Well, they could merge it with Overkill, which would make this not as utterly useless for PvE, which would be nice as its a mandatory talent for Mut. And critting on DoT would not increase burst in PvP, so I don't see any trouble with that.

On another point, something I'm wondering about rogues this patch, is the total lack of any news about Subtlety. I may be missing something, but it seems that HaT has not been really used in PvE since the bugfix, and that most PvP is done in Assa/Prep. So unless I'm completely off, deep Sub isn't used at all these days. Despite that, all the changes are concentrated in Combat and Assa.
Does this mean we'll see a lot of changes in the next stages of the patch for Sub, that I'm wrong and Sub is still often used, or that the dev have chosen to let it wait on the roadside at least until the next patch ?

Our cooldowns really are a double edged sword. On one side we rely on them fully to survive and on the other side we also rely on them fully to do our damage. As the game is now in arena's rogue's are one of the most fragile classes even with all these cooldowns available to us. We literally die in a stun or when for example evasion fades away. Evasion really isn't that much survivability these days, especially in 3v3 and 5v5 it happens constantly that you get completely annihilated through evasion. Then we have the other side of the story and that is when RNG favours us. The combination of evasion, cheapshot, kidney shot and snares can give us a huge amount of control of a fight temporarily while surviving incoming damage. If they want to nerf our cooldowns and abilities like preparation they first need to buff our passive defence or else they screw up pvp royally. This basically comes down to redoing the entire class and that's not on the agenda for now as GC stated. An uneducated guess is this is also the reason why we haven't seen any nerfs to prep yet.

I agree but it's really confusing that they pin that on Rogues and give Holy Paladins their new and improved Aura Mastery which gives that class (famous for defensive cooldowns used offensively) another way of doing so.

Realizing that you're simply tossing around ideas, I'd have to wonder, how would that impact PvE rogues? The tried-and-true rule of raiding as a rogue is to open on a boss, blow all your cooldowns, then Vanish at ~80% to reset your threat. Is 3 seconds of 0 DPS really necessary to fix Arenas?

And while we're on the subject, I've read several different posts (from various forums) suggesting that perhaps a wiser move would have been to simply swap Preparation and Premeditation in the Sub tree. It would make Prepilate an impossible spec, and not biff Mutilate's PvE damage output to the point where they're forced to tack 15-18% damage into one talent just to make it remain competitive.

Has a Blizzard rep ever addressed that question? I haven't seen it if so.

I posted something like this on the official WoW forums the other day. I agree with songster that moving Prep down will result in having only 1 PvP spec which is not what they want. Short of scrapping Prep altogether (yes I did go there...), I suggest moving it up instead, making it available to any PvP spec.

Before I get called crazy, this would of course require many other changes to the rest of the rogue's abilities.
- The Assassination tree would need its burst toned down, which would incidentally allow them to buff up the sustained DPS part of the tree, lowering the 18% HfB, removing the bleed requirement, or even going back to its current PvP use of removing a bleed from yourself.
- The Combat tree has very decent abilities for PvP already and is mighty fine in PvE. You would get rogues using Killing Spree in PvP for example.
- The Sub tree has always been attractive for PvP. It would probably need a buff in damage for both PvP and PvE, which incidentally would allow them to nerf HaT while still keeping competitive thanks to another damage buff.

Those are very general guidelines because I don't wish to start a talent wishlisting trend. This would create more viable PvP specs, and improve the PvP situation.

My conclusion on the official forums was that it was a lot of work and that I was hoping it was still considered for 3.1. And 2 days later, GC posts what you all just read, which seems eerily similar.

Has anyone been able to test if poisons have been fixed with the latest PTR update?

As some of the issues with chaining cooldowns with prep are tied closely to Overkill / Vanish I would say this shuld be a candidate for change. I dont see why prep shuld not be the prime pvp spec. As it stands now it shuld add both offensive and defensive advantages. But there shuld be ways to look at Overkill to ajust this. If you put an "Exhausted" (for a short time 20 sec) type mechanic that would prevent chain vanish, but in turn granted other offensive benefits instead. This could be a buff to both pve and pvp and adress the issue off chaining low cost openers with a huge energy pool.

Obviously 3 seconds of 0 DPS isn't really acceptable but since the issue songster was trying to address was the use of vanish to chain openers his idea could be changed to prevent using one in the 3 second window, while still allowing you to say restart auto-attacking or really anything that doesn't require stealth. Okay, enough of the baseless speculation.

Now, as Aldriana pointed out earlier, it's puzzling that they're so worried about people taking HfB for PvP when they're not doing it currently on the live servers where it's already a 15% damage buff with no bleed requirement ... it's hard to imagine that extra 3% pushing people over the edge and picking it over premed. That said I think the most recent change on the PTR, namely halving the energy cost and doubling the duration, is consistent with GC's claims that the bleed requirement was implemented merely as a sort of "insurance policy" against PvP burst.

I think the intent with the most recent change is to make it so muti rogues can keep as much uptime on HfB as possible with the minimum of nuisance using their own bleeds (thereby keeping the spec as viable as possible for 5-mans and 10-mans). With the lower energy cost, the penalty you pay for refreshing it early is much lower: you'll just be watching your rupture and if you don't think you can get another rupture up before HfB drops then you just refresh the duration. Given that a re-design is off the table for the moment, I think it's a good solution.

Uh... have you both forgotten that on live servers HfB is still three stacks of 5%, meaning 3 GCDs and almost a full energy bar to get it up and running? The reason people don't go for it in PvP is because of the huge energy cost and the time taken to start it up.



As regards HfB in PvE, personally I don't find it to be anything like as cumbersome as people say, even before 3.1 hits.

Look at it this way - each rogue PvE build relies on a DPS cycle of one builder and three "finishers".

For combat, that's SS, S'n'D, Rupture and Eviscerate.
For HaT, it's (Hemo), S'n'D, Rupture and Eviscerate. Hemo de-emphasised through extra CPs.
For Mutilate, it's Mutilate, Rupture, Envenom/Cttc and HfB. S'n'D replaced because of CttC.

In terms of strict timers to watch, Mutilate is hardly any different to combat once you're geared enough to support it. The myth that Mutilate is a difficult spec derives from the early blue-geared days when you just didn't get through a cycle fast enough due to missed finishers, and S'n'D dropped. Once you have Expertise capped, this is a non issue. Mutilate watches two timers: Rupture and HfB. Combat watches two timers: S'n'D and Rupture. Same for HaT.

Arguing that you shouldn't have to maintain HfB is actually arguing for a more boring spec with less interactivity. Mutilate is boring enough as it is due to lack of cooldowns - taking yet another button out of the rotation is actually a step backward in terms of the interest factor in my opinion.

Or, 20 energy right before you open up because you were smart enough to pre-apply it.

As mentioned before, right now, on Live servers, as soon as an Arena game begins, HfB is wiped. You cannot pre-stack it. So yes it is too expensive to use in PvP with the 3-stack system.

In any case, we've already had that discussion here. To end this speculation, we need to look at rogues' parses from arena games. What we need is the amount of damage done when opening up before the other player can react. And the same after a Vanish, a Prep... etc. It's the burst that needs looked at. Once you have that data, add 15% (or even 18%) damage. If it appears that there is potential to kill your opponent during your opening moves just by adding 18% damage, even if only on 50% of the fights, then you just proved that a PvP HfB build could work, which proves Blizzard's theory. If not, then you'll have a case supported by data to present to Blizzad.