Hello, I am writing there asking for some Brutallus advice.
I had a shot at him yesterday for the first time, and the only words to describe my damage on him are "laughable failure". Raid/group composition was fairly solid, CoR was on the boss, we had improved battle shout, sanctity aura and an enhancement shaman in the group, drums chain was going however I found myself stuck at around 1.7k dps.
Since I am slightly undergeared for that encounter, I did not saved on consumables, demonslaying elixirs were used, haste potions and blade flurry were also being used on cooldown and so were thistle teas and scrolls of agi and strength. Accordingly to the spreadsheet in such a raid composition reports my dps should be well above 1.9k, however that was not the case as I found myself hovering on the 1.7k dps quite on every try.
What I can't really understand is what I was doing wrong, SnD never dropped, and my offensive cooldown were used as soon as possible in all the tries, however I found it quite hard to keep my dps output on the level of the other rogue in raid.
Also, reading the wws report, doesn't give me any major hint on what I could possibily have done wrong. Here is a link to it: Wow Web Stats.
Could someone give me any tips/advice?

Comparing you two i see that he gains much more energy than you do and makes much more swings. Comparing your gear i see that he has 6% more haste (that will definately help him gain energy and swings). Weird is that you have more hit than he does, but yet you miss more.

What i have learned from brut fight, that its pretty much static for us and you can stand in the exactly the same place and yet have like 200 dps difference between the tries. On one try you get lucky with CP and RS procs and can maintain good cycles 3s/5r or even 2s/5r, but on the other try you can barely keep 4s/5r cycle alive. Dont know what exactly influences it. But on him i believe that a good start will give you and edge.

The plain issue is that rogues have never been balanced properly in raids, with respect to the DPS and utility they contribute to the raid, versus the resources needed to maintain them. A 5% or 10% personal DPS premium which expert rogues find themselves able to grind out over another top line DPS class is completely inadequate.

The vast array of buffs and debuffs that other classes provide has been gone over enough, but it's not emphasized enough how much of a disadvantage being only able to produce any dps while within a few yards of the mob really is. Being a melee class means rogues have to deal with:

- More lost time spent moving to and from bosses, and dealing with boss movement
- Much more dangerous exposures to close burst effects like damage auras or Cleaves, and to AoE effects like Cave In or Rain of Fire
- Tighter threat windows

I think it bears mentioning which fights in past and current WoW expose melee classes to unavoidable damaging effects more than corresponding ranged classes, or give melee other problems in DPSing. Let's see, there's Venoxis, Jeklik, Mandokir, Arlokk, Magmadar, Gehennas, Garr, Geddon, Shazzrah, Golemagg, Domo, Ragnaros, Onyxia, Kurinnaxx, Ossirian, Broodlord, Firemaw, Chromaggus, Nefarian, Skeram, Sartura, Ouro, Anub'rekhan, Faerlina, Noth, Grobbulus, Gluth, 4 Horsemen, Sapphiron, Kel'Thuzad, Maiden, Rom+J, Curator, Aran, Netherspite, Prince, Maulgar, Gruul, Magtheridon, Hydross, Lurker, Leotheras, FLK, Vashj, Alar, Void Reaver, Kael'thas, Rage Winterchill, Anatheron, Kazrogal, Azgalor, Naj'entus, Supremus, Bloodboil, Council, Illidan, Felmyst, Muru.

Now let's list off all the fights where ranged are exposed to more damage than melee. Bloodboil? Archimonde? Void Reaver if you are terrible?

I think the only people with better aggro are hunters. While we can pull hate. we have innate - aggro modifier AND vanish.

Yes, we do get in the 'thick of it' more then many other classes, we got evasion, cloak of shadows, sprint, vanish. It doesn't take much to get out and move, quickly respond to a threat.

Often I'm one of the last people standing on new boss encounters. I think it's due to just being a rogue. A well placed vanish is such a godsend.

I personally feel poison is what we should be sending back to the devs as our 'utility' role. Wounding is used from time to time, but that's it. I'd like to see at least 3 poisons a raid would like to use during encounters.

