I am lovin this new pre-cata patch. Oh, I know, it wasn't exactly fair and I know plenty of warriors, combat rogues, paladins, hunters etc are out there QQing about the nerf. But some people did come out winners - namely all casters (have you recently raided with a shadow priest or warlock? They pump out simply ungodly numbers on the recount charts these days), elemental shammies, and mutilate rogues.
To be honest mutilate rogues didn't get a buff, but when it seems as though all melee classes got a big nerf, I sure feel lucky that my DPS has not dropped by any noticeable amount. All the talents are still about the same (minor tweaks here and there), and the only big mechanic changes are:
1. Rupture is now part of the mutilate rotation. Before you used it to get the bleed effect if no one else was applying one so you could get the 6% damage buff. Now every rupture tick will grant you energy regen, which means it's absolutely CRUCIAL to apply the longest duration of rupture on the boss and keep it up at all times. Not that this really complicates the mutilate rotation - before it was: mutilate, mutilate, envenom. Now it's: mutilate, mutilate, rupture, mutilate, mutilate, envenom. Oh noes one additional button to press! I swear rogues have the easiest rotation given how much damage they do.
2. The execute phase, which is sort of a major change, but a good one! When the enemy is below 35% health, your backstab grants you 35 energy regen! Which means when the boss drops below 35%, you can basically spam backstab until 5 combo points. The energy regain from the backstab (which is even more if you glyph for it), plus the extra energy from any rupture ticks means that during the execute phase, your energy bar never drops below 50% - more often than not I find myself not being able to use up my energy fast enough! What limits me is the global cooldown on backstab, which is just...insanity. Backstab crits for well over 10k too.
Ah, I've gotten totally sidetracked. The REAL buff that I'm happy about is the recuperate ability. Use your combo points (which can be on a mob already dead) to heal yourself for 3% health every 3 seconds....doesn't sound like much, and it won't do you any good if something hits you real hard, but for soloing dungeons? Fuggeaboudit. Yes, I could solo dungeons before - even some vanilla raids and end-game TBC dungeons. But obviously with no healing ability I'd fight a pack of mobs, then either have to eat or bandage myself in between. Sometimes long boss fights took me dangerously low, not to mention that it was annoying to have to fill my hp back up all the time.
But now with this recuperate ability, whenever I see my hp dropping a little I just use whatever combo points I have going on to HoT myself! Since most vanilla/RBC dungeon mobs don't hit that hard, the HoT is more than enough to get me back up to full and I can go on to the next pack with no downtime!
More importantly, I can now solo things I just couldn't do before. Fights where if I just had a little bit of healing in addition to potions, maybe I could survive. I soloed the tiger boss in Zul Gurub the other night - sure the boss doesn't hit hard, but those 500-1000 hits start whittling down your health as the fight draws on. But with recuperate ticking away, that damage is cancelled out! With other abilities like evasion, bandaging myself between phases, and healing pots, I was able to bring down high priest Thekal! Although sadly he did not drop his awesome Zulian tiger mount...someday!
I can even solo level 80 group quests now (omg I know so OP - whoever has heard of a rogue soloing anything?). I did Threat from Above, which wasn't easy - it took me down to about 10% health. But I figured out that after you bring down Chillmaw, you can simply vanish and the cultist adds will not despawn! So you focus fire on Chillmaw with the HoTs ticking away, right after she goes down just vanish! Move away, heal up, sneak back in and sap cultist 1, blind cultist 2, kill cultist 3, kill cultist 2 right as he comes out of blind, kill cultist at your leisure. Gotta love that 45 second timer on sap.
I realize that of course, some of this would not be doable without being decked out in end-game gear as I am. And I'm not sure if Blizzard intended for recuperate to even be useful to level 80s - I read somewhere it was intended to reduce downtime during levelling. But whatever, until it gets nerfed somehow in the next patch, I'm going to keep soloing things and enjoying the ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment