Rogue 1.12 Preview

[Quark]

So once he saw the talent preview, Wodin (EJ Rogue) decided compare daggers versus swords, before and after. Here's the results:

We begin, as I am fond of doing, with some history:

The review will mainly be centered on talent improvements, making some talents more appealing and general improvements without removing or disrupting current and viable builds if at all possible.

The review, any review, is intended to bring a class to a certain level of balance, hopefully ending up with a balanced set of classes.

I'm taking you at your word. The purpose of this post is to point out that the rogue review as it currently stands has disrupted the delicate balance of incentives for a raiding player, and that as it currently stands it has failed in creating the level playing field that was its stated goal.

Here are two rogues - we'll be using them as the basis of comparison for this post. They have identical armor, and their weapons are as closely approximated in terms of total DPS and stats as possible.

Dagger Rogue: http://ctprofiles.net/2298985
Sword Rogue: http://ctprofiles.net/2299353

Some breakdowns for those who don't want to dig through the profiles:

The dagger rogue has 30% crit(including dagger specialization 3/5) and 16% hit(thanks pugio), with 1152 attack power. The sword rogue has 27% crit and 15% hit with 1151 attack power.

Dagger Rogue Damage Per Energy pre-patch: 21.0
Sword Rogue Damage Per Energy pre-patch(no evis): 15.4
Sword Rogue DPE w/Evis: 17.5

So, being a combat dagger rogue buys you a small but significant DPE boost - your special attacks scale slightly better. Over the course of 60 seconds, a sword rogue uses Sinister Strike 15 times, Eviscerate once, and Slice and Dice twice. The dagger rogue uses backstab 10 times, and slice and dice twice.

Dagger Rogue Special Damage(60s window): 12600
Sword Rogue Special Damage(60s window): 10478

The DPE efficiency of Eviscerate closes the gap between the two builds: Combat Daggers has a 5.6DPE lead on special attacks, but the evis closes the Actual DPE differential to 3.5.

With regards to melee damage, we model sword specialization as a 4% net increase in total melee damage - this is due to the fact that extra attacks are implemented as "your next melee attack occurs instantly" and thus the damage bonus is not as large.

Dagger rogue melee DPS: 175.9
Sword rogue melee DPS: 175.3

Dagger damage(60s): 10554
Sword damage(60s): 10518

However, these numbers don't take into account one critical factor: glancing blows. Of the melee attacks that take place, 40% will glance, dealing 70% of their damage. So let's factor that in.

Dagger damage with glancing(60s): 9287
Sword damage with glancing(60s): 9255

Dagger total: 21887
Sword total: 19733

So daggers are slightly better with identical gear. It's a small advantage, yes, but that margin was enough that people specced daggers and put up with all the hassle. Now, along comes 1.12. We see the sword rogue spec change: he can drop 2 points in Improved Eviscerate and pick up Weapon Expertise, or drop two points in Lethality and pick up Weapon Expertise.


If you drop 2 points in Lethality, the following changes occur:

Sword Rogue Special DPE: 15.0
Sword Rogue Special Damage(60s window): 10237
Sword Rogue melee with glancing(60s): 9888

Sword Rogue(+WeapExp -Lethality): 20125
Dagger Rogue(1.11): 21887

Here, the gap shrinks by 3%.

If you drop 2 points in Improved Eviscerate instead, the following changes occur:

Sword Rogue Special Damage(60s window): 10370
Sword Rogue Melee with Glancing(60s): 9888

Sword rogue(+WeapExp -ImpEvis): 20258
Dagger rogue(1.11): 20387

Here the gap shrinks another percentage point, meaning all that extra work is buying you 4% more performance than a combat swords build.


What happens if we try to get Weapon Expertise as a combat daggers build? Well, we gain 1% crit and +5 weapon skill, and lose 2 points in Lethality.

1.12 Daggers DPE(+WeapExp -Lethality): 20.1
1.12 Dagger Special Damage(60s): 12060
1.12 Dagger melee(with glance): 9924
1.12 Dagger total: 21984

Comparing "new daggers" to "new swords" we see that the gap separating them in 1.11 has shrunk quite a bit in 1.12. Further, the dagger build is even more limited than it was before, because a greater portion of its damage is reliant on melee attacks. Any situation where you are not attacking a monster 100% of the time, you're actually losing damage.

It only gets worse - if the new rank of Eviscerate provides the same 36% increase in damage that we got going from rank 7 to rank 8, combat swords will generate the following numbers:

Sword Rogue Special Damage(1/3 Imp Evis): 10777
Sword Rogue Special Damage(3/5 Lethality): 10683

That closes the gap between Combat Swords and Combat Daggers quite a bit further, down to 4%. With such a small margin separating swords and daggers, the relative tradeoffs for combat daggers are no longer worth it. Why be restricted by positioning and heavily spiked damage - both a problem on zerg encounters like Noth or Gothik? Why suffer with fewer combo points, less mitigation, and the inability to disarm opponents?

It just won't be worth it anymore. Combat dagger rogues thought optimizing for raiding would be rewarded by Blizzard, but we didn't know how good we had it now.