Incision

Did some testing on beta a lot last night (finally got an updated character copied over). Tested for probably 2 or so hours on the training dummies Org, using Recount, but sadly Vista blows ass so I am having a hard time finding the screenshots from it. Long story short, I was using this gear with Shard of Azzinoth MH and (unenchanted) Messenger of Fate in the OH, along with this spec. Throughout the test, I only used Spicy Hot Talbuk, Elixir of Major Agility, and one haste pot right at the beginning of each session. All in all it was a very consistant number: 2400-2500 DPS at level 70 with the stated setup. According to Recount, and this is just from memory as I cannot find my screenshots, my damage output broke down to: ~33% Melee, ~29% Instant Poison, ~26% Envenom, and the rest was a mix of Deadly Poison and Shard of Azzinoth pet(s).

Honestly, I can understand the concern over poisons right now, however I wish people would look at the big picture. Poisons are not what needs some huge nerf. Blame the fact that Blizzard made an amazing talent tree. They more or less created a talent tree the way they have always wanted to; it's synergy is just insane, and every single talent compliments the other. Vigor, Seal Fate, Cold Blood, Cut to the Chase, Infectious Poisons, Focused Assaults... everything is just amazing in that tree. The other big factor is the changes to other classes. For instance, Shamans and WF. With WF no longer taking up the MH slot, we get to put on another poison. That's huge when it comes to any build, especially Mutilate. So, don't be so quick to blame poisons, it's not OP poison damage that is doing 2500 unbuffed DPS at level 70. It's instant poison being turned into deadly poison, which gets to a full stack in seconds with +poison applications, which means Envenom becomes viable, which means Cut to the Chase is amazing, which makes Envenom amazing. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. It's the synergy in Assasination that's doing so much DPS, not instant poison damage.

 

drumbum

Assuming you were just pressing the Print Screen key in game, the screenshots should be in a folder named "Screenshots" in your WOTLK beta folder. It has nothing to do with the OS; the game handles them.

 

ekval

Poisons are out of the hands and I guess everyone knows it. If almost every PvE build need to take poison talents to perform well, in my opinion something is seriously wrong and should be changed. I don't think the so called synergy in assassination tree is either true even that the tree has least filler talents, but it is the poison talents that really make the build good at this moment. All the non poison talents are hardly better than talents in other trees (Seal Fate, Murder, Find Weakness vs Sword Spec, PotW, Combat Potency for example).

The fact that faster weapons are now "superior" to slower ones has to be changed also, and it is only because of poisons.

 

folderol

I'm quite surprised that Deadly Brew currently does not beat Relentless Strikes in a Shiv build since it is nearly a 400dps increase per point right now. Have you tried a 31/40/0 template ?
This should let you use Evenom as an efficient primary finisher after SnD and Rupture as secondary.

 

• Aldriana

So, the first issue of note is that 30/41/0 doesn't actually include deadly brew. You'd need to go 32/39/0. Which may be competitive, but it definitely has some problems. Second, the contribution of Relentless Strikes is not to be underestimated - I'm not entirely sure you don't ditch CP to get Relentless Strikes once you go down that road, as the energy regen is comparable, and it takes less filler to get to. And now you're looking at something like 38/28/5. Which may be entirely valid - I'd need to run numbers on it to be sure. But it's definitely a very different animal.

 

folderol

The build I was referring to is 31/40/0 not 30/41/0 (linked in the above post wih only 1 point of DB) and CP is much better than Relentless in a Shiv build since you proc it with Shiv strikes which brings it's value closer to 5 energy/s compared to 2,5 with RS.

When the poison damage is nerfed, I would however expect RS+SA to beat out Deadly Brew or at least match it.

Edit: Using Vulajin latest LK spreadsheet with default gear + Warglaives, 31/40/0 more or less matches 32/39/0 and comes out better than RS based builds.
Edit 2: Optimal cycle seems to be 1s/5e for 31/40/0 with SnD and Shiv glyphs.

 

Akka

I'm sorry, but even though synergy in the Assassination tree is surely enormous, you're still doing 29 % of your damage purely out of Instant Poison, which is enormously more than the usual share today, even if you would use IP on both hands.

