Ruffy Rants: In 5.2, Anticipation Will Likely Still Be the Belle of the Ball

I’ve got some catching up to do with Ghostcrawler rogue tweets; leave it to a cold to snot away a normally-obsessive-compulsive person’s motivation for twitstalking. This one’s from more than a week ago:

@Aulper7 Have you looked at the 5.2 patch notes?

—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 12, 2013

 

Without a doubt, it’s looking like our level-90 talent tier options in Patch 5.2 will be much closer (in terms of their value) in raids and challenge-mode dungeons. Shuriken Toss will allow us to autoattack at range, dramatically increasing its power, and Marked for Death’s five free combo points per minute provides us with a nice little active-DPS bump that may be especially useful for burst situations.

But is either change enough to unseat Anticipation as the talent of choice in end-game PvE?

The gist of the feedback over at Elitist Jerks is that few expect ST or MfD to win out. I’m no whiz-bang theorycrafter, but I’m inclined to agree: It’s hard for me to envision many scenarios in which, *over the course of an entire raid fight*, it would be more valuable for me to

1. deal decent DPS at range or
2. gain 5 extra CPs per minute,

instead of using Anticipation, which guarantees me that I will

1. almost never waste a combo point and
2. never have to settle for a four-point finisher instead of a five-point finisher.

As of this post, we know next to nothing about most fights in the upcoming raid tier, so there is always a possibility that a surprising number of fight mechanics will favor the buffed ST or the new MfD. But I was one of a number of rogues who, back in the Mists beta, said the same thing about ST and our soon-to-be-dearly-departed level-90 talent Versatility. “But wait!” said I, I said. “Who knows how many raid fights in Mists will require a huge amount of target switching! Or constant running around at range like a maniac?”

I did a Google image search for “maniac.” This came up. How could I not?

The answer turned out to be: Basically none. Or, at least, not enough of a given raid fight required those things to make it more valuable to choose the “old” ST or Versatility over Anticipation.

Maybe that experience has made me more cynical this time around, and I’m being unfair in my negativity. Then again:

For Shuriken Toss — buffed or not — to be more desirable than Anticipation in a given raid fight, it likely means that the fight itself needs to be brutally unfriendly to melee DPS. Designing a fight like that feels like it’d be fundamentally against Blizzard’s current approach to encounter design, which is to allow for a wide range of classes to be viable.

For Marked for Death to be more desirable than Anticipation, we’d need to gain more DPS through getting a magically full CP bar once per minute than we would by never losing a combo point. In most standard fights, that feels unlikely to happen. *Especially* not for Assassination rogues, who gain two CPs (and sometimes three, thanks to Seal Fate) every time they use Mutilate, thus guaranteeing that they’ll be Envenoming at 4 CPs without Anticipation.

But it’s not just Assassination rogues who lose out if they drop Anticipation. Our new-in-Mists DPS cooldown, Shadow Blades (which adds an extra CP onto every CP-building move we use), ensures that other specs lose out, too. Shadow Blades all but requires Anticipation if we want to use it to maximum effectiveness; otherwise we’re either wasting CPs while it’s active, or we’re using smaller finishers.

The only scenario in which I can see MfD potentially being worth that kind of trade-off is a fight that involves a tremendous amount of target switching or a lot of spawning/despawning targets, such that we don’t have a lot of uptime on our targets (reducing the effectiveness of Shadow Blades and reducing the number of CPs we even have the opportunity to gain on our targets). In that scenario, being able to guarantee a quick 5-CPs-and-BAM could be pretty handy. Especially if burst matters.

Let’s kick this rogue up another notch!

But, for the same reason it seems unlikely that we’re going to see raid fights that punish melee DPS enough to make Shuriken Toss the best choice, it feels unlikely we’re going to see raid fights that punish DPS who can’t frequently switch targets all that well.

