Patch 3.3.3 is now on the PTR and with it come some changes to rogues. These changes are very likely to be the last we’ll see before Cataclysm. Blizzard says that they’re never truly satisfied with anything but the fact remains that rogues are in a pretty good place right now. Since the last round of nerfs, the caterwauling about our damage being OP has subsided to it’s usual low rumble and while there are a few fights that penalize us more than other classes (*cough* Sindragosa *cough*), it’s not anything we can’t learn to just deal with.

The changes are pretty interesting, let’s take a look.

• Rupture: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes.

This is the only real change for raiding rogues; it’s the 4-piece tier 8 bonus now made baseline. (For those wondering, the 4 piece tier 8 bonus is being changed to give +20% damage to Rupture.) Feral druids have had this for some time and rogues were jealous. During T8 content rogues ran with as high of a Rupture uptime as possible but as gear levels increased we all saw the writing on the wall. Once we were out of T8 content our other abilities which scaled better than a crit-less Rupture would force Rupture out of our rotation. Anyone who was reading my ranting in the LoD forums will remember me talking about how I’d be dropping Rupture from my talents/glyphs/rotation as soon as we were out of Ulduar. And I did.

Now that a crit-ing Rupture could become baseline we have to look at it again. If you’ve not been following the discussion on the web, I’ll sum it up for you.

1. Assassination builds have become far too dependent on the Envenom buff for DPS to lose any of it’s uptime to Rupture. Blizzard would have to buff the hell out of Rupture’s scaling and likewise nerf Envenom for Assassination to take the talents and use it.
2. Combat builds aren’t as cut and dry. Keeping the same strategy of gearing and gem’ing for Armor Penetration but changing talents and glyphs to support Rupture, Combat builds can get a 3% or possibly greater buff on fights where you can use Rupture, i.e. static fights with long lived mobs. On fights that aren’t as static and you can’t use the Rupture talents and glyphs it’s only about a 1% loss. Basically, giving up a small about of burst damage for some sustained damage. Is it worth it? I don’t know, but since the gearing is almost identical and each character can run two specs and glyph sets… well, you do the math.

The rest of the changes have to do with the perennially neglected Subtlety tree. Even GC himself says that no tree in all of WoW has it as bad off as Subtlety. It’s been a running joke for years and that’s sad. Subtlety is a lot of fun to play. In fact if you look at Subtlety, you can get a feel for how talent trees in Cataclysm will look. There are lots of talents in there that don’t just bump your damage by X%. A lot of the talents in Subtlety are just fun and unique.

And there-in lies the problem. The Subtlety tree is too much fun. There, I said it. If Blizzard buffed Subtlety to be even close to raid viable, every rogue without exception would flock to it, no question in my mind about that. And with all that said, they’re buffing Subtlety… slightly.

• Slaughter from the Shadows now adds 1/2/3/4/5% damage to all attacks and reduces the energy cost of Backstab and Ambush by 4/8/12/16/20, up from 3/6/9/12/15.
• Filthy Tricks now reduces the cooldown by 5/10 sec and energy cost by 5/10 of your Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 3 min.
• Waylay now affects your Ambush and Backstab hits (Old – Only Ambush critical hits). Movement speed bonus reduced from 70% to 50%.
• Hemorrhage now deals 160% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.
• Ghostly Strike now deals 180% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.

First off, the Hemorrhage and Ghostly Strike changes are long overdue. Subtlety has always had an identity crisis about what kind of weapon tree it is and this is just to make it clear. Subtlety is a dagger tree. There’s also a straight up damage increase as well as some energy cost and cooldown reduction in there.

Honestly, this looks like Blizzard’s attempt to give rogues a PvP tree again. Blizzard might love hybrid classes but they hate hybrid specs; Blizzard wants everyone to go 51 points into a tree in both PvE and PvP. Contrary to this, rogues have been running a Mutilate/Prep build for PvP since the dawn of time. Everything in rogue PvP is balanced around it and Blizzard can’t get us away from it.

Is Subtlety PvP viable with these changes? Probably. Subtlety has been on the fringe of breaking into PvP for some time and this looks like it might push it into the mainstream. I highly doubt it will de-throne Mut/Prep but stranger things have happened.

