With the addition of Hemo to Surprise Attacks, it is obvious they expect people to have 0/41/21 (+9) variants. With that understood a couple of things.
1) Aggression needs Hemo added to it's list. (Someone on Beta please recommend that one) No reason to have it only affect Sinister Strike.
2) Three 2 point talents get tossed in direct competition with each other for evaluation, and 2 five pointers.
a) Assuming Combat Potency is taken, Blood Spatter, Blood Poisoning, and Dirty Deeds are virtually interchangeable. 30% more on your ruptures, vs. 2% more physical, vs. 20% stronger Hemo on near dead targets. Rupture is our bread and butter, but will that be true in Wrath? My guess is the 2% full time boost is worth the most out of all situations all the time, but the Dirty Deeds will be the winner for long boss fights, especially if Aggression changes to include Hemo. You get 2 out of 3 of these, so right now I'm thinking the Rupture bonus and Dirty Deeds. Anyone have ideas on why Blood Poison should replace either?
b) Now if you do decide to take Dirty Deed & Blood Poison as your 2 out of 3, you then get the choice of ignoring Assassination tree entirely for Prey on the Weak. 20% crit damage boost as long as you have more health. I have to think that raw 5% crit is better, but obviously Blizz thinks the talent is as strong (or stronger for where it is in the tree), so it warrants some thought. Still, I find it hard to give up Malice.
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Now looking back, one thing I did leave out is the weight of Ruthlessness. Using the same arguments above, you can always add 2/3 in that, or skip one of the others above and take 3/3 Ruthlessness and manage that 1 odd point left over elsewhere. Ruthlessness has always been strong, and there are no qualifying conditions for it's benefit, so it is very likely that this should be kept, and the others sacrificed in some way.
Ultimately, it all comes down to Aggression having Hemo added I think, as well as Hemo getting some kind of touch up. The charges being significantly raised, or just removed, dunno. It's obvious with the change to Surprise Attacks Blizz intends for this kind of build to be used for PvE, and anything outside of 21 (23) points in Subtlety would totally gimp it. What isn't obvious is whether even with changes to Hemo and Aggression, will the 0/41/21 (+9) variants be strong enough to compete.
Malice gives 5% of your crittable damage, before crits. PotW gives 1/5 of your crit% of your crittable pre-crit damage (at 100% uptime). PotW > Malice at 25% crit rate or higher, which is to say, all the time. At 35% crit rate, PotW only needs a 5/7 (~70%) uptime to beat Malice.
This is before other crit-bonus effects like Lethality or metagems. How Lethality affects its comparison to Malice is pointless, since Malice is a prereq to Lethality anyways. A 3% crit damage metagem would alter this by 6%, which means 26.5% crit at 100% PotW uptime or probably around 6% uptime difference for any given critrate.
As for the 2-pointers, blood poisoning is either the best or worst one, depending on whether you have an arms warrior or not (remember, it's a raid debuff, not a personal bonus). Dirty Deeds doesn't really depend on fight length except for how cooldown-stacking mages alter the fight length. 35% is 35%. Comparing dirt deeds to blood splatter is really going to depend on how they've buffed Rupture. I hear it's coefficient got upped, but so did the rest of the finishers. If you're still using it, it's a big part of your rotation now, so my guess is it wins.
Remember, this is all from the perspective of Surprise Attacks now including Hemo, so 0/41/21 +9 variants only.
The thing about PotW though is that you basically only have one option then, 0/50/21. That means any other combination of talents have to be weaker than that exact build, not just 5% crit chance added of Malice. Blood Poison being a raid-buff, I'd have to say you take that if you're a consistent 25man raider, and leave it off otherwise as you won't be getting near the same return on talent points invested.
The same logic was near to what I meant about Dirty Deeds above. If your target doesn't have enough hitpoints to make that 35% be a long portion of time, then you're only getting in a few specials in that period. The longer that 35% lasts, the more actual return you're getting on the talent point investment. That is the main reason DD has the opener component, so that for those short (few seconds) fights (trash, levelling, pvp, etc) you get something out of the talent. 1-3 specials on a target would not be worth it alone really for any kind of raiding consideration.
