Isn't it then ironic that mutilate does not, in fact, do superior damage with the tradeoffs you mentioned ?

That's kind of the point of this whole discussion as far as I know. You say Patchwerk doesn't matter; as a boss you're right. However, when classes who dominate trash situations (mages, locks, hunters, warriors etc) dominate on single-target fights like Patch there is reason to be concerned, if nothing else.

I'm consistently pulling Top5 in all current 10/25 content as Mut.

The only ones consistently beating me are hunters and mages, with a occasional Warrior thrown in there.

For the most part, even when I fall behind the meters its literally by 600 DPS at most.

The difference between 1st and 15th has a margin of less than 5-600 DPS.

That isn't horribly out of whack. I for one am not displeased seeing hybrids do as well as pure DPS classes.

Any complaints about performance on AoE pulls are pretty much irrelevant come 3.0.8. Cooldown-less Fan of Knives is extremely powerful, especially when combined with Overkill and Focused Attacks.

I'm also happy with Mutilate now as a whole. I really wish the penalty for time off target wasn't so high though; as a melee class that is a big problem. For the time I was combat I was fairly happy there too. As for the rest, that's hitting the nail on the head right there.

• Optimal Mutilate play isn't intuitive. It's certainly less so than the majority of classes.
• Greater DPS difference between optimal and average play (especially concerning Mutilate). Whether this is good or bad is debatable; however the gap is wider for Rogues than many classes. A "well-played" Rogue can certainly put up good numbers but the threshold for "well-played" may be too high for the average player.
• Blizz spent two years making Rogues gear and spec one way and then WotLK rewrote it overnight. Outside of Paladins, I don't think anyone's playstyle and gearing as a whole changed as much as ours did. You only have to look at the boards to see how many Rogue "stacking +hit" questions vs Warrior ability rotation questions there are.

I actually had a thought yesterday as I was fooling around with my Death Knight. The idea of the Death Knight and the heroic class was that optimal play would be just a bit harder and the learning curve would be a bit steeper but I found myself playing a static rotation like I was on my Rogue in Sunwell and my Rogue has become the class that requires more thought and was the more dynamic play.

As for our DPS, I do fine in 5-man Heroics but I did better as Combat. In Naxx10, I find myself missing key buffs and falling behind on many fights; this is strictly raid comp though, shifting the buffs towards melee would swing it the other way I'm sure. In Naxx25/etc, when I could get all the right buffs I was in the top 5 consistently but almost always behind Hunters and Frostfire Mages for various reasons which I've not determined yet if they are cause for concern.

I'm hopeful for this but have yet to see it in action.

I can't speak for 25 man raids since my guild has decided to kick back in Wrath and only run 10s, but as a combat rogue I'm having no issues shelling out at least equal DPS in 10 mans or Heroics. *shrug* I suppose you could argue that the people I play with must be idiots, but we've cleared two and a half wings of naxx with seven or eight people and two-shot sartharion our first time in with seven. (And our first attempt was mainly composed of "IT'S A WALL OF LAVA? HOLY $%& that's awesome!"... we don't really like reading strats, it ruins the fun.)

At any rate, I feel like like a lot of the complaining about issues in 10 mans is based on three misconceptions:

1) The misconception that we're supposed to deal an overwhelming amount more damage than other classes. If your goal in life is to play the broken class of the week, be my guest, but I don't see any need for us to be anything more than competitive. Things like "There's no reason to bring a rogue to Naxx unless he/she is a better player of better geared than your other DPS" should elicit a /facepalm, that's the way it's supposed to be. I'd be concerned if the statement was "Despite rogue x being more talented or better geared, we still won't brim him/her"

2) The misconception that we're less survivable than other classes. There are a couple of fights in wrath for which it really sucks to be melee (mostly heroics), but we got a huge HP boost in wrath compared to many of the other DPS classes and we have more tricks for getting out of tight spots than anyone else. Having spent significant raid time as both a rogue and a healer, I can confidently assert that rogue survivability has only increased since BC, at least if you're smart and quick with your cooldowns.

3) The misconception that we bring a lot less than other DPS classes to raid. Partly I think people massively undervalue Tricks of the Trade (it lets people go nuts from the getgo, it directing wayward adds to the appropriate tank, and if you're smart about coordinating it, it can give aoers a huge boost while they're blowing cooldowns), but I think people also heavily overestimate how much other classes bring. Yes, the first person that brings a curse of elements-like effect increases the raid's damage by a ton, but every one after that doesn't. In a lot of ways the fact that so many raid buffs no longer stack was an effective buff to us because it gives the raid so much flexibility to bring the most talented players for DPS slots 4-15 rather than trying to get 4 pallies and 5 shaman and 3 warlocks, etc.

I don't mean to be an ass, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment above that playskill matters more than ever for rogues, and I'm loving it.

