Hmm, true... I kinda posted it wrongish: But what I meant was, because of multiplicative nature of haste, you reach the point where faster attack speed is just not worth going for sooner than 'expected'.

Look to make it more clear:

It is mathematically possible to reach a point at which 1% more hit is more valuable than 100% more haste, because that 1% more hit increases your actual hits way more than 100% more haste. Logically this means that the only situation where haste does not put a diminishing return on itself *compared* to other stats is when you are absolutely hit/crit/expertise capped.

Actually, that's not even remotely possible, unless you're always fighting something with a 90% Hit debuff.

Edit: To be completely accurate, the only way that 1% Hit would land more attacks than 100% Haste is if your actual Hit rate is less than 1%.

It is very possible, mathematically (I am trying to explain why there is a diminishing return on some mechanism like haste). Even if your miss chance is 1%, you can stack enough haste that adding 100% more still does not pass the value of that 1% hit. Basically: The value of haste is the result of how good your hit table looks like.

No, that is absolutely incorrect. Read my previous edit.

Edit: I should have noted that I was talking about attainable stats.

Actually, according to my quickly hacked together excel sheet, at 261,407 haste rating (being 6600%), adding 1% hit yields more damage gain than adding another 100% haste (3279).

That is with 27% miss, 6.5% dodge and totally ignoring all other stats, such as SnD, crits, glancing blows, poisons, etc.

So let me ask this:

At what point are we better of using eviscerate and IP/IP over DP to use envenom, considering the changes to mutilate?

EDIT: to clarify, I mean EVEN if someone isn't providing a poison buff, let's just say.

This is not a diminishing return but rather the perfect example of linear scaling.
The same could presumably be said about AP as having 10k AP would heavily inflate the value of other stats while (and this is the important part) maintaining the value of AP.
Now if we regard the "returns" reciewed by stacking more haste not as DPS-increases but increases in the summed Equivalence Points of our Character then the dependence on the worth of other stats inherent to the Equivalence Point system would indeed result in diminishing returns for every new point of Haste Rating but this is the case with many stats.

So, to return to the proposed 3.1 changes for a minute: since the first teaser of these abilities were posted, there's been something bothering me about the new HFB, and I think I've figured out what it is. And, in point of fact, it's not one thing, but three.

First: the ability is becoming too powerful. Consider the following quote from last September:

Now, the talent being discussed in this case is Titan's Grip. But everything they're saying could equally well apply to the newest Hunger for Blood changes... except they're doing exactly what they said they didn't want to do. They're buffing a single talent point - which is already quite good - by a significant amount, in order to compensate for the overall DPS shortcoming of the class. I mean, at this point, it's quite literally the talent of "rogue DPS is 15% too low, so we're going to give them a talent to do 15% more damage" - period.

Second: it's a really boring talent. I mean, I admit this is somewhat subjective, but somehow an ability that's a straight percent damage boost doesn't really seem that exciting to me. It doesn't in any way change the way you play... you just happen to do more damage. Most 51 point talents are one of three things:

1) A ability that is in some way better than existing abilities. For instance, the 51-point Unholy DK talent provides one with a new, more efficient way of dumping runic power to work into your rotation. The 51-point prot warrior talent increases their AoE tanking ability. The 51-point resto druid talent is a better AoE heal than more or less anything else they have.

2) A cooldown. Killing Spree (combat rogue), Bladestorm (Arms Warrior), Metamorphosis (Demonology Lock), Starfall (Boomkin), etc.

3) Something that has little direct effect on gameplay, but lets you do something cool that most other people can't. Titan's Grip and Beast Mastery are the obvious examples here.

The relevant point is, all of these change your gameplay in some significant way. You have a new spell to work into your rotation, or a new cooldown to pop when you need burst damage, or are looking for different itemization, or whatever. Somehow, the notion of an ability that doesn't change anything you do but simply does slightly more damage seems like a pretty boring 51-point talent. And in particular, I don't think it lives up to the preview billing:

It's still annoying to keep up all the time (though a little less punishing if you let it drop), and I don't really think it's that interesting. Frankly, CttC as a 1-point talent would make a far better 51-point talent than HFB - at least it changes your rotations as it gives you more DPS.

