We have, along with other Melee, the single best DPS ability in the game for fights with constant movement. It's called Autoattack. So long as the high movement fight is not high mobility ONLY for melee, we are actually significantly advantaged in such environments as we never need to stop moving to do more DPS. So long as your tank moves the mob in a predictable manner at a managable speed, and the movement in question doesn't mean moving away from your DPS target, we're actually significantly advantaged in non-stationary encounters.

I think this quote sums it up quite clearly what I've been trying to bring up in my previous posts. All other classes have options to keep their raid spots: arms warrior speccing to prot, feral druid speccing to resto, and so on. Rogues, well, not so much, and it's exacerbated by the fact that there's only one viable raid spec with the mandatory 41 points in combat. That's why I've been trying to compare rogues to warriors to druids to other classes in my previous posts. Now, I know rogues can't tank or heal but what I'm talking about is having THREE raid viable trees for a rogue, the same way that most other classes have three raid viable trees.

Let's look at a priest this time. Now, the main concept of a priest is that it's a healing class right? A priest is supposed to top the healing meters right? Well, they can, and COH priests are wildly desirable for a raid. However, they ALSO have TWO other raid viable trees in the form of Imp. DS for raid buffing and their shadow tree for dps/utility. Priests have no problem with having 3 raid viable trees despite being a de facto healing class so I find it puzzling that some in the rogue community would have a problem with having some utility in a raid or having more than one raid viable spec.

I don't know about some of you, but I find it more fun to theorycraft and play with 3 raid viable trees with differences in combo point building moves, finishers, and gems/enchant/glyphs.

While I don't think Rogues should never have utility, or that they should be the first class dropped from a raid, you aren't making solid arguments here. Unless you routinely raid with Arcane Mages, Marks Hunters, and Demonology Warlocks, the argument that most classes have three raid-viable specs is silly. DPS-only classes will have a "best DPS" spec, and that will be the preferred spec for the majority of encounters; that's just how it is. Survival Hunters are the notable exception, obviously. In fairness, the top DPS specs for some of those classes change somewhat over Tiers. Arcane is good with 2pT5, but falls behind Fire after a point; Affliction may be better than Destro in entry-level (read: Kara) raiding. Still, at any given level of gear/progression, there will be a spec that does the most DPS in most cases, and it would be silly not to use it.

Your Priest argument is also off. Putting ~20 points in Disc doesn't make Disc a viable raiding tree- or if it does, the 20 points in Assassination that a 20/41 Rogue has makes Assassination a viable raiding tree. I have yet to meet anyone who raids seriously with 41 points in Disc.

tl;dr- While I actually agree with you, I disagree with the arguments you are trying to support your point with. The only classes I would consider as having three discrete raid-viable trees are those with three trees for three separate roles (tanking/healing/melee DPS/ranged DPS). (I'm interpreting "viable" as "you could spec this and expect to get invited to raids;" you could raid as 20/21/20 in any class if your guild let you, but that doesn't make it a "viable" spec.)

This is the type of bias that I'm trying to argue against. When the hybrid classes have so much developer time being spent on making sure that every one of their trees is raid viable and balanced, why can't this be true for dps only classes.

I've known plenty of arcane/frost mages and demonology warlocks that wished that they could bring their type of spec into a raid simply because they enjoy that kind of playstyle. Why can't dps classes choose their playstyle for a raid AND be raid viable? Sure, there would be personal dps differences but each tree would bring something to the table to offset that.

Imagine Arcane, Fire, and Frost mages ALL raid viable for WOTLK. Now imagine Assassination, Combat, and Subtlety rogues all raid viable as well. Wouldn't that be a fun concept?

Edit: Yes, I agree my disc priest example may be a little off. But the fact remains that priests have 3 raid slots by virtue of changing spec and gear, not to mention that is it often beneficial to stack COH and spriests in a raid. Raiding guild recruitment policies for priests goes as follows: spirit priest, COH priest, spriest. For rogues: combat ONLY. See my point?

I think you're missing the point. Even if all three trees for any pure DPS class were "raid viable," there would still be a "best," and that's the spec that the majority of the players in any progression guild will be speccing. A best tree is unavoidable unless everything is identical, and then you're right back to being bored again. At any level of scaling, one tree is going to pull ahead; it may eventually be overtaken by a different tree, but they will never really be equal. That's just the way it is. The reason that hybrids have so much time spent on their trees is that they have multiple distinct roles for each. The Assassination tree being weak in PvE is a far smaller concern than, for instance, Paladins not being able to tank at all because their Prot tree sucks.