Arcane mages and shadow priests also have stronger threat modifiers than rogues but they require talent investments while rogues do not. Shadow priests have no active threat reduction so after you factor in cooldowns rogues come out ahead. Mage's active threat reduction requires 5 secs of lost DPS to fully wipe agro and AoE damage can end the ability prematurely. Tighter threat windows is something of a missnomer.

Indeed. Other than hunters, rogues have the least problem with treat of any class, simply due to Vanish and the passive, non-talented, 30% threat reduction on all attacks. If you're having aggro issues as a rogue, either you vastly outgear your tank, or your tank is doing something very wrong.

Hello fellow members and representatives of the rouge community,

my failure guild has managed to kill the Eredar Twins for the third time so far and we already had the chance to wipe on an instant at Entropius. There's something I wanted to know or even try to clarify. It's Rupture vs. Eviscerate and Deadly Poison vs. Instant Poison. I hope there weren't that many posts about it, I'm a very lazy guy to find things myself to be honest.

First of all, it's about Eviscerate. Having a high number of attackpower isn't the problem for a sunwell geared rogue, so I tried to use Eviscerate on the Eredar Twins. My highest crit was something like 3.4k-3.5k. Now this is my rupture. It ticks eight times for an average damage of ~240. We don't have a mangle in our raid, because we are already raiding for some months without a feral druid. It's the lack of people on our server, where only one guild managed to kill Illidan so far. So that rupture would do 1920 damage everytime.

The second thing are those poisons. If a deadly poison never expires and manages to tick through the whole fight, it does an incredible amount of damage. That's fine so far, but everyone knows, it can expire and you have to stack it again five times. But that's RNG, warriors love it in arenas, other classes hate it when it happens. Now there's the point where haste comes into your gear, I already have a speed of 2.5/1.25 on my weapons. If we would apply an Instant Poison on our offhand, i could imagine, that the damage of it wouldn't be that bad. While you can get every haste proc up, you can easily get an offhand speed below 0.4 and that cause your instantpoison to proc very often. I know, it can fully or partially resist, but that's why I'm asking you guys.

I have to apologise for my english, it's based on that stuff I'm learing at school right now.

Thanks in advance, Bartuck

We have spreadsheets that model, over time, given the known proc rates, and your attack speed, hit rating and crit rating on your specific gear, exactly how much damage any given ability, if used will be able to put out.

They are linked in the first post. You should use them.

The conclusion that 95% of rogues are able to come to, barring biazzarreo gear or talent choices, is that Eviscreate will always be worse than rupture in a Brutallus style stand there and smack the boss style situation, and that Deadly Poison will always outperform Instant Poison. I'd advise you to consult a spreadsheet before continuing to conjecture based on your biggest crits.

I remember how painful this was, Ald. Thank god in Wrath we won't "have" to do 10 mans to even attempt the 25 mans. Forcing Karazhan progression to even get in the door to SSC was a mistake that it seems Blizzard learned from.

I think you're overstating the case fairly severely. There have certainly been times throughout the history of the class that we've been at a disadvantage relative to other raiders, but I think it's overstating the case to say that we've never been balanced. In particular, my guild always ran with 5-7 rogues in Naxx days, which is somewhat above the 5 you'd have from even class allotment. That doesn't sound like an underpowered class to me.

I also think the threat argument is bogus. We have the best threat management of any class. The only other class that comes close is hunters, but the fact that they don't have the same passive threat reduction that we do negates the "ranged" advantage, and the fact that their threat dump is resistable reduces the advantage they gain from having a shorter cooldown. Besides which, there are a fair number of fights where it's insufficient to merely not pull aggro - you actually need to be below the tank's aggro. And in these situations, ranged has no advantage.