For the purposes of any Surprise Attacks+Hemo builds, Lethality is irrelevant. (ie: unattainable)
What would the advantage of that be? Backstab costs the same, does less damage on average, and generates less combo points. Mutilate gets an even further comparative boost now that it has access to both opportunity and DWS. Are you planning on using a different combo move, like sin strike or something?
The reason I asked is mostly due to the fact of itemization as of now which is much more sword friendly (warglaives). Yes I was looking at a SS build like this one.
Level 70 build based on SS rotation with HFB-> Envenom-> Rupture
You would open with garrote or SS and pop SnD and go into a HFB Envenom and Rupture cycle to keep all them rolling.
I'm sorry if it sounds weird but I'm basing this build on the fact that I've thrown most of my decent daggers away and I never took the shard of azzinoth (ducks).
So I don't know about the rest of you but if daggers are going to be top dog come 3.0 I'm sort of SOL.
If your target doesn't have enough hitpoints to make that 35% be a long portion of time, then you're only getting in a few specials in that period. The longer that 35% lasts, the more actual return you're getting on the talent point investment.
No you're not, not more than any other talent. The longer 35% lasts, the longer the other 65% also lasts. It's still 35% of the hp you have to take down, and 25-35% of the fight length depends on how you, your fire mages, affliction warlocks, DPS warriors, and frost DKs manage to shorten it. There's a possible arguement that on a short fight this burn range lasts even shorter because mage molten-fury-cooldown-stacking has a larger relative effect, but I honestly doubt that's enough to effect the anticipated return on the talent.
I think you're missing the fact that your 'specials' are tied to energy regen. IE: how many you can do per unit time is relatively fixed. If it's trash, and that 35% lasts 5 seconds, you get nothing out of DD talent. In fact, you might leapfrog the 35% and the target is dead. If it lasts 30 seconds, you get more shots in where the talent is actually providing some benefit. The longer it goes, the higher percentage of your total damage put out on that target comes under the effects of DD. (IE: the more specials you are putting out with the target under 35% and eligible for DD to have any effect)
That's simple math really. DD does less and less for you the fewer specials you get in when it is 'active', and the amount of time it is active is directly proportional to the amount of hitpoints the target has, and the number of specials you can pull of is directly tied to your energy return rate. Yes other DPS and effects adjust that time, but that's like saying if you had better gear, the fight is shorter ... well, no kidding. Assuming same group, same gear, and simply taking the talent on it's own merits, the bigger/badder the target, the more benefit you get as a relative fraction of your total damage delivered.
There is some sweet spot where the extra 20% on specials kills the target the exact amount faster that reduces it's "alive time" such that you end up with fewer specials and it is all a relative wash with not enough time taken off the fight to be any benefit. That is probably exactly the spot Blizzard aims for and then adds a 'boost' to, by design. That tuning is of course tied to a very exact DPS and target health however, and with 24 other people and all their variables, I'm sure that spot is never actually hit. At least, we hope so, or the talent would be insanely useless. The flip side of that is I wonder what percentage boost would make our damage so insane under 35% that the fight blazes through at the end. %30, %40? At some number I guess it becomes like a massive, spamable Execute.
You're still missing my point. The amount of time that DD is active is directly proportional to the amount of time that it is not active. If you got more specials in when it's in execute range, that means the mob had more life, and it took more specials to get there. The two balance out in such a way that absolute duration has nothing to do with it. I'm not talking about how the gear and whatnot makes either phase shorter. The "relative fraction of your total damage delivered" is constant because the relative fraction of time spent in DD range is constant.
If it's trash and the DD range lasted 5 seconds, the rest of the fight lasted 10 seconds. If the DD range lasted 30 seconds and you got in a lot more hits, the whole fight lasted a minute and a half, and you only had DD for a third of the fight, which is exactly the same. If you had a solid half-hour of DD-range, you had to spend an hour getting the boss into DD-range. No matter how many more specials you get, there will always be the same ratio of un-DDed specials to DD-ed specials. The average DPS increase is completely constant. The only effect that actually favors fight length one way or the other is the ability to pool 65 extra energy in anticipation of DD-range, which is more noticeable in short fights than long ones.
