Current Overkill: Abilities used while stealthed and for 6 seconds after breaking stealth cost 10 less energy.
New Overkill: Talent redesigned. Now increases energy regeneration by 30% while stealthed, and for 20 seconds after breaking stealth.
The recently announced change to Overkill was viewed by many as a way to reduce rogue stunlock and burst damage in PvP. Other rogue bloggers have taken it calmly, despite it being a “nerf.”
It does have a significant PvE impact as well. It should decrease our damage on the AoE trash pulls in raids.
I have posted before about rogue AoE dps. Key to these high numbers was the Overkill talent, which reduced the cost of Fan of Knives from 50 energy to 40. In a previous post, I detailed the mechanics of starting in stealth so that Overkill helps you to get off 4 FoK in the first 6 seconds of combat.
With the new Overkill that will no longer be possible.
Here is an opening sequence for a group trash pull with the new Overkill:
Start with 100 energy, stealth into place and
FoK! Now you are at 50 energy
Wait on GCD during which you regen 13 energy (10 + 30% bonus from Overkill) so you are now at 63 energy, and then…
FoK! Now you are at 13 energy.
Wait on GCD during which you regen 13 energy so you are now at 26 energy.
You will have to wait for some Focused Attack procs off of your autoattacks, or pool energy for about 2 seconds before you can get your third FoK off. Then you’re going to switch to single target dps rather than stand around and wait for more energy. So with energy pooling you got 3 FoK off in the first 4-5 seconds of the pull.
Summary:
With the old Overkill we could do three FoK in the first 2-3 seconds of combat and hit a 4th at 6 seconds. With the new FoK we can only get two FoK in the first 2-3 seconds, and get a 3rd by waiting to pool energy. Effectively, this will cut our AoE dps by about 25% on fast-kill trash pulls like the spider packs in early Naxx.
Even Vigor doesn’t help (not that raiding specs have Vigor, anyway)
I’m OK with that. Rogues shouldn’t be the top AoE class anyway. I am still a little embarrassed when I out-dps warlocks and mages on AoE pulls. Maybe they will pass me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve still got them beat on single-target fights.
Forever a Noob - A WoW Rogue Blog 
Hmm, you’re right, I hadn’t considered that scenario. Still at the moment those packs are the ones we win meters on by a large margin, right? So maybe it’s for the best.
Cold Blood->FoK is still going to be crazy fun on those pulls because of FA regen :]
That’s true for short-duration (<10 sec trash) but on longer pulls we should do better right? Overkill/FoK was always a good burst for <6 sec trash pulls, but over 6 sec it lost its power. I see this as a boost to trash pulls in the 6-20 sec range which, in my experience, seem to be the more common ones for AoE.
Or am I wrong?
On trash fights I expect the increase will be minimal. Our dps in trash is limited not by our energy, but by the fact that we have to constantly switch targets as the mobs die, and so we can’t use any finishers.
Lets say that you spend the first six seconds spamming FoK. At this point your energy pool is about empty. But the fight is going to last 20 seconds. What do you do?
With the old Overkill, after the first 6 seconds you would regen 140 energy in the next 14 seconds. That’s two Mutilates, surrounded by a bunch of autoattacks.
With the new Overkill you will regen 182 energy in that time. That’s three Mutilates with autoattacks, but only if the fight actually goes a full 20 seconds because you won’t have the energy for that third Mut until the end of that period (depending on Focused Attacks procs).
So just maybe you might get a third Mut off. But probably not. Most of our trash pulls don’t last twenty seconds.
I think this sucks. Dinaer is right, this will mainly affect FoK, which every rogue should be spamming on trash mobs. You hit the nail on the head, you can now only do 3, where before you could do 4….
I am considering dropping the overkill talent because of this.
I’m not sure if you’re joking, but you can’t drop the Overkill talent because it’s a prerequisite for Mutilate.
Yeah I was kinda joking. I was just mad…I hate getting nerfed. I played around quite a bit last night, and I can honestly say that I no longer care for overkill. 30% energy regen does nothing for me.