Hotfix: Shado-Pan PvE Trinket Proc Changed — Again — in PvP

Just over a week ago, the Vicious Talisman of Shado-Pan Assault — a PvE trinket purchased with Valor points — was nerfed, after many players expressed concerns (and Blizzard agreed) that it was too strong in PvP. The nerf reduced the strength of the trinket’s proc by 21.5%, in hopes of curbing the amount of burst damage it granted. (The same change was made to the Strength version of the trinket.)

But it didn’t take long for Blizzard to start to feel like the proc nerf might not be enough. So, as of a newly implemented hotfix, they’ve further reduced the value of the proc in PvP situations only — but they’ve doubled the proc’s length. The end result should be the same amount of damage, just more consistent and less bursty. The tooltip doesn’t appear to have been updated to match yet.

For your reading-what-official-people-write pleasure, I’ll dump all relevant tweets and Community Manager forum/blog post quotes below.

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On Twitter: Are More Shado-Pan Trinket Changes Coming?

[UPDATE 4/18: More changes were indeed coming. And then they came. And now they're here.]

Last week, a Patch 5.2 hotfix reduced the Agility proc on the new PvE Valor trinket, the Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault, by 21.5% in PvP situations. (This was *not* a Patch 5.3 PTR note, incidentally; the change is actually live.)

The change was intended to reduce the amount of burst that DPS classes/specs were able to deal to other players while the proc was active. But was it enough? Was it even… maybe… dare we say… too much?

HeckifIknow. But WoW PvP master Brian Holinka has been fielding a lot of tweets about the trinket since the hotfix. Here’s a dump (in date order) of all of them to date, for you to peruse and ponder at your temporal preference.

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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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Hotfix: Pre-Potting From Stealth Won’t Mess Up Potion Cooldowns Anymore

This tidbit was nestled among the new round of official Patch 5.2 hotfixes posted today:

Using a potion while under Stealth/Invisibility no longer causes the potion to go on permanent cooldown.

This should fix up an issue a number of folks have reported on their rogues in which they used a potion while in stealth (typically a Virmen’s Bite just before a raid boss is pulled) only to find that their potion cooldown wasn’t starting as it should, thus leaving them unable to use another potion during the fight (and defeating the whole purpose of “pre-potting”). In fact, it left them unable to use another potion until they logged off the game entirely.

I hope you’ll all join me in breathing out a huge sigh of relief that Warcraft rogues no longer have a drinking problem.

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Hotfix: Frozen Orb Now Breaks Blind

Quick rogue-specific tidbit from the second set of official Patch 5.2 hotfixes; this will only be relevant to PvPers:

Blind should now break on damage from Frozen Orb.

Frozen Orb is a Frost mage AoE damage-over-time ability (which also slows any enemies it hits, though that’s beside the point of this post). Some folks had reported that, in the wake of Patch 5.2, a player who was being crowd-controlled with Blind remained so even if s/he was hit with Frozen Orb while Blindeded (despite the ticking DoTs). That should no longer be the case.

Which, as @JDofAndersonia explains, is perfectly understandable:

@SvelteKumquat I'm blind! Someone shoot me with a spinning vortex of razor sharp ice! *thunk* Ahh, thank you. I can see again.

—
JD (@JDofAndersonia) March 12, 2013

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Blue Post: Assassination Gets One More DPS Bump as 5.2 Launches (Updated 3/6)

(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.

—————

(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.

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Hotfix: Subterfuge No Longer Causes Stealth to Break on Weapon Procs

This tidbit was nestled in the Dec. 13 additions to the official Patch 5.1 hotfix notes (which posted last night):

Various weapon procs will no longer sometimes prematurely break the Stealth provided by the Subterfuge talent.

I’m not sure whether this will account for *all* of the occasions in which people who had chosen Subterfuge as their tier-1 talent were seeing their stealth drop suddenly and inexplicably, a problem that folks have been reporting for months now. But it sure as heck can’t hurt.

For a list of all rogue-related changes in Patch 5.1, you know where to go. Because I just linked to it. Back there. A couple sentences ago. Look behind you. Not in real life. *Virtually* behind you. Literary style. There ya go.

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