I think that is very important to recognise. It is a very natural human response to fear change, especially when the nature of the change is poorly understood or communicated. You can be sure that there are forum threads in which all number of DPS classes (or hybrids with DPS specs) are dreading the lich king raids where all their spots will be taken by rogues.

There is a recurrent theme across a number of these posts. "My spot is safe because I contribute XYZ, but...". Whether XYZ is that you are a raid leader, class leader, guild officer, or just that you have 99.9% attendance and give maximum commitment to every raid. If Blizzard succeeds, we will be picking our raid members by these attributes and not the class they selected on the character creation screen. I do not think the game will be worse off as a result.



I recently realised something that may have been obvious before about Onslaught. If you stack hunger for blood in stealth, onslaught reduces the cost to 20 energy (abilities used in stealth or for 6 seconds after). If you did happen to let HFB drop, vanishing to re-stack then re-opening would significantly reduce the penalty. I'm wondering what other benefits onslaught has. The other obvious one would be some kind of pre-vanish energy/combo point pooling to allow you to get 2 finishers and 2 mutilates inside that 6 second window. Vanish->Rupture->mutx2->Envenom?

If you could time it well, you could also time in a HFB refresh while vanished. If you could pull off 1 HFB refresh, 2 finishers and 2 mutilates, that's 50 energy saved which is not to be sniffed at. To keep the white damage loss to a minimum, you could macro the vanish->hfb->finisher part as a castsequence.

Although neat, 50energy on a 3mins cooldown hardly compares to the energy provided by AR or saved by Premed.

I'm not sure how vitality works, but I'm assuming it ups our standard energy regen from 10/second to 11/second. If it's just a straight up 10%, we're talking 22 energy/second on AR, translating to 330 energy/15 seconds every 5 minutes, or 1.10 energy per second extra (not sure if I'm thinking correctly)? Could someone else tell me if it affects our talented energy intake (combat potency, relentless)?

Saving those 50 energy per three minutes translates to ~0.31 EPS extra. I have no idea how you could average that out and calculate if it'd be worth it killing two seconds or so of white damage but I'd guesstimate that it probably is. I'm not quite sure if the current mutilate builds still maintain a rough 50% white damage, it'd be easy to calculate it probably (calculate 50% of your DPS for two seconds, add in poison proc possibility somehow, translate the 50 energy into a partial mutilate or finisher and compare?). I'm just no good at mathematic models, I just follow around what you guys theorize around here which I can more or less follow the concept behind them.

I'd say it certainly isn't comparable to AR or Premed, but since mutilate is ahead of combat for now this might just prove a neat gimmick to get some additional output.

EDIT: Fixed numbers x_x

Just a side question please (first post btw, love the site!)

With the gear that has been shown in Wotlk, I have noticed quite a bit of haste listed. I was thinking that this is partially to blame for the lack of fast speed daggers available, since everyone will have a certain amount of haste, lowering their weapon speed.

Has anyone looked at what amount of haste will be "normal" for raiding? As in, using similar gear available from multiple sources, will there be an average amount of haste for a typical raiding rogue, and what will that make their attack speeds?

I don't claim to be able to theorycraft at all (math skills???) but I do remember there being a limit to hastes effectiveness once weapon speeds get close to the 1 second mark...so wouldn't a certain amount of haste on all our raiding gear make weapon speeds a little less relevant?

I can't imagine Blizz putting in 1.3 speed daggers knowing that with an average amount of haste they would become 0.5 speed monsters (....think of the IP procs then!) but I am almost certain that they are taking it into account. I just wanted to see what everyone thought about this...

Edit: Found a typo...

With respect to poisons being a much larger part of our total damage now there was talk about bosses that may be immune to poisons (a few examples were cited). This was just commented on by Ghostcrawler stating that there may be some immunity based bosses in Wrath but the mechanic is under discussion and it's likely that it will be phased out at some point.

Wouldn't it be funny if, in an attempt to remain anonymous and not arouse suspicion, our mystery rogue actually used poor grammar, slang, bad ideas and some choice words which ended up getting him banned?

Edit to add blue to Blizz quote.

I hate to sound...well, elitist, but 5-mans aren't really that important. Nor are they necessarily "balanced" as far as buffs - I've PUG'd heroics where I don't get ANY real buffs, except for Fort or a Healthstone or something irrelevant to my dps. But again, gear comes into play, and if you've got enough gear and your group has enough gear/teamwork to get the badges, who cares if you're getting beaten by that 'lock who only knows how to cast Shadow Bolt?

