Cataclysm Rogue Changes - Page 63

Crevan · 08/31/10, 4:04 PM

Nihilum lists one more interesting change that is not mentioned at MMO-Champion, which addresses the problem of targets dying before rupture runs its duration:

Assassination
Venomous Wounds - Each time your Rupture or Garrote deals damage to an enemy that you have poisoned, you have a 30/60% chance to deal 1 additional Nature damage and to regain 10 Energy. If an enemy dies while afflicted by your Rupture, you regain energy proportional to the remaining Rupture duration.

Herb · 08/31/10, 4:46 PM

For quite a few builds, both mmo and wowhead have listed Sinister Calling as "Increases your total Agility by 25% and increases the percentage damage bonus of Backstab and Hemorrhage by an additional 25%." - is that how it's currently implemented* (and does it still simply increase BS and Hemo damage by 25%, in spite of the "damage bonus" wording)?
Fully buffed that'd turn Hemo into a pretty strong non-positional attack (142% WD @ 29e), on par with a fully buffed SS (122% WD + 243 @ 39e), and more effective than BS until at least level 57 (SftS).

As for the other Subtlety specialization - is MoS active during Shadow Dance, or only for "real" stealth? It strikes me as a decisively weak specialization in either case, and I've been wondering why they haven't simply chosen HaT instead: it's definitely more of a signature ability for Subtlety, it has a more appropriate level of power, and it offers an obvious synergy with the second focus of Subtlety, namely: finishing moves**.
Besides, it always felt weird that a whole tree's PVE viability was basically determined by a single talent (and the 3/3 Improved Eviscerate elsewhere) - moving those kinds of talents into specializations seems only natural.

*) I'm asking since it seems to have started out as "on live", i.e. Agility +15%, BS/Hemo +10%

**) Kind of a hen-egg situation, though, since that focus has basically been introduced via HaT, and only now been cemented via Mastery and the Endless-Rupture mechanic; as for "obvious synergy", Combat has 50% OH damage <-> extra OH strikes, and Assassination has more frequent poison <-> more damaging poison

Pyriana · 08/31/10, 9:08 PM

I deeply miss timing envenoms after a DP tick, in fact I miss using a DP tick tracker. I enjoy the mutilate style (yes even now) because of the intricacies that it provides that the other specs don't quite have in the same way.

Now I won't say that mutilate in it's current state is hard, but there is definite decision making involved, and what blizzard intends is to increase the gap between people who are making conscious decisions and people who are just mashing buttons. That being said, what they've currently done with mutilate on beta is a step in the right direction, however I don't know if it's a far enough step, yes dropping rupture will severely destroy your energy regen til you get it back up. But with how little energy regen you have (at 83) you don't really need to time envenoms, you almost can't regenerate enough energy.

Although I am speaking from the standpoint of 6 energy per tick venomous wounds, not 10 like it is now, I have yet to do a serious dps test on a target dummy to see how the rotation feels. I will say this though, on my test char that is haste stacked for testing rupture break points etc, it is a lot more difficult to make these decisions when your energy is coming in as fast as it was (at 6 per tick instead of the 10 it is now). So I feel that as we gear up mutilate will become more and more complex, when you have the possibility of getting 10 energy in 2 ticks less than a second apart plus the passive energy regeneration from haste which is whatever it is, that 120 energy cap for mutilate looks like a mighty small margin when you throw in the extra 25 energy you get from your finisher.

Milano · 09/01/10, 6:08 AM

Originally Posted by Pyriana

I have yet to do a serious dps test on a target dummy to see how the rotation feels.

With my level 82 ICC decked char, I feel very energy starved even with the 10 energy gains from Rupture. It was on the edge of not being maintable as there only was a few seconds left on SnD before next Envenom. The energy flow was a lot better with level 80 ratings at ~30% haste though. This can be frustrating at early gear levels. I could see myself adding haste over agility to my gear at that point for convinence. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Imp SnD was removed and made baseline for all 3 specs. I'm sure Subtlety will have similiar problems.

Theone · 09/01/10, 11:56 AM

Has anyone gone over how DBW is becoming 155 Crit with Cata? Looks like it will then be BIS for Mutilate till at least some of the newer trinkets.

Pyriana · 09/01/10, 3:40 PM

Originally Posted by Theone

Has anyone gone over how DBW is becoming 155 Crit with Cata? Looks like it will then be BIS for Mutilate till at least some of the newer trinkets.

