It's a bit early for doom & gloom scenarios for Combat. Sure Assassination and Subtelty are getting a bigger boost in PvE DPS but since Combat was already largely outscaling them in BC, it's necessary to improve these 2 branches if Blizzard wants to have all 3 trees PvE viable.

Combat already has a lot of good scaling talents that synergize extremely well and have been indirectly buffed by changes in raid mechanisms, in particular the new WF 20% melee haste buff which is a significant boost to both Combat Potency and Sword Spec efficiency.

Once the current poison damage silliness is fixed and the numbers tuned, I'm pretty confident the damage potential of the different builds will be pretty close.

As Blizzard has stated, they're still working on the trees, and they do plan to do something to make Lightning Reflexes worth while in its new position on the fourth tier.

Now, assuming that they don't take the path they did with Deflection, merely cutting it down to three talent points and doubling the value per point. Hopefully, they will make it a viable DPS talent, which could potentially cut down on wasted points on filler talents for combat.
Sadly, we don't really have anything but speculation for that yet, but one can only hope for the best.

I for one plan on going 51/5/13 + 2 come lvl80. DW spec + serrated blades sounds like too good to be true, you'll get absolutely huge ruptures at 140% base damage, you still get relentless strikes, opportunity and barely get any useless filler. Plus dirty tricks is never a bad talent to have.

Trouble is, of course, figuring out where the 51 points go. Hopefully the 2 extra "floating" points will help with that...

EDIT: This is probably what I'll go with. I'll be damned if it's not top DPS, I'll be raiding mostly protadin and this looks like a hell of a lot of fun as an alt

It stacks 3 times so before the pull you will stack it up to 3x 3% = 9% dmg. From that point on you have to refresh it every 28 seconds (30 is a bit tricky with lag) to keep it at 9%.

Also even if it didnt increase my stats that much it is quite cool to finally have a spammable selfcast again. (swirleyball)

Bonus points if Blizzard gives the self buff the swirly ball animation. Just for the sake of nostalgia.

Why would you leave out Vile Poisons? 20% more damage for what is going to be one of, if not the primary finisher for any mutilate build seems like a great way to spend 3 points.

This seems like it would generate more dps. Two points remain which can be invested in Rupture, Turn the Tables, Fleet Footed or even Close Quarters Combat. Relocating the two Points in Murder to for example Fleet Footed could also be viable, depending on which boss types await us in LK.

Yes and no. Yes, AP and Agi will provide more numerical benefit due to those talents; however, those talents also mean your AP is somewhat higher than for the other specs, which means that all the other stats are somewhat more valuable as well. I do think it favors Agi and AP a little bit, but not by as much as you might think.

1) It's true, blood poisoning doesn't stack with arms warriors. You can thus call the rogue buff useless because it doesn't stack with arms warriors - or you can call the arms warrior debuff useless because it doesn't stack with rogues. Basically, the change means you have more options for that debuff - you no longer have to have an Arms warrior to get it. Is it the most useful thing in the world? No. But it's definitely not useless, either.

2) I don't see why you're convinced that deep-combat builds are no-go; 15/51/5 and 5/51/13+2 both seem pretty reasonable at first glance, although we will need to run some numbers to get the exact balance right.

3) It's true, Assassination got a lot more DPS boosts. Then again, it needed them, since Combat was quite a ways ahead of it in the current patch.

I did some quick and dirty looking at how Blizz is changing the gear. If you take a look at the first five pieces of T6 from Hyjal Summit and Black Temple and compare stat distributions to what we've seen of the new Naxx 10-man gear you get increases like this:

Armor is largely a filler stat for PvE rogues and can safely be ignored. Agi/Stam/Hit/AP all see increases of around 50% when going from ilevel 141 to 200. The addition of Haste and Expertise along with the loss of ArP are in line with what was seen in Sunwell gear set pieces (bracers, belt, boots).

Look at crit rating though; it's nearly double the % in stats increase when compared to hit rating. This isn't gear that will be shared by feral druids either, this is the rogue set gear and Blizz is seemingly beginning to emphasize crit over other stats. Now I don't know how much each stat is actually worth in relation to each other when Blizz itemizes and I don't know the math to know if this actually results in a similar increase in actual crit % at level 80. Someone who's better at that or has the conversion tables handy can fill that in; I'm just speculating here.

The loss of windfury, consolidation of buffs/debuffs, the proliferation of purely 'defensive' talents in the combat tree, and a quick glance at the new stat distribution seems to really push away from the combat build and towards mutilate. What Blizz has done is try to make all 3 specs usable in PvE and PvP, but by doing so it looks like they've hurt PvE combat builds with purely 'defensive' talents; hopefully the forthcoming changes to lightning reflexes will alleviate some of that feeling.

Still, combat has been the strong PvE tree for quite a while now and seeing it weakened with more defensive talents while other trees get much needed buffs may be messing with my head a bit. Maybe it's just being brought slightly down while the other two come up and it's not as lopsided as some might think. Either way, real side-by-side comparisons of the trees are pretty futile at this point.

