Well here is something to consider and it's a very off beat way to look into rogue itemization. Most dps classes are knee deep into red gems (Even healers are Crimson spinel stacker's). Now look at the value difference in red gems to yellow gem... it's roughly 3-1, 2-1 ratio in gold value. Yellow gems are very underused and are just a step up in usefulness for most classes as green gems are. The only thing keeping yellow gems from being vendor trash is the ever large and still growing rogue community.

This may sound silly but blizzard has got to be keeping the value of the other color gems in the back of their mind and trying to give some classes reason to stack the non red gems.

From a cash standpoint having to stack the gem that has a very low value due to few classes needing that color isn't necessarily bad. However with the current concept build of having leather being more useful and interchangeable with classes that don't want or need hit stacking could definitely cause major problems. If we need 650+ hit rating and our leather only has the ability to max stack 400 we're going to be in a pickle.

Blizzard "could" stack a ton of gem slots in each gear (2-6 sockets per item) which might help us stack our hit. However now we're not even getting items really we're getting empty shells that we need to dump more gold into just to make it an actual complete item. Mix that with enchants and upgrades are going to be back hand blessings. When upgrades equal a big bill before you even get to use them it's going to create frustration. (Seriously does anyone want every piece of gear to have 3-5 gem slots beside Jewelcrafters?)

From preliminary numbers it seems fairly evident that blizzard has got to lower our need for hit to some degree. We should still have to stack hit, but having to stack 5-10 times more hit then the other classes that will use our gear will create a lot of problems with itemization in the long run.

As of right now we seem to be the only class where this will be a major problem, where the classes that share our gear want/need completely different stat to this degree.


(woo for first EJ post)

If you are going to bother being alarmist about druid itemization vs. rogue itemization and how this impacts the gear available to us, I'd recommend being much more worried about the fact that other melee classes prefer strength to attack power.

That said, I'm not actually worried. I am confident that rogues will still do great single target damage, and that we will be able to earn raid spots. I just wanted to point out that if you were going to declare that the sky is falling, there are much lower hanging clouds.

How bad what got until SWP T6 items?

I actually don't mind cat druid and rogues sharing the same type of gear since their mechanics are similar (energy and combo points) and they both can only wear leather. However, I think Blizzard should itemize cat druid/rogue items in a way that would make it a lot less desirable for hunters/enhancement shamans/dps warriors. These classes have a wider array of gear options, have different mechanics, but yet can mix in rogue leather at any time. Also, some of the current best in slot options for these classes are often the rogue leather pieces. ie. Duplicitous Guise, Gloves of the Immortal Dusk, Leggings of the Immortal Night etc. Something clearly is wrong with that.

No need to change Rogue Gear, just give plate/mail gear equally good stats and drop crappy itemization like agi on warrior gear or mp5 on mail. at least int is getting better for shamans, so mail is a bit better for them now

Though I agree on that part, I think Blizz should definitely make the other leather pieces more interesting to rogues as well. So yes, I DO mean druid tanking and caster gear. Don't ask me how they should go about it, but it IS viable for a druid to roll on about any piece of rogue armor already. While at the same time, they don't have to share all the other leather gear with ANYONE.
There's definitely loads of options they could implement:
Spirit affecting energy regen
Strength affecting resillience, parry %, armor rating, you name it
Intellect directly affecting poison damage (and not just crit, I'm talking flat poison damage here)

Yes, in a good guild a rogue will get prio over a dr00d for rogue gear at any time. But for the occasional moron guild, it'd teach the crap druids a good lesson if rogues were to viably roll for druid gear as well, for off-spec purposes or whatever.

Yes, this was also what I was getting at, just didn't mention it in a direct way. Intellect should be reworked to be a good stat offensively for hunters/shamans so when they look at rogue gear, it is not as desirable. I guess we're seeing some of this with the reworking of spirit to caster classes to apply to damage through talents. Plate dps gear should itemize more for strength and be better than a leather equivalent for warriors. No more taking rogue leather and gemming all three slots with epic strength gems and having it best in slot for a dps warrior.

Hunters also got their int=>AP talent moved from deep MM to low MM where every spec can grab it.

However, it looks like mana will continue to be quite meaningless for shaman, and larger mana pools for hunter will continue to be as important as larger energy pools are for rogues

So, I wouldn't count on their gear being better yet.

I have to admit, I'm a little unsettled with the WoTLK beta talents. The combat tree is seemingly remaining more or less the same in terms of Pve mechanics, especially since Murder Spree, while a fun sounding ability, offers nothing when the shoe hits the floor.

How does Blade Flurry compare to Murder Spree DPS-wise? My initial reaction is that BF tops MS in both single and multiple target situations. Throwing Specialization and Stay of Execution both have circumstantial uses in Pve, I suppose, but are hardly anything really worth putting talent points into. Fan of Knives + MS + BF at the same time may be a pretty devastating combination, but it's usefulness in terms of energy spent / DPS gain seems circumstantial at best.

