One question regarding Mutilate:
Did anyone test it in any movement-intense fight ? I have read a lot of concerns regarding Mutilate if for example Slice and Dice drops or if you have to use 2-3 point Envenoms to maintain it. So my assumption would be that combat comes out ahead of Mutilate once the fight includes a lot of movement or target changes.
Please forgive me, if I overread something. (I still have an awful fewer and only read a bit while staying in bed most of the day).
Mutilate was better in movement intense fights than combat if you are at the energy cap when you get back in range of the target.
I don't see this changing, in fact Mutilate should be better off when you have maxed Vile Poisons+Imp Poisons when the combat Rogue does not.
You no longer have to get behind the target in order to use Mutilate even though this is generally advisable for other reasons.
Having to restart SnD is something that everyone has to do when it falls off and is cheap if you have CPs up on the target.
You can use movement phases where you are out of range to refresh Hunger for Blood cheaply.
In fights where you change targets frequently you still have the option to use the CPs to refresh SnD or use them for an Envenom if the target is about to die. It is better to use the CP's than lose them in effect.
It's also worth noting that the 8 points in Lethality + Ruthlessness work out to a total of 240 DPS, while Serrated Blades is only 190; hence, it appears that 15/51/5 beats 7/51/13.
Will the value of serrated blades increases as any individual rogue stacks more ArP?
If so, will there be an eq level where serrated blades would be more valuable than Lethality + ruthlessness?
What I'm worried about is that if combat gets buffed too much, we'll be pigeonholed into speccing it not just for some slightly superior dps, but for ease of use. Combat cycles are easier to maintain, even with the positional changes.
This is not meant as a whine-post; rather I wanted to get people's thoughts on if Mutilate should have a higher potential dps than combat, if one is good enough to balance SnD refreshes, rupture uptime, HfB cooldowns, etc etc. Otherwise, it seems to me that the utility of daze/blade flurry on trash to make for faster clearing to bosses as well as the more simplistic cycle management on bosses themselves (such that it makes it easier to achieve maximum dps without a small mistake) would push combat easily ahead of mutilate for actual raiding situations.
Subtlety, well we all know that the spec is meant for surviving more than dps, thus it makes better pvp tree than dps.
I disagree. Subtlety should have a pve path. Would you accept "Assa, well we all know that the spec is meant for burst more than sustained, thus it makes better pvp tree than dps." ? Obviously not, so why would you impose a pvp-only restriction on players who like the Stealth-and-Feint flavor of Subtlety, more than Poison ?
I must agree with Francois, here. No tree is a 'PvP tree' to Blizzard, at this point. If this is true, what is the intended Subtlety spec?
One issue with Subtlety is that it's rather schismatic. There is indeed quite a bit of 'utility' in the tree, but I refer more to the Hemo vs. Dagger schism; or, in more general terms, fast weapon vs. slow weapon.
Opportunity buffs Daggers.
Ghostly Strike is a buff for slow weapons.
Improved Ambush buffs Daggers.
Hemorrhage buffs slow weapons.
Dirty Deeds buffs low-energy attacks (thus Hemo more than daggers).
Master of Subtlety seems like it would buff daggers more than the alternative.
Waylay buffs Daggers.
Shadowstep also seems to favor Daggers more.
There have been steps to balance this, but there's still a long way to go, and I've seen little if any attention given to it recently.
I think that the order for single target dps should be Mutilate > Combat > Subtley. That for the reason posted above, combat has slightly more aoe abilities in disposal and if the gaps between those specs are too small, we might see the tip scaling towards combat. Subtley, well we all know that the spec is meant for surviving more than dps, thus it makes better pvp tree than dps. If the outcome would put combat to the top again, then I think Im gonna stop raiding for good. Sorry guys who love it, but I think its boring and not at all rogueish to play combat swords. When the info about LK came out I was a bit sceptic about them saying making daggers viable (it was said last time also), but as I saw the planned changes it gave me faith.
My contention with this is that combat is the worst PVP spec, and if it puts out less single target DPS than mutilate nobody will ever spec it for anything. 'Slightly more aoe abilities' meaning Blade Flurry...nobody is going to spec to be an AoE damage rogue, and especially not just every 2 minutes. Killing Spree may be able to jump between targets but it is not AoE, you're still only hitting a single target at a time.
I want to see what Blizzard claims to want; three trees that are equally viable in PVE or PVP. Looking at the DK trees I can see how I could spec in all 3 trees for two different roles (tank and DPS). This gives me hope that one day our trees can be like that for PVE/PVP.