Yes, one tree is always going to be the best (in terms of total DPS put out) but like hunters or DPS warriors, talents can be tuned such that one (or even two) of the trees give buffs + dps that amount to more total rDPS than the "pure DPS" tree. Hunters have Survival and BM, warriors have Arms and Fury respectively.

Furthermore, even failing that Blizzard can tune the trees (and talents) to be close enough to each other that "the best" spec will change consistently. Have better daggers? Go Mutilate. Have better swords? Go Combat. In addition, if they were tuned even more tightly, the exact gear you have might make the difference -- so if you picked up a couple more agility-heavy pieces, that would tip the scales from Combat Daggers to Mutilate.

Hemorrhage here is a good example.
Instead of fixing the debuff to work properly for added utility, they nerfed it to hell.

If they removed charges and made it flat 6 seconds, at least one rogue could bring utility that's worth as much as mangle.
It's the uptime that makes hemo rogue subpar to combat.

There was a perfect chance for that utility.. *end rant*
And my point was - rogues have lots of ways to bring utility without overpowering their dps. Blizzard just have to use them (they almost had it).

This is a bit more complicated, because for Mutilate to be almost on par with combat, you have to gem agility almost everywhere, against hit if you're combat.

I think Rhea have a solid idea by making hemo a 6 second debuff without any charges.
With hemo glyph this would be a heavy raid buff. You should suggest.

I think that the "lateness" of rogue changes is just due to the difficulty they are currently facing: How to balance rogues in a manner that makes them desirable and fun whilst not making them overpowered? It seems eventually to boil down to PvE/PvP balancing that they are trying to do. What I just can't understand is the fact that there are quite a few means that have been used in the past which affect solely PvE and gave the significant increase on rogue's damage output. The original weapon skill with glancing blow reduction was a stellar if somewhat overpowered example of this. I think that they could add via a passive (trainable) skill that -- say, increased expertise rating --, some PvE DPS without forcing us to spec into a given talent tree.

I think that the concern of the "very best" talent spec is genuine for rogues mainly because of the placement of most of the talents. There is a vast array of talents that are just too good to disregard and as such these talents de facto decide the allocation of most talent points. On top of this comes the so-called useless tiers of talent trees that cover the first tier of combat and virtually the first three talent tiers of the subtlety. If you have to waste up to 15 talent points before you can get a worthwhile talent for raiding it comes as no surprise that such a waste shows on the damagemeters. By adding a third talent on the first tree of Subtlety that would provide additional raid/DPS functionality and replacing one of the talents on the second tier there could possibly be a wider range of variation in raiding specs.

Personally I am not too concerned over rogue DPS -- we are fine for as long as our DPS remains comparable to that of the other (pure) DPS classes. When (de)buffs are considered I'd wager that there's something in the making as we speak. I would like a threat reduction ability, say, combo-point based threat reduction that we can use on other targets. This would be possible to implement in case combos would stay on rogue instead on the target we are fighting against. On top of this there could be of course special (preferably) debuffs on the weaker DPS trees, e.g. the suggested change to imp. Kidney Shot debuff which would apply eventhough the target would be immune to the stun effect. Also the idea of ripping charges from Hemorrhage and replacing it with a timed debuff sounds like an easy yet tangible improve for rogue utility.

All-in-all, the times of rogues rocking the DPS charts are (sadly) over. Hopefully through more varied encounter design and a new, balanced debuff abilities rogues are able to keep their 2.5 places on each and every raid. There will be still encounters that favor melee and those that favor ranged. It just should be that on those encounters where ranged is favored there will be some other function than weight-load for melee.

Not really. According to spreadsheets and EP calculations, regemming for Agility or +Hit will net you only 5-10 DPS, maybe a hair more. When you are doing 1500-2000 DPS, this is less than a 1% change. I have successfully gemmed for agility and cross-specced combat/mutilate for several months now. In that time period, my hit rating hasn't climbed above 270 at any point and I've been able to do competitive DPS as either spec.

Also, without Blessing of Kings, Agility and Hit are almost equal in a Mutilate build. So while I choose to advantage myself for Mutilate and gem agility, plenty of people gem for Combat and still play Mutilate viably with a minimal DPS loss.

Furthermore we have literally zero idea of what we're going to gemming for at 80 (Some might say Hit will drop a bit because of the change to Windfury, but then again we don't know what's going to happen with poisons, and what procs will be available at 80 -- so again, we don't know). We need to see raid gear first.

I don't agree. I recall reading a blue post (and of course, I can't find it) along the lines of Blizzard not wanting all specs to be viable in all aspects of the game. While this was more targed at PvP, I think it definitely applies to PvE. So seeing some spec, whether it be a rogue spec or some other class, that does great in PvE and PvP would bother me.

