How many of you rogues out there know that Wounding Poison (Our utility anti healing poison) is a better than our baseline Instant Poison? In fact it takes 4/5 talent point into Improved Poisons just to bring the two up to parity in a raid situation. This means that the assassination rogue is spending 4 worthless talent points for that fifth point that finally makes Instant Poison a better source of damage than Wounding Poison. Below is the chart that proves this fact as Instant Poison damage for the various application percentages is subtracted by wound poison damage (The Zero Line).
As you can clearly see only 4/5 and 5/5 in Improved Poisons makes Instant Poison more viable than Wounding Poison, and 4/5 takes around 4000 Attack Power before it crosses the zero line (Wound Poison Damage). This happened from the massive poison buffs and subsequent nerfs to assassination DPS. When Deadly Brew allowed rogues to double up on instant poisons with a 40% proc rate and still get Deadly Poison ticking the poison damage was making up nearly half of a rogues damage. Deadly Brew and the application percentage was nerfed and this brought rogue poison damage back to where it belonged. However, in a later beta patch wound poison's proc rate was upped to 50% causing the problem you see with instant and improved poisons above.
Solution: Simple, make Instant Poison a 30% baseline application rate, with Improved Poisons Bringing it up to 40%. This has no effect on PvP while PvE rogues get a slightly more effective DPS poison at the cost of utility and Assassination Rogues get about a 5-7% (33% More IP Damage) overall DPS buff (and no longer have to waste 4 talent points just to make instant as effective as Wounding). If the 5-7% DPS gain is too high for 5 talent points, the talent could be reduced to only 3 talent points increasing the chance to 36% fully talented. This would result in a 3-4% (20% More IP Damage) DPS gain for the 3 talent points invested.
Problem: The fixed damage and application rate of poisons greatly favors fast weapons over slow weapons.
At first glance this doesn't appear to be that great of a problem and is largely a "duh" moment. Of course if the damage is fixed and the proc rate is fixed the faster you swing the more damage is going to be done. The problem comes from the nature of the scaling as the chart below shows that damage scales much more quickly the more and more you increase weapon speed. The chart below shows the DPS provided by baseline poisons at the various weapons speeds. The Effective weapon speed includes having all raid haste buffs and 5% Haste on gear. I've included Wounding, Instant (@30% and @40% per my Recommendation Above), and Deadly Poison Ticking at a 5 stack for a point of reference.
You can clearly see the parabolic nature of the scaling. To further prove my point check out the DPS gained by added 15% haste to your gear.
This makes the rogue highly dependent on finding a fast weapon to place their Instant/Wounding Poison on and will cause gear scaling issues as World of Warcraft continues into the future. Weapon speed becomes the single most important stat to the point of a 1.3s blue becoming a better weapon than 1.5s epics that offer 10-30 DPS more in addition to better stats.
Solution: Change Poisons Damage to scale off Weapon Damage and not attack power. I've balanced the percentages to provide DPS between a 1.3 and 1.4s weapon under the current system.
Instant Poison: (Weapon DPS + AP/14) * 120% * Weapon Speed (Tool Tip: Each strike has a 30% chance of poisoning the enemy which instantly inflicts 120% Weapon Damage as Nature Damage)
Wound Poison: (Weapon DPS + AP/14) * 65% * Weapon Speed (Tool Tip: Each strike has a 50% chance of poisoning the enemy, causing 65% Weapon Damage as Nature damage and reducing all healing effects used on them by 50% for 15 sec.)
Here are some graphs that show the viability of this change. The first Chart shows current DPS scaling with weapon speed vs. the change to poison damage based upon weapon damage. The other charts show Haste and AP scaling of the change to poisons based upon weapon damage as a proof of concept that such a change would eliminate the current parabolic scaling from faster weapons. You'll notice that weapon damage poisons are scaling a little better with AP than current Poisons as I used 1.4s weapons and thus damage is scaling slightly better with AP. Even slower weapons would result in even more AP scaling, while faster weapons would result in less scaling, however the DPS provided by the poisons remains a constant.
The problem with this solution is that is devalues Deadly Poison a bit as now all poisons deal equal DPS over all weapon speeds, and would likely require a slight damage buff to deadly poison to keep it viable in a raid situation. Increasing Deadly Poison Damage by 10% would be enough and give all rogues a slight (~1% DPS boost in PvE).
I would also like to see Deadly Brew allow an assassination rogue to stack Deadly Poison up to 6/7 Stacks (for the 2 talent points). This would be a 40% increase in Deadly Poison Damage (about a 4% DPS boost overall), but would help out the rotation and quality of life as Assassination quiet a bit. There are more pressing reasons for this change, but they are outside the scope of a discussion on poisons alone. However, without this change Assassination rogues will continue to favor double instant poisons.
Solution Summry:
- Increase Baseline Instant Poison Application Rate to 30%
- Change Instant Poison Damage to 120% of Weapon Damage
- Change Wounding Poison Damage to 65% of Weapon Damage
- Increase Deadly Poison Damage by 5-10%
- Add a Secondary Effect to Deadly Brew that allows Deadly Poison to Stack up to 6/7.
