A pretty insane number of major changes are on the slate for rogues in Patch 5.2, and virtually all of them are positive adjustments: A much-maligned talent eliminated, interesting new talents added, Preparation baselined, earth-nudging PvP improvements… Oh, and there is one noteworthy negative thing: Blade Flurry’s cleave damaged is being reduced 75%.
Which of those changes do you think has generated the most chatter?
Ghostcrawler put his head down and ran back into the scrum yesterday, answering a flurry (HA!) of tweets about the upcoming Combat changes. There are a couple of interesting new tidbits in here, including a confirmation that they’re considering a reduction to Blade Flurry’s energy regen penalty.
@GuerrillaDawg We buffed Combat single target to make them more competitive with Assassination.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 06, 2013@addikit On Blade Flurry? Yes, perhaps.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 07, 2013@Tophersz Rogues are doing well on almost every fight. The problem we're trying to solve is promoting diversity not giving out more DPS.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 07, 2013@Aulper7 Yeah, that's what we're saying. Ideally "I might do a little more damage as Combat on this fight," not "I must have a Combat spec."
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 07, 2013@Tophersz Why don't you tell me the DPS delta that defines legit vs. mediocre for you?
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 07, 2013
I don’t expect anything in this exchange is going to be enough to pacify people who feel the Blade Flurry nerf is a terrible, class-hurting move. (Well, maybe the energy-regen comment will help a bit.) But hopefully, if you’re one of those folks, you’ll still take some of GC’s points above to heart, at least a little bit.
I realize that, if you look at this change in a vacuum, it can look like a major strength of the class — Combat’s cleave — is being decimated, and very little is being added to compensate *the class* for its removal. Thus the concern I’ve seen from a few players that one end result of this change could be that more versatile classes, or classes with a wider array of fight-specific benefits (such as cleaves) that are *not* being nerfed in 5.2, may become more likely to get the nod in progression raids.
This could certainly happen. Perception is often more important than reality, and if raid leaders begin to widely perceive that rogues are weak overall, their raid representation could well suffer as a result of this blow to Combat’s cleave. But it’s important to keep in mind that rogues are *very* strong end-game DPS performers right now even when you remove our cleave from the equation. 5.2 is not likely to change that.
So while I understand the long faces — nerfs are poopy and we hate them and they make us sad — how realistic is it, really, that raid leaders will dump rogues en masse because a niche strength is no longer that strong? And, as GC asked in that final question in the thread, where should we draw that highly subjective line between “good” and “bad” DPS on a cleave fight?
Somehow I get the feeling this conversation is far from over. :)
Couple things I noticed *put’s on Glen Beck conspiracy glasses*
@GuerrillaDawg We buffed Combat single target to make them more competitive with Assassination.
-It’s confirmed, nobody cares about subtlety, not even the devs!
@addikit On Blade Flurry? Yes, perhaps.
-Blade Flurry will see a significant reduction in its energy regen penalty. Or, Bliz caters to casuals who require an OP ability to compete in PvE.
@evangel666777 Also, to reiterate, it’s fine for Combat to be better at cleaving. We just want to tone it down so you can be e.g. Ass / Sub.
-GC compares Subtlety rogues to ass. One can only hope that with the current buff to Sub we will be promoted to colon.
@Tophersz Rogues are doing well on almost every fight. The problem we’re trying to solve is promoting diversity not giving out more DPS.
-GC out of touch, doesn’t realize some of our worst raiders are rogues!
@Tophersz Why don’t you tell me the DPS delta that defines legit vs. mediocre for you?
-Legitimate question or just giving out sass? You decide!
Reading GC on twitter makes me sad. Not because of his responses but because the arguments he is responding to are silly. Its an inherent limitation of the platform, I can’t present a well reasoned argument about why the BF change makes no sense and he is limited to simplistic or snarky responses. Not that I don’t enjoy the snarky responses, especially given the general intelligence level of the some of the complaints but in place of the more in depth discussions we got during wrath they pale in comparison.
In response to the questions you pose.
Will raid leaders dump rogues en masse?