Will the critical strike damage bonus of Prey on the Weak favor Combat fists or daggers at all? Does the actual math support entertaining the thought of using anything but swords?

My second line of thought is more in-tune with what a lot of others have wrote regarding Rogue utility. Since we really gained nothing in terms of utility (Dismantle is all), I wonder what the situation will look like in both 10-man and 25-man raids. I assume 10-man raids will be rather difficult and often require top-DPS spec's, so will rogues be up-to snuff? Or will more people gravitate toward competitive DPS, buff and utility classes?

When it's all said and done, I really wish there was more. As the new talents sit now, I think we look somewhat sad. Specifically, most of the talents seem decent, but their positioning in the trees seems to lack synergy... even seems a bit contradicting or confused. Maybe it's just me?

It's not just you.

Rogues got Riposte removed as a usable talent, then added back in as Dismantle. And instead of making vanish work properly, the devs are just adding 'Super Redundant Vanish' in Subtlety.

Then, you can play with Fan of Knives or Murder Spree which should be of extremely limited use both in 5 mans and raids.

'Hunger for Blood' is the only new skill which isn't ho-hum. Does anyone else feel like the entire development team is just bored to death with rogues? The way that every patch cycle basically omits them from the patch notes doesn't bode well.

What I myself and probably some others hoped for is that WOTLK would finally provide us with a choice to what to socket. Some stats scale very well when stacked so ideally the game would provide a choice in socketing matching your playstyle.

I for one love seeing a fast attacking rogue. Speed and nice dmg is just something that always made me go for rogue or assasintype classes in games. My choice could then be scketing for more haste.
A Guildie of mine is totally mad about big dmg he could then socket for armour penetration.
Another friend of mine hates missing he will socket for hit and expertise.

How cool would it be if all 3 of these options are around the same dpsincrease. Now THAT would be something that is truely fun. Or if armour penetration and expertise give more bang for your buck till the cap and after that hit so you really have to consider your gear and what raidbuffs you are getting normally. I hate it that for the best increase of dps I always have to socket hit, I don't even need to use the spreadsheet cause as long as I'm under 363 hit I will know what it will suggest.... The choice in what to socket would be alot more fun IMO.

How I understand the description of Murder Spree, it hits 5 times no matter the amount of targets, so as AoE spell it's clearly a whole lot weaker than Blade Flurry. On single target it might be a worthwile talent to use, let's estimate some. Let's say your MH hits for 1000, and OH for 500. That would make 7500 damage in 2.5 (or in 2 seconds, depending do the attacks start at 0.0 or 0.5 seconds, which would obviously increase the dps) seconds, or 3000 dps with no energy cost for the duration, or 7500/120 = 62.5 dps per 2 minutes. These numbers were just pulled off the hat to explain how I see the mechanics, I have absolutely no idea how they would seem in beta, or at level 80 raid scenarios. Since we don't know yet does it stop your white damage for the duration, or other details like that it's obviously just far off speculation, and another matter would be if it's worth it to go that far down in the combat tree either.

When our guild started Karazhan back in the days, and had only one group going at first weeks, I basically just sat outside until raid had reached Aran. Then I went to interrupt, done with the fight, back outside again for rest of the week. While that makes me kind of depressed, let's put that aside. Again it's way too early to say anything about our raid viability before we know level 80 stats, raid encounters, itemization, and how we compare to other classes dps-wise. Can't do much more than wait and hope that our only viability among all bosses in raid instances won't end up being interrupting a frostbolt or spirit shock.

On talents I actually agree with you. I have no idea how people who enjoy PvP at arena think of them, but so far only one I'm really excited is Deadly Brew. Some changes on old ones are really nice, but from new ones I'm pretty much as excited as I'm on doing Alterac Valley -dailies. There's some hope on thinking that we might be last ones on cycle of getting changes for WotLK, and who knows what Blizzard rogue designers might have in store for us later on.

Now for my question: seeing that apparently crushing blow mechanics are being put on mobs that are four levels higher than character, effectively taking them off from boss fights, would there be some hope of seeing same happening for glancing blows?

I am sorry if this one is being discussed before.

Before I ask the question, here is my armory link:

My armory link

In the spreadsheet, [Shard of Contempt] do 5 dps more than [Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality]. I just want someone to clarify that if the SS included the "energy pooling" factor for Ashtongue or not.

Also, another noob question, SS says my best rotation is 4s5r, my starter actually is 1s4s5r, is that the best one? Please advice

With the way it appears to be scaling, our need for Hit rating is going to be forcing us to go down the combat tree to get precision and dual wield specialization at the very least for PVE dps.

