pxleyes said:
It isn't meaningless at all. You obviuosly were too much up Blizzard's ass during your review to go look at the mage one. I dea lthe same amount of damage I did before while generating close to 30% LESS threat than I did before. I never pull aggro on bosses, and it is almost impossible for me to do so with that reductiion. I top the damage meter for my guild's Ragnaros fights almost all the time, unless one of our DPS warriors gets off a ton of executes off.
Rogues aren't kings of damage, never were, and certainly wont be anymore. Give up.
ok, so you're an MC raider. This explains why you know so little about aggro.
The concept is so simple, and such basic math, that I'm surprised we're still arguing about it.
By using talents and/or gear, a mage can reduce the aggro he generates by 30%. A rogue can reduce his by 100% once per fight (assuming we're not talking about a 10+ minute fight.)
So let's say that over the course of the fight the tank is producing
x damage worth of aggro. Anyone who exceeds
x is going to pull aggro and die, unless the mob is tauntable, in which case they're going to die in the next 10 seconds or so. This isn't a contested point. This is how aggro works. It's a key game design component of any game that uses aggro to determine who a monster is going to attack.
A mage, over the course of 10 minutes, can produce
x*1.3 worth of damage without pulling aggro. A rogue can produce
x, vanish to clear their aggro, and then produce
x again, for almost twice as much damage. Over the course of 10 minutes, any dps worth its salt is going to
easily be able to do
2x worth of damage, and probably closer to
3x. So the ability to control your aggro becomes paramount.
That being said, what are the situations where a mage can outdamage a rogue? The most obvious is any fight w/o an aggro component. Patchwerk in Naxxramas is an example of that. Mage DPS is generally much higher during that fight because the entire concept of aggro goes out the window.
The other thing that the above formula doesn't take into consideration is downtime. For a mage, that's regenning mana, either through invocation, wanding, or whatever. For a rogue, that's getting out of the way of any AOE attacks the boss might have. If the rogue spend 25% of the fight shooting his gun outside melee range, his DPS goes into the toilet. For a boss with significant AOE damage (for example, shazzrah) the mage again might out damage the rogue, though it really depends on the AOE.
But, for any boss where aggro is an issue (90% of them) and AOE is either weak or easily avoidable (a lot of them,) the rogue is clearly, inarguably, able to output more damage.
