Coupled with the Deadly Poison requirements, it becomes obvious that mutilate rogues require at least one very quick dagger to function properly. Their primary energy regeneration mechanism, Focused Attacks, is a percentage-chance proc and favors quick weapons as well.

The quicker that a five-stack of Deadly Poison is active, the better. It's why assassination rogues don't stack armor penetration and even do things like gem for haste. Poisons end up being a large percentage of your overall damage, and so optimizing your weapons to maximize their effect is key. Without Instant Poison, your Envenoms would lose their powerful secondary effect. Without Deadly Poison, your Mutilates would feel like a swing from a foam bat. If you're an assassination rogue, then you understand how important your poisons are to you. This is going out the window in Cataclysm, but that's still pretty far off on the horizon. While maces and fist weapons are an option for combat, those weapon specializations fall behind Hack and Slash in terms of potency. What's nice about combat is that we can also use both swords and axes, which means that any slow or fast axe or sword can be used. Our Sinister Strikes, Eviscerates and Killing Sprees have a chance to proc a poison, so having a slow weapon makes the PPM system work for us. Even after the instant attack normalization of vanilla WoW, slower weapons are still better for combat in the main hand. That's OK though, because we already needed to use a quick weapon for Deadly Poison, so we simply combine the two and use a quick off-hand weapon with Deadly Poison on it at all times.įor our main-hand weapon, we're looking for the slowest weapon possible. As this talent is crucial to combat rogues' scaling properly with haste and haste effects, we're forced to use the quickest off-hand possible. The quicker the weapon, the more energy you will recover. Combat rogues probably know where I'm going with this already, but basically the entire combat energy regeneration system is based off the talent Combat Potency. Of all rogue specs, combat has the most specific weapon speed requirements. No matter what spec you're currently using, you need at least one quick weapon for Deadly Poison application and maintenance. As a rule of thumb, any effect that has a flat percent chance to apply favors a faster weapon. Due to the fact that Deadly Poison was left on a pure percentage-chance proc rate, we require a quick weapon to be used. The newly implemented Deadly Poison/opposite poison proc chance changes the way we think about weapon speeds and poison selection. It wasn't until Adrine and the PoisonSwapper addon that this was brought to the public's attention and Blizzard was forced to react. Most of our percentage-chance poisons were moved to a proc-per-minute (PPM) mechanic, shifting the entire paradigm of how we look at weapon speeds.ĭeadly Poison had been designed poorly since day 1, as it was a refreshing DoT with no application effect.

While there have been several changes to rogue mechanics in the years since Molten Core, the most drastic changes to rogue mechanics were the recent poison updates. Going all the way back to two best-in-slot items, Teebu's Blazing Longsword and the Barman Shanker, we can see that even a 0.1-second difference was enough to tip the scales. Historically, 'slower is better' has been a staple of rogue weapon selection. While Cataclysm has promised to roll all weapon types into a single, balanced specialization, we are currently forced to pick our instruments of destruction carefully. In most cases, weapon speed can trump nearly any other stat weight, due to specific mechanics that favor a certain type of sword or dagger. Rogues, on the other hand, have very narrow weapon requirements. I'm just happy that they're not allowed to equip their pets with gear à la Diablo II, or else there would be a massive weapon shortage. Polearms, swords and even daggers can all fall prey to their instant need rolls. Either they need to gear for some special gear set they're working on they're hoping that Blizzard allows them to use maces and wands someday.

If you've ever played with a hunter, then you know that every weapon is a hunter weapon. This week, we discuss the reason we're picky about weapon speeds. Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class.

Instruments of destruction wow