Maybe I am grossly misunderstanding what you are saying about party members dying, but making the assumption that losing 1 party member won't diminish your DPS as HaT makes very little sense to me without some evidence. If that were the case, HaT would be a very viable 5-man dungeon spec, which it really isn't (not to say its bad, but for 5-mans it really isn't ideal). That problem will only be compounded by more group members dying. Take for example a combat and a HaT rogue in the same group.

- The HaT rogue dies, the raid suffers dps loss, and pushed forward.
- The Combat rogue dies, the raid suffers a dps loss from loss of savage combat (assuming no arms warrior is present, just for the point of illustration) and a dps loss because the HaT specced rogue has just lost a source of CP income.

That is just one possible scenario, things might not be impacted as much or maybe even more by the death of another raid/party member.

Combo point roof is 5 points, considering the GCD and energy reserves your interval when one party member dies increases for an X amount of time. That's not to say that at certain points you're looking at better CP regeneration than one can spend with a full party active. The current layout for HaT stacked groups looks like this. I'm stating that the interval decrease does not necessarily mean an noticeable and subjective loss of dps whereas you could regard the spec as not worth it for progression runs.

The rest of your post is a misinterpretation of my post:
- Note that I phrased it as a minimal loss of dps not as you put it 'won't diminish your DPS as HaT';
- Your notion of an increasing problem when more group members dies, ultimately means the two situations I described;
- I'm not arguing the raid utility savage combat gives, but the negativity (eg. Toy spec) that surrounds the HaT spec and defending its rightful place in the cycle.

I'll continue to play devil's advocate.

One could even say HaT is the preferred spec for learning fights, as you get more chances per pull to learn the mechanics. Without Cheat Death, one early mistake means you watch the rest of the fight, whether it's player or raid error.

If your point is consistent DPS, there is no DPS spec that is more consistent than one that effectively can't die and has a range closing ability. You will find that you lose less damage than you think from dead group members, along with the fact that a progression fight is probably over if your group is dead. As a melee class, being able to switch targets quickly is invaluable for progression where DPS focus may need to change mid-fight without prior warning.

HaT is no longer a trivial spec to play properly. It certainly has its advantages and disadvantages, but I don't think we should be complaining that Blizzard has finally given us 3 viable DPS specs.

Stop talking about Cheat Death unless you're going to explain specifically the places where you use it proactively to increase your DPS, or the places where it is a DPS increase by virtue of getting you out of an otherwise inescapable situation. Aside from that, no one cares about your feelings that it helps on learning or that it gives you a psychological edge or that it makes sex better.

This seems to widen the gap between both the Rupture and Tricks glyph in terms of rDPS and especially personal DPS if exchanging with another rogue. With some quick napkin math, I'm getting the glyph being bettered by about 2%. That's of course assuming you use it on CD.

I'm no math expert, but would this be correct?

Edit: removed because I fail at math

This is what I get:

Take an example of a 5k baseline dps toon that you are casting TotT on.

Old Glyph: 25% damage for 6 seconds = 7500 additional damage every 30 seconds.

New Glyph: 15% damage for 10 seconds = 7500 additional damage every 30 seconds.

Am I missing something?

People - when you do napkin math (god I hate that term), please post it so we can confirm or deny your math.

So this is a little off the subject at hand, and would probably fit better in another thread, but this is 3.1, and this question was posed for 3.1 content, so I'm putting the answer here for anyone else who may have had this question.
The question was posed "does the Windfury 20% haste cancel out the 20% attack speed debuff from General Vezax" and I said "of course not, that's not how it works."
That doesn't really answer the question, as we all know. So I broke down and worked it all out and this is what I got.

Base weapon speed/((1+first item of haste)*(second item of haste)*(etc))= attack speed
Plugging that in for what I have
1.8((1+0.40)*(1+0.079))=1.1916 (obviously rounded to 1.19 on the character sheet)

Talking about WF haste (20%) and the 20% debuff from General.
Let's see if I'm doing this right, since I can't confirm this until I'm on the actual boss.
Assuming I have the WF haste bonus, putting it into the formula I have (and simplified slightly to avoid it going on forever) I'm looking at
1.8/((1.4)*(1.079)*(1.2))=1.07 MH attack speed.
The general throws a 20% debuff to your attack speed, this is added in after all your haste buffs. This is simple enough to do by simply multiplying your final attack speed by the debuff.
1.07*0.8=1.3392 (1.34 as seen on the character sheet)
This means the the boss' debuff DOES, in fact, cancel out the 20% bonus from WF and further slow your attack speed.
Isolating the WF buff and the boss debuff, this would be expressed by
1.8/((1.2)(.8))=1.875

For all of the above math 1.8 is my MH attack speed before modifiers. SnD is .4, haste from gear is .079, WF is .2, and the boss' debuff is .8 (20% slowdown from 100%=.8)


Just in case anyone else was wondering something similar.

The only thing it changes is that the glyph becomes less effective for double DPS arena teams. In a PVE scenario it is a wash.

The old one increased the damage done by your target by 2/3, the new one increases the duration of the effect by 2/3. They should be nearly equivalent in total damage while lowering burst. You're completely right here.

