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Comment by frmorrison

Currently this is lackluster talent, since it gives only a 30% chance to not die, and even if it procs, the next attack could kill you.

On the 2.3 PTR, this now has a 33/66/100% chance to proc and now also causes the rogue to take 90% less damage for 3 seconds when the effect triggers. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute.

Comment by Out2conqr

Hooray for 2.3 change to Cheat Death!!

dot dot dot fear........dot dot dot, about to die, cheat death, 3sec later....dot dot dead.

/shrug ...... oh well :/

Comment by Wierd

this is like shroud of shadows but against rogues and warriors when 2.3 comes out

Comment by Wierd

woah 100% is a lot from 30% o.o but its worth it i guess since i see all these warriors beating full epic rogues

Comment by LordVersi

Love this skill. Its saved me countless times and won me losing victories over countless foes. At first glance I didnt like it but after slipping in and out of BG fights bandaging and returnng to repeat the process its priceless.

Comment by Shuror

As of 2.3.2, this talent is currently bugged and decreases all damage taken by 90%, and then absorbs 90% of the remaining damage.

The result is 99% decreased damage during the 3 seconds.

Edit: This talent was fixed in patch 2.4, and now always provides the correct amount of damage mitigation, 90%.

Comment by Spinnacer

Are they going to fix this stupid talent soon? As of now they're immortal when Cheat Death is up.
100 rage execute hits for 18 damage and frostbolt crit for 28....

Comment by lsfreak

No, they aren't. It's been stated on the forums that it is bugged, but that they can't fix the bug currently.

Comment by lithander

Hortus, blue poster, explains the 2.3.2 change:

"When two spells land with exact timing activating cheat death the spells can receive 99% reduction instead of 90%. In the past when this happened the spells were not affected by Cheat Death at all.

This only affects the spells triggering cheat death and not subsequent spells and only happens under very specific circumstances which can not be purposely exploited. It does not give rogues "4 seconds of invulnerability" as some people have said."

Comment by faia

Rarly got kiled before the 3 sec run out, so its like 3 sec exstra living when you die.

so basic, 3 sec of haunting

Comment by clavarnway

All I know is when this procs, Rogues are immortal. I just hope I'm alive when it's over so I get honor for my DoT's killing him.

Comment by HapZungLam

this is bull crap

3 secs are good enough to get a heal off them in any arenas. its like a shield wall on warrior (greater shield wall) whenever they are going to die for 3 secs. lvl 60 can kill Illidan

Comment by ralliartvr4

I have lost my patience for this talent. As an MS warrior in the arenas when i lose 4 games in a row to subtlety rogues because they are sitting there getting crit by my overpowers and executes for 5-20 damage.... kind of makes you angry. And it isnt just 1 i would sit there whomping on them for a good 5-10 seconds, and they dont die.

Comment by Mooo

This talent is screwed up. 99% reduction instead of 90%, hope its getting phixed in the upcoming patch. I stopped to count the times I could have executed these rogues if they didn't have cheat death on em. Gave up the counting at 20...

Comment by Tuffrox

does this work for falling damage, too?

Comment by Tibblesworth

Good for those rogues that like to spam emotes before they die.

Comment by Contay

As a rogue fighting other rogues who have this talent, it's very easy to get around their "3 seconds of immortality", and I'm frankly surprised that there are so many people having trouble working around it in Arenas/battlegrounds.

You simply get away from said rogue for 3 seconds (or he runs away from you, this is normally the case in battlegrounds). You then sprint/intercept said rogue and then hit your execute/backstab/SS/Hemo/whatever. Problem solved. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Bam. Just learn how to count to three, and you're golden; and make sure your finisher is thrown out before a minute passes. I normally save my blind for such an occasion, for example. It may also be prudent to save your stuns for a situation like this as well.

Comment by FlipperGandalf

This gets a new animation for the proc in 2.4.

When it procs, it now shows up a purple skull over your head, vanishing after one second or so.

