Patch 6.0.2 Hotfixes Adjust Wound Poison, Hemorrhage, Cloak and Dagger

Tuning changes for all classes have continued into the first week following the launch of the major pre-expansion Patch 6.0.2. The rogue, she is not immune from these post-launch hotfixes; our class received three small-but-critical adjustments over the past several days.

 

Wound Poison’s damage was reduced by 40% (Oct. 16). Looks like a big nerf; it’s more like a necessary correction. In PvE, Wound Poison had been looking really strong late in the Warlords beta/PTR — so strong, in fact, that for raiders it appeared better than Deadly Poison. Which would be really weird, since WP is not intended for use in raiding; many bosses are immune to the healing reduction debuff, which can create issues with Assassination’s Venemous Wounds ability.

 

Anyway, moot point now, since it looks like the WP damage nerf did the trick; ShadowCraft now indicates that using WP instead of IP results in a roughly 3% to 6% reduction in DPS, depending on spec (the gap is smallest for Subtlety, largest for Assassination).

 

Hemorrhage’s damage was increased by 20% (Oct. 16). Late in the beta/PTR, Backstab and Hemo received a series of changes that appeared to be aimed at ensuring that 1) Subtlety DPS in general wasn’t too much stronger than other specs/classes and 2) Backstab was clearly superior to Hemo. We saw a few players express concerns that the designers went too far with that second goal, and actually made Hemo too weak (a particular concern for people leveling or solo-playing in Sub spec). Looks like the designers agreed.