Probably not however you probably won’t be recruiting any more. I’ve used this example before on the forums and I’ll use it again here, this entire tier my guild has gotten a decent number of apps from WW monks and our answer pretty much universally has been, not a useful addition to our raid roster. It isn’t that these players aren’t skilled, in some cases they have been but melee spots are hard to come by for many bosses and adding a melee dps to our roster who doesn’t bring some form of really awesome utility (BoP, Sac, AM, RC+Banner, Cleave, GG, Aoe Stun, etc.) is certainly a hard call.
Maybe part of it is a perception issue but when you go down the line and start looking at how you set your raid comp it is very hard to justify bringing a rogue. Fundamentally single target dps isn’t a particularly interesting niche, yes rogues are good single target dps but if we look at the patchwork of the tier, garajal you see that the dps delta between best melee and worst melee is something on the order of 7%, not a insignificant margin but figuring 7 melee dps if you replaced a feral druid (worst on average) with a warrior (best on average) you only see a 1% raid dps increase (actually probably more given skull banner but we’ll set that aside for now). In practice it doesn’t matter too much if rogue single target is exemplary because Blizzard has done an admirable job balancing single target dps.
What is the difference between “good cleave” and “bad cleave”
Answering this numerically is admittedly hard, however intuitively it isn’t hard to answer. There are a couple ways we can do this, one way is to look at how the raiding population views cleave damage. Ask a knowledgeable raider what classes they consider to have “good cleave” damage and the answer will probably be Frost DK, Warriors, Combat Rogues (if we confine the question to melee). Therefore we can say that good cleave damage is comparable damage to frost dks and warriors since BF post nerf won’t be that we can conclude combat will not be “good cleave.”
Another way to look at it is to use some form of clustering, imagine we were to draw a set of lines between stone guard dps numbers (because stone guard represents the patchwork of cleave). The goal of these lines would be so that each populated group had the smallest delta dps possible while minimizing the number of lines we drew. This would be similar to k-means which would also be on its own a fine approach. If we did this we’d see one group with combat which we could label “exceptional cleave” another group with frost DKs, fury warriors and assassination rogues which we can label “good cleave” and finally a group with enhance shamans, WW monks, ret paladins and feral druids which we can call “minimal cleave.” Based on the initial calculations of combat cleave combat would likely be in the minimal cleave group. In fact most interestingly assassination may in fact have higher patchwork cleave then combat post BF nerf, admittedly some of this is propped up by the 2 set bonus and rupture cleaving is less sustainable on a more irregular cleave fight but it is still a very relevant result. If we compensate for the 2 set bonus assassination is still quite close to fury warriors in dps.
What that result shows if anything is how dead combat probably is without BF. Based on these results you end up with assassination being equal if not better than combat at just about everything which is the real problem here. As I’ve said a few times on the forums I can live with combat being toned down in cleave, I can even live with combat losing BF completely but something BIG needs to happen to make rogues keep combat around versus assassination or Blizzard has just undermined their entire goal (more spec freedom) with this nerf. Unless combat offers a pretty immense single target dps advantage over assassination (10%+) running combat even as a limited off spec will be very hard to justify.
Sorry this ended up so long.
–FD
Thanks for directly GC toward this, as is probably obvious from my first paragraph I’m not a huge fan of twitter as a platform.
Also a quick correction, combat post BF nerf would probably fall somewhere in between the “good cleave” and “minimal cleave” groups like assassination. Doing percent calculations on logs is hardly accurate but ballparking things out shows once assassination loses its 2 set it will probably be around combat in two target dps, how exactly it would get grouped isn’t obvious without actually computing the grouping but it might for a group with combat between the good and minimal groups, a group that looking at logs we can probably call “average cleave.”
Those of us obstinate enough to continue playing rogue will do whatever it takes to push the dps as high as we can if that was having 2 specs so be it with this change it seems well shelf combat for the rest of the expansion.
Also agree that this change won’t get us more raid spots
You’ll shelf it even though it will still likely be optimal on cleave fights and may be competitive on single-target fights?