Vigor: I do not feel like this talent is worth it although I might be mistaken. My reasoning is that the 10 extra energy is only good after your opener, after that the extra 10 points energy points are a waste since you should not be letting your energy cap out.
Improved Poisons, I am unsure about this one but if I'm going to be running around with dual deadly on then it may be better to spend the points in some other place right now it seems logical to do so because poisons are a major part of our DPS but if they revert the change or tone poisons down then it may not be worth keeping 5 points in this talent.
I put two points into rupture which I am uneasy about, I might be able to squeeze it into a rotation however I don't feel quite confident in where I spent these points.
I'm going to run around with this build for a little while and get back to you guys.
Vigor: I do not feel like this talent is worth it although I might be mistaken. My reasoning is that the 10 extra energy is only good after your opener, after that the extra 10 points energy points are a waste since you should not be letting your energy cap out.
It's encounter-dependent; keep in mind it's an additional 10 energy not just on your opener, but also any time you're forced to stop DPSing for 10 - (slack_energy / 10) seconds. In some fights, this value is nil; in other fights, it could be a lot. Moroes' vanishes, Vashj p2, and Illidan come to mind.
It's encounter-dependent; keep in mind it's an additional 10 energy not just on your opener, but also any time you're forced to stop DPSing for 10 - (slack_energy / 10) seconds. In some fights, this value is nil; in other fights, it could be a lot. Moroes' vanishes, Vashj p2, and Illidan come to mind.
In those cases I could see how it would be useful but don't you think it would just be better to spend the points in something that would benefit you all of the time instead of on a handful of bosses?
In those cases I could see how it would be useful but don't you think it would just be better to spend the points in something that would benefit you all of the time instead of on a handful of bosses?
Yes but other choices can be situational too. For example you picked Fleet Flooded for a PvE Build. Of course it can help you in some Fights (one of the first like Gruuls come to mind - If this buff applied, I'm not sure) but putting two points there could be put in Vigor and Deadly Brew.
Deadly Brew seems a great talent to me. Since Assassination has a lot of synergies with Poisons, having the chance to use 2 Instant Poisons and applying Deadly Poison at the same time should be a nice Boost in Poison Damage.
The only bad thing is Poisons doesn't scale with AP. If DKs Spells do, maybe Poisons could scale too in some way to make them a larger percentage in Rogue's Damage.
Well, lets posit for the moment that we can find a 1.4 speed OH in the expansion like we can at the moment. With such a weapon and the Shiv glyph, a Shiv costs 29 energy. A shiv also does 75% of your weapon damage, thus gains .75 * 2.4 / 14 = .13 damage per point of AP in physical damage (reduced to, say, .10 by armor), plus .18 times your AP via talented IP damage, for .28 dmg/AP, or about .01 dmg/AP per energy.
SS, on the other hand, gains 1.16x your weapon damage, plus some poison; for a SS build, poison is most likely untalented, hence only has a 20% proc chance and does .15 damage per AP; hence, the poison scaling is about .03 damage/AP. Meanwhile, the physical damage gains 1.16 * 2.4 / 14 = ~.20 damage per AP, or about .16 after armor; thus, SS gains about .19 damage per AP, or about .005 damage/AP per energy, about half of what SS does.
Now, the fact that a SS weapon has a lot higher base damage than a Shiv weapon closes the gap somewhat, but it does appear to scale significantly better than SS given current poison values (which may well get nerfed).
Assuming, your build is optimized for Shiv, you'll want a Fist/Sword Combat Potency + Poison (either something like 31/40/0 with Deadly brew or 18/51/2 with 3/3 vile poisons).
In such case, the dmg/energy ratio of Shiv is even better since you'll get a 0.2*15=3 average CP energy return per Shiv which brings the average glyphed cost of Shiv down to 26.
You'll also proc 0.2 MH swing thanks to Sword Spec, so about 0.2*2.6/14 = ~ .04 dmg/AP, reduced to 0.03 after armor.
Thus we get a significantly better scaling of Shiv with 0.31 dmg/AP and 0.119 dmg/AP/energy vs 0.19dmg/AP and 0.048 dmg/AP/energy for SS, not including Deadly Brew.
First, this has been discussed extensively: they're making an effort to itemize towards the more universal stats, figuring people can socket for the ones that are specifically good for their class. And second, there's no guarantee that hit will still be king, given that a number of the major things that were causing it to be good are disappearing, changing, or otherwise becoming less universal. So: it is expected that fewer items will have hit on them. We may or may not socket for hit to make up for this fact. We're still running the numbers to be sure.