I've reforged my DBW and TAJ to haste, heh, in fact any piece of gear that does not have haste has haste on it because I feel *that* energy starved on my rogue as mutilate (which I currently feel is the best leveling spec at the moment)

Now you may say that mutilate isn't good for leveling but with rolling recuperate and snd between fights and fights lasting long enough often for a 4/5 point rupture @ 83 it seems more synergistic with leveling than combat.

As for the rupture change, this strikes me as a very dangerous energy boost in pvp situations where kills would end up sort of cascading if you've gotten rupture on them fairly recently. Especially vs pet classes, with healer mana being more important now the pet classes are gonna have to heal the pets themselves or re-summon once it's dead.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this change but it's definitely different and interesting, it also could make mut rogues fairly good at AoE just tab target rupture 3 or 4 mobs. It will definitely help them a lot with switching and in that regard I guess I like it.

Halbarad · 09/01/10, 9:31 PM

The latest Beta build also updated the Rogue Glyphs.

You can use 3 Prime, Major and Minor Glyphs.

I've compiled a list;

Prime Glyphs
Adrenaline Rush - 5 Seconds longer Duration
Backstab - Bakstab Criticals grant you 5 energy
Eviscerate - 10% more Critical chance
Hemorrhage - Your Hemorrhage Ability also causs the target to bleed for 40% of the direct strikes damage done over 24 seconds
Killing Spree - Increases the damage bonus while killing spree is active by an additional 10%
Mutilate - Reduces the cost of mutilate by 5 energy
Revealing Strike - Increases revealing strikes bonus effectiveness to your finishing moves by 10%
Rupture - 4 second longer duration
Shadow Dance - 2 second longer duration
Sinister Strike - 20% chance to gain an extra Combo Point
Slice and Dice - 3 second longer duration
Vendetta - Increases the duration of vendetta abilitys by 20%

Major Glyphs
Ambush Increase the range on ambush by 5 yards
Blade Flurry - reduces the energy penalty while Blade flurry is active by 50%
Cloak of Shadows - While Cloak is active you take 40% less physical damage
Crippling Poison - 20% extra chance to proc crippling poison
Deadly throw - increases the slow effect by an additional 20%
Fan of Knives - 50% increase damage
Evasion - 5 second extra duration
Expose armour - 12 second extra duration
Feint- reduces the energy cost by 20
Garrotte - increase the silence duration of garrotte by 2 seconds
Gouge - no longer requires the target to be facing you to use gouge
preparation - also resets the cooldown of kick dismantle and smoke bomb
Sap increase the duration of the effect on NPC by 80 seconds
Sprint - 30% more speed
Tricks of the trade - removes the energy cost
Vanish - increases the duration of the vanish effect by 2 seconds

Minor
Didn’t see any changes however one addition
Poisoning- you apply poisons to your weapons 50% faster

Tinwhisker · 09/01/10, 10:00 PM

It's obviously just a first pass on glyphs right now. A quick note for those in the beta, on live, the vanish glyph is minor, and currently in the beta I have the (now major) vanish glyph in my minor spot as a leftover and it isn't working. Putting it in the right spot fixes this.

This appears to be the case with all glyphs that have been moved around. They won't work properly if left in the old spots.

• Aldriana · 09/01/10, 10:10 PM

Initial impressions of the prime glyphs:

Mutilate: The interesting options are clearly Backstab, Mutilate, Rupture, and Vendetta. Of those, I suspect we wind up skipping Vendetta, as 6 seconds uptime of a 20% damage buff every 2 minutes only works out to a .4% average-case damage increase, and given the already-long duration of the ability, I don't see it being particularly more useful for burn phases than the average case implies. Glyph of Mutilate is a little over 2% damage on live, and while it's value will be reduced by not being used the entire fight, it will almost certainly still be in the 1.5% range. Glyph of Backstab should give similar returns, as while it's only an average case 3 energy reduction (or so), Backstab (at the times you're using it) only costs 30 energy in the first place, so proportionately its even stronger than Mutilate while it's being used. Since it's useful for a shorter segment of the fight it's probably still less valuable than Mutilate, but better than Vendetta. And it's hard to imagine Rupture won't be at least a percent or two as well.

Combat: The potentially interesting list looks like AR, Evis, KSp, Rupture, RvS, SS, and SnD. AR, Evis, and SnD are all the same as on live, so there's not a lot of further discussion needed - while we'll need to run numbers with level 85 gear to get exact comparisons, its likely safe to assume that their relative value will be similar to on live. Notably: all 3 are somewhat weak, but Evis is probably the strongest.

