Patch 5.3 Note Update: Tricks No Longer Buffs Some Death Knight Diseases

We got a hint last week, from a series of Brian Holinka and Ghostcrawler tweets, that our Tricks of the Trade spell was likely to get a poke to reduce its synergy with some death knight diseases — particularly the so-called “festerblight” rotation, which gives Unholy DKs some pretty amazing damage potential in a way that wasn’t entirely intended. (Think what would happen if we found a way to extend Shadow Blades indefinitely. Kinda like that.)

Last week, a patch note update included some direct nerfs to festerblight that surprised and frustrated many Unholy players who felt the change was coming out of left field. The devs took a closer look and decided that it wasn’t festerblight itself that was causing the biggest issue — it was how festerblight was being enhanced by the 15% damage boost granted by a friendly nearby rogue casting Tricks of the Trade at the proper moment(s).

Which led to those DK nerfs from last week being reverted in today’s official patch note update, and replaced with this:

• Blood Plague no longer benefits from the damage increase granted by Tricks of the Trade.
• Frost Fever no longer benefits from the damage increase granted by Tricks of the Trade.

This concludes the part of the post where I continue to have any clue what I’m talking about. (Actually, that part may have concluded about halfway through the first sentence.) But because I want to find some closure to the post, I’m going to try to stretch this into some kind of meaningful statement about how this provides a nice reminder that rogue changes aren’t always about balancing rogues in particular; they’re about trying to keep rogue abilities and rogue strengths/weaknesses in balance with the other classes in the game, and trying to ensure that no single grouping of classes becomes clearly superior to others in situations like progression raiding or 3v3 arena (where, for instance, rogue/hunter/priest has proven extremely strong in 5.2, and is seeing hits across that team as a result).

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Patch 5.3 PTR Note Update: Stuff We Already Knew About Becomes Super-Official

WoW Community Manager Rygarius is back from his vacation, and that means an update to the official Patch 5.3 PTR notes. On the rogue front, the update certifies three changes we already caught wind of last week, either via developer tweet or datamining:

• The sharp right turn on the Cloak and Dagger change is now in the notes. Instead of having the range nerfed, it will only be usable in stealth (which doesn’t include Shadow Dance).
• The Find Weakness PvP nerf/PvE buff mentioned by Brian Holinka is now in the notes.
• The Revealing Strike duration buff that was datamined last week, but otherwise wasn’t publicly discussed by anybody official, is now in the notes.

For a full rundown of rogue changes coming up in Patch 5.3, you know where to look!

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On Twitter/Patch 5.3 PTR: Cloak and Dagger Nerf Clarified (It’s All About the Stealthjamins)

Amidst the hue and cry over our latest rogue PvP nerf revelation (in Patch 5.3, Cloak and Dagger likely won’t work when Subtlety rogues try to use it during Shadow Dance), WoW PvP honcho Brian Holinka dropped this little nugget:

@JRoosy CnD's range is back to 30 yards, but no longer usable unless stealthed—
Holinka (@holinka) May 03, 2013

Holinka and Ghostcrawler have been tweeting like CRAZY over the rogue changes since word of this CnD adjustment got out; read my previous post for a (mostly) complete listing.

Between Twitter, datamining and official patch note updates, the Patch 5.3 rogue change revelations have been pretty rapid-fire lately, so just to recap where we think we’re at right now:

• Cloak and Dagger will still be usable at 30 yards; the nerf to 20 yards will be reverted. However, rogues will only be able to use CnD while stealthed — this is why it can’t be used during Shadow Dance, because you’re technically not stealthed when ShD is active. (I’m assuming we will also be able to use CnD during Vanish or, for those of us who play a night elf, while Shadowmelded, but I haven’t seen any solid info on this yet.)
• All the Shuriken Toss changes are still happening. (Energy cost doubles, damage doubles, damage bonus at range removed.)
• The crowd control glyph nerfs (to Cheap Shot’s stun and Garrote’s silence) are probably still happening. (Aeriwen notes in the class forum that the Glyph of Cheap Shot tooltip hasn’t been updated with the nerf, but it’s still in the official patch notes.)
• The Find Weakness PvP nerf/PvE buff is still happening.
• We still haven’t heard a thing from anyone official about the datamined Revealing Strike buff.
• The Recuperate PvP buff is still happening (though that’s not a rogue-only change; it’s part of the broader PvP Power adjustments the devs are implementing for 5.3).

