing to sneeze at

 

Vernichter

Aldriana, the theorycraft is much appreciated.

I do want to throw one concern about Deadly Brew: in a 25-man setting with both an enhancement and an elemental shaman, the stormstrike-charge benefit to Lightning bolt and Chain-lightning is sure to massively exceed the benefit to Instant Poison. That suggests that a 25-man build will need to accommodate for the presence of an elemental shaman when considering that talent.

 

LordVoid

Regarding Shadow Dance:

Sweet. Tap Dancing. Jeebus.

Ok so, what possibilities do we have here?

Say I come across someone. I can:


1. ShS-Ambush.
2. 5 point KS (if initiative procced)--I'm also aware I could get feared or something could go wrong between the ambush and KS.
3. 1 second GCD, I then Dance with 5 seconds left.
4. Ambush, GCD, 3 seconds left.
5. Backstab, GCD+Dance restealth, 1 second left.
6. Cheap Shot,-can't remember if cheap shot suffers from diminishing returns if it is performed after KS(and not before).
7. GCD, backstab (may not have the energy for this).
8. Eviscerate? Then GCD+dance again!
9. Ambush again!

I mean this isn't airtight, but heavens to betsy, you have so many options, and this is only the beginning. One valid question is whether or not Preparation affects Shadow Dance. Does anyone have an answer to this?

I mean 4 ambushes chained together in a boss fight would be significant dps, I wager. Let alone EIGHT of them. Plus with a 2 minute cooldown, you'll easily get three or four of these puppies in a fight!

 

Arindelest

True, but shamans also have a new proc from Lightning Shield (Static Shock) which will also east SS charges, and Boomkins are looking way more raid viable, and I assume they have some nature abilities. I'm not sure how the math will work out but it may be that Blizzard wants to make it unavoidable for other classes to not eat some of the stormstrike charges.

 

sp00n

I'm thinking, do the new poison talents and the changes in poison crits bring some new arguments to the WF vs. GoA discussion? Right now, with my current gear and combat spec, GoA+IP is about 85 DPS behind WF, maybe with these changed GoA might actually be ahead then.

Of course, with totem twisting and a warrior in your group this might be a moot point, unless they somehow prevent totem twisting in WotLK.


Oh, and are there any mirrors for the talent screenshots? Subtley had already its bandwidth limit exceeded, and I suspect the other two to follow soon.

 

flaminghomer

Assassination
Combat
Subtlety

 

Ashere

I have no clue about the cooldown, but the synergy with Master of Subtlety is rather obvious on this one. So those two combined could deliver a substantial improvement to sustained DPS.
Also notice how you enter stealth, not an improved version of Stealth (aka Vanish)
Players will definitely see you toe to toe, so unless you stunned them, you won't get to their backs.
However, as a rogue you should -always- be at a boss's back. So this ability must've been made with instancing in mind.
But, the energy might indeed be tricky. It'll definitely need talenting to make those attacks cheaper. Or alternatively, we'll become tea addicts again (if that doesn't scale down further at lvl 71-80)

Basically, I see 2 moments where this would be a "good" move.
-After a vanish (so when your threat has been reset): pool energy and start dancing.
-Peeling a mob off a healer. It's not improved stealth, which means no aggro wipe. A few openers should definitely give you a noticable amount of threat.

 

Arindelest

The problem with Shadow Dance is you're losing a lot of potentially very powerful white damage every time you enter stealth. Furthermore, even if Shadow Dance netted you 4 additional Ambushes at 4000 damage each assuming absolutely no negative consequences, that's still only 16k every two minutes, that's still only a 133 DPS increase. Hardly earthshattering, given that critting on every single one is not all that likely, and there certainly are negative consequences. Finally...yes Deep Sub gets a 45 energy Backstab, but that's pretty much it for DPS improvements, and Deep Sub still faces the problems that it always did (Can't get DWS and Relentless Strikes, as well as, even with a 45 energy Backstab, having horrible cycles due to no Combat Potency/Seal fate and maybe Imp SnD)