Cataclysm Rogue Changes - Page 17

Ultionis19k · 06/10/10, 6:27 PM

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Just threw this together as what I think is a good Mutilate build for cataclysm as it stands, not sure about backstab, however. Backstab will probably be used below 35% if glyphs remain the same, because you can get 2 backstabs (2-4 CP) for 5 energy more than 1 mutilate (2-3CP), and 2 backstabs will probably do more than 1 mutilate. It will also necessitate having the slower weapon in your MH (or swapping hands at 35% health if your fast dagger is more dps)

What it looks like to me is that it would be the same rotation as it is now, just with Rupture/Garrote (Vanish as a DPS CD), using Hemo every 15 seconds to keep the debuff up, and putting backstab in the rotation somewhere when the boss is below 35%.

I chose the SUB subspec because combat offers only 1 DPS boost to mutilate past the first tier, while sub offers more, as well as a raid buff from the new hemo debuff.

Mind you, this was just quickly tossed together.

I'm very interested in seeing if Hemo will be a major player,if it will stack with other bleed debuffs, and whether backstab will be worth it below 35%, as is discussed by Brotherbear.

The main reason I post my talent calculator is because of hemo being accessible.

Docrev · 06/10/10, 6:43 PM

As I've stated before, it seems to me that going deeper into Combat as a Mutilate seems to be the better option to me. Venomous Wounds, as described, doesn't really seem worth it to me, and if you're willing to go 21 points into Combat you can pick up Lightning Reflexes and Blade Flurry, though this requires you to pick up 7 points of filler. Five points into Aggression seems logical if we're going for the Backstab as execute concept, and the other two points could go into either Endurance for a bit of survivability as well as the ability to Sprint more often, though another option (depending on encounter design) would be Improved Sprint to break snares and the like (Hodir's Freeze, for example). This would leave four points free, which could then go into Relentless Strikes: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

• Aldriana · 06/10/10, 6:58 PM

Blizzard has stated that they want all talent builds to have some reasonable amount of filler - they've stated on a number of occasions that they want the "cookie cutter" builds to be more along the lines of "take these 65 points, and the last 11 you can do what you want with". Hence, the fact that Combat has more filler means, well, it's closer to what they have in mind.

The problem, of course, is that combat filler is mostly boring from a PvE perspective - there's a fair number that might be interesting for solo play or PvP, but in terms of PvE you're probably looking at taking Imp Sprint, Endurance, and then, like, Deflection for lack of anything better. I'd say the *amount* of filler is reasonable, but it would be good to have some more interesting options. Imp Sprint is a nifty talent, Endurance is sort of okay, and everything else is either actively useless or somewhat boring. So a little sprucing up of the filler quality might be nice.

Assassination, on the other hand, has the reverse problem; there's lot of interesting talents that you can imagine wanting to take (Vigor, Fleet Footed, Deadly Brew, Imp Expose - and even Quick Recovery and Deadened Nerves aren't terrible). Unfortunately, you only have room for four points of filler, two of which need to be in the first two tiers (where there's, regretably, nothing even remotely worth taking). Hence, some talent consolidation might be worthwhile so as to make some of that filler a little more accessible. Fortunately, there's some obvious candidates:

Seal Fate seems expensive for a 5pt talent; dropping it to (say) 3 might be a reasonable option.
Turn the Tables is and always has been a weak talent and should probably be dropped entirely or at least replaced with something a bit more interesting.
Cut to the Chase has always seemed odd as a 5pt talent as there's almost no motivation to ever put less than 5 points in it. It could be made a 1 or 2 point talent elsewhere in the tree with relative ease.

I'm sure there are others as well; those are just the immediate ones that spring to mind.

It's also worth noting that Imp Evis is sort of an odd fit for Assassination right now, as it's reasonably useful for the other two specs but completely useless as an Assassination rogue. It might make sense for them to extent its benefits to (say) Envenom as well, thus moving the point where you start spending true "filler" points further up the tree.

In short: right now there are 53 DPS talent points in Assassination, which require 4 points of filler to get all of. It seems to me that they want to reduce that number by about 8-10 to wind up somewhere in the mid-40s for total DPS talents in the tree, and to move a few of them further down in the tree to grand a wider range of filler options. Tiers 3, 4, and 9 in particular feel somewhat bloated right now.

The other issue that's a bit concerning is the new 45 point talents in general. Placement at the 45 point level means they will *always* be cutting into DPS talents in other trees - that is, to take Restless Blades, you're dropping Relentless Strikes or poison talents; to take Venomous Wounds, you'd dropping Lightning Reflexes, Opportunity, and/or Relentless Strikes to get it. And that strikes me as potentially concerning. Combat seems to be developing a cooldown-centric playstyle, with a fairly simple standard rotation but lots of cooldowns. Hence, it feels important to me that a talent like Restless Blades - which so clearly fits with that playstyle - actually be good enough to be worth taking. And at the moment, that seems a bit... borderline. It feels like the value proposition should be a bit more clearcut for such a tree-defining talent.

