I noticed the state of rogues and Blizzards current watching of the class was sneaking into a few other threads. At the risk of making an auto close thread, I thought it might be worth making this thread to make those threads stay clear.
Please keep posts in this thread free of ranting.

Currently in 5 mans I rarely feel competitive and sometimes lose to tanks and most good non raiders, mainly due to aoe but often due to everything dying before a full rupture(except a few bosses). Rogues also take more damage unavoidably than many classes. That said I don't think rogues are at the point where they can't get heroic groups as low end groups use sap and high end groups don't care.

In Naxx on trash I get crushed, unless I'm combat in which case I'm not last but nowhere near first. This is to the extent that on my good runs boss wise, I still always finish last on damage for the full run stats, often being beaten by people who heal occasionally during the run. I think this is largely by design and is being addressed at least in part with fan of knives changes.

10 man raiding, single target low movement; with missing buffs and debuffs and slightly less gear to scale with, than in 25 mans Rogues from my experience are competitive but need to be playing well to top meters, I do lose to ranged and hybrid dps specs at least once a run but rarely if ever by a lot. That said I was made redundant just before wotlk and may have more gear than my companions due to extra play time (already nearing optimal without 25 man raiding). My experience here is Rogues are in the zone where if you were going just for these fights you probably would bring a Rogue, but only just. Bear in mind that for 10 man raiding bringing a rogue means you skip a buff of some sort. This is where you would expect a rogue to shine so this worries me.

10 man other fights: the early Naxx fights aren't too bad with a few having Rogues skills as useful the boss fights. The signature fights all have problems though. That said Rogues are sub par on a few like Heigan and Noth.

Kel-Thuzad due to chaining the 4-5 melee group which seems common seems sub par. Rogues are not great in the first phase either but that's kind of easy and stuns do help so no big deal, do normally come high up damage meters.

Malygos ranged are better at dealing with the sparks and much better in phase 2. Due to shadowstep/killingspree its not all bad. Often end up v high here mainly due to others having responsibilities with sparks and scaling well with lots of spark stacks but in reality I'm still bad here.

Sartharion 10 man is a bit of a kicker for Rogues, the void zones and breaths make hitting the tiny hitbox drakes a liability (to make Rogues good you make want 3 tanks which definitely feels like stacking in 10 man). Rogues poor aoe means that during the hard parts with drakes and adds up rogues are bad. Our strategy at least involves me just running round hitting elementals/whelps during the drake up phases (note we haven't beaten 2 or 3 drakes yet). Although that maybe due to a fairly minimal raid schedule or 9-10 hours a week on average. This may improve slightly when its a bit safer to enter portals.

I only 25 man Wintergrasp boss and 13 man Sarth no drakes so no real experience here.

If this thread is regarded valid I'll add some wws reports as I get them. Be nice to get some feedback including meters from 25 man raiders who don't exploit. Please try to post fair ones rather than the day you crushed everyone or the day your connection was 1200 ping.

For reference Aldriana's post

I think saying that HaT is the only way we remain competitive is misleading at best. I think the simple fact of the matter is that there just aren't that many rogues in high-end guilds that *aren't* exploiting the HaT bug, so it's sort of hard to assess whether they're doing good DPS or not. I can say that in my own experience, myself and the other well-geared rogue in my guild are perpetually near the top in DPS on single targets (Patchwerk, and the like), with the only person beating us by any margin of significance on Patchwerk being a hunter. Simply put: rogue DPS *might* be bad, but until they get some top rogues using non-bugged specs, they really have no basis for comparison. Which, I suspect, is exactly why rogue changes in 3.0.8 are sparse - the bug is dominating rogue theorycraft, so all they can say for sure is "rogue AoE DPS is weak, who knows about single target" - so they're fixing the part they know. Once they've gotten the other classes squared away and the bug fixed, they'll take a look at our DPS and see how it stacks up.

If you want my personal recommendation for making sure the class gets tuned correctly in a timely fashion? Don't spec HaT. The more rogue there are using real DPS specs posting realistic DPS numbers for those specs, the faster they will be able to assess the balance of the class.