Is Subtlety PvE viable with these changes? Ask again later. Right now the general consensus is “no” but things on the PTR change all the time and there are some hidden benefits to Subtlety. First off, it has the ability to change targets as well as Combat and it’s mobility is unrivaled by any class/spec in the game. Talented with the new Filthy Tricks, Shadowstep becomes a 20 second teleport that costs no energy and give a 20% damage boost to your next attack. Right now all eyes are on 10/10/51 to be the best shot at raid viable Subtlety but for all that mobility and fun the damage is still sub-par and the rotation would make a feral druid want to tear their hair out.

Honestly though? I’d love to see Subtlety make it into raiding. That would be awesome. I’ll be on the PTR as much as I can this weekend to try it out and will report back what I find.

Where we came from:

First off, when WotLK was in development, rogues were buggy as hell. We finally had what looked like two viable raiding specs but there are always problems. Bugs that gave extra poison procs, talents that gave 15% crit instead of 3% (stacking 5/5 Deadly Poison for a 3% raid buff should give me 15% crit, right?), etc and a few others meant we were blowing everyone away on the 3.0 PTR. Of course these things were fixed when 3.0 went live but the problem was that several abilities were balanced on those bugged numbers. Then 3.1 and 3.2 brought PvP changes that directly affected PvE; most nerfs were compensated for by buffs but it really wasn’t as equitable as we’d like. The long and the short is that we became even more dependent on auto-attacks for damage and spending time-on-target which, as a melee class, isn’t often realistic. Many other melee classes have specials that hit hard enough that after coming back to a target they can frontload some damage to make up for at least a little time lost. Because most abilities have a fairly high energy cost we only get one or two attacks and often we have to make sure that those lead back into our “rotation.”

By mid-Ulduar and through ToC, Combat was taking a front seat in the rogue world. The two raid buffs (4% increased physical damage and an MS affect) were vital to progression and the fights were set up in such a way that short periods of DPS burst were timed very well with Combats cooldowns. Mutilate was still competitive in single target fights but there weren’t any of those to speak of in 3.1 and 3.2. Just like in TBC, Combat was King.

Where we are now:

Patch 3.3 has really shaped up to be a much better patch for rogues though. We got some much needed buffs, most of which are for Mutilate but they do bleed over into Combat as well. The first being my long-standing problem with Murder. I mentioned it in my own Q&A post back in June ’09 and Blizzard finally responded in 3.3 with, “Murder: This talent now provides a flat damage increase of 2/4% against all targets, instead of only targets which do not appear in Icecrown.” Blizzard knew the score and they knew it wasn’t fair.

The other major buff was to Deadly Poison. Deadly Poison was in danger in going the way of the dodo. Actually, that’s not quite true. Because Deadly Poison was the only pure DoT, rogues were using addons and macros to weapon swap. Invoking a forced weapon swap that denied a dual wield class the use of both weapons for one out of every six seconds was higher DPS than simply using the poison Blizzard gave us. I think Madsushi said it best with:

If you Lacerate when you already have a 5 stack on your target, they take some amount of damage instantly, in addition to refreshing the effect. If you proc Deadly Poison when you’re already at 5 stacks? Nothing but a stack refresh and a nice pat on the back for being a good rogue and remembering to use the right poisons.

Blizzard has now added a secondary effect to Deadly Poison and has also blocked/disabled the addon that allowed rogues to weapon swap. In the end, this was a big buff to Mutilate and a minor buff to Combat (which changed it’s default build to take full advantage of this buff). The buff to Mutilate through this change was actually strong enough that Blizzard nerfed Hunger For Blood by 5%. When a buff is big enough to warrant a straight-up 5% nerf on all damage in the next build, you know it was a big buff.

Mutilate vs. Combat

The question then becomes, which is better, Mutilate or Combat? The answer, to no ones surprise, is one of much heated debate.

In theory, Mutilate is estimated to be somewhere on the order of 1500-1800 DPS ahead of Combat in BiS gear. That means on stationary, single target fights, Mutilate will dominate. And I believe it! My first week in Icecrown (which wasn’t actually week 1) during the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter I played Mutilate and messed up my positioning horribly (during Heroism no-less). My DPS dropped by half for at least 30 seconds and I still came out on top and with as high or higher DPS than any class we’ve seen on non-gimmick fights. If I had had more than a single try at that fight, there’s no reason I couldn’t have broken 11K DPS in only ToC gear. No gimmicks, no weird buffs, just full-on rogue. And because there are more than five bosses in Icecrown, this is a real boon. Deathwhisper and her shield, Saurfang, and more to come will play very well to Mutilate and you can expect to see Mutilate rogues crushing many other DPS classes in single target fights.

