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.
I really think you're underestimating Overkill. While it doesn't help you in extended boss fights as much as some other potential points, it's an incredible boost for trash, 5mans, 10mans and soloing, when encounters don't take an extra long time. Also, if you Vanish mid-fight or even relatively early in WotLK, you won't worry about threat ever again, so the "Oh shit" button mentality is fairly outdated in PvE.
Lastly, if you're talking pure convenience, I highly recommend you reconsider Overkill, because it's one of the most energy efficient ways to keep HfB up all the time -- and at only a 30 second timer, you're gonna have to get in the habit of doing just that.
Overkill is amazing for one talent point considering that it used to be spent on Vigor. It's an extra 60+ energy every fight, as opposed to Vigor's 10 at the onset. Give Overkill a chance; play with it some more, especially at 80, and I think you'll appreciate it more.
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.
Oh, true, my bad.
I read it as "do x times weapon damage, by second", rather than "do x times, weapon damage by second".
Indeed, that'd a very good fix for FoK.
Originally Posted by Zaniel
I really think you're underestimating Overkill. While it doesn't help you in extended boss fights as much as some other potential points, it's an incredible boost for trash, 5mans, 10mans and soloing, when encounters don't take an extra long time. Also, if you Vanish mid-fight or even relatively early in WotLK, you won't worry about threat ever again, so the "Oh shit" button mentality is fairly outdated in PvE.
Lastly, if you're talking pure convenience, I highly recommend you reconsider Overkill, because it's one of the most energy efficient ways to keep HfB up all the time -- and at only a 30 second timer, you're gonna have to get in the habit of doing just that.
Overkill is amazing for one talent point considering that it used to be spent on Vigor. It's an extra 60+ energy every fight, as opposed to Vigor's 10 at the onset. Give Overkill a chance; play with it some more, especially at 80, and I think you'll appreciate it more.
Incredible boost ? I gain 20 energy with Overkill. That's exactly 2 seconds energy regen. So if I spend anything more like 1,5 seconds reaching the target because I'm in stealth, Overkill is a net loss in DPS. I fail to see how such a thing can be "amazing" even on trash.
And I admit I don't know the WotLK fights, but I'd be surprised if none of them has a better use for a total threat wipe/remove snare than to bank it as 20 energy.
I also fail to see the convenience gain. What's annoying with HfB is to keep track of the timer and not miss the refresh once in 25-30 seconds in the middle of the fight, and I don't see how Overkill help in any way in this regard - you're not trying to imply that just being able to refresh it 1 second later before your first opener of a boss fight is a convenience huge gain, are you ?
Considering Overkill replace Vigor, it sure isn't a great difference. But it's not because it replace a very crappy talent, that it's not a very crappy talent itself.
And to be honest, I vastly prefer Vigor to Overkill : at least Vigor is useful every single time you are forced to let your energy bar fills up (which is perhaps never on no-movement boss like Teron, but happens quite a lot on boss where you have to move, wait, get out of fire and the like), while Overkill is useful at best three times a fight, for a paltry 60 energy in total.
A single bonus Mutilate in a whole 5-min boss fight, and only if you burn twice through your oh-shit-ability at the best moment, is really nothing to write home with. That you call it "amazing" is something that simply boggle my mind.
Make Overkill refresh your HfB each time you use Rupture, THEN I will say it's a very good talent, with lots of convenience. But until then, it's still (one of) the worst useless talent in all the rogue's trees.
If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !
So, I recently got [Blade of Savagery] and was thinking of going Fist+Sword. I used Vuljain's spreadsheet to determine where best to get the extra CP for 5/5 CQC and 5/5 Sword Spec, and I noticed for a 5s/5r rotation, taking points off Improved SnD doesn't cause any DPS drop.
