Arindelest

It's also worth noting that even if it were normalized (as per the blue post), that wouldn't actually make it any better of an ability with daggers. Sure, Sinister Strike is normalized, but would you ever want to use it with a dagger? It would fix the problem with differing weapon speeds of the same weapon type, but I feel the real issue is that the ability is so inferior as Assassination where you're obviously using daggers.

 

Imala

actually you're right, I totally forgot daggers aren't normalized like other 1H weapons... so maybe it's normalized (since dagger normalization is 1.70 i feel that the limited testing I've done on those numbers don't warrant the call of normalized or not if you consider the margin of error), but as you said it's still trash for daggers.

 

Jagiya

Strange, they must have revoked it. When I tested it, I used the same weapons you did (both 130 DPS); with no variation in damage. This was quite a while ago though - the same day premades were introduced to the beta.

My understanding was that it had been changed to scale with your weapon DPS; not weapon damage/speed.

 

Imala

I really hope that the current version is a bug and not intended. I think what Gamnin wanted to say in his post is the behavior you describe.

 

Xythil

I am sorry for this, I am sure it has been asked a million times. I looked back 20 or so posts trying to find these answers but I couldn't. My question is simple what are the new stat weights for combat in 3.0+ ? And what is the best rotation these days?

I've been hearing Agility>AP>Haste/Hit>Crit.

According to the spreadsheet agility is giving the best returns point for point?

As for rotation.. with the SnD glyph you basically have the t4 bonus, which makes a 1s5r cycle very possible(with 5pt envenoms in there as well while rupture is still up). Would this be advantageous? 3s5r seems a waste when you only need 1pt to keep 100% SnD uptime.

Anyways sorry for asking things that have probably been stated a million times=p

 

◊ chalon

So couple of interesting developments tonight. First boss armor is being increased by 10%. I'm guessing it's the "armor value" which is being increased, not the actual DR percentage, which means boss armor will go up from ~10900 to ~12000. For my current gear according to Vulajin's sheet this is a loss of about 3-4% DPS. Combat will be affected a bit more though, since more of its damage is reduced by armor.

Second, Honor Among Thieves is stated to be "working as intended" whoever guessed it was right, the 1s cooldown is supposed to be on your party members, not on you. This should help Sub close the gap, but maybe not all the way.

And on a slightly related note, if you were worried about Hunters, they will once again be in striking range as their auto shots are no longer affected by WF/Imp Icy Talons haste effects.

 

Valen

I was a bit surprised about GC mentioning indirectly that combat (and especially dagger) builds are less viable in that post, considering that from what kalgan said during BlizzCon combat scaled better in their tests.

So out of curiousity, how are combat dagger builds doing at 80 at the moment?

 

Deke

That was me, and WOOHOO!

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Upcoming boss armor change

Raid viable subt here I come!

 

◊ chalon

I wouldn't go quite that far yet. It's still hard to say specifically how that will play out at 80. It'll go a long way towards closing the gap, but until we model it we won't be able to say how much.

 

CumpsD

Intersting blue post: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upcoming boss armor change

Seems Mutilate will be a very viable raiding spec, sometimes beating combat. Looking forward to lvl 80 theorycrafting (Guess I'll have to keep a set of daggers arround just in case :p)

---
Edit: Just catched up the last pages, didn't notice the quote had already been semi-posted a bit above

 

Xerop

I still feel you wont be switching combat<->mutilate just by changing weapons. Total optimized gear should come into account and affect results vastly.

Also, whats up with AeP? Attack Power still in the lead?

 

Xythil

So what is the best rotation for Combat guys?
w/ Snd glyph

 

Echophantom

Spreadsheet it. This isn't intended to be a troll, but this question gets asked every page or two by people too lazy to go back a couple pages, see the last person who asked it got told to spreadsheet it, and get the spreadsheet so they'd stop asking questions in the first place.

The sheet already has a tab that shows what each Xs/Yr rotation will give you in terms of uptime, clipping and energy generation. Learn to use it, and the vast majority of the discussion in this thread becomes superfluous.