Songsters Post

I think that's a tiny bit simplistic - it's looking only at raiding DPS, only at boss fights, and only at high end 25-man gear levels. As you say, that's not where the majority of the problems lie.

Looking at the "raid DPS" part - it seems that rogue DPS scales more with raid buffs than other classes. That has always been the case, and necessarily so because of PvP balance. However, in small group PvE situations - 5 and 10-man - all the PvP tricks become useless, and yet our damage is still comparatively low. You and I may not care about Heroic 5-man DPS, but I guarantee you the majority of the playerbase will, and Blizzard should. One of the reasons we scale so much with raid buffs is that our peak output relies on having both the physical and spell buffs/debuffs present, because we use physical damage and spell damage. HaT spec shifts the damage output more towards physical damage rather than poison damage, which may mitigate this effect in part.

Looking at the "boss fights" part: again, our problem has never been stand-and-nuke fights. Right now we're doing comparable damage to ranged classes on Patchwerk - however mobility fights tend to penalise melee more than ranged. That drops us back down the table on fights that aren't stand-and-nuke. One of the attractions of HaT stacking abuse is the minimal wind-up time: as soon as one of the party crits, you're back to full output.

Looking at the "gear levels" part: one of the issues with Mutilate is the reliance on fast weapons due to poison proc scaling. That means that a lot of the supposed rogue gear available from quests, rep and instances is severely sub-optimal. I'm not sure how this is altered in HaT spec, but it's one reason why Mutilate underperforms until you get lucky with Webbed Death drops.

The needed fixes are quite a lot larger than just "fix HaT bug and maybe buff single-target by a couple of percent". To wit:

1) Make our damage output less dependent on having every single raid buff (necessary or we'll be marginalised in small groups). It's not clear how to do this without unbalancing PvP though, which is probably why they're being cautious.

2) Penalise Mutilate (and possibly Combat) less on mobility / target-switching fights. Make AoE less painful (waiting to see on FoK changes).

3) Change our dependence on fast weapons. It's ludicrous that [Librarian's Paper Cutter ] is pretty much equivalent to [Omen of Ruin] and almost as good as [Twilight Mist] (figures from latest spreadsheet, may not be exact, but they're very close). Normalising poison proc rate based on weapon speed would be one option, but would require a lot of other balancing changes, which again is one reason for them to be cautious.

My guild refuses (as an unofficial policy) to use known bugs. As such we didn't have me go Master Poisoner when it was bugged, and we also refuse to use HaT, which is kinda too bad cause even without the bug, I found subtlety to be kind of a blast to play.

Here's last night's 25 man Naxx 2nd half (Wow Web Stats) Please ignore the whole "Thaddius made us his bitch" apsects. As you can see I'm 2nd to a BM hunter on Patches.

I'm pretty coookie cutter Mut spec with some luck in that none of the other rogues like daggers, so I got best in slot in our first clear for weapons, as well as some luck with drops and heroics. However I'm a good distance from best gear possible and dream of someday getting tier gear. That being said, I spec'd Mutilate at 77-78 ish and it was awful. I think this spec is far more gear dependent than Combat is in Wrath. Once my crit started to break 35-40% raid buffed, my energy regen picked up and I actually sometimes do a Mutilate on 4 cps to keep from energy capping.

To be completely honest, my dps has alot more to do with using rogue powerbars addon then it does with my inherent skill. Being able to easily monitor SnD and HfB uptimes as well as the current level of my DP stacks has been a tremendous boon to my ability to dps. And, continuing to be honest, so has my 5 button mouse in that I rarely have to break eye contact with my monitor. Q, E, and Buttons is basically my entire dps cycle.

Oh, and my dps on trash is pretty terrible. Part of it is that Mutilate is a 60 energy base cycle, part of it is that I don't really care about trash dps outside of Sunwell. I follow my raid markings and kill the mobs and when it says "leaving combat" I loot.

