Blizzard reduced the number of non-damaging talent points needed for the Combat build with the latest changes. It will be interesting to see how this compares to Mutilate though.
However, hit will increase the number of yellow crits until you reach the 9% boss mob miss chance.
(By the way, are there any news on the miss numbers for boss mob and dual wield penalty? Or is it still just a rumor?)
In terms of changes for combat, I like the 10% increased energy rate. Might be able to use 2 finishers then within one cycle. However we'll have to see if 2 finishers are worth it if you have to take both Ruthlessness and Relentless Strikes for it, passing e.g. on Blood Spatter and/or Serrated Blades.
And to reply another posting I read during my catch up of the last 5 or so pages:
Originally Posted by Raconzor
Weka -
From a pve perspective, realize just how awful all the points but relentless strikes that are spent in the sub tree are. Serrated blades is the only other thing that even sort of contributes to dps, and as noted elsewhere armorpen in the pve setting is alot worse in the expac than it is now, re:scaling issues.
Serrated Blades is no armor penetration itself, it is more like Sunder Armor. I.e. no % based ability but a straight decrease in armor based on your current level (unless it was changed which I haven't read about yet).
I guess to solve the fast weapon problem for Assassination, we'll probably see normalization or an internal cooldown on Focused Attacks and Instant Poison? Neither of those solutions would have worked for Deadly Brew, but they look to be feasible here. Correct me if I'm wrong please: PPM effects take static Haste into account, so an ICD actually benefits (very minorly) from Haste on gear, while normalization would mean IP and FA don't scale with it?
Don't hold your breath for Focused Attacks to be normalized, as they have not yet done the same for Combat Potency. Far more likely that they'll normalize Instant Poison in some fashion. PPM mechanics do scale down with haste, but if Instant Poison were changed, say, to deal weapon damage, then it would scale just fine with haste.
Blizzard reduced the number of non-damaging talent points needed for the Combat build with the latest changes. It will be interesting to see how this compares to Mutilate though.
Try double-checking 5 filler points in Sub and 3 points in Serrated Blades versus 3 in Ruthlessness and 5 in Lethality.
I'm getting different results when I check it with Vulajin's and dmm's spreadsheets. It could be because dmm's sheet optimized my cycle from 3s/5r to 5s/5r.
Haven't run numbers versus mutilate, but the combat tree comes together relatively cleanly now with the exception of that bottleneck at T5 and the filler before it.
With the fixed Deadly Poison model in the Roguecraft sheet, I'm finding that Eviscerate is coming increasingly close to Envenom in CttC cycles. The one thing keeping it from closing the gap is Improved Eviscerate. However, Rupture is still predictably far ahead of both. This all assumes the "full Sunwell" gear set configured in the sheet at the moment. Aldriana, what's your latest finding on Env/Evis using the Naxx 25 setup?
Also, if you've modeled the latest changes yet, how do you find Shiv builds at this point?
I haven't had a chance to update Shiv, and I haven't done any Eviscerate numbers. I'll try to do that today. My guess is that with the poison nerfs, Shiv builds are probably not going to remain very interesting for long - I suspect straight SS builds are going to match or surpass Shiv builds in overall DPS, though I haven't done numbers on that either.
Envenom vs Eviscerate: it's true that Envenom does cost you DP stacks, but it does give a relatively significant number of extra IP procs, which seems to work out to a net positive for the most part. Of course, with the death of Deadly Brew, we may see the IP proc rate boost removed from Envenom, which would of course reduce the relative benefit of Envenom.
Originally Posted by Vulajin
It's going to be like that until they either nerf Instant Poison back down to a non-significant level of damage contribution (less than 10%), normalize the proc rate to your weapon speed, or normalize the damage to your weapon speed.
I would favor the latter option -- for example just make Instant Poison a 20% chance to proc damage equal to your weapon damage. Problem solved.
Actually, I think at this point the dominant force towards fast MH daggers is Focused Attacks. With the death of Deadly Brew, you're only running IP on one hand, so you could use DP on your (slow) MH and IP on your (fast) OH and not have any problems; except that Focused Attacks gives too much benefit for having the MH weapon fast as well.
