That is so not true. Rogues aren't hard to play, at all, if you mean Mutilate. All you need is an addon that tracks the duration of your abilities and keep refreshing them, following a priority pattern. Granted it isn't as easy as a BM Hunter, but the overall complexity of playing a rogue isn't anything way beyond the capabilities of the average WoW player. I'm also pretty sure that the rogues from top guilds parses are at least decent at playing.

With this, however, I agree. Because of how poisons and Focused Attacks work, they basically made every single dagger that isn't 1.4 or 1.3 worthless for us. Webbed Death is ilevel 213, and if I am not mistaken Ulduar will be ilevel 226; that probably means our best weapon will still be Webbed Death, unless there is a 1.4 dagger (maybe 1.5 too, I haven't checked) from that tier. For the offhand, it will still be the best and should only be surpassed by another 1.4 dagger, or *maybe* a slower dagger from the end boss of Ulduar. A perfect solution would be making poison damage and Focused Attacks normalized.

Another issue with the class that I see, though, is our itemization. We will probably share leather with druids in Ulduar just like we did here, and the way WEx works will basically make both specs have a different best in slot gear set. There is some leather that is currently best in slot for Mutilate that's clearly designed for Druids; and because of that, every Mutilate rogue will compete with the Druids for best in slot gear, and most of the "Rogue Designed" gear will rot, especially for Ulduar since there are supposedly giants there. For a Combat Rogue, you won't be able to use many pieces with expertise at all because of WEx, but the "druid leather" is probably better for Combat, too, if it wasn't for WEx. It isn't that big of a deal, but it would be ideal that the "Rogue leather" is better for rogues, so we don't have to compete with druids for it.

Also, a couple people mentioned a talent that removes glancing blows or just removing glancing blows. Unfortunately, as much as that is an easy change, it won't have an effect *nearly* as good as you think. Last I checked, it doesn't come even close to a hundred DPS.

Regarding AOE DPS, the FoK buff will make us very good AOE DPS, if not unrivaled best burst AOE DPS (hey, it even gives slow daggers an use!).

And last but not least, our DPS isn't very exciting on those super fast Patchwerk kills for a reason. It isn't any secret that many classes benefit from Bloodlust substantially more than us, and not only that, some classes have cooldowns or abilities that stack extremely well with it. In a 2 minute Patchwerk, Bloodlust uptime will be 33%, or 1/3rd of the fight. It's extremely hard to balance DPS around super-fast Patchwerk kill. If you don't Bloodlust at all we would be ranked higher, I am sure.

I really hope you're joking with these, but somehow I doubt you are.

1) Two fast daggers. Yes, it's different. That doesn't mean it's bad. Yes, historically rogues have used slow weapons; now there exists a spec that makes use of fast ones. So? Is this crippling to the class? Is the fact that things work slightly differently than they used to really in your top 5 complaints? I mean, the fact that they haven't *itemized* towards the new balance is a concern, but if the majority of daggers were 1.4 with the occasional 1.8 instead of the status quo - where the majority are 1.8 except for the occasional 1.4 - would we even be talking about this?

2) Berserking gives an armor debuff. So, they decided that they wanted to make an enchant that was better for PvE than it was for PvP. And this is unreasonable why, exactly? It's hardly the first time they've introduced differing itemization between PvE and PvP. The disadvantage is totally irrelevant in raids and almost completely irrelevant for a raid-geared rogue in farming/grinding/etc. So, basically: we have an enchant that is perfectly good for PvE as the disadvantage is irrelevant, such that PvPers might need to think about getting a different weapon to PvP with. Annoying? Sure. Top 5 problems? I'm not seeing it.

3) No raid buffs. First, we do have raid buffs. Quite a few of them. And we're even the best source of some of them. Anaethetic Poison is clearly superior to relying on tranq shots, and Savage Combat is at least as solid a source for that debuff as Blood Frenzy. And Expose Armor, Wound Poison, and Master Poisoner aren't bad either. And second, *no* class has raid buffs that can't be easily replaced by some other class. So the fact that we don't either is... not really that concerning.

