Incoming Rogue Changes Discussion - Page 13

Phantomwrath · 08/14/09, 11:17 AM

Looks like another case of PVE getting castrated for the sake of PVP. I honestly could have understood a 15% to maybe even 20% nerf of FoKs and dropping the interrupt to a 25%/50% chance. The nerfs in their current state though seem quite a bit extreme (trying to be unbiased).

xmod2 · 08/14/09, 11:44 AM

It's unfortunate they're not replacing this with some other form of utility. I already feel pretty trapped taking all mandatory talents. It was nice to have 1 point I could use to bring some utility to the raid group.

I agree it's more PvP orientated. Besides Thorim arena, Yogg+0 and pulling caster trash packs, there weren't any places where it was exceptionally useful except to spam on people in PvP.

Mavanas · 08/14/09, 11:58 AM

Originally Posted by songster

The fix to FoK seems to be (as usual) the quick and dirty option. I think the better option would have been to prevent FoK proccing poisons. That prevents the abusive use of it as instant AoE hamstring / MS, which causes much more PvP aggro than the interrupt. It would take PvE damage down to something reasonable, and also prevent stupid stuff like people swapping in 2T8 for sustained AoE purely for the energy return from AoE DP.

Anyone got a handle on the magnitude of the HaT nerf yet? From here it looks like "to the ground baby", and Sub will be completely non-viable once more.

There were several tests after 3.2 was released that indicated that 1 second cooldown was already implemented. We tested it on Starfall, Stormstrike, Whirlwind, Wound poison, Maul+Swipe, Hemo+Wound, FOK, among others. In all of those cases, HAT did not proc combo points from crits that occured within 1 second of each other. Also an addon that counts HaT procs under the assumption of 1 second cooldown is 90% accurate, and this inaccuracy could be attributed to rng of ruthlessness talent. Perhaps Blizzard omitted certain abilities that we have not tested directly. Either way I do not anticipate major changes to HaT dps as long as there are no further undocumented changes to which abilities can proc HaT.

EDIT: If the 1 second cooldown applies to all combo point income as opposed to being enforced per each player individually, then it will probably bring HaT to an unusable level.

Apps · 08/14/09, 12:09 PM

That partly depends, because once more they're being unclear - the new change could easily mean they're finally changing it to 1 cp per second from the talent as a whole, not a cooldown on a per-person basis as it is in 3.2 live

Tinwhisker · 08/14/09, 2:03 PM

In regards to the HAT "nerf", any chance that this change could be indicative that they may at some point make it raid wide instead of party wide? That is to say, make it a much more consistent and predictable source of CPs through a larger pool of sources and internal cooldowns (not necessarily 1 second)?

bural · 08/14/09, 2:27 PM

I'd actually go so far as to call the combo point inflow from rogues with the 3.2 mechanic fairly consistent. The change to HAT in 3.2 more specifically the weapon imbues increased the pool size immensely. That said I havent actually looked at the distribution.
Problem is, with the current combo point inflow the damage is abit over the top, but at the same time it's very the spec is fun to play - you gotta react fast without being able to spam Eviscerates. For comparison the simulated HAT 3.2 rogue eviscerates on average every 2.3 seconds and performs significantly better than any other rogue spec while the 3.2.2 (assuming 1cps from party) HAT rogue eviscerates every 5.2 seconds and performs stone dead last - a differences of some 2.5k dps.

I see what you mean though and yes, I agree a hard cooldown per party could indicate an intent to make it raid wide. They appear to have a hard time balancing HATs damage output based on the amount of abilities being able to proc it, so a larger pool with strict restrictions could do the trick. For example each of the 5 raid parties can proc HAT once per second. This would most certainly give close to 5cps, a value at which HAT would stop being fun and just be plain stupid. Balancing HAT around 1.3-1.5cps or whatever seems appropriate would require a 3.5second cooldown on HAT per party. Easy to implement, easy mechanic: a valve not unlike HfB that can be adjusted as you see fit.

I guess there's two options for HAT really. Either they stick to the idear of making it a tool to increase the damage of sub specs while grouped or they start focussing on making it work from the rogues (auto)attacks alone. If we agree the "fun" part of HAT is having to react rather than plan ahead as with Combat, some degree of variance in the combo point inflow is definitely needed.

Milano · 08/14/09, 5:58 PM

Originally Posted by Tinwhisker

In regards to the HAT "nerf", any chance that this change could be indicative that they may at some point make it raid wide instead of party wide? That is to say, make it a much more consistent and predictable source of CPs through a larger pool of sources and internal cooldowns (not necessarily 1 second)?

Couldn't that potentially cause the rogues client and perhaps others to freeze up due to the massive amounts of info being processed? Me and another rogue had problems with screen lagging up when we tried the spec the period when multiple HaT specced rogues in group would cause too many procs. I haven't tried the spec since then and can't claim to know if it's the same today with unbugged version. But I can see it comming up again if it goes raidwide.