While I agree with majority of this post, I'd like to point out that this is the Rogue specific, token-purchased set. It shouldn't be itemized universally, rather it should be itemized specifically for rogues without any consideration for other classes. One thing I find a bit irritating is the spread of stats: 4 out of 5 pieces have Crit Rating, 3/5 have Haste, 2/5 have Hit and 1/5 has Expertise. Is Blizzard number crunching showing Crit rating as more valuable despite it's relative high cost per +1%? I surely hope this is the case, though I'm not exactly confident that Blizzard's numbers are entirely accurate (see Instant Poison IX scaling debacle).
Wasn't Windfury one of the main things that made +hit slightly better than +agi? Now that WF is just haste I would've thought agility would be better.
Combat Potency is another major thing that makes hit better than other stats for PvE rogues. Obviously this talent isn't a factor for Mutilate rogues, which many people are hoping will finally be competitive with combat specs for dps at level 80. So even variation between different rogue specs could determine if hit rating is the best item stat for us or not.
There was some discussion earlier that putting Hemo on Aggression would basically invalidate SS.
Sinister Strike 12 in a standard combat build is 1.16 * (base damage + 180) and costs 40 energy.
Hemo in a 0/41/21 + 9 build with modified Aggression is 1.26 * base damage and costs 35 energy.
Torment of the Banished is the juicy looking MH sword from Naxx 10 atm. With this weapons we have 261-485 base damage,
or 373 average base damage.
I don't think SS has much to worry about it. Even accounting for the +75 physical damage from Hemo Rank 5 it would take an average base damage of 1534.68 for Hemo to pass SS. This is equivalent to a 590 DPS 2.6 speed weapon.
So it really isn't that far of a stretch to add Hemo to Aggression.
Assuming, your build is optimized for Shiv, you'll want a Fist/Sword Combat Potency + Poison (either something like 31/40/0 with Deadly brew or 18/51/2 with 3/3 vile poisons).
In such case, the dmg/energy ratio of Shiv is even better since you'll get a 0.2*15=3 average CP energy return per Shiv which brings the average glyphed cost of Shiv down to 26.
You'll also proc 0.2 MH swing thanks to Sword Spec, so about 0.2*2.6/14 = ~ .04 dmg/AP, reduced to 0.03 after armor.
Thus we get a significantly better scaling of Shiv with 0.31 dmg/AP and 0.119 dmg/AP/energy vs 0.19dmg/AP and 0.048 dmg/AP/energy for SS, not including Deadly Brew.
We may have a competitive Shiv build in WotLK.
There's sort of two ways you can go with a Shiv build; you can either go deep combat for Combat Potency, Surprise Attacks, etc., or you can go deep Assassination to get all the poison talents, focused attacks, perhaps CttC, and so on. It's not immediately clear to me which is preferable. The original proposal was the Assassination approach which is why I didn't count Combat Potency or Surprise Attacks for the Shiv build; but the 18/41/5+7 approach is definitely worth investigating as well.
Originally Posted by eek
While I agree with majority of this post, I'd like to point out that this is the Rogue specific, token-purchased set. It shouldn't be itemized universally, rather it should be itemized specifically for rogues without any consideration for other classes. One thing I find a bit irritating is the spread of stats: 4 out of 5 pieces have Crit Rating, 3/5 have Haste, 2/5 have Hit and 1/5 has Expertise. Is Blizzard number crunching showing Crit rating as more valuable despite it's relative high cost per +1%? I surely hope this is the case, though I'm not exactly confident that Blizzard's numbers are entirely accurate (see Instant Poison IX scaling debacle).
Well, yeah, the cross-class thing doesn't apply so much to the rogue set; but lets think a minute about the itemization situation. First, why is hit so good right now? Well, there's a number of smaller factors, but I think the big two are 1) Combat Potency and 2) Instant Attacks scale quadratically with hit (both WF and Sword Spec). Now, the WF part is just plain gone; but hit is presumably still pretty good for deep combat builds for Combat Potency, if not Sword Spec. But, for a deep assassination build, we have none of these factors; meanwhile, crit rating is presumably somewhat more important due to focused attacks.
Now, I don't know what the stat weightings are going to look like, but I think it's pretty clear that they're going to vary quite a bit by spec; so unless they're going to create multiple sets for the different specs of rogue, like they have for other classes (which, while it would be awesome, strikes me as unlikely), they need to itemize in a way that doesn't favor any one spec too much; overloading it with hit and/or expertise would end up favoring combat builds over the other specs, which is presumably undesirable.