In the short term though, I think assassination and combat should put out equal DPS, and combat needs added PVP viability. Then in the long term, bring Sub up to par in PVE as well.
I think that the order for single target dps should be Mutilate > Combat > Subtley. That for the reason posted above, combat has slightly more aoe abilities in disposal and if the gaps between those specs are too small, we might see the tip scaling towards combat.
I'm not convinced of this. It seems to me that each spec should have a role to play, and be capable of higher DPS than other trees, depending on the encounters and on the skill and flexibility of the player. There should not be a single spec that every raider uses, there should be more diversity and competition between the trees, and I think that's what Blizzard wants to promote. For instance:
Assassination: heavily invests in poisons and stuns, so should be the highest single target DPS against targets with no poison resistance. Survivability limited to being able to run away quickly.
Combat: invests in weapon proficiency (hit) and haste and has some multiple target abilities. Should be the highest DPS against multiple nearby targets and against targets with high poison resistance and medium to low armour. Less manoeuvrability than other specs (but more than a warrior). NB I believe that talents to improve Expose Armor should be available to combat rogues (rather than assassination) to allow them to perform correctly on highly armoured targets (sacrificing other finisher DPS for more raid utility), like the warriors they resemble to a certain extent, and perhaps a raid utility like Savage Combat could be moved to Subtlety instead.
Subtlety: invests in survivability, surprise attacks (openers), bleeds and armour penetration. Should be the highest DPS against single targets with low hit points that can be surprised, as well as against heavily armoured, poison resistant targets over a longer period of time. Should also work better than other specs in encounters with nasty surprises and splash damage.
To a great extent, the strengths of the three specs are where things stand at the moment. I do feel that there's a little more work to be done balancing the DPS to match the ideal usage requirements above, though.
For PvP, each of the trees should equally be viable, and would concentrate on its particular strength:
Assassination: stunlocking and considered use of the correct poisons.
In some tests I did on the previous PTR build, subtlety builds weren't as high as Mutilate, but they were real close. The synergy between Shadowdance -> Ambush -> Initiative was great. Vanish -> Premed -> Ambush was nice as I got 5 cps from a single Ambush.
I don't expect, nor want Sub builds to be as strong as Mutilate or Combat builds, but they should be viable in raids. And at this point it looks like they are.
My contention with this is that combat is the worst PVP spec, and if it puts out less single target DPS than mutilate nobody will ever spec it for anything. 'Slightly more aoe abilities' meaning Blade Flurry...nobody is going to spec to be an AoE damage rogue, and especially not just every 2 minutes. Killing Spree may be able to jump between targets but it is not AoE, you're still only hitting a single target at a time.
I want to see what Blizzard claims to want; three trees that are equally viable in PVE or PVP. Looking at the DK trees I can see how I could spec in all 3 trees for two different roles (tank and DPS). This gives me hope that one day our trees can be like that for PVE/PVP.
In the short term though, I think assassination and combat should put out equal DPS, and combat needs added PVP viability. Then in the long term, bring Sub up to par in PVE as well.
How does BF then Killing Spree function when you are in a packed group of mobs? Do you hit more than 1 mob at a time? Is the extra attack from BF ignored?
Unfortunately, tree 'philosophy' will always be sacrificed at the expense of balance. Relenetless Strikes in the Sub tree? Clearly its not a Sub flavored talent, and yet it ended up there because of balance (at least according to blizz). Improved Slice and Dice, while better suited in the Combat tree, is clearly an Assassination flavored talent. There are many examples of this in rogue (warrior and hunter trees too). I agree that talent trees should have a feel to them, and it would be great if it could be that way. But balance will always supercede properly themed trees and talents.
Several pages back I saw an interesting post about the advantage of having the slower of the two daggers in offhand for mutilate builds. However when I tested it on PTR dummies it never quite showed (do note that it was impossible to control debuffs on dummies so I did a few sessions with faster in OH or MH, alternating them to try reduce uncontrolled debuffs effect), in fact the faster MH version was on average always behind.
As you might know the argument of using faster MH was basically that IP makes up for mutilate damage loss. Which I can agree with. The only possible reason I could think of that dps in fact decreases is in the (rare) cases when you wouldn`t have enough DP stacks on target when you hit envenom. As I`m not 100% familiar with playing new mutilate build yet and without addons to track I may have missed low DP stacks, but slower MH just felt a lot better with this.