Poison are obviously not tuned right, and will very certainly be nerfed.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Towbar

What is wrong with poisons doing alot of damage? Currently poisons do nothing more than tickle a boss and to be honest I am happy to see poisons becoming a bigger part of rogue dps. Everyone keeps referring to poisons being nerfed but what about buffing combat to match mutilate dps?

I dont know about the rest of you but I am sick of 3s5r cookie cutter spec and would love to see 2 viable trees for PvE dps. I quite like the idea of 3 or 4 setups for competitive dps in a raid and not being forced into the combat tree like we have been for so long now. It seems blizzard wants to keep us there with past events like the hemo nerf. Another tree and spec became viable raid dps and due to some PvP QQ that spec got nerfed forcing us once again to spam SS.

I for one hope that both trees get balanced in such a way that one is not vastly superior to the other because inspecting season geared rogues to see 20-0-41 and tier geared rogues to see 20-41-0 has become a bit tedious.

One thing I must agree with is that the shift in superiority from slow weapons to fast ones is strange and should be balanced further. Perhaps a reduction in the hit percentage that Improved Poisons currently gives. Or remove the normalisation from mutilate (No chance)

 

ekval

Poisons need to be tuned down as I don't see Blizzard buffing Subtlety or Combat tree to match Mutilates poison power. Atleast from the Roguecraft/Spreadsheet thread numbers it is for Deep Combat build better to take poison talents over Deep Combat talents (PotW for example) which states something is broken and need to be fixed.

They could buff PotW to match the poison damage in Mutilate build but that would give other problems and I really don't see that happening. Tuning down poisons also should fix problem with faster weapons being better than slower ones (atleast part of it).

Should poisons be bigger part of the rogues damage? Yeah, why not. Should poisons be so big part of the rogue damage that you can't make good PvE damage without poison talents + really fast weapons? Not in my opinion. Also buffing everything else to match poison damage isn't really practical task, not when we certainly know the poisons are too overpowered and problem ain't weakness of other talents.

 

Ulthwithian

Towbar: The main issue is that Rogues are doing far more damage than anyone else, and it is fairly apparent that this change occurred with the Poison scaling. I believe Roywyn crossposted his numbers here from the Mage thread to give a comparison.

It isn't pretty, at least on a theoretical level. Since I haven't seen our modelers (hey Aldriana et al) here since the 'resist' issues came up with Poison, I don't know if those factors had already been accounted for. If they haven't been, then the issue may not be as severe.

To your more general question regarding poisons, I agree with you that there is nothing inherently wrong with Poisons doing a large percentage of Rogue damage. However, the absolute damage that Rogues are doing (again, in theory) is larger than should be happening. Therefore, if you like that poisons are doing 30% of a Rogue's damage, but the absolute values are large, your only choice is to lower all damage that your Rogue causes, and that's going to run into the itemization numbers, which are treated as more or less constant.

Thus, the simplest and easiest way to lower the absolute damage that Rogues are seeing is to lower the absolute amount of poison damage that is dealt. This has the side effect of lowering the percentage of damage that Rogues deal from poisons. Another side effect is to reduce the effectiveness of the Assassination tree relative to the other trees, which is something else that many people right now would argue is necessary.

So, lowering Poison damage is not being advocated due to theoretical issues, but certainly more from pragmatic issues.

 

seamusmc

Have you not seen the posts where it's looking like a 'shiv' build may be the top dps build for rogues? That using two fast weapons provides the best dps? You weren't maximizing your dps using the shard of azzinoth, a 1.4 or 1.5 dagger in your MH would have boosted your dps significantly.

Edit: Noted that you were posting numbers from memory.

 

Roywyn

Buffing poisons is a good thing.

Right now in Sunwell, a rogue uses no poison on one hand, deadly poison in the other hand.
Poison adds 5% to their total damage.
Poisons are a class defining ability for rogue, they should deal more damage and scale.


Fast forward to the current build:

Poisons do up to 50% and more of your total damage. Unless you run around with something slow as a 2.8s Warglaive or something, your poisons hit harder than your weapons.
You don't even care about your weapon damage anymore, your focus is improving poison damage.
You stitch together builds that focus on a weak instant off-hand attack that was used only for utility so far to get more poison procs.