Of the others: KSp is now a 10% buff to KSp instead of a 60% increase, a massive nerf to the glyph. Currently on live it's worth 280 DPS for me; with this change, that would drop to ~50 DPS. Restless Blades will prop up the value to some extent, and its potentially still worth using, but it's nowhere near the slam dunk it is on live.

RvS, in practice, works out to a 10% damage increase to all your finishers. Given the design of the tree I suspect finishers will not increase past 10% of our total damage (given that it's quite a bit less than that on live and I see little reason for that to change). Hence, it's at *most* a 1% damage increase, and quite possibly less than that.

SS goes from 30%+ on live to 20%; this is clearly a nerf, and given that it's value proposition was already becoming somewhat unclear, one has to wonder if it's worth taking. And if it's not, the gap in quality between SS and RvS is starting to look pathetically small.

Rupture, meanwhile, would likely be a very solid option if Combat were guaranteed to use Rupture in its rotation; but given the lack of +rupture talents available to Combat, it's not at all clear whether that will be the case. If we're using Rupture anyway, this is clearly something we take. But if we're not, the situation is less clear cut.

In short: Combat has a lot of options that provide small benefits, but a shortage of the 2%+ glyphs that we see on live right now. Blizzard probably considers this to be a good thing; for the moment all I can say is that it will take more detailed numbers to figure out exactly how they stack up.

Subtlety: Interesting options are Backstab, Hemo, Evis, Shadow Dance, and SnD. Hemo really looks like the sort of thing that should be baked into the ability to start with - a reason to hit the button every so often other than the debuff. As it is, having to burn a glyph spot to make keeping your raid buff up suck less seems... lame. Which is not to say that we won't wind up doing it; while Backstab and Eviscerate are almost certainly worthwhile, SnD and Shadow Dance both seem likely to be somewhat weak. My guess is that we wind up with SnD or Hemo as our third glyph, but again, it'll take exact numbers.

In total, though, all of those glyphs are at least worthy of consideration for at least one spec, which is probably what they're going for. I suspect in practice half of them will never see use as they're just not quite as good as other available options, but the fact that it's unclear which ones those might be at this stage is at least progress relative to Wrath.

In terms of the Major glyphs: there's some obvious damage-boosting options that are tempting (FoK, TotT), but there's quite a few that seem at least circumstantially useful, so there will probably be at least some degree of customizability there - though I suspect most fights will still wind up with some obvious favorites.

Docrev · 09/01/10, 10:21 PM

The Glyph of Hemorrhage and Glyph of Backstab both seem to be very interesting to Sublety. The former gives Subtlety a reason to use Hemo even if there's a Feral in the raid, while the latter allows Subtlety to be a bit more efficient. Backstab seems pretty close to the value of the Mutilate glyph (with 30% crit and 3/3 Slaughter from the Shadows, it reduces Backstab's cost by ~7.5%, while Glyph of Mutilate reduces the cost by ~8.3%).

Tinwhisker · 09/01/10, 11:34 PM

Originally Posted by Aldriana

In terms of the Major glyphs: there's some obvious damage-boosting options that are tempting (FoK, TotT), but there's quite a few that seem at least circumstantially useful, so there will probably be at least some degree of customizability there - though I suspect most fights will still wind up with some obvious favorites.

I think the fact that we can swap glyphs so easily now (ie, not have to carry a stack with us) makes the major glyph spot the really interesting one. I can imagine that prime and minor won't change in our given set-ups much but if major turns out to be the real "utility slot" then if Blizzard makes it so we swap them at least a few times during a raid instance then it's a real win for design.

Brotherbear · 09/01/10, 11:43 PM

Just fyi, both worldofraids and mmo-champion are reporting that the FoK glyph is a 50% radius boost, not a 50% damage boost.

Which I'm not crazy about if they really do intend to require CC on pulls in Cataclysm.

• Aldriana · 09/02/10, 12:21 AM

If that's the case, then I suspect we spend a lot of time running Glyph of Tricks (as it is a direct personal damage increase in more or less all situations) and rotate the other 2 based on the exact fight. I can see Blade Flurry, Cloak, FoK, Expose, Evasion, Feint, and Sprint all being useful at times, but those are clearly all highly situational as well; on non-AoE fights (which should be most of them) FoK is useless, Blade Flurry only matters for fights with adds to cleave, and so on.