My post about why you see such a big difference on numbers, by the way, based on that:

You really did not understand the point. The reason in my guild I never see the "rogues are doomed" syndrom but the entire world seems to believe it is that rogue is tricky to play perfectly. Just knowing the theoretical value of a play style doesn't equal high performance. By your definition, Affliction is at the moment the easiest to play spec.

For start, complexity is a relative term. Compare the amount of awareness needed from a typical rogue to any other spec but affliction, and you will see where the hole is.

Complexity is directly dependant of amount of factors involved and computed during a "rotation". Doing good rotation on patchwerk isn't rocket science even though even on patchwerk you can pull alot of tricks to perfect it. Doing perfect rotations on 4HM is not impossible but is fairly hard. That's where you see a rogue do 1500 more dps than next one (I have). On top of all that, fixed rotations are almost never optimal anyways; If you don't make on-fly decisions, you are hurting your dps significantly.

The amount of randomness that is rapidly being added into the a class like rogue, on top of "cheesy" mechanisms here and there, makes the class a challenge to the average player. That's my point. A guy that *heavily* relies on addons to even know about when his rupture or HfB gonna end, is creating tunnel vision over time, which is by no means optimal during challenging encounters.

Of course it is crippling right now and adds to the universal low dps potential of the class. In the entire content available there is 1 optimal speed dagger, and every rogue wants 2 of it. I remember a quote from GC along the long of: "Yes, we know the problem, but I don't see every rogue trying to get 2 fast daggers". It's happening though, and I really don't see them not adding slow daggers anymore into the game.

If you see a rogue doing 1500 doing more DPS than the next one, then the one way below is clearly underperforming way too much; he will probably have horrible SnD uptime, which the average rogue usually doesn't have much problem with. You list 4HM as a difficult fight to have a "perfect rotation" (Mutilate doesn't really use a rotation as much as a priority list), but I fail to see a problem here, as nothing truly stops you from maintaining HfB and just using a finisher before the target dies and you go to the next horseman with a full duration SnD and have the travel time to refresh HfB.

You contest that Fan of Knives primarily becomes useful through Overkill or Adrenaline Rush. (It makes no sense to posit a situation in which a rogue has both of these talents, so I will not do so.) I intend to disprove this claim in this post.

Let's start with a Mutilate rogue. Assume he is using 2x [Omen of Ruin] with about 4500 raid-buffed AP, 50% crit (after Turn the Tables and raid buffs), and exactly 8% hit (thus 10% spell hit). Assume that his MH has Deadly Poison IX, and his OH has Instant Poison IX. He does not weapon swap for this test. He also does not open from Stealth. He simply runs into an AoE pack of size X with a full energy bar and begins to cast Fan of Knives as frequently as he can. Note that the rogue in question does have T7 4pc.

For this rogue, Fan of Knives costs 47.5. In addition, his Fan of Knives attacks (two per target) crit 50% of the time, with each crit restoring 2 energy via Focused Attacks. Thus, he can expect to regenerate 2 energy per target. Here's his effective energy cost for various numbers of targets:

X	4	6	8	10	12
Effective Cost	39.5	35.5	31.5	27.5	23.5

Fan of Knives will hit once with each weapon for 159% normalized weapon damage (6% additive from Find Weakness, 50% multiplier from using daggers) per target. An [Omen of Ruin] hits for 150-281, or an average of 215.5. The normalized AP bonus will provide an additional 4500 / 14 * 1.7 = 546.4 damage, for a total of 761.9. The weapon damage multiplier brings this to 1211.5. The off hand will additionally hit for 75% of this amount (thanks to Dual Wield Specialization), so the total damage from both weapons is 2120.1. These attacks have a 50% chance to crit, and courtesy of Lethality and [Relentless Earthsiege Diamond] their crits will deal 237.8% damage. Applying these multipliers brings the total to 3580.8 damage. Assuming that a typical raid mob negates 35% of physical damage when its armor is not debuffed (this is likely since a warrior probably won't be able to Sunder every target in an AoE pull), our final expected damage per target is 2327.5.