Given this, and the general overpoweredness of Focused Attacks right now, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see it switch to only OH crits, which, if my numbers are correct, would allow slow MH weapons to surpass fast ones.
While Focused Attacks saying only OH crits would be balanced, wouldn't it then essentially be a clone of Combat Potentcy, something that they were trying to avoid?
It's not "3% crit on white damage". It's 3% crit on everything, included mutilate and envenom, so unless your mutilate somehow does more than 50% of your damage, you want dagger spec over TtT.
Originally Posted by Aldriana
Not to be a dick, but: you *did* read the rest of the post, right? Including the part where I said TtT was 27 DPS per talent point, while CQC was 50 DPS per talent point?
This is what I get for posting drunk at 2 AM. Makes sense, carry on!
"Aggro" (n): in the Ancient Lordaeranian, a battle cry roughly translating to "Victory and death!"
Another avenue to consider looking at is whether 1/2 Deadly brew would remain useful, even post nerf, insofar as Crippling Poison satisfies mutilates poison requirements during Envenom spam situations without 100% deadly uptime.
At that point you've got to weigh the potential gains of speccing into Deadly Brew merely to get crippling up to cover the poison debuff for the small amount of time where Deadly falls off (or after an Envenom, I suppose). And what would be lost? At this point, a significant DPS talent -- most likely Master Poisoner/TtT.
I just can't see the small gains of those potential poison uptimes outweighing either of those talents, especially given that Mutilate doesn't contribute as large a % of our damage thanks to poisons.
I think where using Deadly Brew to make sure poisons don't drop would make sense is if you're in charge of keeping up Master Poisoner - the raid DPS difference between 90% uptime and 100% uptime is not at all negligible - assuming every class gets about 50 DPS from 1% crit like we do, that means dropping the debuff 10% of the time is worth 15 DPS for every DPSer in the raid, which can easily be 400 DPS in a 25-man. So if you could use Deadly Brew to guarantee no buff downtime, it might be worth it. Though again, I don't think it'll work often enough to be worthwhile.
In other news, I did some Eviscerate estimates (and bear in mind that these are rough calculations and, as such, are extremely likely to contain minor errors), and it looks to me like Eviscerate just plain loses to Envenom damagewise in terms of Mutilate cycles at the Naxx-25 gear level. Briefly stated: Envenom with DP/IP and Eviscerate with IP/IP (yes, it's better) do almost identical amounts of poison damage - the loss of DP uptime is covered almost perfectly by the extras IP procs. And since the Envenoms just plain do more damage, it appears to me that Envenom spam trumps Eviscerate spam by about 150-200 DPS at the Naxx 25 gear level.
Note, however, that if the IP proc bonus is removed from Envenom, that advantage will evaporate, and the two will become quite comparable.
Wound Poison has a higher base damage (90 vs 115.5, about 25% edge) but scales way worse (.03 vs .02, IP has 50% more AP contribution). They might nerf the base damage to make it more in line with the scaling, about 150-175. Note also: IP gets a larger benefit from Envenom's poison-proc boost. 15% is a bigger increase to 30% than to 50%: 30->45 is a 50% increase, 50->65 is a 30% increase, so IP gets 5/3 the benefit from envenom that WP does.
Wound Poison has a higher base damage (90 vs 115.5, about 25% edge) but scales way worse (.03 vs .02, IP has 50% more AP contribution). They might nerf the base damage to make it more in line with the scaling, about 150-175. Note also: IP gets a larger benefit from Envenom's poison-proc boost. 15% is a bigger increase to 30% than to 50%: 30->45 is a 50% increase, 50->65 is a 30% increase, so IP gets 5/3 the benefit from envenom that WP does.
Your figures are off. Wound Poison currently gains 4% of AP and Instant Poison gains 10% of AP (giving Instant Poison an advantage by a factor of 5/2). However Instant Poison has a 20% proc chance and Wound Poison has a 50% proc chance (giving Wound Poison an advantage by a factor of 5/2). These cancel out, which means both Wound Poison and (untalented) Instant Poison deal the same amount of damage per unit time from attack power (and Wound Poison has the slight advantage with base damage per unit time).
Also, the most recent revision of Envenom only increases poison proc chance of Instant Poison and Deadly Poison only. It does not affect Wound Poison. This is probably sufficient reason not to use Wound Poison over Instant Poison, at least for Envenom-based cycles which appear at this point to be the best.
