Who knew that Ghostcrawler held such a deep affection for the world’s wrist-brace manufacturers? As a Valentine’s Day gift to them, he announced last night that Combat rogues in Patch 5.2 would have a chance to spam their buttons like they’ve never spammed them before:
We are going to do something unusual and allow the [new PvE Tier 15 four-piece] set bonus to also reduce the global cooldown on rogue abilities to 0.7 sec during Shadow Blades.
This means that, if you have the four-piece, and you pop glyphed Adrenaline Rush and Shadow Blades at the same time, your global cooldown for most abilities will actually be HALF A FREAKING SECOND. I KNOW.
(GC did not say whether this change *only* impacted the Combat spec; his words were general enough that I think it’s likely it affects all three specs. Only Combat will see a massive benefit from it, though.)
The Gritty. And Some Nitty.
This impending button-mashing-madness for Combat raiders is the result of a long series of back-and-forth exchanges between players and Ghostcrawler (as well as between rogue theorycrafters and forumgoers), both in the forums and on Twitter.
Since the rogue Tier 15 set bonuses were first announced several weeks ago, a number of players have expressed concerns that the four-piece bonus benefited Combat a lot less than the other specs. The gist of these concerns revolved around how we currently use Shadow Blades and Adrenaline Rush at the same time because they make a beautiful combination for burst damage.
We already come awfully close to energy capping when those two cooldowns are paired, since AdRush more than doubles our energy regen (we get the flat 100% increase, but we also get more Combat Potency procs because AdRush increases our melee attack speed) and the extra combo points we get during Shadow Blades translates to us using our finishers (e.g., Eviscerate, which costs less energy than Sinister Strike) a lot more often than our CP generators.
Now bring in the new four-piece bonus we’ll get in Patch 5.2. It reduces the energy cost of our abilities by 40% while Shadow Blades is active — so, our Sinister Strikes and our Eviscerates (and everything else) get even cheaper, meaning we have even more energy to spare. Meanwhile, our gear will have more haste on it than at any point in the expansion (since gear has to keep getting better, else we would be very sad), further increasing our energy regen. It’s a formula for buttloads of energy capping.
As a result, theorycrafters began to think it’d be best for Combat rogues with the four-piece bonus to “decouple” Shadow Blades and AdRush — i.e., instead of using them at the same time, to make sure that they never overlap. That way we’d reduce the risks of energy capping. But we’d also lose the awesome damage benefits that come with SB and AR being active at the same time. Which threatened to make the set bonus decidedly weaker for Combat rogues than the other specs. Injustice!
GC’s recent announcement (excerpted at the top of this post; I’ll also copy the full text below for posterity/completeness) suggests that the design team agrees. That this is the way they chose to address the issue is… fascinating. It will certainly make Combat a *very* fast spec to use whenever Shadow Blades and AdRush are active — for rogues with the new four-piece bonus, that is. It’ll pretty much only be Thunder King raiders who run with it. You’ll be able to tell them apart from other players in trade chat because they’ll be the ones spamming messages like “WTB orthopedist who specializes in finger injuries PST.” (Or, because they’ll have permanently hooked claws for hands, it’ll probably look more like “wetb orhtopedist who specialzioes i n fingrinjjuries pst sry i have tyo ytpe weitrh my toes”)
UPDATE 2/14: I think I made Ghostcrawler sad with my carpal tunnel jokes. Now I feel badly.
@SvelteKumquat For 15 sec every 3 min? I think you'll be fine. We're not talking about LK Prot warriors here.
—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) February 14, 2013What Actually Got Said
For the sake of my own OCD and my fear that these statements will eventually vanish from the places they originally appeared, here’s a record of the back-and-forth players have had with Ghostcrawler over the four-piece bonus during the past week or two.
We started off with this tweet:
@JosephDelage1 Even if you aren't using SB and AR together?
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) February 09, 2013Meanwhile, in the “PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues, Part II” thread in the official WoW forums, a player wrote that “its got to the point where the rogues in my guild thought about not popping ar and sb together for combat because of the rediculous nature of our energy situation and that inherently hurts our long term dps because sb wont benefit from the 2-3 cycles/finishers we use during the AR.”
What is the inherent problem with not using Adrenaline Rush and Shadowblades together? Doesn’t that sort of give you two Adrenaline Rushes? If it’s a big DPS loss then that would be a problem, but all it really seems to be doing is changing up your rotation a bit.
Another player tried to explain (using some unfortunately over-the-top language, which I won’t quote here but which really hurt his/her argument and made it harder for GC to understand where s/he was coming from) that “We already energy cap during Ad Rush, so giving us more energy during Shadow Blades does nothing, as de-coupling Ad Rush/Shadow Blades appears to be a DPS loss even with the 4 piece. I thought the goal was to boost combat single target damage in 5.2.”
To which GC responded:
We would need to see some numbers on this. If you hate to decouple the two CDs then I could see how it would be a problem. But decoupling them and using the set bonus should be a DPS increase.
Eventually, though, it looks like players did an effective enough job at conveying that the problem wasn’t that the set bonus was awful — it was just that it unintentionally discriminated against Combat relative to the other specs. That led Ghostcrawler to post this:
We think we understand the rogue concerns on the PvE 4pc better now. We don’t mind Combat having to unlink AR and SB to maximize the bonus, and we still think the set bonus is a DPS increase over not having it. However, it may be the case that the value of the set bonus forces Combat to swap to another spec because the cooldown stacking is one of the mechanics that keeps Combat competitive. To try to (ahem) combat this, we are going to do something unusual and allow the set bonus to also reduce the global cooldown on rogue abilities to 0.7 sec during Shadow Blades. This should help prevent GCD lock / energy capping. Normally we are very reluctant to reduce the GCD lower than 1 sec, so this is very much an experiment.