The other thing to bear in mind about your list is that in a lot of those fights you list, the disadvantage is marginal at best. For instance, Anetheron, the fact that every so often an infernal will hit melee and do slightly more damage than it otherwise would is a fairly small effect in terms of the difficulty of the fight. On Vashj, it's true that we can't DPS striders and are inefficient on elementals... but *someone* has to kill the naga (and the ability to cloak/sprint/vanish out of the various debuffs and snares she uses is a definite advantage). And on a lot of the old world fights - yes, we may have had more movement to do, but we *still* did more damage than most other classes even with the movement. So while I do concede that there are adverse implication to being in melee, I think the number of fights where it's been a serious problem is fairly limited. While I agree that there are more fights that are bad for melee than there are fights that are bad for ranged, and that it's a problem, it's rarely a serious problem, and it's certainly true that across the history of the class we have had times where we clearly justified our raid slots.

Tighter threat windows specifically was referring more to melee in general, such as fury warriors and enhancement shaman which in our raids get screwed by lack of threat reduction all the time. It also applies fights like Gruul where a ranged class can cheerfully outthreat everyone but the main tank, while a melee trying to accomplish the same thing gets to see a five digit smackdown.

The fact that 'rogues can just dps the nagas/doomguards/phoenixes/Olm/Telonicus/etc' argument is a total straw man. Ranged can also do every single one of these jobs, and usually with less risk than the melee can. If you are composing a raid group for maximum flexibility you would simply take more ranged dps to every fight rather than hope that there's some alternate job which rogues can perform adequately on.

On some of the fights I listed the melee disadvantage is minor, and on some it is major, but this is also irrelevant. If a ranged class is only slightly better on some fights and much better on other fights, while worse on none, it begs the question - why melee?

I agree that rogues have still been represented well in all raid groups up to this point, this is generally because 1) they are a very popular class and 2) they do have irreplacable utility in a very few fights, therefore they get dragged though the rest of the content in case they are needed later. There is also the gear effect which you posted about earlier. But if you had a hypothetical raid group which swapped in the perfect team for every fight, I am certain that melee DPS would always be represented by a bare minimum and often absent altogether.

Balancing every fight to be perfectly fair to melee and ranged classes would be impossible and stupid. I'm instead taking the position that the current 'DPS premium' applied to STEADY STATE rogue dps in a STATIONARY fight, i.e. Brutallus (which you estimated earlier as being maybe 10%) is too low. This is a fight where melee have every advantage possible, and they should radically outperform ranged in this kind of situation. I'd eyeball the number at closer to a 20-25% advantage. I also believe that this was actually Blizzard's intention when they talk about rogues and their single target strengths, but it did not materialize in BC simply because other classes like hunters and warlocks scaled surprisingly well - and therefore made rogues look worse by comparison.

Or to summarize, in case my foaming was too lengthly to be interesting...

I don't have a problem with the balancing concept that ranged dps classes are better for some fights and melee dps is better for other fights. But can anyone tell me - what are the fights that melee dps is better for?

Reply to below: I'll grant you Aran and Teron, but dispute the other fights on your list as being ones where melee may have good output but also suffer from increased exposure to damage. Also RoS is a pretty good answer for a melee-biased fight. I will drop it, I've summarized my point and I don't want to derail the thread again like the KZ discussion.

Aran, Magtheridon, Void Reaver, Solarian, Kazrogal (war/rogue specifically), Archimonde, Teron (no pushback), Gurtogg.

Though, seriously - if you're asking that question, you're either being purposefully dense (stop it) or you're just not thinking about some very obvious things.

I'd add RoS.
How is melee better for Magtheridon?

1) Yes, fury warriors and enhancement shaman have threat issues on some fights. Fortunately, we're not discussing the balance of fury warriors and enhancement shaman - we're discussing the balance of rogues.

2) The point is that rogues tend to be better at DPSing certain types of adds, and provide other advantages. Again, with Vashj as the example: yes, you can have ranged kill Naga. But fundamentally, melee are just better at it. We do more damage, faster, and have cooldowns to help if we fall behind. Plus, we can cloak out of static charge and escape Entangle in any number of different ways. If a ranged gets Entangled in Toxic Spores, they're going to need a lot more healing than the rogue that blows a cooldown and waltzes out. So yes, you *could* have ranged do Naga... just like you *could* have melee do elementals. It just tends not to work as well.