So does that mean that Combat has been de-throned? Not at all! Combat is all about burst, cooldowns and smacking things hard and fast. Mutilates biggest weakness is target swapping. Ask a Mutilate rogue to work on adds and he’s going to fall flat when compared to any other DPS. It takes Mutilate a good 10 seconds to ramp up their DPS and in 10mans will often have to put up their own bleeds which delays things even longer. Combat, however, turns on the heat right away and can swap targets as well as any other melee class. Couple that with some very great cooldowns like Adrenaline Rush, Blade Flurry, and Killing Spree and you have some really good burst capabilities that Mutilate will never be able to match. ICC fights like Marrowgar, Deathwhisper’s adds and the Gunship Battle play right into Combats burst and cooldowns. Because of cooldowns and Combat Potency, Combat also has a much stronger potential for Fan of Knives (the rogue AoE).

This also brings up another big difference, both Mutilate and Combat are blended when it come to damage, some of it is physical and some of it magical (poisons/nature) but the proportions of each in both specs is quite different. Mutilate is now somewhere around 55% magical damage with the remainder being physical while Combat is only about 27% magical with the vast majority being physical damage.

Pick One Already!

I wish it were that simple. The problem comes in the fact that while both specs will use a lot of the same pieces of gear in ICC, their gemming strategies are quite different. You can try to blend your gemming for both but the end result is that you’re not going to excel in either. Couple that with the fact that rogues are a dual wield class which opens up another problem when it comes to choosing a spec and gearing. A lot of guilds run on DKP and just assign a single value to weapons and won’t let rogues get “offspec discounts” because hey, offspec’ing sounds like cheating when you have three DPS talent trees. So if weapons cost 100 DKP, the paladin gets his 2hander for 100 and can offspec that tank weapon and shield for nothing while the rogue pays 200 for his daggers and another 200 for his swords (nevermind the fact that we need two matching drops and not just one).

So, because of potential gem issues and gear issues (don’t forget that feral druids want combat’s gear!), we have to pick one. There are two schools of thought on how to pick. You can either pick the spec that is favored by the most fights in the instance or you can pick the one based on the hardest fights in the instance. But with only four fights available right now and no hard modes we have no idea what the ideal spec for either of those is.

Another idea is to say that raid buffs are going to play heavily into the answer and if we look at other classes we might be able to make some inferences. Let’s have a quick look:

Mutilate brings one raid buff in the form of 3% additional crit to your target. This buff is also most notably brought by retribution paladins (and both holy and prot can bring it as well if needed). With ret being so prevalent it’s highly unlikely that even a 10man raid won’t have a ret paladin (or an elemental shaman). In fact, earlier in WotLK it was common for Mutilate rogues to not even take the talent as it was so common and they could get better DPS elsewhere.

Combat brings two buffs in the form of a 4% increased physical damage (the default MS effect is now defunct in 3.3). The only other source for this buff is the now dwindling number of arms warriors. Arms was very powerful in early WotLK but as gear levels have increased, Fury has climbed up top in most warriors minds. That makes Combat very desirable for both it’s burst and it’s debuffs.

Honestly though, while raid buffs are important, having an off-spec with non-optimal gems and so-so weapons is usually perfectly acceptable.

Enough chatter, pick one!

So what do I say and what am I doing? Well, I’m playing Mutilate in 3.3. I’ve played Combat all through Ulduar and ToC and now I want back into Mutilate. For all the rest of you out there, pick the one you want to play. I don’t know for sure but it appears there are fights that cater to both in ICC and if a certain raid buff is really that vital to downing the boss then it should be acceptable to off-spec the other with less-than-optimal gear and gems.

In the end it isn’t a player who conquers the encounter with his leet deeps (or whatever the kids call it these days), superior burst, fantastic tanking or clutch healing. All these things are great but you can have these things and still fall flat when it comes to encounters in Warcraft. When played well, both specs are perfectly capable of putting out the necessary DPS to complete the encounters and when you play the spec you enjoy, I found it tends to do better. =D