Edit: Ok, maybe I should actually answer the OP's question.

Dps in heroics = 2nd or third depending on the instance. Not great but not terrible. Heroics = use your utility more than dps

Dps in 10mans = respectable, but you are so buff dependant that group composition will have a much greater effect on your dps than anything else (I rarely get a feral druid in 10mans, it makes me sad).

Dps in 25mans = Good bordering on excellent. I think rogues will continue to scale exceptionally well with gear. Also if we all stop using exploits to top meters it will hasten Blizz getting a real idea of our strengths and weaknesses and buff or nerf accordingly.

With the best Mutilate gear in the game you are looking at ~5200 DPS. I don't know about combat but I'd be guessing it's in the ballpark of that as well.

With the HAT bug and 1 other rogue in your group you are looking at 6K+ easily. Of course this will be fixed very soon as stated by a blue.

The blue post responding to the HaT bug makes no mention of it being fixed soon. He only states that it is a known bug and that it makes our damage look better than it is.

I don't recall seeing a post about it being fixed though.

I think it's pretty clear rogues are in trouble, at least at the 10 man raiding level. I haven't been able to run in a 25 man group, and with all the buffs up and running things may well be very different. But in a 10 man, if you are working on progression, a rogue is really the last choice of a class to take. Note that most posters here probably cleared Nax at 60 and are finding it a walk in the park. My guild is treating it as progression; the Heigan dance took us more than an hour to get down so we could kill him, as an example.

I really see no good reason to take a rogue for serious 10 man content (other than they are a guildie/are better geared that your other dps/are a better player/etc.). Rogues bring no buffs (Edit: expose armor I guess, if you have no warrior, our MT is a warrior so I forget about it...much easier for any warrior to keep up sunder than for a rogue to keep up expose armor, and even for a dps warrior it's easier in comparison to keep up) , and for a 10 man that means missing out on something for the raid. Rogues bring no utility, and have nothing to offer if things start to go wrong...oh, we can vanish and maybe avoid a repair bill if we manage to stay in stealth.

Rogues aren't useless and we do decent DPS. But we are fragile and have to fight in harm's way, and on many fights have less time on target than ranged classes. Is there any 9 man group who, when looking for a 10th member, says let's recruit a rogue? Just seems if you are looking for melee dps any other class brings more to the table.

Edit: I don't want it to sound like you can't do Nax with rogues or anything. Just that if you are min/maxing a 10 man raid and have other options for good players of non-rogue dps...I just don't see when taking the rogue is the better option. Aside from not wanting to shard loot...

For 5 mans, though, I think rogues are actually fine, at least as combat. Even on heroic most instances are pretty easy. And as long as I'm making good use of all my cooldowns (blade flurry, AR, killing spree, fan of knives for large groups), I pull pretty good dps and can top the meters (depending on the instance and party makeup). If I pull aggro from a mob in a group I can hit evasion or vanish...if the tank is really bad just hitting tricks of the trade before blade flurry + killing spree works too. But to be competitive with other good dps I have to really work at it, unlike in BC. I can see where mutilate rogues would have far more trouble though.

I don't know about HaT, I pride myself on being a good player and fairly well versed in mut and combat, I'm a little upset that I don't smash the meters like I thought I would compared to the other pure dps classes. I don't necessarily feel like exploiting the HaT bug to boost my dps is the the best decision either, simply because it feels like I'm not beating everyone out on my own so much as I'm riding the crit coat tails of another class.

To answer your question though, I do fairly well usually placing anywhere between 1st and 5th depending on the fight. Its still a little sobering when I'm watching my rotations go off perfectly, seeing 3 to 5k ss crits and then I check recount and there's still like 4 guys above me. Here's hoping we get something going soon.

You people do realize that there is a slightly broader picture of other classes that are doing too much damage currently are getting scaled back right? Also, look at the start of TBC when gearing had much less of an impact on DMs, but over the lifetime of the expansion rogue scaling showed that as time goes on they start coming out ahead again.