Comment by Koblec

Pretty sure this is bugged at the moment, because whenever this procs, I get two buffs that last 8 seconds, and one lasts 3 seconds.

Comment by Khayman

Worth mentioning that the number of subtlety rogues has increased esponentially recently. This and shadowstep are the absolute certainty that none will ever escape you.

Basically a rogue at 1% can unleash death upon it's opponent while being invulnerable. Hope the patch will fix it, but if you ask me it'll still be unbalanced, 90% is kinda a lot anyway.

Comment by Carighan

Cheat Death is the alpha&omega signature card of the Sublety tree. It's a talent which shows amazing power in all applications of the game.

For PvP, it's an obvious choice. It gives you more lifetime, more chance to bring the enemy down before you are killed.

For Raiding, it has an amazing use though: It makes you ~invincible. Since a boss is unlikely to get a deathshot on you more than once every 2-3 minutes, and you mitigate that with Cheat Death, you can be quite relaxed on dodging some bossabilities, and still come out unscratched.
It doesn't substitute for a quick eye and a ready mind, but remember: Dead Rogues have 0 DPS. Remember that before you calculate in the DPS-loss from speccing Sub ;)

Comment by Eritu

IMHO Cheat Death needs to be buffed lol, weshould get a bonus 10000000k healing while in cheat death so renew ticks for our health and more :D just jokes, saved me countless fights, and ive killed probly more people in those 3seconds then the X-amount of seconds with BF / AR going :D

Comment by Anundir

i've played a rogue for 2 years and when the burning crusade came out, i retired it due to this talent. rogues took skill to play back in the day, now it's a 100% noob class, rogues never needed a talent like this, they really need to get rid of this imo.

Comment by Mithrans

Cheat death doesnt work if you're drowning :(

Comment by gumm

does it proc when you well jump from your flying mount from very very high things....maybe a flying mount ?

Comment by DrinkFloridaOJ

You have a 100% chance to completely avoid any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you and reduce all damage taken by 90% for 3 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute.

l2read.. fall damage and drowning aren't attacks.

Comment by JamesR

Unless you're willing to consider the fact this guy is attacking himself with his own stupidity.

Comment by Anundir

if rogues only viability is to go noobstep/hemo. Taking away rogues most signature move "backstab/daggers" and making it not as good as swords in pvp is retarded, people don't roll rogues to use swords, thats what warriors are for, and heck if u want to use fist weapons or axes you can roll an enhancement shaman (warriors can use these as well). Why don't they just take out all the daggers in the game that are for melee. Cheat death should be a lvl 70 skill bought at the rogue trainer, so daggers would have a little bit more viability.

Comment by Halliwell

Seems broken atm... Or is it just me? Often I feel like I die straight after the animation... And thus not " completely avoid any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you and reduce all damage taken by 90% for 3 sec" - I dont know if it's just me or it really is bugged? Feedback would be lovely :)

Comment by Nephandius

The talent negates a killing blow first of all, then it then reduces all damage by 90%... thats probably before mitigation, I don't know. I know that while I can NOT be one-shotted I can be two shotted, happens all the time in PVE and PVP. Its just not easy to do. This talent doesn't make a rogue unstoppable by any means. The reason most rogues seem so hard to kill is as soon as we see that skull we pop evasion AND cloak of shadows at the same time and try to sprint away from whatever is attacking us. Like an above poster said, back up, throw a dot on us and count to three.

Comment by nyck

This talent is rather annoying in a rogue vs rogue fight...as soon as that skull appears it's vanish time!
And then what is the other rogue to do? Too late your stun locked for the next 5-10 seconds more then enough time to get through your Cheat death. Best advice is as soon as you see his skull vanish...

also this talent is great in AV. whenever fighting Galv or Drek and he does his whirlwind attack, this will proc and i'm only a little under my halfway mark so it keeps me going to live a bit longer. (i like to stunlock/dodge tank galv ^_^)

Comment by Sandos

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.

/points at rogues
/laugh

Comment by Reticeo

In patch 2.4.3, "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."

