(I updated this post around 11pm on March 6 to note the new, correct numbers; contrary to my normal m.o., this time the new stuff is on the top and the old stuff is on the bottom. So pretend it’s like reading an email thread.)
The first round of official patch 5.2 hotfix notes includes this juicy nugget of DPS goodness for Assassination rogues:
Assassin’s Resolve now increases the Rogue’s damage by 25% (was 20%).
That’s half as much of a last-minute buff to Mut’s passive damage bonus as Ghostcrawler had initially indicated (see my original post below), but still a substantial increase overall, particularly alongside the Dispatch and Envenom buffs that had already been slated.
The last-second nature of the introduction of the AssRes (how is everyone not calling it that?) buff, immediately followed by its partial reversion (down to 25% instead of 30%), has led to a fair amount of confusion. It probably hasn’t helped that it looks like the bump from 20% to 30% and then back down to 25% led to some tooltip weirdness that presumably won’t be cleaned up until we download another patch (since tooltip text is typically stored on our local computers). Don’t be surprised if we see a “Patch 5.2a” download in a few weeks or so that cleans up little errors like this.
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(This is the original post, which went up on March 5 around 11:30pm ET)
Hey peopleses! I’m away on a work trip this week (it would, of course, turn out to be a patch week, wouldn’t it?) and don’t have time for… well, I don’t even have time for this post, really. But for anyone who missed it late last night, Ghostcrawler noted this in the official WoW forums:
Assassin’s Resolve now increases damage by 30%, up from 20%.
For those of you keeping score, that’s *three* separate Assassination-only buffs given to the spec during the latter part of the PTR testing process, apparently as the designers noticed that other specs (namely Combat) were starting to look a little too strong in PvE compared to Mut. A few weeks ago, Envenom and Dispatch both got damage bumps, which also brings a nice side benefit of increasing our active damage (thus also acknowledging, if not entirely fixing, an issue many Mut rogues in particular have been unhappy about for a while). This new tweak increases both passive and active damage across the board, and is almost certainly a much bigger overall DPS boost than those previous changes.
Happy patch, wacky ninjas! I hope to join you in diving into the new fun sometime next week.