So, I recently got [Blade of Savagery] and was thinking of going Fist+Sword. I used Vuljain's spreadsheet to determine where best to get the extra CP for 5/5 CQC and 5/5 Sword Spec, and I noticed for a 5s/5r rotation, taking points off Improved SnD doesn't cause any DPS drop.
Is that normal?
5s/5r is an outdated cycle. With energy regen and glyphs now it's possible to run a 5s/5r/5e with a little management. Assuming you intend to push for max dps you'll be fitting in more finishers so the extra SnD time becomes very important again. Aldriana determined that the best place to drop a point is to go 4/5 sword spec as it's the lowest dps contribution per talent point.
Oh, true, my bad.
I read it as "do x times weapon damage, by second", rather than "do x times, weapon damage by second".
Indeed, that'd a very good fix for FoK.
Incredible boost ? I gain 20 energy with Overkill. That's exactly 2 seconds energy regen. So if I spend anything more like 1,5 seconds reaching the target because I'm in stealth, Overkill is a net loss in DPS. I fail to see how such a thing can be "amazing" even on trash.
And I admit I don't know the WotLK fights, but I'd be surprised if none of them has a better use for a total threat wipe/remove snare than to bank it as 20 energy.
I also fail to see the convenience gain. What's annoying with HfB is to keep track of the timer and not miss the refresh once in 25-30 seconds in the middle of the fight, and I don't see how Overkill help in any way in this regard - you're not trying to imply that just being able to refresh it 1 second later before your first opener of a boss fight is a convenience huge gain, are you ?
Considering Overkill replace Vigor, it sure isn't a great difference. But it's not because it replace a very crappy talent, that it's not a very crappy talent itself.
And to be honest, I vastly prefer Vigor to Overkill : at least Vigor is useful every single time you are forced to let your energy bar fills up (which is perhaps never on no-movement boss like Teron, but happens quite a lot on boss where you have to move, wait, get out of fire and the like), while Overkill is useful at best three times a fight, for a paltry 60 energy in total.
A single bonus Mutilate in a whole 5-min boss fight, and only if you burn twice through your oh-shit-ability at the best moment, is really nothing to write home with. That you call it "amazing" is something that simply boggle my mind.
Make Overkill refresh your HfB each time you use Rupture, THEN I will say it's a very good talent, with lots of convenience. But until then, it's still (one of) the worst useless talent in all the rogue's trees.
You aren't timing your Overkill usage properly if you're only getting 20 energy out of it. You should get about 40 energy out of it when starting from stealth, and 30-40 energy if you use the Vanish trick. I'm not saying it's amazing by any means, but I am saying it's situationally useful. Yeah you aren't going to do Vanish/Overkill on a fight where you might need your Vanish, but that's few and far between to be honest.
I like it better than Vigor simply because it gives me more control. I can't necessarily control when I'm going to have sufficient downtime to cap out on Energy, but I can control when and at which point I Vanish/Overkill.
I definitely agree it's a lackluster and not that great of a talent, but I just disagree that it doesn't have its uses.
Was sword spec nerfed or something? Since when did 5% crit become greater than extra main hand swings that can crit?
Or is this just for Fist/Sword?
I think it's because there are generally faster daggers available than faster swords, so a fist mh, 1.4 speed dagger oh would be better than sword mh, 1.5 speed sword oh.
You aren't timing your Overkill usage properly if you're only getting 20 energy out of it. You should get about 40 energy out of it when starting from stealth, and 30-40 energy if you use the Vanish trick. I'm not saying it's amazing by any means, but I am saying it's situationally useful. Yeah you aren't going to do Vanish/Overkill on a fight where you might need your Vanish, but that's few and far between to be honest.
I like it better than Vigor simply because it gives me more control. I can't necessarily control when I'm going to have sufficient downtime to cap out on Energy, but I can control when and at which point I Vanish/Overkill.
I definitely agree it's a lackluster and not that great of a talent, but I just disagree that it doesn't have its uses.