 

Imiut

In this post you will find sp00n's addition to Vulajin's Roguecraft spreadsheet. It has the new option to come somewhat close to the AeP for your gear level. I suggest you use that to find out what's best for you.

For example, for me it's still Agi > AP > Exp > Hit > Crit > Haste > ArP > Str while for someone else it might be more like the AP > Agi > Exp > Crit > Hit > Haste > ArP > Str Aldriana posted on page 113. The order is as always still an approximation, use the spreadsheet to find out what's truly best for you.

Just to be clear:
The spreadsheet will help answer your questions regarding what gear/spec/rotation/glyphs to use.

 

Xythil

No. According to the spreadsheet Agility < AP < Hit rAting (for combat)


I saw this tab but I don't get how to figure out which is the best DPS rotation.

 

drumbum

You're just misunderstanding what he meant. The bug is in the tooltip for the Glyph, not the tooltip for Sprint. He's saying the Glyph correctly removes 15 seconds from the CD, but its tooltip had not been updated to reflect this change. It removed 1 minute when Sprint was a 5 minute base cooldown, but when they brought Sprint down to 3 minutes, they had to nerf the Glyph.

 

Imiut

Assuming you mean Agility > AP > Hit Rating here. Otherwise, no.

The tab is useless if you don't know what cycle you, in your gear, with your focus level and for what encounter you're working on can actually keep up. It does not provide a general rotation you can use at all times. For example, in my case I could choose to uphold a 2s/5r or a 5s/5r/5e cycle. They are 6 DPS apart on the sheet. But, the second is harder to maintain for me because I need some lucky potency procs and whatnot so in my situation, I'd rather go for the former. For you, this can be entirely different based on a number of things.

It'll be changed to Use: Increases the movement speed of your Sprint ability by an additional 30%, but reduces the duration by 5 sec. come 3.0.3. They promised to roll out this patch before Hallow's End was over, so it's probably coming next week.

 

drumbum

Regarding the discussion on Fan of Knives normalization: I'm not really sure why Blizzard insists on basing this ability on melee weapon damage instead of on thrown weapon damage. The ability would make a lot more sense if the rogue was throwing his "thrown weapons" around (after all, that's what they are for), and simultaneously by basing the damage on thrown weapon damage it eliminates any concern with fast speed vs. slow speed melee weapons. It does mean the requirement of using a thrown weapon over other ranged slot weapons, but with Deadly Throw, Blizzard has already shown they are OK with getting rogues to prefer thrown weapons, and as long as thrown weapons with good stats are available, it shouldn't be a problem.

In general I'm not sure if Blizzard really seems to consider weapon speed much when they are designing our abilities and talents. For example, if Blizzard changed poisons to a PPM system, they would simultaneously help bring Combat DPS in-line with Mutilate (assuming that is truly the situation at level 80 on beta right now), and also simultaneously eliminate the biggest factor contributing to the desire for fast weapons by Mutilate rogues. I think the only remaining Mutilate-spec effect that favors faster weapons would be Focused Attacks, unless I'm forgetting something.

 

CumpsD

With "keeping a set of daggers" I didn't mean just swap them, I was already thinking of the dual-spec ability to switch Muti for bosses, combat for trash.

But then again, dual-spec will probably be Pve/PvP to prevent going insane on the game, but a true PvE-only person could probably use it

 

bural

Could be due to pvp. Both assasination and sub lost some options while snared (shs, hfb removing nothing but bleeds).
FoK coupled with Deadly Brew works exactly like a Piercing Howl. On beta it's an amazing ability for catching that druid druid who just got out of melee range or making sure you'll catch up to that damn pillar humber.

 

Akka

I'm sorry, but 20-30 energy every three minutes at the cost of our "oh shit" move is perhaps marginally fun, but certainly not how I would chose to spend even a tier-1 talent point, much less a supposedly spec-defining 31st-point.
Additionnally, Overkill is just completely outside the feeling of the Assassination tree, it just screams "Subtlety". They should merge it with Master of Subtlety, and give some real Assassination-flavoured true 31-points spec-defining talent.
They should simply base it on AP, and be done with it.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

• Maestroquark

Hammer of the Righteous - Spell - World of Warcraft

That's how to do it right.

