I’ve got some catching up to do with Ghostcrawler rogue tweets; leave it to a cold to snot away a normally-obsessive-compulsive person’s motivation for twitstalking. This one’s from more than a week ago:
@Aulper7 Have you looked at the 5.2 patch notes?
—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 12, 2013
Without a doubt, it’s looking like our level-90 talent tier options in Patch 5.2 will be much closer (in terms of their value) in raids and challenge-mode dungeons. Shuriken Toss will allow us to autoattack at range, dramatically increasing its power, and Marked for Death’s five free combo points per minute provides us with a nice little active-DPS bump that may be especially useful for burst situations.
But is either change enough to unseat Anticipation as the talent of choice in end-game PvE?
The gist of the feedback over at Elitist Jerks is that few expect ST or MfD to win out. I’m no whiz-bang theorycrafter, but I’m inclined to agree: It’s hard for me to envision many scenarios in which, *over the course of an entire raid fight*, it would be more valuable for me to
- deal decent DPS at range or
- gain 5 extra CPs per minute,
instead of using Anticipation, which guarantees me that I will
- almost never waste a combo point and
- never have to settle for a four-point finisher instead of a five-point finisher.
As of this post, we know next to nothing about most fights in the upcoming raid tier, so there is always a possibility that a surprising number of fight mechanics will favor the buffed ST or the new MfD. But I was one of a number of rogues who, back in the Mists beta, said the same thing about ST and our soon-to-be-dearly-departed level-90 talent Versatility. “But wait!” said I, I said. “Who knows how many raid fights in Mists will require a huge amount of target switching! Or constant running around at range like a maniac?”
I did a Google image search for “maniac.” This came up. How could I not?
The answer turned out to be: Basically none. Or, at least, not enough of a given raid fight required those things to make it more valuable to choose the “old” ST or Versatility over Anticipation.
Maybe that experience has made me more cynical this time around, and I’m being unfair in my negativity. Then again:
For Shuriken Toss — buffed or not — to be more desirable than Anticipation in a given raid fight, it likely means that the fight itself needs to be brutally unfriendly to melee DPS. Designing a fight like that feels like it’d be fundamentally against Blizzard’s current approach to encounter design, which is to allow for a wide range of classes to be viable.
For Marked for Death to be more desirable than Anticipation, we’d need to gain more DPS through getting a magically full CP bar once per minute than we would by never losing a combo point. In most standard fights, that feels unlikely to happen. *Especially* not for Assassination rogues, who gain two CPs (and sometimes three, thanks to Seal Fate) every time they use Mutilate, thus guaranteeing that they’ll be Envenoming at 4 CPs without Anticipation.
But it’s not just Assassination rogues who lose out if they drop Anticipation. Our new-in-Mists DPS cooldown, Shadow Blades (which adds an extra CP onto every CP-building move we use), ensures that other specs lose out, too. Shadow Blades all but requires Anticipation if we want to use it to maximum effectiveness; otherwise we’re either wasting CPs while it’s active, or we’re using smaller finishers.
The only scenario in which I can see MfD potentially being worth that kind of trade-off is a fight that involves a tremendous amount of target switching or a lot of spawning/despawning targets, such that we don’t have a lot of uptime on our targets (reducing the effectiveness of Shadow Blades and reducing the number of CPs we even have the opportunity to gain on our targets). In that scenario, being able to guarantee a quick 5-CPs-and-BAM could be pretty handy. Especially if burst matters.
Let’s kick this rogue up another notch!
But, for the same reason it seems unlikely that we’re going to see raid fights that punish melee DPS enough to make Shuriken Toss the best choice, it feels unlikely we’re going to see raid fights that punish DPS who can’t frequently switch targets all that well.
It may be that the best we can really hope for in Patch 5.2 is that, for those of us who *do* choose to go with Shuriken Toss or MfD on raid fights because we find those abilities more fun to use than Anticipation, our DPS won’t suffer quite as much for our decision as it would have before Patch 5.2.
Although Anticipation would seemingly be the best. There is still something to be said for MfD, for just purely not letting a finisher like rupture and snd drop off, or to add damage during burst stages. Personally for assassination I can’t see much beating out Anticipation as the finishers are so simplified in that tree.
Combat, you might want to get in another 5cp finisher during that red phase, or possibly for subtelty, who also benefit from anticipation well due to the honor among thieves procs, you could drop another bomb during the find weakness window, if rupture and snd are eventually going to run out close together, you can dump the existing cp into snd, and 5pt the rupture again. I suppose if you needed a ranged interupt fast…andyou had specced into deadly throw as PvE (yes i’m aware you wouldn’t but still….) the 5cp is then another ranged interupt…admittedly you only need 3+ if the changes to deadly throw go live but there you have it.
