I always assumed Vitality changes from 10/second to 11/second. 10.1/second would only be a 1% faster regeneration.
That said, I was already thinking about testing the increased energy/second ratio, if it is really 10% or some other value. Just didn't have the time to think of a good way to actually test it.
Maybe noting down the time required to perform x Sinister Strikes with and without Vitality, but that is very latency dependent, and seeing the current state of the PTR, rather suboptimal.
I think I mentioned this in another thread, but our team has a really amazing rogue theorycrafter who stays really in touch with the community (anonymously). We have a surprising number of really good players on the team in general, but I always feel really safe about his conclusions on rogues. But that has also meant fewer blue posts than you deserve, so I'm trying to make up for that.
Just a side question please (first post btw, love the site!)
With the gear that has been shown in Wotlk, I have noticed quite a bit of haste listed. I was thinking that this is partially to blame for the lack of fast speed daggers available, since everyone will have a certain amount of haste, lowering their weapon speed.
Has anyone looked at what amount of haste will be "normal" for raiding? As in, using similar gear available from multiple sources, will there be an average amount of haste for a typical raiding rogue, and what will that make their attack speeds?
I don't claim to be able to theorycraft at all (math skills???) but I do remember there being a limit to hastes effectiveness once weapon speeds get close to the 1 second mark...so wouldn't a certain amount of haste on all our raiding gear make weapon speeds a little less relevant?
I can't imagine Blizz putting in 1.3 speed daggers knowing that with an average amount of haste they would become 0.5 speed monsters (....think of the IP procs then!) but I am almost certain that they are taking it into account. I just wanted to see what everyone thought about this...
With respect to poisons being a much larger part of our total damage now there was talk about bosses that may be immune to poisons (a few examples were cited). This was just commented on by Ghostcrawler stating that there may be some immunity based bosses in Wrath but the mechanic is under discussion and it's likely that it will be phased out at some point.
Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler
I'm talking mostly about resist fights, but bosses that are immune follow a similar thought process. I also won't claim we're 100% succesful, or that the kind of planning we have historically asked for is worth it in the end. But hopefully that logic makes some sense.
I will say that it is something we're actively discussing, and it may be that the time has come to phase them out. I know that isn't a definitive answer, but that's because we just haven't decided yet.
Wouldn't it be funny if, in an attempt to remain anonymous and not arouse suspicion, our mystery rogue actually used poor grammar, slang, bad ideas and some choice words which ended up getting him banned?
Now, they walk out of the raid and do some quests on their separate way.
The rogue, being without buff, now only does his 1500 baseline DPS. With his Savage Combat, it goes up to 1530.
The chaman, without buff, does 1400 baseline DPS. But then, he still has WF (+20 % to his white damage), and his rage (+10 % to his AP), then his Strength of Earth totem. All in all, with all these buffs, he can probably pretty easily goes up to 1800 or 2100 DPS.
So outside of raid, the chaman has a large DPS advantage over the rogue. He can offers to a group higher personal DPS, and also buffs to other DPS, and also keep the advantage of being able to change role.
Even in a buff-stacked-group (with a holy paly, an arms warrior, a feral druid and another enhancement chaman), where all his buffs are already covered, he still bring the same DPS than the rogue.
So in the worst case, he's just as a good DPS as the rogue. In the best case (a buffless group), he has higher personal DPS and lots of buffs for everyone. And in all cases, he has the hybrid advantage of being able to respec if he feels so.
That's the situation I worry about when I say "subpar outside raid".
In a raid, where all the buffs are covered, a rogue has its place, though he must certainly feel a bit bland, adding nothing really specific.
Outside a raid, the fact that all is tailored to make every class equal in raid, make it so that he risks to be quite underpowered.
I hate to sound...well, elitist, but 5-mans aren't really that important. Nor are they necessarily "balanced" as far as buffs - I've PUG'd heroics where I don't get ANY real buffs, except for Fort or a Healthstone or something irrelevant to my dps. But again, gear comes into play, and if you've got enough gear and your group has enough gear/teamwork to get the badges, who cares if you're getting beaten by that 'lock who only knows how to cast Shadow Bolt?
But if you're truly concerned, realize that the scenario you're coming up with is really, really generic. There are so many other variables - I guarantee that you'll have be doing the *exact* same dps baseline, because there are more issues then just the numbers in abstract. Do you have a Beta key and if so, have you actually had legitimate problems getting into groups? If you have actual concrete examples, that would make this argument a lot more convincing.