Well, yeah, the cross-class thing doesn't apply so much to the rogue set; but lets think a minute about the itemization situation. First, why is hit so good right now? Well, there's a number of smaller factors, but I think the big two are 1) Combat Potency and 2) Instant Attacks scale quadratically with hit (both WF and Sword Spec). Now, the WF part is just plain gone; but hit is presumably still pretty good for deep combat builds for Combat Potency, if not Sword Spec. But, for a deep assassination build, we have none of these factors; meanwhile, crit rating is presumably somewhat more important due to focused attacks.
Now, I don't know what the stat weightings are going to look like, but I think it's pretty clear that they're going to vary quite a bit by spec; so unless they're going to create multiple sets for the different specs of rogue, like they have for other classes (which, while it would be awesome, strikes me as unlikely), they need to itemize in a way that doesn't favor any one spec too much; overloading it with hit and/or expertise would end up favoring combat builds over the other specs, which is presumably undesirable.
Well, I never mentioned Hit specifically, I understand that Hit Rating may no longer be king at 80. My main concern was that the set wasn't very balanced, seeing as how it's more optimized for Crit than anything else. Dropping 1 appearance of Crit Rating in favor of Expertise or Hit would help.
Regarding the 2nd part of your post, I had not considered that the gear was designed for all specs. That does make sense, seeing as how supposedly all 3 are supposed to be viable. However, I will disagree that overloading Expertise will favor a specific spec. I'm pretty sure Expertise up to cap is highly valuable for all Rogues since it affects both White and Yellow damage.
Expertise, like hit, benefits from quadratic scaling on Sword Spec (and, currently WF), as well as Combat Potency. It also doesn't apply to poison damage, which makes it somewhat less potent in the hands of a poison-heavy build. So while it's certainly *good* for all specs, my suspicion is that it's going to be significantly better for a Combat build than for an Assassination build.
So overall: I think crit and haste will be good for Mutilate builds, while hit, expertise, and haste are good for Combat, while Subtlety has no obvious favored stats. Based on which, I'd expect gear to be itemized fairly "flat" - that is, not a lot of any one stat. Which makes the rogue set we've seen so far a bit surprising - it is a little crit heavy - but I don't think it's particularly unreasonably so. But again, we'll have to wait and see how the numbers turn out.
There was some discussion earlier that putting Hemo on Aggression would basically invalidate SS.
Sinister Strike 12 in a standard combat build is 1.16 * (base damage + 180) and costs 40 energy.
Hemo in a 0/41/21 + 9 build with modified Aggression is 1.26 * base damage and costs 35 energy.
Torment of the Banished is the juicy looking MH sword from Naxx 10 atm. With this weapons we have 261-485 base damage,
or 373 average base damage.
I don't think SS has much to worry about it. Even accounting for the +75 physical damage from Hemo Rank 5 it would take an average base damage of 1534.68 for Hemo to pass SS. This is equivalent to a 590 DPS 2.6 speed weapon.
So it really isn't that far of a stretch to add Hemo to Aggression.
You can't ignore AP scaling when comparing SS and Hemo.
Solving for AP gives Hemo w/Aggression has better DPE than SS for AP >= 2600, which will always be true in lvl 80 raids and this is the most favorable comparison for SS since we don't take into account any physical debuff provided by Hemo.
Now, let's just add a single non scaling +75 dmg charge to the Hemo base DPE:
With these assumptions, Hemo DPE overcomes SS at AP = 430 and Hemo damage overcomes SS damage at AP = 5937 which is probably attainable in WotLK T8 or T9 raids. This comparison still underestimates Hemo full damage contribution.
Aggression scaling for Hemorrhage would make SS significantly inferior.
Well, I never mentioned Hit specifically, I understand that Hit Rating may no longer be king at 80. My main concern was that the set wasn't very balanced, seeing as how it's more optimized for Crit than anything else. Dropping 1 appearance of Crit Rating in favor of Expertise or Hit would help.
Regarding the 2nd part of your post, I had not considered that the gear was designed for all specs. That does make sense, seeing as how supposedly all 3 are supposed to be viable. However, I will disagree that overloading Expertise will favor a specific spec. I'm pretty sure Expertise up to cap is highly valuable for all Rogues since it affects both White and Yellow damage.
EDIT: Trying to keep capitalization consistent.
