A Rogue in Naxxramas – Patchwerk

This is part of a series describing rogue tactics for the bosses in Naxxramas. The focus is on the 10-man version of the fights, since that’s what most people will be running. If you have suggestions for alternate strategies, or if I say something that you disagree with, please put it in the comments.

These are not meant to be full raid strategy guides. They are written to describe the role of rogues (or other melee dps) during the encounters. For full strategy guides refer to Bosskillers or WoWWiki.

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So you’ve decided to do the Construct Quarter. By many accounts, this is the hardest of the four pre-Sapphiron quarters in Naxx. However, the fights in here are also very active and fun. Well, Grobbulus is not fun, but its interesting.

Before you get to Patchwerk, there is trash that deserves special mention. Several pulls into the wing, there is a room full of Embalming Slimes. They are small and green and almost cute. BUT, NO! There are about twenty of them and they all pull together. Each one does an AoE of about 3-4k. If you get trapped in the middle of four or five of them then you are going to take 16-20k damage immediately. You can Cloak to avoid it for a few seconds, and you can Feint to reduce some of the damage. But its better to just stay away. As tempting as it is to run in and FoK, you’re better served letting the hunters, mages and warlocks take care of them from range.

The first boss in this wing is Patchwerk. This is a very fun fight. It is a stand-still-and-dps fight, so rogues can shine here.

Patchwerk is what is known as a gear check. If your healers aren’t geared and skilled, they won’t be able to heal through the huge damage. If your tanks aren’t geared, then they can’t take the hits. If your dps isn’t geared, then they won’t kill Patchwerk before his enrage timer. Once everyone is geared, then its actually a very simple fight.

On the 10-man version, once engaged Patchwerk will melee the main tank and also do Hateful Strikes on the person in melee range who has the highest health (other than the main tank). This is somewhat reminiscent of Gruul, if you raided pre-Wrath. The Hateful Strike will one-shot a rogue, so you need to avoid it at all costs. Ranged dps cannot be hit by Hateful Strikes.

There is some disagreement about who gets targeted with the Hateful Strikes. Most say that anyone in melee range who has the highest health when the Strike is cast will get hit with it. Because of this, most raids have melee dps jump in and out of the slime river to keep their health down below that of the tanks. My guild does that, in fact, and it has been successful. According to Bosskillers, this is the correct approach. According to WoWWiki, though, using the slime is unnecessary because the Hatefuls can only go to the top two in threat (10-man version), choosing the player with highest health between those two.

My experience has been inconclusive. There are times I have stayed out of the slime for a while and not gotten hit by any Strikes. There are other times that I took a Hateful Strike when I though I should not have. I’m still experimenting with it, but I don’t want to play around with it at the expense of my raid’s repair costs. So I’ve been jumping in and out of the slime. (the slime reduces all of your stats by 50%, so your health drops by half when you step in it. Make sure to step right back out. Then jump back in when your health is high again)

All that aside, your job here is to hit hard and hit fast. He has a hard enrage timer at six minutes. Since is health is just over four million, your raid must do about 12,000 total dps to beat the timer (10-man version). If your raid has two tanks and two healers, then the 6 players should average around 1.8k dps each. With three healers, you would need a little over 2000 dps each. A rogue should be well above that.

With all that as background, here is the rogue strategy…

1. Wait for both the tank and Hateful Strike tank to establish aggro.
2. Get behind Patchwerk.
3. Jump into the slime river whenever you are at max health, then jump right out.
4. KICK BUTT
5. Stay lower than the two tanks on aggro. Use TotT on the tank and off-tank every time it is up to help with this. Also, use Vanish at some point in the fight to wipe your threat.
6. KICK MOAR BUTT

The difference on the 25-man version is that he hits TWO people with Hateful Strikes. So rogues need to keep their health (and threat, to be safe) lower than two off tanks. In the 25-man your raid needs a total of about 35,000 dps to beat the timer.

Patchwerk is a good fight for our self-esteem, as rogues can put up very high damage numbers in this arrangement. The 10-man fight can drop Hatestrike, which is a very nice sword (that has a cool animation). That’s about it.

The 25-man raid Patchwerk has a large loot table without much rogue stuff in it. It has Fool’s Trial, Belt of the Tortured, and Strong-Handed Ring, but some of those are also dropped by other Naxx bosses.  He also drops Arrowsong which is a good ranged weapon for dps, but if you take it over a hunter you are a bad, bad person.

Back to main Rogue in Naxxramas page —–>

Patch 3.0.9 for Rogues – nerf or buff?

We got news of a surprise patch for tomorrow, and it has some fairly important changes for rogues. Nothing that changes gameplay mechanics, but pretty significant changes to some core abilities. Its clear that Blizzard wants to reduce the burst damage of Assassination rogues without hurting their overall PvE dps. Did they accomplish that?