But if you're truly concerned, realize that the scenario you're coming up with is really, really generic. There are so many other variables - I guarantee that you'll have be doing the *exact* same dps baseline, because there are more issues then just the numbers in abstract. Do you have a Beta key and if so, have you actually had legitimate problems getting into groups? If you have actual concrete examples, that would make this argument a lot more convincing.

This is a good point. Another thing to consider would be that 5 man instances are generally balanced around less than optimal play.

If a dpser knows how to play their class well, as would be expected in a raid environment, they should be more than useful in a 5-man environment, despite less than optimal buff synergy.

A more legitimate concern would be baselining enough for competitiveness in 10 man raids, since there will likely be a number of guilds who choose that as their primary progression course, but even that is tricky due to the very wide options for group configuration in a 10-man situation.

The flaw in this kind of train of thought is that you see the damage that poisons do to high armor targets as a "bonus" where it is actually nothing more but a determining trait of the high armor target. We rogues loose out on both encounters, in one way or the other... Versus the high armor target, all our non-poison based abilities suffer reductions relative to the value of the bosses armor and on poison immune targets we loose a huge chunk of our dps from poisons.( which is slightly reduced by the fact that you can use whetstones or other temporary weapon buffs)

To further complicate matters blizzard could do the same thing they did in TK, add a target that has ultra high armor, and is poison immune( enter the Void Reaver) where melee was highly unwanted during the progress phases... It was not unheard of to completely sack non-tanking melee for more healing/ranged/tanks. True, this has changed as the encounter grew more trivial with the gear growth but the fact is unchanged that it should not happen again!

To conclude please do not scold blizzard for trying to remove the whole problem of immunity bosses, they make the game suffer, and through that make us as the consumers suffer as well.
I apologize if I seem to come hard on you, but immune encounters are in no way "fun" and shouldn't exist if I had something to say about it. High resistance encounters are a different matter, they only add flavor and uniqueness to a boss, and that option should be further explored.

I have a question about something I see people stating around these boards sometimes. People state that if you see multiple gains of slice and dice in WWS logs on a stationary fight that this is a prime indication for bad rogue. However there is no way to see in WWS logs how long snd actually dropped during a particular fight now is there?
Then why state it's inherently bad when you see more than a few snd gains in WWS?

Personally I try to regenerate some energy before refreshing my snd at the last split second, now the game may actually report this as a buff dropping out but it's certainly not down more than 0.1 second (and probably less than that). This results in less than 0.5 seconds in total on a fight like Brutallus. Is this really bad practice? Is it something about how the game registers buffs that I shouldn't do that?

I think that Aldrianna is right, and that people need to stop worrying about stuff like whether or not Rogues will be obsolete, and instead focus discussion on what Ghostcrawler has actually asked for, that is, what current mechanics and talents "feel wrong." It might help if we were to agree upon a list of the top 10 things that "feel wrong" in the current beta, and then have Vulajin post them on the Beta forums.

Here are a few that we keep seeing:
1) Shiv scaling better than Sinister Strike. No need to elaborate.
2) Shadow Dance being a keybinding nightmare, as well as not utilizing Master of Subtlety talent.
3) Killing Spree disrupting normal attacks. Not being able to use SS while doing it is one thing, but losing white hits and having to toggle auto attack back on makes it feel very clunky.
4) Fan of Knives having both a longish cooldown AND a high energy cost. Compare to Warriors' Whirlwind, for example, which is used in their normal DPS rotations.
5) Poor itemization in terms of weapon speeds.
6) Fast daggers scaling better than slower daggers, due to poisons.
7) Massive opportunity cost to keep Expose Armor up, if needed. Perhaps change Imp. EA to behave like CttC, but work off of Eviscerate or SnD?
8) Gross inferiority of Mace Specialization's armor penetration effect, due to the order in which it is applied. It needs to be applied before debuffs, and possibly slightly down-tuned after that.
9) Lack of Mutilate glyph. One exists for SS, BS, Shiv, & Hemo, but not Mutilate.
10) Lack of a defining feel to spec'ing deep Combat, other than steady damage and superior energy regeneration. Perhaps add a Tier 9 or 10 talent that allows us to use Axes, sharing the specialization with Swords.