That makes sense, and would seem logical that a fix they might take would be simply remove the ability of shiv to proc instant poison, since that is what is causing the trouble.



Also, completely unrelated, at your note, "failed at quitting", I too failed at quitting... lasted almost a year before some friends dragged me back into the game.

The main problem with it as a primary ability that I see is that the majority of the dmg comes from the increased poison application, not the weapon itself, so there would be issues with itemization and scaling that would make it less important to upgrade weapons as you go on, and provide fewer options to upgrade with.

Right, I'll concede that point, but it's also not quite as big of an affect on Poison damage as normal/special melee attacks.

You could argue through this, that in higher gear levels (lvl80 instead of SW gear?) the more "normal" builds will actually catch up and even surpass since they WILL actually have weapons worth the upgrade.

First, putting my moderator hat on for a moment: while it's perfectly fine to discuss what specs are going to be good for leveling, I think we're starting to get a little repetitive on that note. Your experiences leveling from 60 to 70 are not really germane to this discussion, given the volume of changes that has happened sense. Pointing out that it depends on your personal preference is also not the most productive thing in the world - everything does. And we really don't need another testimonial that most things die before coming out of stun as Mutilate.

If you have something new to report on the subject that's fine and by all means tell us about it. But please take a minute before posting to verify that you are adding something new. Thanks.

On the topic of spec balance for raid DPS:
I think there's a couple important points being missed in the discussion. First a spec difference of 1% may be lost in the RNG, but that doesn't make it any less important; whether you can look at any one fight and tell the difference or not, the fact is that better is better, and over the long haul - all attempts on all bosses over several weeks - you will do more damage, whether it's noticeable or not. Hence, if you are interested in optimality: 1% better is still better.

That's not to say that you can't play the inferior spec if you like it better, of course; and your GM may or may not be fine with that. If you're in the average casual raid guild, people may not worry about 1% differences. But if you're in a more high-end progression raid guild, particularly if there are major DPS check fights around, people are going to notice and care. Speaking as a person who recruits rogues for a raiding guild: if I see an app from someone with a spec that's known to be 1% inferior, my first question to them in the interview is going to be "why are you using an inferior spec". And it's the sort of question you want to have a pretty good answer to.

Now, all that said: do I expect Blizzard to balance all specs to within 1% at all gear levels? No, I don't. I will frankly be shocked if they do. In any class with multiple specs, one is going to be better than the others - simple facts of life. However, the hope is that Blizzard will be good enough that if you don't have ideal gear - particularly for weapons - switching specs can be a viable way to continue advancement. Even if Mutilate is the top spec, it would be nice if you could switch to swords if your guild has bad luck with dagger drops. At 70, a dagger needed to be about 3 tiers better than your best sword to be worth using - if they can drop that to 1 tier, that will be enough to get people to vary their spec some, based purely on what they have access to.

Also, it's possible for specs to be circumstantially better than each other. Let us posit, for a moment, that Mutilate is 5% ahead of Combat on single-target DPS. Under normal circumstances, this would mean that all rogues, more or less, will want to spec Mutilate. But what about a fight like M'uru, where Blade Flurry is incredibly powerful for downing adds, and Adrenaline Rush provides some nice punch for downing Entropius? Even at a 5% single-target disadvantage, combat would still be better for M'uru. Now, you're not going to let people spec something 5% inferior just for it's advantages on one fight... but if there were enough fights that favored the inferior spec, it could be worth considering.

This is, of course, in addition to the usual point on debuffs. I'm hoping that they're not going to totally rely on either debuff to make a spec worth taking for raids, particularly with the redundancy of buffs; but it is true that if combat is only 1% behind Mutilate, you will bring a Combat rogue for the raid debuff. You might even have two, in case one misses a weak, and you'll probably let them both come as combat if they both show up rather than making one or both maintain good Mutilate gear as well. This is, of course, assuming that an Arms warrior doesn't prove to be the superior source of the debuff, which I can't really comment on at this stage.

Also, none of this invalidates the original point I was trying to make - even if Mutilate vs Combat balance is only as good as sword vs dagger balance is at 70, the rest of the argument I made in post 2384 still flies. The points others have made about the value of Fleet Footed and some of the other talents is valid, of course, so the advantage might not be quite as obvious as I spelled out there; but I'm still of the opinion that combat will be a good spec for leveling even if it's mediocre for raiding.

On Shiv:
I do think that Blizzard probably did not intend to allow Shiv to become a primary attack, and history shows us that Blizzard tends to nerf things that they did not intend. On the other hand, there's no real harm to allowing Shiv-centric builds, so long as they're balanced against everything else, so perhaps Blizzard will allow them to continue. If they *do* decide to nerf it, my money is on them nerfing the Shiv glyph, and/or removing it from certain talents (i.e., Surprise Attacks). It's only if both of those fail that they'll look at more extreme measures (like having it do 50% weapon damage, or whatever).