Here are the incoming changes:

Hunger for Blood (Assassination): Now increases damage 5% per stack, (up from 3%.) – The three-stack will have a 15% damage buff instead of 9%. This is nice. It affects all of our abilities top to bottom. Its not exactly a straight 6% increase in damage, but its close enough (as long as HfB is kept stacked).

Mutilate damage will now do 20% increased damage against poisoned targets, down from 50% – Now before all the Mutilate rogues panic, read carefully. It doesn’t say that Mutilate is being nerfed by 30%. It says that the increase in damage is being reduced.

I looked at a recent WWS parse of my raid damage. It said that my average Mutilate hit was about 1400 damage. Since my targets are always poisoned that means that my damage was being increased by 50%, as stated in the Mutilate tooltip. That means that my base Mutilate attack was 1400/1.5 = 933.3 before the 50% increase. Now change that to the new formula, which has a 20% increase on poisoned targets, by multiplying 933.3 x 1.2 = 1120.

BUT those damage amounts were using the old Hunger for Blood, which was 9%. With the new shiny Hunger for Blood, my damage goes from 1120 to 1181.

Therefore, my new Mutilate attacks should average 1181 instead of 1400 which is 84.3% of what they used to be. That is a 15.7% “nerf” in Mutilate.

Slice and Dice: This ability now increases melee attack speed by 40%, up from 30% – Pure wonderfulness. This is a straight buff to sustained white damage. Is it a 10% buff, though?

Haste works by reducing the attack speed of your weapon. If you have a 1.4 speed weapon (ex: Webbed Death) then you attack once every 1.4 seconds. In a 5 minute fight that means you attack 300 sec / 1.4 = 214 times.

With 30% haste, your attack speed is reduced to 1.4 / 1.3 = 1.077. That means that in a 5 minute (300 second) fight you would autoattack 300/1.077 = 278 times. That is a 30% increase in the number of autoattacks, so you do 30% more white damage.

With 40% haste, your attack speed would be 1.4 /1.4 = 1.0 second. In a 5 minute fight (300 seconds) you would do 300 autoattacks. That is, of course, a 40% increase over the unhasted autoattacks.

We’re not comparing hasted vs unhasted though, We’re comparing 40% haste vs 30% haste. If you used to get 278 autoattacks in 5 minutes, and now you’re going to get 300 autoattacks in 5 minutes, that is an increase of 300/278 = 7.9%. So this is about an 8% buff to white damage.

BUT then add the new Hunger for Blood (15% vs 9%) on top of that. That loosely brings your white damage up to 13.9% of what it used to be while SnD is up. (playing with percentages which combine multiplicatively… 1.08 / 1.09 x 1.15 = 1.139 or 13.9%)

That doesn’t even include the increase in the number of procs from Focused Attacks and Combat Potency.

So, what is the net effect of all of this? Well that will vary depending on your spec and playstyle. Clearly, Combat rogues come out of this with pure Win. They get the boost in white damage from SnD and the increase in HfB without losing anything from the Mutilate nerf.

Rather than overwhelming you with algebra, lets use some hypothetical numbers.

In my last Naxx run as Assassination spec, my damage on bosses had this breakdown:

• White damage – 35%
• Mutilate – 20%
• Instant Poison – 18%
• Envenom – 10%
• Deadly Poison – 9%
• Rupture – 7% (yeah, this is a little low)
• Fan of Knives – 1%

Rather than using the actual ugly numbers in the actual run, lets say that I did a nice round 1,000,000 total damage. If that were true, then the damage breakdown would be

• 350,000 from white damage
• 200,000 from Mutilate
• 180,000 from Instant Poison
• 100,000 from Envenom
• 90,000 from Deadly Poison
• 70,000 from Rupture
• 10,000 from Fan of Knives

Now I’ll apply those increases and decreases that I calculated above

• White: 350,000 * 13.9% increase = 398,650 damage, or an increase of 48,650
• Mutilate: 200,000 * 15.7% decrease = 168,600, or a decrease of 31,400
• Instant Poison: 180,000 * 6% increase (approx) from new HfB = 190,800 or an increase of 10,800
• Envenom: 100,000 * 6% increase (approx) from HfB = 106,000 or an increase of 6,000
• Rupture: 70,000 * 6% increase (approx) from HfB = 74,200 or an increase of 4,200
• Fan of Knives: 10,000 * 6% increase (approx) from HfB = 10,600 or an increase of 600

All told, my damage output would have increased by 38,850. Based on the original 1,000,000 total damage, that is a minor overall increase of 3.89%, assuming that HfB is always up.

Add in the Combat Potency and Focused Attacks procs and all rogues should see a little increase in damage. And if white damage is a larger percentage of your overall damage (read: combat spec) then your increase will be even larger. Combat is probably seeing closer to a 7-9% buff, as a rough guess.

Tuesday afternoon people will be testing on practice dummies and maybe some of these calculations will be refuted. I’ll revise the post if I made any errors.