I'd argue that the SnD glyph is pretty important right now, given that with unlucky crits it can take 250+ energy (and sometimes as much as 330) in order to rupture and then envenom again, such that SnD would be at high risk of dropping during unlucky cycles if one didn't have the glyph (given that average-case regen in an unglyphed SnD is down around 230). Then again, with some gear scaling and a glyphed envenom, it's not inconceivable that a straight Envenom cycle could overtake Envenom/Rupture cycles as top DPS, which would be safe without the SnD glyph (and, for that matter, wouldn't require the Rupture glyph either). Then again, we have a spare glyph slot as it is, so whether the SnD glyph is essential is hardly a matter of concern just now.

Ultimately, of course, one would expect them to introduce glyphs for Mutilate and Envenom, and possibly Instant and/or Deadly Poison as well; any of these would (presumably) result in some manner of DPS increase, so it's not unreasonable to think that we might have a meaningful decision to make at some point (though some of those might wind up being minor glyphs - I can, for instance, see a minor glyph for Deadly Poison which leaves DPS unchanged but causes it to tick 1/sec instead of 1/3sec).

With the speculation of mutilate and other glyphs that favor assassination I am worried as to where that will leave combat specs. Combat is already behind and with new glyphs will only lose more ground. I have played as combat since first stepping foot in MC. If and when these new glyphs come out, I will be forced to change specs.

With the way that DoTs work right now, then going off the numbers from my last Patchwerk kill, if I had received 1 Tricks of the Trade near the start of the fight when I applied my Shadow Word: Pain I would done around 16600 more damage in the fight purely from SW:P alone (or around 86dps). Would seem worth 15 energy and a 1 sec GCD to me, but I'm not an expert on what sort of damage a rogue can put out for that 15 energy and 1 GCD.

Im not sure why you'd post such a question in this thread or even this class forum. (So please delete this post if the post above is moved/removed)

Having said that, it appears to me you're talking of a bug with Pain and Suffering which causes SW: P to use the modifiers and spell damage from the original cast to calculate the damage of SW: P whenever it's renewed rather than use current values. With TotT on your first SW: P cast you'd get +15% damage on it for the entire duration of the fight? Pretty much the same mechanic druids abused in 2.1 to keep immense +healing on their rolling lifeblooms with trinkets and PI.
If in fact this is the case then yes, it'd be worth it assuming you no have problems with threat. There's no effective energy cost on the first Trick btw.

PS. If Pain and Suffering is working the way I described (and I have no immidiate way of testing this), rest assured it'll be fixed like Lifebloom and Curse of Agony before it.

All DoTs currently (at least all Shadow Priest DoTs) determine how much they tick for at the time of casting. With the exceptions being direct damage increases debuffs on the target like CoEl/Earth&Moon/Ebon Plaguebringer. (Crit debuffs on the mob are factored into the original cast).

Now for most DoTs that only means 15 to 24 or so seconds where it's fixed like this. Shadow Word: Pain on the other hand, can be refreshed via Pain&Suffering. However the only thing it recalculates when SW:P is refreshed via Pain&Suffering is any change to +spellpower.

So you can't just pop a +spellpower trinket and then cast SW:P and expect the extra spellpower to last for the full duration of the fight. Instead it'll last until the first Mind Flay after the trinket wears off.

All other buffs (e.g. Shadowform, stacks of Shadowweaving, Moonkin Aura's crit buff, Ferocious Inspiration, the stacking charges on the Thaddius fight etc., +crit buffs from trinket procs or activations) as well as all non-direct DPS boosting debuffs (so e.g. Totem of Wrath's crit debuff, Imp. Scorch etc) are only calculated once, at the initial cast of the spell and aren't recalculated upon refresh via Mind Flay.

So while spell power doesn't "roll" everything else does.

