MMO-Champion and Wowhead have picked up a new Patch 5.3 PTR build, which includes two rogue changes:
- The Subtlety-only Find Weakness PvP nerf/PvE buff that Brian Holinka tweeted about earlier today is in place, though it’s not yet in the official patch notes. (Instead of 70% armor reduction, it’s now 50% reduction against players and 100% reduction against PvE targets.)
- Unexpectedly, Combat rogues appear to be getting a fresh DPS bump (and possibly a PvP boost?) in the form of a buff to the duration of Revealing Strike. Everything else about RvS stays the same, but when you use it the buff will last for 24 seconds instead of 18 (a 33% increase). This change hasn’t been confirmed (or even mentioned) by anyone at Blizzard yet, so we may not be seeing the full story yet.
While we won’t fully see the PvP implications of these changes until the new season begins, the PvE implications can be calculated to within an inch of their lives, as the Rogue Code dictates must be so. A couple of players have tinkered with our best simulation tools to see what sort of impact these changes will have on our DPS.
For Subtlety, Dansu posted on the WoW rogue forum that, in SimCraft, the Find Weakness PvE buff amounts to a little more than a 5% DPS increase for the spec — which, in theory at least, puts it basically on the same level as Assassination at very high gear levels (i.e., heroic raid gear with both set bonuses). Fierydemise, one of the brains behind our beloved ShadowCraft rogue-optimizing tool, came to a similar conclusion after modeling the change in that engine.
For Combat, as Fierydemise also noted in the post I just linked, we’re looking at a super-tiny DPS impact if it’s truly going to be implemented solely as it was datamined. The change basically would mean that, in the course of a six-minute raid fight in which you’re on the boss the whole time, you’ll be using RvS instead of Sinister Strike five fewer times than you otherwise would. That’s… barely any effect. RvS deals slightly less damage than SS and has no chance to proc an extra combo point when used, so being able to use SS a few more times is cool, but certainly not a major spec-balance fix — provided you’re already very good at juggling Slice and Dice, Rupture and RvS. If you’re not, then this change potentially becomes a much bigger deal, because it makes that juggling act a little bit easier.
Part of me wonders if, assuming this RvS change really is entirely what was datamined, it isn’t intended mainly to be some sort of PvP buff. Considering Combat is widely panned for competitive PvP at the moment and I haven’t tried it in ages, I have no concept of what impact this change would have in that area. Maybe make kiting have less of an impact?