I think the point is that if you didn't have to take overkill, you wouldn't. Overkill is not modeled in the theorycrafting spreadsheet, but even if it were, it's contribution to damage on anything other than trash would be negligible, and well under the contribution of most other talent points in the assassination tree.
40 is the maximum energy you can get from an Overkill usage assuming a normal assassination dps cycle, and even then it pretty much requires that you only use it when you are already at full energy, and ideally, already have at least 3 combo points on your target (if you have to throw more than 2 mutilates in this 6 second period you will not be able to get the full benefit).
So let's say it's 40 energy every 3 minutes (averages to 13.3 energy per minute). Just to give some sense of scale, Adrenaline Rush (same tier in Combat) gives 165 energy every 5 minutes- even without vitality (33 energy per minute), and can be glyphed to 4 minute cooldown (41.25 energy), and doesn't waste any other cooldowns, and is simply much easier and less restrictive to use. Given that the assassination tree already can cause energy pooling with CttC and a 3 finisher rotation, it is debatable if this contribution is worth the headache.
[EDIT: as per chalon's note, I have removed incorrect information suggesting that a vanish/mutilate macro might reset your swing timer]
One minor note, we verified that Vanishing does not reset your swing timer. So if you have a macro setup theoretically you shouldn't lose any white attacks. I'm definitely not saying it's a huge boost either way, but it is a little thing you can throw in to slightly increase DPS. You can argue the slight DPS boost isn't worth the headache and that may be true, but my point is just that a.) it is a slight DPS boost and b.) it's probably situationally more of a DPS boost than Vigor is, which was the previous required talent.
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.
i was thinking the same but i am not sure how a raid is to be convinced that the dependancy of your dps relies on your group. that is what also GC has mentioned. nonetheless if HaT stay as intended this may be the best HaT sub build for pve: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
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.
Forgive me if this post is a little too anecdotal in nature. I'll try to keep it meaningful.
HaT sounded like a lot of fun and I was worried it would be nerfed soon, so I specced for it for yesterday's BT clear. I was running 5/12/44. Here are my observations:
Sub/HaT is a viable spec . . . sometimes. The problem with it is its chaotic nature. You get to pick up some really strong dps talents along the way (Deadliness and Sinister Calling are insane with all the available raid buffs and the greater emphasis on Agi/Ap in gems/gear), which helps, but you have to depend far too much on the rng nature of HaT. On 2 of our 9 fights, I was top dps, and on those fights, I would estimate that my energy was more than 90% spent on finishers. Other fights where I was much lower I had to use 3-4 Hemos between finishers.
It seems really odd that the nature of HaT is that variable, I suppose it would take more consistent testing to figure out why. I suspect its usefulness drops considerably as the size of your raid decreases.
Sub/HaT has the weird issue of using Hemo as its base combo builder, wherein Hemo is supposed to be this grand raid debuff, but you end up using Hemo a lot less which makes its debuff nature irrelevant. At 80, when I have 10 more points to spend and can comfortably pick up SftS, I would probably skip Hemo and just use Backstab.
Sub/HaT is the most fun spec I've ever used. Sometimes I would blink and five combo points would magically appear. There were plenty of times that I simply could not keep up with the combo pts, spamming finishers as soon as my energy pool/GCD would let me. It also has some unexpectedly nice side effects. For example, on Supremus I was able to spend 10 combo pts on a Deadly Throw and a full Slice and Dice during the kite phase and still had 5 combo pts for a full Rupture once I got back to him.
Does the additional armor on bosses at 80 make maces or serrated blades more viable on lvl 80 combat specs?
Since Serrated Blades is a flat armor reduction, it is weaker with this change than it was before. Since Mace Spec is percentage-based, it is slightly stronger - though I strongly suspect it's still weaker than the other weapon specializations.
Originally Posted by Xythil
Was sword spec nerfed or something? Since when did 5% crit become greater than extra main hand swings that can crit?