Comment by Dealoras

This would mean that you need 492 (12.5% * 4) Resilience to keep the 90% damage reduction during Cheat Death.

Comment by Priesty

Actually, read the description again; "The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes." Meaning, that the cap will actually be 22.5% (times 4), i.e. around 442 resilience.

Comment by 2critornot2crit

I don't know why people complained about "Cheat Death". Any class can really get through this easily. All you got to do is be smart and put DoTs on the rogue or bleeds and it will do the same ammount of damage as it normaly would if the "Cheat Death" was not even happening.

Comment by 2critornot2crit

That is not true....When fighting Rogue on Rogue they use Rupture for 2 reasons. 1 so they can't Vanish and 2 for Cheat Death because if you put Rupture before Cheat Death happens then is will deal same ammount of damage same goes for Warrior bleeds and such.

Comment by kurobana

Probably the best patch rogues got this whole year.

Comment by makron

Also a PvE nerf. Previously, if rogue pulled aggro from tank, or tank died, rogue could be one shotted, but due to this talent, he was usualy left unharmed, after 3s he just popped evasion, and could tank for a while. This could save from wipe...
Now first shot got on 10% and second can still gib, not good :).

Comment by costolaz

http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:ResilienceFromRating.jpg
to get the damage reduction, just multiply the red line x 4
...
my PVE equip has almost no resilience, so i gonna die by consecutive raid bosses' aoe :(

Comment by fourwindsoh

I cry a tear of sadness that cheat death is nerfed with the resilience factor. LOL!

Comment by Mornay

so would i be right in assuming that if you have no resilience, you know if you're (heaven forbid) below level 70, then you will get no benefit from Cheat Death at all?

Comment by OhTeeSee

Unless you have sub-70 resilience gear, then no, after the initial damage absorb, you will not benefit from the 4 seconds of reduced damage.

Comment by drewidice

Me too...it should be something different like agility that level 40's can get easier then resilience... why even make this a talent, make it a 70 passive spell :P

Comment by BoddAH

For resilience capped full arena geared rogues, this change basically doesn’t change anything.
However I still end-up dying far more often. The biggest nerf of this ability is the “psychological nerf”:

In most cases Cheat Death has never been overpowered. People didn’t even try to focus Rogues thinking Cheat Death makes them “invincible” which just wasn’t true and just moaned about it. Now that they “nerfed it” (remember, it isn’t even a nerf to full arena rogues, it changes NOTHING except for the 10% part), they start focusing rogues again and it actually works quite well, who would have guessed that?

Comment by BoddAH

I think the sole purpose of this talent was to avoid PvE geared rogues dominating the arena:
Crazy PvE gear damage while still being very hard to kill thanks to the old Cheat Death.
So basing the absorption percentage on anything but resilience would be stupid and defeat the whole purpose of this change.

However that doesn’t mean the change wasn’t useless/stupid. Most of the awesomeness of PvE rogues competing in arenas comes from things such as Azzinoth Warglaives or retardedly overpowered trinkets and these can still be used in rated games without gimping resilience much at all.

Comment by BoddAH

"When two spells land with exact timing activating cheat death the spells can receive 99% reduction instead of 90%. In the past when this happened the spells were not affected by Cheat Death at all.

I love how this bug involving several events/attacks happening at once and making Cheat Death stronger than intended got nerfed after some weeks, yet Vanish failing 75% of the time for the same reason has not been fixed for years.

Comment by sillyrabbit

honestly, who cares? rogues suck at everything besides pvp, might as well let the little nooblets have what fun they can while playing the most annoying class in the game.

Comment by tom226

In my opinion this is NOT ment to make you unbeatable but is to give you a chanse to run or vanish 3 secs aint much time to do a lot of DMG so you best vanish

Comment by 1771

worksagainst hazardous areas (lava, gas clouds)

Comment by kylex3

does anyone know the exact formula to figure the effect of resilience on this spell?

