Tinwhisker

Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen the level 80 values anywhere.

Crit does seem to take a slight dip when the ratings are applied but I think my original point still stands because hit takes a much larger nose dive in comparison. Hit on the first 5 pieces of T6 comes in at 3.04% at level 70 and hit on the 10-man Naxx gear comes out at 2.13% at level 80, a much larger decrease in value.

 

sp00n

Interesting. That doesn't even cover the 9% base miss chance against boss level mobs, even including Precision.

What kind of gems are available in WotLK that give hit rating? And are yellow gems still the only ones providing pure hit rating?
Seeing that the nax rogue set only has 2 yellow sockets, I wonder if we'll be able to even reach the cap if we wanted to take along gem boni (and not socket for pure hit rating to make at least the specials hit capped).

// Edit
So with the nax set one would need ~62 more hit rating to reach the cap. Gems seem to be 16 hit rating for blue quality yellow gems, leaving 30 hit rating to be covered elsewhere. Should be obtainable by the other slots.

However, we'd need 755 hit rating to be hit capped for white attacks, which I assume will happen nowhere soon if they follow current itemization.

 

VeeV's

Well it really depends on the intention of keeping the DW penalty in its current state. Looking at the Naxx set there are a few possible scenarios. One of em being the Naxx Set carrying towards the Mutilate crowd essentially pulling a T5. The other would be either a reworking of the DW penalty (/root) or somehow aiding combat to be able to compensate for the loss.

Or they might just do what they did when BC launched yet again.

 

Tinwhisker

I decided to go back and try to find some trending of hit and crit rating in the 5pc sets (Netherblade, Deathmantle, Slayer, 'Naxx'). Percentage values are at their respective levels (70 and 80).

T6 was obviously a boon to rogues everywhere. It appears to me that T7 gear has ratios/values similar to those of T5 (albeit slightly higher). In my mind, T5 really favored a mutilate build and I can't help but feel that T7 will as well.

In all fairness, T5 was not 'bad' for combat builds but the stat distribution was far from ideal. Gemming helped a lot as did the items found in other slots (neck/trinkets/etc). Blizzard does appear to be making both mutilate and combat PvE viable but mutilate builds may have it slightly easier as combat rogues will be looking harder for those pieces in other slots depending on how many are available.

 

Waldar

Careful, you did compare 5 pieces of T4 vs 5 pieces of T5 vs 8 pieces of T6.
I didn't check for naxx-10.

 

Tinwhisker

Argh, that was dumb. Here we go:

I'll put a link in my original post.

 

Kumar

Even then, anything that requires you (the Rogue) to dodge an attack to become active largely becomes filler in raid fights. The other option is to have an effect when your target dodges your attack.

 

Tinwhisker

That negates some of the usefulness of expertise in the combat tree. Suddenly you're trying to balance 'just enough' expertise on gear/talents to negate DPS hurting dodges but not so much that you can't maintain the buff.

 

Ideal

I was under the impression that he meant you would get the 5% dodge plus some small static haste buff.

That said, however, I still think we'd be much more likely to see something along the lines of added haste to SnD, either way.

 

◊ chalon

Yeah, this should pretty much work. Or you can take your bugged poison damage, assume that it's with a 100% proc rate, and thus multiply it by 0.45. I can say with the level 80 PvP Premade I was doing ~3.4k DPS without any buffs and without any debuffs on the target (other than Master Poisoner), and Instant Poison was like 60% of my overall DPS. So my overall DPS would have been something like (3.4 - (3.4 * 0.6 - 3.4 * 0.6 * 0.45)) or ~2.3k DPS? I dunno, I just did that math real quick but I think it's right (subtract the difference between current poison damage and theoretical poison damage, then subtract that from my overall DPS).

I don't really see what the advantage of making the hit cap easy to get is. Yes, hit is a nice stat, we like us some hit, but if you make the hit cap easy to achieve, that just means our gear will cap out much, much sooner and it becomes harder for them to itemize for us. Do we really want a TBC mage scenario where gear with hit becomes undesirable because we're capped out easily? Once your hit rating is high enough such that your special attacks are guaranteed to not miss, any additional hit is a desirable stat certainly, but it's not like it's a game braking scenario if you aren't hit capped. In addition, in WotLK Mutilate specs will be viable, and at least for Mutilate specs you'll find that while hit is still a nice stat, agility ends up likely being better.

 

Cybelirrae

One thing that has bothered me in the last few pages of this thread are the frequent references to "T5 being a mutilate set" or "favoring mutilate." In no way was that the case. Almost all of the t5 pieces where large stat upgrades over their t4 equivalents. Rogues that posted on the rogue forums and in threads on this site who made statements like "I can't pick up t5 helm, because I will lose too much hit" were promptly chastised (to put it kindly). Tier 5 was an upgrade, it was just itemized differently. Sorry for the aside.

