Thinking About Beta Rogues.
Now, this has been done before, and by people much more intelligent than me. That said, I’m still working on getting the Beta client and therefore have nothing better to do.
51/15/5 – A lot of my reading has pointed to Assassination becoming a particularly powerful tree. In BC, Assassination has been the ‘gimp’ tree; you put points into it to beef up your PvP or PvE spec, but hardly anyone goes all the way down the tree. (Yes, I know there are PvP Mutilate rogues out there. From what I can tell, however, they appear to be a rare breed, and the current positional requirement (more on this in a second) seems like it would be painful, especially in a PvP environment).
This spec seems like a possible strong DPS contender, albeit with no Blood Poisoning. The removal of Mutilate’s positional requirement is HUGE; if the number of BC raid bosses who like to do that “spin around to cast” deal is any representation of a trend, this will be a fantastic change. Adding that to the buffing of poisons makes Assassination begin to look very viable.
20/51/0 – The “Blood Poisoning bitch” spec. It loses Relentless Strikes in exchange for Improved Poisons. Now, this change may not be necessary; if the poison hit cap is lower than the melee hit cap, then it might be possible to hit cap poisons and move those 5 points to Relentless Strikes. The weapon specialization is also open to change; I chose Sword Specialization because, frankly, I have no data on the strengths/weaknesses of the new and improved weapon specs. One thing is sure, though; they’ll have to do something DAMN nice to get me to spec combat daggers again. Positional requirements are the devil.
Now, keep in mind this is by no means a comprehensive list of all possible specs. I’m still considering some sort of Hemo/Blood Poisoning penultimate raid debuff spec; the problem with Hemo in BC was the increase in personal DPS from speccing Combat/Assassination was greater than the raid DPS increase given by taking any sort of Hemo spec, once you hit a certain level of (easily obtainable) gear. A comparison (not perfect, but close) showed that, in T5-equivalent gear or so, my rogue dealt 200-300 DPS less, while Hemo, than she did while Combat. So to make up for it, the Hemo debuff would have had to provide 200-300 more raidDPS. Now I don’t have the brain for math, but I don’t think that’s right… and I shall close this post on that digressive note. If my thoughts are wrong, please, feel free to let me know.
Now, c’mere, little Beta… I promise I don’t bite…
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