With respect to poisons being a much larger part of our total damage now there was talk about bosses that may be immune to poisons (a few examples were cited). This was just commented on by Ghostcrawler stating that there may be some immunity based bosses in Wrath but the mechanic is under discussion and it's likely that it will be phased out at some point.
Wouldn't it be funny if, in an attempt to remain anonymous and not arouse suspicion, our mystery rogue actually used poor grammar, slang, bad ideas and some choice words which ended up getting him banned?
This was one thing I recall from raiding naxx as mutilate pre-tbc. It wasn't a huge issue, but there were a few trash mobs that were immune, as well as melee side for gothik, etc.
As long as poisons are treated as spells, this will be an issue, but it shouldn't gimp us completely. The benefit gained on high armor targets by having a larger portion of our dmg come from poisons should balance with the poison immune mobs.
As for a blizz insider here, I would imagine they would use poor grammar and present information less coherently on the blizz forums, not here. An insider here probably would have a cover background of a well educated statistical analyst who posts in their free time at work. They would probably have to be in a well progressed raiding guild as well.
I hate to sound...well, elitist, but 5-mans aren't really that important. Nor are they necessarily "balanced" as far as buffs - I've PUG'd heroics where I don't get ANY real buffs, except for Fort or a Healthstone or something irrelevant to my dps. But again, gear comes into play, and if you've got enough gear and your group has enough gear/teamwork to get the badges, who cares if you're getting beaten by that 'lock who only knows how to cast Shadow Bolt?
But if you're truly concerned, realize that the scenario you're coming up with is really, really generic. There are so many other variables - I guarantee that you'll have be doing the *exact* same dps baseline, because there are more issues then just the numbers in abstract. Do you have a Beta key and if so, have you actually had legitimate problems getting into groups? If you have actual concrete examples, that would make this argument a lot more convincing.
This is a good point. Another thing to consider would be that 5 man instances are generally balanced around less than optimal play.
If a dpser knows how to play their class well, as would be expected in a raid environment, they should be more than useful in a 5-man environment, despite less than optimal buff synergy.
A more legitimate concern would be baselining enough for competitiveness in 10 man raids, since there will likely be a number of guilds who choose that as their primary progression course, but even that is tricky due to the very wide options for group configuration in a 10-man situation.
The benefit gained on high armor targets by having a larger portion of our dmg come from poisons should balance with the poison immune mobs.
The flaw in this kind of train of thought is that you see the damage that poisons do to high armor targets as a "bonus" where it is actually nothing more but a determining trait of the high armor target. We rogues loose out on both encounters, in one way or the other... Versus the high armor target, all our non-poison based abilities suffer reductions relative to the value of the bosses armor and on poison immune targets we loose a huge chunk of our dps from poisons.( which is slightly reduced by the fact that you can use whetstones or other temporary weapon buffs)
To further complicate matters blizzard could do the same thing they did in TK, add a target that has ultra high armor, and is poison immune( enter the Void Reaver) where melee was highly unwanted during the progress phases... It was not unheard of to completely sack non-tanking melee for more healing/ranged/tanks. True, this has changed as the encounter grew more trivial with the gear growth but the fact is unchanged that it should not happen again!
To conclude please do not scold blizzard for trying to remove the whole problem of immunity bosses, they make the game suffer, and through that make us as the consumers suffer as well.
I apologize if I seem to come hard on you, but immune encounters are in no way "fun" and shouldn't exist if I had something to say about it. High resistance encounters are a different matter, they only add flavor and uniqueness to a boss, and that option should be further explored.
I have a question about something I see people stating around these boards sometimes. People state that if you see multiple gains of slice and dice in WWS logs on a stationary fight that this is a prime indication for bad rogue. However there is no way to see in WWS logs how long snd actually dropped during a particular fight now is there?
Then why state it's inherently bad when you see more than a few snd gains in WWS?
Personally I try to regenerate some energy before refreshing my snd at the last split second, now the game may actually report this as a buff dropping out but it's certainly not down more than 0.1 second (and probably less than that). This results in less than 0.5 seconds in total on a fight like Brutallus. Is this really bad practice? Is it something about how the game registers buffs that I shouldn't do that?
