*Rupture. Okay, what does this even *mean*? Do we get an extra two and a half ticks of rupture? Like, this is potentially either really good or utterly useless - we'll have to wait and see which.
That kept me thinking as well.
For what it's worth, mages have Frostfire Bolt that leaves a 9 second slow which also deals damage 3 times, after 3/6/9 seconds.
There is a 3 point frost talent that increase the duration of slows by 1/2/3 seconds which also applies to the Frostfire DoT.
When you place 3 points into it, you get a 4th tick. So far, so good.
If you place 2 points into it, you always get the 4th tick with the full tick damage. Which is totally unexpected.
If you place 1 or 0 points into it, you only get 3 ticks.
So, it seems that the amount of ticks is rounded, which may mean rounding up if the DoT is up for at least half a tick after the last regular tick.
Maybe. Maybe it's something else though. But it is pretty unintuitive design to split DoT ticks.
From this observation, it could mean that you get 3 ticks at the cost of only 5 seconds. It could mean anything though.
If you have an AP or Crit clicky trinket that you synchronize with your haste effects, you would gain benefit out of syncing that with AR as well, so there's a marginal additive bonus. But really, I would consider it a PvP or other non-raid talent.
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.
Not exactly the best idea to compare it to today's items when we don't know what's coming at level 80 in terms of gear. Infact, all 2 min cooldown AP trinket just gained viability with the change to AR.
And again, the issue with most of the math you do is the concept of averaging. "And an extra 15 energy every 2 minutes from AR" is just a wrong term in today's WoW, especially when it depends on endless factors, when and how you use your cooldowns in different encounters. Just to give you an example, in early teron days, the difference of new and old AR would be 150 extra energy.
On top of all this, blizzards seems to slowly move toward the concept of short term buffs given to different classes and generalizing the long term buffs, which again would give an edge to AR. (something similar to priests power infusion).
Sure, on any particular fight, the difference might be larger or smaller. On Teron, 4min is an extra 150 energy over 5 min. On Brutallus, they're exactly the same. Meanwhile BF is 50 for Teron and 75 for Brutallus. So depending on the fight, either one could be better. But if you look at the average across all fights, I suspect you find the benefit of free BF is at worst comparable and very likely better than the benefit of 4 min AR. So I suspect when you get new pieces of gear for progression raiding, Glyph of AR is going to be pretty far down on the list of worthwhile options, at least for PvE.
I just thought of something, brought on by the Rupture glyph discussion.
They changed the way things regenerate in this expansion, the concept of "ticks" has been done away with as it regards to regeneration of mana and energy. What if this same sort of "tick-eradication" is their eventual goal as it regards to dots as well? As in, you get a debuff that does 800 damage over 8 seconds, and each 10th of a second you get smacked for 10 damage?
I just thought of something, brought on by the Rupture glyph discussion.
They changed the way things regenerate in this expansion, the concept of "ticks" has been done away with as it regards to regeneration of mana and energy. What if this same sort of "tick-eradication" is their eventual goal as it regards to dots as well? As in, you get a debuff that does 800 damage over 8 seconds, and each 10th of a second you get smacked for 10 damage?
This would remove some nice restealth tricks in the arena.
Looks we will see some upgrades on our abilities soon:
To be honest, our DPS tests right now are mostly worthless. Some talents aren't working correctly, some ranks of spells aren't there yet, etc. How things work is usually some designers create the spells, then other designers balance the numbers. We've done most of the design, but very little of balancing the numbers. That is what we're working on now. Initial tests showed some mage builds doing ~8K DPS while our best Rogue was doing ~3K DPS (mostly because of Frostfire Bolt and the % modifiers it currently has access to). So yea, something was wrong there, and in that sense Kalgan is right that the Mage is doing too much damage (and also the Rogue not doing enough).
Note that we test things in level 80 greens, level 80 blues and level 80 epics. We also do trials with fully debuffed mobs with fully buffed raids. The way the mage from QA was able to do that DPS was through a very specific build, which I haven't seen emulated from the beta testers yet.