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Official Patch 5.3 Rogue Changes: The Breakdown

The third major patch of the Mists expansion has arrived! Several rogue-related changes are on the menu for Patch 5.3, and they are almost entirely PvP oriented. In a teeny nutshell:

• Shuriken Toss will be nerfed (mostly).
• Cloak and Dagger will be nerfed.
• Find Weakness (Subtlety) will be buffed in PvE and nerfed in PvP.
• Revealing Strike (Combat) will be buffed.
• Blade Flurry (Combat) damage will be adjusted in PvP.
• Glyph of Cheap Shot will be nerfed.
• Glyph of Garrote will be nerfed.
• Recuperate will be buffed in PvP.
• Tricks of the Trade will get a minor, extremely specific tweak that doesn’t affect rogues, but does nerf death knights.

For more in-depth details on each of these changes, step inside. (C’mon in; nothing to be afraid of. Promise. ish.)

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Patch 5.3 PTR Note Update: Cheap Shot, Garrote Glyphs Nerfed

Newly updated official notes on the Patch 5.3 PTR were posted today, and they include these two new items for rogues:

• Glyph of Cheap Shot now increases the duration of Cheap Shot by 0.5 second, down from 1 second.
• Glyph of Garrote now increases the duration of Garrote’s silence effect by 1 second, down from 1.5 seconds.

Rogues have made a huge comeback in competitive PvP since Patch 5.2 launched. Probably a little too huge a comeback. Although their damage output isn’t imbalanced, their ability to effectively lock down enemy players (particularly casters) has proven so strong that the Blizzfolk clearly feel it needs to be dialed back.

So, in addition to the Shuriken Toss nerfs, we also now see some relatively minor adjustments made to a couple of key rogue crowd-control abilities. By altering the Cheap Shot and Garrote glyphs rather than nerfing the abilities themselves, it’s pretty much ensured that the changes will only impact players in PvP situations, since most PvE players wouldn’t bother using either of those glyphs.

Here’s a bit more on the thinking behind these changes, courtesy of WoW’s PvP chief Brian Holinka:

@jedibatman3 It's a nerf to rogue control out of stealth and in shadowdance—
Holinka (@holinka) April 15, 2013

For a full rundown of all rogue-related changes coming in Patch 5.3, you know what to do.

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Shuriken Toss in Patch 5.3: What’s Actually Happening

There has been a whole mess of confusion around the changes being planned for Shuriken Toss in Patch 5.3. Some folks out there have been angrily referring to it as a nerf, some have been angrily referring to it as a buff, some have been angrily referring to it as a wash, and some have been angrily referring to it as something that other people keep angrily referring to too often.

Here’s the deal: It is a nerf. In most cases.

What’s Changing

• The cost of using ST will double from 20 to 40 energy.
• The damage dealt by ST will also double.
• If you’re more than 10 yards from your target, ST will no longer deal double damage in 5.3. (PvP chief Holinka first tweeted about this over the weekend; it was added to the official patch PTR notes on 4/15.)

What’s Not Changing

• Using ST when you’re more than 10 yards from your target will still trigger ranged autoattacks.
• You’re still a badass ninja.

What This Means for Rogues

• Yknow how fun it’s been in PvP to spam ST to 3+ combo points on a caster, then hit Deadly Throw to interrupt/silence them, then quickly spam a few more STs and do it again? Yeah, that’ll be a lot harder now.
• Yknow how fun it’s been to stand 10 or more yards from something and destroy the poop out of it by flinging tiny ninja stars at it? In 5.3, you will destroy exactly half as much poop.
• Yknow how you love using ST when you’re within 10 yards of your target but outside of melee range, because it allows you to keep doing damage while being kited? Keep loving it, because that will not change at all.
• Y’ever wish that you could unleash three pretty powerful ranged attacks in rapid succession, even though we’re a melee class? Bam.