Comment by Skullhawk13

in areans it might because reslilsnece ((major typo)) -_-"""makes it last longer

edit: o.o wait i need to do homework on this spell

Comment by PhoenixWright

I'm pretty sure during the time of the post, Retaliation was NOT usable in arena due to having a 30-minute CD.

Comment by Remord

How Much Resilience do u need at lvl 80 to procs and works the best?
Or how is it modified by resilience?

Comment by Carlotta

So lets look at the basics first:
82 Resilience = -1% chance to be critically hit, -1% periodical damage taken.
-2.2% damage from critical strikes, -2.2% reduced effect on mana-draining effects.

I'm equipped with 684 resilience, that equals -8.34% and -18.36%. When looking back at the combat log, I find my Cheat death to absorb just about 66.7%.

So I feel confident when I say that the formula for how much Cheat death will absorb, should be:

8 * (R / 82) = A, R being your resilience, A being the %, that Cheat Death will absorb.

Comment by kylex3

judging from that post by Carlotta
923 resilience will give you the most benefit of this spell(90%), i might try this out on my rogue but i'm going to wait for the 'dust to clear' on specs for next patch and for Ming's theorycrafting because that always amuses me. I have 906 resilience out of the 923 (incase anyone wants to know how its so high for a rogue: I have two sets of deadly pants and one is gemmed for max resilience (adds around 155 resil just from pants, im a JC with the 27 resilience gem), and full deadly w/ kharmaa's grace in my chestpiece)

so i'd just need to get 17 resilience if this turns out to be a viable spec then i could see something like http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?rogue=30523101002305102231200000000000000000000000000000000005300222030302121050130000000&glyph=050115000000&version=9614 working next patch. The new glyph of crippling poison will help with a big problem this spec has with offhanding crippling poison: the reliance on shivving vs dispellers.

They haven't announced how much haste they are giving to mace specilization, just Lightning Reflexes so far. If it's a good 20% like I hope it is then this may just be the awesome arena spec that we've been looking for. (hello holy paladin/rogue teams, if that rogue always peels they will have a tough time hurting both the rogue and the paladin though if the damage isn't as much pressure as mutilate i'm not sure it will work, i will just have to wait and see)

Also I'd like to know how Nerves of steel and 923 resilience cheat death will stack up if anyone has tried that out.
-Criticals (rivendare)

edit: also you should notice that there is a very huge difference between being at 90% vs 89% vs 88%, just take 10% of your max hp mine happens to be 20794 at the moment

20794 * .10 = 2079.4
2079.4/.11= 18903
2079.4/.12 = 17328

I believe this means 90% cheat death will allow you to live for 20794 damage, 89% cheat death will allow 18,903 damage, and 88% cheat death will allow 17,328 damage.. as you can see if you have 923 resilience this talent benefits you FAR more than 900..

Comment by sandrat

The above post is excellent as well as the previous one. Only thing I would have to add is that you don't need to get your resilience that high since no one will be doing 20k dmg in 3seconds in pvp.

A good number to shoot for is about 750 resilience or around 75% absorbed which turns out to about 15k dmg. Maybe less depending on what you focus on (2v2, 3v3, 5v5 or BGs)

Comment by sexytool

... There was a LONG period of time where cheat death had no cooldown.
Meaning that pretty frequently CD would proc in chains and yes, it took up to a minute to kill a rogue that's on 10% hp if you really got unlucky.

Remember CD USED to be a CHANCE of proccing, not a guaranteed proc. If the rogue got lucky, he proc'd it on killing blows for in excess of a minute in some extremely rare cases.

Comment by Bakaleaf

I have a small question I want to pose. If an all PvE rogue, meaning no to minimal resilience, as of 3.1 was to have this talent, how would it fair against a Hateful Strike from Patchwerk? I recently read this and discussed it with my guilds tanks. If the attack can land 86k BEFORE armor then is reduced by armor and other means then again by the Cheat Death talent it would be helpful.

The situation being the tank made to take the strikes doesnt get healed in time and dies so the rogue being next on threat from not fienting will take the hit. Cheat Death procs and reduces them to 10%, which for many rogues ive seen would be about 2k. a quick chain heal or circle and they are able to take only about 5k a hateful for a few seconds while the tank gets revived by a druid and healed up to spec.