Similarly, Venemous Wounds, while a neat idea, has the problem that, by default, Mutilate would not necessarily be rupturing (given that the entire tree is structured around envenom, right down to the mastery). Hence, Venomous Wounds needs to be good enough to not only offset the out-of-tree stuff you're missing, but also to make it worthwhile to transition over to Rupture by itself. And that seems.... dubious. We'll have to wait for the final numbers to figure out whether it's worth using or not, but, again... it seems like a cool idea that could very easily wind up being completely ignored as it stands.

To be clear: I'm not saying that they can't work, or even that they don't - we'll need to wait a bit until we get the rest of the information (masteries, early itemization, etc.) to be sure. But it does seem like there are some definite questions about talents in that location that I would hope to see answers to before things go live.

Ultionis19k · 06/10/10, 7:35 PM

However doubtful, if the Hemo Debuff stacks with other bleed dmg boosting debuffs, going deep sub over Blade Flurry to get Hemo may be more raid dps over personal dps, depending on the number of classes using bleeds.

Docrev · 06/10/10, 7:41 PM

From everything they've said, Hemo is just supplying another source for the Mangle debuff. It's not its own class of debuffs.

Howland · 06/10/10, 9:06 PM

Noob question, but how much dps is Cut to the Chase? I had the thought of speccing around it and getting 3/3 Venomous Wounds and 2/3 Turn the tables. Assuming a rupture/envenom cycle with points in Imp Snd, and 4/5 RS. How much of a difference is a more tradtional cycle compared to one with cut to the chase?

Rahdik · 06/10/10, 9:28 PM

If we assume the change to haste in regards to energy regen will equal that of Mutilate's now, is it fair to say Serrated Blades is equal to 4p T10 when including the value of HaT?

That sounds like a lot of assumptions but Aldriana's post got me thinking about this talent in regards taking it over presumably Lightning Reflexes and Imp Eviscerate/Malice. I just see this being a big RNG fest when a reliable 5 CP Eviscerate + Shadow Step will be a lovely addition to our DPS rather than always using SS with Rupture.

Tinwhisker · 06/10/10, 9:31 PM

Another point about making specs and fiddling with talents is that we have glyphs to put with them. I believe Blizzard has said that many glyphs are changing. Obviously the HFB glyph will be gone but with only one real glyph left for Mutilate we're probably more in the dark for that tree when talking about glyphs than the other two.

Zaniel · 06/11/10, 7:42 AM

Along the lines of the Mutilate glyphs, and given that they seem to want us to use Rupture in the cycle with Backstab s our "execute ability," how workable would the current Glyph of Backstab be? I know this makes three fairly brave assumptions: 1) that we'd want to use Backstab; 2) that we'd want to use Rupture; 3) that we'd want to use current glyphs over whatever Cataclysm will release.

Given that the trees are going to change a lot before the 4.0 patch, it's still something to consider, unless they change the HfB glyph into something great for Vendetta.

bural · 06/11/10, 8:02 AM

I tried adding a couple of lines to the 1.5.1_Bare Mutilate sheet in order to get a feel for the value of Murderous Intent with the current energy regen levels and ability damage. In short I'm assuming something like a standard 51 18 2 spec, 62% crit, 16e/sec, 1465 MH dmg, giving Backstab a DPE of 109 sub 35% as opposed to Mutilate's 72.

For simplicity let's assume we're either doing 2 or 3 Backstab finishers. Feel free to correct me if I've missed a permutation in the following. The chance of a 2 Backstab finisher is
P(2 Backstab finisher)=P(4cp_2BS)+P(5cp_2BS)=P(no_ruth*critBS^2)+2*P(ruth*no_critBS*critBS)+P(ruth *critBS^2)=92.7%
and P(3 Backstab finisher)=1-P(2 Backstab finisher).
Now with 92% crit on Backstab, Backstab will cost 60-30-0.92*2=28.2 energy sub 35%. This gives an average Envenom cost of (2+(1-0.927)*3)*28.2+35-(2/5)*25-0.62*2)=86.3 (as opposed to the standard 99 for the Mutilate cycle). At 16e/sec this is one Envenom every 5.39 seconds or 0.19 Envenoms per second. Compare this to the standard rotation and we get a 19% increase in Envenom dps - or somewhere around 300dps. If we use the DPE difference to calculate increase in combo builder DPS we get ((109/72)-1)*Mutilate DPS ~ some 900 DPS. A 1200 DPS increase to a base of 13200 with a 35% uptime is almost exactly 1% dps per talent point.

A concern though: I tried calculating it with 5/5 Relentless Strikes aswell and the average cycle length actually drops below the average Envenom buff duration. I know all too well one can be forced to clip Envenoms on live, but having to do it every single Envenom (or rather more often than not) seems weird at best. For this very reason I fear they may run into problems if they want to tweak the talent. A higher energy reduction on Backstab will only serve to reduce the cycle length even further, so it's possible it'd need some secondary effect to work properly.

edit: missed avg finisher combo points in the avg Envenom cost calculation. I'll leave it as it is.