Edit:
Overkill's design goal seems to be to want Assassination rogues to use stealth. It's not that bad a goal, honestly, because otherwise there really wouldn't be a need to stealth at all.

What are you waiting for, a certain shade of green?

 

Akka

Not really, you still have the "main hand damage", which is the entirety of the problem.
The goal may be interesting (though I still see Subtelty as the tree for stealth, Combat has nothing in relation with stealth either and doesn't seem the worse for it), but the means aren't. The benefit is so tiny as to be practically inexistant on a boss, and it's not that great even in PvP, as you don't spare really much energy from it anyway.
It lacks synergy AND flavour with the rest of the tree, which is quite a problem from a talent so deep in the tree, and required for Mutilate on top of that.
I would gladly put a talent point into Fleet Footed, or even Improved Kidney Shot or Deadly Brew, rather than Overkill. I would not lose any measurable damage, and I would gain a LOT more in utility/survivability/convenience.

Additionnally, I don't see at all how it is related with Mutilate. There should have some thematical link between the two. Right now, I don't really see one.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Hidden

It's "main hand damage per second", it takes your char screen main hand DPS and multiplies it by 4 so your weapon speed doesn't matter.

 

Ashere

Ok, HaT working as intended is definitely good news. Now the only problem left with it is: it still needs reliably high critrates within your party to make it match up to the other trees.

Now for the non-dagger sub-build I'm working on: 7/7/50 +7
Scaling has to come from your finishers: hemo isn't supplying much of it.
Energy regen will allow for 1, maybe 2 hemo's per finisher, depending on HaT procs.
->At 1 HaT proc every second, you'll be doing 1 hemo every 4 seconds, saving the rest of your energy for finishers. (4 HaT (4 seconds) + 1 Hemo (3 seconds of energy) + 1 finisher (1 second of energy, gained during HaT))
->At 1 HaT proc every 2 seconds, you'll do around 2 hemo's every 7 second, saving the rest of your energy for finishers (3 HaT (6 seconds) + 2 hemo (6 seconds of energy) + 1 finisher (1 second of energy))
->At 1 HaT proc every 3 seconds, you'll take 2 hemo's every 9 seconds, get 3 other CP's from HaT, and use your energy for your finisher. You can do 3 hemo's, but you'll have to increase the cycletime to 10 seconds if you do, so take the HaT proc and swim in energy. But, since you'll have plenty of energy here, it may be worth investigating whether weaving in Ghostly Strikes could yield more damage.
->At 1 HaT proc every 4 seconds, you'll make 3 hemo's every 10 seconds, get 2 CP's from HaT.

-> Time per combo/finisher set is (3 second * amount of hemo's + 1 second) or (time required for HaT procs), whichever is highest.

Yes, there's still 7 unused talentpoints in that build, I think talentweights will fluctuate a lot, depending on your HaT procrate.
Imp Evisc might actually be looking around the corner for high procrates. It will definitely outperform Lethality once HaT starts proccing more often than once every 2 seconds.
Malice will remain a good talent to improve your procrates yourself, as well as improving your damage.
Ruthlessness seems to be an overkill on combopoints for high HaT procrates, but a requirement for lower procrates
DW is a must-have, as always
Imp SnD is also a must-have, or you won't be able to squeeze in enough extra finishers to make the difference.

Hitrating isn't as big an issue as it is for combat or assassination builds, assuming you're (easily) yellowcapped, and less reliant on Poison and not at all on Combat Potency.
Expertise certainly is an important stat. Reliability on special damage is a lot higher, every parried/dodged/blocked finisher costs you more DPS than a blocked hemo or Sinister Strike.

And yes, I know, finisher damage is only ~10% of our DPS. But if you look at it from another direction: doubling finisher damage means a DPS increase of ~10% as well.