One of our top rogues would only take on average about 55k from a hateful when one slipped and he was not sub so wouldnt have this talent. If it really did work out then this would be a nice emergency buffer in 10 man where losing either tank spells death for the raid.

Comment by Daretocarebear

Can anyone besides me imagine the WMV's of Rogues with this showing it off to the song "Time of dying" by Three Days Grace?

Comment by Glexarn

Vanish occasionally fails without any reason whatsoever for it doing so.

You are wrong, sir. I've seen it happen to rogues I've fought, rogues I've played with, rogues I've seen randomly(world/BGs), and I've also had it happen to me while playing my rogue alt.

Although the failure rate is nowhere near 75%, Vanish DOES indeed fail, and stating otherwise is merely stating your own ignorance of its bugs.

Comment by Mordox

Try to vanish with a hunter and their pet auto-attacking you. GG.

Auto-attack > Vanish

Comment by druglord187

Lol I like how you kept saying assass.. it made me laugh

Comment by lovechia

what if youre below 10% health and Cheat Death procs
are u healed then up to 10% health

Comment by Tsychiya

PVP (3.2.2)
I find this talent helpful in PVP. There have been a few times where I'm sprinting away at low health while a class (cough Paladin) hits me with an ability that would have killed me (cough Hammer). This talent has helped me run away and restealth allowing me to come back.

PVE (raids)
I tried respecing to sub to dps raids... I got all the maximizing talents/glphys along side of cheat death hoping that cheat death would hep me during those times when I'm 1 shoted by bosses (ie TOGC animal charge, ony breath, WW's etc..) . Although dead rogue = 0 dps, the dps I was producing in the sub tree was significantly lower than mutilate, and usually when you know the fights, your not likely to be 1 shotted. But i liked the fact that I could have this passive talent just in case.. But the dps of the subtly tree is not worth it.

Comment by Kelranos

Has it been fixed yet? Or are they planning on fixing it?

Comment by Hosenkyu

heaven forbid you have to avoid the AoE

Comment by DruidNE

922 resilance is needed to get the 90% dmg reduce -.-

Comment by versusvs

i currently have 930 resilience, and i am only getting 316 Physical (1179 Absorbed) reduction of 0.21137123745819397993311036789298 ~= (100-21.137= 78.863%)?

So it appears there is a curve? ---Grrrr----

put on 2 more resil items to check

0.13975903614457831325301204819277 this time 290 holy (1785 absorbed) @ 1014 resil = 86.0240963855421686746987951808% reduction

so still missing another 4%... the most important 4%....

another test

0.1038961038961038961038961038961 this time 432 Physical (3886 absorbed) @ 1108 resil = 0.10004631773969430291801760074108 = -89.9953682260305697081982399259 % reduction, so it seems the cap is around 1100 (guess), and it appears to round up. (note, this was a physical damage, so maybe armor was calculated into it)

Comment by Rehkihket

this talent seems to be bugged atm. it doesn't takes you to your %10hp just makes the 'tiny' absorbence.

Comment by Gauldion

After taking this talent, still at low level (50 atm), I kept wondering why this talent existed anyway. As far as I could see (I have only been doing BG's) the survivability it offered was useless.

Now that I've seen comments about it's use in Arena it makes a bit more sense, nevertheless, since I plan on doing mainly BG's I continue to wonder if those points would be better spent elsewhere.

I say this because any time this procs for me, it seems to be only a 3 second warning that you are going to die.

Comment by Gauldion

Comment by woa12

Never Ever try to cheat death...

Comment by Swiftling

Every time i defeat a Paladin because of that talent, and he starts whining, I remind him how he used bubble the same fight before i giggle silently in front of the monitor.

Comment by selvin

Supposidly they fixed it in cataclysm.

Comment by Hirokiri

Is this no longer resil dependent? It seems its not in the cata talent tree/tooltip.