The flaw in this kind of train of thought is that you see the damage that poisons do to high armor targets as a "bonus" where it is actually nothing more but a determining trait of the high armor target. We rogues loose out on both encounters, in one way or the other... Versus the high armor target, all our non-poison based abilities suffer reductions relative to the value of the bosses armor and on poison immune targets we loose a huge chunk of our dps from poisons.( which is slightly reduced by the fact that you can use whetstones or other temporary weapon buffs)
To further complicate matters blizzard could do the same thing they did in TK, add a target that has ultra high armor, and is poison immune( enter the Void Reaver) where melee was highly unwanted during the progress phases... It was not unheard of to completely sack non-tanking melee for more healing/ranged/tanks. True, this has changed as the encounter grew more trivial with the gear growth but the fact is unchanged that it should not happen again!
To conclude please do not scold blizzard for trying to remove the whole problem of immunity bosses, they make the game suffer, and through that make us as the consumers suffer as well.
I apologize if I seem to come hard on you, but immune encounters are in no way "fun" and shouldn't exist if I had something to say about it. High resistance encounters are a different matter, they only add flavor and uniqueness to a boss, and that option should be further explored.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, I was not trying to condone them, or even hint that immunity fights are "fun". I'd be happy if they just removed them altogether, but then I'd be happy if they removed high armor bosses as well, but I doubt that is something they will do.
Yes high armor bosses hurt the rest of our dmg as well, but a spec based more heavily on poison dmg would perform better on a high armor boss than a spec based more heavily on melee dmg, whereas the opposite would be true on a low armor/poison resistant boss, so I was saying that those should balance out if they are present at all.
I think that Aldrianna is right, and that people need to stop worrying about stuff like whether or not Rogues will be obsolete, and instead focus discussion on what Ghostcrawler has actually asked for, that is, what current mechanics and talents "feel wrong." It might help if we were to agree upon a list of the top 10 things that "feel wrong" in the current beta, and then have Vulajin post them on the Beta forums.
Here are a few that we keep seeing:
1) Shiv scaling better than Sinister Strike. No need to elaborate.
2) Shadow Dance being a keybinding nightmare, as well as not utilizing Master of Subtlety talent.
3) Killing Spree disrupting normal attacks. Not being able to use SS while doing it is one thing, but losing white hits and having to toggle auto attack back on makes it feel very clunky.
4) Fan of Knives having both a longish cooldown AND a high energy cost. Compare to Warriors' Whirlwind, for example, which is used in their normal DPS rotations.
5) Poor itemization in terms of weapon speeds.
6) Fast daggers scaling better than slower daggers, due to poisons.
7) Massive opportunity cost to keep Expose Armor up, if needed. Perhaps change Imp. EA to behave like CttC, but work off of Eviscerate or SnD?
8) Gross inferiority of Mace Specialization's armor penetration effect, due to the order in which it is applied. It needs to be applied before debuffs, and possibly slightly down-tuned after that.
9) Lack of Mutilate glyph. One exists for SS, BS, Shiv, & Hemo, but not Mutilate.
10) Lack of a defining feel to spec'ing deep Combat, other than steady damage and superior energy regeneration. Perhaps add a Tier 9 or 10 talent that allows us to use Axes, sharing the specialization with Swords.
With the gear that has been shown in Wotlk, I have noticed quite a bit of haste listed. I was thinking that this is partially to blame for the lack of fast speed daggers available, since everyone will have a certain amount of haste, lowering their weapon speed.
Has anyone looked at what amount of haste will be "normal" for raiding? As in, using similar gear available from multiple sources, will there be an average amount of haste for a typical raiding rogue, and what will that make their attack speeds?
I don't claim to be able to theorycraft at all (math skills???) but I do remember there being a limit to hastes effectiveness once weapon speeds get close to the 1 second mark...so wouldn't a certain amount of haste on all our raiding gear make weapon speeds a little less relevant?
I'm running about 10% haste at the moment I believe, in mostly Naxx 10 gear (couple Naxx 25 pieces). But the point is kind of moot. 20% more attacks from a particular weapon is 20% more attacks regardless of how much haste you apply on top.
RE: Solo/5 man performance, they have said consistently their intent isn't necessarily to balance DPS in this scenario, but just make sure everyone is viable.
Originally Posted by VuBce
I have a question about something I see people stating around these boards sometimes. People state that if you see multiple gains of slice and dice in WWS logs on a stationary fight that this is a prime indication for bad rogue. However there is no way to see in WWS logs how long snd actually dropped during a particular fight now is there?
Then why state it's inherently bad when you see more than a few snd gains in WWS?
Personally I try to regenerate some energy before refreshing my snd at the last split second, now the game may actually report this as a buff dropping out but it's certainly not down more than 0.1 second (and probably less than that). This results in less than 0.5 seconds in total on a fight like Brutallus. Is this really bad practice? Is it something about how the game registers buffs that I shouldn't do that?
