They would take a rogue because they are 1) a skilled player 2) buffs/debuffs are already provided for.

In regards to item 2, Blizz is doing everything they can to eliminate raid stacking. Once a buff or debuff is provided for it can't be stacked for min/maxing purposes. This will give guilds much greater flexibility in choosing who comes to a raid and the skill of the player will be a much greater part of the equation then it has ever before. Min/Maxing will be more about minimizing the unskilled players in the raid and maximizing the skilled players in the raid, not buff/debuffs.

Even at their most ignorant/naive in terms of tree development, Blizzard has never shut an entire class out of raiding (specs yes, but never a class). Yes, if things go down this road, no longer will we be the default #1 DPS class.

Ideally, raid contributions will have more to do with the skill of the player than the skills of their class. As long as you're a good player with skills to match, you should have nothing to fear about losing a raid spot.

Well, skilled player is one thing, but the class usefullnes - another. I want to give my guild best, and rogue does not seems all that shiny now, if what blues are yelling for weeks now turns true and we are on par with hybrids in terms of damage. Having all the buffs needed already provided by several characters and free to select the others just cries for min/maxing - will you take 3 rogues that at best can do some sort of missdirection or rather take 3 ferals - the additional CRs are often saving the day left aside other utilities. Or I shall hope for all encounters to be BB-like so a rogue tott can overvalue the cr :p
Just wondering if it is the time to level some meow if blizzard really do what they promise to do

Oh well, I was not trying to start a long discussion on the "RP" element in the game (or else I would have ranted 'till my tongue is blue about Relentless Strike being in the Subtlety tree while being through and through a pure Assassination talent), just countering the gameplay argumentation that immunities had to go.
My point was that it's perfectly fine to have immunity, as long as there is a coping mechanism somewhere. And no, the "there is magic so we can throw all sense out of the window" isn't a really adequate answer
I know it's still in beta, but I'm a bit worried. Nearly half of the damages are from poisons, which tends to indicate grossly overtuned poisons, and still the rogue is quite below the warlock, on a rogue-dream combat (of course, it could be due to player skill, gear and the like, so I'm not THAT worried, more than wondering how it will work in the end).

Let's see what Blizzard has in store for everyone, I guess we'll see some heavy balance tweakings in the upcoming month.

It's not tuned yet. No need to start worrying about WWS reports. Blizzard still have to "play with their knobs" as a former poster so eloquently put it.


Has there been any clue from Bliz that the dual wield hit penalty might be reviewed? I've seen a couple of posts here about it and I think it would make a lot of sense. They are trying to align gear such that it is suitable for multiple classes and specs. The fact that dual wielding classes tend to value hit in a very different way to 'single wielders'(?) is at odds with this. So fury vs ret vs arms gear, feral leather vs rogue leather, hunter vs enh shaman gear issues could be simplified if the dual wield hit penalty was less significant.

That patchwerk parse had all casters with Blessing of Might, with a bugged Glyph giving them ~800 spell power instead of the intended ~50-70. That's half a dozen raid tiers free damage.

Then the Destruction Warlock had said BoM also on his Imp, which roughly doubled the Imp's damage output.
So he gained roughly twice the bonus that other casters had.
The high damage output also made him not require Life Tapping at all (ISL, 30% chance to return 10% damage as mana).

The top mage Cheesy used Arcane Blast spam which is generally seen as mis-/overtuned.

Who else is quite high up there are hunters.
Survival is pretty high with Explosive Shot (6s cooldown) doing 30% total / 35% of the personal damage of the hunters.
That sounds quite like a lot, maybe a bugged ability.
The BM Hunter does 1.8k DPS via his pet and 1.8k DPS in persona, more than 50% damage of his pet sounds an awful lot.


So, take that parse with a grain of salt. Most of the top classes in it have quite a few things waiting to be tuned.

Can we stop circulating this fallacy? We are *supposed to be* the #1 single target DPS class by Blizzard's publicly stated definition, pre-TBC. We *are not* the #1 single target DPS class currently nor have we been for quite a while. This has been gone over multiple times in this thread so let's please stop saying it.

For all these reasons, parses can't be taken seriously yet other than to highlight where things don't seem like they're the way Blizzard intends. My concern with their tuning process is their methodology. Their "robust internal spreadsheets" have produced such gaffes in the past that it leads me to question their true quality. I hope it's not their main source of guidance in determining if classes are tuned correctly.