It's actually rather annoying because it takes some time for everything to be fully stacked up and it's a question of do we hold off casting SW:P until things are stacked up or do we cast one earlier and then decide whether or not to waste a GCD and mana recasting it. One pitfall of trying to manually recast it is it won't let you replace an old SW:P with a newer one if the new one is "weaker" than the old one. However the only thing it uses to determine if a SW:P is stronger than another is +spellpower. So if you cast a SW:P when you had more spellpower (say a trinket procced and you had Improved Spirit Tap up) but you didn't have the full set of buffs and debuffs then you're stuck with a sub-par SW:P on the target that you can't get rid of unless you don't cast Mind Flay for 18 seconds or you can match or exceed the spellpower you had when you last cast SW:P.

Will it be fixed? I hope so. The current system while it can have it's good points is on the whole rather annoying to manage.

In the meantime however, a single Tricks of the Trade at the right time would boost our DPS across the entire fight.

As for threat, that's not really any sort of an issue. We won't be casting SW:P until a few seconds into the fight, and we can always hit Fade if need be to give the tanks even longer to build threat. And of course Night-Elf priests like myself can just Shadowmeld to wipe threat.

Why did I post this in the rogue thread? I noticed a discussion on the worth of using TotT to boost the overall damage the raid does (even if it's only boosting 1 person at a time at the expense of the rogue who casts it) and in it's present state it would seem that using 1 Tricks of the Trade on a Shadow Priest near the start of the fight is a worthwhile use of the spell.

I really don't know where to begin, as this thread is spreading itself over so many issues, but I will try to give my point of view to the state of rogues and to some of the things that has been said in this thread so far.

about HaT
While I admire those few who match or surpass the TG warrior using this spec, I have yet to both see and experience any positive about this spec. It is a gimmick, which basically reduces a rogue / rogues to a class, which has four people doing all the work, while the rogue himself is spamming eviscerate. You can even make a cast sequence macro, go afk to return saying: "wow, Im #1 dps". While it - very sadly - is the only spec that has a snowballs chance in hell to compete with TG warriors in dps, I find it both naive and damaging for our class to bring this spec forward, as talking about rogues doing 9-10K dps really doesn't give a true picture of our state as a dps class; mutilate / combat data does, HaT does not.

Rogues is a class that for very long has taken pride in optimizing themselves thru perfecting cycles / rotations to the split second, and now due to a gimmick, the only way we are to compete with top dps classes should be by letting others do our work and be reduced to a "one ability" spam class, who cannot personally fail, but only fail if others fail at doing theirs? Is it really only I who find the state of HaT damaging to our class?

about FoK
I love FoK. The ability, along with Tricks of the Trade, to do AoE "misdirect" to tank is just wonderful. But despite the removal of cool down, I don't see FoK as being part of any rotation ever. It just allows us to do something "once in a while" on AoE groups, instead of single target dps one mob in a group of many.

about The performance of rogues in 10/25
I do not see rogues being a top dps class again, unless Blizzard boosts us. TG warriors simply are better, due to both TG, their weapon dps and their ability to do insane damage below 20% boss hp. Hunters simply are better, because they aren't weakend as much as rogues in terms of hit / expertise. Retridins and DK's just have insane damage outputs which we cannot match.

To be honest, I am having a hard time thinking of any reason why anyone would bring rogues to raids, as there are so few fights where rogues can contribute with anything. We are good on Sarth, due to our ability to tranq the adds with FoK/Anestetic poison. But what does a rogue bring to Malygos? TG warriors does more damage, Hunters likewise and can do it ranged (big advantage before vortex), DK's does more damage and can DG sparks. We are there because, we are in the guild. Same on many, if not all bosses in Naxx. While it is nice to be able to do Trick of the Trade on Patchwork and EA on Razovius, other dps classes just bring more dps than rogues on all bosses except maybe on Thaddious.

The talk about "bring the player, not the class", is naive. You bring the player because he is in the guild, not because he performs.

