I'd rather have resto shammies be able to buff us than to be reliant on the fact that you are in the enhance shammy group. My guild has 2 enhance shammies (1 just got back from being gone for like 3 months) and for a long time our GM ran very light melee because we didn't have a good melee group. So why take 2 rogues that will only be buffed by a hunter or two when you could take an extra warlock and keep 1 rogue to suck up loot.

I think overall the spreading of similar buffs to different classes/specs is good. Sorry if you're an enhance shammy or another class with a redundant buff (hell, as it stands now, rogues don't have any buffs to hand out). However, redundant and raid wide buffs will make it to where I don't want to kill myself because I'm doing subpar DPS for lack of a good melee group (not to mention it will make 10 mans easier to have a well buffed group).

Redundant buffs are going to make the end for some specs. Yes, it is nice to be able to still field a balanced group even if you are missing someone, but it sucks for those that got spots ONLY because of their buffs before. Now that other classes, that are auto guaranteed spots for other stuff they do, have the same buffs, those that were only getting invites for their buffs are SOL.

Until the finish performance testing every class relative to the others. There's really no way of knowing at the moment which class' buffs will have the lowest raid opportunity costs. We can make assumptions based on what buffs overlap and what we think each class will have to give up to provide the buffs but those assumptions aren't based on the facts as they will exist in 3.0.2 much less WotLK.

On the topic of the coming content patch: I hear people saying that they're pushing it out quick to compete with other games or whatever, but to be honest I have no idea where this is coming from. I mean, they've said it'll be on PTR fairly soon, but there's a big difference between PTR and actually going live. Frankly, I view the PTR release as primarily an opportunity for increased testing of certain aspects of the expansion. PTR is allowed to be buggy and incomplete, and has been on any number of occasions. When you throw in the recent blue post which mentioned patches staying on PTR for as much as two months, I don't think there's any reason to believe that they're going to be pushing 3.0 to live anytime soon, and certainly not before it's ready. If 3.0 hits live servers before mid-October at the earliest, I will be surprised. Blizzard isn't so stupid as to release incomplete patches that utterly hose significant sections of their player base, and I don't see why anyone believes they're going to start now. Yes, it will be on PTR soon. Yes, it may be horribly balanced. No, it's not going to make it on live realms until it's ready. So if we could stop with the foretellings of doom until there's some reason to believe it's actually going to happen, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Quoted from Eyonix
He's not talking about the PTR there, he is talking about live. While coming weeks could mean 15 weeks from now, when a normal person says it they are generally referring to the next 2-4 weeks. If he is talking about more than 4 weeks he should have said the coming months.

First off, there is no direct language that says 'live relms' and second 'coming months' would be 8+ weeks so anything less than that could be 'coming weeks.'

Ald is completely right here and there's really no room for argument. Blizzard isn't dumb enough to think rushing a content patch out the door before it's finished is the right way to deal with WAR.

Many of us have beta keys. The short version is that many of our new skills and abilities are not implemented yet. It is useless to try to draw conclusions from what is available to us now.

While it's true that the end combat talents are competitive with the first 15 points in assassination, I would argue that that's a problem in it's own right. It seems to me that 40+ point talents might reasonably be expected to be better than tier 1 talents in other trees, which at the moment is only marginally the case.

Also, more to the point: the tradeoff (once you get to 80, anyway) is not to much end combat versus early assassination; one has to consider what you'd be doing with those points instead. You don't have to choose between Prey on the Weak and Lethality; rather, you're choosing between taking both, or dropping both in favor of getting Serrated Blades and Hemo.

In particular, the concern is this: under current estimates, the best talent builds in the expansion appear to be either tri-spec Mutilate (41/22/5+3) or tri-spec Hemo (11/39/21). Which basically means that our principal gain from 70 to 80 is... 10 extra talent points that we will put in talents already available to us. Which I would argue is a pretty strong argument that there's a problem.

In short: I agree, most of the talents we're getting aren't necessarily *bad*, per se - a lot of them give modest DPS increases. It's just that they're not good enough to warrant actually taking, which strikes me as bad.

As a quick note on Murder Spree: I think it works out to be really good or really bad. It really depends what happens with autoattacks during the spree - if it interrupts our swing timer, I suspect it's mediocre at best. If it doesn't, it'll probably be pretty good - although, again, cooldown abilities tend not to have large impacts on our sustained DPS in comparison to more passive abilities. The burst is nice in some circumstances, I imagine; but in terms of raid DPS, the benefit of stacking a few more middling DPS talents relative to cherrypicking one of the existing powerful talents (such as Hemo) strikes me as marginal at best. This is why the opinion here is that these talents need to be changed, which is why our review is so hotly anticipated.

