It is a baseline ability yes. I don't know which level you would gain it at however, but it's definitely baseline.

Also since I saw someone asking it earlier in this thread without it getting answered, the other known baseline new rogue ability is this:

Which is a weapon and shield disarm.

Guess that explains the change to riposte. Nice. A bit of small group utility and a nice pvp buff (especially that it removes shields). Not too hard to imagine that being worked into a boss encounter either...

I appreciate the analysis (napkin-math) of the new talents.

I do have a question that might be even easier to answer...

Suppose you could build 80 point talent builds with the gear and talents you have now (i.e. no new talents, current gear levels, etc.) What would the top PvE build be?

11/39/21 Tri-spec Sword Hemo? 41/25/5 Mutilate? 30/41 Seal Fate Fists?

Whatever your answer is, its a good point of comparison for any argument about the new talents.

This seems like exactly the sort of question you could answer yourself using a spreadsheet.

And in fact, a certain amount of analysis of talents in terms of current gearing and spec has already been done a few pages ago.

However, comparing the DPS of 71 point distributions at level 70 gear, using alpha talents, and without a clear picture of what skills we have and how they scale isn't particularly valuable.

So, the reason I've been neglecting it to date is that it's sort of an interesting idea but it's not honestly that good in most cases. With the damage it deals and the cooldown on it, it's not really a viable primary source of AoE - you're not going to be able to replace a mage or warlock on an AoE fight. It's sort of a nice added bonus, but as a source of AoE it closer to Hurricane and Volley than it is to the true AoE spells. So, is it a nice idea? Yes. But is it going to change our role in raids? I don't really see that it will. So I'm not really as excited about it as I might be.

I ran some numbers for honor amongst thieves using an old anetheron WWS and I found that even with a resto shaman and a survival hunter in my group the number of crits per second of the 4 people who are not me is about 1 crit per second on average. So it would be fairly safe to assume that a crit per second of around 1.2 is entirely possible, if not an underestimate. That combined with the 30% proc rate and the number of estimated backstabs gave me 177 combo points for the 3 minute fight as opposed to the ~80 combo points I gained with mut spec (energy from relentless strikes/25). Which means you have around 100 extra combo points for a 3 minute fight which in simplest terms is 20 eviscerates. My average eviscerate is ~1800 so assuming you had improved eviscerate with a sub spec that would yield 41,00 additional damage. Taking into account a 17k dps loss due to not having imp DW and a 8k dps loss for the 200 energy (backstabs) that is still 16k more damage on a fight where i did 235k or a 6.8% dps increase.

Now I know there are lots of approximations for this as well as math done in my head not on paper and the low level sub talents suck, but it does show that this talent may make it so sub daggers is a viable spec in the expansion. Especially if blizzard does not allow poisons to scale, thus decreasing the scalability of assassination.

Well, for starters I'm a bit skptical that you're averaging 1800 damage on evis, though I'm happy to see a WWS parse that proves me wrong.

Including crits

I know, including crits....a simple "here's my WWS, you're wrong" would be fine.

I could make some guesses based on your analyses and posts so far but I would be very interested to read what your top 5 things to change from alpha to release would be Aldriana.

As for myself, I would actually put: remove the cool down from fan of knives, somewhere in the top 5. It seems clear that Blizz is not going to drastically change our role as a primary DPS and give us some sort of meaningful group buff.
Thus, it would be nice to at least be able to fit a role of both single target and Aoe target DPS. Especially since every other DPS spec, including hybrid classes seems to be getting at least one spell that allows them to "fill" an AOE/DPS spot.

Buffing the 45 and 51 point talents would be nice as well, but frankly, as long as we are putting out competative DPS, I don't really see anything wrong with not feeling that it is necessary to take the last points in a given tree.

Well, lets figure this out, shall we?

Fully raid buffed, with all procs and activated abilities averaged out, a Sunwell-level rogue has something in the ballpark of 4000 AP. As jonnnney's gear is more T5-level, lets reduce that to, say, 3500. The base damage of Eviscerate is then 1045 + .15 * 3500 = 1570; since one is deep hemo, one does not have aggression, and probably can't afford Improved Eviscerate. Since he has 2/5 T5, we add 200 to that to get 1770. Then if, say, a third of those crit, we get an average damage of 1770 * 4/3 = 2360. However, we need to reduce this by armor; standard mitigation for a debuffed Hyjal boss is about 2200, and he appears to have no extra ArPen; so actual damage per eviscerate is around 84% of that 2360, or 1950 damage.

Note, of course, that we're dealing with a low-armor boss, full raid buffs, and T5 2/5; but 1800 is totally reasonable.

So, yes, Honor Among Thieves is a reasonably effective talent. That said: you're still a deep-sub rogue not using Hemo. I just don't see that the benefits you get are enough to offset all the powerful talents you lose.

