Pharmacon

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).

 

Keegantir

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.

 

tetracycloide

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.

My vanity is justified.

 

• Aldriana

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.

 

Keegantir

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.

 

tetracycloide

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.

My vanity is justified.

 

Ariashley

I was hoping that someone here would have thoughts already about whether, at patch 3.0, it would be better to take Lethality or Prey on the Weak and whether Murder Spree is better than Relentless Strikes. I don’t know any rogues that got invites to Beta (a couple of paladins, warriors and priests). Doesn’t look like anyone here (or not too many anyway) got invites to the beta or those that did aren’t able to provide much insight, as I understand a lot in the beta is still broken.

Honestly, it seems like most of this thread is a “I wish Blizzard would…” or “I’m going to suck more than xxx class now because of…” discussion. Given that I doubt Blizzard spends a lot of time combing the elitistjerks theorycrafting threads for ideas and I have no interest in being alarmist, I’m not sure that the last 50+ pages of discussion has been all that enlightening.

In regards to the above post from Arindelest: What are you talking about with 7 talent points that result in 0 DPS? If you ignore those talents we already take to spec into surprise attacks (seems ridiculous to start crying about those now, since we already have them), we're talking about 2 talent points that need to go somewhere in combat that probably won't result in a DPS change (unless you spec into 2 weapon types, in which case you have to more points that could go someplace else to give more DPS).

I don't think Unfair Advantage looks as terrible as you're making it out to be. Seems like that talent is pretty much a flat 2% crit chance and dodge increase in a raid. I’m never going to sneer at a 2-2.6% damage increase. This actually seems about exactly the same as the Prey on the Weak talent. If you tank any boss fights (RoS, Bloodboil Fel Rage), that 2% dodge isn’t really garbage either. It would clearly have less uptime in a PvP situation.

It’s tough to say what Murder Spree will be like. Sounds kind of like a mutilate that hits 5 times in 2.5 seconds with swords (or fists or maces, whatever). It might not suck. I can’t quite envision it.

In raids, Prey on the Weak would be active a lot of the time I’d imagine. Doing a really quick and dirty calc on this looks like around a 2.5% damage increase, if it was active say 2/3rds of the time (which on certain bosses is reasonable and on others would be completely unrealistic).

Here's how I arrived at that conclusion:

http://wowwebstats.com/fab2nir4fqmho...5466&a=xdb4c94 (the raid and fight I'm looking at)

141 crits on white damage over 4.67 minutes
average crit 1014 (crit bonus damage 514 - due to RED, made a simiplifying mutiplicative assumption here)
25% * 514 = 128.5 extra damage per white damage crit
128.5 damage * 141 hits * active 2/3rds of the time / 4.67 minutes / 60 seconds = 45 DPS / 1725 from the fight = 2.6% increase

Looking at the same data for Lethality, it appears that it adds about 33 DPS (about 2%) and, therefore, Prey on the Weak is probably better than Lethality when having to choose one over the other at 70. It would depend on someone doing a measurement of average uptime of Prey on the Weak though. I know I don't currently pay attention to how much of the time my health % is lower than the boss health %.

 

dinesh

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.

 

• Aldriana

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.

 

Danzir

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.

 

Mikari

First Rogue changes posted on the beta forum

 

• QControl

Also Dismantle will be trainable at level 20.

 

PSGarak

Mutilate no longer has a facing requirement removes the... feel of the spec, but for most applications it goes well with the removal of Gouge's combo point.
Enrages are becoming a more "core" part of the game, similar to how Bleeds are all classified together nowadays.
Cut to the Chase is now 65% more unstupid, depending on raid buffs. Between that and envenom stacking your DP back up really fast, assassination is now much more finisher-heavy like God meant it to be.
Relentless Strikes sounds like it's being made trainable... but I'm not sure. They may mean 11 combat.

Something I'm noticing across the board is that, while in general you see awesome talents deep in the tree and merely good ones shallow, tier 1 talents are often kickass or required or spec-defining to the point of being class-defining. For rogues, Cruelty and DWS are part of basically all builds now, plus they may have something up their sleaves for subtlety (ridiculous Opportunity?). They explicitly said all three DK trees have mandatory tanking talents in the first tier. If you've peeked at the new official calculator, there's now 5-balance mandatory for resto and vice-versa in Genesis and Furor. I don't know if it's a good thing or not, it's just something I've noticed. Maybe it's meanto to help 51-point talents compared to 21-point talents by tying 45-51 together.

Killing Spree/Fan of Knives: Do they mean that daggers are not penalized?

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

ekval

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.

 

McFry

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.

 

Hildegard

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.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Chack

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.

 

• Aldriana

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.

 

Grimmlokk

So, am I the only person in the world who thinks the poison requirement on Mutilate has to go? What purpose does it serve? To make fighting elementals more annoying? To make using Envenom less attractive? Seriously, why even have it? I get that most of this will be "hardly ever" type situations, but I don't see any reason for them to ever be an issue.

New CTTC looks nice. I imagine instead of it refreshing to 5cp it will refresh to whatever CP you use it at. Also, does the "refresh" part in the wording mean it won't work if you don't already have SnD running? Would suck if it didn't work in those situations where you accidentally let SnD drop for 1/10th of a second. Use Evisc that little bit late and then have to start your cycle all over from scratch. Blech.