Just because Kalgan says "the mage is doing too much damage" doesn't mean we're going to nerf Frostbolt or Fireball by 10% or anything like that. The issues we have with the Mage's DPS right now is with talents and abilities that do not exist in the game yet
1. I really appreciate the discussion that goes on here. Aldriana,Vulajin,Spoon, Tetracyclyde, and many others provide hard numbers to dispel myths about various melee/rogue associated abilities. You guys really rock and provide the hard numbers on why x is better than z.
2. Am I the only sunwell raiding rogue to feel like an endangered species. I have brought up this point multiple times throughout this thread. And to be realistic have been satisfied with the majority of the responses. But.....
Sure I can look at wws and see various rogues doing well on certain fights. Now I am no slouch and don't feel that I am really being slighted in the dps department except for a few major things.
A. Our dps doesn't outweigh our raid debuffs and/or vulnerabilities.
B. As a raid leader especially with the expansion on the horizon I have to question why I want to continue playing a rogue.
To clarify preBC I played a lock. My rogue was my 2nd 60 who I really enjoyed playing and was not able to play at the highest level due to class constraints. During the expansion I was able to switch but experienced first hand the exclusion of cutting edge content due to class. I'm sure that I was not the only to be excluded from heriocs and/or kara because i was a rogue. Now this hasn't been a problem in most 25man instances. And to be fair I fully expect that this won't be a problem in future 25mans. But as blizz seems hellbent on making 10mans the model of the future then it becomes quite a big problem.
The big question.
Are you thinking about rerolling come wotlk?
This comes from one of two officers of a sunwell raiding guild. Not that that matters just to give some background on where I am coming from. I enjoy raiding , I enjoy dps, but I also enjoy feeling like I am making a positive contribution to the raid. And right now I feel that we can easily do without the rogue class period.
1. I really appreciate the discussion that goes on here. Aldriana,Vulajin,Spoon, Tetracyclyde, and many others provide hard numbers to dispel myths about various melee/rogue associated abilities. You guys really rock and provide the hard numbers on why x is better than z.
2. Am I the only sunwell raiding rogue to feel like an endangered species. I have brought up this point multiple times throughout this thread. And to be realistic have been satisfied with the majority of the responses. But.....
Sure I can look at wws and see various rogues doing well on certain fights. Now I am no slouch and don't feel that I am really being slighted in the dps department except for a few major things.
A. Our dps doesn't outweigh our raid debuffs and/or vulnerabilities.
B. As a raid leader especially with the expansion on the horizon I have to question why I want to continue playing a rogue.
To clarify preBC I played a lock. My rogue was my 2nd 60 who I really enjoyed playing and was not able to play at the highest level due to class constraints. During the expansion I was able to switch but experienced first hand the exclusion of cutting edge content due to class. I'm sure that I was not the only to be excluded from heriocs and/or kara because i was a rogue. Now this hasn't been a problem in most 25man instances. And to be fair I fully expect that this won't be a problem in future 25mans. But as blizz seems hellbent on making 10mans the model of the future then it becomes quite a big problem.
The big question.
Are you thinking about rerolling come wotlk?
This comes from one of two officers of a sunwell raiding guild. Not that that matters just to give some background on where I am coming from. I enjoy raiding , I enjoy dps, but I also enjoy feeling like I am making a positive contribution to the raid. And right now I feel that we can easily do without the rogue class period.
As has been said a couple times in this thread so far, it seems pretty unlikely that rogues will become an endangered species.
First of all, rogues are pretty much a good tradeoff up until *very* end-SW where hunters have legendaries and are out-dpsing us while providing their own (small) buffs. Until that point I see no reason why you *wouldn't* want to bring rogues, since our DPS probably usually makes up for our lack of buffs.
Secondly, the myth that we are somehow more "vulnerable." There was a pretty extensive discussion a few pages back on how "vulnerable" rogues really are, and for the most part, being melee really hasn't disadvantaged us a lot post-2.1 in 25-man instances. Furthermore, our very good threat management skills (rivaled perhaps only by hunters) give us a significant advantage over a lot of other classes. And Cloak of Shadows allows us to avoid a lot of annoying magical effects, saving healer mana and allowing us to DPS when other melee couldn't.
Third, we have an important role in some fights and probably will continue to do so (Blizzard has implemented rogue gimmick fights since early raiding, from the Suppression Room in BWL to Council in BT and a few times in between).