I'm not going to go down the list of fights and show why melee have a valid role on all of them, but, suffice it to say, I'm of the opinion that in many cases, they do.

3) My point is that in many of your examples of melee disadvantage, the disadvantage is so small as to be irrelevant - particularly in the case of rogues. And you're underestimating how useful our other abilities are. Lets take a look at BT for a moment:

• Najentus. The first couple melee are at no more disadvantage than any member of any other class; it's not till you get up around 6 melee where it starts to become an issue. Meanwhile, the rogues can additionally cloak the Tidal Shields, so in small numbers actually take *less* damage than ranged, and have higher DPS which makes it easier to make the enrage timer. Hence, this fight is melee unfriendly only that there's an implicit upper limit of how many you can bring before starting to be a burden on your healers; up until that point, it's about equal or even a bit melee-favored. I'd call it pretty even in terms of rogue balance.
  
• Supremus. It's true that melee can't (or at least, shouldn't) DPS during kiting phases, but that's not where most of the DPS is done anyway; the majority is done in the stationary phase anyway, where we do as well as anyone. Slightly ranged favored, to be sure, but so easy that no one bothers to swap out raid composition for it.
  
• Akama. No melee disadvantages to speak of; DPS requirements are more easily made with high-DPS melee present to rip things apart, though again, easy enough that worrying about raid comp is uncommon. We'll call it even, since you do need some ranged in addition to the melee.
  
• Teron. Rogues in particular take less damage and do more; melee as a whole has no disadvantages and does better damage, making the fight easier. Not much to say - this is a good rogue fight.
  
• Reliquary. Lack of armor makes us top DPS in phase 1, and a few rogues are extremely helpful in dealing with enrages; our interrupts are necessary in phase 2; and our high DPS and ability to spike upwards with cooldowns make us highly valuable in phase 3. Again, no major melee disadvantages. Hence, another good rogue fight.
  
• Gurtogg. Rogues in particular are a huge asset on this fight due to top-notch aggro management and the ability to evasion through Fel Rage, not to mention high DPS, blah blah blah. While other melee DPS might be at a bit of a disadvantage, rogues are one of the better classes for the fight.
  
• Shahraz. It's current incarnation is a little more fair, but the early version was a horrible fight for caster DPS. For now we'll call it even, but it's worth remembering this used to be a rogue favored fight.
  
• Council. Okay, admittedly melee does take somewhat more damage here than ranged does; on the other hand you do need to bring a fair number of melee to help with interrupts and wound poison/MS. And, frankly, Mind-numbing poison doesn't hurt on this fight either. Plus, the higher melee DPS is helpful for making the enrage timer when you're first learning the fight. I suppose we can classify this as a bad rogue fight, but if it makes that category it does so only barely.
  
• Illidan. There are a fair number of phases where rogues can't attack, so I suppose we should mark it as a bad rogue fight.

So, totaling everything up, we have 3 good rogue fights, 3 bad rogue fights, and 3 reasonable indifferent fights. Off the top of my head, that doesn't sound too bad in terms of our class role. I don't think that can reasonably be called "utility on a very few fights".

4) Popularity of a class tends to have little influence on the presence thereof in top raid guilds, and rogues have not noticed a significant drop in membership amongst high-end guilds through all of T6 and Sunwell - and not even too much, as I recall, in T4/T5. Hence, there must be some reason to bring us other than pity, since I guarantee you that Nihilum does not hand out pity raid invites when going for world firsts.

5) You make up these numbers about what our theoretical advantage should be, but where are they coming from? I mean, at the end of the day, we need to be good enough to earn our 2.8 raid spots (2.5 in the expansion), and so far we've been doing that. Would I love to do another 20% damage? Sure. But do we need it to guarantee raid spots? Clearly not, since we're getting raid spots in reasonable quantity already, and generally pulling our own weight.