In addition to weapon damage, each Fan of Knives cast has a chance to proc your main hand and off hand poisons. In a Mutilate build, this means a 30% chance to proc Instant Poison from your off hand and 40% chance to proc Deadly Poison from your main hand. For this hypothetical situation we will ignore Deadly Poison, because in an AoE pull it's not likely to get much chance to tick anyway, and you will see later that its contribution is not especially important. Instant Poison will deal 300-400 damage, or an average of 350, plus 10% of the hypothetical rogue's 4500 AP, for a total of 800. Applying Vile Poisons (20% increase) brings this total to 960. Note that it does not make sense to figure in raid buffs such as Curse of the Elements since this is an AoE situation. However, we can figure in roughly a 20% chance to crit poisons for 154.5% damage, and a 7% chance to miss. Thus our final expected damage per target from IP is (960 * 0.93 * (1 + 0.2 * 0.545) * 0.3) = 297.0.

Our final expected damage per target from one Fan of Knives cast is 2624.5. Let's see how this converts to damage per energy per target, given our calculations of expected energy cost with different numbers of targets:

X	4	6	8	10	12
DPE / Target	66.44	73.93	83.32	95.44	111.68

Now let's consider a typical AoE situation in a raid. It probably doesn't last very long, since everyone seems to AoE these days. 10 seconds is probably a good minimum, and 20 is probably a good maximum. Over a time span of T, if we start with a full energy bar, in total we will have T * 10 + 100 energy to work with. Given the above numbers of DPE per target and our assumptions of reasonable time frames, let's figure out how much total DPS we can deal to the various numbers of targets we've considered. (The below calculations can be expressed as (DPE / Target) * X * (10 * T + 100) / T.)

	X = 4	X = 6	X = 8	X = 10	X = 12
T = 10	5315.5	8871.7	13331.0	19087.6	26803.9
T = 12	4872.6	8132.4	12220.1	17497.0	24570.2
T = 14	4556.2	7604.3	11426.6	16360.8	22974.8
T = 16	4318.9	7208.3	10831.5	15508.7	21778.2
T = 18	4134.3	6900.2	10368.6	14845.9	20847.5
T = 20	3986.7	6653.8	9998.3	14315.7	20102.9

This all seems a little bit ridiculous, even to me - but then, we're still assuming a full energy bar to start with, which matters a lot in a short fight. Let's look at the steady state DPS, assuming we only have the 10 * T energy we gain every T seconds and nothing else. (The below calculations can be expressed as (DPE / Target) * X * 10.)

X	4	6	8	10	12
DPS	2657.8	4435.9	6665.5	9543.8	13402.0

This is a little more convincing. You can see that our per-target DPS increases with the number of targets we're attacking, from about 650 with 4 targets to about 950 with 10 targets. Our DPS in an actual combat situation goes completely through the roof if we can start with a full energy bar. And note that the following factors were not even considered in the above analysis:

- Deadly Poison proccing on AoE targets and ticking one or several times before they die.
- Hunger for Blood potentially being stacked before the pull.
- Obviously, since the premise of the argument was that Fan's strength does not depend on Overkill, I didn't account for that.
- You can be performing white attacks while spamming Fan for additional DPS on your target as well as Focused Attacks procs.

For what it's worth, let's assume you don't have Focused Attacks. You're still going to deal 2624.5 damage per target with Fan, but it will always cost 47.5 energy. Thus, your DPE per target will always be 55.25, and your DPS per target will always be 552.5. Thus, for our various X values above, you will deal this much DPS:

X	4	6	8	10	12
DPS	2210.1	3315.2	4420.3	5525.4	6630.4

These numbers are a lot less jaw-dropping, but if you combine these with white attacks on your target, as well as the Deadly Poison and Hunger for Blood effects we haven't even been considering, you'll still see very decent numbers on AoE pulls compared to before. In summary, make no mistake: Fan of Knives is a very strong ability that will greatly assist us in the AoE pulls where we currently feel so useless.