Obviously Blizzard isn't finished yet with both talent trees or gear. Subtlety still feels unfinished to me; as if it has no real direction. But I get the feeling that when 3.x hits I'll be dusting off my daggers and putting mutilate on my bars. Part of me is sad because I've always loved swords but part of me is excited because the thought of being the dagger class again seems like fun.

I am curious to see if focused attacks in a mutilate build will favor a faster offhand (or mainhand as well). Something tells me the potential gain in energy regen (and thus faster rotations) won't be worth the potential loss of mutilate damage.

On a similar note, focused attacks still feels weak to me. Obviously mutilate builds have a very high crit rate and the talent does apply to both hands but as has been said several times before it is a much, much weaker talent than combat potency which shares the same teir/position in the combat tree. Perhaps increasing it's chance to proc would make it a stronger talent?

I'd say the main complaint I have is that even from that perspective it's inferior to the Arms one. Bare with me as I'm drawing comparisions from my experience at 70, as my guild tends to run with an Arms kid to battleshout us, demo/TC and help with sunders whenever necessary (just to speed up the process) while still doing something acceptable like 1.7k DPS. That's why I mentioned the rogue one is 'useless', but you're also right when you say it is an alternative. On an aside, I just have a feeling that Blizzard's philosophy of alternative pickings will eventually fail as gear starts to climb up.

I said that because people here seem to be mentioning how hemo seems better damage/energy compared to sinister strike at 80, more so with the added physical damage glyph for hemorrhage. I just feel if you're putting five points into Sub, you may as well go deeper for Serrated Blades and maybe hemo. I reckon you're right, before considering hemo 15/41/5 and 5/51/13 +2 don't seem all that different in numbers at 70-level things. A decision on that level would depend if hemo is better than SS or not when it comes for overall energy/damage ratio as they're talking about.

On yet another aside, ainly my biggest nag is how weak our 51 pointer for combat when compared to what the assassination tree gets. It feels more like a gimmick rather than a useful last-tier talent. It's probably a decent bang-for-buck at a one-point talent, but I'm not really fond of these gimmicky talents for PvE.

Well... I don't know how damage scales from 70-80, what type of boosts the new gear, new skills bring, but I'm establishing comparisions from 70 here and reports of an obscene ~1K DPS from poisons is scary as hell in my eyes and that is a huge jump from the current what, 120ish from double poisons equipped?

The feeling I'm getting is that combat is overshadowed right now, I haven't really read much about it so I've not yet looked into what kind of damage combat is doing at 80, but Mutilate kids doing 3.6k is pretty big. Again, it depends how damage is scaling from 70-80. Maybe the numbers just shook me a bit.

1) Under the current raid balance, you do want to bring at least one DPS warrior, so as to be able to battle shout the melee; this warrior can reasonably be either Arms or Fury. Arms warriors tend to be a slightly better choice, purely because they apply a raid debuff; but if a rogue can keep that debuff up equally well, then you could bring a (higher-DPS) fury warrior instead. Of course, this all assumes that Fury Warriors and Arms Warriors will maintain roughly equal footing in terms of comparative DPS, which may or may not be true - my understanding is that they're trying to bring them much closer in DPS. For that matter, you don't really need a DPS warrior at all anymore, as a pally giving Blessing of Might replaces Battle Shout. And that just speaks to the new Blizzard design paradigm, where every buff can be gotten from more than one class, and all classes do roughly comparable DPS, such that no class is essential purely for buffs, and no class is useless based on it's buff being unnecessary.

Plus, even if in 25 mans an Arms warrior is commonplace, in a 10-man or 5-man it's going to be a fair amount rarer, which increases the relative benefit of having the rogue able to apply that debuff.

2) Hemo builds may prove to be better than SS builds, but I don't think we can say that with any certainty yet. Even if Malice is straight-across better than SS, having to sacrifice 5/5 Malice, Killing Spree, and 2 points of your favorite filler to get it means that Hemo builds may or may not trump Combat builds as a whole.

3) Killing Spree, from the reports I'm hearing, is a pretty brutal PvP ability right now - a warrior in my guild was griping this evening that a rogue gibbed him from full in about 3 seconds with it - 18000 total damage. So it certainly has it's uses. In terms of PvE: well, lets see. At level 70 stats with raid buffs, I imagine a Murder Spree would do something like 9000 damage, which adjusted by cooldown, works out to something like 75 DPS. Which is more than, for instance, Adrenaline Rush. So I can't say I'm too unhappy with it in it's current incarnation.

4) I don't think anyone's going to argue that poisons aren't a bit overtuned right now. I don't think Blizzard intended sunwell-geared level 70 rogues to be able to do 1000 DPS just with poison. But even if it is intentional, I don't think that spells the demise of Combat. Blizzard isn't stupid. They aren't going to make Mutilate blow Combat away by 500 DPS. Unless you have some specific evidence to the contrary, I would argue that the more sensible assumption to make is that Blizzard is aiming for Combat and Assassination to be roughly comparable in terms of DPS output. If you have numbers that indicate they aren't succeeding in that goal, great, lets see them. But if you don't, I think it's kind of silly to be worrying about the death of specs at this stage of the balance process.