Well this is what happens when a set of gear is shared between 3-4 classes, with completely and absolutely different mechanics. (horrid idea imo)
They cant carry for one stat wich has a different cap for each class, as it would put the other leather users into a disadvantage. The focus on Agility can be accounted to the fact that all of the leather capable classes get MAJOR benefits from it and it has no "cap".
Seeing the Nax set Im not optimistic as we will have to stack yellow yet again, just to be able to reach the special attack cap.
I´m getting more and more intrested in the Wotlk specs. But since I´m not in the beta, I can´t say for sure if something like this would work.
How I reasoned putting it together.
1. Imp. SnD. It doesn´t feel like needed anymore. If they want us to use Envenom, we will have to do it.
2. Blood Splatter. Had a real headache trying to decide between Blood Splatter and Ruthlessness. In the end it will come down to if an Envenom or an Rupture puts out more damage, and if its worth using the CP on it.
3. Full Vile poisons and Imp poisons. With Deadly Brew this might come handy, and with Envenom as main finisher even more important.
4. Overkill. This is a thorn in my eye. I really don´t like that you have to choose this to be able to get Mutilate. I see this as a waste in my pve build, and I hope they will either remove it or change it. Maybe "Abilities used from behind costs 1 less energy".
5. Its crowded in the assassination tree when you get to this point and on. If I could, I would take everything from here on. But as I can´t, I´ve chosen to skip Infectious Poisons and Turn the Tables. Infectious Poisons seems nice now when we seem to get more poison dependant, but Focused Attacks and Find Weakness is better at that tier.
6. I choose Master Poisoner over Turn the Tables simply because we should hardly ever not have poison on target as Mutilate, so I count it as 3% free crit, over Turn the Tables that only is for combo moves and only 2%.
EDIT. Mistake from me. It is 6% for 3 points. Makes it more difficult, but I will stay with 3% crit on all.
7. Cut to the Chase is pretty much what the new Mutilate build will be built around. We are getting a free Envenom or Rupture, depending on what cycle will be used.
8. As I said, I´m not in the beta, so I can´t say if Hunger for Blood is great. But by reading the tooltip, it seems pretty weak for top tier. Its like a 3% dmg trinket every 2 min. I´m no expert at theorycrafting, but I´m pretty sure it beats 1% crit which I see as the alternative.
9. Combat tree. Not much to say about. No more imp. SnD, and 2 points in Close Quarters Combat. If 1% crit should prove worth more then 3% dmg every 2 min, this is where it would go.
10. Assassination tree. Yes, I´m one of those that is upset by the Relentless Strikes change. But I still think it would be hard to survive without it as Mutilate. Opportunity, as I said earlier, I´m not a theorycrafter, but I think that 20% more damage to Mutilate beats 2% crit or 20% damage from poisons.
If anyone got any information from beta, and have tried it out, I would really appreciate it.
Last edited by Minishadow : 09/08/08 at 8:31 AM.
Reason: Spelling
So overall: I think crit and haste will be good for Mutilate builds, while hit, expertise, and haste are good for Combat, while Subtlety has no obvious favored stats. Based on which, I'd expect gear to be itemized fairly "flat" - that is, not a lot of any one stat. Which makes the rogue set we've seen so far a bit surprising - it is a little crit heavy - but I don't think it's particularly unreasonably so. But again, we'll have to wait and see how the numbers turn out.
Subtelty is likely to favor Agility (and possibly AP) since it has better scaling with these stats thanks, to Deadliness and Sinister Calling.
As an aside, I've been playing around with the talents looking for a raid-viable deep Subtelty Backstab build (15/5/51 or 8/12/51 are the 2 builds coming to mind).
Such builds give suprisingly good results in a slightly hacked version of Vulajin WotLK Roguecraft spreadsheet (-3% compared to combat swords) so we may have a raid viable build for all our combo point generators.
It's nice to see that backstab Subtelty builds don't need Ruthlessness anymore thanks to the new Premeditation, which is strictly better. Coupled with Honor Among Thieves (itself a strictly superior version of Seal Fate), it makes sustaining a 5s/5r cycle easy even without Imp. SnD.
Sinister Strike 12 in a standard combat build is 1.16 * (base damage + 180) and costs 40 energy.
Hemo in a 0/41/21 + 9 build with modified Aggression is 1.26 * base damage and costs 35 energy.
...
I don't think SS has much to worry about it. Even accounting for the +75 physical damage from Hemo Rank 5 it would take an average base damage of 1534.68 for Hemo to pass SS. This is equivalent to a 590 DPS 2.6 speed weapon.
