Assassination:Weapon Swap gimmick

#0 - Sept. 17, 2009, 5:29 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Getting to the point:

In the next minor patch (3.2.2) Assassination's 'Master Poisoner' is getting a rework. Instead of increasing the chance of Deadly poison applying increased, it will make Envenom not remove Deadly poison at all.

This sort of mechanic puts forth that Deadly poison is only on your weapon to keep the 12 second DoT up on your target. That gives rise to the clunky, irritating mechanic of Weapon Swap for Poison utility.

The premise is that you have a dagger with Deadly poison, and two weapons with Instant poison. You get the 5 dose of Deadly poison on your target, then swap the the double Instant setup and continue to expend and build your energy and combo points as you would. After eight(8) seconds, you swap back to your Deadly poison dagger, make sure it reapplies, then swap back.

This mechanic is clunky as all hell, and requires no more skill than say the Combat rotation, or the existing Assassination rotation. It's just, in Ghostcrawler's words from the Rogue QandA:"Not supported well by the UI".

Possible changes include redesigning Deadly Brew:
-Instant procs Deadly
-Wound procs Crippling
-Mind Numbing procs Crippling
Seeing as PvP rogues would never be using Instant over wound; and the talent point investment outweighs to an extent the boost from Instant proccing Deadly

Another alternative is to 'wipe poisons clean' when you swap weapons..Though it should be known, I'm pretty certain most Rogues agree with me when I say that's the last thing we want to see - Function taken from our class =)
#16 - Sept. 17, 2009, 9:22 p.m.
Blizzard Post
There is some theorycrafting that suggests swapping weapons like this will be a net dps increase. It's not a huge dps increase, and the conditions in which the simulation were done were extremely generous.

Short story: we're not convinced ROUGES are really going to be doing this. If they end up doing it, we'll probably take some action because we agree it's a clunky mechanic. In the meanwhile, there are some legit and slightly less clunky opportunities to swap weapons and we'd rather not make those collateral damage if we don't have to.