In all honesty, with them trying to put redundancy in the key raid buffs, and with the caveat that this is not informed opinion but merely speculation - I wouldn't be surprised if we see other "important" buffs fit into our trees. Expose Weakness seems like a good canidate for a buff that hasn't been made redundant and meshes well with roguey-ness.

Look at the mage design tree though - they provide some VERY solid debuffs (+10% dmg, +10% crit) for other users of those damage types - I think others are correct in saying that it's likely that our DPS will be toned down slightly, but rogues will be given some solid raid/group utility to make up for it.

What it comes down to is a matter of choice. If you wanted to do "mad dps", you still can with the spec that does the most dps. However, if you do choose to manage buffs/debuffs, you can spec into that too and still be raid viable. Having utility doesn't have to come at the exclusion of high dps. Just look at BM and Survival hunters right now. BM hunters perform "mad dps", even higher than that of rogues in a classic tank and spank fight, and they even provide a group buff to boot. Also, if one wanted to provide debuffs (ie. EW and IHM), they can spec into Survival and lose some personal dps.

Right now, as it stands, it's deep combat or bust for raiding, deep sub for PVP, with deep assassination completely useless for anything. It seems like a waste of a tree to me.

I beg to differ! Mutilate is a very fun and interactive spec, and I'll have you know, using it I top my guild's dps meters regularly, even against some other "not so dedicated" Combat Swords rogues. Saying one entire tree is "crap" cause you dislike it is just wrong and counterproductive. The fact may stand that Mutilate will be outdpsed by a Combat swords build on equal grounds, but in my opinion it VASTLY makes up for that minor dps difference in the sheer enjoyment of playing a non-spam spec.

Also, Mutilate as it stands now in the unfinished talent trees is getting much more love then combat, and I for one hope blizzard continues the trend, after all, this is supposed to be a "dagger comeback" expansion.

Fold's central point was not one about choice. It was pointing out that it is wrong that we are second-best and offer nothing else. When faced with the choice of settling for where we are if Blizzard throws us a bone and gives us some raid benefit, he is squarely with the camp that chooses to refuse such an offer and requests we be restored to our undisputed dominance on single target dps.

There is nothing wrong with that view, nor is there anything wrong with Blizzard making that a reality once again. Blizzard explicitly stated pre TBC via a slide in a public slideshow that the rogue's point was to be the clear #1 choice for single target dps. They have failed in that. Now if their intention is to hold true to that and make things right, heck I'm all for it. I rolled a rogue because I like that very underlying tenet.

The hunter example is an extreme case of how Blizzard got it wrong. They gave them the only same-stacking group buff which stacked multiplicatively, to make things even worse, and turned them into peerless leaders by ridiculous margin that also helped their party do more damage/threat that also provide noteworthy debuffs. That's a great starting point for the bare minimum we should be demanding / expecting of Blizzard.

I think the age of "Rogue is the highest single target dps" is a thing of the past. To be realistic we were for a long time. Windfury made us king with haste being amazing for our dps with trinkets and procs with no internal cooldown. When they changed haste and nerfed haste procs (Warglaive, DST, Blacksmith hammer) they knocked us down quiet a few pegs.

A few things changed between Karazhan and T5.

AOE became more prevalent.
Group synergy became the center point of group design.
No longer was it how much damage could you do but how much could you do and what do you give others.
They nerfed the hell out of haste, windfury, sword procs. (even expertise i think)
They let percentage based buffs that were "ok" on lower content go unfixed for to long. Before you knew it they started designing content around guilds advantaging off of them.


Elemental Shaman, MS warriors, Ret pallies, Boomkins. Specs that brought a lot to the raid but were always left out due to their personal performance got boosted like no other.

The problems i'm trying to highlight is that we lost a lot but other classes which weren't far behind us in performance and had buffs to offer didn't get knocked down at all. This is why you seen Hunters Top damage along side the Warlocks.

They've clearly stated that they are getting rid of the "no buff big damage, got buffs poor damage" design and giving everyone something they can give to the raid. They're trying to jigsaw the buffs and have mutiple classes give buffs from multiple other classes. This will allow raid design to be a lot more flexible.

As for what the rogue will get. Well, I think anyone's guess is as good as the next. Perhaps that's why we're last. How do you give a raid buff to the "assassin" class without it making no sense. Rogue's aren't spell casters. We don't roar. If I had to put my money on it I'd guess it to be something involving our poisons. They'll probably put some sort of bleed damage, nature, maybe armor reducing debuff in. I'm hoping for some way to boost caster damage as well to justify a rogue spot in a caster heavy raid group.

Poisons are a possibility, but they're almost too easy. I'd rather see something in a finishing move, myself - that way, it'd take a little more skill to use effectively. Somewhat along the lines of Expose Armor, but increasing damage in a different way. Also, ideally, having duration that scales with CP rather than effectiveness of the debuff (more like SnD than EA in that respect). As having to queue up 5 CPs before firing off EA had significant adverse effects to our ability to put it up quickly.

Changing Expose to be duration-based would probably be a little overpowered in PvP. An easy tweak to bring it back in line would be to add charges to it a la Hunter's Mark. (For those who aren't familiar with the ability, it grants X AP against the target when cast, then each shot against the target ramps the provided AP by Y, to a cap of Z.)

There will always be a "best" spec for a particular role. This goes for every class, and while the actual best spec may change, the concept will not. It's near impossible to balance everything to be equal, even between similar specs in the same class. Itemization, synergy with others and encounter design will always make things unequal.