Fourth, it's important to remember that we're not competing against the "first" or even "second" of every class in terms of utility and total DPS. Our best rogues are essentially competing against the third or fourth mage/warlock/hunter etc. In all but the best guilds in the world, it's likely that these players either have less skill or gear than the first rogue, and therefore are thus disadvantaged. In addition with buff redundancy it's less important to bring that third or fourth player of a class (you might get another soulstone or battle rez, but it's not like you're adding Windfury to another group or anything, like we have now). So the utility of stacking third and fourth players of a certain class certainly diminishes in WotLK. Additionally, it's a better use of gear to have someone who can actually *use* those leather pieces and daggers, rather than having them get DE'd. You'd have to run Raid X a lot of times to get 4 bows for your 4 hunters, but it's much more likely you'll get 3 bows for 3 hunters and 1 MH dagger for your rogue in the same space of time, and even more likely that you'll get 2 bows for your 2 hunters and 2 MH daggers for your 2 rogues in the same space of time.
Finally, the deficiencies of rogues in 10-man situations have been extensively discussed by many people, but as has been said before by others (including myself) Blizzard has definitely shown that they *can* improve in that regard. ZA is a much, much more rogue-friendly instance than pre-2.1 Kara ever was, to the point that it's *useful* to bring a rogue to ZA and you often wouldn't to Karazhan back before 2.1.
The big thing that is going to make rogues more viable in 10-mans that has been revealed so far is the spreading of important buffs to many classes. So now you're much more likely to get a full (or pretty good) buffset without having a 10-man composition which is necessarily constructed to cater towards rogues. I don't think you're going to get every buff you might get in a 25-man, but you're much more likely to get, say, LotP, now that a fury warrior *or* a feral druid can do it. And I expect we'll see a lot more buff redundancy in upcoming beta builds as Blizzard expands upon this philosophy.
If you look at your class and your buffs seem lacking, uninteresting or underpowered, it's probably because they haven't been updated yet. In the past our design was more that there are classes that bring buffs but have lower dps, and classes with high dps but fewer buffs. While not every class will end up at exactly the same dps, we can bring things a lot closer together. Rogues, mages and hunters can end up with good buffs that fit their kit. Poisons are a great angle for rogues, though not the only one.
And if I didn't say it clearly enough, rogues and any other class that feels they don't currently bring enough synergy to the raid will get be getting new or modified abilities to fill that role. The idea is to back down a little from: I have crazy buffs but that's really it, or I have mad dps, but that's pretty much it.
I wouldn't be too worried that a rogue won't bring enough to the table to get invited to raids in Wotlk. The way I'm interpreting this is that Blizzard continues to intend for rogues to be the highest single target dps class, but to make the gap with other classes smaller than it has (or might have) been in the past. In return, rogues will receive some kind of minor group/raid buff, maybe through poisons.
Well I won't quote you but I will cover a few of your points.
1. We are a good tradeoff.
Not going to argue that. But. And let me tell you the but is huge. If I had my druthers making another ranged group is much better from a raid leader perspective than making a melee group period.
2. The Melee Myth.
Uhm yeah not a myth. Just because we have the ability to mitigate more damage than other melee is not a valid point. The point is why take a melee group. Because of the debuffs? The dps? I'm pretty sure that you are all well read on the recent blue posts regarding debuffs. And equally well aware of the dps situation. Melee takes more splash damage on a majority of boss and realistically trash encounters than ranged does. ( Trash being mentioned mainly because it is a bigger time waster than bosses imo.)
3. Our Important Role
See the post about Blizz talking about class homogenization.
4. Pride
I'm not competing with the 2nd Lock or the 2nd Hunter or the 1st Mage. I'm sorry I want to be the best. If I'm not competing and defeating those people then I'm in the wrong fucking class.
Finally
As someone who has done multiple bear runs I speak from a bit of experience. Let alone countless hours of kara on multiple toons ( I have a 70 warrior,hunter,shaman,lock, and rogue) I can tell you that it is easier to make a dps ranged group than a dps melee group. Now can both be sucessful??? Sure. But which is easier to accomplish? I'll tell you the ranged and I guarantee that you aren't surprised by that. And as has been pointed out in this thread why take a buff soaker when a buff giver is going to be able to put out even more comparable dps while providing yet another valuable set of buffs?