Now this is something of great concern and pretty much sums most of what I have been reading the past weeks. The "new" talents offer nothing that isn't already available to us at lower tiers (in terms of dps). Everyone is waxing poetic about "potentials" but when a End tier Combat talent is being debated as being equal to a Tier 1 assassination talent - that is a huge cause for alarm. I mean, there is so much truth in what is quoted above that everyone is arguing over scraps and how to best spice the scraps to fill our bellies the most - but in truth -- just read what is quoted.

First Rogue changes posted on the beta forum

Also Dismantle will be trainable at level 20.

DWSpec in Tier1 and Relentless Strikes change are the most major in my eyes. We will see if they give RS as trainable skill which would be good choice.

This is probably the mentioned % increase to physical damage that was mentioned a few days ago in the Raid Utility post. This is pretty nice considering the changes to Fury, so your warriors aren't still forced to be specced for Blood Frenzy.

The wound poison change gives us a "better" mortal strike, as it lasts longer than the warrior's MS-effect at least if bosses don't start to dispel the poison on them.

The Hunger for Blood change is something to give Mutilate an edge when fighting melees but lost a lot potential regarding PVE.

Removing the directional requirement from Mutilate will most likely mean that it will no longer gain the +20% from opportunity. But maybe they are changing that talent totally as well.

Well, lets go down the list here.

General
* Quality of life improvements. Not much to say here - we'll have about 2 spaces of extra bag space, and will save a little time on restocking poisons. Definite improvements, though not major ones.
* Envenom. So poison should stack up a bit more quickly after an Envenom - with 5/5 Improved Poisons, we're talking an 80% proc rate. Deadly Brew rogues in particular will like this, I imagine. This is a definite buff to envenom due to the lowered opportunity cost, but we will still need a new rank of it if it's going to be a viable finisher in raids.
*Wounding Poison - A significant PvP buff, but the impact is relatively low in PvE. We don't use WP that often, and keeping it up shouldn't be too hard in most cases.
*Anaesthetic Poison - A nice utility boost. I think we just took over as the definitive way of managing enrages - the fact that we dispel them automatically for the most part, and can drop a shiv to take one off immediately strikes me as much more efficient than Tranq shot. Not that every fight will need Enrage removal, but it's a nice niche to have for the ones that do.
*Evasion/Sprint/Vanish. A nice change; faster vanish will be handy in aggro-limited situations, plus more cooldowns is always a good thing for one things start to go wrong.
*Cloak of Shadows. I suspect this nerf is aimed more at PvP, though it will also effect fights like Brutallus and Kil'jaedan. I suspect this won't be *too* relevant in PvE, though - if they make the 2 minute cooldown too much of an annoyance, it'll start forcing rogues to spec Sub for particular fights, which would be annoying. I suspect this wants to be positioned as "a nice perk to speccing subtlety, but will never be required".
*New ability. Obviously hard to comment on.
*Fan of Knives. It's certainly a nice change, and fixes one of the two major problems with FoK; hopefully there are further changes coming to address the "but it still sucks" issue.

Assassination
*Mutilate: Vastly increases the universality of Mutilate as a spec. You can now use it while farming, it's better in PvP, and it means that you don't get totally crippled on fights like M'uru and KJ where you can't always stand behind the boss.
*Relentless Strikes: Another badly needed change. We'll have to see if "more accessible" means trained, or merely tier 1 rather than Tier 3. Either way, it will vastly increase the number of viable specs. Vigor is a much more reasonable talent for that level of the tree - adds a little PvP utility and allows better energy queuing, so useful to many specs, but not at all essential for any.
* Find Weakness. Reduces the importance of energy queuing for rogues (making Mutilate a little easier to play), and makes it vastly easier to model Mutilate cycles, but shouldn't affect net damage output that much.
* Cut to the Chase. A badly needed change, certainly; but as has been discussed, it's still weak for a 5-point talent. I'd still like to see it dropped to 2-3 points to be competitive for it's place in the tree.
* Hunger for Blood. Since we can already cloak the magical effects, I suppose it's nice to be able to remove some stuff that we currently can't; but with the longer cooldown on cloak and the relative scarcity of these sorts of effects relative to magic debuffs, I can't help but feel that this is a nerf to a talent that wasn't super-strong in the first place.

Combat
*Riposte. Nice for farming, possibly useful in PvP, still largely useless in PvE (barring rogue tanking, but lets not go there as that's clearly not anything they're worrying about, based on the rest of the review).
*Mace Specialization. Will really depend on how much armor reduction we get. Too early to tell if this is good or not.
*Deflection. See Riposte.
*Fist Spec. I suspect we don't see many more fast OH fists with this change - rather, the expectation will be Fist MH/Dagger OH, which, coincidentally, also increases demand for daggers, a stated goal for rogues.
*Dagger Spec. This, combined with the previous change (and the next one), basically means that splashing combat becomes a lot more viable for certain specs. I'll touch on this more at the end.
*DW Spec. Okay, this is huge. This is going to open up a lot of new spec options - again, I'll cover this more at the end. Lightning Reflexes, however, will need a *massive* buff to be at all credible as a tier 4 talent.
*Unfair Advantage/Stay of Execution. Again, we'll have to wait and see what they put in, but they're definitely aware of the problem, which is good.
*Killing Spree. A good change in light of the importance of fast OHs to rogues. Though we still don't know how good it's going to be until we get a chance to try it.