Rogues WILL have utility in WOTLK (or did you miss that in the last 77 pages of discussion)? Can we please not have more alarmist posts that make it clear that whoever wrote them has no clue what the discussion is even about? Oh wait, nevermind, those people will never actually READ this post.

Actually, rogues have some utility anyway, as in many fights, poisons are extremely useful, as are interrupts. For exampe that boss in Hyjal that requires the wound poison - what's-his-face, 2nd or 3rd guy, been months since I was in there, Illidan (wound poison), Reliquary of Souls (Mind Numbing and interrupts in phase 2, tanking in phase 1). Rogues are one of the few DPS classes that rarely reach a hard threat cap, due to Vanish. My guild LOVES me when I get a Fel Rage for Bloodboil. However, despite all that, Blizzard is giving rogues more utility.

With no Blessing of Salvation and with tanking threat not seeming to be tuned to increase threat by 30% (which I base on the fact that I have a tankadin that raids casually and am keeping informed of the theory and testing), there will be a need for something to increase the tanks threat. Tricks of the trade is clearly designed for the purpose and now Blizzard is trying to think about how to make it so raid leaders don't NEED 4 rogues in a raid by applying a debuff or something to the tank(s). Our raid leader (a constantly threat capped warlock) is drooling over that rogue talent - and, because he's a warlock, he really hates rogues on principle (since they kill him pretty handily most of the time).

Additionally, unless you frequently have arms warriors in your raids (we never do), Blood Poisoning in the combat tree is pretty useful. Master Poisoner seems pretty useless to me, on the surface, since we usually do have both an elemental shaman and ret paladin as main raiders (who both plan to play those toons at 80) and the Master Poisoner buff would not stack with either one.

If you don't think your guild will bring you to a raid on your rogue in WOTLK, maybe you need a new guild. I'm pretty sure no matter which of my toons I decide to level, I'll get to come to raids unless I suddenly decide to suck.

Agreed, just check out WWS reports.

I felt the same way when looking through that WWS. I believe that the mentality we, as rogues, have developed about poisons being an add-on dps of minor import has just changed forever. It looks as though the "new" rogue is being balanced in such a way to maintain his melee dps, while expanding his overall raid-dps through the use of the LK scaling poisons in an a sort of melee/caster type of way. Poisons are no longer the incidental they used to be, and could be equated to our "school of magic". The overall spirit of the Assassination tree leads me to think that poisons are our "tuning knob" for Mutilate Raid Dps (to miss-quote an earlier poster) and as such, making the top-end poison talents costly for deep sub, PvP becomes easier to normalize etc. It is difficult to garner an idea as to what the direction or plan is for the Combat tree, but I will be surprised if, even after the poison tune-up, deep combat is a competitive raid build compared to Mutilate+.

With the stated goal of normalizing dps between the classes, the use of poisons to extend us, or retract us, as top dps on any given fight is a smart move. In much the same way mages are at the mercy of mob immunity to fire damage etc. The merging of spell hit-melee hit and crits on gear further makes me think that we are now "poison casters" in some way.

I personally hope that poison damage stays a major part of our new raid damage base, so long as we can talent to overcome some of the inherent weaknesses of being dependent upon a dispelable, resistible, and possibly immunity based dps source. (See also: Mages)

Unless I'm behind the times on dps warrior outlook in WotLK, there will be no reason for them to be Arms at all since the Fury option is significantly stronger. We are currently the best source for the Blood Poisoning/Frenzy effect. That's really nice to have.

Having poisons as a more important component of our damage is fine but the issue with poison being too strong is that it gives Assassination too strong a scaling advantage.
A Mutilate rogue can approximately increase his Instant Poison damage by 224% compared to a non poison-talented rogue (just 5 points of Improved Poisons provide a 125% boost to IP damage), not including Deadly Brew.
This is fine only if the non-poison rogue (Combat or Subtety) can scale his damage by a roughly similar amount through another talent tree specific mechanism (white damage, energy damage, ... whatever really).

With the current AP scaling and base damage, non talented Instant Poison has the damage range of a 2.4 speed 180 dps melee weapon. It's applied on each hand and bypasses armor. Being able to scale that kind of damage by more than 200% is just insane !