It's interesting that you raise ZA as an example; as my prior guild was, for a while, working to optimize our bear run times; at the time, we were competitive with the top guilds (EJ, etc.) in terms of clear time. We're talking clears with up to 15 minutes to spare back in March. And for so doing, the optimal strategy - by quite a bit - that we settled upon was to run as close to all-melee as we could. As I recall, we usually ran 1 hunter, 1 warlock, 2 healers, 2 tanks, and 4 melee DPS. Now, admittedly, there's not a lot of benefit to clearing with 15 minutes left versus 10, but the underlying point - that melee DPS clears the instance faster than ranged DPS - means that if you are, for instance, only marginally at the gear/experience level where bear runs become feasible, you'll make the DPS timer more easily with melee than with ranged. So on the whole, I would argue that ZA is a very *good* instance for melee DPS.
But, more to the point: speaking as someone with, if I may flatter myself, a bit of experience on the matter of rogues and high-end raiding, I haven't noticed any major class viability problems since the cleave patch. And even if such issues do currently exist, there's plenty of time for them to be fixed in WotLK. Think about it this way: Blizzard isn't stupid. If class balance ever finds itself in a place where guilds aren't bringing one class - any class - anymore, they risk alienating a significant section of their player base, which would be moronic for them to do. Hence, they have a vested interest in keeping rogues - and every other class - raid viable. And if they happen to screw it up and rogues start getting marginalized - they'll fix it, just like they did in BC. Hence I see no reason to worry about the long term viability of the class.
Also, on your 4th point (Pride) - everyone wants to be the best. Not everyone can be. Which is why the goal is "balanced", as opposed to anything else you might advocate.
You act like we've never had to wonder about our raid spot before. The same thing happened with BC, and the same thing will probably happen in a year and a half when the next expansion comes out. If you're worried about your raid spot as a rogue, pickup one of your (apparently) many other classes, and roll that for LK. This thread shouldnt be a QQ session for people like you that are afraid of not being able to raid as a Rogue. Rogues will have raid spots, and Rogues will still be top DPSers.
What you seem to be missing (and a lot of people it seems), is that Rogues have not had their review yet. We dont know how are talents are going to be. We dont know what buffs/debuffs we'll be getting. We have no clue how raiding at Lv80 is going to be. The Dev's themselves have stated that caster DPS is out of control. That should be a huge clue that they are still working on things. If it comes down to two days before release, and Rogues look exactly the same as they do now, then by all means worry about raiding. But the fact remains that this is still in Beta, Rogues still havent seen a huge amount of focus yet, and there's still months of testing before this hits the store shelves.
The point of my post was simply to posit a question that I felt many other people had. Nothing with myself personally. Any personal questions could be handled via pm's or simply patience.
Thank you aldriana for responding. I couldn't agree more. Some of our most positive za runs are pure melee. Including not one but two rogues. (Myself and Boonlue)
I made this post mainly for the people that continue posting negative examples about wotlk. And I am quite drunk waiting for an episode of House to load on surfthechannel. I have enjoyed raiding as a rogue throughout TBC. And as you and Xaoc have stated we have not had our review.
So could we please hold the bitching and complaining over the last few pages down a bit?
P.S. It was worth an infraction. Oh and our glyphs need some work...seriously.
I think at least to this point rogues are the class where you got to really stand out in groups. You got to be sociable, even tempered, and a great player.
It's not easy getting in a high end raiding guild as a rogue. If you are the best rogue on your server, but have the social grace of a donkey, you might get raiding spots when your needed, but as soon as your not your going to get the boot.
Now if you have some social skills, even in fights where you're not optimal you still keep your spot.
I've been running with the same group of folks before BC, and I know even if the rogue class took a complete nose dive for raiding, they'd take me. We are not the cutting edge, but we raid, we see new content, and I still get epics.
I think if you really want a secure place in a raid, you shouldn't be looking at your class, as much as being a good person to play with.
