Shiv build prevailing... Again

Ideally, Shiv would not be an uber PvE button to push, which is why we have nerfed it before. We don't have any changes to announce for it yet, but we may end up changing it before 3.1 ships. The purpose of such a change would not be to nerf rogue damage, but just so you didn't feel like you needed to use Shiv for Combat or Assassination PvE builds.

Please remember that we have not announced all of the 3.1 changes yet. Even when 3.1 goes up on the PTR, it will not initially have all of the class changes in it. We want to get this patch up early so we have lots of time for feedback.

One thing we are messing a lot with is poison procs. Changing poison to a proc per minute would make super fast weapons less attractive. I am suggesting that such a change might happen just so you don't recklessly shard all of those slow weapons. (The Enhancement shamans may want them too.)

Shiv is an ability primarily designed to get poisons on a target quickly. It is primarily a PvP ability. We don't want to just nerf it for PvE or it kills what it is doing for PvP. But it is not ideal that it makes a main ability like Sinister Strike look like poo. And we can't just buff Sinister Strike et al. (more on that below).

I understand that rogues, and particularly optimized players, will gravitate towards whatever spec and rotation maximizes their dps. That's cool, but it doesn't mean that we should just celebrate any bizarre way to play that comes up just because that happens to maximize dps.

I also understand how from a player point of view it always makes sense that when you see a big number and a bunch of little numbers that we should buff all the little numbers. It may be fun, but it rarely makes sense from our point of view. For starters, it causes game inflation at a much faster rate (and it is already pretty fast). It makes us have to buff other classes that are supposed to be on par with the target class. It might even make us buff encounters. That is a lot of work with a lot of risk compared to lowering perhaps a single number.

We are committed to improving rogues in PvE, and we have had trouble doing that without a major patch because small tweaks tend to have ripples throughout the class, making whole trees too good or too bad in PvE or PvP. But 3.1 is a major patch and we can touch as many things as we need to touch to get to the target we want.

Rogues have always had a problem where weapon speed can trump all, and we are seeing it now where blue weapons like Librarian's Paper Cutter can out-perfom much better weapon just because of the weapon speed. Usually when chance per hit is pushing players into doing unusual things like this it is because hits are being over-emphasized, and fast weapons hit more often. Our usual solution to that is to go to a proc per minute where slow weapons proc more often per swing than fast weapons so weapon speed itself becomes a lot less relevant compared to other other stats on the item and players actually have the option of benefiting from a higher level item that drops, rather than having to pass on it because it isn't 1.4 speed or whatever.

Q u o t e:
Whats up with the new HfB glyph?

I thought the ability doesn't stack anymore (in 3.1) yet the glyph increases dmg "per application"?

Am I reading something wrong?

The HfB glyph is, if I recall correctly, just a flat 3% to the ability and doesn't mention stacks.