If that is a fact then we're looking at being one of the least flexible classes come WOTLK due to a very short list of X factor talents.

As of right now the bottom of the combat tree is quite weak for being our PVE dps tree. The strongest PVE talents reside at the bottom of Assassination and Subtly tree (Hunger for Blood, Honor Among Thieves). Prey on the Weak definitely looks to be the bread and butter talent of deep Combat and looks to bring viability back to Combat fist and daggers, even though sword dps might still work out to be better (this is all hard to tell until we get more itemization clues).

If blizzard was smart, they would do rogues a huge favor and make dual wield spec and precision both caked in talents to rogues over or at 70 and replace those talents with something still half decent. Lets face it if you had dual wield spec and precision passive, combat tree would be somewhat laughable minus Imp SnD.

Rogue's need spec flexibility for pve, pvp that other classes are all getting. As of right now, if you want pve dps your spec will look like X, Y or Z and same goes for pvp and even spec differences are minimal at most because the rogue talent tree is more of an obsticle course where you're trying to not waste so much points to get to our bread and butter talents.

If we were to get Dual Wield spec and Precision it would open the doors wide open for spec flexibility, you can't underestimate the amount of room you'll have to work with an extra 10 talent points that were once a must have for PVE dps just there for everyone. Heck it might even make digging deep into Subtlety for the AP and Agi damage modifiers worth it.

Just something to think about.

Hunger for Blood truly isnt that great for PvE DPS. It lasts for 10 seconds, and can stack to 3 for a 15% damage increase. However, to keep that stack up, you have to use it once per Find Weakness buff, which means no chain finishers because of lack of energy. This talent would be good if just about every boss had a debuff casted on you that HfB could take off and refund the energy. Otherwise, its very lackluster compared to, say Blade Flurry.

Re: Raid spots, larger raids will favour utility hybrids and smaller raids will favour "pure" classes. This is fairly obvious - the more people there are to buff, the better those who buff other people become. The less people there are to buff, the more each individual must stand on their personal DPS alone.

This is why the personal DPS of the hybrid classes (shadow priests and retadins most obviously) is in most cases being increased - this makes them viable for 10-person content. A retadin who does 80% of the damage and makes up the difference by buffing the other 14 DPSers is obviously inferior in a situation where there are only 5 other DPSers to soak up his buffs.

In summary, I expect rogues to do fine in 10-person content. (I expect them to do fine in 25-person content as well, but that's more just due to general quasi-confidence in Blizz to have learned from early TBC.)

I fail to see why you can't use mutilate, HfB, and a finisher within 10 seconds. Total energy cost is 60 + 30 + 35 with 10 to 20 energy refunded on average from Relentless Strikes. Worst case scenario, that's 115 energy every 10 seconds, which means you need 5 Focused Attacks procs in those 10 seconds. With 1.9 speed daggers, you average 19.42 attacks in 10 seconds with SnD and WF. Thus, in the worst case scenario with a 35% crit rate, you're likely to lose 9.46 energy per finisher. However, that would only occur 10% of the time. 15% of the time, you lose 4.46 energy per finisher. 30% of the time, you lose 3.56 energy per finisher. And 45% of the time, you gain 1.44 energy per finisher.

That leaves you with an average energy debt of 2.035 for every finisher. Starting with an energy pool of 110, that means you will have problems with energy after 9 minutes. As all those calculations assume you never have to refresh SnD (due to CttC) and you never are able to use HfB for free due to a raid debuff, I don't see an issue with FW and having it up on chain finishers.

So you're saying that one stat being more beneficial than the other is not fun? I fail to see the logic here.

The option of choice.

Same that there is only one best viable raidspec. Would be great if there are 2-3 very different playstyles that do close to same dps when geared and socketed right for it. For me the option of choice would be something I would like to see ( and not the choice to do lower dps )

Problem is that different specs scale differently with gear. If Bliz balanced 2-3 specs to do the same DPS at one gear level, they will be different at a different gear level, and most people will pick the spec that is doing the most DPS once gear level spreads them out.

It would be great if there were 2-3 specs that could do equal DPS, and I believe that this is what Bliz wants, but the truth of the matter is that it is just not possible.

Aye - same as PvP-balance if you also want PvE balanced and vice versa. RPGs are at the core unbalanceable games due to the heavy impact gear has on the character. Just the nature of the beast.

The only problem is that mutilate is very suseptable to the RNG. Both ruthlessness has to proc and mutilate has to crit in order to keep that cycle going with 4 CP finishers. When one or the other dont proc, you either have to settle with less of a chance to proc relentless strikes, losing HfB, or losing the finisher chain (by mutilating again). If relentless strikes doesnt proc, then you have to settle with the choices again at the end of the next FW.