Hang tight, this is going to be a long one. TLDR Mut/env sucks, is boring, and not interesting. Need better sub runes for VANILLA SUB. buff backstab. fix other dumb rune placements, stop making us play playstyles from other xpacs.
First off I’d like to say that mutilate is too strong in its current form. Regardless of your talent choice, if you choose daggers, mutilate will always win.
To compare some things with backstab.
Mutilate has a higher damage per energy.
Mutilate can proc poisons twice.
Mutilate generates more CPs per energy.
Mutilate can also proc the rune that gives you energy on crits twice (focused attacks)
and finally, I’m pretty sure mutilate is going to be able to proc combat potency.
So this is to say, backstab and other CP generators need to be rebalanced to compensate or mutilate needs some hefty nerfs.
Some other things to point out. Please stop forcing us into playstyles from other xpacs. I really hated playing rogue in WOTLK when mut/env/snd was the playstyle. It was boring and brain dead. Please take another look at VANILLA assassination tree and take note that yes indeed the spec is poison focused, BUT it is also the “finisher” spec, and it would be really nice to receive a playstyle that’s more in line with a finisher spec, and not just a copy paste repeat of WOTLK rogue.
Next, I will mention sub. Please take note of specific key talents in sub that could make it a bit different. Specifically serrated blades. With a quick glance of +attack power from deadliness and the boost to rupture damage on serrated, and boosted garrote and bstab damage from opportunity, it would be interesting and make sense to perhaps push a good backstab and bleed build for pve. Please dont force shadowdance either. This would also be a great time to create a rune that turns hemorrhage into more of a support role like it was intended at first. This would also make sense because we have so many other CP generators right now to compete with. It was also originally intended to be a support ability rather than a main cp generator in OG vanilla. Perhaps make hemos debuff effect bleed procs. That would be awesome and great for other classes that have bleeds as well and would deff give some flavor to the rotation as the rogue would have to watch the stacks. Allowing the use of garrote each time hemo gets fully consumed would be incredible!
On a final note, why is the shiv rune a hand rune? Shiv is more of a support/utility ability than it is a main CP generator. Having it compete with mutilate and saber makes absolutely no sense, especially when you consider that shiv is typically iconic on muti/env rogues in other expansions. I would even go along and say that shiv mostly deserve to be on the finger slot as its purely utility and barely even competes with standard sinister strike.
More a of a problem for rogues in general is all of their runes are undercooked and any that are good are just future abilities from later expansions. Which is quite saddening, many a suggestion I have seen and not acted upon by blizzard.
The inherit strength of mutilate is mostly as you say, and severely limits the class ceiling for improvement as a rune.
Bare with me, Let’s remove mutilate as a rune for a moment and have a Baseline book:
Assassin’s tome of Mutilation.
Your main hand combo generating strikes that do not require stealth also strike with your off-hand. (Worded to not affect ambush)
You then move the slaughter from the shadows chest rune to hands.
Thus the playstyle is maintained without any major swings.
I would like to see sword/mace/fist and backstab dagger being buffed to keep up with mutilate. I liked this post someone put on the ptr forum for sod about improving the sub tree
I think we can actually utilize shiv being a hand rune and as part of the rotation to buff backstab. It just needs something where shiv will buff your next backstab or backstabs for some period of time and maybe some energy return. Deep wounds type of dot from your next backstab, an additional instant damage proc for 50% of your backstab, or something else
I remember in phase 1 of SoD someone wanting a ranged type of rogue playstyle in the sub tree like a ninja with throwing weapons, hemo, bleeds and high mobility, but if they could make hemo viable that would be interesting.
They could also consider reworking shadowstrike. It’s 20 energy, but only usable in stealth and does 150% weapon damage. If it can be used out of stealth without the teleport and had a CD that could be interesting, especially if it did something to buff backstab
Mutilate is INTENDED to be a replacement for backstab.
You don’t see feral Druids bemoaning not using claw in favor of mangle. So why do rogues insist on trying to complain they don’t cast backstab if they have mutilate.
Welcome to rogues? There will always be a strongest cp generator. If you nerf mutilate, something else will take its place unless blizz adds some sort of proc or conditional that occasionally buffs another cp generator.
Thanks for the shout out. Since OP is talking about subtlety as a bleed build, what if shiv did something like “adds 6 secs to existing bleed effects”?
You could keep rupture/garrote rolling without having to refresh if you weave a shiv in here and there, and serrated blades + opportunity boosts your bleed damage.
With these changes + what I suggested in the other thread, you open with garrote, and backstab for 1-2 combo points (1-3 if running seal fate). Maintain garrote and rupture by weaving in the odd shiv here and there when you’re at 4CP and need to topp off at 5. Otherwise, your finishers just go to SnD or envenoms. This allows you to easily maintain carnage on the target as well.
Wrong buddy. Mutilate is supposed to have a lower base damage than backstab because of all the bullet points I listed. Mutilate is intended to be a ramp up combo generator that deals more damage over the time you use it. It having a high base damage per hit off the bat makes every other cp generator useless.
Backstab is upfront damage and burst while mutilate is supposed to be for over time.
Wrong. Mutilate is a “dot rogue” ability and backstab can be either. It’s several complete different playstyles for arguably different specs. It’s also braindead because positional requirements vs lack of positional requirements. It also turns gouge into retail-pseudo interrupt instead of it being a setup for backstabs. Does anyone remember pvping as assassin in wotlk and how weird gouge felt to use when everything has deadly poison on it now?
Also who wants to play deep sub or combat as mutilate? It’s already looking like we are 100% stuck on daggers for pvp this season as well…
Yeah, I can agree that BS should do more damage, but that’s immaterial. It will not change the fact that tuning, theorycrafting, and sims will identify which builder results in the most overall damage based on calculations using CP generated, energy costs, and damage output.
As a result, you will not see any variance in which cp generator gets pushed.
Edit: it looks like some rogue changes came through and I hope we both can agree that they are implemented well, at least in theory. Blizz also seems to believe that “NeRf MuTiLaTe” was not the way to go and instead did actually create those conditionals for backstab to find a place, namely with the ambush proc from backstab.
They added some pretty interesting changes to rogue. I do like the idea of extending rupture/garrote because it can be a challenge to juggle both SnD and rupture, but replacing shiv with something to allow ambush out of stealth is really cool plus the slaughter from the shadows buff is huge. I wonder what would be the new meta with these changes
So looking at those patch notes for the ptr, I am cautiously optimistic. At the very least, the pvp version of backstab got light years better based on energy alone.
Grants a 15% chance per parry or 100% chance per gouge to allow the use of backstab with no positional or weapon requirements and free, if it crits, create a dot effect over 10 seconds equal to the damage done.