To be fair I agree with you quite a bit Kasumi. This is more a sociological game than an algebraic. Which is why I again would caution people. (who are a big part of the raiding game) to wait for the rogue review.
Wow I am being way to agreeable lately. I blame the alcohol. OK. Stop being idiosts. Stop posting about unsubstantiated bullshit. Seriously. I (and I believe the rogue communtiey) want to see posts about the following ;
A. New specs
Seriously we love combat, wait i meant mutilate, wait can't i be hemo , i heard my best friends cousins mutated dolphin did more dps as sub.
B. New abilities
Fan of Knives.......Give me a fucking break.
C. Gear & Abilities
Seriously crunch some numbers and tell us which professions are going to be the best before the expansion comes out. Listen we don't care that you can't tell since they are still in the process of changeing everything. You need to make and objective recommendation and then feel bad when its wrong and we get all pissed.
While it's not game stopping, having some form of aoe will help us long term. I find many of the other new rogue abilities suspect Cut to the Chase being top of my list of 'what?'.
Also, looking at blues posting about raiding they seem to be giving the impression they want sub rogues viable in raids... (any class any spec ) I have yet to see any reason to bring a sub rogue past 24 points.
If you look at your class and your buffs seem lacking, uninteresting or underpowered, it's probably because they haven't been updated yet. In the past our design was more that there are classes that bring buffs but have lower dps, and classes with high dps but fewer buffs. While not every class will end up at exactly the same dps, we can bring things a lot closer together. Rogues, mages and hunters can end up with good buffs that fit their kit. Poisons are a great angle for rogues, though not the only one.
So the way I see it, the following are angles for rogues that 'fit our kit':
- Poisons. We already have some consolidated utility here, in the form of "the healing debuff", "the slow casting time debuff" and of course the most powerful snare in game. I would argue though that they are not a great angle for rogue utility because they are boring and because they do not cause the rogue to make any great sacrifice. Once you find a boss can be numbed, you need to remember to put mind numbing on, you lose a fairly small amount of poison damage. Beyond that, it's pretty much passive.
- Finishers. Ignoring stuns, Expose Armor is our existing utility finisher but it doesn't play well with others. I prefer this angle, as it requires the rogue to actually do something that might be challenging and it does represent an obvious sacrifice.
- Talents. Just as Rampage for warriors got merged into "the melee crit bonus", it's not beyond the realms of possibility to imagine Find Weakness or Hemos buffs getting aligned to this new model. Equally, some of the lackluster talents currently at the top end of combat could be ripped out and replaced.
One thing I note is that our current 'raid synergies' come in the form of debuffs on the target. Something mentioned in the big blue post was that they are trying to keep debuff numbers on the bosses down. So adding a whole bunch of new poisons or debuffing finishers probably isn't the way to go.
With those mechanics and Blizzards stated intentions in mind, here's a few things I'd quite like to see:
- Expose Weakness effect as a finisher or talented side effect. It should perhaps be hassle for the rogue to keep up so as not to eclipse the MM hunters role if you have one, but close enough that your physical dps aren't gimped by not having one.
- Insect Swarm effect as a poison. It's a boring debuff but one worth keeping up and a good fit for a poison effect. Perhaps one of the deep assassination poison talents could make deadly poison cause the -2% hit.
- Fero Insp effect as a talented side effect, maybe replacing something like Unfair Advantage.
These all seem like valid raid buffs that 'fit the kit'. We wouldn't be putting BM/MM/Balance druids out of their jobs but we'd be able to cover several raid niches.
Yeah, but live says: "Increases the damage dealt by your critical strikes with maces by 5%"
While the beta patch notes says: "increases critical damage bonus by 2/4/6/8/10%."
It may just be a typo, but if anything it's a nerf if it works the way it is written in the patch notes.
The talent itself doesn't include the word bonus so Mace Spec looks to be in the clear. Is it safe to assume Mace Spec would be #2 (worse than Sword, but better than the others) after this?
Before you start to drift, and your soul begins to scream.
I just wanted to tell you, that you're listening to a dream.
A WWS posted in my guildforum struck me as very weird because of the top rogue completely missing on any ruptures.