As an aside, the sweet spot you're talking about is "you are fighting it on your own." You do the same damage overall if that's the damage it takes to kill it. If someone else is doing any amount of damage, then the total damage increase (as a percent) is less than your damage increase, so the lifetime decrease is less than if you were killing it on your own, meaning you get bonus damage compared to the amount of damage you would have done before it died. It's always a DPS increase, but in any non-solo situation it's also a total-damage-done increase as well (unless someone else has better execute-range abilities than you).
You get 2 out of 3 of these, so right now I'm thinking the Rupture bonus and Dirty Deeds. Anyone have ideas on why Blood Poison should replace either?
*shrug* Blood poisoning is a raid-wide buff, so it's the absolute winner unless it's already covered by someone else in the raid. Argue it out with your Arms warrior. Either he takes Blood Frenzy or you take Blood Poisoning, end of story. Surely this shouldn't need asking?
*shrug* Blood poisoning is a raid-wide buff, so it's the absolute winner unless it's already covered by someone else in the raid. Argue it out with your Arms warrior. Either he takes Blood Frenzy or you take Blood Poisoning, end of story. Surely this shouldn't need asking?
Interesting though, how Blizz seems to "advertise" bringing rogues of various specs to the raid:
1 Assassination rogue for Master Poisoner, it will be a waste of talents for other rogues to have it
1 Combat rogue for Blood Poisoning, it will be a waste of talents for other rogues to have it
1 Subtlety rogue to supply the hemo debuff, again, it will be a waste for other rogues to have it.
With the addition of Hemo to Surprise Attacks, it is obvious they expect people to have 0/41/21 (+9) variants. With that understood a couple of things.
1) Aggression needs Hemo added to it's list. (Someone on Beta please recommend that one) No reason to have it only affect Sinister Strike.
I think it definitely needs to be excluded from Aggression.
With it's inclusion in Surprise Attacks, Hemo is already a better scaling combo generating move than SS in combat builds (120% damage for Hemo vs 180+116% damage for SS) and seems to have a slightly better DPE at early level 80 stats, without taking into account the damage debuff.
With an added 6% scaling, it would be so superior to SS that it probably renders all SS-based PvE builds strictly inferior, which seems a bit contrary to Blizzard objective of promoting diverse raid viable builds.
Has anyone noticed Turn the Tables now affects "combo moves" instead of finishers. As tested by the new lethality descirption "combo moves" are combo point building non-finisher moves. So TtT will increase the crit chance of mutilate by 6% fully talented.
I think it definitely needs to be excluded from Aggression.
With it's inclusion in Surprise Attacks, Hemo is already a better scaling combo generating move than SS in combat builds (120% damage for Hemo vs 180+116% damage for SS) and seems to have a slightly better DPE at early level 80 stats, without taking into account the damage debuff.
With an added 6% scaling, it would be so superior to SS that it probably renders all SS-based PvE builds strictly inferior, which seems a bit contrary to Blizzard objective of promoting diverse raid viable builds.
Hemo is now only 115% as of the latest patch on the live realms. In addition to this, taking Aggression and Sinister Calling means you can't take 5/5 Malice, and you can't take Ruthlessness or Lethality at all, so it seems a fair enough trade to allow Hemo to benefit from Aggression.
These are the list of changes. I copy pasted from the posts of various people (Lokar, Aldriana, Waywilder) and added some that I have noticed. Removed quotes for clarity.
Assassination:
* Lethality now reads "Increase the critical damage bonus of all combo moves by 30%". Sinister strike is a combo move, finishers are not combo moves. It is not confirmed whether it applies to Ambush.
* Blood Spatter indeed moved to tier 2, and also buffed to 15/30% from 10/20% increase to Garrote and Rupture.
* Improved Expose Armor changed from increased duration to lower energy cost by 5/10.
* Murder moved to tier 6, but buffed to 4% (2% per point spent)
* Deadened Nerves changed to 3 points, and all damage reduced instead of only physical by 2/4/6%.
* Find Weakness is "All offensive abilities up by 9%" for 3 points.
* Mutilate doesn't show Requires Daggers on this tree. (possibly a bug) * Turn the Tables now affects all "combo moves" (which means mutilate will be affected by it, finishers won't).
* The Hunger for Blood changes are in, but the buff nerfed to 3% stacking 3 times.
