Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Intermission: The State of Rogues


Taking a break from my regular schedule because I wanted to point out a few recent revelations in the world of roguing. If you don't play a rogue, this stuff will probably bore you to tears and only half make sense.

  • It appears that with the buff to FoK, my aoe dps matches even mages. Just keep SnD up and white hit one target while pounding on your FoK key and you win.

  • Combat Rogues have been using the Glyph of Slice and Dice, along with the Improved SnD talent to extend the length of their SnD. Recently, it's been discovered that a 7/51/13 rogue (the most powerful combat spec right now) can actually increase his dps by exchanging the glyph for the Blade Flurry or Adrenaline Rush glyph. Further, if they are using a fist MH/sword OH combination, they can take a point out of imp. SnD and use that point to finish out Sword Specialization for an overall DPS increase (see the build here). An optimal rotation for this setup keeps Rupture uptime at 100%. It alternates 3 or 4 point SnDs with 5-point Ruptures. This rotation doesn't require all of that extra time on SnD, so you don't need the glyph and only need 1 point in the talent. This becomes even more advantageous with the 2-piece tier 7 set bonus, which increases Rupture damage by 10%. 15/51/5 rogues still want to stick with something like a 5s/5r/5e rotation with their SnD time maxed via glyphs and talents.

  • Ghostcrawler has announced that Mutilate specs vastly outdamage Combat specs, and that a Combat buff (and a rogue buff) is imminent. According to the spreadsheet, at my current gear level, I see at most a 100 dps difference under optimal conditions by respeccing Mutilate. It must be that this difference appears at higher gear levels. Also keep in mind that my available Combat weapons are slightly better than my available Mutilate weapons. I'm betting a Mut rogue with 2 Webbed Deaths (good because they are so fast) is probably beating a Combat rogue with their optimal weapon combo (Calamity's Grasp and Hailstorm).

  • In case you didn't know, you should use Wound Poison instead of Instant Poison if you are playing a Combat spec.

4 comments:

Raitin said...

So top DPS is achievable with Fist/Sword now instead of Fist/Dagger? Man I need to get my home computer fixed ASAP (tomorrow, yay!) so I can go back to reading about all this stuff. Geez I miss WoW (been having some computer/accounts issues, detailed in my blog).
It will be interesting to see what GC reveals about the Combat 'buffs' (using the term lightly) before I get all excited about it.

Rich said...

i heard about the FoK buf, but am curious as to how much energy it costs (I'll look it up myself, just wondering aloud here), to make it competitive and "spammable". I imagine anything over 20 energy would deplete pretty quickly, so ... hm.

Raitin said...

At the moment FoK costs 50 energy(!), but as a Combat Rogue, you regen 12.5 energy a second, but even with that, pending any Combat Potency procs or using Adrenaline Rush, you can still only get off 2 FoK's until you are "OOE". It would take another 2 seconds of regen (again, not counting RNG procs) to spam another FoK, then another one every 3-4 seconds after that. Hardly seems like 'spamming', but I can see how it could work. It's a shame Blade Flurry doesn't stack with FoK... that would rock.

Hatch said...

I can't spam it as in "cast it every global cooldown", but I can just sit there jamming on the button and get one off every 4 seconds or so after the initial burst of 2 or 3 in a row. It just does enough damage that even at the high energy cost it's still competitive aoe.

Also, in reference to the fist/dagger comment Raitin made: I actually haven't looked at what happens if you do Calamity's/Webbed Death as combat. It very well may outdps the fist/sword combo with Hailstorm. I'll have to check later...