Baraccus

No one has started a thread on this yet, which amazes me. So I thought I would. Anyhow, I respecced from STR/INT to STR/STA and here's what i've found.

-Slightly lower single target
-Significantly higher aoe
-Impenetrable is a great oh shit ability, has saved me alot so far
-Spinning spear doesn't require stealth, so if we're getting hit we can still AoE
-Not having Intoxication kind of sucks

I haven't parsed much with this new spec, can anyone add some input, extensive parsing would be nice.

Faabio

I'm firm in the idea that sta is a spec that you go down if you just want to PvP, with the correct strats and ability you can pump out a lot more encounter damage then most give us credit for, without the help of that proc thing~

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Baraccus

Yeah, I have 24% chance to crit, with GDOH that's 1300-2400 auto attack damage, with a 28% chance to turn that into an aoe, then a 25% chance to proc hemotoxin off of that..

Jayad

Can somebody post some comparisons of several days of raiding?

Karel

I respec'ed to STR / STA Thursday / Friday to work on Into the Heart of Mistmoore. It was the happiest day of my life as an assassin. =/

Baraccus

Going to be raiding labs then DT tonight, and CoAA tommorow, i'll post my findings.

TrodUnderfoot

I tried it the day the AA changes went live and absolutely hated it. Total time before I respecced back to STR/INT: 2 hours.

* Even though malignant mark does melee damage, it benefits from damage spell crit chance. Without INT line, it hardly crits at all.
* With Enmesh/Poison Combination, hemotoxin crits for 500-600, and it crits often.

On zonewides Mark/Hemotoxin/Cloaked assault are generally the three largest sources of my DPS after piercing. Two of those three benefit from spell crits.

* Bladed Opening / Poison Combination / Spinning Spear all share the same reuse timers. This was a source of endless frustration, and I wasn't impressed by Spinning spear.
* Intoxication, when it's up, accounts for about 100 DPS, and averaged 854 damage/proc in EH last night.

I didn't give STA line a fair shot, and maybe I will when I have some disposable plat. If I compared parses between the two, maybe I'd change my mind, but I doubt it. Bottom line though, I felt gimped without INT and couldn't bring myself to go on a raid still specced STA.

Stinkfinger

the question is how much zone wide DPS did you lose with Sta vs Int.

once we know that we can see if the benefits from STA out way that

Kuian

Anyone able to give more info of the STR/STA build vs STR/INT from a purely DPS standpoint?

Pokie

I respecced to Str-Sta to give it a shot and gotten pretty good results. All my damage from CA's seemed to stay the same which I would have expected, but where i saw the biggest difference was in autoattack and poison (also expected)

I compared two nights of 3rd floor EH trash cause its mostly single target fights which I thought was a better test then looking at multi mob encounters which would play into the strengths of the aoe attack spec. and skew the numbers.

My groups were the same both nights to the best of my knowledge (fury, troub, SK, conj, warlock & me), but on the str-sta spec I switched my offhand to vampirc axe from rapier of Darkness. GDoH main hand. Was also using poison seeds instead of hemo on the str-sta night. Also, the total raid makeup was probably fairly close on both nights.

The only thing I don't know for sure is if I was slacking on the night where I still had the str-int spec cause it was kinda late and I may have been tired. I suspect that i was becasue even though I had more fights in the Str-Int spec, I did a lot more total damage in the Str-Sta spec. So I would say the percentages would be a better indication of how the spec was working out.

Anyway...

Str-Int (50 fights)

Pierce - total damage 1,369,593 - 25% of total damage
Agonizing Pain - 688,768 total damage - 12% total damage
hemo - 523,211 - 9% total damage (I do have the hemo AA maxed)

I was critting about 50% of my poison and mark attacks.

Pierce - total damage 1,531,560 - 17% of total damage
Slash - total damage 1,093,582 - 12% of total
Agonizing Pain - 792,782 total damage - 9% total damage
poison seeds - 640,493 - 7% total damage

Was critting 7% of poison and mark

The biggest surprise was the increase in total damage using the sta spec, but I have some thoughts on why that was the case.

Basically, so far im pleased with the dps this spec was giving me. I was obviously better on aoe fights and was better on single target as well. I really need to go back and pull a few more nights of the old Int spec and see if I just pulled a bad night for comparison, but so far I like it.

If anyone has any specific questions I'll be happy to go through logs and try and answer them for you.