Combat:
* Dual Wield spec is now required for Close Quarters Combat, Precision no longer required for Lightning Reflexes.
* SnD is now 2 pts (25, 50%)
* Mace Spec wording says that it ignores "up to" 3/6/9/12/15%
* Hemo has been added to Surprise Attacks
* Prey on the Weak nerfed to 20% instead of 25%.
Subtlety:
* Opportunity still reads "striking from behind" and it still affects Mutilate. I think it will increase the damage of mutilate when you are behind the enemy, otherwise it won't.
* Imp Ambush is now 2 points, 25/50%
* Inititive buffed to 100% for 3 points
Last edited by robfang : 09/07/08 at 2:15 PM.
Reason: Corrected.
* Lethality now reads "Increase the critical damage bonus of all combo moves by 30%". Sinister strike is a combo move, finishers are not combo moves. It is not confirmed whether it applies to Ambush.
* Mutilate doesn't show Requires Daggers on this tree. (possibly a bug)
I've confirmed that Lethality doesn't affect Ambush. Mutilate's tooltip has omitted the dagger thing for a while now, but it still very much requires daggers.
I've confirmed that Lethality doesn't affect Ambush. Mutilate's tooltip has omitted the dagger thing for a while now, but it still very much requires daggers.
Can you confirm how opportunity works with mutilate? Does it imply a positioning requirement?
It currently affects Mutilate regardless of positioning and I see no reason why they would change that. At least if they listened to anything I said, the point of removing the positioning requirement is that it doesn't actually reward good play (not more than any other spec), but merely punish arbitrarily for circumstances that are beyond your control. Thus, it would stand to reason that having Opportunity only work behind the mob would do the same thing.
Plus, unless my intuition on the mechanics of the game is way off, I would wager that making the talent only affect Mutilate when performed behind the mob would be a pain of coding.
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On a completely unrelated tangent, I managed to poke around Wowhead long enough to find what I think is some information on the actual damage dealt by the new ranks of Envenom. First, look at these two entries, the existing ranks:
Notice how both spells have "School Damage [Nature]" as Effect #1 and "[Dummy]" as Effect #2, with each effect having an equal value -- that value being the amount of base damage provided per combo point. Now look at Envenom 3 and 4:
The tooltips are still the same, and the "[Dummy]" value doesn't change, but the "School Damage [Nature]" value does change. Unless I miss my guess, then, Envenom 3 deals 176 base damage per CP, and Envenom 4 deals 216 base damage per CP.
Ruthlessness seems to me a waste of talent points if you don't plan to use 4 point finishers. Seal fate already gives you 96% chance to get 5 cp's with 2 mutilates. Of course this matter will get more clear with the spreadsheets.
Other than that, the build is pretty much the one you build. It may change depending on the presence of another one for 3% crit buff in the raid. In that case those 3 might be invested in Turn the Tables, Close Quarters Combat or Improved Poisons depending on whichever gives the highest dps in a raid.
It depends a little on the intended dps cycle as well. If CttC means that the primary cycle will utilize Envenom finishers (or Eviscerate against poison immune mobs), which seems to be where Blizzard is steering us, then I don't know if you're going to want Blood Spatter (which seems to be going more towards combat rogues who want to stack it with Serrated Blades). If you pull out Blood Spatter, you'll probably redirect 1 point to Improved Poisons (you need the point there to meet the tree requirements), and the other point would likely go into Improved Slice & Dice.
And if you're an end-game raiding rogue, at some point I suspect that Turn the Tables will become appealing. In a 25-man raid, especially doing trash or battles with multiple tanks, it would seem a strong prospect for a nearly continuous 6% mutilate buff with 3/3 points. Of course, everything else at the top of the tree is appealing too, so I guess we're all still waiting for the developers to cut down the bloat at the top tiers!
Have any of y'all kept combat logs for the training dummy parses? I think I've hacked up Stasis to fix the Overkill fubaring the combat log parsers (thx gian for a sanely structured program), and I'd be interested in seeing if Recount is really accurate about the absurd numbers you guys are pushing.