That being said, I would echo what some of the posters in this thread have said and am curious about Blizzard's intention with the dual-wield penalty. I can understand Blizzard's desire to put crit/haste/armor pen on non-set gear to appeal to ferals, but it does seem odd to have so little hit on our rogue-specific sets. As Aldriana has stated we don't know that hit will be the be-all, end-all stat in WotLK anyway, but the prospect of a cap at twice the current level is daunting.

 

jonnnney

Anyone else find it interesting that assuming combat and mutilate are roughly equal in damage eventually through much tweaking. There will be a 4% damage damage discrepancy between the two stemming from whether the target a humanoid, giant, beast, dragon or not. And if you were really interested in min/maxing then the current fight you are working on would determine whether or not you put points in murder, for a mutilate build.



On a side note: Some combat swords rogues on this board are coming across more like religious zealots trying to push their beliefs than players of a game discussing an the effects of an expansion that is still in beta. Just calm down a bit, be willing to consider different points of view, and realize that the expansion is not finished yet so its a bit early to be talking of manifest destiny.

 

eek

I'd like to retract my previous assertion about the sub-optimal stat allocation on the Naxx sets based on the following quote from Ghostcrawler:

 

Tinwhisker

No, you're right there. T5 was an upgrade and any rogue who still wore their T4 helm (for example) when they had T5 available to them was simple being foolish (or one-track minded). Those tend to be the rogues that pass on obvious upgrades in agility/crit/AP/ArP.

Hit and combat potency work in a very nice synergy to increase white damage. And when all the hit rating that T4 had wasn't seen in T5 all the combat rogues said, "where's my increase in synergy?" Don't forget too that T4 had set bonuses that favored combat (increased SnD time). By the time we were in T6 content though our other non-tier pieces were providing enough hit that the lower hit in T6 (identical to T5) wasn't noticed.

T5 had the higher base crit rating and everyone associates crit with some for of dagger build so it's easy to call the T5 set a 'mutilate' set even though it may not technically have been.

I don't think that's intentional, combat has been the clear king for a while now and unfamiliarity with the unknown can be quite intimidating.

 

folderol

The best thing we can have in a T7 set is a wide base set of meaningful DPS stats with enough gem slots to customize for a specific spec. It seems to be exactly what Blizzard has done and the result is much better than T4 was for rogues in BC :

On the base gear, you have 70 hit/37 expertise rating (-2,13% miss and -1% dodge) + 7 sockets (2 yellow, 2 red, 3 blue)

In WotLK, we're likely to gem for hit/expertise/agility and maybe ArP depending on how this mechanism works out.

Assuming optimal gemming for Combat rogue is expertise/hit and a RED-like constraint, gemming with rare gems the T7 gives you a total of 102 hit and 101 expertise on set (-3% miss and -3% dodge) while scoring +18 agi and +8 AP as socket bonuses.
This leaves combat rogues with only 33 hit rating and 32 expertise rating to find on one of the 10 other slots to be at yellow damage hit and expertise cap, which is the one that really matters.

This set looks very well itemized for an entry level raiding set while still providing a lot of gear upgrade options on the next tier.

For those wondering about the high crit rating value, we must remember that it also applies as spell crit rating and so is the only way we have to make our poisons crit since agility will only provide melee crit rating.

 

swelt

I think when considering hit rating, it's worth noting that pvp items are now coming in a +hit flavour. e.g. this PvP cloak

While not everyone approves of getting pve items from pvp, at least it's guaranteed rather than relying on drops.

 

eek

I agree with the entirety of your post except for this last snippet. Well, technically, I agree with this snippet too, but I also feel that it's a tad misleading. Hit Rating and Expertise Rating both affect poison damage indirectly in that it gives you more chances to proc. Granted, 1% Hit and -1% Dodge has to go through your proc rate to generate extra poison damage, whereas 1% Crit does not.

EDIT:

Also, I'm really enjoying the broken-ness of Instant Poison in beta. Dual wielding 1.4 speed daggers is pretty comedic. Do people here feel that, bugged proc rate aside, Poisons are still too powerful? Instant Poison IX at 15% of AP for scaling seems a bit too powerful, especially when you consider that the base damage at 0 AP is still 2x higher than Instant Poison VII.

 

• Aldriana

It's true that T5 was an upgrade over T4 - but I do think it's fair to say that it was a bit disappointing on the whole. Lets go piece by piece:

* Legs - Better than T4 legs (which were weak in their own right), but only a marginal upgrade at best over Skulker's Greaves (from Karazhan)
* Chest - Better than T4, but inferior to Bloodsea Brigand's Vest (from SSC)
* Shoulders - Better than T4, but inferior to Shoulderpads of the Stranger (from SSC)
* Helm - Better than T4 and hence good. Though it's worth noting that there are no other helms with a meta socket from T4 and T5 content.
* Gloves - Actually quite good... and the only piece of T5 itemized along our preferred Agi/Sta/AP/Hit arrangement.

