Thursday, January 29, 2009

How to Fix Rogues


Reduce the base damage of Mutilate significantly, and slightly reduce the base damage of Envenom and Eviscerate. Then, let Deadly Poison stack to 10 and increase its duration. Continue to allow all moves to scale the way they currently do with stats like Attack Power.

You've buffed overall rogue damage for all three raid specs in raids, while reducing Mutilate's burst damage in PvP only.

Deadly Poison will do more damage, but won't reach its full potential unless the fight is long enough for you to get your stacks up. It lasts longer so you aren't punished for having to move during raid bosses. It also reduces how much of rogue damage is mitigated by armor by making a larger portion of it poison damage.

In PvP, rogues will face a major trade-off if they choose to use Deadly Poison: they get less advantage from Deadly Brew (which procs Crippling off of other poisons besides Deadly), and they can't use Gouge or Blind as freely on a target that has a DoT on them. So you force pvp rogues to pick between either more sustained damage, or more control, while nerfing their burst damage. Their raid damage is still the same because the extra Deadly Poison damage makes up for the nerfs to Mut and Envenom, while raid damage for Combat goes up. HaT builds (deep Subtlety raid builds based off the talent Honor Among Thieves) stay at roughly the same damage as their Deadly dps goes up but their Eviscerates go down a little.

Busy day at work, Dale the Game Mechanic is still on his way.


LATE NIGHT EDIT: I was thinking about this, and just realized that Envenom wipes Deadly Poison stacks, so this wouldn't be very Assassination-friendly. If the damage of Envenom were reduced slightly, could we get away with having it not remove Deadly?

3 comments:

Rich said...

have it remove '...up to 5 stacks' and you're fine. if you have ten it breeaks off 5, and in fact it would be awesome to double wham someone on back to back GCDs if you earned having 10 stacks put up.

THAT would be burst damage you need to work for, and deserved.

I was tryign to think about warlocks on the way to work today, and thought it would be cool if they had a move that could 'rip' DoTs off a target. Like if you needed to CC something (lol CC), you could tear your DoTs off them (for a small chunk of burst).

warlocks need a way to give burst on demand, and it take sso many globals to put the dots up in the forst place.

how would it scale though? say your corruption ticked once and you ripped it off... does it tick for half of corruptions full length? no... because then you could get a full currpution by ripping it twice in like 4 GCDs... maybe the move itself could have a cooldown, or be based on somethin like "500 base damage, plus 300 per DoT affecting the target".

Corruption 300
Immolate 300
CoA 300
Siphon Life 300
UA 300
Haunt 300
Shadow Embrace 300
+500
---
2000-ish... not bad, but sonsidering it took 6 GCDs to put it up, and all the mana, just to rip them out for garbage damage... it would need to find a good balance, but could work i think. plus it would let you 'cash in' loose end dots right before the mob dies.

Hatch said...

That "dot rip" is a really good idea. It elegently fixes a number of different problems for warlocks all at once. Ideally, you balance it so it does damage based on the duration of the dots left on it...like, the more time left on corruption, the more damage the rip does. But this may not be technologically feasible in WoW. Then to balance it, the rip just does a fraction of the damage the full duration dot would have done. Put it on a cooldown and your golden.

I'm thinking that if you put up all 6 dots, then ripped, you should do something like 5k to make the action worthwhile. Then locks get burst, but they have to pay a high price for it.

And the "...up to 5 stacks" thing really solves the problem I ran into with my solution for rogues.

Rich said...

like, the more time left on corruption, the more damage the rip does

but the problem here it that there's no incentive to let a DoT runs it's full course, then, (unless the rip has a cooldown attached, and is cooling)...

it's almost like it should based on how long you left it up before the rip, but then you're back at square one, where you have to sit around and wait for the damage to build up.

lol i posted this on the warlock forums last night right after posting it here, and bookmarked that page to check it in the morning, not a single response :)