Here's a few minutes of me using this build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
You'll have to filter out the other players, my character name in it is Lata
Ruthlessness seems to me a waste of talent points if you don't plan to use 4 point finishers. Seal fate already gives you 96% chance to get 5 cp's with 2 mutilates. Of course this matter will get more clear with the spreadsheets.
Unless my maths is completely awful, you need an 80% critrate on Mutilate for a 96% chance for Seal Fate to grant you to gain the extra CP. At 30% crit (45% for Mutilate) you get little over a 70% chance to gain the extra CP, and with endgame critrates of roughly 40% (55% for Mutilate) you have just under 80% chance for Seal Fate to grant you the extra CP.
Seal Fate is largely a waste of space. Even on the live servers, shifting 5 points from Seal Fate over to Improved Poisons (which is itself pretty awful when it comes to raiding - remember this is only with Deadly Poison on the offhand and Windfury mainhand) only cost me 13dps on the DPS Spreadsheet. That's less than 1% of my dps. With the number of other talents currently available in the beta, once you've invested as far up the tree as Vile and Improved Poisons (26 points. 28 if you include Murder), I'd be very surprised if any raiding Mutilate build actually includes Seal Fate when WLK goes live.
That's not to say that Ruthlessness is a particularly good talent, but it's a significantly lower point investment and is taken at a point in the tree where there are few other dps talents available (Improved Eviscerate and Blood Splatter being the obvious alternatives, though both are potentially worthless if Envenom spamming eventually does become the normal cycle). As such, I think it's far more likely that we'll see people raiding with Ruthlessness than with Seal Fate.
If it's trash, and that 35% lasts 5 seconds, you get nothing out of DD talent. In fact, you might leapfrog the 35% and the target is dead.
Counter-argument: When I'm specced DD I intentionally save up energy for that 35%, and the shorter the fight the more significant the effect of doing so. If, as you said, that last 35% only lasts 5 seconds, and I go into it with a full 100 energy I get at least 4 hemos off in those 5 seconds.
If, on the other hand, that last 35% lasts for 30 seconds, I still get 4 hemos in the first 5 seconds...but then it's back to a regular pace for the remaining 25 seconds.
With the exception of this extreme case, I'm pretty sure the only thing that makes DD's value vary from fight to fight is the ratio of time that the boss is below 35% to the time that he's above 35%. Expressed another way: imagine a graph with the Y-axis being Boss Health and the X-Axis is Time. If the boss's health declines at a consistent rate then the graph is a straight line. If it's a curve BELOW this line (i.e. a bunch of your dps have died off) then DD is worth more than usual. If the curve is ABOVE this line (i.e. bloodlust & execute) then DD is worth less than usual.
Unless my maths is completely awful, you need an 80% critrate on Mutilate for a 96% chance for Seal Fate to grant you to gain the extra CP. At 30% crit (45% for Mutilate) you get little over a 70% chance to gain the extra CP, and with endgame critrates of roughly 40% (55% for Mutilate) you have just under 80% chance for Seal Fate to grant you the extra CP.
Seal Fate is largely a waste of space. Even on the live servers, shifting 5 points from Seal Fate over to Improved Poisons (which is itself pretty awful when it comes to raiding - remember this is only with Deadly Poison on the offhand and Windfury mainhand) only cost me 13dps on the DPS Spreadsheet. That's less than 1% of my dps. With the number of other talents currently available in the beta, once you've invested as far up the tree as Vile and Improved Poisons (26 points. 28 if you include Murder), I'd be very surprised if any raiding Mutilate build actually includes Seal Fate when WLK goes live.
That's not to say that Ruthlessness is a particularly good talent, but it's a significantly lower point investment and is taken at a point in the tree where there are few other dps talents available (Improved Eviscerate and Blood Splatter being the obvious alternatives, though both are potentially worthless if Envenom spamming eventually does become the normal cycle). As such, I think it's far more likely that we'll see people raiding with Ruthlessness than with Seal Fate.
Well, I think your maths are not very good. If we assume 55% crit rate, thus 45% not crit rate for mutilate, with 4 attacks (2 mutilates) it makes (0.45)^4= 0.041 not crit chance. So, you will have at least 1 additional cp from SF 96% of the time with 2 mutilate applications.
Considering this, currently, ruthlessness is a waste of talent points for any mutilate build that also use SF if 4 cp finishers are not considered viable.