Also: try stopping by a mage thread sometime and convincing them that rogues should be able to do 25% more damage than they can on sustained fights. See what the reaction is. I guarantee you you'll never convince them. Point being, *every* primary DPS class wants to be at the top of the heap. I've heard mages arguing that they should be 10% ahead of everyone else, warlocks arguing that they need to rival mages in terms of personal DPS, and so on. So while I do think us beating by 10% is totally reasonable, I don't think you're ever going to convince anyone that that number should be 25%.

Basically: I'm not saying that the class doesn't have and hasn't had issues. But on the other hand, in the last couple of instances, we've done pretty well for ourselves. We've justified our raid spot. Even now, with top hunters rivaling our damage, we're still getting plenty of raid spots, for the simple reason that the ability of a hunter to do top DPS is subject to many of the same restrictions on melee being able to do good DPS, due to their reliance on their pet. So while I do think there have been some issues at times, I also think Blizzard has done a reasonable job of addressing them, and I think the statement that "we have never been balanced" is ludicrous.

Interrupts on the channelers are pretty important, and we're as good as any class in terms of DPSing Mag himself.

1) Aran
Melee doesn't have to run all over to dodge Blizzard (he constantly pulses counterspell as an aura)

2) Netherspite / Lurker C'thun style / A'lar phase 2
You countinue DPS'ing while running out of void zones / around lurker, while casters have to stop DPSing while running.
(Very few casters can produce more than insignificant DPS while running.)

3) Teron / Reliquary / Sharaz / Solarian and many more
No spell pushback. (I'm aware that pushback will be less an issue in Wrath due to many changes.)

4) Reliquary phase 2
Far less spikey/bursty DPS, less chance on gibbing yourself.

5) Gurtogg / First minute of Brutallus
Far less bursty damage / threat, and <more threat reduction in most cases of melee vs. ranged>
As a caster, 2 back-to-back crits can get you from a save 105% to a dangerous 130% in the fist minute of Brutallus.
As melee you need a whole crit streak to get a similarly dangerous threat.

6) Then there is Void Reaver
The best way to do the fight right now would probably be "24 in melee and 1 ranged running in circles"?
You can park melee at his feet. They have 100% DPS time, where a not-so-lucky caster drops below 50%. The cost is that you need healing, but there is plenty of free healing in that fight anyway.

Is melee an advantage there? A disadvantage?
I think you can make very good use of them there. Extra healer is not much of an issue since you need some healer redundancy anyway to get your tank healed if most of them are running.


That is not meant as a list of encounters, but rather as a list where melee may have a slight advantage.
I'm sure you disagree with some points. It's not about being right, but more about showing the differences.


*) Fights with downtime favour Rogues as they can pool energy and their DPS is energy limited.
Non-arcane mages are just time limited - they can regen mana during aggro/phase shift downtime, but they don't gain anything from it.
People tend to argue that the whole T5 fights are against fire mages because you have to restack scorch so often on adds/submerges. Rogues can just unload on new adds/submerges. There is the issue of new sunders though.
But that's going waaaay off-topic.


[E]) As far as rogue DPS goes on Brutallus:
BM Hunters do more damage, but general consensus is that they are out of control anyway.
Warlocks are ~10% behind what rogues would do without glaives, and the Devs stated on the WotLK forums that Warlock scaling went out of control with the huge amount of modifiers.
If those 2 were toned down, it wouldn't look so bad really.

Now Wrath turns everything upside down though. And we have to see and hope that things are in a better balance time.


In BC, rogues usually had 2 safe spots in the melee group, because they were simply the best thing to add to war/enh/ret. In Wrath with most buffs going raid wide, those 2 spots can go to non-melee.

Mages are in a similar boat, with the advantage of having 1 secure spot for raid debuffs. The disadvantage is that if you are to bring a second mage, they have to convince via DPS. If they'd be above rogues, you'd drop the rogues. If they'd be below, you'd bring 1 mage.

It's a lot of balancing to come, and also a lot of ugly decisions ahead, one way or another.


Balance in BC came from group synergies. You wanted to have 1 melee group (Demo/BF/JoW/TC/Sunder), and fight designs usually discouraged more melee groups. Maybe 2 melee groups incl. tanks and some shaman or hunters lobbed in.
In WotLK, the loss of the strict group structures will likely make it more competitive.