Poisons are not balanced right now as it has been stated in last few pages.

I believe this was their intention pre-BC as well, looking at the T5 set gear it's obvious they were hoping to give mutilate a boost and push it into raiding. The combat tree was just scaling too strongly though.

When it came time to finalize the T6 gear they had adopted a more 'blended' distribution of stats (at least in my eyes); this further diminished mutilate builds and created the 20/41/0 combat cookie-cutter we see today. I'm sure this isn't what Blizzard wanted but a full overhaul of the rogue talent trees during WotLK development was not an option.

Edited for missing content.

Others have voiced the 'combat is being overlooked' opinion before; and it's true to some extent. Not to be a record player repeating others, but Combat has been the only 'viable' PvE spec for over a year now. Blizzard is looking to balance things out by allowing a spec from each tree to be useful for PvE. This means that the other trees have to either step up, or Combat has to step back. I, for one, am glad that they're pushing all of them ahead (just Subtlety and Assassination a bit more).

There are areas where Combat builds aren't going to suffer. Take a look at the combat glyphs, for instance. SnD, SS, BF, AR, and Rupture glyphs are avaiilable to fill the primary DPS talents for the tree.

Notice any missing 'Primary DPS Talents' from other trees? Hemo has a glyph. BS has a glyph. Heck, even Shiv and Ghostly Strike have glyphs. In fact, every single direct damage dealing talent presently has a glyph associated with it except for Mutilate and Envenom (though Eviscerate could help the Assassination rogues depending upon how it scales).

Is this an accident? I think that this is too coincidental to be treated as though it were not intended. Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to implementing it yet?

But either way, we're a ways off from seeing things in their final state. Rogues should be celebrating the positive changes we see as a class, and we should be pointing out deficiencies to the Blizzard developers to review if they make errors.

Well, clearly their intent is to make both deep Assassination and deep Combat viable PvE options. And potentially they could make Combat/Hemo a viable option as well, as long as they made Hemo a desirable raid buff.

I figure their process was "okay, so in TBC Combat was top billing, so let's look at buffing Assassination first." They still are going to do iterative passes on the trees to make sure in a raid environment at least those two specs are extremely similar DPS-wise. I do share the belief that with current talents, even once they fix the Assassination Poison procs, Combat will be lower DPS. But that's not something a few changes can fix (including making LR actually worthwhile).

As for glyphs, I'm pretty sure our glyphs are still nowhere near complete. I would be extremely surprised if they shipped with no Mutilate glyph. It's probably more like, they didn't want to bother putting in Assassination glyphs until they got the talent trees in a state they were happy with. Keep in mind they said that their budgeting process for glyphs is very similar to talents.

Here's a combatlog parse that I just ran on the premade server with a pvp 80 rogue. I used the fast OH dagger and this build from a recent poster. My attack order was to mut until 5 CP then envenom while hitting HfB when it was near cooldown. The server was laggy so I might've slipped up a bit on the rotation but EavesDrop was reporting 2100 DPS if I remember correctly.

For those that asked about keeping HfB up it basically replaced SnD in my rotation while Evenoming at each 5 CP.

Put one point into Improved Poisons and watch your DPS skyrocket with the bug.

As someone who does have Imp Sprint/Kick now, there's definitely uses - I mean, not a TON of uses for bosses ... (uhm, let's see ... Maulgar for imp kick . . . . . . Vashj for Imp Sprint), but trash often has a lot of use for those abilities.

I've always been a fan of Imp Sprint. Imp Kick not so much so as most bosses are immune to the silence effect. With 4 "filler" combat talents I'd generally pick up 2/2 Imp Evasion and 2/2 Imp Sprint.

However, the first hurdle of reducing the filler points from 9 to 4 (assuming single weapon spec).

I think till the Poison numbers get stabilized on the beta, its useless to look at Mut DPS. I am waiting for that to happen before I get on and compare Mut, Combat DPS.

Isn't the poison bug a problem with Improved Poisons? If so then could somebody not simply test a Muti build with zero points in Improved Poisons, and just calculate roughly how much their poison damage should be increased by adding in a fixed version of the talent? It should eliminate the effect of the bug anyway, and give a better starting point for showing how and where rogue dps needs to be tweaked.

This thread has the combat rating values:

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...gs_level_80_a/

I'm not in the beta so I cannot verify, but it looks like 45.90598679 Crit Rating = 1% Crit at 80. 70 was 22.07692337. Converting your example to Crit % instead of rating we have: 4.57% for T6, and 4.12% for T7.

Not surprisingly we are losing actual crit %, because otherwise as the expansions continue to roll out crit % would scale to an unreasonable amount if the first tier equated to more than the last tier at the old level.

Lightning Reflexes fix: % haste per point added to the dodge. Or adds a % haste bonus to SnD.

This would reduce the large amount of filler currently needed and make lightning reflexes DPS oriented as they are wanting.