Ghostcrawler said as much but I believe that was largely an example and that all classes were being tuned towards some imaginary number (Rogues included).

To which I'll reply: anyone who looks at overall DPS/Damage is a bad raid leader. Fights are different, even trash. Some favor certain classes more than others. There's a reson I always have Recount set to "Current Fight", not Overall. If your raid leader kicks your out of a raid for overall damage, you need to find a new leader.

EDIT: Leto types faster than me. :P

Second part of that quote above: you say if we get some buffs, yet a mage/hunter ends up on top 7/10 times then it hurts us? That's another example of someone not knowing how to read a damage meter. Do you only look at the #1? What if the next person is 1% behind only? I've done some runs where everyone ended up withing 5% of each other. Can you truly say some of the people in that group sucked? Of course not! Maybe they had bad luck with the RNG, who knows? This is within acceptable margins, and it's ludicrous to think rogues would need a buff if we always ended up that close to the top DPS'er, whatever class that may be.

We may need some tweaks right now, but not massive buffs, that's for sure.

Go tell Blizzard that. That's their reasoning, not mine. We're back to the "consider the type of fight, don't just focus on absolute damage meter numbers." They didn't balance the classes with specific types of fights in mind. You can't ask for buffs solely on the basis of movement fights.

I'm invited on progression runs because I can top the meter or come close. Nothing else. You're essentially saying I think things aren't that bad because I can't see what's going on outside my guild. I'm not sure the opinion of rogues in the LFG channel are necessarily reflecting the reality though. Perhaps there's a reason they're not established within a guild.

Logs aren't needed to see this... it's just logic. I've observed it personally many many times in progress on Sarth with drakes up.

When flame tsunami comes, you have to move to avoid it. To minimize movement, you place ranged classes in one potential safe spot, and tank the drake in the other. Melee can dps just as effectively while moving, while range classes generally have to interrupt their casting, etc.

We would get the first drake down before portals much faster when luck gave us more waves where ranged didn't have to move.

I'm curious how this will pan out between Assas and Combat. We'll assume we are trying to maximize AOE damage, so Assas would have two 1.8 speed daggers, and Combat a 2.6 speed fist and 1.8 speed dagger. With the 3.0.8 patch, the 1.8 speed daggers can effectively be considered 2.7 speed weapons for the purpose of FoK (or is 150% damage somehow different than 150% speed?).

Lets say an average pull has 5 mobs, and you are running with a 40% crit rate. 6 hits, 4 crits, 8 energy back from FA, thus the average cost of FoK is 50-2.5(4/5 T7)-8=39.5. The cost with Combat is 47.5. With both specs running SnD and staying on a single target, a certain amount of energy is generated through FA, or CP, and I am not sure how these stack up. Combat also has the benefit of vitality. In the end I think Combat can perform more FoK than Assas can due to vitality.

Damage modifiers; Assas has FW and Vile Poisons, while Combat has PoTW and Serrated Blades. I think these would stack up fairly evenly, but if they ever fix Instant Poison range, Assasination should win hands down with double instant, especially considering that AOE pulls are very rarely armor debuffed. Of course if there were a fight that necessitated a full burn, aoe style, nothing in assassination can compete with Adrenaline Rush FoK.

Obsidian Sanctum and "benchmark" probably shouldnt be mentioned in the same paragraph, much less sentence.

The closest thing to a actual DPS benchmark we have is Patchwerk. Even then, it's semi-flawed.

You could slightly move too far whilst dipping, and lose some DPS. And for Warriors, the complete absence of any raid damage distorts damage. Same story for Ret Paladins, no incoming damage = no mana = less DPS. Patchwerk also favors classes that rely heavily on long duration, short cooldown buffs. IE: BM Hunters. Classes that have reliable burst but poor longevity seem to shine fairly well.

So even our "benchmark" boss is flawed in many ways.

WWS reports of Patchwerk kills which are well over 4 minutes aren't really useful to see really competitive numbers. I mean, the fact that someone is in the top 3 on meters with <4k DPS doesn't really say much, because it just means that overall your raid-wide DPS was very low.

Going through all of our Patchwerk parses, the highest any rogue has placed on any of our kills is 5th place. I got it once, and Wodahs got it once. Our most recent kill is: Wow Web Stats

We didn't have our best geared mage in there either, Baron is actually MM instead of BM, and we had 0 Fury Warriors in for the kill (both of whom would've easily beaten our numbers). But as you can see, myself and Wodahs both did respectable damage, yet still weren't able to compete with the people at the top. And we're even getting beaten by DKs now . I've gotten some upgrades since then, most notably the dagger off KT, so I expect my numbers to hit ~4.7k this week, but even with that I most likely won't be in the top 3.

I'm not sure what you mean by "still weren't able to compete with the people at the top." Wodahs was 9% behind Silver (and he's being seriously toned down in 3.0.8), 3.2% behind Puppies and Ephedrine, 2.7% behind Baron, and and 1.7% behind Seratha. I'd hardly call that "unable to compete." Some of Wodahs' gear isn't even optimal, and he's Combat, providing a 2% boost to all the physical DPS in the raid (not to mention coming in behind the currently theorycrafted DPS levels of Mutilate).

(edit) For that matter, your own gear is not especially fantastic and you came in only 3.3% behind Wodahs. I'm not really sure how much more you're looking for.

So, before I get into my analysis, here are the 2 WWS that I'm primarily basing my impressions off of:

Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats

These are the last two weeks of Naxx for my guild; I was Mutilate both weeks, and Escoffier (the other well-geared rogue in the guild) was Combat for one and Mutilate for the other.