And this is exactly what Blizzard wanted, as stated multiple times. We are all roughly equivalent, and what you listed is what will get you in a group. We don't NEED utility to be brought along. If your guild has too many people for their raids, your skill should get you the spot. And aside from top guilds, I doubt you or anyone has the ideal guild setup where everyone is of equal skill.

This whole whine about rogues and their DPS is exactly what happened when Blizzard announced DPS would be aligned in WotLK. No more, no less. It's time we got used to it, don't you all think?

We may need tweaked, but it certainly isn't the horror that some make it out to be. We're also not necessarily supposed to top the meters. It depends on the fights, and at the end of the day, regardless of the fight, there's nothing wrong with not being first, as long as you are fairly close to everyone else. Again, that was stated by Blizzard.

I also don't like the trend I'm seeing with HAT. Some are starting to use it as a justification for buffing the other 2 trees. Example: "if the other 2 trees were viable, I wouldn't have to spec HAT and exploit the rogue-stacking bug". Let's be honest for a minute, shall we? Even if Assassination and Combat were a little above the rest (like Hunters now), many would still spec HAT simply because of the bug and the insane DPS generated. It's human nature.

Nobody is helping the rogue class by doing that. You'd think you'd want the other specs to be balanced so that when they fix the HAT bug (and yes they will fix it, whether they stated it or not), you actually have a viable spec to fall back on.

So can we please stop the over-dramatization and focus and what needs done instead? I maintain that we're not in that bad a state. My gear is certainly not best-in-slot, and I am certainly not last on the meters (running with equivalently-geared players).

I am fairly happy with mutilate right now. Maybe some minor tweaks, but nothing major.


The main issue I see at the moment is optimal mutilate play seems to be less intuitive than optimal play for other classes (to the best of my knowledge at least). This results in the majority of rogues having sub-par performance in a raid environment. The dps difference between optimal and average play is also quite large.

Gearing isn't exactly intuitive either, especially since blizzard has itemized poorly with regards to weapons.

I find myself doing fine on meters compared with other DPS classes. The only person in my guild that seems to continually smoke me on boss fights is our frostfire mage, and he spends almost as long trying to min/max his character as I do.

I decided to give HAT spec a try last night due to claims by two of the best rogues on my server that even as the only rogues in the raid a HAT rogue in a good group composition does significantly more damage than they could pull off as mutilate. I'm not so sure if I buy into their claims wholesale yet though. I found myself getting passed by a lot more people on meters than on other raid nights and I felt I was using hemo way too much despite having an enhancement shaman, BM hunter and two fury warriors in my party. I'll test the spec out a bit more but I get the impression that HAT is over-rated.

As mentioned before some classes will be getting their DPS scaled down a little bit. I don't find myself in such a bad state dealing damage that I feel it's worth complaining about honestly. I enjoy the competition if anything.

I must admit, I'm quite despondant about the state of our DPS so far.

Granted, it has only been a month or so since LK launch, but our liabilities were always outweighed by our ability to top the meters.

We bring almost nothing else to the table.

Sure, AP is nice on Gluth, but it's a gimmick. Make AP work with *every* enrage, and maybe people would bring us more.

I was in a US top 200 guild in Sunwell; the only people I ever had to worry about were Warlocks and Hunters, and usually the rogues came out on top.

Now... well, now, I just feel like hanging up the rogue and playing my hunter.

I refuse to spec into HaT because I really wanted to see what I was able to pump out "legitimately." Now it seems I pretty much have little choice in the matter.

Is that what Blizz wants? I can't believe that.

Unless they give us some serious utility to make up for the buff to everyone else's DPS, I see my days as a rogue numbered.

In my case, since moving back to a more "casual" server due to RL > WoW, where I'm the GM of a guild near the top of progression on our realm, ultimately I take the player and not the class since I know I can count on <Player X> over <Class Y>... but if you're in one of those top guilds pushing for server first 3 drakes, I don't see where the advantages to bringing rogues are anymore.

The state of rogues? Sad.