Considering my "tests" weren`t really well controlled I was just wondering if anyone else did some testing on this subject or perhaps even theorycraft.
How does BF then Killing Spree function when you are in a packed group of mobs? Do you hit more than 1 mob at a time? Is the extra attack from BF ignored?
Blade Flurry ignores Killing Spree. Tested several times earlier today. Pleased with the change to autoattack, but still a long way to go. Gave me only ~40 dps (or 4000-5000 damage every 2 minutes) on PTR.
In 1s/5r, your SnD is 18 seconds, and your Rupture is 20 (assuming both are glyphed). It is thus theoretically impossible to have near-full SnD uptime without overlapping Ruptures quite badly. So I confess I'm a bit skeptical of your findings.
Yep, my mistake Garrote-Glyph not Rupture. So Rupture is at 16s. There is about 1 second room if energy pooling to not overlap the ruptures.
0s S&D (S&D@18, R@0)
11s Rupture (S&D@7s, R@16s)
14s S&D (S&D@18s, R@13s)
25s - 27s Rupture (S&D@7-4, R@2-(-1)) [pooling]
.. so with SS as combo builder it's an S&D cut, but no rupture overlap, enough energy to kick in the BF's and KSp's. However I understand that the test is in no way conlusive in regards to the glaive proc, and shiv testing should be done with 19/42/0 or sth like that (at 70). I try that tonight.
I find a 13/51/7 or 15/51/5 combat dagger/fist build pretty intriguing, lots of flexibility there. If you snag Improved Sinister it's essentially a full Combat Fist spec when you want it to be (besides sacrificing 2 from Lethality or RS for Opportunity) and you get Combat Daggers too. Can't wait
I still wish they'd buff Lightning Reflexes into something cool for DPS.
I know I said Agi was ahead of AP before - I found a few more DPS tweaks to add since then, which caused them to switch order. Point remains: they're very very close, and nothing else is.
Additional note: Oscarvil pointed out that the value of Relentless Strikes is actually lower than the value of VP in the weightings I provided, and thus inquired about the validity of a 18/51/2 or 20/51/0 build. When I tried this, I found it did less damage. Upon investigating the cause of this, it appears that the value I gave for Relentless Strikes earlier is in error - it appears to be closer to 73 DPS per point. I will update the above table accordingly.
I tried the same thing in the but got some results I can't explain. Perhaps my methodology is wrong?
What I am doing is one by one, I add 1 point of a stat (2 in the case of AP) and see how much of a DPS gain there is. Then I reset it and do the next stat. What I can't explain is (for example) I can add 2 AP and get +1.66 DPS, but if I only add 1 AP, I get +.55 DPS. AGI appears to do the same thing.
It looks like I am doing it the way EP was originally supposed to be calculated, but maybe I am looking at this at too small a scale and need to use some bigger values (10 or 20 AP) to reduce potential rounding errors.
Looking now at Combat, and the PvE future of Subtlety, I think we can certainly say SS Combat is coming along nicely. There may be some pvp implications still, but I'm focusing on PvE implications only. Combat should be pretty close to Mutilate now. Variations in weapon itemization (speed) and subsequent specialization choices seem to be able to add the last touch of "umph" where needed. And if that is not enough, they can finally touch up Lightning Reflexes to top off the DPS increase.
With that said, the only recent Combat change that still baffles me is the Surprise Attacks addition of HEMO. This addition obviously is meant to pit HEMO vs Sinister Strike (improved), but they have made no other changes to Combat nor Subtlety or even HEMO itself in order to support that notion. The most obvious thing would be adding HEMO to Aggression from a Combat tree perspective, with 50/21 being the staple build as long as PotW continues to prove to be better than Malice + Blood Spatter even with the increased Rupture damage of Serrated Blades that comes automatically with any HEMO user. (Is SB rupture bonus + Malice + Blood Splatter > PotW? Aldriana?)
I think we kinda hinted at this some before, but now with what looks like the major change to Combat done, do the numbers support this idea of Hemo in place of SS as even nigh-feasible? Should they just throw out that whole idea? What kind of changes to HEMO would make it work? Does HEMO need a complete overhaul anyway to make deep Subtlety work for raiding in the first place? We have to assume a major Subtlety revamp is coming soon for PvE. Has anyone heard anything on the Beta boards from Blizz about where they are inclined to focus in that tree? What do we 'here' think would be most beneficial?
Again, this is all PvE, 25man, raid boss and related adds focused. PvP thoughts for another day.