It's only 3 seconds, but it's a very important 3 seconds. Consider: if Ruthless doesn't on either the envenom or the following rupture, you *have* to do 4 mutilates to get two 4+ finishers off - there's no way around it. Now, a Mutilate costs 60 energy; with T7 4/5 it's down to 57, and when you pro-rate the focused attacks gains from Mutilate crits, perhaps 52. So 4 Mutilates cost 208 energy. Since we're doing 2-mut finishers, they're very likely 5-pt finishers, so your Rupture is free and the Envenom costs 10 energy. Thus, for our essential cycle components, we're talking 218 energy. But if we have to do HFB during this cycle - and we will, about 2/3 of the time - we're now up to 248.

Now, average-case Focused Attacks regen from autoattacks is about 2 energy per second; so regenerating that 248 energy takes just a hair under 21 seconds on *average*. Which means, about half the time a 21 second SnD is not enough; meanwhile a 24 second SnD is all but guaranteed to cover it (99%+). Hence, the relevant question is: how likely is this scenario?

Well, we said 2 Ruthlessness non-procs during a cycle in which we need to refresh HFB. The odds of this are 2/3 * .4 * .4 = 11% or so. Thus, once in 9 cycles, we're going to run into this situation, and hence, on average, every 18 cycles or so, unglyphed SnD will either a) drop or b) require you to do a 2-3 point Envenom to save it. 18 cycles * 20 seconds/cycle = about 6 minutes. So, without the SnD glyph, you run into energy trouble about once every 6 minutes, versus once every... never, for Glyphed SnD.

Now, admittedly, queueing can mitigate this to some extent - but if you're having to use your queuing just to keep SnD up, you have a lot less wiggle room for nonoverlapping envenom buffs, stacking Mutilates into envenom buffs, timing DP ticks, and other optimizations. And it also might be noted that we haven't factored in the energy cost of TotT if you're using on cooldown, the chance of Ruthlessness non-procs, and so on. So while you might be able to sacrifice some cycle flexibility in order to lower that number to, say, once every 15 minutes, that's still pretty likely to happen at least some of the time on boss fights, and when/if it does, it costs you a *lot* of DPS.

Also note that the estimates on Mut cost and FA regen assume optimal gear - 4/5 T7, raid-buffed crit rate up around 45%, a couple hundred haste rating, expertise capped, and so on.

Hence, the overall assessment - in my opinion, anyway - is that *if* you have near best-in-slot gear, you *can* drop the glyph, and it shouldn't cost you *too* much DPS. But that's hardly a ringing endorsement - in practice, I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

Now, as gear continues to improve and more glyphs become available, we might find that the opportunity cost drops somewhat, and that the other options are just better. But for the moment, I really do think the SnD glyph plays a vital roll in Mutilate cycles, and I think it's misleading to say otherwise.

You misunderstand: I'm saying that given all the problems you describe, plus other factors such as ToTT, the fact that you may get unlucky on Mutilate crits as well as Ruthlessness procs, poor luck on melee crrits Focused Attacks, etc., and teh fact that most people don't have best in slot gear - the issue is too large to be band-aided with the S'n'D glyph. Rather, I suspect that it would be much more effective to put a single point in Improved Slice'n'Dice and use some other damage glyph. That does however rely on other glyphs being available! So for now, of course you use the S'n'D glyph - what else is there to use? But if there were a choice between 1 point in CQC and the S'n'D glyph, or a point in Imp S'n'D and some other useful glyph, I'd probably choose the latter.

Even with the S'n'D glyph, I'm considering swapping a point from CQC into Improved S'n'D, just for peace of mind and cycle stability. However if I do that, I might as well be running with an empty glyph slot, as the S'n'D glyph will be rendered useless by the talent point.

I agree with a lot of the comments expressed in this thread toward rogues not needing a big buff in dps. But I do think we do need some tweaking specially in combat side.

Independent of the spec, or talents, I would like to see changes toward making hit a better stats for rogues, one thing that comes to mind is different conversions that casters and melee get, while in the past I could understand this as hit scaled way to good for rogues, its not the case anymore, why not just make it the same amount/ratio?