I will explain once more, differently.
Slightly offtopic first; not everyone is mutilate, we mainly play combat in the guild as the cooldowns offer more efficient dps on encounters like twilight zone. Also KS right now is the most effective dps talent on malygos due to about ~30-40 sec more dps up time during phase 1, of which most are stacks of 2-3 sparks.

For 2, most guilds don't kill 4HM one by one. "perfect kill" is mainly about killing em at same time. They switch sides, switch the bosses, and at same time generate maximum dps up time. If you play combat on 4HM you need to develop a complete new rotation for that fight, just to get the best out of your CPs/possibly keep 100% expose uptime on both melee side bosses solo.

Anyways, bringing up examples isn't my point. The point is that compared to most other classes, rogue right now requires more awareness and understanding of mechanisms, to be played well, especially if the fight is something chaotic like twilight zone. I won't go back to sunwell fights, as I believe that most of the complexity (just a relative term mind you, obviously nothing in a game is rocket science) was added with some of the new talents/gyphs in expansion and wasn't so apparant before.

I think it's safe to assume that FoK+FA will become the same treatment that CPot+FoK did at some point, as the issue is the same. I remember a quote from GC before reducing the cooldown to 10 seconds that "We can't reduce the cooldown if people end up using it as energy generator on some fights, mainly concerning combat potency". But then since shiv change affected FoK too, they went through with the change.

Anyways, didn't you happen to also do the maths on FoK+CPot+Vitality(+possible AR)?

Well, there is also combat potency if you melee something.

I am mainly interested in comparison of the both during a longer priod of time (AE'ing KJ/Muru mobs long). Although as long as focused attack doesn't get the same treatment that CPot did, it probably will still beat combat's AE.

Combat Potency does not proc on Fan of Knives. Vitality is, trivially, a 25% boost to your Fan DPS per target. AR would be a 100% boost to your Fan DPS for 15 seconds.

As far as DPS over a "M'uru/KJ period of time," you need only look at the sustained numbers calculated in my post. In a three-target situation, you'd deal about 1897.3 DPS (total across all targets) using Fan spam, given my gear, buffs, and talents, ignoring Hunger or white attacks. On four targets, you'd deal about 2657.8 DPS.

In a trash clear your fights will be much shorter, typically on the order of 10-20 seconds, so you would use the much larger numbers that result from having a full energy pool to start. Not to mention you'd definitely start from Stealth to take advantage of Overkill.

To get a better feeling for these numbers they need to be looked in comparison to the AoE potential of other classes.
The class I'm most familiar with (given that I play it) is the Shadow Priest. It's generally regarded currently that Mind Sear is one of the "rather strong" AoE's (along with Volley and probably Blizzard). Volley is having it's base damage nerfed but from what I can tell that's not the major part of it's DPS. It's possible Mind Sear might be nerfed too at some point but what I'll post here is how it currently functions.

Mind Sear(Rank 2) costs 853 mana when talented (which all Shadow Priests are highly likely to have). It's a 5 second channel which ticks every 1 seconds. It does 212 to 228 base damage. It can crit, but only for 150%. It's affected by haste (but, like Mind Flay, it has a "travel time" so the first tick takes longer than you'd expect given haste).
Mind Sear damages all enemy targets within 10 yards of the primary target but does no damage to the primary target.

Its base scaling with Spell Power is 28.5% (or 1/3.5) per tick. It benefits from Misery (effective spellpower scaling boosted by *1.15), Darkness, Shadow Weaving, Shadowform, CoEl/Earth&Moon/Ebon Plaguebringer as well crit and haste boosting buffs and debuffs.