I have a strong feeling that the major nerfs to hemo for PVE usage back in 2.3.2 were true to their view of what we should be capable of. As nice as it would be for that to have changed (I enjoyed the extra survivability of 11/27/23 for the week that I tried it), I don't think they're going to do an about-face. I don't think that hemo will become a primary CP builder for PVE again. Not for a damage build compatible with 41+ combat or mut, anyway.
Will the value of serrated blades increases as any individual rogue stacks more ArP?
If so, will there be an eq level where serrated blades would be more valuable than Lethality + ruthlessness?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: while stacking ArPen does increase the value of the armor penetration on Serrated Blades, it also reduces the proportion of your damage that comes from Rupture and thus reduces the value of that component of the talent. So, ultimately, it seems to be sort of a wash - dumping extra ArPen into the calculations doesn't appear to allow Serrated Blades to catch up appreciably.
Of course, there's also the question of why you'd actually want to stack ArPen in the first place - it pretty clearly the weakest stat for combat rogues at the moment.
I still wish they'd buff Lightning Reflexes into something cool for DPS.
I don't think anyone has touched on this for a while so I'll mention that adding a slight haste bonus per talent point would make Lightning Reflexes attractive to many Rogues. Something along the lines of a .2% haste per talent point, hell one could argue up into the .5% haste per talent point, more than this would make the talent much too overpowered/necessary. I'm not into doing math to figure out the exact bonus to dps that 1% or even 2.5% flat haste would give, but I am fairly confident that it would be a nice enough buff to Lightning Reflexes without creating another "must have" talent.
I don't want to start a wish list tangent, but I don't really see another way to spice up Lightning Reflexes short of turning it into something else entirely (Lightning Reflexes has been renamed to Wickedly Sinister Sinful Ways: This talent now gives you blah blah blah).
We can now gem for Expertise rating, Precise Red Gems(+ Expertise) and Accurate Orange Gems(+ Expertise / + Hit), and this should be gemmed to cap before any other stat no matter what build you use. (Most bang for your buck.)
For Combat you will still want to Gem Hit as your main stat, after Expertise.
For Mutilate you will need to reach your Expertise cap and then the 9% Hit "soft cap" so that specials don't miss. After that its up in the air about which will lead to higher dps, but the main contenders are Crit, Haste, and Agility.
If I am reading Aldriana's latest stat weightings correctly, this gemming philosophy is now turned on its head, correct?
Now we should be gearing with whatever choices maximize dps (with some combination of hit, expertise, crit, AP, Agi, haste, ArPen, stam, etc.), then (for all combat specs, and probably all PvE specs) gemming with AP or Agi exclusively?
I suspect next build will include some Subtlety adjustments. Whether this includes any adjustments to hemorrhage remains to be seen, but if any, such a change will probably happen to the hemorrhage core, and not just through a talent deeper in the subtlety tree (though such a change might be included in addition as well, to cover that route of talenting).
The reason for this is pretty simple: the addition of hemo to Surprise Attacks means that Blizzard does want this combination of talents to be viable (to some degree, at least). So any balancing of Hemorrhage will have to take that into account, and be adjusted for that. If this leaves a 50-51 point subtlety build with Hemorrhage still subpar by far, then adjustments might be added further down the sub tree as well, but they'll start at the core of the ability first to bring the combat version in line with expectations.
I don't see a lot of need to buff Lightning Reflexes - we have Aggression now filling the gap in the talent tree at that level. And in point of fact, there's only 4 points of filler on the way to 51 in the combat tree right now, so we don't have 5 spare points to spend on it (I mean, we would if it did more damage, but we'd be dropping DPS talents to get it).
Frankly, the biggest change I'd like to see in combat right now is a bit more consolidation of some of the weaker talents to give us a little more flexibility - right now we can't do much beyond taking straight DPS talents with a combat build - and, in fact, with a mixed-weapon build, we literally have 0 utility talents. So if we could get the commensurate DPS output with room for another point or two in utility talents, that would be slightly preferable in my book. But, frankly, that's a minor nitpick - I'd be fine with the tree going live in it's current configuration.
I kinda doubt Lightning Reflexes will be "fixed" now. Aggression being moved down to Tier 4 with it basically fixes the problem of that tier (no dps talents). Adding more just might push it into too many dps talents that puts combat well ahead of mutilate again. At best I'd think they'd only reduce the number of points you can pump into it.
10/01/08, 7:14 AM
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