Remember when you laughed at farmer rogues running around with ninja'ed [Finkle's Skinner]s? Using Hemo as their main attack?'
That's where you're heading right now. Not literally and definately not for the same reason, but still.


Changing paradigms can be a very welcome thing. But currently, it's just dumb.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

VeeV's

We can agree that this will not go live, hell there are blue posts saying it wont't.

They even say (snatched from a blue post):
"5K for rogues is a little silly. Don't expect to get buffed to that point. And they shouldn't either. "

Poisons will get tuned down and "Thats A Good Thing" (tm), if not then it will be another pigeonhole spec with a pigeonholed weapon choice just like what we had so far.

Noone wants to be cornered into Mutilate with 2x 1,3 daggers, it would be like Combat Swords thru BC with a different name and weapon.

Probably the idea is to balance Mutilate and Combat DPS so you can choose wich one do you want. It makes me wonder how they plan it, as Combat Potency will lose its value drastically, unless Combat specs are able to get close to the lvl 80 hitcap.

Maybe we will see a Glyph of Precision who knows.

 

folderol

We're indeed going to lose about 10-15% hit at Naxx-10 level but we also gain a 20% haste bonus (Windfury).
Now, Hit is a more powerful stat than haste for scaling CP but the sheer amount of haste we're gaining will more than likely offset the loss in the early raids.

 

Ashere

Much rather 3 actually, I don't know, but the pre-TBC state where there were only 2 trees considerable overall doesn't really attract me anymore.
And no, sub wasn't "The" PvP tree pre-TBC either, apart from the last month before TBC release, during the "Before the Storm" patch, when viable hemo weapons finally became commonly available and it temporarily had the CloS talent as 41-pointer.

I like how the trees "look" now, where having one rogue of each spec seems as viable, if not more desirable, than having 3 rogues of all the same spec. (I'm referring to the Master Poisoner, Blood Poisoning and Hemorrhage debuffs here). It's just the numbers that still need tweaking to make it so, and the current state of poisons definitely plays a big part in that tweaking.

Just look at the effects of a talent like Infectious Poison: if poisons are ~30% of your DPS, than 1 point in that talent increases your total DPS by ~3% already. And Infectious Poisons isn't the only talent like that in the Assassination tree.
Vile Poisons more or less does the same thing, though that one's easier to reach for other builds (it's almost as much of a must-have as Dual Wield), and Deadly Brew is one that improves your poison damage by ~40%, or in other words: ~6% of a DPS increase for each of the two talentpoints spent.

All those big leaps in DPS from talents don't have to be really problematic. But in addition to those, every single filler point you place in other talents in the Assassination tree is a DPS increase as well. Unlike the Combat tree, where you'll find 2-9 mandatory non-DPS filler talents (depending on spec), or the Sub tree, which has 3-8 mandatory non-DPS filler talents (also depending on spec).

And since the WotLK release date has already been announced, I doubt Blizz is going to give the Assassination tree another overhaul. Tweaking the numbers, and especially the poison scaling seems a much quicker and simpler method of balancing.

 

Incision

Poison damage isn't as big right now because you raid with one weapon with Poisons applied and your instant poisons don't also apply deadly. If you can't see the point and make the connection that it's the talent tree, than I don't know what else to tell you.

And to person who replied to me about my screenshots, yes it does matter the OS. For some odd reason Vista puts them in an entirely different folder.

World of Warcraft (English) Forums -> Windows Vista , scroll down, shows you how to find screenshots in Vista, but the same method doesn't work for my beta screenshots.

 

Pharmacon

First glance, this seems like a logical argument. However, I just can't agree with it. As far as I know Hemo is a unique debuff. If the sub tree gets buffed up to the range of combat/assassination, then a sub rogue becomes mandatory in a 25 man where min/maxing becomes an issue. This gets away from Blizz's goal of equal opportunity (de)buffing and mandates that one rogue you bring needs to be sub. I'm not opposed to sub rogues coming to raids but it seems to me that getting all three trees into PvE is greedy.

I'm sure someone is bound to say "It's not greedy wanting to be able to raid as any given tree Blizz gave us." Fine, let's make 24/24/23 viable while we're at it as well because I want to raid that. Sure, that's an extreme, but it's the same logic.

