The first round of changes to the Outlaw tier set have been made and it's a super good step in the right direction so far. With the original version having an almost non existent payoff of less than 1% dps this version looks to be much greater with easy potential tweaks if they decide to change more in the future. With the change the payoff is much greater than before but in my opinion still a bit weak. Firstly, a lot of the synergies are a lot less promising than first envisioned upon making sims for the set.
Ambidexterity is still an incredibly weak conduit, so attempting to optimize stats and rotation for adding
Blade Flurry to the core rotation is a dud. The second potential synergy I touched on before was other legendaries.
Greenskin's Wickers is much stronger than before due to changes to how the 4 set works and it's interaction with
Opportunity and
Restless Blades. Now you always get the big
Pistol Shot hits from the legendary, and it now works with
Restless Blades to get even more casts of
Between the Eyes, which also has great synergy with
Resounding Clarity so it sounds like huge value! But sadly, to be the bearer of bad news, the raw output of
Celerity is still too much for the potentially more gameplay altering legendaries to get breathing room to be best in slot.
So with the changes the tier set was looking at around a 5% dps gain from the 2 set, and only about 3.5% from the 4 set. A big improvement over the previous build but just needs a little bit more of a push. The biggest part of the change is the fact that it now works with
Restless Blades. After testing the set a lot on training dummies on PTR, and playing the spec during all raid testing so far, the set feels pretty great. While my original concern was that the 2 set being random it would be too difficult and awkward to play with but I can say after playing with it my concerns are no more. It feels great to have any amount of extra resources especially combo points but the 4 set is nothing too special. It doesn't really feel like it's doing too much, but it's giving a bunch of CDR which is great.
In conclusion this is a great start and hopefully we see some more mild tweaks moving forward. Personally I've noticed a few people dislike how random the set might feel, which is a bit ironic considering which spec they are designing a set for, maybe just turning that 50% into a 100% to make people feel better and make it a bit stronger in the process. The 4 set
Between the Eyes proc could also gain an increased damage effect and "reloading" of combo points akin to
Ace Up Your Sleeve back from BFA. You could make it so the 4 set causes both the
Pistol Shot and
Between the Eyes cast be guaranteed a critical hit to really push the
Greenskin's Wickers dream. Overall I'm loving the set as it's fun to play with and there is still some cool design space they could explore to give it a slightly bigger boost.