Also keep in mind that even if they don't intend Shiv to be a primary attack, they do want it to be worth using. I suspect they'd like to have it be worthwhile to Shiv to save a DP stack, for instance. So they don't want to nerf it *too* much even if they are going to nerf it.

apart from nerfing Shiv, can we simply buff SS for combat, like increase its ap modifier or base dmg? Some testing done so far seems Combat Shiv dmg is almost same as Multilate now, if we want equal dmg Combat and Assa, buff up SS seems a logical choice?

I understand the argument that Shiv was never meant to be used as a main combo point building attack but like Sinister Strike it is a base ability, generates a combo point and does damage; it pays for it's utility through energy cost like sinister strike pays for it's extra damage.

Some of us look at the decreased energy cost available to Sinister Strike at the bottom (top) of the Combat tree and say, "Combat builds should use Sinister Stike" which lately strikes me as odd now that we don't say the same about Eviscerate and Assassination builds. Just because a talent is in a tree doesn't mean the tree should try to be made to use it, right?

I'm sure Blizz initially didn't intend Shiv to be used as a main attack but why would it be wrong to use it as one now? Combat needed help, they gave us a Shiv Glyph and a few changes to the combat tree, and now it's theoretically competitive with Mutilate builds.

There's the argument too that Shiv needs faster offhands than are being offered, there's going to be an itemization gap, etc. but isn't this the beta? And isn't it easier to add in or change a dagger/sword or two than to rewrite Sinister Strike, Shiv and give combat talents special clauses for certain poisons?

It just seems to me that the trees (Assassination and Combat) are a lot closer to being balanced now. Does it really matter that the way they balance doesn't fit traditional models? And it isn't like the Shiv build came out of left field; the idea has been kicked around for a long time before now.

As long as it doesn't run away with DPS and start blowing the doors off everything else, I don't think Blizz has any reason to nerf it.

Sinister Strike definitely needs a buff of some sort. I suggested adding a talent mid-tree to alleviate some of the current non-DPS bloat, taking from Blizzard's old Shadow Strikes, but of course it's probably too late in the testing cycle to implement anything new.

Shadow Strikes
3-pt talent
Gives a 15/30/45% chance to do Shadow Damage equal to Sinister Strike, when Sinister Striking.

Wishful thinking, of course. They'll probably just nerf Shiv in some manner once they get wind of this.

I like the idea of bringing back Shadow Strikes in some form, but I don't know if they'd give it to us given that DKs now have Scourge Strike. Also, if they did bring it back it would be something more like "Your Sinister Strikes deal an additional 10/20/30% damage as Shadow." They wouldn't want it to double-proc the full damage because that would make it pretty overpowered in PvP I'd imagine.

Also, I'm pretty sure at this point they still plan on revamping/changing abilities, especially if it's using functionality that's already there in some capacity. However we're less likely to get some entirely new crazy mechanic given the schedule.

Well, adding new daggers, swords or whatever wouldn't fix the problem unless they made all the offhand daggers/swords 1.3 speed. Blizz has a history of wanting weapon dps, not speed be the main determining factor in choosing an upgrade, hence why they normalized many abilities such as ss, mortal strike, back stab, ambush, etc. Otherwise you might have the situation where a blue item is better than an epic of equal iLvl, simply because it is faster, or slower, or whatever. They would have to normalize weapon speeds for poisons to affect shiv similarly.

Why is so much of the discussion more in the vein of nerfing shiv than buffing SS, and lending more damage to mutilate? The problem is not like the original LK mutilate, where rogues were very clearly doing "too much" damage. The problem is, people don't think that shiv should be or was intended to be a primary attack. Seems to me that it's just a case of many of us being jaded, and believing that Blizz is more likely to address such a problem with a nerf than a buff. Wouldn't a slight buff to combat SS and mutilate builds with glyphs, or what have you, address the perceived issue just as well? Isn't a rogue's primary function damage (even with our increasing capacity for utility)? And isn't asking Blizz to have us do less damage in the optimal situation (if the numbers are correct, and shiv is currently #1) a little counter productive?

I don't think anyone is arguing that we shouldn't use it if it stays in it's current form; I think the argument is simply that, as Blizzard did not intend it, there's a reasonable chance it will get changed. Why? Simple. Because Blizzard's models for balance and whatever do not include things they didn't expect, so even if they're currently balanced, Blizzard will need to devote resources to updating their model to make sure they *stay* balanced - and, historically, they seem to prefer to just remove the problematic mechanic. If they *don't*, we'll certainly continue to theorycraft and potentially use Shiv builds; if they do, then we'll figure out what to use instead.