I ran the numbers on Combat Shiv builds (23/43/5, to be specific, which appears to be the strongest combat-centric build), and they seem to be running about 10% behind Mutilate. I think with the demise of Deadly Brew and Infection Poisons, there's not a lot to recommend the Assassination Shiv builds - all the poison talents of note are low in the tree now. The only talent worth going that deep for would be Focused Attacks, and somehow dropping Combat Potency, Endurance, Adrenaline Rush, Surprise Attacks, and Savage Combat for Focused Attacks, Seal Fate and some assorted filler seems unlikely to be worthwhile. Focused Attacks is good, but it's not going to match Combat Potency and Endurance all by itself.
I haven't kept up with all the rogue changes, but I have a few speculative PvE questions that I would like some people who are more up to date to answer.
Lightning Reflexes was going to get a buff. What do you think this buff will be? Right now, Deflection is superior to LR, being 2 fewer talent points for 1% more avoidance.
5 points for Relentless Strikes seems like overkill to me. Do you think Relentless Strikes will get cut to 2/3 points eventually?
At WWI this year, Blizzard said, "Dagger specialization will be improved for rogues in Wrath of the Lich King." I know that they merged Fist/Dagger Spec into CQC, which doesn't improve Combat Daggers at all, and doesn't address issues like how Sword Spec is superior, and how Combat Daggers has problems with CP generation. Judging from the current state of beta, will combat daggers still be way behind in Wotlk?
At WWI this year, Blizzard said, "Dagger specialization will be improved for rogues in Wrath of the Lich King." I know that they merged Fist/Dagger Spec into CQC, which doesn't improve Combat Daggers at all, and doesn't address issues like how Sword Spec is superior, and how Combat Daggers has problems with CP generation. Judging from the current state of beta, will combat daggers still be way behind in Wotlk?
I think they only said "dagger builds". Moving CQC down a tier does make easier access for the 2 other trees to get. Whether it's shadowstep backstab, or mutilate. Though right now Mutilate only reaches 3 of those points. But either way, seems daggers (mutilate specifically) been significantly boosted.
In other news, I did some Eviscerate estimates (and bear in mind that these are rough calculations and, as such, are extremely likely to contain minor errors), and it looks to me like Eviscerate just plain loses to Envenom damagewise in terms of Mutilate cycles at the Naxx-25 gear level. Briefly stated: Envenom with DP/IP and Eviscerate with IP/IP (yes, it's better) do almost identical amounts of poison damage - the loss of DP uptime is covered almost perfectly by the extras IP procs.
Are these calculations solely based upon finisher damage, or is for eviscerate+IP/IP the fact that mutilate will probably lose a part of it's damage also taken into consideration?
"...vincer potero dentro a me l'ardore
ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore"
My sense is that most bosses are immune to crippling poison which would render that less than wholly useful, but it's certainly worth testing.
Hrm not really, I found with envenom usage that poisons were applied so quickly that you didn't even really need to monitor it for the use of mutilate.
I found putting instant on offhand (1.4spd) and deadly on main hand and then just using a 5cp envenom (after you have done the S&D to get Cut to the chase working) was the best overall dps, but since I have no way of 'modeling' the damage rather than just testing it on the lvl 1 dummy's (Because they swapped out the boss level for level 80 in Stormwind). Mutilate is coming out far superior and the only reason I can think of is the crit rate on a lvl 1 (focused attacks) is completely skewing the numbers. It's not a small difference either, it's around 35% more damage than the various combat sword builds I've tried (I have t6 level gear and all 100+ dps weapons which are equal). With 5cp envenom and instant on the offhand you don't even need to take imp S&D because you take around 10-12seconds to get the max cp and then start over for the S&D so you can dump 3 or so points into Relentless
My only choice for live is wether to take Turn the tables or Master poisoner
So, just what is the rotation now? My experience has been that without imp SnD, the only way to keep SnD up through CttC was to Evis/Envenom every time I had 5cp. Along with refreshing HfB, this left no room for Rupture in the cycle.