Casters 1% hit = 26.23
Melee 1%hit = 32.79

The only classes right now that cap their hit are casters. Hunters, Warriors, Enh Shamans, druids just look for a low specials cap and then go for other stats, and now rogues do the same, I think this is wrong in pve. Hit should be more appealing at least in pve, and lowering the melee hit ratio to the same as casters will raise the contribution that hit gives, not sure it will put it up to par with other stats, but certainly right now its not good if all class avoid it. And in all honesty I don’t think this will make all classes move toward hit still, I think even with this change people will still prefer other stats than hit, but it’s a right move toward making hit more appealing.

Blizzard has done it in the past, remember haste? It was 1%=15.6 for both melee/casters, then casters got shafted to 20.2 apparently because it scaled to well for them, then in a later patch was lowered to both classes to be equal into 15.6. So I don’t see hit being equal ratio for casters and melee being a bad suggestion, crit and haste conversions are the same, I don’t understand why hit should be any different.


Mutilate,
Given the WWS showed here, I think mutilate isn’t that far away from most true dps classes, given that there are much higher WWS of mages/hunters/locks/tg warriors, I think they are close enough, only thing I would like to see in mutilate is

Murder: Affect all mobs, never understood why it was restricted to 3 types, I could see not affecting Humanoids for pvp nerf but it does, so basically it was a nerf inside instances specially in TBC/WOTLK, I could see this being like that when it was a tier2, since combat was a strong spec in TBC and could take this talent easily, but now it become a pure Mutilate deep talent, so I think making it affect all mobs will put mutilate very close to what all classes are capable in raids, without giving any extra buffs in pvp.

I would like to see more glyphs in mutilate, rogues probably the only class that the tree didn’t get any specific glyphs for pve. Probably a mutilate glyph (increasing crit or bypass the poison requirement), a HFB glyph (increasing duration or stacks per click), an envenom glyph (maybe doesn’t eat the charges of deadly).



Combat,
I think combat is where I’m probably more disappointed in terms of what the tree was and what its become. Given that it’s not that far from top dps specs, its being outpaced by mutilate, and by all true dps classes. I personally don’t like how blizzard made even combat rogues don’t like hit anymore, I remember back in beta there were posts like

We are making gear more usable for all classes, where you could see a druid gemming stam/agil, while a rogue will gem heavier toward hit.

Overall I don’t see that happening, we just cap the spell hit cap, and then work toward better scaling stats. This imo is a mistake from blizzards, Rogues, specially combat speced, should scale a lot better with hit, and they should be still perusing it as their best dps stat, I hate how we have become another hunter/dps warrior toward how we see hit.

Part of this behavior is how our new breakdown is, where white damage does a lot less contribution to our overall dps (from 65-75% to 40-50%), while I’m not disappointed into how other stuff contributes more to us, I think blizzard should tweak the combat tree towards being more hit friendly. For example

Prey on the weak, this talent goes for crit damage increase, favoring specs like fist and daggers over swords and maces, this talent could be reworked into hits not crits, and probably lower the amount or % toward it becoming the same. Maybe 10% increase in all swings, instead of 20% increase on crit. It would be a lot like HFB just you don’t have to sustain the buff but it will not always work as your health will vary thru the fight.

51tp – Killing Spree, don’t get me wrong I do like this talent, but for 51tp high dps pve spec talent idk, seems not to par with talents like Titan Grip or even HFB, I always expected high dps talents deep in trees, while KiS isn’t that bad in dps side, it cant be used at will in all fights. And tbh I don’t see it fit on combat tree style, seems more like a subtlety 51tp then combat, then again this is only my personal opinion but I would like it to be replaced with something like:

Empowered Slice n Dice – Increase by an additional 10% the attack speed of you slice n dice. Like T6 4pcs just 10% not 5%. This talent would increase the value of hit, while increasing moderately the dps of combat, maybe around 5% overall, if murder is changed in assassination then this would be almost the same for combat side.

