Ok, this is something I haven't thought about. There's always a positive side I guess, but for healers there's already the option to kick with a lockdown of 5 seconds, without losing combo points, and for breathing space, you cannot have any dots on the target for this to work.

Might turn out useful after all, but my first impression is that I don't like it, it seems to weaken one of the rogue's 'class defining skills' (= stuns).

True, its a nerf in solo pve, but hey, you can't have it all, and solo pve is not as important as pvp, or raid/group pve...

I use gouge the most in MH... it may sound weird, but locking necros or banshes is invaluable, and also, you can sometimes break spells you couldn't interrupt otherwise, try it some times( Anti-Magic barrier), it is really fun.

Didn't gouge get changed to do zero damage some time as well?

For soloing, or single target pvp, it's a nerf. For multi target pvp or pve tanking it'll allow you to keep something semi incapacitated while continuing dps on your main target. It'd be better if combo points were simply kept globally though.


The new glyphs look very promising at least, but I hope there will be more added than this.
Also wondering how much these will affect our dps, compared to simply taking extra stats for certain professions.

The gouge changes (glyph combined with combo point) will allow it to be used much as blind is now. 5.5 second repeatable CC, usable on targets in combat for 35 energy. It still does damage, it's just [0.21 * AP] damage rather than requiring trainable ranks.

Wondering how CTTC looks now: we have the option for +10% crit on evis, plus the crit bonus from turn the tables. If you start your cycle with mutx2->CB Evis to guarantee a good start, what are the odds that a mut,mut,evis cycle would keep SnD up 100% for no cost?

Kick does no damage anymore, gouge was reduced to 1 rank.

Vulajin did a pretty extensive blog post on CTTC if you haven't read it yet.

Cut to the Chase - Elitist Jerks

And even if a Mutilate > Mutilate > Eviscerate cycle were feasible, there's also the increased energy, decreased damage-per-energy, and armor mitigation to consider when using Eviscerate as opposed to Rupture.

Vulajin's idea of having CTTC refresh SnD ANYTIME you use Eviscerate (or Envenom) based on the number of combo points spent makes much more sense. As he pointed out, it's entirely too possible to run two Mutilate > Mutilate > Eviscerate cycles, not crit on either Eviscerate, and have SnD drop, which is a catastrophic loss of sustained DPS.

Problem is, 50-60% still means it doesn't refresh in two envenoms about 20% of the time, so you still need to weave in some SnDs to keep it up. And frankly, as I showed in an earlier post, even if it refreshed 100% of the time, it would still be weak for a 5-point talent at the 45-point level.

Just added the new items off MMO-Champ's homepage to the gear sheet to get relative values. The neck it lists (Necklace of the Chrono-Lord) is better than the Brut Neck or the crafted Hard Khorium Choker by a pretty significant margin (60 and 40 AP respectively), and has the same stat layout as the Brut neck (agi/stam/ap/haste) so regardless of sensible mechanic changes, it will be better than Sunwell gear.

The bracers listed are slightly better than T6 bracers (about 3AP on my setup of the sheet), but don't contribute to the 4pc (or more importantly the 2pc) bonus of T6, so are not really an upgrade.

Obvious disclaimer that things could change and this is only an extrapolation and should not be taken as a recommendation as we have ZERO idea how rogue mechanics will honestly end up at 80.

My 'feel' is that the lvl 80 blues will be slight to moderate upgrades to BIS sunwell gear, but Sunwell gear will be perfectly sufficient for beginning raiding.

(Oh, there's a 120 dps offhand sword as well, but due to it being 1.6 speed, I don't think it has any chance of beating out a warglaive.)

The rare quality PVP weapons (seen in this image and this image) are 130DPS with the typical PVP stats and speeds (2.6 and 1.5). The warglaives should basically become obsolete once level 80 is reached.

I suspect those people with both warglaives might find the set bonus sufficient to allow them to compete with level 80 blues - they are at a 20 DPS-per-weapon disadvantage, but they're the absolutely optimal speeds and have the set bonus is quite powerful. But it is pretty clear that they'll get replaced by the first level 80 epics to show up, even if they do make it past the blues.

Bear in mind that the (datamined) level blue 80 PvP weapons have an unusually high DPS.
They are 10 DPS (1H) / 13 DPS (2H) / 41 Spell Power above the level 80 blue weapons from level 82 bosses in Stratholme.
Considering level 70 weapons are 100 DPS / 130 DPS / 233 Spell Power, those PvP weapons would the equivalent of level 85 weapons rather than 80.

So, it doesn't really look like the 130 DPS PvP one-handers are representative for blue weapons at 80. We'll see how things turn out.