What hasn't been noted though is just how good this might be for PvE rogues in fights where threat can become an issue. Yes, I know it's not the greatest concern right now, but it very well could be. Besides our natural threat reduction we carry with us, TotT also allowed us to gain zero additional threat for ~20% of any given fight; the glyph change keeps the total damage increase to our target nearly the same but also means we gain zero additional threat for another 13% of the fight (which may become a problem for the player we dump it on).

With 2 or 3 rogues it wouldn't really matter much if all the rogues would use it on each other threat should still remain within acceptable limits.
However if the fight itself has aggro issues, then one of the rogues could ToTT the tank providing quite a lot of extra threat.

On add intensive fights a 10 second ToTT gives much more time to FoK the adds to a target (and provide you with threatless AoE damage).

So overall I would say that it's a buff to PvE, and a slight nerf to Double-DPS in PvP.

Now, I haven't tested this personally because my guild sucks and we haven't got to Vezax yet. But the entire haste/slow fiasco was fixed in patch 1.12 to work sensibly; it was a big deal at the time. The founding principle behind the fix was so that a "20% haste" effect and a "20% slow" effect would exactly cancel each other out. The correct way to calculate weapon speed from haste effects is what you have above: 20% haste from WF causes a 1/1.2 multiplier to your attack speed. Slow effects are calculated differently; a 20% slow from Vezax causes a 1.2 multiplier to your attack speed. These (should) cancel exactly. If your character sheet and manual testing disagree with this claim, then someone programming the Vezax encounter used an old-style slow effect again, which is a bug.

That would mean that the encounter is bugged because a guild member confirmed this after I posted the numbers on our website.
Or, perhaps, it is working as intended, and they want the slower attack speed, despite WF/IT.

From the 3.1.3 notes:

This is kind of interesting...it gives Mutilate a mini-Adrenaline Rush cooldown, at least we have something to optimize now.

Going up to 20 seconds after will make Vanish a nice tool, not only as a threat dump, but offensively on boss encounters.

Do you suppose the 30% would only affect our natural regen? I think it would be asking a bit much for it to also work with our FA procs.

Napkin math time: 10 energy/second normally, becomes 13/second, which totals out to 260 energy in the duration. We gain 60 energy for stealthing/Vanishing. That's some considerable cycle compression if used at a good "burn" time.

I would suspect that it would only affect our natural regen as that seems to be the way blizzard prefers to do things these days. I think making work with FA would push people towards prefering faster offhands again just for the increase in the FA procs during this buff period, which is certainly not blizzards intention. It is nice to see this coming into the game, assassination certainly needed some sort of an on demand cooldown (not counting coldblood).

Normally I'm not a fan of opening from stealth because with my current build it means I would be to the target "late", but moving from 51/13/7 to 51/7/13 (w/ Camoflauge) after picking up 4pc T8 might make more sense now as you can stealth/sprint to open much more easily for a pretty decent gain.

I think another interesting note that this change contributes is the fact that it actually gives us less need for optimization when using Vanish offensively. In Overkill's current incarnation, its energy-saving potential gives a flat, 10 energy reduction on any and all abilities used during its uptime, encouraging the use of Vanish when Hunger for Blood is about to fall off, to maximize the volume of abilities that get the discount.

In other words, Overkill currently works alot like the 4pT7 bonus, only without incidental optimization; its energy-saving potential is not well adapted to passively pooling energy (Overkill's effect currently saves you more energy for every ability you use during it those six seconds.)

With this change, Overkill will behave more similarly to Adrenaline Rush, as chalon stated, which gives it more flexibility as an offensive cooldown.




Final note is that this overkills Overkill's explosive synergy with Fan of Knives.

I wonder if it may be worth droping 2 points in Precision to grab Elusiveness in the 51/7/13 build to drop the cooldown of Vanish to 2 min if this new Overkill makes it to live.

I thought people used it this way already. I typically try to use Vanish following some energy pooling and hitting a 5 CP Envenom (preferably with Cold Blood) so I can try to squeeze as many Mutilates and finishers under the Envenom+Overkill buffs as possible. Typically, this saves me about 40 energy in 6 seconds. I also try to hit HfB in this time period since a 5 energy HfB should be efficient if you have less than 40 seconds left on the buff. That's up to an additional 10 energy saved (depending on how much of your current HfB buff you've "wasted").

With the new change you will only be gaining 18 additional energy in the initial 6 seconds after opening, however, you will be getting 60 energy total after the full 20 seconds. So this is a PvP/soloing nerf for Mutilate burst, but overall it should be a PvE buff.

On the other hand, I do think the new Overkill doesn't play as well with timing Vanish with trinket+zerking procs, since the time when you have 3+ procc buffs up tends to be limited (ie much less than 20 seconds).

To be honest, i don't think a 30% faster energy regen every 2 mins would outdps a 2% more hit that works with all white hits too, boss fights are like 7 mins or even faster..
And to get those 2 points in sub tree you will have to use the 51/7/13 spec which ,except u have 4pcT8, is itself inferior to the 51/13/7.

Sure, I already Vanish/Overkill. But this change makes its usage more flexible, because you don't have to worry about being nearly full energy in order to get the full use of the Overkill.