Earlier today, Ghostcrawler added a second ginormous data-dump of answered questions into the new Patch 5.2 discussion thread he created yesterday. Here’s the new roguey stuff; I’ll intersperse my comments between each item.
During Shuriken Toss, your auto attacks are replaced with throwing Shurikens, which do 80% weapon damage, but are on the ‘yellow combat table’, meaning they don’t glance, and don’t suffer the dual wield miss penalty. The 80% number was chosen because that approximately offsets those other benefits.
This is a clarification of some of the specifics that players have come across while testing out the new Shuriken Toss autoattack system on the PTR. These autoattacks, which kick in for 10 seconds if you use ST from a range of more than 10 yards, behave pretty similarly to a hunter’s autoattacks. To offset the fact that ST autoattacks will have a drastically higher chance to hit the target (and thus apply poisons) than our regular melee autoattacks, they nerfed the damage. That way we won’t feel enticed to do some seriously wacky stuff with our combat rotations (like constantly moving into/out of range so we can keep refreshing out ST autoattacks).
In our above description of Blade Flurry, ‘normal’ means the same as it previously did; that is to say, the damage that the ability would have done had it hit the secondary target.
This clarifies GC’s comment yesterday that, in the next PTR build, Blade Flurry would be further de-nerfed to deal “40% of normal damage to up to 4 additional targets.” This clarification certifies that BF won’t work any differently from how it used to — i.e., it won’t start copying poison damage or Elemental Force procs or any of that stuff.
The 2pc does encourage using Rupture as Combat.
The two-piece Tier 15 raid set bonus elongates finishing moves that have durations based on the number of CPs we used. As I mentioned in this EJ post (and others have likely noted as well, but who pays attention to THEM?), this feels likely to result in Rupture becoming more desirable for Combat rogues. GC appears to have confirmed that’s the intent.
Burst of Speed saying “movement-reducing” means that it no longer breaks roots, but does break snares.
The tooltip for BoS on live uses the phrase “movement-impairing” instead. Between the text change, the phrasing of the official patch preview notes, and the results of player testing on the PTR, we were already pretty sure we knew what “movement-reducing” meant. Now we know for sure.
We are experimenting with allowing Smoke Bomb to reduce the damage done to allies by 20%. We agree that rogues are lacking in the group utility department and we’d like to see less use of Smoke Bomb strictly as an offensive ability in PvP.
Cool. :) (What do you want from me? PvP is like that scary old aunt with a huge ugly mole on her face whose house I’m afraid to visit.)
We are going to reduce the PvP set bonus from +50 energy to +30 energy.
This is a more solid affirmation of something Ghostcrawler tweeted about yesterday regarding the new four-piece PvP set bonus. Keep in mind that the starting point here is +10 energy (that’s what we have now), so this is still a huge deal. A number of rogue players have been pretty frank about how they felt +50 was likely too much, so this buff-reduction is unlikely to bother folks who aren’t wearing aluminum foil on their heads.
Smoke Bomb giving a 20% reduction is actually huge in PvE. Consider all those encounters (Elegon, Bladelord, and Empress come to mind for t14) where the entire raid stacks up for a burn phase and needs tons of AoE heals.
I have to confess: I read “Smoke Bomb,” and my brain didn’t even go any further. I know it already has rare, highly situational uses in raids, but it’s so far from my consciousness as part of the PvE arsenal that I cognitively shut down whenever I see the name. :)