Actually shuriken toss is a fairly viable ranged opener for a rogue now with some 1st tier talents taken into cosideration (minimal cost or +20% damage from stealth) and if you care about meters and such, you could eek that little bit more dps between packs of trash with it. Some builds for testing did use it as a cp builder instead of backstab,hemo or as a top up to mutilate (to 5cp) if blindside hasn’t proc’d and its generally not that far behind due to the low cost allowing for more energy pooling (ok yeah its behind on all parses…but still…. maybe this change makes it a bit better).
I can see massive uses for all in pvp, but that isn’t the argument. Maybe i’m just trying to play devils advocate….
The thing about anticipation for combat is that it means everything is up one BG level, that is a lot of damage. Yes you can use MfD to prevent rupture or snd from dropping but really with anticipation that should rarely be a problem, pooling past 5 cps solves the tricky parts of getting in well timed refreshes.
MfD is interesting because it may actually be viable for a few fights, especially when you take into consideration stuns. On tsulong heroic you want to stunlock the embodied terrors to prevent them from casting terrorize which when combined with unstable bolt from the unstable shas can gib someone. Running combat for MfD->RvS->KS could be interesting on something like heroic tsulong. I don’t think Blizzard can make a fight that has enough target swapping to make MfD good, one of the common themes of strat design is all about how to minimize target swapping especially for melee because of mobility issues, but it may come out on occasion for incidental utility.
ST however will probably never be used, ever. Fundamentally while ST is decent damage now its still less efficient in terms of damage per energy (comparing just ST not its white swings which should compare comparably to regular white swings) to our regular cp builds and/or doesn’t fit into our rotation properly. Assassination would be the most likely to use ST as a replacement for mutilate but its much less damage/energy and by mid next tier will no longer have a cp/energy advantage.
The only way for ST to be viable is if melee have large amounts of forced downtime (enough to let your energy cap for several seconds) relatively often and Blizzard isn’t going to make a fight like that because it would absolutely break dps balance for other melee dps if not us as Rfeann points out correctly.
The new T6 is certainly better than before, I might actually consider using MfD once per tier, but fundamentally anticipation is a very powerful talent that adds a lot (although not nearly enough) of needed depth to the class.
–FD
I personally think that the solution would be for sustained damage to not be built upon and only upon cranking out 5 point finishers. Spamming 1 or 2 point ones is no fun though, so you’d not want to do anything like that. maybe 3 points is the sweet spot. Something like 1-100%, 2-225%,3-350% 4-425%, 5–500%. This way, you have the option of rolling more burst into a finisher but it’s not the best thing for sustained dps. Also remove finisher cost rather than the refund crap we have now.
I may be alone here, but here I go anyway (because as I rogue, I go places alone a lot)….
I hate Anticipation. I think it’s the most boring talent we have, and we have some fairly dull talents. It’s boring because it’s such a baseline ability. If you take Anticipation, you remove combo point management from the rogue game almost entirely; but if you don’t take Anticipation you damage your dps because even with perfect combo point management, you’re going to drop points due to Revealing Strike or Honour Among Thieves procs; or because of the high combo point generation of Shadow Blades and Muti/Seal Fate.
So we have an option to make our gameplay more dull in exchange for doing more damage. We think less, react less and show less skill in exchange for better performance.
The only exception I can think of is Combat being able to game Bandit’s Guile, but I’m not sure whether that is what Ghostcrawler would call “compelling gameplay”, especially when the default UI doesn’t even show your sub stage within BG.
My suggestion would be to remove Anticipation as a talent entirely and give us something new in its place. Perhaps Combat could have Anticipation baked into it via a skill (there’s no reason it needs to be confined to max level rogues); which would allow them to keep their Bandit’s Guile trickery.
Am I completely missing the point here? It feels weird to desire a nerf, but I really think it would improve the rogue gameplay, especially when the major complaint of PvE rogues at the moment is not low damage, but low activity.
This might be a very basic question. I am confused on this anticipation. You gain 5 extra combo points from what I have heard. Why doesn’t those 5 extra combo points show up on the default blizzard UI? Do you really have to get a add on to see the extra five combo points that you build up? Or am I missing something with this?
Yeah, they didn’t design any kind of new element for displaying the extra CPs you get from Anticipation. You *can* see them, though, within the default UI — they show up as a buff in the upper-right part of the screen, in the same area as all of your other buffs (trinket procs, well-fed, flask/potion buffs, raid buffs).
Definitely not the most user-friendly approach, since your combo point bar is over on the other side of the screen. Which is why I expect most folks who run with Anticipation do indeed use an add-on to customize the way those extra CPs appear on their screen.