Frost vs. Blood
First order of business, been having some server issues. It’s makes things a bit difficult to get more people to the site when things don’t work. It’s Vmware’s fault, and I’m trying to get it settled. If you’ve had issues getting on; I’m sorry about that. If you haven’t, forget this first paragraph. I’m a one man show here, I designed the site, I host the site, and I write content; sometimes the gnomes tinker with my hardware.
First bit of news is a big “I told you so”. According to Blizz, rogues are getting nerfed. They expect a 7% damage decrease to Assassination and a 2% decrease to Combat. Taking into account the meters from ICC, I’m not surprised at all. Take away 7% of our rogue’s damage and she’s still ahead, but not by quite so much compared to everyone else. We have good people with about equivalent gear and skill, if someone’s THAT far ahead, something is wrong with the class. This is the same argument other people used against Death Knights back in Naxx. The buff nerf game is part of the class-mechanics merrygoround that the devs use to keep everyone interested; deal with it. As expected some wonderful people of the WoW community have taken the news waaaay too far. Check out this read from Ghostcrawler on the forums:
It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.
Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.
I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is.
In your eagerness to find a gotcha I think you misinterpreted me. You guys (the community) theorycrafted the nerf to be about 7% for Mutilate. For you guys (the community) to then complain that it's a massive nerf that will cost you a raid spot seems disingenuous. Either you don't believe those estimates, in which case I advise you to address those players who made them, or you're just being melodramatic.
We know how much we wanted to lower rogue damage, but we typically don't share our numbers. What happens is if we said "Rogue target damage is 7.5K dps" then every time players did less than that or saw other classes do more, they'd try and argue that we need to make changes instead of them trying to do better.
- Ghostcrawler (Source)
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to say that Rogues DESERVE to be nerfed, or that they shouldn’t be a little bit higher on the meters than a DK. What I am trying to say is that an equally geared and equally skilled rogue should not be topping the meters by as high of a margin as they are (or maybe were) currently. That turns into a class balance issue, and guilds start stacking rogues as they have stacked other classes in the past, and an overpowered class becomes a crutch.
As promised, I did a little comparison between blood and frost. These meters were taken on the same raid with the same raid members. I used my normal frost DW spec (0/53/18) and the top 2-hand blood dps spec (51/0/20). I think that the damage ended up being relatively the same. Blood scored a little less, but I chalk this up to less familiarity with the rotation. I was able to come up top on one of our attempts against Saurfang.
We killed Saurfang again, but we had to slightly modify our strategy. We had a hunter and a balance druid for ranged dps. We had the ranged, and one of our DK’s on permanent flesh duty, while myself, Kaali, and the rest of the melee dps focused totally on the boss. We were able to get to Frenzy just as Saurfang was using the first MoB. The strain on the healers was a lot less. Even though we had less overall dps, we still rolled the encounter. If we hadn’t made that change, we would have failed. So, if you’re raid is low dps-wise, you may want to consider a similar strategy.
That was it for the night unfortunately, we had some people bail before we could try the new wing, and then Yuriken and Kilios’ dad was rushed to the hospital, killing our raid night this week.
Got something you want me to talk about, feel free to drop me a line. Also, if you have a screen shot of someone being a Deathnoob, feel free to email it to me for our mutual amusement and their humiliation.