Weekly Sub Tree Questions

Q u o t e:
Sub is actually closer to the sort of theoretical Cataclysm design than either of the other rogue trees. It has relatively fewer Savage Combat / Prey on the Weak style talents and relatively more active and proc style talents. What they mean by a choice between utility and utility is that most other trees will have more Sub style active stuff and sub will be compensated by passive DPS increases which become part of all the trees. I would expect Sub to do very well if only because it needs less work to function in Cata than, say, Priest Holy, which is a giant pile of passive talents.

That's a good assessment. Ultimately, we'd like for more talent trees to look like Subtlety. Trading utility A for utility B is an interesting decision. Trading utility A for more dps is not an interesting decision; the latter is always going to win.

Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it's likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It's going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. (For some players, losing any dps is unacceptable, but I also know enough hardcore players that I can say with some confidence that you can't just make a blanket statement that all competitive players feel this way.)

I don't think we're there with rogues yet. Assassination is now a serious contender in end-game raiding, but Subtlety isn't and hasn't been since HAT was in a silly place. I think we're a lot closer with mages. Arcane may be the highest dps in a general sense, but there are fights on which Fire will win. Frost is a lot closer than it used to be, to the point where someone who just loves Frost won't feel like they are horribly gimping their group's progress. (It probably still needs to be slightly higher than where it is, but we'll see what Icecrown is like.) We eventually want to get rogues, locks and hunters closer to where mages appear to be in 3.3 (and work on mages more too of course).

Honor Among Thieves was a good attempt to get more combo points, and therefore damage, into the tree. It ended up having the scaling problem that a lot of our abilites have -- it's easy for it to be too weak in a small, 5-player group and to be too powerful when it's scaling off of 25 players. (Restricting it to a group doesn't really help because you can just fill that group full of folks who crit a lot, and raids provide a lot more buffs to guarantee crits.)

I do agree with the general feel of Subtlety being high finisher damage and cps through alternative routes, and that's a kit we want to keep going forward. I also agree that Ghostly Strike, Hemo and Backstab all could use more "juice" (by which I don't just mean higher dps). I'll also add that I think we went a little overboard in emphasizing damage over utility in Lich King PvE, especially in the earlier raid tiers. Who needs a good Sap when you're AE'ing everything down?

PvP-wise, utility can be a lot more useful than in PvE. However, as I've said before we think we've kind of let rogues get into too much of that glass cannon state. They either keep someone controlled and blow them up, or they themselves get blown up. We would still like to tone down some of the rogue CC and increase some of their passive (not cooldown-based) survivability. It's a little weird that leather classes are generally more fragile than cloth.

We try very hard not to give due dates on some of these changes. When you read through threads like this, I think you can see why. The risk of sharing some of our long-term plans is players then get frustrated when the changes don't materialize in the next patch. We have a very long list of changes we'd like to make to WoW, and if we tried to get them all into whatever the next patch is going to be, those patches would just get continually delayed. When I say "long term" I'm trying to say not to look for a change any time soon (because we haven't made the change yet) but that we recognize the problem and have some ideas we'd like to try out. This philosophy is the whole genesis of the infamous "Soon" and "When it's ready."

In other words, it isn't that we don't care -- just that we have a lot to do. If you buy that, then all you can really argue with is our prioritization for what we do first and I totally acknowledge there are subjective elements to that as well as considerations that aren't necessarily transparent to the community. I have no doubt that you might prioritize things differently were you in our shoes.

I know the Blizzard pace of development can be frustrating for some people, but when you look back at the history of the company, it's hard to argue that it doesn't work for us.

Q u o t e:
One of the things I've been assuming about the Cataclysm design is that it also seems to allow for much simpler fine-tuning, so that as specs inevitably drift out of the desired performance band as gear scales up, it becomes a much simpler matter to tweak them simply by adjusting the passive tree bonuses. Just for a hypothetical example, one of the trees they showed us in the dev panels was Combat:

51 points in Combat
- Passive: +72% melee damage
- Passive: +5% hit chance
- Mastery: +10% armor penetration (green, increased by Mastery rating)

So perhaps Combat is gaining 1.412% melee damage per point spent in the tree. Now say Tier 12 rolls around and Combat is getting a little out of control and needs to be toned down by about 3%. Rather than mucking about with individual talents and worrying about unintended consequences of those changes, they can simply reduce the bonus per point from 1.412% to 1.314%; voila, they just reduced the spec's melee damage by 3%.

Now it may be a little more complicated than this -- that 72% may not be linear. But the principle remains; they adjust the bonus, and they adjust spec performance, and they do so gently across the board without hitting individual talents hard.

I'm not at all sure they intend to use the new system this way, but it sure seems to have that kind of potential. And if spec performance can be easily tweaked in this manner, it matters a whole lot less if they don't scale the same.

Yes, that is definitely one of the strengths of the talent tree design -- we can easily turn knobs without changing how combat ratings work for everyone else. Now I wouldn't want to overdo it. I wouldn't want the passive damage from just spending points to let us justify lackluster talents or uninteresting talent builds. On the other hand, the kind of tweaks we often do now (say tacking passive damage on to a talent we know you'll get, or even buffing a glyph) aren't always elegant and can end up biting us down the road. Having an easier system to adjust just gives us one more tool when we need to make quick (i.e. not rebuilding the talent tree) changes.