Stasis parses will show you SnD uptime, so you can use that as your argument for why SnD dropped :P. It's not that big of a deal for Combat I suppose if you immediately refresh anyways. But definitely you can't avoid refreshing early with CttC in Mutilate because it's a huge penalty for even a 0.1s drop.
RE: Posting what's wrong with current affairs, pretty much all the items that have been posted extensively in both this and threads on the official forums. In fact about half of those points I covered in a reply on page 1 of that thread where GC was asking for feedback. They more than likely know about most of this.
RE: "Person on the inside" -- really there's <10 people I would say who have been heavily involved with rogue theorycrafting (there's only really been so many people who've maintained spreadsheets in the course of Rogue theorycrafting history, and a couple of notables that contributed greatly in any event), so I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of them. I have a few theories but I'm not going to say anything.
7) Massive opportunity cost to keep Expose Armor up, if needed. Perhaps change Imp. EA to behave like CttC, but work off of Eviscerate or SnD?
I do not feel that EA is hard to keep up, actually I find it easy in any spec. Sure you are loosing lots of personal dps but you, and lots of other rogues, are simply conveniently forgetting the fact that keeping EA up is "more dps" the keeping 1 extra rupture up. Also should a rogue be a "designated EA keeper" you could spec for it, and actually GAIN energy by doing 5pt EA, 10 energy that is, 20 if you are deep Assassination( for Overkill). Surely that compensates somewhat for "passing" the top dps meters spot to someone else.
Here are a few that we keep seeing:
1) Shiv scaling better than Sinister Strike. No need to elaborate.
2) Shadow Dance being a keybinding nightmare, as well as not utilizing Master of Subtlety talent.
3) Killing Spree disrupting normal attacks. Not being able to use SS while doing it is one thing, but losing white hits and having to toggle auto attack back on makes it feel very clunky.
4) Fan of Knives having both a longish cooldown AND a high energy cost. Compare to Warriors' Whirlwind, for example, which is used in their normal DPS rotations.
5) Poor itemization in terms of weapon speeds.
6) Fast daggers scaling better than slower daggers, due to poisons.
7) Massive opportunity cost to keep Expose Armor up, if needed. Perhaps change Imp. EA to behave like CttC, but work off of Eviscerate or SnD?
8) Gross inferiority of Mace Specialization's armor penetration effect, due to the order in which it is applied. It needs to be applied before debuffs, and possibly slightly down-tuned after that.
9) Lack of Mutilate glyph. One exists for SS, BS, Shiv, & Hemo, but not Mutilate.
10) Lack of a defining feel to spec'ing deep Combat, other than steady damage and superior energy regeneration. Perhaps add a Tier 9 or 10 talent that allows us to use Axes, sharing the specialization with Swords.
I completely agree with 1-8.
9 I somewhat agree with, but actually, I would rather see an "assassination" centric glyph instead of a mutilate glyph.
As for 10... Assassination is defined by mutilate. Sub is defined by mobility and maximizing stealth. combat is (seemingly) defined by a constant steam of predictable Dps, and potentially minor aoe damage (3 separate talents contribute to multi-target dps). I fear that adding something like axes would seriously throw off itemization balance, and could restrict choice in the long run.
Then why state it's inherently bad when you see more than a few snd gains in WWS?
It's number 5 of Aldriana's 7 Commandments of Rogue DPS. Pooling energy before refreshing SnD is good practice and sometimes SnD can fall off because of lag and associated factors but letting it drop many multiple times on a stationary fight for any length of time is poor buff management. The same could be said for warriors (and their groups) that gain Battle Shout 3 times during a 6 minute fight. Lost DPS is lost DPS.
Originally Posted by Andeh
Lack of a defining feel to spec'ing deep Combat, other than steady damage and superior energy regeneration. Perhaps add a Tier 9 or 10 talent that allows us to use Axes, sharing the specialization with Swords.
A lot of this was talked about both here and the official WotLK forums but I thought I'd comment on this one.
The problem with adding axes to Combat way up in the tree is that it limits future upgrades and the ability to change specs. Once spec'd out of that for any reason you're left with weapons you cannot use and not just weapons that are suboptimal for a specific build (eg daggers/swords/maces/fists). And God help you if you've raided for a while and then try to spec into it with two green AH weapons. They removed a similar talent from Shaman not too long ago.