Or is this just for Fist/Sword?
I have no idea what you're referencing here, so I'll give the abbreviated summary:
1) With Prey on the Weak and the addition of Eviscerate/Envenom to SS cycles, Crit is more valuable than it was in TBC; hence, for the MH weapon, Fist Spec tends to be more powerful than Sword spec.
2) For the OH, a fast sword is still ideal; however, at level 80 there aren't any swords faster than 1.6, and the difference between a 1.6 sword and a 1.4 dagger is sufficient to favor the dagger in combination with a fist weapon. Hence, the best combat weapons available at the current time are fist/dagger.
3) If one does have a good OH sword to go with a MH fist, there aren't enough points in combat to get all DPS talents. It has been shown that the 5th point in sword spec has the lowest damage contribution, for reasons that are related to both above points.
Since Serrated Blades is a flat armor reduction, it is weaker with this change than it was before. Since Mace Spec is percentage-based, it is slightly stronger - though I strongly suspect it's still weaker than the other weapon specializations.
I have no idea what you're referencing here, so I'll give the abbreviated summary:
1) With Prey on the Weak and the addition of Eviscerate/Envenom to SS cycles, Crit is more valuable than it was in TBC; hence, for the MH weapon, Fist Spec tends to be more powerful than Sword spec.
2) For the OH, a fast sword is still ideal; however, at level 80 there aren't any swords faster than 1.6, and the difference between a 1.6 sword and a 1.4 dagger is sufficient to favor the dagger in combination with a fist weapon. Hence, the best combat weapons available at the current time are fist/dagger.
3) If one does have a good OH sword to go with a MH fist, there aren't enough points in combat to get all DPS talents. It has been shown that the 5th point in sword spec has the lowest damage contribution, for reasons that are related to both above points.
I probably should be clear I was referencing level 70 builds not level 80, sorry.
Regarding level 80... is combat swords dead due to itemization failure? (1.6 offhand swords, 2.5 mainhand swords?)
Regarding level 80... is combat swords dead due to itemization failure? (1.6 offhand swords, 2.5 mainhand swords?)
Dead? No. Disadvantaged? Yes.
Right now the best weapon combination for a SS build is Calamity's Grasp and Webbed Death. This is in part due to the fact that it's the only ilvl 226 MH rogue weapon available, and partly due to the fact that fists are just good. However, not everyone is going to have a Calamity's Grasp for a while; in terms of using other weapons, while swords might be a bit behind fists at equal ilvl, it's generally smaller than the difference between tiers of weapons - that is, an ilvl 213 sword will tend to be better than an ilvl 200 fist.
Hence, swords are no longer the optimal weapon, but depending on your itemization luck they may be a totally viable option. To figure out what's ideal based on what you have, I would recommend, that's right, using the spreadsheet.
Has anyone else running the Combat 5s/5r/5e cycle and queueing 60/80/60 had significant problems with capping out energy, particularly with the 80? I finally got to raid with this last night, clearing all of SW & BT, and what I found was that for those 80s, I would get damn close to or past capping, due to the combination of massive energy regen and GCDs.
Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun frantically trying to dump abilities while staying under cap, while managing cooldowns in such a way as that they wouldn't get wasted. Drums in particular were really scary to use, since they give a 2s GCD instead of our usual 1s. But I think that this may be another case of where the spreadsheet shows that something is theoretically better, but practically not. (Compare this to the issues faced by Combat Potency Shiv builds, prior to nerf).
I've searched around looking for the answer, but I can't figure out why my poison crit rate isn't equal or near to my actual crit rate. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious, but I thought that since crit rating now affects everything equally, that my poison crit rate would be similar to my melee white and yellow attacks.
Here is the link to my WWS over (most) of a BT run last night. As you can see, my instant poison crit rate is only 20%~, while my SS and swings are much higher--30% and 36%, respectively. Wound poison, while I only used it for a short period of time on Naj'entus, shows a similar proc rate.