It looks like he just spammed SS and SnD: Wow Web Stats
Didn't really compare the equipment of the rogues to the last spot but in my opinion the average white hit is more or less in the vincinity of random eveness.
But there's no way or no amount of AP in which you'd lose DPS by completely dropping Rupture, now is it? It just doesn't make any sense to me. What am I missing?
Since you spoke about ZA, I'd like to bring utility example, when we started doing first sucessful bear runs we had 2 healers, palatank and heavy AoE caster dps. I was in 100% of these runs having not a single synergy class in raid. (Minimum of Salvation + might)
My DPS was far from being impressive but my role was bringing good portion of control to clearing trash mobs, kicking/stunning flamecasters, kidneyshotting handlers on cast of electrified net, preventing lose mobs reaching healers, etc and that considerable number of prevented wipes and saved healer's mana.
Perhaps that's the way Blizz want to see our utility?
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
Since you spoke about ZA, I'd like to bring utility example, when we started doing first sucessful bear runs we had 2 healers, palatank and heavy AoE caster dps. I was in 100% of these runs having not a single synergy class in raid. (Minimum of Salvation + might)
My DPS was far from being impressive but my role was bringing good portion of control to clearing trash mobs, kicking/stunning flamecasters, kidneyshotting handlers on cast of electrified net, preventing lose mobs reaching healers, etc and that considerable number of prevented wipes and saved healer's mana.
Perhaps that's the way Blizz want to see our utility?
No disrespect (you are much more geared than me and obviously play your class well) but maybe you were brought along (the za runs) because they were short on talent and needed a space filled. Or perhaps you are friends with those going. I am by NO MEANS dogging you but to be part of a raid because we 'help out a bit' and we might be relegated to the 'phone answering' class.. alot of other classes clear trash mobs alot better. kinda sucks. ( i am just speculating on what others are saying about wotlk and our role) - so I want to move away from this thought process that we can be brought along cause we can kick or somesuch. I can't wait for the whispers after a raid "man, you kick real well. Glad we brought you along. Btw can you stop by the vendor and pick some things up for us..." :-)
As others pointed out if WOW is trying to 'close the gap" between our dps and others and yet letting us have that "little bit more on single target dps' - that kinda sucks because out of all the bosses out there, how many actually just sit there and let us do our thing on them? I mean for wow to say "Lets close the gap between rogues and other dps & yet let them maintain a slight single target dps on few bosses' that actually sit around long enough for the rogue to maintain a nice rotation etc.." is a suckers gambit. But like others have said -- they haven't gotten around to us yet so who really can say.
Since you spoke about ZA, I'd like to bring utility example, when we started doing first sucessful bear runs we had 2 healers, palatank and heavy AoE caster dps. I was in 100% of these runs having not a single synergy class in raid. (Minimum of Salvation + might)
My DPS was far from being impressive but my role was bringing good portion of control to clearing trash mobs, kicking/stunning flamecasters, kidneyshotting handlers on cast of electrified net, preventing lose mobs reaching healers, etc and that considerable number of prevented wipes and saved healer's mana.
Perhaps that's the way Blizz want to see our utility?
To be fully honest, I don't see why would Blizzard want us rogues to do tanks' job? It's not our job to control mobs so they don't reach healers. For that control we have to spend energy, GCDs (equals wasted time) which we can and should spend to do some damage and leave tanks and offtanks to deal with adds/trash mobs. I've played with your guildmate Congloxx, he can do it instead of you. :P
Also, while we can kick, we are forced to pool energy and slow down with dps to do it. On the other hand, enhancement shamans can use their Earth Shock ability to interrupt as it's only taking a small portion of their mana pool, and it's on a shorter cooldown thus making it actually a better alternative as shaman actually does nothing except Stormstrike every ten seconds along with auto attacking and eventually totem twisting.
So no, can't agree we are already bringing something to raids. We're naked. I believe we should get more utility, but something in a form of a buff to melee classes which we'd benefit from aswell.
It's only really viable if Focused Attacks and Combat Potency are a wash. Turn the Tables strikes me, assuming 100% uptime on both, as significantly better than Unfair Advantage. At that point, it's Seal Fate and Poison talents vs. Prey on the Weak and Expertise.
08/23/08, 4:37 PM
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