Also, if you could all do me a favor and try to be a little bit less confrontational and a little more explanatory in posts, I think the flow of this conversation would go a lot better.

If my sources are correct, Shadow Dance is being changed from "enter stealth every 3 seconds for 9 seconds" to a buff that "allows you the use all of your abilities that require stealth while not stealthed for 3 seconds." Seems like an interesting shift, and I hope it will go in. Obviously timing will be tuned and all that, but at least your autoattacks won't become all screwy during the Shadow Dance.

Eh, not much impressed unless/until they up the duration a bit. That allows you to replace two backstabs with ambushes, or throw in a cheap shot, a garrote, and an ambush if you time it well. You probably get more out of the combo points from initiative and premed than the actual abilities. It has PvP applications for cheap shot, sap, and waylay, but that's about it. Plus, no more Master of Subtlety proc, correct?

I'm not really counting how many ideas I put up here, so it may be more or less than 5... but here goes:

1) Fan of Knives. Somehow, it seems odd to me to have rogues be top AoEers. I'm not necessarily saying they shouldn't do it, but it does seem odd. Since no cooldown FoK would rival if not surpass Arcane Burst, I'm not sure that's a direction we want to go. Additionally, it seems to me unfortunate that there's such a press towards daggers - and fast OHs - when Fan of Knives really wants the slowest weapons it can get.

So, what do we do with this? Well, lets fix the second problem first: rather than having is be based off weapon damage - and thus speed - lets just have it scale with AP, only. In terms of how much damage... well, lets think about this a moment. Arcane Explosion does 377-407 base damage, or 392 average; it has a spell coefficient of .214, meaning a raid-buffed Mage with, say, 1400 spell damage winds up doing on the order of 700 per cast; as it's Instant cast it's thus bounded by GCD; assuming some small amount of spell haste, that's sounds to me like ~500 DPS. Given that that burns through their mana at an impressive rate, we should probably be a bit lower - say, 300 DPS. Since we need to deal with armor (as no one, anywhere, ever, sunders every mob in an AoE pack), that means our raw damage probably need to be something on the order of 500 DPS pre-mitigation. So assuming a raid-buffed AP of 4000 (which, with Unleashed Rage, is totally doable), we'd thus want to do, say, 50% of our AP in damage, with no cooldown. Not sure if that works out exactly right - I haven't put a great deal of thought into tuning those numbers - but it sounds like the right ballpark.

2) General talent philosophy. Now, it's true that not all 51 point talents need to be worth taking all the time... but they definitely all need to be worth thinking about. For instance, at current, there are viable builds that don't go 41-points deep (TSH builds, mostly)... but there are also viable 41 point combat builds and 41 point assassination builds. 41-point sub builds are admittedly weak for PvE, but I hear they see play in PvP. So while I don't think the 51 point talents need to be clear "thou shalt take this" talents, I think it's also true that there should be top builds that include them.

3) The single biggest thing they could do to make deep-Sub builds viable is to make Relentless Strikes trainable, and stick something else in that slot in assassination. While the rest of low-end assassination is certainly good, it's not notably imbalanced. But Relentless Strikes is just stupidly powerful. So make it trainable - probably down around level 50 - and put something else in it's spot in the tree. What should that something be? I'm sure there are plenty of good ideas for this, but the first one that springs to mind for me is Improved Envenom - Envenom no longer clears poison stacks (you still need to have the poison stacks, but they're not consumed). This assumes, of course, that Envenom gets a new rank that does sufficient damage to be borderline viable as it is; if not, it'd need to be something else.

Now that it's no longer essential to go 11 points deep in assassination, all sorts of new opportunities are opened up - 0/50/21 Hemo seems potentially worth looking at, as do 0/20/51 (or 0/21/50) deep sub builds. On the whole, it gives a lot more flexibility.

4) High-end Assassination talents. Hunger for Blood should be buffed slightly- lets say 25 energy instead of 30. Cut to the Chase needs a huge buff... at the very least it needs to be all Evis/Envenom, not just crits - whether that's enough depends on what they do to the finisher damage potential. If nonSnD finishers are still only 5% of our damage, it will need more. The natural solution that occurs to me is to swap the positions of Cut to the Chase and Focused Attacks. Move Focused Attacks to the 45-point tier, expanding it to a 5 point talent that gives 8/16/24/32/40% chance to regen 5 energy on a crit; meanwhile, drop Cut to the Chase to the now-open position at the 40-point level, converting it to a 3-point talent that gives a 33/66/100% chance to refresh SnD on a successful Eviscerate/Envenom. Again, the exact balance would need playing with, but that's why we have playtesting. Past that... I'd probably make the damage bonus of Devious Poisons apply to Envenom as well, and call it good.