So it really isn't that far of a stretch to add Hemo to Aggression.
Again I'd point out that Hemo is only 110% base, and 115% if you take Sinister Calling, and you can't have both Sinister Calling and Surprise Attacks in the same build anyway (meaning that, even if Aggression were changed, Hemo would only ever be 116% if you went as far as Surprise Attacks, or you'd have dodged finishers if you took Sinister Calling for a 121% Hemo)
Though I agree that adding Hemo to Aggression would be perfectly reasonable, if one is going to spec Hemo, then I'd imagine deep Subtlety would actually be the best route anyway, given how Slaughter From the Shadows increases your Hemo DPE (and therefore DPS) by around 17%, as well as combing with Honor Among Thieves resulting in extremely fast cycles. And that's not to mention the possibility of stacking of both Blood Splatter and Serrated Blades.
Master poisoner is now a raid debuff like Heart of the Crusader, and it doesn't stack.
I think che best spec for a double envenom cycle will be Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Solving for AP gives Hemo w/Aggression has better DPE than SS for AP >= 2600, which will always be true in lvl 80 raids and this is the most favorable comparison for SS since we don't take into account any physical debuff provided by Hemo.
Now, let's just add a single non scaling +75 dmg charge to the Hemo base DPE:
With these assumptions, Hemo DPE overcomes SS at AP = 430 and Hemo damage overcomes SS damage at AP = 5937 which is probably attainable in WotLK T8 or T9 raids. This comparison still underestimates Hemo full damage contribution.
Aggression scaling for Hemorrhage would make SS significantly inferior.
Following on with this math actually yields that currently given the same 2 specs as listed above that Hemo 5, with the +75 inclusive & no Aggression, outscales SS12's DPE at 743 AP. So yes, unless the state of things change, The buff to surprise attacks to include Hemo allows Hemo to effectively replace SS.
This also has the sideaffect of neatening cycles considerably. My best bet for a Top DPS build to "abuse" this would be Fist/sword 5/43/21 +2 for low crit shifting to 0/50/21 once the threshold for Prey on the weak is crossed. (very quick and dirty napkin math shows that being at 25% base crit if you assume 100% uptime on Prey, not counting RED either)
Edit: After taking into account Uptime and RED. Prey becomes better at 26% Base Crit with 100% Uptime.
90% uptime requires 29% Base Crit.
80% Uptime requires 33% Base Crit.
There will likely be a point as you approach 24%(uptime depending) where you will start to bleed points from Malice into Prey on the Weak if you are that far inclined to min-max.
Edit: Also to take into account is the Hemo Glyph which boosts the bonus damage by 40%, or 110 for Hemo V. This has the affect of granting Hemo better DPE at 0 AP. Removing Hemo from Suprise Attacks and putting it on Aggression instead yeilds equal DPE at 40.8 AP. Even reverting fully back to no combat talents affecting Hemo. Eg 116% SS, 110% hemo has a point of equal DPE at 2090 AP.
In other words Hemo will already outscale SS at 70 after 3.0
Again I'd point out that Hemo is only 110% base, and 115% if you take Sinister Calling, and you can't have both Sinister Calling and Surprise Attacks in the same build anyway (meaning that, even if Aggression were changed, Hemo would only ever be 116% if you went as far as Surprise Attacks, or you'd have dodged finishers if you took Sinister Calling for a 121% Hemo)
I think you've missed that Surprise Attacks now gives a 10% bonus to Hemorrhage, hence the base 120% scaling in a combat build and the discussed 126% if added to Aggression too.
While I agree with majority of this post, I'd like to point out that this is the Rogue specific, token-purchased set. It shouldn't be itemized universally, rather it should be itemized specifically for rogues without any consideration for other classes.
While this is true, it's also true that there are good game design reasons for Blizzard to not give out perfectly itemized tier gear early on in the expansion. The pattern of WoW established in the original game and the first expansion is that itemization and set bonuses generally improve at each tier, rather than having perfectly designed gear at each tier.
There have been exceptions, but these typically have not been very fun for players. Consider our T4 set versus our T5 set: T4 was very well designed for combat, T5 much less so, and while T5 might've been good for mutilate, Blizzard didn't manage to make Mutilate a competitive spec at the time when T5 was cutting edge content. As a result, rogues didn't gain as much from T5 as other classes did, and were a bit behind the curve heading into T6.
It's also a good thing for Blizzard to be able to throw in the occasional off-set piece which is better than tier pieces for specific classes/specs. The gear game is a bit bland if the optimal piece is always a tier piece.