And yet, Aldriana recommends points in Blood Spatter. Does this mean that one would alternate rupture and envenom, and alternate CttC and manual refreshes? Or does rupture only become viable with 80 set bonuses and glyphs? My thinking was that for the remainder of lvl 70 raiding, for those of us who continue, Blood Spatter is a waste and rupture is out. Perhaps I am trying to oversimplify my rotation.
So, just what is the rotation now? My experience has been that without imp SnD, the only way to keep SnD up through CttC was to Evis/Envenom every time I had 5cp. Along with refreshing HfB, this left no room for Rupture in the cycle.
And yet, Aldriana recommends points in Blood Spatter. Does this mean that one would alternate rupture and envenom, and alternate CttC and manual refreshes? Or does rupture only become viable with 80 set bonuses and glyphs? My thinking was that for the remainder of lvl 70 raiding, for those of us who continue, Blood Spatter is a waste and rupture is out. Perhaps I am trying to oversimplify my rotation.
Recall that SnD defaults at 21 seconds for 5 points without talents. It gets up to 24 with the glyph, which only requires 250 inscription to make, so it should be available to us with 3.0. During that time, we regen 210(240) energy, enough for 3-4 Mutilates, not even counting crits proccing Focused Attacks or finishers with Relentless Strikes.
Napkin math time: let's assume a 24 second SnD (since it's a great glyph to pick up early), 51/5/5 spec, a slow MH (1.8, to maximize stress on the cycle) and fast OH (1.5), and a rotation that is well under way, so you're just playing with renewing SnD and not initiating it.
You'd do 2 Mutilates to get 4-5 cp (120 energy, 12 seconds tops), then pop a finisher (Rupture, 25e, total cost 145e, 15sec; or Envenom 35e, total cost 155e, 16sec).
With a 4pt finisher, RS has only 80% chance to refund 25e; 5pt guarantees 25e
At this point, you have 8 seconds left on SnD.
If you haven't pooled any energy before the cycle started, which is admittedly unlikely, you'd need 155e to be able to do another full cycle ending in Envenom before SnD ran out. You're only guaranteed 80e from natural energy regen, so you need 75e from Focused Attacks or Relentless Strikes to have it be possible with a full 5pt 2nd finisher.
With a RS proc, that's 50e, which means at least 17 crits throughout the cycle (24 seconds). Without a RS proc (20% on 4pt) that's 25 crits.
Given you're hitting 4 mutilates (8 chances) in 2 cycles, and with the assumed weapon speeds hastened by SnD already 19 MH hit, 22 OH hits, you've got the potential for some slack depending on your crit%. At 30% crit, you're winding up with 13 crits from white hits, and roughly 2 single- or double-crits from Mutilate (after Puncturing Wounds). That might be possible with the RS proc, but without it you're stretched too thin.
Remember that CttC doesn't specify any number of CPs to get a full, 5pt SnD effect. All you have to do is hit with the Evis or Envenom and you get another refreshed SnD of 21(24) seconds.
It should be fairly rough to do a full two-5pt-finisher rotation, but if you're not using a 5pt 2nd finisher every time it gets more manageable... and depending on crit rate, it can get much more reasonable. It largely depends on your first cycle and if you get a RS proc, or so it looks like.
Now, if you manage to get lucky and proc an extra CP off Ruthlessness, that also eases some of the burden on energy, but not quite as much as you'd think. I don't care to get into that modeling right now, because I have to run, but essentially it could save you as much as a full Mutilate's energy and still net you 4cp, which would be huge. Also, and I just don't recall the final result: do poison procs give energy from FA too? If so, that might make the full 2-cycle model much more viable.
Long, long post short: you'll have to adjust your cycles on the fly based on RNG procs and energy regen. Mutilate is definitely more interesting than Combat in this way.
Doing 4-5 point Ruptures followed by 4-5 envenoms and also renewing hfb, I still find myself with a handful of time to let my energy fill a bit before I renew the slice and dice with an evenom. I'm using a 1.5 speed mh and 1.4 speed oh so I'm getting a few more crits in than say a 1.8 and 1.5, but even with 1-2 less crits per 10 or so seconds I don't see it being an issue. I also usually take 5/5 relentless strikes which helps a lot. I do not have the glyph so there's even more room in which to work with.
09/20/08, 1:40 PM
Makes sense, carry on!
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