And third - and perhaps most importantly: I think making the majority of the rogue DPS buff lumped into a straight percent damage boost is going to hinder the ability to fix other problems - as a number of the current rogue issues have obvious solutions that would involve increasing rogue DPS. Consider some of the common rogue problems we see right now:

1) Weapon speed - on both weapons, but particularly the MH - is too important, leading to rogues using 130 DPS blues over Naxx epics. Well, there's a number of things that would help here, but one of the simplest changes that would make itemization a bit more intuitive would be to make finishers have a chance to proc effects from both hands. Suddenly, the slower and/or higher DPS weapon now wants to be back in the MH. However, this also gives a 1% damage boost - which isn't a bad thing, but if the majority of our DPS benefit is going to come from HFB, there's not a lot of room for this sort of tweak.

2) Master Poisoner costs too much, and sucks. Blizzard has stated they want to do something about talented raid buffs to make those that cost a lot less painful to get. Master Poisoner would seem to fall under that heading. The problems here are twofold - it provides no DPS benefit, and it doesn't have full uptime. But if, for instance, it also gave a 33/66/100% chance for Envenom to not clear your Deadly Poison stacks, that would address both problems. Not to mention helping with the previous point on weapon speed. But this would also give a 1-2% damage buff... and again, you can't add too many 1 and 2 percent damage buffs if you're going to lump the majority of our DPS buff into HFB.

3) Mutilate rogues lack good DPS cooldowns for burst situations. If - as we expect - combat gets buffed so as to be comparable to Mutilate in sustained DPS, the fact that the Combat rogue can control when they get spikes of damage and the Mut rogue can't is going to be a disadvantage. Hence, we could use some manner of DPS cooldowns in Mutilate to provide some level of controllable burst. But this would, again, increase our DPS.

4) DP gets badly outscaled by IP. Buffing DP AP scaling by 50% (from .08 to .12) would help a *lot*... and would, again, increase our DPS.

I'm not going to claim that these are all our problems, or the best way of fixing them, or whatever... but the point remains, there are a number of tweaks that could make to fix some of our other problems, and if all our DPS gains are going to be for HFB, it seems like that would hinder their ability to fix other things.

So, in conclusion: I think the new HFB (and the existing HFB as well, for that matter) are just poorly defined abilities, and I'd like to see Blizzard come up with something a little more interesting and a little better balanced. There are plenty of places in the tree to tweak things to fix existing problems that would get us the DPS boost we need without having to dump it all in a "+n% damage" talent, and I think we'd be better off if Blizzard did it that way rather than going with the current proposal.

Should I ask what everyone thinks about the announced 3.0.9 changes in this thread or wait on a new one?
From MMO Champion:
* Hunger for Blood (Assassination): Now increases damage 5% per stack, (up from 3%.)
* Mind Numbing Poison now reduces cast time by 30%, down from 60%.
* Mutilate damage will now do 20% increased damage against poisoned targets, down from 50%.
* Slice and Dice: This ability now increases melee attack speed by 40%, up from 30%.

I don't think it's entirely fair to judge HfB in that light. The assassination tree already has a talent like that, in the form of mutilate. It's our defining ability, just like titan's grip is for fury warriors. It doesn't make sense to add a 'second' ability like that. I do agree that it's fairly boring however and that CttC would have been a better 51 pointer, all things considering.

That wouldn't address the issue (and I think it is an issue) of being forced into the fastest possible offhand, leaving for very little variation/choice. For instance, murder and WB should both be valid offhand choices, but one is clearly superior to the other based on a stat that isn't even weighed into the item budget. Adjusting poison proc chance to the weapon speed would probably be better so that poison DPS is the same regardless of weapon choice.

I think that is only viable if the 50% poison time reduction on the talent were dropped, else it would be much too valuable for 3 talent points I guess.

Obviously I haven't tested, but I'm not sure those changes are equivalent (for HfB/Mut dps builds). Was there some hybrid spec that that ran around with just 41 points in Assassination? Is the mutilate nerf the way to bring up Combat's DPS?