Raid buffed (including totems) in my hit-capped raiding gear (a mix of 25man and 10man gear with a couple of best-in-slots items as well as 1 SWP wand and 2 ilvl 200 blues) I'd be at 2554 spell power with another effective 53 to 60 spellpower from Glyph of Shadow. Let's say 2610 spell power. I would also have a 29% crit chance with Mind Sear (not counting Imp. Scorch/Winter's Chill debuff), 3% increased critical damage and 21.57% haste.

Ignoring CoEl/Earth&Moon/Ebon Plaguebringer as well as Imp. Scorch and Winter's Chill (because it's unlikely that all targets will be debuffed with it) then my average Mind Sear tick non-crit would be:

(220 + 1.15*1/3.5*2610)*1.1*1.1*1.15 == 1499.4 dmg.

A crit would be: 1499.4 * 1.5 * 1.03 == 2316.6 dmg.


With an average crit rate of 29%, the average tick damage would be 1736.4 dmg.
With a 21.57% haste rating then in terms of DPS (ignoring the initial delay because throughput doesn't change once the bug is fixed which it apparently is on PTR) then that's 2110.9 DPS per target.

Filling in the table (remembering to subtract 1 target because Mind Sear doesn't hit the primary target). (Time isn't really relevant here for Mind Sear. It'll keep ticking and mana isn't an overwhelming concern given that at T = 20 that's around 5 casts which is only 4265 mana not counting regen).

	X = 4	X = 6	X = 8	X = 10	X = 12
T = any	6332.8	10554.7	14776.6	18998	23220.4

This would seem to put Mind Sear on par with Fan of Knives around the 14 second duration with FoK coming out ahead on shorter AoE pulls but falling behind on longer ones.

*edit*: Forgot to take into account partial resists and the like. Which would account for a small drop in DPS but hopefully not too large of one.

Yes, but Combat potency does give you energy back from melee attacks that you do at that point, which would probably yield significant FoK Damage as well. (Heroism/Ret aura/WF all suddenly play a big role in AE damage). That will also increase the value of hit/haste on serious AE fights, if they add any in future.

I would be interested to see optimum dps rotations for FoK.

I hate guessing, but assuming a sustained fight on a single target while surrounded by adds, your best rotation will be 4+n with any extra energy going into FoK spam. The alternative to this must be to let SnD drop, and just whitehit FoK spam. The optimality of each tactic I assume would vary with the number of mobs within aoe range.

I am thinking purely in terms of 10 and 25 man 3 drakes. We downed 2 drakes trivially leaving rogues single targeting, but with FoK improvements, I would not be surprised to see rogues helping with adds on the 3 drake encounter. That being the case,I am wondering how much rotation I should think about dropping from drakes/sartharion in order to assist on the aoe.

(sorry to massively go off topic but seeing as everyone is discussing fok anyway)

Objectively Rogues are currently at a disadvantage to certain other classes/builds when it comes to doing our job: single target DPS. However this is not because Rogues are poorly balanced, have suboptimal Talent Trees or any other deficiency inherent in the class.
The two builds which stand out as being, from an objective standpoint, "better" than us; BM Hunter and Fury TG Warriors, are either being "rebalanced" in the next Patch (BM Hunter) or will be visited by Blizzard in the future (Fury TG Warrior).
As far as single target DPS is concerned, in the context of our Guild Raids, our Fury TG Warriors are not so far ahead to worry me at all.

Subjectively I feel comfortable with my ability to do my job taking my level of gear into account after 1 visit to 25 man Naxx. How others are performing, regardless of class balance, does not worry me very much. There is no point worrying about something over which I have absolutely no control.

Much more important to me is doing things right. Members of our Raid group also have a wide disparity of gear levels, this certainly makes any detailed analysis [of our combat log parses] as to the effect of class balance on damage output impossible.