I think you've missed that Surprise Attacks now gives a 10% bonus to Hemorrhage, hence the base 120% scaling in a combat build and the discussed 126% if added to Aggression too.
Balls, I'm making a complete fist of things recently - I was too focused on the finisher aspect of Surprise Attacks. I think I'd best just go back to lurking in the shadows for now.
Am I the only one really worried about the future of combat builds? I mean, take a good look at what we got new in combat that has some possible raid viability:
20% extra DPS value on our crits (assuming 100% uptime, real values should be a little lower given at the start of a fight with random damage it's unlikely to 'stay up').
Blood Poisoning, 2% extra physical damage for you and the raid. It's okay. Except it doesn't stack with Blood Frenzy. So useless solo filler it is. /facepalm
Uh... 5x Main-hand and 5x Off-hand white-attack damage swings over 2.5 seconds distributed either on multiple targets or on a single target. I'm no good for trying to develop that into actual calculations but if it works as I'm stating it right now, that's a very, very small boost every two minutes. A horrible 51-pointer I'm guessing, especially compared to HfB.
A million filler talents like riposte, lightning reflexes, improved sprint, endurance and unfair advantage which have no real effective significance in actual raid performance.
And mutilate?
25% extra chance for poisons to hit (assuming the IP talent is the way to go).
Our old murder, now improved, how useful it is depends on the mob-types in future raid instances (4% vs the current 2% accessible to combat).
Find Weakness turned into a passive 9% extra damage and a pretty solid 51-pointer talent which gives you a stacking self-buff which increases your damage by 9% for 30 energy if you manage to keep your cycle going, which you shouldn't really have trouble as mutilate I reckon. This has made mutilate cycles much, much more interesting in my eyes.
30% chance per crit to regain 3 energy. Now, it's not combat potency but given this applies to both hands, daggers being fast attacking and mutilate specials having a really, really high crit rate, this is pretty decent.
Deadly Brew, Improved Poisons, Infectious Poisons and the new Envenom combined should be insane. I mean, with WF being a passive haste effect, I believe you can go double IP and just proc like a madman.
To top everything off, not only will using envenom up your poison proc rate, but it'll refresh your SnD. So if you keep your cycle up you effectively should only need to pop SnD once in a fight.
Unfortunately I didn't get a beta key so I haven't really been able to try either out and see how that works.
However this means that effectively any predictable combat builds like 15/51/5 are a no-go. So as you guys've been discussing, something like 0/41/21 + 9 seems to be the way to go, but these specs seem garbled as well. Sub just doesn't seem to be oriented for PvE and I get this nasty feeling we're going to have a lot of useless filler just to get stuff like Serrated Blades and Hemo.
I'm just not a huge fan of how stuff is right now. Mutilate seems to be getting all the right, poison related talents, massive scaling and an overall more interesting cycle, whereas guys like me who've never really been huge fans of daggers will pretty much be forced to get a million filler talents if they really want to avoid daggers. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please!
While this is true, it's also true that there are good game design reasons for Blizzard to not give out perfectly itemized tier gear early on in the expansion. The pattern of WoW established in the original game and the first expansion is that itemization and set bonuses generally improve at each tier, rather than having perfectly designed gear at each tier.
There have been exceptions, but these typically have not been very fun for players. Consider our T4 set versus our T5 set: T4 was very well designed for combat, T5 much less so, and while T5 might've been good for mutilate, Blizzard didn't manage to make Mutilate a competitive spec at the time when T5 was cutting edge content. As a result, rogues didn't gain as much from T5 as other classes did, and were a bit behind the curve heading into T6.
It's also a good thing for Blizzard to be able to throw in the occasional off-set piece which is better than tier pieces for specific classes/specs. The gear game is a bit bland if the optimal piece is always a tier piece.
While youre right, they stated 30 raid viable specs that will include 3 rogue specs, with completely different stat weights.
In BC they had a very clear cut case of what is THE raid viable spec, yet we all seen that how T5 turned out to be after the goodness that T4 was. We can argue that T5 might have been godlike for mutilate, but mutilate as a pve spec wasnt a competition to Combat Swords, as every rogue (and the Devs) knew. Now they will have to juggle stats between 3 rogue specs, and the other leather capable classes in the case of non tier armor.
What we may end up with is the somewhere above mentioned "Flat" stat allocation, which alone might tilt the scales towards mutilate as the premiere pve spec.
09/08/08, 2:53 AM
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