In essence, these changes make ST a lot less useful for crowd control in PvP situations and reduce rogues’ ability to deal sustained damage to a target from far away. But this *will* make the ability a lot more bursty, provided you’ve pooled your energy enough (or you’ve popped a cooldown/potion that will greatly amp up your energy regen) to be able to hit Shuriken Toss multiple times in a row.

This could be especially fun for Combat rogues with the 4-piece Tier 15 PvE set bonus who decide to dabble in PvP. When those folks pop Adrenaline Rush and Shadow Blades (assuming they have the Glyph of Adrenaline Rush), they’ll have 15 seconds during which they can cast Shuriken Toss for just 24 energy every half second, and they’ll be regenerating energy at a rate of 25 or more per second. That’s probably some pretty serious ranged damage right there.

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Hotfix: Shado-Pan Assault (Valor Trinket) Nerfed in PvP

[UPDATE 4/18: Further changes to the proc were implemented in a subsequent hotfix a little more than a week after the change covered in the post below.]

The lamentations of the dead have been heard!

Vicious Talisman of the Shadow-Pan Assault now grants a reduced bonus of 6908 to Agility when the effect is activated in PvP combat, down from 8800. The bonus remains unchanged when the effect is activated in PvE combat.

(Please note: Though this change has been made, we’ve been warned that it won’t immediately show up in tooltips yet. Also, yes, that’s a typo in the official hotfix note: The name of the trinket is “Shado-Pan,” not “Shadow-Pan.”)

So sayeth one of the newly-posted-but-dated-April-10 additions to the official Patch 5.2 hotfix notes. This change follows a great deal of complaint (even by WoW-players-on-the-Internet standards) that the Shado-Pan trinket, which is a PvE rep reward purchased with Valor Points, offered way too much burst potential in PvP settings (particularly when coupled with other burst cooldowns, which we rogue types do so love to use).

That super-specific Agility number difference mentioned in the hotfix amounts to a 21.5% nerf to the proc. As lead PvP designer Brian Holinka noted in a tweet (below), this will keep the Talisman’s burst potential higher than its PvP counterpart, but its overall damage will be lower.

And now, for the sake of putting all this somewhere relevant, I shall dump upon ye most of the tweets that Holinka has sent out in the past couple of weeks in response to people asking about this damn trinket. (These have all been living in the home for wayward rogue tweets for a while; it feels nice to give them a more permanent home. Yep. Feels nice.)

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Hotfix: LFR/Coin Weapon Drops for Assassination Rogues Become Mut-Friendly (and Anti-Combat)

Today’s new batch of official Patch 5.2 hotfixes includes this quality-of-life change for raiding rogues:

Assassination Rogues should no longer be receiving non-dagger agility weapons from bonus rolls and Raid Finder.

The good news: If you looooove raiding as Assassination and would never even consider Combat in a million bajillion years because you hate it with the passion of a thousand burning telenovelas, now you will never even have to *look* at another stinking one-handed axe, fist weapon, mace or sword.

More importantly (and less snarkily), you won’t find yourself winning a loot roll only to be given something you have no use for. This can be particularly annoying when a boss has a chance to drop, say, both a piece of leather armor and a one-handed +Agility weapon, and you win a drop — but then the system decides to give you the weapon instead of the armor, and then you fling it into the air in anger, and it eventually lands on the head of your healer in the middle of the next raid fight, and you wipe. Which would all be very unfortunate.

The bad news: If you like Combat but you happen to be doing a particular fight in Assassination spec, this appears to guarantee that you will never get a main-hand weapon drop from that boss (unless you’re doing a regular/heroic-mode fight and the weapon drops for the entire group). That’s not so cool. I’m surprised that this hotfix doesn’t appear to take that likelihood into account.

