So the beta has been updated with build 8962 and we have a few more changes, though no direct overhauls on things rogue side. I’ll just list them in a nice list to make things easier:
- Ambush damage increased. (Check skill list for details)
- Envenom now gives you an additional 15% chance to apply Instant and Deadly Poison to targets for 1 sec plus an additional 1 sec per combo point. (Previously 25% chance)
- Focused Attacks (Tier 8 ) gives your melee critical strikes 100% chance to generate 1/2/3 Energy. (Previously 30% chance)
- Infectious Poisons removed.
- Improved Poisons (Tier 4) now increases the chance to apply Instant and Deadly Poison to your target by 3/6/9/12/15%. (Previously increased the chance to apply all poisons by 5/10/15/20/25%)
- Backstab damage increased. (Check skill list for details)
- Unfair Advantage (Tier 9) now states that the effect cannot occur more then once per second.
- Enveloping Shadows (Tier 7) reduces the damage taken by area of effect attacks by 5/10/15%. (Previously increased your chance to avoid them)
Ambush and Backstab damage increased is.. well.. nice for dagger rogues I’d imagine. I’m not going to pretend I can make numerical sense out of the Envenom change since I simply don’t use it – though if Setup + Honor among Thieves is a suitably awesome combination, I might actually start using either that or Eviscerate for additional threat – provided I have the combo points to spare.
Unfair Advantage being given an internal cooldown was expected, though my impression that one second still has significant potential for being twistedly mighty. I’d still love it for threat and still think it could be interesting (read: very painful) in PvP against combat rogues.
Enveloping Shadows would likely be nice if I had three talent points to spare.
There’s also this little one that we saw datamined a whole lot of whiles that apparently hasn’t been actually been made available until now: “Glyph of Sinister Strike — Your Sinister Strike critical strikes have a 40% chance to add an additional combo point.” – another one of those things probably nice for other (read: normal) rogues but not at all so for me.
There’s also some new mounts and mount achievement malarky and mounts you can get from it, and stuff – looking forward to see how the passenger mounts work since they’re supposedly adding one of those.
Right, with the Wrath chatter out of the way, let’s move on to the actual header image. I put together issue 49 of Beyond the Tree last evening night and ultimately decided that I not only didn’t really have some camera angles of the insides of the Astranaar Inn I wanted, but that some of the ones I wanted would also be impossible due to an inconveniently placed NPC.
Soooo.. I located the conversion scripts I’d conveniently downloaded some time back and set out to have the building usable within 3ds Max itself. It generally means three things – firstly that part of the background won’t stand out as much from the characters because it’s part of the same image layer as the characters are (this is the bad thing), secondly that the world and the characters will consistently cast shadows on eachother that interact in a very uniform manner (this is good), thirdly that I don’t have to mind where NPCs are normally located and I can both light, shoot and furnish the place however I please (this is Awesome).
Naturally this isn’t something I can do (atleast not yet) with the whole world, nor something I’ll directly be doing every time Beyond the Tree goes indoors – converting and furnishing a structure is alot of work, and the Inn is only half furnished at this point – I’ll be adding more later as I get more use of it for issue 50.
Still. It’s something that’s possible to do for things that’ll be of use enough to warrant it. I’m hoping that atleast a fair ammount of buildings might get that treatment, but like said, it’s alot of work. So much like the idea of making blank poseable models for NPCs, I’m not making any promises.
On a closing note, I actually did get the PTR downloaded and installed, and my character copied. But I haven’t actually had the time to try it out yet. Between trying to catch up on Beyond the Tree and doing school work, it’s felt like a lesser consideration so far.
Thoughts for Food 
A maybe interesting link i just ran across : http://www.arroway.de/textures/05/en/index.html
Not directly related to the comic, but shows some textures and bump mapping which might be useful for reference.
The Enveloping Shadows change is actually incredible horrible, at least from a pvp point of view. I understand what they’re doing – trying to minimize the randomness of some of those talents, which in general is a goal I agree with.
However, in this specific case, the main use of the talent before was avoiding aoe crowd control like Psychic Scream, Frost Nova, Howl of Terror, etc etc. With the change to a flat damage reduction it’s totally worthless for that purpose.
I’m not sure the talent was overpowered in its former state – just too random, maybe. I wonder if there’s a better way to “fix” it?
(Came via the link from Valenna, hi!)
Hi there! /wave
And yeah, I was actually informed by the person I generally bug for all things Game Mechanical that the change was more a nerf than anything. My own immediate thoughts were more along the lines of “Oh, so chance of it triggering Setup then, pity. Oh well, guaranteed is good I suppose.” until pointed out otherwise.
Still never had the points for the talent, so I’m excused in my ignorance, or somesuch 😉
No matter what they do with it it likely won’t affect me, though making it better without making it too good would likely be nice. We’ll see what they do with it.
And I’m not sure how much that link is of help bbr – its main purpose seems to be to sell a DVD full of various textures and doesn’t really explain how bump maps should be made (as I just do an emboss filter). And so far I’m just extracting art resources from World of Warcraft and tweaking them anyhow to maintain graphical consistency – you’d most likely really notice if something from another source got mixed in due to it looking painfully different.
Hi Nhani,
Based on your comments, I guessing you’re thinking about deep subtlety?
I thought you might want to check out:
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t26242-rogue_pve_dps_wotlk_discussion
go over this issue pretty thoroughly. (And yes, I HAVE read all 132 pages, 3277 postings!
This is a PVE-only, raid-centric look but it’s still really good analysis on the effectiveness of the different talents on DPS.
They’ve pretty much concluded that 51/5/5 (mutiliate) or 5/51/5 (sinister strike) are the two best leveling builds. They’re roughly equal from DPS.
They REALLY like the CttC effect to extend SND indefinitely. They REALLY like the synergy between the Assasination poison talents and the new poison application buff in Envenom. (Envenom is the new jazz).
Also the change to windfury totem (doesn’t overwrite poison, does add a haste buff)
plus the new AP scaling to damage poisons means that poisons have gotten a HUGE buff.
So, take a good hard look at assassination & combat. There’s good stuff in there.
/wave
Unfortunately, anything but deep subtlety leaves me lacking a very key and core talent for what I do, namely Sinister Calling. Any spec I have basically needs 40 subtlety atleast to work, that’s really how it is. And come 3.0 (and later, Wrath) I’ll also need at least 20 points in combat for Lightning Reflexes, as they’re moving it down the tree.
Mind you, I do love some of the things in the combat tree (Blade Flurry is nice, Unfair Advantage would be potentially quite sickly for me too and soforth) but in general, I don’t have the points spare to get them. Unless Combat or Assassination somehow end up able to match the offensive and defensive boost that 15% extra agility provides, I don’t see how I’d be able to go anything but subtlety. There’s really not much that compares to that much gain in sheer avoidance that I know, even with diminishing returns.