So, of the five pieces: one was itemized in a fairly normal way and hence good; 3 were better than T4 but inferior to other drops in the same tier (or even the tier before) that were better itemized; and 1 was good, at least in part because there *are* no drops in the same tier with more normal itemization budgets. Throw in a relatively useless 2/5 set bonus for good measure, and you can see why that set was somewhat maligned.

That said, the rest of Cybe's post - the fact that hit might not be our best stat, and the fact that having some room from the cap are a good thing - is spot on. Actually, the stat I'm most worried about based on itemization in the expansion to date is Expertise. Depending on whether one is Combat or not, one needs somewhere in the 150-200 expertise range to cap out. From my cursory search, there's 5 items from 10-man Naxx alone that are of interest to rogues and have Expertise on them, and they average over 40 expertise per piece. There's also many blues with expertise, so one has to expect this trend will continue throughout the expansion. Moreover, there is Expertise food, Expertise gems, and so on. It seems to me that it's going to be absolutely trivial to get to and/or surpass the Expertise cap, which I can see causing itemization problems down the road (and some gear resocketing whenever you pick up an upgrade).

Also, the quantized nature of Expertise benefit - wherein you can have have half a dozen points of Expertise Rating that do no good at all because you're a bit below the next breakpoint - is going to be highly frustrating. I think we will all be much happier if they made it apply continuously, the way that all the other ratings do.

Well, it's true, there is hit on it; on the other hand, if you add up the stats on it and compare it to a level 80 blue, much less a level 80 epic - or, for that matter, even a level 70 epic - it doesn't really come out that well in the comparison. Most of the PvP items I've seen so far burn enough stat budget on Stamina and Resilience that they're mediocre at best in PvE. I suspect level 80 PvE non-weapon items hold roughly the same place at 80 that they do at 70 - they're perfectly good options if the PvP set is a tier or two higher than the PvE piece you'd be using instead, but they're not going to be a major portion of our raid gear.

 

• Neto-

You can check the "unbugged" poison damage in the LK spreadsheet - it's still massively overtuned. Having 50%ish of your damage from poisons is a little too much.

And since Blizzard has been trying to increase our non-white damage in WotLK, it makes sense to have more Crit and Expertise instead of Hit in our gear.

 

koaschten

Related to that, can you imagine the screaming from the official forums if a boss with nature resistance gets implemented? The uproar will be immense if half of average mutilate joe's damage is cut into half. Do you remember the mages whine over Al'ar and Hydross?

 

Kumar

Yes, its too powerful. The IP damage will be stablized at some point, which is why I still maintain that any DPS tests with poisons will not prove too fruitful.

I like Combat, well, I prefer the look of Swords a lot more on my character than daggers. Ideally, I would like both Combat and Assasination provide similar DPS values and right now IMO, if they tweak the Combat tree a bit, that would be the case. Also, its the basic idea that you should not need 9 filler talent points for Combat tree. No matter what Blizzard tries, I don't see Combat becoming a PvP favourite.

I personally think with the current Mace Spec providing a 15% AP buff, Combat Maces could outdo Combat Swords and Mut, but the number of filler talents still need to be reduced.

This is also complimented by the crit damage increase talents.

 

Tinwhisker

Depending on the size of your raid pool; most classes have had to respec at some point to get in on fights. Warriors go from prot to arms/fury, priests from shadow to holy/disc, paladins/druids/shaman between all three. Rogues, Warlocks, and Hunters have actually gotten off pretty easy in this department for quite a while.

 

• Neto-

Yep. If anything, a quick respec will fix the issue (if respec costs stay 50g at 80, it will be even more trivial); but note that there are very few Poison immune bosses in TBC as it is. I think Hydross for the poison phase and Flames of Azzinoth?

 

tetracycloide

This point has been brought up several times and it is perplexing whenever it does. What baring does the number of so-called 'filler talents' you have to take have on anything if the end result is competative DPS between rogue specs and competative DPS between rogues and other classes? If one tree was 50 points of 'filler' and the 51 point talent was a 2 min cooldown that dealt 10000 damage everyone would spec 50 points into that tree to deal 5000+ DPS.

'Filler talents' seems a complete missnomer for a completely different problem, insufficent DPS. The presence of talents that do not directly contribute to DPS is only a problem if sum DPS contribution from 51 points in any given tree is too small. Pushing the DPS contribution from talents into a few select top tier talents is a perfectly acceptable convention as long as the opportunity cost of getting to those talents warrants the investment.

My vanity is justified.

 

Kumar

Its the choice you make when you rolled the class and took it into raids. You can't exepct to roll a class that can perform multiple roles in a raid and expect to stick with the same spec through your raiding experience.

On the other hand, Rogues, Hunters, Mages have one duty and that is to DPS. All their spec trees are for DPS purposes. Its the choice I made when I rolled a Rogue, I don't think we have gotten off easy, we have performed as per our class definition.

The Warlock thing is interesting, because even through as such they are a DPS class, they have been useful is some tanking situations,