I do not feel that EA is hard to keep up, actually I find it easy in any spec. Sure you are loosing lots of personal dps but you, and lots of other rogues, are simply conveniently forgetting the fact that keeping EA up is "more dps" the keeping 1 extra rupture up. Also should a rogue be a "designated EA keeper" you could spec for it, and actually GAIN energy by doing 5pt EA, 10 energy that is, 20 if you are deep Assassination( for Overkill). Surely that compensates somewhat for "passing" the top dps meters spot to someone else.
Sure, no one is arguing that EA is "challenging" to keep up. And yes, if you have no one to sunder running expose is better than running rupture. The point though is the relative opportunity cost for the two buffs is inconsistent. SA is "free" if it's a prot warrior tanking. SA is "low" or at worst "medium" opportunity cost for a Fury/Arms warrior. Expose armor is "high" opportunity cost for a rogue.
Or to put it in other terms, if you had the choice there is absolutely no practical reason to run EA if you have the choice of SA. This is kind of problematic when it's intended to be one of our major group synergies. There are other buff categories for other classes where this is definitely still the case, but I'd imagine part of balancing group synergies is also somewhat balancing the opportunity cost of said synergies.
If you bring a Rogue for your 10 man, it's highly desirable to also bring a Warrior, instead of having your Rogue do EA. You only use EA if it's as a last resort and there's no Warrior available.
As an officer in a Twins killing guild, I can only agree with Aldriana here. There are plenty of shit rogues out there. Far too many. We have had an open rogue spot for months and cannot fill it with anybody vaguely competent.
Inability to use cooldowns, inability to keep up slice and dice, inability to gem/gear/enchant properly.
Blizzard has given the rogue community a great compliment. As a group, we are the tightest and most brutal theorycrafters around. (Thanks to Vulajin/Aldriana currently, and others like Kalman in the past)
Whining about not having a raid spot is completely down to so many rogues sucking, not a problem with the rogue class.
From what i've seen, there are 3 problems with recruiting (not necessarily just rogues).
1. The players Sucks. What I mean is that the player, as a rogue/whatever, does not know his class, does not research his class, and does not care much about his class. He does OK on the damage meters/healing meters, but not super-great for his gear level.
This occurs at all levels of gear, and can usually be trained into a decent-to-good player. Competitiveness forces people to look at other players and see what they are doing different, to be doing better.
2. The player is Under-geared. Everyone starts somewhere, and some people get there faster than others. Call it drops/bad rolls/too many of one class. The best players can only go so far until their gear is holding them back.
This is just a matter of perseverance: Eventually, given enough time, the item will drop if you kill the boss. (oh DST, how i hate thee.. let me count the non-drops..)
3. The player doesn't have the instance knowledge.
Practice makes perfect. Learning a boss fight is just a matter of doing the fight enough to know what will/can happen. If a player does the fight enough, they will learn the abilities/what to do in that fight. Unless you go back to #1.
If I had to estimate, I'd say that there are alot of #2's, less #1's. Probably a 60/40 split.
To use myself as an example:
Right now I'm the best rogue in my guild. Infact, i'm either number 1 or 2 on the damage meters for most, if not all, fights. I have the gear, skill, and knowledge for my gear level to let me perform well.
But that's at a T5 level. If I went into BT tommorow, I wouldn't be nearly as effective as BT raiders who have been there for months, but that's because I don't have the knowledge or gear. (I'm fairly sure i have the skill to play a rogue by now). Given a reasonable amount of time (and drops), would I be able to perform with the same efficiency as the other BT raiders in that theoretical raid? Yes, of course.
Now if i was recruiting another rogue right now, who's in Blues/Greens, I wouldn't expect them to be able to know all the fights, or have the gear. I would certainly hope that they could prove they know their class, how to gear and gem properly, what finishers/rotations should be used. That would be my criteria more than "You have teh gear? You know the fights? Welcome aboard!".
If they were fully T5 Geared on the other hand, I would have completely different expectations. They should know every fight in T5 content, backwards and forwards from a rogue perspective. They should be gemmed/geared properly. They should be using the right rotations/etc. All of this should already be there, or I would definitely not be recruiting them.
If they haven't learned by T5, after going through all of T4 content, and T5 content, Why should I be the one to teach them?
And I'm sure that's what you face right now. Geared, Skilled rogues are hard to find. Geared rogues might be easy, Skilled rogues might be medium easy, The combination is hard.
Chaith logs on
<zyl> Actually, I do like my paladin. He's fun to play, but don't tell Chaith.
<chaith> Looks like i logged in at the right time
<zyl> ....