On a related note, I'm still of the opinion that Tricks could use some adjustment. The notion of a button you have to hit every 30 seconds all fight to make someone else do more damage strikes me as bad design on a number of levels - particularly once it starts to feel essential to glyph. I think the question that has to be asked is: does it really make sense for Tricks to to give a damage boost to it's target? What would the reprecussions be if it were purely a threat management move?

thebitterfig · 09/02/10, 1:16 AM

As to FoK radius, I don't really see a problem since glyphs will be much easier to swap (ie, change some things in a user interface tab in a few seconds out of combat), or so it appeared last time I heard anything about it. Swap in when you can use the range, swap out when it would be a problem. Presuming trash will wind up in wings or hallways or something like that, where each section has it's own style, it probably is the case that it won't be too hard to know when you need to go with or without the glyph.

The Hemo glyph, however, is a wonderful bit of design, in my mind. Makes me wonder if cat druids will get some sort of similar buff to their Mangle, but that's for a different forum. Additionally, while I love the idea of a nice selfish benefit to Hemorrhage (I was truly annoyed in a personal-emotive sense that Hemo was becoming so small a part of sub), I'm mildly concerned about it's implementation. The glyph reads like the exact value of the dot will be determined from whatever damage is dealt to the target, and if there is a crit, the entire dot crits right then and there, or if the random damage component happens to roll low, your ticks will be lower this hemo than they will be on the next one. Kind of like how 4t9 Shaman works, with Lava Burst dealing an additional 10% of the damage over six seconds. The mechanic works fine for the shaman set, since there is an eight second cooldown on LvB. Hemo on the other hand is spamable, even if you would rarely if ever want to. Another example: Flash of Light's HoT on Sacred Shield targets. It's kind of a clunky implementation.

I easily could be reading too much into it, and it might have normal DoT behavior after all. On the other hand, there might be strange issues which arise from refreshing early where either the DoT doesn't take, or if you accidentally spam it twice and overwrite a huge crit DoT with a weak one, or some other nonsensical little story. The general direction of the glyph I utterly love, but I just hope that it winds up working cleanly. This dovetails with the idea that it ought to be a built-in part of Hemorrhage rather than a glyphed in addition, and the ability would probably benefit from being redesigned as a Rogue-Rake, basically.

As to the Backstab glyph, I'm happy with it from an output sense, but I get the feeling that it will be the death knell for Ruthlessness for Sub rogues, in favor of Puncturing Wounds. It could easily have been that Ruthlessness was doomed from the start, that it wouldn't hold up against the crit or the hit from Precision, even before this glyph entered the equation, but it's just kind of sad to see it go. It always felt like it fit well with sub's theme of finisher-spam (or as close to it as it can be with HaT cooldowns and multi-CP bugs removed), and while swapping it out for baseline hit or crit or any damage modifiers really seems like a loss of something interesting. It is also a little odd that they add a crit proc into this glyph, at the same time as they take the crit-based part of the SS glyph away.

Concerning that glyph, it oddly might be a good thing. A 20% chance for a bonus CP is equivalent to what the old SS glyph would do at 40% crit. However, Blizzard has repeatedly said that they felt crit and haste and all the other ratings got well out-of-hand in Wrath, and that Cataclysm would see much lower rates. Clearly we won't be starting the first raiding tier with as high a crit chance as we have now at the end of ICC, and if we walk into our first raids with a 25% crit chance (particularly in 10 player raids), a 20% flat rate would be better than the Live glyph version. It might not be until BiS in the last raid of Cataclysm that we'd reach Sinister Strike crit chances over 40%. Of course, it could just as easily go the other way, where we start raiding at around 40% crit fully buffed and it only gets higher from there. Time will tell, but just because it's a clear nerf at level 80 stat conversion rates doesn't mean that it will be a nerf at level 85.

Saweni · 09/02/10, 3:18 AM

I really like the way major glyphs are designed, at least for a muti rogue.

There is one obvious glyph, the Tott one, the two other are situational, sprint is a choice that makes sense for the same reason that makes Fleet Footed a great damage granting talent. Then you've got one glyph left considering the fight (Fok for aoe based fights, CoS or Sap in certain cases) or even considering the filler you could have had to take for a certain fight (Glyph of EA for a Imp.EA spec, Glyph of crippling poison assuming it works on 1/2 deadly brew specs)

The only grief I still have is that Imp.EA isn't a filler right now, as you have to give one dps talent up to take 2/2. But moving it a step upper in the three would surely achieve what Blizzard was willing to do with "customizable specs".