Throwing specialization – While its not a bad talent considering they took out the gloves pvp bonus, imo its in the wrong tree, its more pvp talent than pve, probably deep subtlety will make it a lot more appealing for pvp rogues to be taken, probably lower than 25, so mutilate pvp builds cant have access to it, but deep ambush/bs/hemo builds become more appealing specially with the nerf to the mobility of ShS. Instead of this talent I would like to see something like

Improve Fang of Knives – Lower the energy cost of Fang of knives by 10%, 20% (2tp). While it seems fine as it is, mutilate’s Focus attacks and overkill work on it, combat doesn’t have anything. This talent will just lower the energy from 50 to 40.


Poisons,
I think blizzard should review this, especially things like wound>instant for combat. Or fast daggers > slow daggers for mutilate due to instant poisons. Even though right now it’s moving back again due to bug of offhand procing dual poisons.

I think blizzards late review on poisons, upping wounded to 50%proc not stacking and nerfing poisons late on beta lead to this mismatch.

I would like to see instant being normalized where speed doesn’t become a huge factor toward its damage contribution. While the damage seems fine at least seeing how warriors bleeding was buffed as well, I think some tweaking needs to happen into instant at least.

Maybe something along the lines of extra damage per swing, tied down to the multiplier of damage of the weapon, for example (weapon damage range * %) +AP bonus, you could play with the % proc rate and the wpn % contribution so both weapons are relatively attractive to using instant, the faster weapons will proc more with less damage per hit and slower weapons will proc less with higher damage contribution.

I would also like wounded damage contribution to be removed, I never understood why wounded should do damage, while mind numbing doesn’t, to the point that combat uses wounded over instant in pve, taking another debuff slot. Maybe an inherit resist dispel would be better than extra damage for wounded poison, and make it more up to par with MS debuff is.


Combo Points,
I would like to see combo points become a self buff instead of target, this would allow rogues to be a lot more flexible into multi target dps. Probably with an expire timer so rogues can’t have cp saved from previous fights, although u can see warriors trying to stack rage before fights aswell as DK with runes.

Hit rating is balanced around other stats, like expertise, etc. Just changing the ratios is not as easy as just changing one formula. Unless we get a real dual attack effect added, like windfury was, hit is not going to dramatically increase in value imo. Differing values for melee/spell hit also play into hybrids, and the ability to cap hit for spell/phys without "wasting" a large portion of hit.
In regards to capping, it in some ways is the same its always been. Casters cap, not just for a damage increasing stat, but to make sure dispells, speelsteals, and interrupts work. So while casters cap actively go for capping, which is higher than melee hit cap, its often for differing reasons.

In regards to combat, personally I prefer a shifting of emphasis away from white damage. Long gone are the days I runn 27% hit in raids, then go out and solo waste a large portion of that hit. When I solo, I basically need to cap yellow hit, and load a bunch of crit/ap so my specials just burn targets down. Which now, is basically how we are designed.
Prey on the weak is pretty incredible atm, its synergy with lethality makes for some pretty insane rng damage fluctuation as well. I am pretty happy with the damage per talent point return. Killing spree on the otherhand suffers from design and implementation flaws that makes a luckluster talent even worse. It is burst, which is nice, but being pulled off a boss to hit a critter 10 yds away on hit #5, and being out of melee on the boss your fighting is terrible.
Poisons - This is one area of contention that I dislike. I dont like envenom clearing dp stacks, and I dont like faster weapons having such a large difference in overall dmg due to weapon speed. That smacks of a flaw that needs to be fixed. In regards to poison dmg and wound, mortal strike and aimed shot do dmg, I do not see why you would want to give up dmg in order to keep an ms effect up, while other classes dont.

Are fury warriors really doing so much more dps than rogues?