 

ekval

I think perfect finish line (and Blizzard's intend) is to have three different talent trees where every one of them is playable and somewhat useful in both, PvE and PvP. It's like being able to toss 61 talent points in any of three talent trees and still able to do somewhat similar damage output/utility as two other trees you are comparing to. It doesn't need to mean that the damage output needs to be within 5% or so as utility (hemorrhage debuff for example) can be calculated as benefit even that your personal dps might be lower than two other trees.

From my point of view the talent trees are in quite good condition and we are hopefully getting three different, unique and viable talent trees. I'm quite sure everyone wants to have more diversity than TBC's whopping two viable talent builds gave us (20/0/41 PvP, 20/41/0 PvE).

Poison damage needs working, so does mid Combat tree (Tier 2-5) and maybe mid Subtlety tree (Tier 2-6). Killing Spree and Shadow Dance requires either total overhaul or some tuning to be complete 51 pointers.

 

tetracycloide

This is a complete missnomer for the actual problem. Poisons contributing the percentage of damage they do in a mutilate build is not the problem, the problem is poisons contributing the percentage of damage they do in NON mutilate builds. If non-assassination rogues saw significantly less damage coming from poison and the overall DPS from mutilate was roughly equal to other rogues specs and specs of other DPS classes there wouldn't be a problem. The problem is not that poisons scale well for mutilate it is that they scale too well for combat and subtelty, so much so that they throw off scaling and itemization for the abilities their trees were designed to buff.

The simplest solution would be to reduce the AP scaling of all poisons to something more reasonable. The exact number is unimprotant but it needs to be at a level where 3/3 vile poisons isn't a bigger DPS contribution to combat swords or hemo builds than talents that buff SS or hemo respectivly. Meanwhile assassination still needs strong poison damage because most of the tree centers around buffing mutilate and poison damage. Adjusting a deep assassination talent to increase the AP contribution to poison damage, much like caster classes get deep tree talents that buff the coeficents on their on tree spells, would be a good choice.

My vanity is justified.

 

• Vulajin

This is really not accurate at all. Mutilate builds are currently ranked roughly 1K or more DPS above other builds courtesy of poison talents, especially Deadly Brew and full 5/5 Improved Poisons. Mutilate was never far enough behind the other builds to need poison damage buffed to the extent that it was.

If Blizzard's intent is to have poisons be a substantial source of damage, then they need to be that for all builds, not just Mutilate, because otherwise Mutilate is simply going to become the new de facto spec and we won't be in any better a position than we were in.

 

• Aldriana

I must say, while I was not initially particularly enthusiastic about Killing Spree, it's growing on me. When you run the numbers it turns out to be a pretty significant source of raid DPS - around 75 DPS, which isn't bad for one talent point. It's certainly going to be potent in PvP - a burst of 7k damage over 3 seconds is nothing to sneer at. And it's certainly a bit more interesting and exciting in terms of usage than, say, Surprise Attacks. So despite my initial hesitance about the talent, I'm actually pretty happy with it right now.

It's not just the AP scaling - the AP scaling accounts for only a little over half the damage poison does - even cutting the AP scaling in half would only reduce the damage output of the poisons to about 3/4 of it's current level, which doesn't solve the whole problem.

No, I think the larger problem is that the poison talents were designed with the old poison damage numbers in mind. When poisons only account for 5% of your raid DPS, talents that double your poison output are totally reasonable. When they account for 30% of your damage, those same talents start seeming a little over-potent. So I think what we can expect to see is significantly reduced benefit from the poison talents. Look at the estimates I put together on the value of poison talents - on a point-for-point basis, Improved and Vile Poisons are worth 4 to 5 times as much as non-poison talents of comparable tier. So while it wouldn't surprise me to see the AP scaling reduced, I think that'll be only part of the fix - the real fix we're going to be seeing is the numbers on the poison talents - particularly Improved and Vile Poisons - drop dramatically, so as to make them less essential for all builds.