As for hunter stealth, the first time I read the hunter ability, I assumed it was more like shadowmeld than a real stealth (being unable to move and if you get within like 10 yards they are detected). Going back and rereading it, it sounds like they may be able to move and even string up an aimed shot before breaking stealth. That screams to be nerfed if that's the case. A shadowmeld-like ability I, personally, don't find that uncalled for in the class, or really all that OP.

I believe the post by Arindelest immediately following your post argues against this point. However, I'd like to add that at one time, for hunters, MM was THE raid viable spec pre-BC, and if Blizzard decided to tune MM, it's not inconceivable that BM/MM/Surv could have been all raid viable for BC.

This is precisely the kind of thinking that led to the subtlety tree being broken for at least a year after BC release. Shadowstep was never used and it was finally usable in PVP play after the latest changes in January 2008. This is also the reason why we don't see more dagger rogues. To me, having things like a 41 point talent broken for at least a year is unacceptable.

This is easily solved by the duplication of buffs/debuffs or the interchangeability of roles between classes. I believe I went through this before in my earlier posts but I'll go through it again and give a concrete example. Hypothetically, say that a hemo rogue provides similar buff/debuffs to that of an arms warrior and that an assassination rogue provides similar raid utility to that of a survival hunter. Now, if you have 3 friends that all play rogues, you don't have to sub them out of the raid because they weren't an arms warrior or a survival hunter. On the flip side, if you already have a survival hunter, you don't specifically have to go out and recruit an assassination rogue. To me, that's more flexibility and not less.

As a rogue in a guild planning to focus on 10 man progression in Wrath, I'm wondering where all this will leave rogues in a 10 man raid. If rogues are going to have trouble justifying their raid spot in a 25 man, where they can expect to have all the buffs they want...does that makes us a de facto waste of a slot in a 10 man raid?

I'm really excited about the paladin changes, and my pally may well be my main in Wrath just because it seems so much more useful raid-wise. If rogues aren't going to top the damage meters by a lot (or maybe at all, from the posts I'm seeing), and they provide no buffs and no ability to respec to another raid role, and depend on full buffs from a 25 man raid to be truly competitive for damage...then there seems no reason to take a rogue on a 10 man unless they're a friend.

And this, to me, is a big problem. 10 mans are getting full progression, so all classes should be useful at this level as well. In their current state, rogues seem like the last choice for a 10 man, by a lot. I realize the focus of this website is on cutting-edge 25 man raiding, but class balance for 10 man raiding should also be considered given Blizzard's new focus on that raid size.

That's not likely. One of those specs would yield the most raid DPS, and thus would be chosen as *the* spec. The pet survivability increase along with the 20% haste and simplified shot sequence is what put BM hunters on the map. If MM ended up doing more damage, raiding hunters would have specced MM instead of BM, not either-or.

The rogue "problem" is better related to mages. There's only one idea spec at any given level of gear/content, the difference is that it does change in TBC.

I'd agree on principal that balancing 3 trees to all be equally viable in PvE would be difficult at best. Basically, you'd need one main DPS tree and 2 support DPS trees each with a different buff which doesn't stack with itself. At no point in WoW that I'm aware of has any pure DPS class had 3 equally viable PvE DPS trees, so while I certainly wouldn't complain if that happened, I think a 2 tree model (main DPS/support DPS) is probably more realistic, and adequate to address the concerns that have been brought up in the discussion.

Something analogous to mags is also a possibility, though I'm not sure that we really want to be so hinged on set bonuses (as 2 piece T5 is really the only reason fire wasn't dominant all the way from hit cap to Sunwell).

That sounds suspiciously like Cone of Cold and Dragon's Breath. Is it likely that they re-used a bit of code for Fan of Knives? Did you seem to hit more mobs as they were further away from you?

Erm, did Blade Flurry work on Deadly Throw? I wouldn't assume it works on throwing moves... but I never tried.

Would it work if you got a dozen of your guildies together and going to an outdoor arena like Nagrand. Have them form a raid and stand in a clump while you attack them.

Solution: give us a talent that reduces glancing blows, both frequency and effect. Zero impact on arena, huge impact on bosses.

Edit: Harkurm mentioned this in passing as well. I won't debate whether or not the old implementation was "overpowered" but it seems like a simple enough thing to tune.

Blizzard could also remove glancing blows from the game, they already have the armor lever to mitigate physical damage.

And it would be quite in line with the removal of crushing and the 1% resist to spells.

I'm not a fan of removing Glancing Blows entirely from the game. Here is an easy pve mechanic that Blizzard has to give *rogues* an up-tick. I would prefer to see this in the form of a passive class benefit or at least a talent unique to rogues.