Anyone should be able to look at the new (or old) HfB and see it's problem. It's one talent point for a straight 15%, across the board, DPS increase. How is that good class design? It's not and anyone who says it is is a lunatic.

Sure it might get Rogue PvE DPS where it needs to be now, but a week ago I made the joke to fix Rogues, the Rogue class description should say, "does x% more damage to bosses than you would think." Little did I know I was a fortune teller.

What does that put the EP/talent point for HfB at now? 6000? Higher? Over 9000? *smirk*

As for the Ghostcrawler quote, that doesn't surprise me in the least. It fits well with the quote, "We won't keep one class poor in PvE just because they're good in PvP." Which is exactly what they did.

Class balance isn't easy, but this is getting ridunculous.

http://elitistjerks.com/1094335-post179.html

This has been part of the discussion for a bit.

These changes give a net buff to pve mutilate builds. The appearance suggests 30 seconds spent figuring out how to reduce pvp burst then another 15 seconds on how to make it up in pve. How does nerfing one tree buff the other exactly?

It definitely smacks of sloppiness. Maybe we can all hope there's a more elegant solution coming in 3.1 because is far from it.

Anybody have any numbers crunched for how Combat is going to stack up now? Rather favorably, I'd imagine, and it's nice to know that Combat can bring their raid buff without gimping damage as severely.

I know this isn't the right forum for this (since this is 3.1 discussion), but I don't have time to look through every forum/post. So, I apologize in advance for posting this here, but since this is the only forum in which I have seen some discussion on 3.0.9, I am wondering where is the source of these notes? Nobody has provided a link to these notes (the official ones from Blizzard...), and when I did a quick search, all I found was the MMO-Champion coverage. While these changes don't seem outrageous to me, I would like to know if they actually came from Blizzard...

Please feel free to set me straight if I missed something big.


EDIT: Seems my quote missed something. Not sure how to fix that, but if you didn't gather, I was referring to the 3.0.9 changes reported on MMO-Champion that don't seem to have a "real" Blizzard source the back them up.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - HfB, Which is it?

Sideways remark that implicitly confirms the MMO champ notes.

Also, threads with the 3.0.9 notes have been disappearing from Official/Realm Forums.

Another issue is how bloated our talent tree's are becoming. Combat has no room at all for any utility talents (think in the lines of imp sprint, imp kick etc). Mutilate has mostly the same issue that we have to make so many choices between talents (although in some cases this isn't nessarily bad). Thing's like quick recovery, fleet footed, endurance, improved sprint, unfair advantage and nerves of steel are all talents that can be nice for solo'ing or during certain situations in raids. But neither combat nor mutilate has any spare points to get one of these talents. And on the other hand we get dps talents that are just bad. Ruthlessnes and master poisoner are examples of talents that cost alot of talent points with a very marginal gain. I'm not even going to talk about the sub tree which has the exact opposite for the first 3-4 tiers of talents where they only get utility stuff.

Correct me if this is too much wishlisting but at this point Relentless Strikes being a trainer ability seems long overdue. Every pvp and pve spec has that talent. It's become so important that it's safe to say each rogue spec is balanced around having it. We are lacking in pve and we are stuck with bloated talent tree's. Vulajins spreadsheet puts this talent at around 400-450 dps with high end gear fully raid buffed for a mutilate rogue and im guessing its going to be around the same dps for the other specs. Allowing this to be a trainer ability will free up 5 talent points for both combat and mutilate allowing both to get talents that could be a good dps boost without breaking pvp or requiring a single talent to give an insane dps boost.

Normally I would say relentless strikes becoming a trained ability is far too strong, but considering we are trailing in DPS and every PvE spec uses this, it might not be that terrible of an idea.

@ Feist-Mok

I guess the remark does *implicitly* confirm it, but I'd still like to see a link to a Blizzard post about it, since this wouldn't be the first time bullsh*t was put up on MMO. Especially since 3.0.9 posts are disappearing from the official forums. But eh, I guess MMO will have to suffice, maybe we will know more tomorrow after maintenance.

It'd be a great idea, and has been for months. It'd really help round-out Combat and Mutilate specs as well. Mutilate would be able to finish off CQC and get Lightning Reflexes. Combat would be able to get some deeper Assassination talents for DPS.