[Edit]: At first I thought they might be "miscoloured epics", but the PvP shields have only 7287 AC compared the the 7032 AC of the level 80 Stratholme shield, which is only a little step upwards. Then again the badge shields only have 7530 AC.

Maybe they try to smoothen the transition from blue to purple?
Blues were 71 DPS 1H and 3.8k AC shields, while S1 arena had 92 DPS 1H and 5.2k AC shields, which was a pretty huge step. The gap between S1 and Sunwell is about at as big as this one.

We'll have to see how it'll finally turn out.
I'd like a smoother transition, but it's probably hard to balance to make gear upgrades not meaningless like pre-2.1 or on the other hand force people to PvP weapons.


Maybe those PvP weapons are supposed to be comparable to level 80 heroic gear? Two tiers of blue gear perhaps?
I'll stop speculating, we'll see when it's done anyway

/rant on

What I would like to see in terms of weapons, and what probably won't be implemented anyway, was some kind of way (e.g. a quest or some other way) to upgrade every rogue's wet dream, the warglaives to match the weapons in WotLK.

I mean, come on, these are the weapons from Illidan Stormrage, The Betrayer, demon hunter, consumer of the Skull of Gul'dan, creator of the second Well of Eternity, Ruler of Outland.
How can a piss poor PvP blue weapon possible be better than a glaive?
Or some club you obtain for measly marks you gather around the world, basically on infinite stock?

Ok, say it's improvements in alloying or whatever, better new metals, new magical components in the manufacturing process that makes these new weapons harder, better, faster, stronger. Then why not take both weapons, the warglaive and the newly acquired unbelievable advanced weapon, wrap some nice little quest around it, and simply allow an upgrade to the warglaive?

Upgrade its DPS, maybe not the point of the WotLK weapon to account for the speed and set bonus, but please, I wouldn't want to see such a weapon to collect dust on the bank, be disenchanted or even sold to the vendor. It's just not right.

/rant off

Blizzard have said before that they have no intention of 'upgrading' legendaries as they want people to obtain new and exciting gear between expansions rather than sticking with the same weapon for the rest of your (ingame) life.

Yes, but that's the elegance in this proposal: you don't simply upgrade the weapon, you first have to obtain the new weapon before you can make the warglaive on par with it. Or not and stick with the expansion weapon, and experience the joy of having a new and exciting weapon - that everyone else also haves. It's up to you.

Whether you pick up the new weapon first or not doesn't really matter if you're going to trash it afterwards and go back to using the glaive. They don't want people using the same items all the way through the length of the game, whether using an 'upgrade' concept or otherwise.

You're not alone in your wish though, there have been quite a few proposals put forward over the last few years to try and make thunderfury/sulfuras/quel'serrar/etc up to date with new upgraded versions.

edit: just found the bluepost here - MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upgrade quests for legendary weapons

Not to mention that unless the upgraded glaives were exactly the same as their level 80 counterparts, all wotlk raiding rogues would have to continue to run black temple full clears weekly if they wanted to fully max out their character.

Thus rewarding a slew of rogues and warriors and hunters who did nothing more than win the RNG lottery by preventing them from ever needing to upgrade those particular slots again. It shouldn't take much thought to see how counterproductive that would be from Blizzard's standpoint.

Well, we're getting a buff.

Or a debuff.

Question is what'll it be.

Ehm, the point of AR glyph isn't only the extra average energy but the extra syngery with other 2 min cooldowns (so basicaly majority of rogue buffs/trinkets) and also allowing it to be used more than once in most fights. It's probably one of the better glyphs they could give us.

The concept of AR and average energy used in most spreadsheets isn't even close to reality anyways.

Regarding the new Rogue Glyphs, did anyone notice that stacking Glyph of Rupture and Slice and Dice would end up in you clipping your own rupture? With +3 seconds to SnD, you would 1s/5r, but a 5cp rupture would last 21 seconds (16+5 from glyph).

There is more to the rupture glyph as well. Rupture currently ticks every 2 seconds. They gave us an extra 5 seconds of time on the dot. You'll be wasting 1 second of uptime with no possible damage. The only thought that did come to mind in this is that they plan to change the base mechanics of Rupture to tick every 1 second. But who knows?

How many 2-minute cooldowns does one actually have these days? I mean, in Sunwell-type content, you have BF, Haste Pots, and Drums as 2-min cooldowns, none of which benefit in any way from stacking with AR, unless, as Shaker pointed out, you're in a multi-mob situation. The potion thing will be disappearing due to potion sickness, meaning that you're basically talking stacking with drums only. And an extra 15 energy every 2 minutes from AR, stacked with drums, just isn't going to be enough to offset an extra 25 energy every 2 minutes from BF, unless, again, you're in a multimob situation.