I hesitate to chime in here at all, this thread is on a slippery slope. There are two fundamental questions:

(1) In this, bring the player not the buff/utility realm, rogues are pretty much "left out" of the party. There is master poisoner and savage combat, but (and please correct me if I'm wrong), these are replaced by Heart of the Crusader and/or Blood Frenzy. The majority of you are spec-ing mutilate it seems in raids that almost surely have a retribution paladin. If said retribution paladin is not destroying you on the meters over a course of a Naxx raid, well, he/she is just not good. Further, while Naxx, Malygos and Sartharion don't require much min-maxing (outside of 3-drake Sarth I'm guessing), the other classes do things rogues just can't.

Death Knights provide an incrediblly obvious -- you see it on the buff bar -- raid add in Horn of Winter. They also can do things like Death Grip the sparks on Malygos and kite on Gluth. You can do neither as a rogue. Paladin buffs are obvious. Warriors can slap on tank gear and handle adds here and there if needed. Druids can currently match (exceed?) rogue dps a lot of the time as feral, and turn into tanks, buff the raid, provide a very obvious in-combat benefit from leader of the pack, combat rez, etc. This list is somewhat old and obvious, but the rogue can provide nothing more than one or the other replaceable debuff and Tricks of the Trade, which is almost never important to the rest of the raid after the pull, but instead is used to slightly buff rogue/rogue damage.

(2) Rogue dps often plummets when there is movement. Sometimes embarrassingly so. Other melee has issues with this as well, but things like rage and runic power don't tend to cap out (and get wasted) and shamans, warrirors and death knights don't seem to have anything to the consequences of losing a cycle due to movement, having to waste energy/combo points just to refresh slice and dice, etc. Honestly, Thaddius and Heigan don't strike me as particularly troublesome vs. other melee. The point vs. ranged is obvious.

These above truths have been made more true in Wrath, but they are not particularly new. In Burning Crusade, until very very late in the expansion, it was all mitigated by the following: Well played rogues won the damage meters on most boss fights. It's quite possible to argue from a theorycrafting standpoint, even that didn't justify bringing many rogues. They required a tremendous amount of group stacking, had you had druids you could've rezzed an extra person on fights like Teron and Anetheron, and that dps gain might've been enough to justify replacing the rogue with a druid. But no matter. People drank the Kool Aid and raids had 2-3 rogues in them for their meter topping.

At this point, it's fairly reasonable to argue that any rogue "fixes" need to start with the obvious and consider the less obvious:

* On stationary tank and spank, a well-played rogue has to be meter topping. He/she is never ever going to be otherwise. If not then/when?
* In terms of raid buffs, the rogue class needs to be able to access master poisoner and savage combat and said buffs need to be considered as "required" as anything else. Rogues probably should have the equivalent of Horn of Winter or Leader of the Pack as well. These would often be duplicative. But in smaller groups, rogues would be much more useful/desirable.
* Combo points need to move to the rogue instead of the target. Nearly every other class got a gigantic change in playability either in TBC or Wrath (multi-target swipe and the other tanking changes come to mind).
* Things like fan of knives need more wholesale changes to be interesting. 50 energy is still a very rare fan of knives. The energy cost needs to be lowered to something like 20-25 energy with the damage scaling down, albeit more slowly. Rogues could then AoE. They would be the only AoE class besides holy priests at this point who have to run inside the mobs to do it, and still quite vulnerable. The energy bar would still limit rogues tremendously vs. mages, moonkin and warlocks. But if say the energy cost was halved while the damage dealt reduced by one third, the ability becomes slightly spammable.
* Heroism/bloodlust is gigantically overpowered in 5-mans, fairly gigantic in 10 mans. No other class has it. It's broken. Create some kind of equivalent for rogues (maybe with less juicy goodness, but a similar kind of boost). If you don't know what I mean by heroism/bloodlust being "broken" read the heroics thread.

Anyway, my guild doesn't min-max and I've played my rogue there for 2 years and I have a fair amount of respect in the guild. At this point, it's not the guild asking why I'm bringing my rogue, it's me asking it. I'm close enough to having an Ulduar-ready gear set that I can play the rogue should it be relevant. And we are well served to remember that the state of rogue damage in early TBC was also terrible. But it is getting old to play the "broken class". I'm leveling my druid in the meantime. The best rogue on our server already rerolled paladin. It's a data point of one, but the kind of thing that isn't without significance. We're a "day 1" server and it's the top guild. They aren't running without rogues like Nihilum pretty much was in Sunwell, but they certainly could be. How many classes is that statement true of?

I'll reiterate...

Even though patchwerk is a static fight, it is *not* an ideal fight to compare dps balance amongst classes, since it is so short.

Certain classes (hunters/mages for example), see much more benefit than rogues from use of their cool downs and heroism, so when a fight is really short, the percentage of the fight under such buffs is larger.

You would need a longer fight to let things even out.

Thaddius isn't a good example either because certain class abilities scale differently with the buff than others.

I'll take wws this evening with new toys (Calamity's and actual 25 man T7). I won't run known exploits on fights (HAT), especially on content as trivial as Naxx is now (and multi-drake Sarth is if we could get people on reliably thanks to holidays and finals).

In the last run I ran meters on, using Silent Crusader MH and 10 man T7. Wow Web Stats. Sorry, anonymized thanks to guild rules (except for the unfixed DK stuff, lolwws). I'm the retard rogue at 4760ish.