It may be that the best we can really hope for in Patch 5.2 is that, for those of us who *do* choose to go with Shuriken Toss or MfD on raid fights because we find those abilities more fun to use than Anticipation, our DPS won’t suffer quite as much for our decision as it would have before Patch 5.2.

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On Twitter: Versatility Needs “Serious Work,” Sayeth the Crawler of Ghosts (Updated 12/21)

Like, seriously, y’all.

 

@Aulper7 It needs serious work.

—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 19, 2012

 

Which leads into the obvious question: If completely rejiggering (without removing) Versatility is on the table — whether for Patch 5.2 or beyond — how would you rejigger it? Keep in mind that this needs to be within the context of a talent that is fun, meaningful and powerful, but *wouldn’t* be so powerful that it clearly overshadows the other two options in that tier. Assuming it remains a talent within our level-90 tier at all.

Let’s say, just for the sake of pure speculation, that Versatility was rewritten so that it made combo points stack on the rogue. GC has long been fundamentally opposed to this (as have other Blizzfolk), and it’s probably unlikely to become a reality. But what if it did? Would that not just make it the obvious choice in PvP? And would it do anything at all to unseat Anticipation as the undisputed talent for PvE? Leaving Shuriken Toss to wither away, alone and neglected, pining for happier times?

(I’ve cross-posted this over on the WoW rogue forum; if I’m feeling especially productive I’ll copypasta highlighted posts from there in this thread for the sake of posterity/consolidation.)

UPDATE 12/21:

 

@SvelteKumquat Well... a lot is changing right now. I'll just say two things: "I'm excited" and "More information in January."

—
Nik Gianozakos (@Daxxarri) December 21, 2012

 

I’m thinking he probably isn’t just referring to Versatility.

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Interviews: Ghostcrawler Shares Early Thoughts on 5.2 Talent Changes. And Mentions Rogues. Very Briefly.

Ghostcrawler (and a few other Blizzfolk) made the fansite rounds this week, chatting about a huge range of issues related to how much of the new majiggers introduced with Mists have been working out so far.

I wanted to call particular attention to these chunks of two separate interviews in which GC talked about how the new talent system has worked out, why no major changes have happened yet, and what guidelines he and the class-design people are following as they ponder whether (and what) to do about problem areas. (What follows is my transcription of the audio, so any typos/mistakes are my burden to bear.)

And yes, he mentions rogues. A little bit. (So does one of the interviewers, who gets THREE (3!) Rogue Points for doing so. That gives him three more Rogue Points than anyone has ever had in history. )

First there’s this, which is from the 12/4 episode of Legendary on Gamebreaker.tv (posted 12/4). The quoted bit starts at 23:40.

Gary Gannon: “How’s the new talent system working out?”

Greg Street (Ghostcrawler): “I’d say, overall, it’s working out pretty well. We actually have a meeting today — later on — where we’re gonna start analyzing for 5.2: OK, what are the talents that just nobody takes, or what are the talents that everyone takes, and are they taking it because the other ones suck, or are they taking it because they’re often in a situation where its useful, or because its easier, or whatever. … There are definitely some tiers that look great, and all three talents are getting used, and there’s kind of theorycrafting debates on the best one, and players swap in and out of them all the time. Then there are some that, like: Every player has X. I think that isn’t really delivering on what we promised the feature would be, and we kind of owe it to players to take a look at those and try to un-cookie-cutter them where possible.”

Josh Allen: “I know a couple of the complaints that come to mind, like: There’s two non-lethal rogue poisons that you can take in separate tiers of the rogue talent system. So it’s like, if you take one of those, then you can’t really use the other one anyway. But then turning around and looking at my paladin, for example, there’s like the end tier — especially in PvE, the final tier — you’re kind of swapping between at least two of them. Do you feel like it’s at least OK if it’s at least two of them that you’re swapping between? Or is it something that you really want all three of them to be viable options for everybody?”