Is being top of the meters important to me? Yes, but only because of my own pride and no other reason.
I am hanging in the top 5 on most bosses if not the top 2, overall damage is not telling me anything significant.

At no point do I feel that Rogues are being hindered because of the state of the class, quite the contrary in fact.

In WotLK Blizzard have given Rogues tools which give us more "width".
Fan of Knives is about to get better and is already a potent tool when used properly.
Killing Spree is a key skill for Combat Rogues and I get a great deal of vicarious pleasure out of using it.
Tricks of the Trade is awesome and can be used to improve our DPS or our survivability.

As this is a game the fun factor, for me at least, ranks higher than just about anything else.
Fact is: I am enjoying playing my Rogue now more than ever before.

I am defintely not well geared in this moment, still using some Sunwell/badge pieces as I really didnt find anything better so far.
What I experiences in Naxx-10 and Naxx-25 is simply that... currently the game is AOE and we don't have any.
The DMeters and Recounts look bad because of trash pulls that are 100% AoE.
On single targets, any boss, any fight, I am 4th or 5th, even in our first 25-men try on Anub'rekhan. I am undergeared for the most of the heroics, but with a strict rotation (assassination) and always caring for HfB to be up, searching for anykind of crit buff to maximize Seal Fate, I can still produce 2k DPS.

The class is changing. With the new %/rating ratios, capping hit rating is impossible, so you aim for 350 / 400 and than stuck Crit to proc Seal Fate and Focused Attacks (as assasination). The rotation you can go for is 4r/4e/4e all done with single critting mutilates and proccs from Ruthlessnes (which is sometimes not proccing, does it have a inner cooldown or is it just bugged? I saw many times no free CP from a 5CP finisher).

I am still trying to solve the MH/OH issue for speed cause i don't see that DPS improvement with the Librarian's Paper Cut in MH. For what I see "on the field" the new play style relys a lot on Envenom, so having slow MH helps a lot more, while the fast OH with deadly gets you back to 5 poison stacks instantly after envenoms.

On the other hand, what makes you really a good choice for raid is Trick of the Trade. On those AoE pulls, you activate it on your MT and simply ignore the "skull" (usually the first target) and go for the X (the secondo target). You open with a all-out dps sequence (HfB x3 + Cold Blood, Garrote, Mutilate, Rupture, Mutilate, Envenom) and you help the tank establishing arrgo on the trash mobs. The difference is noticeble without even going to the numbers: simply the X doesn't run for mages.

In the situtations where you can keep that 4r/4e/4e rotation up there is -nothing- that beats you in dps, on equal gear level.

Now let's see what the Fan on Knives change will do, but it's still a 50 energy cost ability, so you use it twice and then you're useless like before. 150% damage with knives also makes it an assassionation oriented move.

They should make Blade flurry trainable, so to give all rogues some AoE and give Combat some new talent, maybe aimed to survivability. I don't know... I agree with the general idea that we are the class that is suffering the most from these new rating conversions, but hey, it's a moment ^^ we will be fixed

A fully talented Ruthlessness yields 60% chance for any finisher to give a combo point, not 100%.

And you're wrong on the whole , that's sort of the whole point of the thread .

This post is wrong in almost every way it's possible to be wrong. In order:

1) You do not aim for 350 hit raiting. Beyond the poison hit cap, hit rating is very much non-optimal. That cap is 237 if you have a moonkin or shadow priest, 315 otherwise. Neither of these numbers are "magic", and having less than the poison hit cap is not always wrong.

2) You do not stack crit - crit is one of the worst stats. You want expertise up to the cap, then hit to somewhere around the poison hit cap, then AP or agility.

3) Of course Ruthlessness does not always proc, it's a 60% chance. Learn to read tooltips.

