[Note: If you’re looking for a full breakdown of rogue changes in Patch 5.4, here’s where you wanna be.]
There are two rogue-specific changes in tonight’s update to Blizzard’s official Patch 5.4 PTR notes. Neither is a huge surprise, but both will affect our DPS (at least for the first few weeks after the patch goes live):
- The earlier buff to Assassin’s Resolve, the Assassination-only passive ability, has been reverted. It once again will increase Mut rogues’ damage by 25%, as it does right now in Patch 5.3. (If this looks familiar, it’s because the reversion was datamined yesterday.)Keep in mind that Mutilate and Dispatch are both currently slated for a huge buff in Patch 5.4 (+40% each). Ghostcrawler noted several weeks ago that Assassination was inexplicably performing lower than they wanted it to perform on the PTR; to fix that, they turned three knobs and watched to see whether it fixed the problem. Looks like it overfixed it, thus the AssRes reversion.
Remember, peopleses: This is not a nerf. It’s the reversion of a buff that they found was not needed.
- The Tier 15 (raid gear) four-piece bonus is being heavily nerfed. When Shadow Blades is active, the cost of rogue abilities will drop by 15% instead of 40%. That’s a huge reduction — and a necessary one, at least for Combat. (Less so for the other specs, but this isn’t as big a nerf for them.)For weeks now, numerous rogues have posted to WoW’s official PTR forum warning that, because the current raid tier’s four-piece bonus is so incredibly powerful for Combat rogues, people playing the spec might have no reason to bother upgrading to Tier 16 gear in Patch 5.4. Though the designers initially disagreed, it looks like they ultimately came around — no doubt partly spurred by a separate finding that the Tier 15 four piece had an insanely powerful synergy with one of the new DPS trinkets being introduced in Patch 5.4, Assurance of Consequence.
I’ll update this post once theorycrafters have had a chance to poke around and see what sort of impact this change is likely to have on raiding rogues when Patch 5.4 launches. But this will certainly hurt Mut and Sub’s DPS a little, and Combat’s more than a little — at least until they get their first two pieces of Tier 16 gear, which hopefully will happen within the first few weeks of the patch.
Hopefully we’ll see some sort of explanation from Blizzard as to why they chose to nerf the set bonus for *all* specs rather than just Combat. My best guess is that, similar to the Assassin’s Resolve reversion, they discovered that Mut and Sub were looking a little too strong at current (pre-patch) gear levels, and this is how they chose to address it. That, or they figured the impact on DPS would be so small, and most rogues would upgrade to better gear so quickly, that it would be a minor and short-lived problem for Mut and Sub rogues in the new patch. (It’s also possible that the T15 four-piece simply can’t be programmed to work differently for each spec.)
As always, my full rundown of Patch 5.4 rogue changes is full and rundowny.
At least what I’m seeing from the theory crafters, they did it wrong. Someone with more skills than me seems to think that if they removed the energy reduction completely, T15 is still better than t16 by a whole lot (5k EK if I read it right)
I was futzing around with ShadowCraft (the front-end; not tooling around with the gears like a pro, as Fierydemise does) a little this morning, and assuming SC is modeling things properly, it looks to me like 4pT16 comes out to around 10% better than 4pT15 on single-target fights. So that seems fine.
Where it looks like there still may be some trouble — and I think this is what FD was getting at with his tweets and forum posts overnight — is that the Assurance of Consequence trinket still looks REALLY good for Combat, and may actually get *better* as our gear improves.
A brief look at a sample case in SC suggested that Combat 4pT16 with AoC may only be around 3%-4% better than Combat 4pT15 with AoC, so that’s maybe a cause for some concern. Not nearly as bad as it was looking before, though.
AssRes. Do you guys really call it AssRes?
They would if I ran the world.
I’m also having a heck of a time getting the planet to accept “ProGro” as the preferred abbreviation for Proving Grounds.
I recently heard that by the time 5.4 hits blizzard is going to nerf rogues poison damage by 30%. Has anyone heard this by chance? I heard it from a guy who knows a guy who apparently has connections.
No. Don’t make me smack you.