It's not a 45s cooldown by itself.
If you recall, they did something similar to engineers a couple of patches ago - Use your rocket gloves, and you can't stack it with a trinket on-use (nothing like 5 people hitting a rocket glove then a GLG at once to effectively one-shot a target).

The change is described better in the PTR patch notes:
"Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc."

If you use WotF you get a 2min CD on WotF and a 45sec CD on your PvP trinket.
If you use vour PvP trinket you get a 2min CD on the trinket and a 45sec CD on WotF.

right?

I would love to see some numbers on how the different racials effect PvE. Since my undead PvP advantage is essentially dead I'm thinking of switching to an Orc or Troll

Can the Troll racial stack on bloodlust while popping a haste pot? I'm thinking of choosing Troll because of possible scaling in a raid.

Orc is the best racial for rogues, in pve.

1. Axe & Fist with more expertise. (works for both HnS & CQC)
2. Blood fury. (an extra on use AP trinket)

Currently on the PTR.


IF you activate your PvP trinket, Both you trinket and WoTF start a 2min CD.

IF you activate your WOTF, you WoTF starts a 2min CD, but your Trinket Starts a 45sec CD.


Im pretty sure it's bugged. dont kno why its making PvP trink and WOTF share the 2min CD one way, but not the other.

Haste always stacks with haste so Berserking is much better then it used to be but the Orc racial gives 332 AP at level 80 on a 2 minute cool down. Compared to an Epic level trinket this isn't much, but like the Troll racial, it stacks with similar effects. So the benefit of either one may be different depending on your raid set up.

dont forget that 5% damage to beasts. it does factor in for some fights.

A nice little buff to Murder in the latest PTR build.

Looks like I'll be going mutilate then with the poison swapping and the change to Murder.

Assuming poison swapping is going to be nerfed in the coming major patch, What I am looking at right now is the potential scaling capability of combat vs mutilate. With Hunger For Blood giving a flat out 18 percent damage increase, is it correct to say that mutilate scales better with gears? especially with the new murder change giving mutilate spec another 4 percent flat out damage increase.

The murder change sounds very much like one of Blizzard's short sighted stop-gap measures they often implement after changing another aspect of the class. It makes no sense for them to agree that Hunger For Blood is an incredibly bloated talent damage wise and then essentially make murder into a passive version of the talent.

Right now mutilate on murderable targets without poison swapping pulls ahead of combat slightly. With poison swapping on muderable targets you see mutilate pull ahead of combat by a decent margin on single target boss damage. And with poison swapping on non murderable targets you will see mutilate and combat doing near identical dps, that is to say it was almost necessary with near identical gear to poison swap to "keep up" with combat on non murderable targets.

I won't get into Ice Crown Citadel encounters too much or at least the ones we've seen because the PTR is in such early stages but right now most of the fights in there are heavily skewed in favor of a combat spec, even with all enemies now being murderable.

Either the murder change is a pre-cursor to a nerf to something else (like poison swapping) or Blizzard can identify that mutilate would fall far behind combat without this change due to the mechanics of the fights they have in place. Being able to utilize that extra 4% damage and still poison swap would keep Mutilate competitive and viable against combat, if Blizzard "fixes" poison swapping and still keeps the 4% murder change it will be hard not to spec into combat and get the huge utility that blade flurry brings in ICC at the moment.

It's a nice change for Mutilate, but I can't help but feel Mut will always be behind as long as Combat has three good cooldowns and Mut just has Cold Blood (mediocre) and Overkill (mini-cooldown, but still).

I'm not nearly BIS-geared, but given what happens in RAWR modeling, if I change my spec, I get a supposed 600 DPS increase going from assassination to combat (on non-murderable targets, which is going to be somewhat the norm in ICC). This change to Murder is very welcome and the nice thing is, for Blizz, it's a no-brainer, since Murder already affected PvP targets to begin with. I started gearing up for combat given that it's simply better in TOC and from what I've heard, better in ICC, but I just can't stand playing the spec, so anything that brings Assassination up to par with combat is good in my books (and will save me on two more Berserking enchants).

I find the theorycrafting quite reasonable, given it's the best thing we have to go on, and those figures don't show rogues doing that well come ICC. They are already having trouble against the many classes that can put out decent single-target DPS while hitting multiple other targets (Paladin, DK, Warrior) and it sounds like these trends in fight mechanics will continue indefinitely.

I have a friend playing a mage in our guild, and we were running RAWR together this afternoon. Given we're similarly geared and he managed to get a potential 9000+ DPS from his simulation to 6800 DPS for mine, it does certainly show a discrepancy. I'd assume that anything they do to fix weapon-swapping would have to be on the favourable side for rogue PvE DPS.

