Has anyone spent any significant time solo grinding/questing on PTR? I am pushing a Rogue up to 70 right now in preparation for the Xpac and am curious about the efficiency of Muti vs. Combat for grinding/questing.

I would not even consider Muti except for the positional requirement change, but now I am wondering whether it would actually come out on top, especially with the subpar gear I will have at 70, greens and easy blues most likely. So low hit and thus poor white damage.

Along the same lines, is there a good reason to Cheap Shot rather than just running up to the next mob and dropping a remorseless +40% crit muti after a poison proc? I know you take less damage with CS opener, but you also waste time stealthing and potentially drop SnD from the last mob you CttC envenomed.

There was a pretty in-depth discussion about grinding/leveling a few pages back. The consensus seems to be that it comes down to personal preference, and both specs will be very effective leveling.

This has been discussed significantly in this thread already. chalon is correct that it comes down to preference and playstyle, for more in-depth views you may begin reading here for recent discussion: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t26242-r...96/#post905015 and also much earlier in the thread.

Thanks, sorry I must have missed that part of the thread. Just started playing again a week ago after a year hiatus, have some catching up to do.

I leveled from 1 - 69 Assassination. It was good times, but in order to raid I had to go Combat Swords and never looked back. I think we can agree that Muti. is a fun spec, but I really wonder if all its nuances will end up standing up to the stupid but effective Combat tree. I mean, it looks really solid now, and my hope is that they'll both be viable specs (if anything, it seems that Combat needs improvement right now). But from chalon's description of the Mutilate rotation, I think that being able to execute the ideal rotation is going to really separate the good rogues from the okay ones. Which I suppose is a good thing.

Anyhow, I'm thinking that a lot of which spec I initially raid with will depend simply on what weapons drop. I'm wondering if anyone has a "plan" as far as gearing up pre-Naxx, particularly when it comes to weapons. In BC, of course, grinding for S1/S2 swords was the obvious way of doing it, but it looks like PvP rewards will be a lot more restricted, since they all require Arena points (and are limited in stat itemization besides). But has anyone on the Beta gone into Naxx with one of those 130 dps blue weapons from Quest Rewards/Heroics? Did you feel like you were doing competitive dps?

PS - Serious bummer that this hotness drops off Trash. Meaning we'll never see it.

/slight offtopic

We don't care about gear. Anybody we recruit will be 4T6 after 1 week. There is nobody (well, not quite true there is a couple) that is getting mainspec gear from 4/6 Sunwell right now. Most of the druids are going for PvP gear after also being 4T6 Moonkin.

We've put in green/blue geared players that we know can play.

Skill > Gear. Sure, they're not going to contribute in the first 1-2 weeks - but that's of secondary concern.

/ontopic

Rogue PvE DPS is not going to be left in the dust. Sure, there are things that need to be worked out - but I have to concur with other posters that _every_ class is currently experiencing levels of crying with each PTR build about how their class is "broken". Blizzard has been saying they are doing their DPS passes right now, so we should keep providing good feedback about our class - and not worry quite so much.

Paladins were broken, now fixed
Warriors were broken, now fixed
Enhancement shaman were broken, getting better
Resto shaman were overpowered, then broken, now getting better

Rogues are not broken, we have some inconsistent scaling skills right now - but I have full confidence they will be fixed, if not for 3.0.2, but for Wrath.

The latest patch weighs in at 76mb, and here we go with rogue changes (taken from MMO):
Got my second Warglaive yesterday and I'm waiting on the new copy for the PTR to try out the new changes. The Vitality from 10 to 25% seems huge though, nearly 14 energy per second. Let's hope SS is more competitive now as well and how it stacks up against mutilate.

EDIT: Also hoping we get some dummies that can be afflicted by PotW.

So, Combat changes coming up in today's build:

*Aggression moved to Tier 4 and damage upped to 3% per talent point.
*Blade Twisting also adds 5/10% more damage to SS/BS. (This seems very shoehorned in)
*Vitality changed to 8/16/25% greater energy regen.

So I guess this effectively kills Combat Shiv since that build was already running into problems with having too much energy/not enough gcd's. It's a shame though since Combat Shiv was actually fun to play.

My initial thoughts are that this should go a long way towards making Combat closer to Mutilate specs, but hard to speculate without actual numbers. Also, with SS getting so many different damage boosts thrown in there now, I think it may pretty much kill off the Shiv Combat talk.

Interesting note: Warrior Sword Spec was changed and now states it can't happen more than once per 6 seconds. Now, Rogue Sword Spec does not have this noted in the talent tooltip, but it's probably worth testing to make sure they haven't added a cooldown to it - because if they have, it would have fairly far-reaching implications to the damage potential of the spec.

A quick hack of the current roguecraft spreadsheet using these changes shows combat as a -1.52% decrease over current mutilate damage. Although I may have misenterpreted where a certain number came from, it's safe to say that the two specs should be pretty even at high levels of gear.

This has actually been in beta for quite a while now. It was done mainly to reduce the burst from two-handers. There has never been any mention about the cooldown applying to rogues and I don't see why that would change now.

