Rogue News: Wooah! DPS after patch 3.3 and Hunger for Blood

Everyone: “Check out the DPS!”

Assassination Rogue flexes his muscles, oooh so strong!

Combat Rogue sulks

What can I say? It’s great to be up there at the top of the damage charts. It’s especially satisfying since Combat Rogues have being outdoing Assassination Rogues for far too long. I really enjoy playing as an Assassination Rogue and, despite all the top Rogues using Combat spec, I’ve stuck with it. My DPS has always been competitive with Combat Rogues with them usually beating me but only by a reasonable margin so why change?

As I’ve said before in previous posts; REAL Rogues use daggers!

You simply cannot NOT notice the whopping difference in damage done following changes to Deadly Poison, Improved Poisons and the update to Murder. I’m sure Combat Rogues are feeling a little bruised at the moment having “ruled the roost” for too long…. Good!

 I wonder how many Combat Rogues are now going to be switching over?

Both Sam (Slice and Dice) and Dinear (Forever a Noob) have written great articles covering the DPS increase from before and after patch 3.3 for Assassination Rogues. According to their numbers their DPS has increased between 20% and 25% (on a stationary target dummy).

Of course we’re already hearing “NERF ASS ROUGES” and I have to hold my hands up and just admit it; I am loving it! (I’m not going to deny it).

Unfortunately, I do have to agree this sort of DPS increase does seem a little overboard, we’ve been expecting an “adjustment” and sure enough…

Ghostcrawler has come forth and revealed Hunger for Blood will now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%:

“We wanted to increase Assassination rogue damage, and we were succesful, but we overshot the mark. We buffed Hunger for Blood back when Assassination needed a damage boost, so we’re more than happy that this talent won’t account for such a huge dps increase. Because of the nature of hotfixes, it is unlikely the tooltip will change to 10% right away”

It was only to be expected really wasn’t it?

As Dinear says; “mutilate still has a significant buff overall from the patch” and in all fairness we are still looking at a buff of between 15% – 20% after this nerf (on a stationary target dummy).

Are you a Combat Rogue? Will you be changing to Assasination spec?

Rogue News: Talent Trees and Class Changes in Cataclysm?

Ghostcrawler’s latest blue post gives us a hint about some interesting ideas and developments for the Rogue class in the upcoming release of Cataclysm.

There’s been quite a bit of talk about the viability of the subtlety talent tree where utility and mobility are the dominant focus rather than DPS and if you didn’t already know Blizzard are revamping the talent trees in the next expansion…

“… We’d like for more talent trees to look like Subtlety. Trading utility A for utility B is an interesting decision. Trading utility A for more dps is not an interesting decision; the latter is always going to win.

Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it’s likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It’s going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. (For some players, losing any dps is unacceptable, but I also know enough hardcore players that I can say with some confidence that you can’t just make a blanket statement that all competitive players feel this way.) “

My sentiments exactly!

Of course Combat Rogues are currently in first place in terms of DPS in raids. However, I just love Assassination too much to switch. Fortunately, Assassination Rogues are not far off Combat and with the incoming patch 3.3 update we’ll be even more competitive and without the need for any Weapon Swapping shenanigans.

Where it lacks in terms of quick-fire burst damage, for sustained DPS, Assassination wins. Look at fights like Gormok the Impaler, Twin Val’kyrs (Fjola Lightbane and Eydis Darkbane)and XT-002 in Ulduar. However, these fights have something in common; they’re pretty much stationary battles. As soon as there’s any real running around to be done Combat wins. However, this is part and parcel of the spec you choose and you have to accept there will be differences.

I chose Assassination and stick with it. For me the challenging rotation, the playstyle is much more enjoyable and I don’t want to have to change to Combat (which I personally don’t enjoy as much) in order to get a regular raid spot and progress.

I enjoy playing World of Warcraft and, without wanting to sound selfish, I want to use whatever playstyle I find most enjoyable not whatever spec is flavour-of-the-month in terms of pure DPS.

“I don’t think we’re there with rogues yet. Assassination is now a serious contender in end-game raiding, but Subtlety isn’t and hasn’t been since HAT was in a silly place. I think we’re a lot closer with mages. Arcane may be the highest dps in a general sense, but there are fights on which Fire will win. Frost is a lot closer than it used to be, to the point where someone who just loves Frost won’t feel like they are horribly gimping their group’s progress. (It probably still needs to be slightly higher than where it is, but we’ll see what Icecrown is like.) We eventually want to get rogues, locks and hunters closer to where mages appear to be in 3.3 (and work on mages more too of course).”

The reason I picked up a Rogue was primarily due to one thing… Stealth!

I played around with the subtlety tree back in The Burning Crusade and absolutely loved the mobility; Shadowstep was just awesome fun! I really enjoyed it and, whilst slower for levelling, used it for questing, 5-man dungeon runs and battlegrounds. Ok, it wasn’t the most suitable spec but it was by far the most fun for me.

I would love to be able to give the subtlety tree a go but it is simply not an option at all at the moment.

“Honor Among Thieves was a good attempt to get more combo points, and therefore damage, into the tree. It ended up having the scaling problem that a lot of our abilites have — it’s easy for it to be too weak in a small, 5-player group and to be too powerful when it’s scaling off of 25 players. (Restricting it to a group doesn’t really help because you can just fill that group full of folks who crit a lot, and raids provide a lot more buffs to guarantee crits.)

I do agree with the general feel of Subtlety being high finisher damage and cps through alternative routes, and that’s a kit we want to keep going forward. I also agree that Ghostly Strike, Hemo and Backstab all could use more “juice” (by which I don’t just mean higher dps). I’ll also add that I think we went a little overboard in emphasizing damage over utility in Lich King PvE, especially in the earlier raid tiers. Who needs a good Sap when you’re AE’ing everything down?”

In terms of PvP I’m using the 44/2/25 spec (primarily Assassination). I am in no way an expert… In fact I’ve got a long way to go before I’d consider myself to be any good… BUT… I enjoy it. I have been tempted to give subtlety a go here too but to be honest I miss the control the Assassination tree provides. Without it I feel too vulnerable; we do get torn apart pretty damn fast without our crowd-control abilities.

In my (limited) experience so far, in PvP, the Rogues job is to control and manipulate the opposition using stuns, interrupts, disarm the enemy and NOT get caught. If we get caught, that’s it. So far I’ve found we are the first nuke target. As soon as we open out of stealth I hear cries of “NUKE TEH ROUGE!”. And it can happen fast!

“PvP-wise, utility can be a lot more useful than in PvE. However, as I’ve said before we think we’ve kind of let rogues get into too much of that glass cannon state. They either keep someone controlled and blow them up, or they themselves get blown up. We would still like to tone down some of the rogue CC and increase some of their passive (not cooldown-based) survivability. It’s a little weird that leather classes are generally more fragile than cloth.”

Amen to that!

So… When are we going to see these changes? Well… Soon says Blizzard.

Personally, I’m excited to see what the changes in Cataclysm will bring.