5) High-end Combat. So, I'm not even going to pretend that I can balance this in it's entirety; suffice it to say, all the stupid crap needs to die horrible painful deaths and get replaced with stuff that we might actually care about. Topping this list is Unfair Advantage - my only question here is what *were* they thinking. This talent is only useful for farming/grinding, which is not something people spec for. There should be a damage talent here - how does Improved Combat Potency sound, which allows Combat Potency to crit (restoring double energy) using your OH crit rate? Next on the list would be Prey on the Weak. I don't honestly have a lot of good ideas here, but it really should be another DPS talent. And given that Deep Assassination is for Mutilate builds, deep Sub is for Backstab builds, and Hemo has a nice tri-spec going for it now, it seems to me that it should be something that boosts Sinister Strike in some significant way. This might also be a handy place to stick a raid buff. So, utterly making something up on the spot (and I make no claims that this is balanced and/or good, but): how about... your Sinister Strikes apply a buff that increases the attack/casting speed of everyone in your group by 2/4/6/8/10% for 5 seconds, which doesn't stack with multiple rogues in the group?

6) Deep Sub. With the Relentless Strikes changes, it's not even clear to me how many additional changes this needs. My guess is that 0/21/50 daggers probably becomes decent with Relentless Strikes, but it's just really hard to say.

So, yeah. I don't claim any of these ideas are notably well balanced - they'd definitely need playtesting. But it does seem to me like it would be a significant step in the right direction relative to the current state of affairs.

Well the energy decrease of back stab will make it so you can do 33% more back stabs or in other words do 33% more damage with your back stab and yeah thats one hell of a buff.

So you have more combo points than you really can know what to do with, in addition you do 33% more damage from back stab (which with the +10% from sinister calling is at least as good as mutilate I believe), and finally and increase in eviscerate damage means that sub will likely do plenty of raid dps as with the current alpha talents.

What is currently unknown is what blizzard is doing with poisons and finishers. If poisons dont scale it is likely that mut and sub will be neck and neck in tier 7? but in tier 8 and tier 9 sub will likely lead out. Also if finishers are changed to be a much higher percentage of our damage mut will gain more than combat but sub will scale far better.

Does the wording of Honor Among Thieves suggest that it will work for the Rogue's own crits, like a 30% Seal Fate (plus autoattacks)?

Well, I think what they were thinking is that the throwing weapon probably wouldn't do enough damage by itself - which is true. They could change it to be an AoE version of Deadly Throw, certainly - throwing weapon damage plus some additional bonus - and, in fact, that might be easier to control the scaling of than the AP thing I suggested. But, regardless of how they go about doing it, they do need to change it to not be based on weapon damage, I think.

Well, as it stands, they seem to want to make the ability valid for PvE but not overpower it for PvP. I believe a duration increase slightly would help it out in PvE, but there are things to be said about this combo: Cheap Shot/Garotte/Ambush/Ambush --> premed Cheap Shot/Garotte/Ambush/Ambush.

This is without factoring in finishing moves at all. So as you can see... Shadow Dance will probably be really weak, really strong, or really removed.

I believe if you used shadow step, and maybe even prep so you could shadow step twice, with dance of shadows it would do nice spike damage having 2 +20% ambushes in a row then followed 30 seconds later with another +20% ambush and a regular one.

Some one may have already mentioned this thought but it seems as good a place as any to bring up my dream poison:

Crippling poison rank 3 reduces targets movement speed by x% and attack speed by y%

even if the attack speed reduction was only 1-2% that would be a huge difference on hard hitting melee bosses

In case you're referring to this for the Honor Among Thieves talent:
That talent procs on critting abilities & spells, not just every crit. So you'll want to figure out how many abilities & spells the various classes do per second and the chance for those to crit.

I think assuming an ability or spell to take about 3 seconds on avarage is slightly on the generous side, but it'll do for some napkin math (for the lack of exact modeling):
1 spell every 3 seconds, with an assumed crit chance of ~30%, means about 1 critting ability every 10 seconds.
A 30% chance to get a CP out of that means you'll get an avarage of 1 CP every 33 seconds. With 5 members in your group, that would mean about 5 CP's every 33 seconds, so roughly 1 CP ever 6.5 seconds.
In a 3 minute fight, this means an avarage of 27.7 CP's, or 5.5 finishers. So, your DPS increase from those finishers will be closer to about a fourth of your estimate I'm afraid.

Innnteresstiiing...


We are getting gimmick talents.. Its almost like they are giving us specific stuff, to capitalize on in future boss encounters to increase rogue raid validity.. That would be the most horrid solution to calm the increasing worries about rogue raid viability.


BTW.... What If I pop ColdBlood and stand in cleave on a raidboss and Turn the Tables procs?