A high end raiding guild will want every player to be functioning at maximum potential for each encounter as they learn it, particularly if they are bleeding edge. Most guilds are understanding, and after putting things on farm, do not mind their members occasionally playing a different spec for fun, but that's more of a social thing than anything else.

The nature of cutting edge raiding is always going to be min/max, and without rogues being changed into something similar to hunters (i.e. bm vs sv in tbc) they will likely get pidgeon-holed into a "best" spec, even if said spec varies from encounter to encounter, or raid zone.

Right, but as has been discussed: it's reasonable to expect that they get balanced within the variance of itemization. That is, it may be true that given a sword and a dagger of equal quality, the sword is better; but it is highly desirable that they be close enough that, should a dagger drop that's theoretically of higher quality, it may be worth respeccing to use. The situation we saw in BC - where a sword from pre-raid content does better DPS than an end-T5 dagger - should ideally not be repeated. How feasible this is remains to be seen, of course, but I think it would be an admirable goal.

One possible rogue buff/debuff they could give (though this would only benefit mutilate) would be to make find weakness a debuff on the target instead of a buff on the rogue. This might be a bit overpowered plus it leaves combat out, but would be a serious reason to take at least one mutilate rogue to the raid.

I like that idea! Won't be over powered if it'll be changed to only +3-4% dmg, and that way mutilate also loses some dps to compensate for increased raid dps.

The reduced FW debuff would only make sense if it worked for all damage. Also, blizzard is struggling to reduce the number of debuffs on a target, simply because it is hard to model additional debuff slots, and it is stressful for other player's computers.

Thus, Debuff is not the route we want to take.

This is not a valid comparison, "apples to oranges". Why is it easy to make hybrid classes raid viable in all 3 trees? Because they're performing 2-3 roles, with a talent tree to match each. Prot is for tanking, Fury is for DPS, and I'm not sure how many raid DPS warriors are speccing Arms, but MS is certainly the prevalent PVP spec.

Rogues have one role, so I imagine it's much harder to make varied and equal design decisions for damage dealing across 3 different trees. It looks like they're trying, but I think in this case Sub will still be the dominant PVP spec, with Combat not changing much from it's BC incarnation and Mutilate raid damage benefitting greatly from the addition of 10 extra points regardless of any new 41+ talents (DW spec + Opportunity + Blade Flurry + New Poison talents) -- thus keeping Sub delineated as PVP, and Mutilate performing much more closely to Combat to offer a choice in pure damage dealing.

Edit: My comments are based on the assumption that raids will be min/maxing to some degree, i.e. not allowing an MS warrior because they are a family friend when another spec would provide obviously superior DPS.

Actually, in current high end content the first DPS War in a raid is generally Arms due to Blood Frenzy. The Arms/Fury distinction for Warriors or the Survival/BM for Hunters I think is a very good model for how they could take rogues: one spec which does lower personal DPS but provides a useful raid DPS buff/debuff, another with higher raw personal DPS. Though it could go a number of ways, right now I think the strongest breakdown would be:

Assassination -- Raid buff DPS tree
Combat -- personal raid DPS tree
Subtlety -- best PvP tree

I think this is a better way to state the position, I apologize if I misinterpreted Cally's post.

The obvious answer is that they tried to do this with Hemo, it's a physical damage buff that's raid wide and adds significant damage, but the loss of personal DPS when taking a tri-spec (post-hemo nerf) wasn't worth the added raid-wide DPS which is a huge fail. Perhaps a 0/41/30 would be viable? At least in BC, any raid spec without Relentless Strikes was doomed.

Any raid spec without relentless strikes will likely still be doomed in Wrath.

That does bring up an interesting point. If Blizzard wants to eliminate the cookie cutter specs they will have to do something about the must have talents. Relentless Strikes is way too good for a 1 point 3rd tier talent. I took a quick look at the dps spreadsheet and RS accounts for 10% of my damage output. Dual Wield Specialization is another must have 3rd tier talent. I receive a 13% damage increase from the 5 points invested in this talent. That is better than Seal Fate and Find Weakness combined, even better than having combat potency (if you could get it in a mutilate spec).

Poisons as the source of group utility have the same advantage that warlock curses do: you get to switch to a DPS variant if the utility is unnecessary. In this case, you actually can trade in your utility for damage as the raid composition varies.

That said, I'm very much in favor of Tetra's interpretation where utility has zero impact on DPS, because all synergy is assumed to be present. The current 'snapshot' of developer progress along these lines has "irreplaceable" raid-buffs like Blood Frenzy being way toned down to the point where they actually balance out against individual contribution in a 25-man setting. I anticipate the rogues will earn their raid spot not by having higher DPS, but by providing the same DPS at lower maintainance.

Saw this in the UI & Macros beta forums:

WoW Forums -> GetComboPoints() api changed

Basically GetComboPoints() is now GetComboPoints( "unit" [, "target" ] ). No actual confirmation that it does something useful, but this is an intriguing change none-the-less.

I would imagine that has something to do with the new focus stuff that Blizzard is doing, so you can see the combo points on your focus if you choose to make one for some reason.

I recall reading at some point that they were considering making combo points stick to rogue instead of them being applied on rogue's target. It would be warmly welcomed change as who wouldn't hate wasting five combos.

Almost a year ago, Drysc wrote: