The times they are a changing

So half my list of WoW blogs has had something to say about the PTR patch notes for 2.4.3 and I thought it was about time I posted something about rogues so here we go.

There's a solitary change listed so far and I'll copy it here so you don't have to go off following links:
Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue's health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.

Now there's a lot of stuff there and I'll attempt to dissect I a bit, if only just to describe my own thoughts on this change. I've specced into Cheat Death for a weekend of BG honor grinding before now and when it procced and a healer was prepared to use some Mana on me it was awesome. Generally some DPS warrior has just charged in swinging his big two-hander like some demented pillock and looks confused as his execute fails to kill me, and I plainly refuse to die before suddenly having health again.

The first part of the change means that even when you cheat death on a massive crit from your enemy you're still gonna end up at 10% health rather than just shaking it off and doing something sneaky in return. Now this isn't a massive problem as you might just have a chance at that point to pop a potion or vanish or have a heal land, but it's still gonna be a bit scarier when it happens.

The second part just seems nuts to me, in order to get the full benefit of this talent you need to be stacking enough resilience to reduce incoming crits by 22.5%. Given the resilience cap is 25% that's a heck of a lot, and some back of an envelope maths (and wowwiki) seem to indicate you'll need to be stacking 444 resilience rating. Now I'm not a massive PvP player but that seems rather large, in a BG it might not be a massive problem but I can see this could be a big change for arena rogues. Not having played arena at all I'd be interested if any other rogues out there who've dabbled in arena have any major views.

As a conclusion I'm not entirely sure why this change has come in, it feels like a big nerf, and likely to be one from some other class who's vocal players have problems beating rogues who know how to play their class well. We shall have to see if this change goes through to the live realms unchanged, personally I hope not but having got through the last couple of patches untouched something big was clearly on the horizon for rogues.

Stick to the shadows, it's so much easier to hide and pick out the weak one there ;)