Either Blizzard needs to tune down the base poison damage so that a non talented poison hits for significantly less than a full weapon swing or reduce the scaling talents... probably both.

Okay i have seen people come close but miss a gigantic fallacy for months now. The original blue message (and I'm paraphrasing here) was that all the sweeping changes that are happening in WOTLK were to eliminate raid stacking. This being a forum of avid 25 man raiders came to the natural conclusion that ' man shaman and lock stacking in SWP was kind of a pain it will be nice to see it go'. This however i believe to be incorrect, the root causes of the changes does not have anything to do with 25 man raiding.
The changes have had a different purpose - TO BALANCE 10 MAN RAIDS. Think about it, the current changes would not change stacking on tightly tuned 25 man encounters; in fact unless all dps classes did exactly the same damage the changes would only exaberate stacking. Guilds would figure out the most efficient method to cover all the needed buffs and then fill every remaining slot with the most efficient dps/healing classes. The fact that raid stacking became such a part of TBC was intentional on blizzards part in an effort to courage a more diverse class/spec composition. Just look back on vanilla raiding, you had 40 man raids but with the exception of a hand full of classes, every class speced exactly the same way. Ever rogue was combat, every priest was primarily holy, every shaman resto ect...
Enter TBC and the new synergies with the new 25 man raid size. A 25 man raid has slots for 2.5 of every class and with the synergies the ideal raid shifted from 8 of each class with the same spec to most classes represented with 2 members with a few having 3. It also greatly encouraged (if not required) that many of the classes be speced different variants.
Now this was not a perfect system but it was a great improvement overall from the 40 man system... so why are they choosing to abandon it now? The answer is because with the current method of buff synergies makes balancing challenging 10 man raids impossible. With the addition of Death Knights raising the number of classes to 10, a "balanced" 10 man raid would have one of each class. However this is far from the current idea 10 man set up that cherry picks the most powerful buffs and has a few classes sit outside and buff(paladins/mages). IF you want further proof of this you have to look no further than EJ's thread about bear runs, you can see that when the event was considered challenging there were a handful of group compositions that were used to the exclusion of many classes.
Now blizzard is well aware of this and with their decision to put greater emphasis on 10 man raids in WOTLK they had no choice but to scrap the current buffing system or forever have a balancing nightmare.

So what is my conclusion base upon this conjecture?
It's rather simple:
Vanilla raiding was a 40 man game, 20 man raids did exist but they were a minor element content wise comparatively. Vanilla was the 40 man era

In TBC 25 man raiding was king content wise, though 10 mans existed and were immensely popular, TBC will be remembered as the 25 man raiding era.

In WOTLK 10 man raids will be king and will be blizzards primary focus. 25 mans will still exist but in a greatly reduced fashion. WOTLK will be the 10 man era.

PS: i would like to apologize for this block of grammatical insanity and any damage it may inflict upon the unsuspecting reader.

I don't see that there's any reason to believe that 25-mans will be greatly reduced simply because there will be more 10 mans - in particular, it's been explicitly stated that there will be exactly the same number of both. So yes, there will be more 10 mans, and they're paying more attention to the balance and fun of those raids - which is fine. But I don't think there's any reasonable reason to conclude that there won't still be all the same 25-man content we know and love.

Look at it this way:

At 60, there were 4 and a half raid instances for the large raid size, and 2 for the small.
At 70, there were 5 and two half raid instances for the large raid size, and 2 for the small.

All they're doing is making sure there will be about the same number. Instead of 5 and 2, it will be 5 and 5. So you're right that they're paying more attention to 10 mans and balancing around them and whatever - but I think all the changes are designed to be balanced for 25 mans as well, as there is every reason to believe that they will still be a major part of the raid content in the expansion.

They're making sure no class is left out of 10-man raids becuase of synergies, recieved or given. Bear run being an excellent example, I can't think of a successful one where I've been dps or tank without salvation. Either with a paladin in raid, or a paladin alt logged outside.

I suppose what he was trying to say is that, with the possibility to have all the high-level instances as 10-men, the 25-men will be considerably less used. Simply because it's so much less a hassle to launch a 10-men-raid than a 25-men one.
As such, the main focus of the raid game will be on 10-men, with 25-men probably becoming a niche for hardcore - or very large - guilds.

