All I see there is the talent abilities.

Anyone can tell me what the New spells are? It seems Fan of Knifes is one of them, but and what are the other among those?

Read back a few pages, you'll find them.

It would be nice if it worked that way, but I predict it will turn off autoattack for the spree period and also reset your swing timer. Therefore, while you are getting your free attacks you're losing white damage.

If a spree takes 2.5 seconds and you lose about 1s of swing timers, you've lose about 2 MH attacks and 3 OH attacks, and gain 5 MH attacks and 5 OH attacks. In other words I think the actual value to your DPS will be about half that.

Very true - I hope it doesn't work that way but you're right that if it does, the talent becomes devalued.

I did, but it still doesn't separates Talent abilities from new Spells. That or I just don't get it. Can't find it on other websites on a clear way too.

The heavily buffed eviscerate numbers on the current alpha;

r10: 985-1105
r12: 1977-2231

It may now be quite a competitive finisher.

Hunger For Blood can be stacked up before pulling the boss, and i think 180 energy a minute is worth a 15% gain in dps, less if you have a bleed/magic debuff.

Last I checked it's not even possible to downrank as a rogue - when you get ability level n+1, it replaces ability level n in your spellbook. Not that I can imagine any reason for wanting to downrank - the whole point of doing so is mana conservation, and since they all cost the same amount of energy, it would just be doing less damage for no reason.

My understanding is that the base damage on Eviscerate has been buffed somewhat, but the major change is that it scales a lot better with AP than it does currently. Don't know if that's true or not, but that's the rumor I've heard.

I have a question about how the average differences between the damage output of different specs were calculated.

From this, I gather that Combat Dagger would be 1-3% behind Combat Swords. I used the spreadsheet and the standard Combat Daggers and Combat Swords (2xsword) builds. To utilize similar weapons I used the S2 Daggers and S2 Swords. The DPS of swords I get is 5.06% higher than daggers with my gear.

I really like daggers better as weapons, and in playing style, but if the difference turns out to be above 5%, and not the 1-3% I had assumed from the Rogue PvE article, I am really considering to switch to swords.

I can't speak to exactly where those numbers come from, but it should be noted that the relative value of these specs depend heavily on your gear level and exactly what buffs you have. If you have your typical buffs and gear in the spreadsheet, and it shows you 5% behind, that's probably the number you want to go with.

Yeah, I assume the spreadsheet is correct. I used a fresh sheet with default settings for everything including buffs, imported myself, and changed nothing but the weapons and the standard sword and dagger builds. My gear is, as you can see, T4/T5 with some 2.4 badge rewards.

I did the same with your profile. I used S3 swords and daggers just because they're higher level items. You come out with 4.43% better DPS with swords compared to daggers.

So it seems that the article underestimates the difference, if the arena weapons are a good measure. The arena ones are probably the best we can find for comparison, I guess. How this turns out with sword/fists, combat maces, combat fists etc would have to be research before changing the article though.

Ok, after reading some sites and some pages here. STILL don't understand how many Rogue spells outside the talents are discovered yet.

By the way, how many are we suppused to get? New abilities out of the talents? 3?

Ye, you're right, but judging by how many came with TBC and how many are in the other classes alpha we could have an ideia.

By the way, many people are overestimating Prey on the Weak, because they're missing the part where it increases your crit bonus on WHITE ATTACKS ONLY. This is pretty key to understanding the talent. My estimation on lvl 70 numbers is 15% more damage on 40% (crit rate, reasonably high end) of 60% of your damage (yellow/white ratio), with a 75% uptime. This comes out to 2.25% more damage for the 5/5 talent, which at 2000 dps, is 9 DPS per talent point. That's fairly underwhelming given that the other talents leading up to the 51 point talent are pvp filler.

It's not an over-estimate, the combat specs chief source of damage is white damage. You are almost certainly using swords as well, the scaling with gear b/c high end TBC gear is strong on haste favours combat spec above all because of the white damage. Assassination is more combo point /mutilate-poison based, subtelty also on special abilities, not combat.

Also people are forgetting that up to 4 more base rogue abilities are to come, only the warlock has seen it's 5 new base abilities between 70-80, and it got the last 2 in the last patch, all the other classes have seen 2-3 except the rogue which has seen one, and the 2 classes who have seen no changes. So watch out. Those abilities if they do come may yet influence a lot of things

Rogues and warriors only have the highest rank of any spell in their spell book. The cannot downrank.