Anyways, here's what I posted on one of my guild's forums. Swearing removed.

General

- Quality of life improvements:
Not sure how the poison stuff is gonna save bag space. Are there really people carrying around a bunch of poison components instead of just making the things? Why not make the poisons work like shaman weapon buffs. Whatever, nothing bad here.
- Envenom:
Neat little change. With all the poison changes this fits in nicely. Will make using instant poison with Deadly Brew more viable in conjunction with Envenom.
- Wounding Poison:
About ************* time.
- Anesthetic Poison:
I thought we were cutting down on the poisons I have to carry? Oh well, rogues are better players than huntards so this will help the raids.
- Evasion, Sprint, Vanish:
This is another "about time" situation. Getting 2 uses in arenas without prep will help, and significantly more vanishing during boss fights is only a good thing. I suppose
- Cloak of Shadows:
**** you Blizzard and whiney ******** casters. Nerf our good TBC non-talent ability. ***holes.
- A new level 75 ability:
No damn idea. Something like Hemo I think, except not a near worthless debuff.
- Fan of Knives: Weapon normalization to equalize effectiveness regardless of weapons carried.
Was needed. Especially if they do manage to make daggers viable. Still nothing amazing, but it'll be nice to finally have an ability to blow up mass groups of lowbie shit like everyone else can.

Assassination

- Mutilate: No longer requires you be behind the target.
That's great. Now remove the pointless poison requirement so it's not horrible on elementals and works well with Envenom.
- Relentless Strikes:
This was needed. Having 11 points required in a tree for any viable raiding tree was stupid.
- Find Weakness:
No idea WTF this means. A proc'd 10% damage to special abilities talent going passive? So either it will be overpowered and provide 10% damage to specials and finishers all the time, or I honestly have no idea. If the % is nerfed it'll just end up an Aggression clone.
- Cut to the Chase:
This is huge. Massive. Gigantic. Before this talent was essentially useless for raiding and mostly crap for PVP. Now it's great for both. It's not expressly mentioned, but I imagine it will refresh SnD to whatever #CP usage you use now, instead of the 5CP value of the old version. Which is fine. So spend and extra 10 energy on refreshing SnD, for the added damage of another finisher.
- Hunger for Blood:
Hard to judge. On the one hand the ability to remove Hamstring/Wing Clip almost at will(30 energy) is nice for PVP. On the other hand the original version removed magic effects. If it still refunds the energy whenever it removes an effect, it's probably a nerf. You tend to get hit with a lot more magic than physical stuff, meaning this will be free a lot less than before. Still not sure where you'll find 90 energy every 30 seconds or so to keep this up purely as a damage buff, making it a questionable 51pt talent.

Combat

- Riposte:
PVP/Solo talent. It's OK, the CP is nice. Dismantle has been moved to level 20 for our disarm, so no real loss there.
- Mace Specialization:
Latest build had removed the stun and buffed up the % damage on crits to 2% per point. No idea what this will look like in the end or how good it will be. Pointless to speculate until we get #'s.
- Deflection:
Nice little buff to this. 2 less points for 1% more
- Fist Weapon Specialization:
OK
- Dagger Specialization:
So we can get dagger 5pts earlier in Combat and fists 10? Sounds like they are pushing for us to use those 2 specifically. Which is odd, since warriors are being pushed in to using 2H's. Who do they want taking 1H swords? Of course, we still will if it stays the best DPS spec, but that's not the way they are pushing us.
- Dual Wield Specialization:
Good stuff. Same as Relentless Strikes, except more so even. I imagine LR will end up giving Agi also or something.
- Unfair Advantage and Stay of Execution
No idea WTF Stay of Execution was really gonna do. Kinda confusing wording. Unfair advantage was basically 2% crit all the time before(8 sec after a crit). So like, small version of Malice, but 41 GD points in to the Combat tree. wtf. No idea what new versions will be.
- Killing Spree:
Needed normalized. No idea how this will perform in the end. Needs to scale with weapon DPS or something. Also, it's called Murder Spree, not Killing.


Subtlety

- More attractive Tier 1 to draw in all types of builds.
No specifics given. I dunno, maybe changing Opportunity or something. It is our only tree with only 2 T1 talents. So maybe something moved or entirely new.
- Fewer dagger specific talents to allow additional build options.
This is good as the top of the tree was aimed squarely at daggers in the last build. Which is odd for the Hemo tree. Also nice not to have 2 trees dedicated to daggers.
- Wrongfully Accused:
PVP talent. Kinda worthless in PVE. I expect it to get changed really. Wording is kinda ambiguous, does it mean that anyone who attacks you will be down 50% damage for the first 6 seconds? Or only if they're already in combat with someone else?
- Shadow Dance:
Right now I think this basically does vanish every 3 seconds, 3 times. PVP talent only really. Seems pretty underwhelming for a 51pt talent. Just like the other 2.

Plenty to do still as you can see. As I mentioned, this isn’t everything we’ve got our eye on but gives you something to discuss and look for in an upcoming beta patch. Please add to the list anything you think needs special attention.
Hopefully this means someone will actually read and respond to the legitimate questions and complaints that pop up occasionally among the retardery. Not holding my breath.

 

Kukulkan

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

 

Hildegard

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

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Kukulkan

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.

 

kharen

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

 

• QControl

I think our level 75 skill has been found.

 

• Aldriana

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?