Since then I've picked up a substantial amount of crit (5% from fist spec - and I'm not one of the people getting the blessed bug ) and about 400 ap.

Using current gear, in 10s we're doing much more poorly, a recent achievement run, Wow Web Stats. Admittedly not an optimzed group with no sunders and me throwing non-imp, non-glyph EA on fights including Patch. Take away the EA penalty (and it's huge), and we'd be more competitive. I'm only 100ish over the other rogue in the raid with roughly the same gear (and who I typically outplay by a large margin), whereas normally it'd be 600-1k. I should add that I'm still many hundred below hunters.

I am working stupidly hard to get the dps I do on most fights - but I just can't catch up even blowing full consumables. Haste potion nerf hit us particularly hard, and with the lower dependence on white numbers, WF just isn't what it was after the changes.

Where I'm valuable now is threefold, my dps isn't abhorrent (versus honestly what it should be in max gear), I don't die stupidly, and I show up every night and have for far too many zones now.

I have difficulty comparing some classses to others at this point, simply because Naxx is stupidly friendly to hunters (and probably ranged, but we seem to eat the souls of ranged in our guild and they don't stay) by and large in that you can sit and plant somewhere (and pets don't fall over dead immediately on a lot of it), and loved by DPS warriors because of the huge quantities of free rage floating around as aoe/raid damage. We don't get the gimmick advantage of +9000 bleed damage on fights (and who can force a warrior to go arms or know what a feral is these days), so I end up spamming untalented, unglyphed evisc on Loatheb and other gimmicksl for pure ugly numbers. I'm also still in my Naxx learning curve, being one of the few in the guild who didn't do it at 60.

So in summary, we're not awful. We're also not scaling as well as people seem to have projected. A lot of the rogue complaints I've seen are from people still running with 'ZOMG 70, must stack hit' mentality, or who haven't played around outside reading a post or tow. I get beaten by any of the classes that Blizzard spent a substantial time on in alpha and beta, and I think personally that's where we're in trouble until a class review in a future patch. The last couple major pushes on beta got us closer than we were for months, but they just didn't go far enough.

I'm hoping for change sooner rather than later.

I think disadvantage would be fights where the boss moves but ranged dpsers would not be required to move.

That is basically moot though because there are also fights where ranged will have to move and melee does not.

In fact, I'd say the most difficult fight in the game now favors melee, since they can dps drakes on sarth uninterrupted by flame tsunami, wihle ranged classes will have interrupt their dps while moving to avoid it.

I don't agree with this. Its all about the numbers. Plain and simple. Many raids are run on a set time schedule and to be fast. If a rogue lacks survivalability, lacks useful raid buffs (ToTT is really not that useful, truth be told), and is pumping out average dps EVEN ON MOBS he/she is not gonna be taken unless they are personal friends of the raid leader. Truthful. As much as everyone here says "Its not about 'overall dps', its about BOSS dps", its not true any longer. The plain truth is, most everyone posts "overal dps/damage" and THAT IS WHAT is important. If some rogue does 200dps more on a boss, yet is a numbnuts on all the mobs... his value, in terms of 'working as a team' is reduced and that rogue is expendable. But the problem is, we can't even enterain that idea becasue even on "rogue boss fights" we are not winning. And "one" raid boss does not make a rogue top dps. That is what I don't understand. Lets say rogues finally, after some buffs, top patchwerk. So what? If a mage is tops in 7 out of 10 or a hunter or whatever.. "they" are the top dps'ers not rogues.

No. You can't be equal in dps yet unqueal in movement, survivalability, raid buffs. That does not make any sense. DPS is one component in a slew of them. IF you make dps equal, then you must make all bosses, all buffs etc.. equal. Is that possible? No. So, aligning dps is a losers gambit.
The big issue with these sorts of sentiments is an inability, and I feel many rogues exhibit this, is that they only look "at themselves" when denoting an issue. For instance, raid rogues who are in guilds and are invited along because of friendship or because they have better gear than others etc... they can't project outside themselves and say "yeah, overall rogues are lame.." They only see their position and say "things aren't that bad...". Try this. Go to LFG and whisper the rogues. Ask them how hard has it been for them to get into heroics or raids. You will find that many are having a hard time because they are being overlooked.

I clicked on this thread expecting something totally different than what's here, but I'm going to say what I have to say anyway (I think it still is kind of relevant).

Is it just me, or is the rogue class pretty well done? I mean, other than the HaT situation, I don't see quite as many changes being applied to Rogues as a great many other classes. Correct me if I'm wrong (but nicely, I'm fragile!) but it seems to me as if Blizzard is happy with the general state of rogues, +/- a few tuning aspects.

That's not to say that we aren't a little low on the DPS meters (which is what seems to be the consensus in this thread) on certain fights, but the way Blizzard is moving, those fixes will either come in the form of small coefficient changes, or a small amount of tuning to the other classes. Pardon me, other classes, for saying this, but I kind of feel like Rogues are being used as something of a baseline.

Full Disclosure: I'm on the outside looking in here, I stopped playing 2 days after LK came out, but am I wrong?