TG warriors that are hit capped now, will net a free 150ish stat points, either str or crit, from losing the 5% hit cap penalty and regemming in 3.08. Right now, TG warriors get 20%+ of their dmg from deep wounds, a tier 3 talent in arms, on non cimick fights, and 30-40ish% on gimick fights like Thaddius/loatheb. I dont see TG warriors as doing a metric ton more dmg than rogues right now in general, but dw is in need of tuning.

I very much like that idea, actually. It'd be nice on trash as well, where you have to balance poison uptime for mutilate extra damage against envenoming.

Our fury warrior is currently able to pull ~4.5k DPS with his present gear if we have someone else to keep up sunders, ~4.2k if he has to keep up sunders himself.
The World of Warcraft Armory

By comparison, on a good stationary bossfight with optimal conditions, our rogues cap out at 3.8-4.0k. This, even with significantly better gear than said warrior.

Unfortunately, changing it in the manner you want to isn't really realistic with Find Weakness (+9% damage against everything) in the same tree as well. Blizzard devs would consider it "boring". A +Expertise bonus in deep assassination would be interesting though, with the only downside being itemization being tougher to figure out without expertise-capping with ilvl 226 items like Combat can, and a less-sharp delineation of things like "Chestguard of the Recluse is for Mutilate, Frosted Adroit Handguards are for Combat".

I've always thought that there should be an Assassination talent that allows you to build to 6 combo points, but maybe that would be unrealistic and hard to balance.

I'm sure they'll look at the facts and decide to do something, or not, and hopefully what they decide will be appropriate.

Well a new quote from GC,

It does seem like Haste is more valuable for casters right now than meele, and I would say even for Combat Rogues right now it seems to me like it was valued higher in TBC compared to WoTLK. It would be interesting to see if they do change Haste mechanics for meele, which route they go.

I honestly don't see what they would add to haste to make it more appealing to Mutilate rogues, though a GCD reduction could be kinky for Combat. I guess GCD reduction could be interesting for Mutilate too, "in practice" more than "on spreadsheet" (because of things like tightness of cycles, HfB refreshment, etc), but I can't really figure out what they could do to make it that much better?

I remember in TBC it having been proven that PPM mechanics were affected by passive haste rating, but not by +% haste abilities like Slice and Dice or Blade Flurry. Has that changed? If not, given that proc-enchants will probably forever be the "top DPS enchantments for melee", maybe that would make haste more worthwhile. Again though, that doesn't really increase the value of the stat so much as it decreases the "penalty" associated with it.

Well, they could do something like change the conversion of haste rating to melee haste; at the moment hit and spell hit have different conversions, and there's nothing stopping them from doing the same with haste. Nor would it be the first time they adjusted the haste rating conversions. And if they, for instance, dropped the conversion rate from 32.whatever to 26.whatever (the same as the spell hit conversion), haste would abruptly become one of our stronger stats, as it's EP value would rise to somewhere in the 1.9-2 range. So that would be sort of the obvious change; however, there's probably some more subtle things they can do as well.

Well isnt totally true though, check combat tree, multiple talents that increase the same like aggression, surprise attacks, and blade twisting increase SS damage, but i do agree into boring, it can be done.

Im not sure, i recently seen some WWS with warriors able to reach 6k, Wow Web Stats , and i have yet to seen yet a warrior dualwielding Betrayer of humanity or with the best in slot, wait for that 5% hit penalty drop and we might see TG warriors like hunters are right now.

Honestly, I don't see how a haste rating conversion could help rogues... It is a very nice idea that all the classes get together and sing Kumbayah before and after raid, but during the raid it is a fight to A). Win, and B). Prove your worth so you are invited again. Obviously, if warriors and hunters recieve yet another buff in the form of increased haste percentage this time(even with the impending BM nerf) rogues will only be left in the dust, again. I think that there are some painfully obvious changes blizz could make to both the mut and combat tree to buff rogues without nerfring other classes to the ground (as they have already started to do with BM, though that probably was deserved).

