GC said:
If this goes live, blade flurry will:. We feel like the implementation of Blade Flurry on live forces rogues to go Combat on any cleave fights, while leaving Combat too far behind on any single target fights. It's fine if the rogue specs have niches, but the niches shouldn't be so rigid that you don't feel like you have any choice in spec. Blade Flurry will be how Combat does 2-5 target AoE damage. In the next PTR build, it deals 40% of normal damage to up to 4 additional targets, for a 20% energy regen reduction.
1)- Be worth pressing for two targets, but not be great on them. Essentially, we abandon this niche to other melee- warriors mostly.
2)- Be about equal to our current blade flurry on 3-4 targets. Blade flurry on live still does acceptable damage (versus pressing fan + CT, or respeccing to sub or muti and pressing fan + CT, or even versus sitting the rogue to bring in a three target king)- the only harsh thing will be that blade flurry is much harder to aim than other aoe moves.
3)- Possibly be top at 5 targets sustained and grouped. Unsure about this, but on live your flurry hits for 100% of your physical hits, and here it would be 0.4*4=160% of your physical hits. Since the live one works out generally to be something like 1.6x your total damage (because poison isn't forked, and the energy cost adds up), we can extrapolate and assume around 2.0X, 25% more damage under ideal circumstances than live. I think that's enough to catch most other aoe in that exact situation, but I could be missing something (like survival hunter or whatever).
Either way, while I'd prefer blade flurry not be dorked with at all, this is a vastly improved thing versus the old one, has a place on our bars, and offers us a niche (one that doesn't ever really happen, but whatever :P ).