My personal opinion would be that making some low-cooldown "hit multiple targets" mechanic (similar to Blade Flurry) baseline for rogues is about the best option at this moment. There are plenty of classes that do better single-target DPS then us, so we're not exactly filling the niche we used to. Most, if not all melee specs have baseline abilities on short cooldown that hit multiple targets with the exception of ferals who are in a similar situation to us.

Sure HFB and now Murder are ugly fixes, but I'm willing to wait for the, as promised, fix in the next expansion. However, I would like to have a skillset that matches the current encounters and to scale as well as other classes for this last patch, if only to feel like I'm making a reasonable contribution to the raid.

I am slightly confused here. All of the parses I've seen from the PTR, and given Mavanas' sim sheet --- it clearly shows Mut is ahead of Combat, by a large margin. This buff to mut will just widen that gap (in addition to the recent envenom/deadly buff). I am not sure where this "mut is behind combat" conversation is coming from now. My own experience is that mut is showing itself to be a better dps spec.

I was going on the post from Mosq about the mechanics in ICC (our guild isn't participating on the PTR, so I don't have any experience myself). The only data I've seen is from modeling and it put rogues versus other classes somewhere in the bottom 30% of the list (purely for a patchwerk-style fight, one can assume). At least on live currently, it seems that combat is ahead of muti due to fight mechanics. At least in our guild. Anecdotal evidence of single-target DPS versus other classes comes from a recent run in Ulduar (which we're not running generally anymore, but visited due to having a raid booked and nothing else to do) in which, on the XT fight, rogues were no longer in the position they were when Ulduar was the top dungeon.

Perhaps they will nerf the automated weapon swapping you can do on live. I highly doubt they will nerf weapon swapping that is on manual mode with a macro or 2 used in your rotation. After weaponswaping for a few weeks I can say with confidence that it's not too difficult and may actually be better if you use it on manual.

It reminds me of how I was watching deadly poison dot ticks before Master Poisoner got buffed. 3-4 seconds left on deadly, change weapons. The only difference is the timing and the occasion gcd blocking that occurs (which on manual you can control better anyway)

I don't think they will remove weapon swapping. They've stated they like that we can utilize different poisons in the same fight rather than having to make a choice at the beginning of the fight. Also, Warriors have reasons for swapping to shields for spell reflect and such, so it's not just a rogue issue.

But I think they will make it so that poison swapping for the dps boost that it is right now will be removed, or severely nerfed. Whether it be wiping poison stacks when you switch weapons, or some other mechanic. Ghostcrawler's recent posts on the issue make it sound like something will be forthcoming. How quickly? It's Blizz...who knows.

Has anyone done or seen enough testing on the PTR to state, even inconclusively, that the principles behind combat's effectiveness in ToC will apply in ICC as well?

From the fights I've seen, it seems plausible, especially the healing encounter with the emerald dragon, but I'd appreciate the testimonial of a more experienced rogue.

Lots of target switching, lots of adds, lots of fights where targets don't live long enough to get proper cycles in, and a lot of fights where Blade Flurry is extremely handy. From what we have seen so far combats effectiveness is even greater in ICC than ToC. There's also a lot of fights where clever uses of Killing Spree can add a lot of DPS up-time to your parse much like beasts.

As Aldrianna said Mutilate is a great epeen DPS to boss spec but the downfall it had in ToC is almost two fold thus far in ICC. Think of the mechanics of Jaraxxus for example. As Mutilate you can do great single target dps (even without Murder) but when the sisters come out Mutilate does not have the luxury of cleaving off Jaraxxus. Sure Mutilates single target DPS to Jaraxxus should be higher at the end of the fight but the ability for Combat to directly execute a rotation off Jarxxus while damaging sisters means your raid as a whole will see a net gain in DPS to Jaraxxus because casters will get more time on him and not the adds. Those types of fight mechanics are rampant in what we have seen of ICC thus far.

I said a few posts up that the murder change is a nice buff but I still do not believe that it alone is enough to give mutilate the "single target DPS king" niche that it needs to choose it over Combat for progression. It will take more than a few hundred DPS difference between the two specs to choose Mutilate. Blade Flurry is just too good to pass up.

If you have seen the tier 10 gear stats and that new 155 passive armor pen trinket + all the massive amount of armor pen in gears from tier 10 content, getting up to 1400 hard cap armor pen is not going to be an issue. That should also lower the gap between combat and mutilate even in the perfect single target dps situation.