First off, deadly brew? This was a very awesome talent, and it freed up the need to choose between ip/ip or dp/ip and also gives us flexibility to spec out of some the weeker filler talents, i.e murder and TtT.

Secondly, Focused Attacks... I didn't think that FA was at all overpowered in beta, although my playtime in beta was... short to say the least, it certainly didn't amount to me spamming mutilate/finisher ever 5 seconds.... I see no reason why that ability was nerfed to an essentially weeker version of combat potency. Yes, it does scale dualy with haste and crit, and this is a beautiful thing, it would be considerably more helpful though, if it didn't take 30 procs to account for a single combo builder.

Also, Find weakness? Changed back to two points to level out the tier and damage buffed to 5% per point perhaps? Or damage buffed to 5% per point and made 3 points for a total of 15%.

In any event, the idea was not to go telling blues what they should be doing, but rather to ask why these talents were nerfed to begin with. Clearly we are not an overpowered dps machine at this stage of the game, and although we are gear dependant, this doesn't seem to be a scaling issue, it is not as if we reach some magic gear level like MM did in BC to suddenly become godlike. Spreadsheet math pretty much dictates that the course for rogues at this stage of the game is mediocrity, and it will pretty much stay that way until blizz and her devs decide to give us a lift.

To be fair, that warrior does gain two deathwishes and a hysteria in a 2:30 fight (one of which probably coincided with bloodlust), so it's a little stacked. But yes, TG warriors are currently out damaging us in almost all fights (aoe, gimmick and straight up nuke) - and scarily, have always been (at least one of) the class that scales best due to rage dynamics.

I was looking at the trees the other day and warriors just have so much more juicy things than us, I mean, for 21 points they get Deathwish where we get Blade Flurry. And while there's no denying Blade Flurry is an awesome ability, c'mon. The joke that is deep wounds, third tier ? Taste for Blood ? Intesify Rage dropping the Death Wish cooldown to 2 minutes ? And comparing Titan's Grip to Killing Spree, wow. This is an ability i can't use on practically anything that has a tail, or puts me on some mounted unit, or includes mobs near to the boss that i shouldn't actively be hitting.

I don't like posting suggestions because it always seems a little immature and futile, but really AR could do with a buff or a complete overhaul. I'd say make it 30 seconds, or lower the cooldown to 2 minutes, or both, but we all know how far that'd get before forums exploded even harder with ROGUE PVp OMG posts. There's really no need for HfB to be manually stacked, make it an on crit proc, or an on-mutilate proc, and hell, make it a flat 10% or more, and you could even roll in a 5% raidcrit buff to that and Killing Spree (or whatever it's alternative should be, because it's just not good) so that people might actually want to take us anywhere.

Can we please stop posting dream suggestions of how to change our talents and/or abilities? It's pointless and stupid.

The best thing we can do, if we feel that both Combat and Assassination are not sufficiently powerful, is to discuss specifically what aspects of those two trees are "lacking," so to speak.

The biggest gripe I have (besides believing that our DPS is a tad too low) is Expose Armor. There are really two (somewhat overlapping) problems with the way Expose Armor works: the annoyance of keeping it up and the DPS loss of keeping it up. In terms of convenience, it's a lot easier to put Sunder(s) on a mob that dies in a short-to-medium period of time than it is to Expose Armor (take M'uru adds for example). In terms of DPS, a Prot warrior loses nothing to keep Sunder Armor up; a DPS warrior must drop a single Sunder every 30 seconds while a rogue must use a full Expose Armor every 30 seconds. Furthermore, it's even more of a DPS decrease/annoyance to have to Expose as a Mutilate rogue, since you'll end up having to Mutilate at 4 CPs in the event of a Ruthlessness + SF proc (I've never had to do it, so I'm not even sure whether that cycle is 100% sustainable as Mutilate without putting points into Imp SnD). If we are to become an actually viable source of the debuff, something needs to change with the way Expose Armor works.