The thing is, they've shown a greater tolerance and willingness to deal with the importance of speed on weapons in BC than they did back in MC days when normalization was added. Consider Combat Potency: it has caused a dependence on weapon speed far larger than normalization ever did, and would be easy for them to fix (simply make it 2*weapon speed energy per rank instead of a flat 3), and yet they haven't done anything about it. When the expansion first released they may not have realized the magnitude of the issue - hence the shortage of viable OH swords pre-BT - but once it became clear what the dynamic was, they started releasing faster OH weapons (Savagery, OH Glaive, etc.). That is, the itemized to the speed imbalance rather than fixing it, which is the exact opposite of what they did with normalization. Had they simply sped up Barman's Shanker, Arcanite Reaper, and maybe one or two other items, there would have been no need for normalization; instead, they implemented a new mechanic to fix it. So I think Blizzard has become more tolerant and aware of the importance of weapon speed, so that by itself is not reason for them to fix (or not fix) Shiv builds.

Actually, the larger concern for me in terms of weapon speed is the apparent disconnect between class balance and the people doing the itemization. For instance, the current balance situation is that fast daggers are better for Mutilate, which I think is fundamentally okay - I don't see that it matters in the grand scheme of things whether we use fast daggers or slow ones. The part that's concerning to me is that the majority of epic daggers seem to be 1.8 speed. Fast dagger mutilate only works if they give us fast daggers to mutilate with, which, to date, they haven't. Hopefully they'll fix this either by making more 1.5 and under daggers, or by making slow daggers comparatively stronger - I'm not really picky as to which, but there's a definite need to do one or the other.

this new expansion seems favor rogue poison dmg a lot, that makes Shiv a better choice for cp and dmg output as a regular skill, 100% chance on an extra instant poison dmg is more than +base dmg on SS, so we can replace SS by Shiv for main hand top skill seems justified. and change SS to a bigger +ap talent but with a CD for pvp burst dmg?

The main reasons I see why a Shiv build was never Blizzard intentions, and also shouldn't be:

• Common sense: even in such a game there's some sort of logical background. Why should an attack with your weaker, less controlled hand be better than an attack with your strong, literally 'main' hand? It just makes no sense.
• Shiv was designed with the TBC poisons in mind, and not with the new AP scaling poisons. And since Shiv draws all of its power from these poisons, this is clearly a design flaw, or 'unintended'.
• In order to use Shiv's full potential, you cannot take the new tier combat talents. You basically stop with TBC talents and increase your poison damage instead.

And just to clear things up, I don't have anything against Shiv build per se. Just against it being the only viable for - not even deep - combat.


On another note, as proposed before I selected [Muramasa] and [Blade of Savagery] for the Shiv build. It loses almost exactly 100 DPS with these weapons. Also, a faster main hand (again a Blade of Savagery) does not make up the loss of sword spec (-28 DPS), neither does selecting instant poison main hand instead of deadly.


However I think a further discussion of the sense or nonsense of a Shiv based build is a moot point. All arguments have been laid out, multiple times, and I have to agree, we should focus more on how combat itself and/or Sinister Strike could be improved instead of another build being nerfed.

Of course the actual numbers would have to be tweaked, either the proc rate or the damage.

Yeah, probably wouldn't happen even if some Blizz dev did find this suggestion. But the fact that SS needs a buff, plus the non-DPS bloat mid-tree, plus Shadow Strikes being ridiculously cool, made it impossible for me to resist suggesting it...

That makes sense Aldriana. I didn't notice it as much in TBC since I didn't play a rogue for it.

I guess if anything, that faster daggers are better now for mutilate bothers me more, since that means I'll need fast daggers for pve and slow for pvp, but that's a minor gripe.

This, as written, just plain wouldn't work, if for no other reason because rogues need a spamable ability usable from the front to use for the 69 levels before they get access to Shiv. And making Shiv available at level 1 like SS is would have definite implications for PvP, not to mention the fact that it would be strictly worse than what we have for the 20-odd levels before rogues get poison. SS is, at this point, a signature rogue ability, and I don't think they're going to change that.

1) I already theorycrafted Shiv builds at Naxx 25 loot levels about 5 pages ago. I found it to be about 10% behind Mutilate. I may have made a mistake, of course, but that's what I found.

2) Right. So there's 10 daggers, of which 1 is the clear favorite for both hands for Mutilate builds. And less than half are even plausible options for Mutilate. I mean, it could be worse, certainly, but if Mutilate is going to be a primary DPS spec, having 2/3 of the daggers in existence be PvP toys and Hunter stat sticks seems a bit off.