And then, finally, GC offered this clarification (which he also tweeted) when a person asked whether Shadow Blades would still stack with the Glyph of Adrenaline Rush (thus giving Combat rogues a 0.5 sec global cooldown on most abilities during Shadow Blades):
They will stack. As I said, it’s an experiment.
Want to put in a correction here. With the GCD reduction the 4pc should be a pretty substantial dps increase, you are still going to energy capped but the bonus should be on the order of 6-10%. The 2pc is still pretty abysmal for combat however.
–FD
POOP. Your EJ post referred to the 2-piece. Not the 4-piece. I always find a way to miss something. I’ll correct now, thanks — and will likely remove my entire final paragraph in the process.
I was putting up a value of 1600 EP on the official forums but that was before we could quantify the value of AR+SB stacking at all. Pins did some awesome work with the concept of dps phases and with some energy capping logic that lets us accurately assess this bonus.
You are one of very few people, I think, who actually muck around in the ShadowCraft back end. (I am not one of them; I poke around every so often, but can hardly make heads or tails of it.) You see what Pins et al are working on but often don’t publicly discuss in forums. That’s tremendously valuable when it can be shared in a way that makes sense to us pleebs.
I’m just wondering here, if someone’s done the math: with equal gear how big are the 2- and 4-piece bonuses for each spec? IIRC during Cata Assassination tended to fall behind as gear improved (since it didn’t scale as well as the other specs).
Another thing I’m kinda wondering: if we look at spec specific DPS CDs, Assassination has Vendetta 1/2min. Sub has strong, short burst 1/1min, Combat has Restless Blades cutting down the CD for AR (so, less than 3min) and KSpree (less than 2min). Depending on encounter mechanics Combat can have quite a lot of burst opportunities, and Restless Blades actually scales with gear, specifically, with haste, since that allows the spec to pull off more Eviscerates.
So, if I’m interpreting this right, Combat has a very active scaling system within the spec, which explains why it tends to do very well in later tiers. Sub on the other hand scales passively very well, due to Sinister Calling (+30% Agility), and it did exceptionally well in the last tier of Cata. Assassination doesn’t have any kind of extra scaling system within it, and besides Vendetta and Energy Pooling it lacks the the burst the other specs have. I’m wondering if these things will cause Assassination to lag behind in damage in the next and the following tiers…
Scaling is a difficult issue and is hard to quantify however the relative value of set bonuses is pretty straight forward.
2pc
Combat: 350
Assassination: 850
Sub: 900
4pc:
Combat: 10K
Assassination: 950
Sub: 1200
If the set bonus goes live like it is combat is going to skyrocket when you get 4pc. This is more to do with how combat scales with GCDs rather then how well combat scales with gear in general.
Ah. So, basically, you’re saying that, assuming no massive oversights in those calculations, there ain’t no way the revised 4p Combat bonus is going to see the light of day as GC initially described it.
FD, do those updated numbers include Mut and Sub both accounting for the .7-sec GCD? Not that there would necessarily be any impact of that on those two specs. This is one of those areas in which my brain doth fear to tread.
That doesn’t give a lower GCD for either sub or assassination, the only spec that has any gcd capping logic is combat. For those specs that shouldn’t be a major accuracy issue because the lack of GCD cap logic means Shadowcraft assumes no GCD cap limitations. If GCD capping is a substantial issue the bonus is being overestimated but I suspect that isn’t the case.
As for the strength of the bonus for combat all Blizzard needs to do is reduce the GCD reduction, .1 seconds would work as would .2 seconds, .15 would probably be ideal.
Finally 1 correction, the new phase logic shows the 2pc as stronger for combat then I have it there as. I assume that is because an increased duration on snd means you “waste” less gcds during AR+SB on refreshing SnD. This places the value of 2pc for combat around 750 EP.
You’d also waste less GCDs on refreshing Rupture, which I’m uneducatedly guessing will still be favorable to use during AR+SB given the DoT’s de-facto buff and reduced cost.
Thats something I’m trying to add at the moment. Our standard cd usage boilerplate says don’t use rupture in energy capping situations and I’d like to add logic to support that as an option. Still a work in progress.
Also I’m not sure why but I can’t seem to follow the nesting with replies. I’m not sure if there is some option you can set somewhere.
Yep, it was set by default to only allow nesting three levels deep. I’ve increased it to five.
Another aspect:
I recommend autohotkey-scripts for the button-mashing issue.
Would really like to see a discussion about that and its alternatives, too.
Walk me through what that would involve?
late reply, but I think he means that you could set up Autohokey to do multiple instances of something when you press it once (ie. press ‘2’ once, script spams it 4-5 times etc).
Just saw a Kripparrian video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcewYKebsx4) where he goes into a bit more depth about how it works. It would make energy capping less likely and save your hands from carpel tunnel.
Not sure about it’s legality in WoW to be honest. Sounds fishy and would probably warrant a ban.
What’s your opinion?
Ahh — I had entirely forgotten about this comment. Pathal (the big brain behind ShadowCraft at the moment) posted on Elitist Jerks a bit over a month ago (in the first/second page of the Combat thread, http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t132417-5_2_combat_im_not_dead_yet/) and swore by the Autohotkey approach. He also defended its legality, which I’m inclined to agree with — this isn’t about creating a scenario in which the game is making decisions for us, it’s about augmenting our gameplay with a tool that makes it easier to execute the things we choose to execute (much like macros). They’re game-assisting, rather than game-breaking, so I don’t think I hear any fish. :)
[…] four-piece bonus, when synced with Adrenaline Rush, would result in combat rogues being completely unable to burn all their energy fast enough. Blizzard’s first suggestion was to split up AR and SB, which is a very bad idea. […]