Even with loot a tier above, we'll most probably a sharp drop in r25 attendance for nearly all but the top guilds. Heck, there is already a people shortage in many high-end guilds, and this has been a daily issue for the past year in many middle-end ones.
Equal loot between r10 and r25 would very certainly have caused the near total disappearance of r25 for all but the most devoted raiders.
Honestly, that's not a very hard assumption to make (at least from my point of view), considering how many Karazhan guilds there is compared to even Gruul/Mag guilds.

Though we're going astray from the topic and should probably agree to disagree and leave it at that

The people shortage can be attributed to player burn out, lack of new content for months and months. (then M'uru) If there is nothing left to explore and kill, only the content you can do half afk while watching House MD youll get bored.

I wouldnt count on 25 mans going away, youre getting caught in your own preconception Im afraid. If anything 25 men raids will be the rage because of the tons of people returning to the game eager to raid, not even counting the new players. (check PC game sales WoW is a permanent fixture in the top 10 since years)

On Topic:

The naxx 25 man set is out and it continues the trend of the naxx 10 man set, also they changed HfB's energy refund to 15 energy.

If mutilate is indeed one of the major raiding specs then they already have that weakness, even without the poisons themselves being a large part of your DPS: mutilate's poison requirement on target alone will handle it.

Couple of things I noted:
- the naxx set follows the exact same itemisation pattern, the 25 man slot is simply 'more'. This could eliminate (for set pieces at least) any chance that the 10 man version is deemed better than the 25 man because of the way it happens to have been itemised. But that begs the question of...
- Set bonuses. The shots on mmo-champ show the 25 man items as part of set called "Naxx 10 set Rogue". That would imply to me that both 25 man and 10 man sets could share set bonuses, in a similar way to that in which arena sets do now. That might mean it's advantageous to run both versions of the instances early on to quickly fill those set bonuses out.

Speculating quite a lot here of course, but I think it's a logical path for Blizzard to take with these sets. The alternatives are they they have different sets, which could lead to mixing 10 and 25 man items for optimal set bonus abuse, or to skip bonuses on the 10 man set (unlikely).

The Naxx25-Set offers +48 Agility, +44 Stamina, +21 Critrating, +25 Hasterating, +10 Hitrating, +5 Expertiserating, +86 Attack Power over the Naxx10-Set. Not a huge step in regard to each single item (roughly 12-17% increase in stats), but quite a large step when viewing the whole set. I am wondering if the set bonuses will be the same on Naxx10 and Naxx25 (or even interchangable, like Arena-Sets).

On another note, does anyone understand what Blizzard is aiming at with weapon speeds?
Mainhand weapons like swords and maces get only 2.4-2.5 speed (like Silent Crusader), while Offhand weapons in most cases have a meager 1.6 speed (like Split Greathammer or Maexxna's Femur).
1.6 OH-speed is quite inferior for combat specs, so is Blizzard holding back the "good" weapon speeds for later tiers or is this a new trend for WotLK?

I don't think that's too wild of speculation to assume they would have the same set bonuses. Both being the first sets found in their respective raiding paths (10 vs 25) it would make sense. However I don't know if it would be wise that they would share set bonuses like the different tiers of Gladiator gear do.

Having the same set bonuses hurts nothing, the 25-man gear will have better stats and thus make better use of 2 and 4-pc bonuses; nobody can then say that the 10-man has better bonuses and is thus better in some way. (eg "Why am I raiding at a harder level when the lower gear is better?")

I don't think the two sets would share bonuses though because players could get their 4-pc bonus so quickly. Blizzard worked hard in BC to pace players and keep many of them from running out of content too early. A big part of that is getting 2 and 4-pc bonuses for the majority of a raid group before dropping content for more time in higher tier dungeons.

Yes, players could get 2 different 2-pc bonuses (like stacking the +35 resil in early arena days) but obtaining a 4-pc bonus is usually much stronger than a second 2-pc bonus.

Latro's was the only 1.4 speed sword before the Blade of Infamy. My guess is that Blizz is just holding them back. I'm sure we've not seen all the loot there is to be had. There's also talk about changing the dual wield penalty in some way and this may be part of it.