Previn · 06/11/10, 9:47 AM

Originally Posted by Rahdik

It's a little too early to start making specs, but, no I wouldn't agree with your second one. Not sure why you put points in Setup.

What I'm really hoping is entirely removed rather than changed is Deadliness. Just boost the first mastery of the Subtlety tree and possibly a bit of the Mastery to account for the loss of damage to the finishers as well as straight melee damage, and you've removed a good deal of bloat in the tree.

Sub is currently even more of a mess than on live, so I'd stay as far away as you can from speculation involving it.

The HaT change has gutted the combo point and energy regen and thus far there's nothing to remotely cover that loss (I believe it's 4 seconds between points, not 2 as the calculator shows). Once you get down to HaT level anyways, you're finding that you're going to be dumping at least 58 points into the tree just to cover the new bleed focus and get the previous necessary talents.

The new bleed focus and HaT change also devalues the Armor Pen mastery a lot as it's not used by the former, and the later cuts back on the number of finishers (both meaning fewer finishers that can use the Armor Pen mastery, and fewer finishers to take advantage of the Finisher Mastery). Given how deep sub currently works you're going to be looking at something like Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft.

Incidently, Sagiunary Vein seems like a slightly reworked HfB to me, and I'm very dissapointed that Pericing Wounds was made more difficult for sub to get and that Murderous intent was put out of reach of Sub entirely.

Druss · 06/11/10, 10:03 AM

I suspect a ton of rogues to be using a combination of Mutilate and Backstab (below 35%) quite possibly with a spec that goes something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

51/3/22 Slow MH/Fast OH

At 35% you switch to BS which will not only return energy but also do 20% more damage from the Dirty Deeds buff. I am assuming that Rupture will NOT be used because it will be no better than it is now with a build like this (Mangle will not likely stack with Hemo's debuff and we all know Envenom is king for assass......). What is unclear to me is whether the 2 points in DD will actually be better than 2 into completing 5/5 DW......quite possibly not but with the energy returned on BS's below 35% there could be enough stabbage to make it worthwhile.

I actually kinda like the look of it and suspect it will have more flavour than what appears to be a bland Combat tree.

• Andeh · 06/11/10, 11:24 AM

I think it makes more sense to go deeper down the Combat tree, picking up 20% more offhand damage, 5% hit, 15% Backstab damage, and 7% melee haste. At the very least, 5% hit should be roughly equal to 5% crit from Dagger Spec (if not better), and then you're comparing 5% more Backstab damage against 20% offhand damage and 7% haste, so I think the Combat spec is pretty clearly better. And then at that point it gets really tempting to pull another 4 points out of Subtlety to pick up another 3% haste, 2 points of filler, and Blade Flurry.

Brotherbear · 06/11/10, 11:42 AM

Right off I want to apologize for ignoring Subtlety. I've never raided as subtlety, and I prefer to only talk about things I think I know something about.

I have nothing against the tree, just that I didn't use it so I can't really speak to its strengths and weaknesses.

Another thing that has occured to me when looking at the new 45pt talents is that the equation goes something like this.

For Venemous Wounds, it's worth picking up if:

Rupture damage + Average VW damage >= Envenom damage + Envenom damage buff + dps value of other talents.

So alot rests on the value of mastery points as well.

That being said, I think Blizzard might want to look at making VW a 33/66/100 talent. Right now the average damage needs to be pretty high to be competitive with Envenom, which (at a 45% application rate) means the actual damage will be even higher. This has definite pvp connotations which could lead to some serious tweaks to VW down the road.

At 100% uptime, it will just be easier for Blizz to tune the ability if it turns out to be too powerful.

EDIT: Deleted mastery related stuff due to reading the blue post stating that the mastery bonus from talents will cap out at 51. Therefore it is not an factor in this discussion.

Druss · 06/11/10, 1:12 PM

Originally Posted by Andeh

I think it makes more sense to go deeper down the Combat tree, picking up 20% more offhand damage, 5% hit, 15% Backstab damage, and 7% melee haste. At the very least, 5% hit should be roughly equal to 5% crit from Dagger Spec (if not better), and then you're comparing 5% more Backstab damage against 20% offhand damage and 7% haste, so I think the Combat spec is pretty clearly better. And then at that point it gets really tempting to pull another 4 points out of Subtlety to pick up another 3% haste, 2 points of filler, and Blade Flurry.

Actually - I think you are right though this would probably mean ditching mutilate altogether in favour of backstab as:

51/17/8 (or 51.18.7 if LR is ahead of Opportunity)
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Controversially NOT opting to even include mutilate in assass.........though I suspect one probably would for those occassions where backstab was not possible due to positioning. What would be wonderful is the removal of the "behind target" requirement and probably remodelling of backstab so that it does less if NOT behind but can still be used.......or just rename it "Stab" and let it be from any position without other change.