Greg Street: “Our rule of thumb is particularly, like: Within, say, PvP, there should be two viable options. Or for a Holy paladin, there should be two viable options. If we can deliver on three, that’s awesome. But it kinda sucks if you look at: 100% or 99% of protection paladins pick this talent — you know, they pick Light’s Hammer instead of Execution Sentence — then we don’t think that’s really fair to players, and we owe it to them to try to make the others more competitive. …

“We’re even OK with a talent that isn’t used commonly, but sometimes you really want it because it’s awesome in certain situations. Even that feels OK. And that’s much harder to measure: You can’t just look at stats to be like, well, nobody has this talent when they logged off. Maybe they took the talent for an hour and then swapped out of it again. That’s still a better situation than: The talent that is literally a dead talent and nobody in their right mind would ever take it.”

Next we’ve got this, which is from episode #322 of the All Things Azeroth podcast (posted 12/5). The quoted bit starts around 56:10.

Medros: “Which classes do you feel could still use some adjustments in the new talent system?”

Greg Street (Ghostcrawler): “I have a meeting this very day where we’re starting to go through all of the talent feedback. For 5.1, we really didn’t want to mess with talents much. But we feel like now’s the time to look at the talents, for the 5.2 patch, of: What are players taking too frequently, and why are they taking it? Is it because it’s overpowered? Is it because the other options are too situational?

“It’s not gonna be a gigantic shakeup; it’s gonna be a lot of number tweaking, of: ‘Oh, well, this ability is fine, it’s just undertuned. So by changing cooldowns, durations, things like that, we’ll get players to use it again.’ Others may be too situational, and we’re gonna take a big look at that. …

“I think there’s some rogue talents, definitely, that no-one is taking at all, that we need to take a hard look at. I’m trying to think of another one that we’ve talked about so much — that’s one of the ones we were talking about today, that’s why it’s fresh on my mind.

“I’d say, overall, the system has worked out well, and there’s a fair amount of diversity for classes overall. We just have a couple of rows here and there where almost everyone is taking the same choice, and PvP and PvE may be a little different. We want to encourage a little more diversity there.”

There’s not a whole lot to read into here; none of what GC says is a surprise, and he doesn’t provide specifics on particular rogue tiers he and his team are planning to look into (though it’s pretty reasonable to think that at least the level-90 tier is likely to experience some changes, due to his earlier tweet on the subject and the overwhelming popularity of Anticipation so far in the expansion compared to Versatility’s dead-fish impression).

So, people who already feel like Blizz hasn’t done enough to address rogue issues won’t take any new hope away from these interviews, and will continue to feel angry and frustrated, giving them plenty of reason to keep making stereotypically furious posts in the WoW forums. Meanwhile, those who feel like things are mostly fine and don’t need any huge changes will likely be pleased. So it’s a win for all of us any way you slice it, really.

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Twitter: Ghostcrawler on Versatility vs. Anticipation

@JamesWire1: “@Ghostcrawler Rogue – I’ve read theorycrafting on using Versatility for some fights, but Anticipation still wins out. No real choice there.”

@Ghostcrawler: “@JamesWire1 we fear that Anticipation just does what Versatility is trying to do better.”

@srzbznz: “@Ghostcrawler @JamesWire1 You ‘fear’….? You ‘FEAR’? Perhaps if your team listened to feedback sooner you would have ‘KNOWN’.”

@Ghostcrawler: “@srzbznz if we listened to all feed, mages would have 1 mil dps by now. It’s listening to the right feed. Know solve for that? Let us know!”

Twitterized 11/17/2012

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Twitter: Ghostcrawler on Versatility usage

@Raimu21: “@Ghostcrawler serious question, does blizzard have numbers on how many people have taken versatility as a talent? I’m betting its VERY low.”

@Ghostcrawler: “@Raimu21 We do, and it is low. We’re looking at all unpopular and too popular talents and considering changes.”

Twitterized 11/16/2012

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