Comment by Neptuno

nothing says "90%" like a 20k Hammer of Wrath FULLY absorbed by this when he had 59 hp left... it's definitely providing unkillable for 3 seconds and not just 90% reduction

maybe it's fixed for 4.0.3, but it's not on live

Comment by DarklingThrush

This talent can be a huge pve dps gain, because - face it - your dps sucks when you're dead :P

Comment by parazyte

worksagainst hazardous areas (lava, gas clouds)

Learn how not to stand in the fire.

Comment by parazyte

worksagainst hazardous areas (lava, gas clouds)

Learn how NOT to stand in the fire.

Comment by parazyte

I hope moderators clean up this thread with all comments about Resilience.

This talent has NOTHING to do with resilience any more.

Comment by rockmanzero

His comment could be understandable since there was a bug in 2.3 that allowed to take damage up to 90% of your health and then absorb 90% of the damage, but the bug has been fixed by looooooooooong aging of patches and was fixed in 2.4.

Comment by FritoDan

As of 4.0.6, Cheat Death now works correctly against Chaos Bolt.

From the patch notes: "Cheat Death was activating by a warlock's Chaos Bolt but not working. Chaos Bolt will still trigger Cheat Death, but will not kill the rogue."

Comment by Krisaff

If you're trying to track this proc or it's internal cooldown (90 seconds), the proc name is Cheating Death. This talent is useful, but not reliable. It's great against casters or any class that deals in large damage that comes at you in chunks. Note that it says "reduce you to 10% of your maximum health." It does NOT heal you. It just prevents you from dying from one particular swing or spell cast. That means that a big hit can bring you down to 500 health, the next auto attack procs Cheat Death, but you stay at 500 health, just now you have an 80% damage reduction for 3 seconds. Well, big whoop, the next windfury weapon to the face takes you out.

It's not all bad, though. If you get deep freezed at ~15-25% health, there's a solid chance you'll proc cheat death and have CD eat the whole thing.

Comment by Magnatross

When it procs the flashy lights mean that the rogue's life is flashing before their eyes

Comment by Mormolyce

There is now a "Cheated Death" debuff that appears when the ability is "on cooldown" like a Mage's Cauterized debuff. Pretty handy.

Comment by 7destroy

Hotfix (2012-09-14): "Cheat Death can now only absorb up to twice the rogue's maximum health."

Comment by Hateborn

This talent is INSANELY useful, no matter what anyone says. It's basically 3 seconds of self-triggering invincibility every 90 seconds.

If you're leveling on a PvP server this thing can be hilarious. I can't even count the number of times a 90 swooped by to kill me (while I was a lowbie) and failed completely - because of this thing.

What this skill also means is nothing can ever kill you in one shot, so if you're quick with your Vanish and Sprint, you can escape from 90's ganking you like a baws. Saved me so many corpse runs along the way.

To add to it, it's amazing in any form of PvP, if you get nuked down it gives you just enough time to comfortably prep+vanish+cloak again, as well as really annoying players thinking they can just use an execute move on you when you're low and that's it.

I could rant on forever, but I love this skill, I've had so many 90's make another toon just to whisper me and ask how I survived their 100k crit at level 40, and I've won so many duels just because of this buying me enough time.

Comment by EMPHaraljier

"To cheat death is a power only one has achieved, but if we work together; I know we can discover the secret."

Comment by Neffi

Applies the following aura, for people looking to create triggers in their favorite addons: Cheating Death.

Comment by Pantyraider

7.1.5 changed this talent and made it pretty underwhelming: Cannot trigger more often than once per 6 min.

Comment by FALLAKAI

This talenr is op in raiding becus you can for example soak a big armagedon on kj with feint and this that is probubly why they made it a longer cd so u only can so it once that fight

Add to list...Links WeakAuras Export

Cheat Death

Cheat Death

Fatal attacks instead reduce you to 7% of your maximum health. For 3 sec afterward, you take 85% reduced damage. Cannot trigger more often than once per 6 min.