Upcoming Boss armor Change Tries to Balance Class DPS
As I have posted a couple of times recently, we decided to raise the armor of level 83 raid bosses by 10% to correct for some dps difference between casters and melee + hunters. I wanted to address the issue head on with the rogues.
We have done a lot of testing recently, and concluded that even with this change, Assassination rogues are likely the top dps spec in the game against single bosses that don’t move around a lot (like Patchwerk). This isn’t a bad place for them to be. They pay a small price both for being melee (where more damage tends to occur) and for lacking the ability to respec into a non-damage build. We don’t think they will be as far above hybrids as they have been before — as I’ve posted before, it’s very important that hybrid classes do higher dps now that their buffs do not stack.
Combat builds, especially swords, is competitive but probably behind Assassination. This is something we’d like to address, especially if it turns out to be a major difference between the specs. Additional armor does hurt Combat, but also remember it’s just raid bosses and not other players (or trash or heroic bosses).
Subtelty, sadly, is just much harder to test since so much of their damage relies on other players. Our preliminary evidence is that they generate plenty of combo points from Honor Among Thieves, but this might mean their personal dps when not in a group suffers. This is something we’re still testing.
I will add that some players have wondered if Honor Among Thieves is bugged since the cp can occur more often than 1 sec. In this case, the tooltip is just unclear. When Jimmy the Shaman crits, he cannnot “send you” a combo point more often than 1 per sec. But if you have lots of players critting all the time, you can build them up quickly. So Honor is (here it comes) working as intended. (src)
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Oct 22nd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
As one person who posted in the thread this was taken from has said, “Nail, meet coffin.” (at least, as far as the Combat tree is concerned)
Oct 22nd, 2008 at 1:17 pm
you know, I’m not so sure. only 1 of 4 tanks can sunder armor, so what’s to say that a rogue shouldn’t be using expose armor? hell even if there IS a warrior in the raid DPSing as fury or arms or whatever, he won’t be sundering right?
Oct 22nd, 2008 at 7:20 pm
My point was that Combat was having a hard enough time as it is (and combat used to be THE PvE raiding specc), so throwing in 10% more armor is just going to make Combat fall even further behind. At this rate, Combat will be just like Assassination was in TBC - a sub-par PvE and PvP tree that virtually no one who knows how to play will touch because it’s DPS/survivability poison.
In case you were wondering why this will make Combat fall behind further, it’s because realistically, Combat can only allow for two finishers to be used regularly - as of now, those two finishers are Slice and Dice and Envenom (rupture used to be the best to use, but now Envenom is doing much more damage) - both of which are abilities that directly enhance our personal DPS. With this change to armor, rogues will have to throw in EA *just to keep the status quo*, only this time, they’re using one less DPS-enhancing finisher, so this will be a big nerf to Combat DPS. With Assassination, it’s not as big a deal because combo point generation is much easier with Assass than it is with Combat.