Of course, I mean the Honor Among Thieves build, not a normal hat. Although I must say that one of our guild’s warlocks (portrayed on the left side) has four pieces of T7 and a blue hat on his head. That combination looks totally awesome and makes me smile every time I see him. :) Anyway, back to the topic.
My rogue has always been Combat Swords (with an addition of Fists at the end of TBC), and me being the rogue Class Master of the guild, I consider it wise to know some things about the other specs, so once in a while I try them at our 25-man raids. This time I’ve respecced into 3/23/45, the HaT build and went as that for Naxxramas-25.
I have to say that I’m not satisfied with the results of this test, and I was glad to spec back Combat Swords for the next evening. If you want some more detailed information, read the rest of the post.
On rotation and group setup
As every rogue knows, Slice and Dice is your friend no matter what, so you want to keep it up whenever it’s about to fall off. With the free combo points flowing from your group’s crits, I’ve had no problem with that – you can refresh it when there are 3 or 4 seconds remaining, as opposed to Combat’s 10-12 seconds. All other combo points are spent on Eviscerates and/or Ruptures – I’ve tried keeping up both, but the group was not critting enough, so I’ve ended up skipping Rupture almost at all and putting it up only when the boss was about to somehow move away from me (think Gothik blinking from the living to undead side).
The group setup is the most important part when you want to raid as HaT. If your group is not critting often enough, you’ll find yourself doing Hemo or Sinister Strikes just to have any combo points at all – and by doing that you waste too much energy that can be used on Eviscerating the hell out of the mobs.
Of course, that means the spec is currently useless if you and your raid aren’t geared good enough – if you’re just starting on doing Naxxramas and heroics, you’d do better if you go Combat or Mutilate.
Butbutbut, the numbers?
My dps on the fights was somewhat lower than normal, floating from 2000 to 2500 dps.
Part of that is that I’m so used to Combat Swords, that I kept pressing the completely wrong buttons for the first hour of the raid. After that it was a bit better, but still wasn’t on the level of what I usually do in Naxx. Another part of the problem is my gear – while I can and will spend enough gold for two Berserking enchants for my swords, I won’t do it for the daggers I use only once in a while. I didn’t also use the well known HaT bug – I was the only one rogue that used this spec at that evening.
And the last thing – you’d better have a good PC that can handle an 25-man raid fight very smoothly. If you have low fps, you will have a lot of lag, and that is simply wasted combo points (and probably wasted dps). My laptop isn’t the greatest unfortunately.
Overall
The main thing I don’t like about the HaT spec is that it’s strictly a raiding spec. Sure, you can kill things with it, but as a Combat, you do it a lot faster and more efficiently. The main drawback here is that you have to depend on other people in your group critting a lot, and the free combo points just don’t happen often enough when you’re running solo. It’s a bit better in a 5-man group for heroics, but with a tank and healer in the same group it’s still a loss of DPS.
The HaT spec is also heavily lacking on trash fights – where previously I could join the AoE festival with my Killing Spree, this time I had to stick to damaging one, two mobs at most. An ideal encounter is a typical tank and spank, where the boss doesn’t do a lot of movement and you can stay at his back doing your job. Unfortunately there aren’t so many of these.
To finish this rant – this spec can be nice if you like the Subtlety tree and don’t mind its drawbacks. I never did, I prefer my big swords. :)
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