Subtlety
Not going to go item by item here - basically, they've realized that subtlety as a tree just sort of sucks and are going to work on it, which is good enough for me right now.

Now, it's still early, and we still have a lot of unknowns, but we can definitely say a few things based on these changes:

1) We're getting some more utility, in the form of our level 75 talent, possibly improved AoE via FoK, and Anaesthetic Poison. Good thing.
2) They're aware of a lot of the talents that just plain sucked. Good thing.
3) There's still a few talents that they seem a little unclear of all the issues with - notably, Cut to the Chase is still weak, as is Hunger for Blood.
4) They're making some of the must-have talents easier to get, to allow greater diversity of specs. This is a very good thing - lets look at this in a bit more detail.

*Deep-Ass builds. Previously deep-ass builds were looking at 41/25/5 and the like due to needing too many important talents in other trees to afford all of Assassination. Now 51/15/5 with DWSpec, Precision, and Close Quarters Combat in combat strikes me as much more viable.
*Non-Mutilate SF builds. I suspect these are still weak, as SF is still not that great; but the fist change does make fist/dagger SF builds more interesting. Particularly due to the ability to swap between Backstab when behind the boss and Sinister Strike when in front. I can see 30/17 forming a useful core for such a build - though we'll have to wait for the Sub changes to have any idea how one finishes out the other 24 talent points.
*Deep Combat builds. Well, the combat part is rearranged but not necessarily improved that much - the filler is just a little higher up the tree. But the relentless strikes change does open up the opportunity for 0/50/21 type builds in addition to 20/51/0 builds, which opens up a lot of options.
*Sub builds. Again, Sub is going to change a lot, so it's hard to comment on this in too much detail, but: with more non-dagger talents, Hemo presumably gets stronger; and the ability to get more of the powerful talents earlier in the tree strikes me as a good thing. Like, you want a basis of 0/10/21 to get DWSpec, Precision, and Hemo; but past that, I can see dropping the other 40 points almost anywhere working - there's still good stuff in combat for CP/Hemo type builds, good stuff in Assassination for tri-spec builds, and plenty of ways to go deeper into Sub for Deadliness and Sinister Calling.

So, basically: we have a lot more somewhat-reasonable spec options to consider; I suspect there's still one or two that will migrate to the top, but if your itemization doesn't allow the best spec, or you hate the best spec for some reason, or you want a hybrid PvP/raiding spec, I suspect you're going to have a lot more options.

On the whole: I like what I'm seeing. They're definitely addressing many of our concerns. There are certainly still issues and areas of concern, but the initial wave of information is definitely promising.

Somehow, I sort of doubt it. It seems odd to me that they'd give us a level 75 ability that only one rogue per raid will ever need to use - that sort of thing strikes me as better done in a talent than in a trained ability. I could be wrong, of course, but if I had to guess I'd expect this to be raid utility more in the "misdirect" mold than the "straight extra damage" - not necessarily aggro management per se, but something that each rogue can do to help a raid which, while not essential, can at times be convenient. But, again, we'll have to wait and see.

With this change, I suspect they will take mutilate out of Oportunity as Sinister strike, Shiv and hemo arent there.

Or they change to plus XX% to all specials which would make most to any spec have 5/5/5 as basis.

That could be good, but still have the lethality 5pointer that cripples combat daggers, that will be the case with most deep combat builds, lethality needs to be lowered to 3 point talent (10% per talent points), then you could have much easier time specing with combat daggers or your purpose oportunity.

With the change to Relentless Strikes, combat daggers should be able to easily spec 15/51/5 and still get full Lethality.

I think our level 75 skill has been found.

I'm not entirely sure why people are so hung up on Combat Daggers, honestly. I mean, it's nice to have good dagger specs, but will all the opportunities these changes will allow, getting hung up on Combat Daggers specifically seems... silly. I mean, it has the distinct advantage of being able to toggle between a fair SS build (with fists) and a possibly reasonable BS build... but it's not clear to me that having a combat-centered dagger build is high on their list of priorities. I would guess that with these changes, deep Sub is going to take over as the premier backstab-based build... but I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

My point is that while wanting viable backstab builds is fine, I'm not sure I'd set my heart on any particular implementation of a dagger build - combat daggers or any other.


QControl, where is that from?