4) A strict 4r/4e/4e rotation is wrong. You do 4+r, then 4+envenom until you need to refresh rupture - repeat as appropriate

5) Envenom damage is not affected by base weapon damage, so weapon speed is irrelevant for Envenom damage

6) A slow main hand is suboptimal. You DEFINITELY do not want deadly poison on your fastest weapon. You want the slower weapon in the main hand with DP on, and the faster weapon in the offhand with IP on.

7) Yes, Tricks of the Trade can be useful. However, attacking the second mob is not a good idea, it won't be debuffed, and overall damage will be suckier than if you hit the right target.

8) As demonstrated extensively above, FoK will be very powerful after the changes. It's not a 50 energy cost due to the returns from Focused Attacks. Saying you can "use it twice" neglects that point that, you know, energy regenerates

9) The 1.5 damage multiplier on daggers for FoK does not make it an Assassination ability, it merely compensates for the facts that combat uses slower weapons. A 1.8 dagger will hit the same as a 2.7 sword. A 1.4 dagger will hit the same as a 2.1 sword.

10) Trainable blade flurry would be insanely overpowered.

As much as this is nitpicking, FoK will be, indeed, considerably worse for any spec that isn't Assassination, but it should still be very decent AOE DPS.

Nothing, the poster you are quoting is wrong. Focused Attacks will make it a bit better for assassination energy-wise while the passive +energy regen talent does help for combat but not as much. And, as has already been mentioned in this very thread, you regen energy all the time. You're not out of energy after 2 FoK's, you're merely low on energy which is replenishing, quite literally, every second or more.

Either will be decent and far, far better then what we have today.

There is all this talk about poeple with Mutliate and it being the spec of choice. But do all of your guilds really have an Arms warrior or another combat rogue? Seems there is little discussion of where Combat stands since Mutilate is a better individual DPS spec. Personally i am the only rogue in our guild and we only have 2 warriors who are both TG. So i have to go combat just for the dmg buff (which is about 500dps for the raid in total). I find in general I could easily to 300ish more dps as Mut but being pigeonholed to combat, and it will only get worse when TG gets buffed.

That's not actually clear to me. Combat has BF and AR, both of which double FoK DPS (assuming BF works with it: is this definitely the cas?). Now you can say that these are both longish cooldowns - but AoE fights occur intermittently and are by and large not sustained for long periods. This gives a good chance that at least one of the two cooldowns will be available on most AoE fights, and occasionally both (quadruple the AoE damage). So I wouldn't want to speculate about the relative strength of Mutilate and Combat AoE without seeing it in action in a raid situation.

Another thing to consider, at least with current itemization, there's a pretty good chance for Mirror of Truth to proc on the first FoK cast and the subsequent casts benefiting from a pretty hefty AP boost.

I do see FoK with no cooldown as a potentially insane aoe burst ability.

For the record, Relentless is additive, it will always proc on 5 point finishers.

As for the actual topic, I must admit that as we gear up, we do seem to be scaling back up towards the top. Our first few Naxx runs were dominated by BM, Affliction, and one of our Shadowpriests. As we've all continued to gear up, it's usually the BM Hunter (which is moot now), and then Rogues/Warlocks/Titan's Grip.

Here is our Patchwerk from last night: Wow Web Stats
Deathbiscuit and Injek have similar gear, DB might have a slight edge. I am still missing several important pieces that they have (DC:Greatness, and I'm still wearing 3 level 70 items).

If the PTR changes were live for that kill, it would have been Warrior, Rogue, Lock, Rogue, Rogue (maybe Skhope sneaking in there), which isn't a huge departure from the way it used to be. I think our mages under-represent in general, but I don't think the rest of our DPS massively misplays their characters or anything.

Just wanted to double-back to the glancing blows point, briefly. If Blizzard were to take this route, it would be wrong to make it a talent. I'd prefer it be more of a passive *rogue-only* effect otherwise you're changing little since the idea is to not boost all melee, just rogues and their relative placement. Although a change like this wont move mountains, with current damage spreads it will result in roughly a 2% boost in our damage which, if you think about it, may be just enough to make the difference.