Don't forget that you might be using rupture between envenom cycles (Vulajin had some calculations on that matter) if rupture provides more dps with Blood Splatter.
On the other hand, getting 1 additional cp's at every cycle for 6 talent points might not be so good anyway. Instead 3 point ruthlessness might be used at the cost of a 4 point finisher 40% of time by investing in Ruthlessness instead of SF. This change might in fact yield better dps depending on the alternative talent choices. However, too many variations are needed to be considered which is quite difficult without the help of a spreadsheet (or target dummy experiments).
Last edited by robfang : 09/07/08 at 4:23 PM.
Reason: Typo
Well, I think your maths are not very good. If we assume 55% crit rate, thus 45% not crit rate for mutilate, with 4 attacks (2 mutilates) it makes (0.45)^4= 0.041 not crit chance. So, you will have at least 1 additional cp from SF 96% of the time with 2 mutilate applications.
Where are the other 2 chances coming from? Oh right, you Mutilate twice. I knew it would be something obvious I hadn't accounted for. However, I still don't value Seal Fate highly, especially compared to the talents available once you've made your way that far up the tree.
On the other hand, getting 1 additional cp's at every cycle for 6 talent points might not be so good anyway. Instead 3 point ruthlessness might be used at the cost of a 4 point finisher 40% of time by investing in Ruthlessness instead of SF. This change might in fact yield better dps depending on the alternative talent choices. However, too many variations are needed to be considered which is quite difficult without the help of a spreadsheet (or target dummy experiments).
This is what I was thinking - you could take Ruthlessness and simply accept that 40% of the time you'll be doing 4-point finishers, and in return you get to max out all of the higher-tier poison talents as well as your choice of Focused Attacks or Turn the Tables, assuming that they're better than Seal Fate on a point-per-point basis. I'm also interested in seeing if it's worth dropping the point in Hunger for Blood, now that the effect has been reduced to just 9% fully stacked. I suspect not, particularly for Envenom spam cycles, but it's certainly worth finding out for sure, as with everything else.
I'm also interested in seeing if it's worth dropping the point in Hunger for Blood, now that the effect has been reduced to just 9% fully stacked. I suspect not, particularly for Envenom spam cycles, but it's certainly worth finding out for sure, as with everything else.
Let's see. If we say Focused Attacks is 1 energy/sec (pretty generous) then you generate 330 energy every 30 seconds. We need to use HfB once every 30 seconds. So you get 9% more damage.
Instead, that 30 energy could be spent on half a Mutilate. If you are doing Envenom spam cycles with Seal Fate and 2 Mut + finisher, that requires 120 energy for the Mutilates and .96*10+.04*.8*35=10.72 energy for each finisher. So each cycle like that takes 130.72 energy. (261.44 for two.) Effectively you'd end up with 4 Mutilates per HfB refresh and 38-39 spare energy. The 30 extra energy would net you half a Mutilate per cycle (you have a bit more but I think that's probably a decent buffer and accounts for my Focused Attacks estimate being a tad high), effectively increasing your Mutilate DPS by 12.5%. If Mutilate ends up being 30% of our damage in WotLK (maybe a bit high, but not impossibly so) then not using HfB nets us 1.125*.3=.3375, or a total damage increase of 3.375%. So in that situation HfB is a 5.625% damage increase.
In a similar case with no Seal Fate, each cycle takes 120 + .6*10+.4*.8*35=17.2, so 137.2 energy/cycle. 274.4 energy/HfB refresh. In this case you'd be left with 26.6 spare energy, so even without HfB you still wouldn't have enough to do one Mutilate every cycle. If everything went perfectly the 30 energy would net you ~47% of a Mutilate per cycle. So not much difference there. If you were running Rupture/Envenom you'd probably be equal to the above situation. At best you might be running Rupture/Envenom with SF, then you'd probably gain the least from Hunger for Blood, but I can't see it being less than a 5% damage increase in any situation.
The other aspect of this is what other talents you would take. It's pretty null and void in almost every situation, since no single talent point anywhere else is going to give you a 5% damage increase. Even in a high-mobility fight HfB should still be up 100% of the time with the 30-second change.
09/07/08, 2:16 AM
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