Secondly, I'm not sure why a lot of people are proclaiming that playing Mutilate is hard. I won't argue it's less difficult than Combat, certainly; I won't argue that it's a really fun playstyle, either. But I do think Mutilate "lost" its one great advantage in BC, which was the amazing ability to pick up a cycle from offtarget. Right now, Mutilate is far more susceptible to lost DPS than Combat is when offtarget, as one frequently has to use Slice and Dice again rather than Envenom.

I'm not exactly sure it's productive to also shoot down brainstorming. You may view some of the suggestions as ridiculous pie-in-the-sky ideas, but why does that mean it's better to just shut down idea generation. Even if the idea in its original form isn't realistic, we can glean something of value out of it that might evolve into tomorrow's solution.

My take on things is that we're in trouble. I don't think it's a desperate situation heralding the extinction of rogues, but I do see us being marginalized because of the fact that we don't offer enough as it stands compared to the "next best option." The degree to the tuning is up to debate, but the one thing that everyone does see is that we need changes. Let's try not to let the ideas get out of hand, but let's not slam the door on something that can lead to a good idea.

Speaking as a moderator for a moment (which means everyone should listen): this is actually pretty explicitly what we're trying to avoid. Wishlisting is rather specifically against the rules, and it is for a reason: those reasons look something like

1) The vast majority of ideas are bad, and
2) It's not our job to fix it.

Let me go through these one at a time.

First, most ideas are bad. If you look at some of the ideas that have already been posted in this thread, it's pretty clear that a lot of people don't even know what the problems were, nor have given the slightest thought to the consequences of their proposed solutions. Most of the ideas generated by that sort of speculation takes the form "wouldn't it be cool if..." - and the answer is usually no, it's wouldn't. And, frankly, while their may be a good idea every once in a while generated by such rampant speculation, it seems to do so by the same mechanism by which a sufficient number of monkeys and typewriters can generate the works of Shakespeare (though admittedly with a marginally higher success rate). And speaking as the person who gets to clean up the mess than an open invitation for bad ideas would bring, I'd rather prefer that such things be done elsewhere.

Second, assuming for the moment that we *did* generate a good idea, and we *did* get the majority of the community to buy into it and declare it to be a good one (note that this will never happen)... are we really convinced it would make the slightest bit of difference? Blizzard *might* buy into it and implement it... or they might not. They have their own priorities, and standards of balance, and ultimately their standards are probably better for the gam in general. Frankly, as much time as some of us put into this game, we really do focus on a pretty narrow segment of the game. Blizzard's concerns are different from ours - balance in high-end raiding is important, but so is balance in 5 mans, and solo farming, and PvP, and all the other aspects of the game. And frankly, I don't think there's anyone here who's qualified to assess balance across all those areas. There are people at Blizzard who are - and they're paid do it, and frankly they're pretty darn good at it. So, really, I don't see that coming up solutions is necessarily within our domain. It's fine to identity problems, but when it comes to proposing solutions, I'd rather we leave that to the people who are actually qualified to do so.

So, in short: if you have specific concerns about the class that you would like to see adressed - great, let's hear them. If you think an ability is over- or under-powered, that's fine. And if you have some notion of *why* it's a problem, that's fine too. But when it comes to making up new abilities from whole cloth, that is explicitly against the forum rules, and it will not be allowed.

And just to be clear: "we don't offer anything to the raid except DPS, and not enough of that" is not a valid complaint. "We suck" is not a valid complaint. Be specific, or don't waste our time. So, for instance: "Expose Armor has much higher opportunity cost than Sunder Armor, particular for Mutilate for whom the need to generate a full 5 combo points rather than 4+ is onerous" is a good complaint. Arguing "it would be good if they could give a cheaper way to refresh it" is fine. But debating whether it should be done via glyph, modification of talent, or creating a whole new ability is simply not a productive discussion.