Very happy with the combat changes. Only concern now is it looks like 23/43/5 will out do any 51 combat variation, especially with killing spree being "weak" at the moment.

Prey on the Weak is probably strong enough to eliminate that possibility, but it will certainly require testing. And, frankly, it's not totally the end of the world if 23/43/5 does in fact beat 5/51/5+10 builds, as it will still play a lot like the combat builds we're used to.

In other news: has anyone figured out how AR stacks with Vitality? I would assume it gives 1+.25+1 = 2.25x baseline regen while up, but it might be worth verifying that it's not 1.25x2 = 2.5x baseline regen.

I agree, I've long liked the playstyle of combat and am glad the damage appears to be coming in line with mutilate. It's totally silly that 5 points in 4 assassination beat out 5 points in tier 10 combat, but I'm not sure what the fix there is. I suspect that if they simply move Imp Poisons deeper into assassination, combat will once again lag behind. Perhaps if they deepen imp poison but include a buff to make PotW better, this could be viable. From a touchy-feely perspective, I'm still not wild about being as heavily reliant on poison for dps as mutilate/HfB specs are, both because of the lower cost of utility poisons and because I still fear any poison-immune fights.

edit: Aldriana posts too fast >.<
Maybe PotW is good enough to make 15/51/5 (or maybe 7/51/13?) better than 23/43/5, but as you say, it obviously requires testing.

Sigh. These are buffs, for sure, and Blade Twisting actually becoming useful makes it much easier to get to the next level of the Combat tree. (Sinister Strike gets what, +35% damage now?) But this strikes me as a pretty uncreative. Granted, if you're Combat you expect to be spamming SS, but I really hope they add a little more complexity to this tree, a la Mutilate. Right now you're just doing the same thing as in BC, which is pretty dull. Maybe something fun with Lightning Reflexes?

Has anybody tested Killing Spree with CC'd mobs?

Does it break them?

Vitality alone significantly alters combat's play style. My guess is we'll be pulling of 3 finisher cycles. Add to that two more cooldowns in TotT and killing spree (assuming it gets buffed) and our play style should be sufficiently different. I'd like to see a more interactive feature like energy pooling with old-school find weakness, but I seem to be in the minority on that front.

The changes has a minimal effect on 15/51/5 (which still is stronger than 23/43/5) Combat Sinister build, which still has a long way to go, before it is competative with Combat Shiv. The only real change, as I see it, is that optimal rotation is reduces to 1s/5r from 2s/5r, and that you now can do 3s/5r/5ea easy.

On the other hand, the changes suddenly brings Combat Backstab builds (5s/5r) back into the game, which now is almost on par with Combat Shiv, as we have higher energy regen and higher backstab damage. Backstab has some disadvantages vs other builds though, first positioning, second no glyphs, third limited flexibility in cycles.

I agree that the Blade Twisting change seems somewhat shoehorned, and while the changes allow for less fillers in Combat, increasing Sinister damage and energy regeneration only have limited effects. In my opinion, in order to bring Combat Sinister up to par with Mutilate, give us a deep tier hit chance increase (for instance swap Weapon Expertise with Precision and boost Precision), boost OH damage from 50% to 100% and place it deeper tier (for instance swap Dual Wield with Lightning Reflexes), or something in those ways.

With the rupture glyph, won't 1s/5r force you to overwrite rupture most of the time?

Okay, good news from the beta server (long-time reader, first time poster as people use to say here :p)
Made enthusiastic by the latest patchnotes I did some testing on the OG dummies with a 7/51/5ish Spec (didn't get further than 72 till now).
Conclusion till now:
Killing Spree doesn't stop Autohits anymore. Continued hitting during the skill's attacks and didn't have to restart it afterwards. Checked it multiple times, looking into the combat log confirms it (btw, any page where I can upload beta-combatlogs? wws doesn't accept them). But still, SS doesn't work ("Can't do that right now.").
The other point about Sword Spec: Had 2 procs within 2 seconds, another time 2 procs within 5 seconds. So no CD for us so far as it seems, we'll see if they finally adjust its damage to the other weapon specs, but for now they left it in its current state.

Gonna look for other hidden new things now~

Even in the current state of the game, you often run into that particular issue with Rupture in 1s/5r. In WotLK, particularly if one uses the Rupture Glyph, a 3-finisher cycle (such as Xs/Yr/Ze or Xs/Yr/Zn) will certainly be superior, since our extra energy regeneration is giving us both extra Sinister Strike damage as well as extra Finisher damage. Vitality + 1s/5r nets us little to no extra finisher damage.

This certainly doesn't spell the demise of Combat Shiv builds--it's not like they were nerfed in any way--, but it looks like Blizzard is not intent on their viability, since all the Combat buffs did nothing for Shiv (increased Sinister Strike/Backstab damage, and increased energy regeneration to a build that would make little use of it).

Edit: Okay, so Killing Spree now allows us to auto-attack again. Not being able to use yellow attacks is really a non-issue. I believe the previous estimate of Killing Spree puts it at *approximately* 75 DPS, while our best Hunger for Blood estimate makes it *about* a 5% boost. If we're doing 4000 DPS, Hunger for Blood is ~2.7 times better.