<zyl> I pressed enter half a second after you logged on.
hi all, I just recently bought s4 swords. I have been reading this forum and it seems like mutilate is the way to go in both PVE and PVP. Should I change to s4 daggers now while I can?
If I change to s4 daggers now I wont be able to raid until patch comes out which means that the guild im going to will get another rogue instead.
On Vanish/Onslaught:
Yes, there's some use you can extract from Onslaught via Vanish. However, when working out the damage thereof, it's worth remembering that vanishing disrupts your swing timer and, as such, may not give as large a damage benefit as you might expect.
On SnD dropping:
It's true that the length of the drop has some bearing on how bad this is, but it's also true that any drop is a mistake. I ran the numbers a while back, and as I recall worked out that the damage loss from letting SnD drop for a given amount of time is 6 times greater than the damage loss from refreshing SnD that amount early. That is to say: you're better of refreshing SnD 2 seconds early as opposed to half a second late. Hence, when timing it, you want to err on the side of refreshing early rather than late.
On Axes:
I don't see that we actually gain anything of substance by being able to use axes. There's no inherent superiority of axes over other weapon types of comparable damage. It would give us a few more drop choices and make us slightly less likely to get screwed over by lack of weapon drops, but it's not like we're going to gain significant amounts of DPS by switching from the arena sword to the arena axe. So, frankly, I think it's a pretty silly idea for a high-end combat talent - there are other things I'd far rather see.
I think Akka is talking about game design on a much more basic level, UberDrivel.
Take two players; both enjoy the game as a concept equally. Let's add even more control to this thought experiment by saying that they come from the same gaming background with very similar skill levels.
One decides to play a Shaman and one decides to play a Rogue to do dps with. Now they get to level 80 and they start raiding and let's say they both get to the point of absolute best in slots for the T7 content available.
At this point the game should be just as fun for each other on off raid nights, right?
Well now, when they go to do dailies the shaman does his about twenty minutes faster. After they get done there's four other guildies on looking for a healer for badge runs. The rogue is SoL here. The shaman can play with his friends for a few gold. The gold might not even be an issue in the future.
Now, because of raid balance, the game is less fun for the Rogue than it is for the Shaman when they aren't raiding. I consider this to be a failure in game design.
This isn't just a problem for rogues, but a problem for all of the pure dps classes. I'm not sure there's an elegant solution. It seems like they're breaking the rules set forth by wow basic game design for some classes, but not others. Hybrid classes in the original game as I understand it were balanced to where they had playstyle options and gave buffs, but just couldn't put out the raw numbers. Now they made the raw numbers close to equal but haven't shown any sign of smoothing the utility. Even if this becomes equal the shaman still has the heal spells.
The cost is more than a few gold for the shaman. He'll need to build an off-set as well as learn to play a healer style instead of a dps style.
You could also look at it another direction, rogues are more successful than enhancement shamans in the arena. Now the shaman is forced to respec to do arena, get different gear, etc, while a rogue could just do a respec.
Basically, there are enough factors that I fail to see how this isn't "fair".
I think that hypothetical situation is balanced by an equally hypothetical situation where a Rogue would get an invite over a Shaman, e.g. if the group really need Sap. Granted, there's always going to be certain encounters where certain classes will be better than others. In my limited experience, phase 1 of the A'lar fight sucks for melee dps, 'cause we have to chase down adds while the 'locks, Hunters and Mages spam at the big bird (no Firebolts or Incinerates allowed, of course). On the other hand, the Nalorakk fight is a cakewalk for Rogues, because we don't care about Silence and we never get charged. WoW needs variety, even if variety comes at the cost of occasional imbalance - the only way of making everything completely even is if every class could tank, heal and dps evenly. And I think we can all agree that would be a pretty boring game.
I kinda like parts of that "T7" graphic, although the hat is a bit much, especially with Night Elf ears. The shoulderpads and little heads are kinda cool, though.
The cost is more than a few gold for the shaman. He'll need to build an off-set as well as learn to play a healer style instead of a dps style.
You could also look at it another direction, rogues are more successful than enhancement shamans in the arena. Now the shaman is forced to respec to do arena, get different gear, etc, while a rogue could just do a respec.
Basically, there are enough factors that I fail to see how this isn't "fair".
The offset argument doesn't really apply, as to be successful in arenas, you need a different set of gear from pve gear anyway, so it doesn't matter what spec that set is suited for. Shaman also have at least two of their trees very viable for arenas currently.
Anyway, it seems like such a discussion doesn't really belong in this thread.
09/30/08, 9:58 AM
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