Tinwhisker · 08/14/09, 6:07 PM

Originally Posted by Milano

Couldn't that potentially cause the rogues client and perhaps others to freeze up due to the massive amounts of info being processed? Me and another rogue had problems with screen lagging up when we tried the spec the period when multiple HaT specced rogues in group would cause too many procs. I haven't tried the spec since then and can't claim to know if it's the same today with unbugged version. But I can see it comming up again if it goes raidwide.

Well, I think there was a lot more going on with that bug than what we could see at the surface. I got the impression that the same data was being processed multiple times (or at least passed back and forth for checking multiple times) and eventually being caught in some time-out/loop handler. In any case, that bug was clearly unintended and not designed by Blizzard. What I'm talking about would be a bug-tested deliberate change and not some unintended error as we saw there so I'm sure Blizzard would fix anything like that.

vash1025 · 08/15/09, 2:45 AM

I'm not entirely surprised by the nerf to FoK damage. Wiping the floor with all other AoE classes on trash and then laughing at them on boss fights, was getting a little bit silly.
We should never be the best AoE class. Period.

The throwing spec change is annoying, but I guess it gives a couple of points back for the people who took for trash/PvP.

The only problem I have with the damage nerf is that if you look at logs and compare total damage of a Feral Druid's swipe to FoK you will find that Swipe actually does a good bit more damage. If swipe is doing more damage, and Feral Druids are a hybrid class, then why the need for a damage nerf to FoK?

Kireiray · 08/15/09, 3:19 AM

Originally Posted by vash1025

The only problem I have with the damage nerf is that if you look at logs and compare total damage of a Feral Druid's swipe to FoK you will find that Swipe actually does a good bit more damage. If swipe is doing more damage, and Feral Druids are a hybrid class, then why the need for a damage nerf to FoK?

Did the meters also include the damage of poisons applied to every mob?

Milano · 08/15/09, 5:18 AM

I think Swipe (Cat) does more damage than FoK MH+OH already (perhaps not with poisons included), but falls behind due to not hitting in a 360 degree radius and being only 5 yards. It's harder for them to pull off the numbers we do. But they could potentially do more damage than FoK if they manage to place themself correctly and the mobs tanked in a way to allow them to do so. I guess Swipe (Cat) will get some changes in a later patch if it should outperform FoK.

vash1025 · 08/15/09, 6:40 AM

Originally Posted by Milano

I think Swipe (Cat) does more damage than FoK MH+OH already (perhaps not with poisons included), but falls behind due to not hitting in a 360 degree radius and being only 5 yards. It's harder for them to pull off the numbers we do. But they could potentially do more damage than FoK if they manage to place themself correctly and the mobs tanked in a way to allow them to do so. I guess Swipe (Cat) will get some changes in a later patch if it should outperform FoK.

I would hope so, even in situations where they don't do more damage with swipe than we do with FoK they're still doing a lot more damage with swipe than pure aoe classes are doing with their aoe abilities. That doesn't strike me as something that should be happening considering Druids are hybrids.

paramourn · 08/15/09, 12:36 PM

I couldn't agree more and within our own guild we have been discussing this. Yea ok, if your going to nerf the Fan of Knives spam at least add in another variable, such as fan of knives now cost 40 energy etc etc. Being in a raid with Feral druids....indisputably they are the MOST versatile class in the game. Not only are they a hybrid but they have BOTH dps types...melee and range. The bring massive raid buffs and should be doing the lowest dps in dps form than any other class. Now given, that would be a perfect world, but sure as heck not anywhere near our aoe or say a mage, hunter.

What I'm wondering and I'm hoping is we can intelligently discuss possibly why this is occurring...why with no warning did they do this? Obviously we were all hitting like trucks but I have a feeling this has something to do with the new wep scaling. We arguably scale harder than any other class in the game for our aoe (based off weps) You swap two heavy daggs or swords and spam that aoe with some of the new ToC weps it could hit remarkably harder.. On top of that do we have any news on the set bonus (having rupture up) and how that will effect our aoe spam? Possibly it will be a significant upgrade with 10 energy fan of knives when the set procs. Or do you guys/gals think something different? Any ideas on how we can combat and max what we have. With the fan of knife glyph be effected? What are your thoughts?

• Aldriana · 08/15/09, 4:27 PM

Lets stop with the totally irrelevant druid comparisons. And I mean now. They are a different class, they have different properties, and how good they are at various things has little to nothing to do with whether we get nerfed, because they're a different class. If you'd like to comment on the implications of the nerf and how we're going to deal with it, that's fine. But do not just complain about how we got nerfed while class X is still totally OP. It's unproductive, and we don't want to hear it.

madsushi · 08/15/09, 6:56 PM

The true loss is the interrupt from throwing spec, as a Rogue could use the FoK glyph for trash or AoE heavy fights (swapping glyphs is now easy and fairly inexpensive). Although with ToC being the new "end game", Fan of Knives hasn't really seen any use. It will remain to be seen how effective FoK will be on the Faction Champions; we'll see this week. As long as there aren't any encounters that require (or greatly reduce the complexity of) AoE interrupts on a regular basis, it will be business as usual. A small hit on our trash parses is not bad when considering that the core of our currently potent boss DPS was left untouched. Yogg+0 is one of the few exceptions, though I imagine it's not Blizzard's focus with ToC released.