100% time on target, kicks / pummel / etc being required for Phase 1, no pushback due to fire spit/blast nova/infernal fire pulse, and nobody in their right mind is going to pick a rogue for cube clicking duty when a warlock/mage/hunter can do it - and their interruption in dps is giving us a buff to our DPS at the same time - it's a pretty good fight for us, all things told.

Horrific bounce-cleave aside, yeah.

Everyone has the bounce, and while ranged don't have the cleave variable (generally), we don't have casts interrupted by it - given that we have evasion and can generally avoid the front cleave area with some experience on it, I don't consider the earthquake to be particularly anti-rogue.

Wow.

To provide further anecdotal evidence to this discussion, there is only one fight in 25 man raiding that I have felt my guild would have been better served bringing another class - Al'ar. 10 mans are a slightly different story, but that's more because of group composition than because of fight mechanics.

It's important to remember that even though a fight might have melee phases and no-melee phases while ranged continues to wail on the boss, there are often factors to make up for this. For example, on Leo, despite the fact that I right out right before his WW CD, and despite the fact that all our ranged would still burn him during WW, I still managed to do top or near top on him. And this is against people that give me a run for my money even on bosses that are "melee friendly."

Finally, you mentioned doomguards as adds mobs that ranged are better on than melee. That is certainly true, but did you know that you can put melee on Azgalor? Since we can usually move out of doomfire without having to stop DPS, we actually do quite good damage on that fight, and with cloak of shadows, we can undo the damage from one fire a minute. I wouldn't exactly call it melee friendly, but I still do very well on the meters, and don't die to doomfire more often than ranged.

I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for here. If you don't think there are more than a few melee friendly fights in the game currently, what sort of mechanics are you looking for to make fights more melee friendly? What is your definition of a melee friendly fight? What sort of abilities would you want added in wrath for us to overcome this apparently crippling tendency for "ranged friendly" fights?

I started playing very shortly before BC came out, and didn't reach level 70 until around february of 07. I struggled a bit trying to make my way through karazhan, being a new player i was still learning the mechanics of the game. This forced me to become a better player. If karazhan was a little rogue/melee unfriendly it made me earn my raid spot. And so, by the time I reached 25 man content I was well prepared and nearly always found myself in the top 3 on dps throughout. I think that a certain type of player gravitates towards the rogue class. They are adaptive, they have quick reflexes, and they must be extremely situationally aware. I don't think anything should be guaranteed. I don't want to have a 25% damage advantage over the rest of the dps classes. Simply because it will breed laziness, and i will tire of a class that a year later I still love to play.

There is always something you can do to contribute to the raid. A classic example is Felmyst, a fight where I think we can all agree is extremely melee unfriendly. I am the raid's breath caller for that fight, simply because I don't really provide usefull dps on the skeleton adds. But I can pretty safely say I am the most important class on that fight, with a single missed call I can single handedly wipe the entire raid. Another raid utility for rogues is the role of main assist. My guild focuses dps off whatever target I'm on. I tend to dps until its about 10-15% then move to the next so that as soon as the previous target is dead, they can start killing the next.

Ultimately I feel its the player that makes the class viable. If I wanted to faceroll my way to dps I would have rolled a warlock. I feel like I earn every bit of damage I do in any encounter. That to me is the joy of playing a rogue. I have to give my all and I'm rewarded by doing so. Blizzard will likely change it up with our talents in the patch, and we'll adapt. But in the end it is the person at the keyboard that will decide whether or not the class is brought to a raid or not. I just don't see the need for the chicken little attitude... We need to yell loudly enough that they don't forget about us. But rogues are FAR from broken in my opinion.

Brutallus has 7685 armor, so it's not really the best fight for us.

Either way, we shouldn't be 25% ahead of everyone. In WoW, some fights require more healers, others less, some more ranged, others more melee. If this change happened, basically every single fight where rogues can hit the boss, you'd want to stack rogues. Really, we're fine.