 

Ariashley

Me and 4 other members of my guild had the opportunity to do some testing last night in a heroic Shattered Halls and in Kara on the PTR (so, at 70, all in BT gear). First, we were able to 5 man Attumen, Moroes and Maiden without any problems (party was tankadin, retadin, holy/disc priest, me (assassination with really crappy kara and ZA daggers, Emerald Ripper and Prowler's Strikeblade), and arcane mage. I'm sure we could have finished the instance, but it was late, so we went to sleep. Moroes was dead in 58 seconds (not including his adds - which added about another 1.5 minutes), Attumen dead in 2.6 minutes, Maiden 1.3 minutes - did I mention we only had 5 people?

Is there a new rank of poisons at 70? I didn't notice one.

I have a parse I ran with a program downloaded from curse. I'm trying to figure out how to get it into a nice readable format, but may just need to screen shot it. It will give no idea of special damage, since I pretty much fail at mutilate right now. It should reflect poison damage pretty effectively and I can compare it with combat later on today.

That ret paladin (who is usually holy) was destroying....everything.

 

tetracycloide

That was kinda my point. The PTR version of poisons in combination with the low tier poison talents scales too well for non-mutilate builds. Adjusting the AP scaling is one way to deal with the issue, moving and/or adjusting vile/improved poison talents is another. I was objecting to the characterization of poisons as being overpowered in mutilate builds, they're overpowered in all builds because they're broken. It would be perfectly reasonable for poisons to be a substaintial portion of mutilate DPS and not combat or subtelty DPS if combat or subtelty perform the same overall. The objection to poisons being a significant damage contribution in any build or not all builds is silly if the overall DPS and scaling with itemization is roughly the same for each build.

My vanity is justified.

 

Kaveli

The number of % modifiers in assassination is just insane. Test dummy with no buffs but random debuffs on the dummy i was holding 2600 dps as mutilate (51-7-3, 51,10,0 and a few others) with little to no effort and compared it to a 1500 dps combat build. Instead of AP scaling I think the talents and the overall extent of % modifiers needs so trimming. Here are some of the obvious poison centric talents that need some adjustment.

Vile Poisons- 3 points for 20% more damage is very reasonable. Even as a 5 point talent it was good. 3 is just generous.
Deadly Brew- would be more reasonable at the cost of more talent points. for 2 points you're doubling your poison damage.
Infectious Poisons (although not working on the PTR) is another over tuned talent for the low cost of 2 points. another 20% damage for instant and deadly.
Instant Poisons- No one has mentioned how much better this talent dump is now. It is worth it to put full points in it as on live it's 10% max. On the PTR 25%. This can account for the 70-80% poison applications. Instant has a base of 30% + imp gives you 55% base application(roughly).

So for 12 talent points you get- 40% more poison damage, double poisons (not quite 100% more since deadly doesn't do the damage of instant now but it is getting all the other buffs as well), and 25% higher base chance to do all this extra damage.

Although the AP scaling of instant could use a bit of trimming, These % modifers are all over the place and really need more consideration before live. I'm just hoping blizz does tweaks to this instead of taking a bazooka and taking out Assassination top dps viability. I'm looking forward to playing with my daggers so let's hope they don't kill it to bad :-P

The short of this is this is way to much synergy on an already inflated poison damage. These % modifiers need a tone down.

 

Ashere

Very true, though I don't think it's too much to ask for a hemo spec to have it's personal DPS + estimated damage from the debuff to be competing to any other build. A percent or 2 more or less shouldn't make it required, nor obsolete. It should just be a different flavor.

As for min/maxing raids: TBC kinda showed that this isn't as important a factor as cooperation. Occasionally, a wipe during the last 3% of a boss happened, yes. But very generally speaking, wipes happened more often from bad strategy and bad cooperation than from lack of DPS. The enrage timers on various bosses were set rather broad for example. Once you get the hang of a boss, and all raid members know exactly what to do, it's possible to down most bosses with enrage timers well within the time available, without having aquired substantially better equipment since first tries. Not killing a boss in time or even wiping in general, meant that more was wrong, than just too little DPS.
A simple TBC boss like Aran is even an example how there can even be something like too much DPS, (try getting sheeped, wreathed AND have the elementals out all at once), where the DPS is definitely high enough, but lack of coordination is the killer.

Of course DPS is needed, but it's already more important that the one dealing it knows what to do than trying to top the meters. This doesn't make rogues obsolete for raiding though, since rogues are still the ones that can deal damage most efficiently, stick most damage into the windows they have for it.