[UPDATED 4/2 AND 4/4:] The best news: Although this appears to be a happy change for Mut-only rogues and a not-so-happy change for Combat-plus-Mut rogues in 5.2, when Patch 5.3 drops, it looks like *everyone* will be happy, since for each raid fight we’ll have the opportunity to select which *spec* is the one we want to receive loot for, regardless of the one we’re using to kill the boss:

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Hotfix: Blade Flurry’s Range Increased From 5 to 8 Yards

This just in from today’s round of official Patch 5.2 hotfix notes:

Blade Flurry now has a range of 8 yards, up from 5 yards, and will only hit targets that are within the Rogue’s line-of-sight.

For anyone out there who’s still as steamed as a well-pressed shirt over the fact that Blade Flurry in Patch 5.2 does much less damage in two-target fights than it used to… well, no, actually, for those of you who are still angry about that, shut your faces already, because BF is still the strongest of the three specs on two-target fights, it now has solid DPS potential against 3 to 5 targets, and the originally planned nerf was partially reverted THREE TIMES to ensure that BF would still be a strong ability.

But I digress. For anyone out there who IS still annoyed over the BF changes, this tweak will hopefully turn that frown upside-down. Five yards is melee range; as Chase Christian pointed out just this week on WoW Insider (and many rogue players have noted in forums), that’s just small enough to make it extremely difficult to use BF to its maximum effect in most raid situations. The 60% bump in range may be all Combat rogues need to be competitive with Assassination in less-than-6-nearby-target situations (which accounts for most raid situations in which rogue AoE is helpful).

But why turn the dial up to 8 yards instead of 10? Not entirely sure. I don’t know other classes’ abilities well enough to compare all the ranges, though iirc warriors’ Cleave is only 5 yards. [Edit: As Señor Christian notes, warriors' Bladestorm also has an 8-yard range.]

(Actually, now that I think on it: Eight yards, as it so happens, is the same range that Fan of Knives used to have during the previous two expansions. We also used to have a glyph that extended the range from 8 yards to 12. In Mists, though, the glyph went away — FLASH TRIVIA: What glyph replaced it in WoW’s database? Hint: It’s lethally kinetic — and FoK’s range became 10 yards.)

I assumed that if Blade Flurry were going to be buffed, it’d be buffed to match FoK’s range. But this may well just be a case of the class design team taking an abundance of caution: They’ve already seen the kind of backlash that one Blade Flurry nerf caused, and they likely don’t want to overbuff it now only to have to dial it back down again in the future if 10 yards proves to somehow be too strong. However, don’t be surprised if you see another uptick to 10 yards in Patch 5.3 if Blizzard doesn’t see Combat DPS improve on multitarget fights as much as they’re hoping.

One closing note, on the line-of-sight change: <shrug>. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even realize BF ignored LoS in the first place. My best guess is it has to do with a desire to avoid potential issues in arena PvP, where a rogue could potentially chill next to a pillar and beat on one target in front of them, while also transferring some of the damage to an enemy caster on the opposite side of the pillar. How thick are those pillars, anyway?

Ew. That question sounded dirty. Like comparing a person to a sleeping bag filled with tent poles.

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Hotfixes: Feint Fakeout Fixed; Darkmoon Destealther Debugged

We’ve got two directly rogue-related bug squishings to note from today’s new batch of official Patch 5.2 hotfixes.

The first pertains to the final (regular-mode) boss fight in the new raid tier:

Fixed an issue where damage from Lei Shen’s Crashing Thunder, Lightning Whip, Overcharge and Discharged Energy was not being reduced by Feint.

So, yknow, that’s good.

Meanwhile, in news pertaining to the fantasyland within fantasyland, we have this:

Darkmoon Whistle should no longer cause other players to drop out of stealth.

The whistle – which is a specially made in-game item for people want to annoy people around them, but not quite as much as people who carry around  Toy Train Sets – turned out to have a little quirk that made them unexpectedly useful for rooting out rogues in virtually all PvP settings, apparently including rated battlegrounds. Well, until today.

Not to toot my own horn, but I, uh… um… hm. Whatever that joke was gonna be, it clearly ain’t happening. Probably for the best.

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