Any ideas? Am I missing something painfully obvious? I feel that I am
Has anyone else running the Combat 5s/5r/5e cycle and queueing 60/80/60 had significant problems with capping out energy, particularly with the 80? I finally got to raid with this last night, clearing all of SW & BT, and what I found was that for those 80s, I would get damn close to or past capping, due to the combination of massive energy regen and GCDs.
Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun frantically trying to dump abilities while staying under cap, while managing cooldowns in such a way as that they wouldn't get wasted. Drums in particular were really scary to use, since they give a 2s GCD instead of our usual 1s. But I think that this may be another case of where the spreadsheet shows that something is theoretically better, but practically not. (Compare this to the issues faced by Combat Potency Shiv builds, prior to nerf).
Yes, a few combat rogues upthread reported similar pooling with full combat, due to the sinister strike glyph. This may be related to some reports that the glyph is giving combo points for other abilities, which is believed to be a bug.
In either case, I think a fourth e finisher in the rotation is not necessarily a bad thing, as 1 second of SnD downtime is not nearly as bad for a combat rogue as it is for an Assassination rogue dropping SnD or HfB.
You could also dump 50 energy into a Vanish/Garrote macro, I suppose. These conditions would be difficult to simulate on a dummy without raid buffs though, so it's hard to say which method is better.
Forgive me if this post is a little too anecdotal in nature. I'll try to keep it meaningful.
HaT sounded like a lot of fun....
Thanks for the post. I was actually discussing doing something like this in my guild's rogue forums right before reading your post. With raid-wide buffs and raid members in high crit end-game gear, after reading the post on HAT last night I've drooled at the idea of trying this out. Most of what you typed up is what I had swimming in my head. Sub has very little synergy, and the fact you wouldn't actually perform Hemo very much, but rely on finishing moves more seems backwards. Building combo points when off target wasn't something that actually occured to me though, and that's definitely a plus for fights where we spend a lengthy time off target.
It's also worth noting that, last I checked, no one ever claimed the 5s5r5e cycle was tight. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's been previously asserted in this thread (and if it hasn't, I'm asserting it now) that 3s5r5e and perhaps even 2s5r5e should be sustainable, at least at level 80 with proper gearing. So I can't say I'm particularly surprised that 5s5r5e sometimes yields excess SnD uptime.
2) For the OH, a fast sword is still ideal; however, at level 80 there aren't any swords faster than 1.6,
This isn't quite true. They changed the Malygos OH (Hailstorm) to 1.5 a couple patches ago and there's also a BoE epic (Avool's Sword of Jin) that's 1.5 speed.
This isn't quite true. They changed the Malygos OH (Hailstorm) to 1.5 a couple patches ago and there's also a BoE epic (Avool's Sword of Jin) that's 1.5 speed.
Hmm, point. I guess I missed those changes. However, I don't think it affects the fundamental analysis very much; there are still faster daggers available than swords, which helps make up the difference between Sword Spec and CQC on the OH. Hence, I suspect that, when the numbers are all worked out, dropping 4 points in utility talents to use a 1.5 sword with 4/5 sword spec instead of a 1.4 speed dagger is not going to be a terribly interesting proposition. And in terms of straight sword spec versus a fist/dagger setup, the advantage of fist spec over sword spec on the MH will matter more than the OH situation. So I still think it's true that at equal ilvl, fist/dagger will probably run ahead of sword/sword; but the difference is likely to be less than a tier of itemization. So, again: swords may be somewhat disadvantaged, but check the spreadsheet to deal with your exact situation.
Is it at all viable to replace mutilate with ss in a deep assassination build? It's possible to spec to blade flurry and still have focused attacks, making the problems with armor vs. combat at high levels essentially disappear. I also notice in such a build, talent points don't feel wasted at all.
10/22/08, 9:29 AM
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