Lets start by looking at Patchwerk. Both weeks, Escoffier and I are top 5; the only person beating either of us by a significant margin is a hunter, who will soon be nerfed. So while you might argue that this is the one fight we should consistently win and, hence, that our DPS should be bumped up by a couple hundred DPS to ensure this, it's hard to argue that we're not at least competitive.

While we're on the topic: people talking about redipping on Patchwerk are making a mistake. I don't even dip on Patchwerk anymore. Why? Simple. If you're getting topped off over the course of the fight, you're eating chain heal bounces (or whatever) that could be helping heal one of the other tanks. Never mind the fact that each time you dip you lose damage to the stat reduction. And, frankly, if I'm at 20k HP (i.e., full) and I'm getting hit, that means the tank - who was at less than 20k and thus at significant risk of dying - didn't. And me getting splattered instead of a tank is *not* a bad thing. So I'm of the opinion that as long as healers are using Chain Heal or Prayer of Mending or whatever to keep tanks up, melee DPS shouldn't be dipping.

Anyway, moving on to the other fights in the instance: I think the first thing to keep in mind is that movement, by itself, is not bad for rogues. Switching targets certainly is; but attacking a moving boss, or moving around the boss, does not cost us as much DPS as it does a ranged. We can keep autoattacking and mashing specials while running all over the place; a mage has to stop casting FFB for the duration of the move. Hence, fights with movement - i.e. Grobbulus - aren't fundamentally any worse for us. And if you look at damage done to Grobbulus, I finished 3rd one week and Escoffier was 1st the other. Now, you'd be correct in pointing out that a mage utterly worked us all over the first week, so there may be a problem there - but compared to everyone else in the raid, we're more or less okay. Similarly on Thaddius and KT, which, while they may require us to move, they don't really hurt us any more than the ranged DPS - and sure enough, I was 2nd on Thaddius both weeks, and rogues went 1-2 on KT. So I think on fights with movement but not target switching, we're still doing fine.

Now, there are some movement fights - 4 Horsemen, for instance - and some fights with AoEs (Sapphiron) that give us problems, and the rogues fall back into the pack. But that's not really unreasonable - the philosophy is that all classes contribute comparable DPS, and since we're near the top on many fights, it's totally reasonable that we're a bit behind on others. And it's not like we're getting killed on those fights, either - we're middle of the pack instead of top of the pack, but it's not like we're only above the tanks or anything.

Of course, the final sort of fight where we do somewhat poorly is fights with an AoE component - for instance, on my guild's Sarth+3 kill, I was only 6th overall on DPS. But, 1) rogue AoE is being significantly buffed, particularly for Mutilate rogues such as myself, and 2) You bring different people to do different things. Yes, the AoEers are going to have more damage. But you can't have all 15 DPS AoEing; someone has to kill the boss and drakes. And if you start looking at single-target DPS, on that same kill where I was 6th overall, you find that I was top DPS on Sarth and top 3 on 2 out of the 3 drakes. Again, my DPS was very solid... on the stuff I was assigned to kill. And the people assigned to kill different things may have done more, but comparing AoE to single target is not the fairest thing in the world.

So, ultimately, what's the point here? Well, looking through my experience, it's certainly the case that I've been a bit lower on a lot of fights than I might like, so I wouldn't be totally averse to a buff of some sort - but the key point is that it needn't be a large one. If you buffed rogue DPS by 10%, Escoffier and I would be winning close to every fight (particularly after the hunter nerfs). And that's not the stated target of balance. I think if there's going to be a buff at all - and again, I think it's a bit early to say for sure - we're talking at the couple-of-percent level at the most. We don't do well in all circumstances, but we have our job to do on most fights - kill single targets - and we're really pretty solid at it, at least in 25 mans.

Yea the way I look at it right now for me as long as I'm in the top 3 and I enjoy playing my class and if I can lose a little dps and bring more buffs to the guild thats what I want to do, so thats part of my reason swapping back to combat. Right now we are a heavy melee dps guild as well.

Whats your take on the whole mut versus combat as the gear scales up? I don't know much about it yet considering our guild just now has started doing 10 man naxx and downing bosses, I'm curious to know from more of you that are in the 25 mans and getting more of the gear if the gap between mut and combat eventually gets bigger and bigger??

Well, being able to clear and manage in a timely and concise manner is important to some. Also, in my previous post we are making the assumption rogues are at the top in dps - not 5th or 4th etc.. Unfortunetly, this is not the case. So, sub-par mob dps, and sub-par boss dps. No 'real' raid buffs and even though you discount to some degree, low survivalability and low manueverability - movement fights.

Also, when I make reference to "overall dps" it is not just the raid leader. It is a whole mindset which propogates to the raid itself in how perceptions are formed and utilized. The problem we are facing is that pre-wotlk perhaps boss dps was 'the barometer', but with the advent on so much dps being thrown around by hybrids and other pure-dps classes, the meters have taken a turn. No longer is raid boss dps that important when most other dps can do it better, in most cases. We use to link our boss dps because of disparity between boss/mob dps.. whereas most other current dps now retain a very similiar dps score between the two.

So, in a nutshell. Rogues loose all around.

Just as a note here, folks: I'm fine with this thread existing as long as it remains a constructive discussion of where we're strong, where we're weak, and the overall role of the class right now; however, if it starts getting whiny (and some of you are headed in that direction), I'm going to put a stop to it. This is your one and only warning: whines are no more permissible here than anywhere else on the forums, so don't. And if too many people start to, the thread will get closed. Just so we're clear.