I'm with the camp that advocates buffing Sinister Strike. Screwing with Shiv seems more difficult in terms of what things they have to consider. It's a utility attack that applies poison and also gives us a way to salvage some use when disarmed. We pay a fair energy cost for it that scales with our weapon speed. All in all it's a skill I'd like to see go unchanged.

When thinking about how to buff Sinister Strike, would it be outlandish to alter Sinister Strike so that it bypasses armor? Yes, that would reduce the value of armor pen for a combat build but that change itself would result in roughly a 5% bump up in power. It seems easier to say that a combat talented rogue had a defining special attack that struck a vulnerable point for maximum effect rather than simply make us more magical in nature and give us shadow damage.




Mobility is only an issue when it's just the melee that have to move. Any fight that requires the entire raid group to move makes rogues absolutely critical since we lose nothing while sticking on our target. In this scenario, the reverse is true. I haven't been in beta or PTR but I'm told there's a 5-man instance fight where your entire party has to run back and forth because the boss is essentially forces you to do this. GG ranged. That doesn't exactly make for good encounter design and I'm not sure Blizzard would want to make that the norm enough to justify favoring mobility talents.

The only reason I'm not exactly for this is that it just forces on-the-spot respecs like we're doing in SWP. It's not like the typical raid group will have their go-to-guy combat, mutilate and shs rogue on the bench and switch that person in for the specific fight. It's more likely that the best 2 rogues will have to respec if the need is that dramatic. I'll say Shadowstep would be an interesting way to help those who somehow never seem to make the jump to Thaddius, though... talk about a loss of time on target.

One of the banes of rogue dps is high mobility fights. Now suppose, that for subtlety builds, the dps gap between it and the best single target dps build is fairly small for a stand still and dps fight. In game testing shows that a character runs at approximately 6.15 yards per second. With a run speed enhancement of 15%, this is 7.07 yards per second. Shadowstep provides instant coverage of 25 yards every 30 seconds.

So, for a straight line time advantage, shadowstep provides a 25/7.07 = 3.53 second advantage. However, running back to the boss rarely goes in a straight line, with frontal AOEs and cleaves, and the rogue must also be positioned behind the boss. So, given human error, latency, let's posit that this advantage is 4 seconds.

Given a 6 minute fight, and say that you can use ShS every minute, and sprint twice during the fight, with sprint reducing the speed advantage by 2 seconds twice during the fight, a subtlety rogue stands to gain approximately 4*4 + 2*2 = 20 seconds more time on target for the fight, assuming the rogue needs to cover 25+ yards. Whether or not that tips the scale in favor of ShS rogues for high mobility fights depends on how close the builds are in terms of dps.

So, mobility could be an interesting angle for Blizzard to pursue in terms of promoting different rogue specs. BC ShS specs were so far behind combat that the time on target advantage was never really an issue. Perhaps that may change with WOTLK.

So in our hypothetical 6 minute fight, we gain a maximum of 20 seconds of DPS uptime; 20 seconds out of 360 would require Shadowstep to be no more than 20/360 = ~5% behind combat, and right now the gap is over 10%. The new deep-Sub talents will make up some of this ground, of course, but it's worth noting that as things currently stand, Shadowstep just isn't enough to make deep sub fly.

The other thing I'd note is that while fights with high mobility do favor Sub rogues relative to combat rogues, they also favor "ranged DPS" over either, so in the interest of class balance they can't make too many high-movement fights without screwing over all the melee. So I'd expect such fights to be relatively rare, which is backed up by my recollections of 40-man Naxx. Some of the fights may have changed in the 10 and 25 man version to invalidate these assessments (and if they have, please let me know), but my recollection of the original version is that the only fights with enough movement to allow Shadowstep to get that full advantage were 4 Horsemen and Loatheb. There's a few fights where you'd get partial benefit (getting webbed on Maexxna, cutting out a few short runs on Gothik, etc.) but on the whole, there's only 2 fights where you get anywhere close to that 5% advantage from Shadowstep.

Anub would see the benefit as well, as I distinctly remember sprinting in that fight to get more time on the boss.

Faerlina uptime would be helped during the transition from killing the first adds to getting on her, and getting back on her when you run off to avoid fire, etc.

Gluth running back after a fear (though did they remove the fear in Wrath?)

Noth after a blink or to get to different packs of adds faster.

I notice that you (and most people talking about shiv builds) used 23/43/5 or similar, which I assume includes 5/5 improved poisons in assassination. I don't understand the need for 5/5 imp poisons when we're talking about a shiv build. Is the additional uptime on the MH deadly really worth losing, say, 3/5 Prey on the Weak?