I had missed that, thanks

Oh I agree, but I think you gain a lot more from taking talents in the other trees instead (Opportunity and Blade Flurry for example) as well as not losing Mutilate damage in the process. The top-end Assassination talents just seem wholly inadequate in their current incarnations.

From what I understand from the discussion in the thread it seems that the new PvE spec would be one of these three:

Mutilate (possibly taking a point out of dual wield spec for 3/3 focused attacks):
War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

20/51 combat:
War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

Seal Fate/Fists:
War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

It's an overestimate if they're calculating its value while not understanding that it doesn't affect yellow damage, and I am *very* aware of the layout of white damage for combat builds - please note my calculations which include such.


You're missing lvl 70 Combat Mut + DaggerSpec/Opportunity, linked here:

War Pirate :: Rogue WotLK Alpha Talent Tree

I think that's a very interesting idea, but I also think that they'll be changing the power level on many of the deeper talents to make a build like that less attractive.

10% Rupture damage is a very poor talent investment over focused attacks or devious poisons. 3/3 improved eviscerate is also a poor choice compared to vile poisons.

I don't have access to those pages from here, but my thought for WLK PvE spec is more likely than not to be something of the 44/27/0 nature.

It all depends how pervasive Expertise gear is in raiding in the expansion, but full focused attacks + dagger spec + Weapon Expertise + DW spec + Imp Backstab/Mut and the other "essential" combat talents could very well prove to be a huge DPS increase over a similar combat build given that it has the same "white" damage potential.

One thing worth noting is that there's only one new rank of backstab, leading us to believe that it's being phased out as an attack entirely, with recent and upcoming mutilate buffs like imp backstab improving mutilate, and having essentially the same white damage potential.

Focused attacks also (assuming a change to glancing/crushing blows as has been pushed through the rumor mill a few times) scales equally well with hit, haste, expertise, AND crit, which is an improvement over combat potency which only benefits from the first three.

I'm terrible at theorycrafting energy cycles though, so a comparison of combat potency v. focused attacks could prove most useful.

But yeah, as Shaker points out, Prey On The Weak is pretty weak as a talent in general, and gets worse in situations with heavy burst damage where the rogue might not be topped off all the time and might sit at 75-80% for most of the fight.

If they really want to make healers care about rogues, they should either give us a protadin-ish talent that restores energy on heals received, or re-implement the 2pc Tier 3 druid bonus in either itemization or talents on the healer level such that we get energy back from HoTs or direct heals.

As it is, it's terrible for 5 points, and would be still be sub-average as a 3-tier talent.

For Mutilate, taking all the highly synergystic poison talents will likely be superior than 5/5 Cut to the Chase. Take a look at Aldriana's post a few pages back.

Speaking of which, it looks like the tradeoff for finisher priority will be to either choose Imp. Eviscerate + Cut to the Chase for making Eviscerate a primary finisher, or else taking Bloodspatter to make Rupture the primary finisher. Since the first is 8 talent points of investment and the second is 2, it's going to take a lot of improvement to Eviscerate to make it worth going that route.

Few things:

Backstab is definitely not being phased out - see the 45 point sub talent. It's also still hanging on in deep combat, though we'll see how that pans out, as it didn't get any real improvements in the new combat tree, and it's already somewhat behind.

See a few pages back where Aldriana does a very good analysis of all the deep assassination trees, including Focused Attacks. It's roughly equivalent to Combat Potency, and scales about the same - except with crit/haste instead of hit/haste. It will scale ever so slightly with expertise on the two roll system, but it doesn't scale with +hit at all, since we assume that raiding rogues have enough +hit so that their specials never miss, and white attacks are on a single roll system. Obviously combat resolution table changes would affect the relative power of both of those, but I haven't seen evidence of that - feel free to correct me on this.

Also, Resto Druids are getting an energy heal component to their AE heal (via talents), so I really do think that trees will be good in those positions. I don't think giving an energy restore is going to really make healers "care" more about melee - "caring" about specific targets over others is either a healer problem (if the healer is assigned to heal melee, they are doing their job or they're not) or a strategy problem (if someone isn't assigned to patch up melee and the melee are dying).