Exsanguinate or Toxic Blade? Both have their uses and advantages but I'm feeling like Exsanguinate allows you to have more burst when Vendetta is not ready. On the flipside, using Toxic Blade with Vendetta gives some rather hefty Envenoms.
Discuss.
Hey!
In my opinion Toxic Blade is better right now. It does boost your envenom damage by 20%, which is insane even outside of Vendetta. And it also boosts Deadly Poison damage by the same amount. If you look at recount and combat logs when you score kills you'll notice Deadly Poison is far from negligible. Oh and of course System Shock and Poison Bomb benefit from Toxic Blade.
And that was only why the spell is good BY ITSELF.
Now think on that: Kidney lasts 5-6s depending on relentless/orc/none of the two. Then you have a 20s DR before you can stun again. That equals to 25s. Toxic Blade CD? 25s. Convenient, I know. That means everytime you lock your target down you can have 20% more damage on a good part of your damage. You're half under Vendetta.
Now let's say you pick MfD as well. 30s CD. That means you don't use TB on cd and don't use Kidney on DR but you wait 5s. And now every 30s you can Kidney into TB into double envenom, a nice chance to proc a bomb, and all the damage that entails. And since you should always plan on killing/bursting on Kidney windows that fits pretty nicely!
On the other hand we have exsanguinate. 45s CD. Doesn't line up with Kidney. Doesn't line up with Vendetta anymore. Using it means more DoT damage for 10 seconds MAXIMUM and more energy regen that you will spend like this: mut mut envenom mut mut and it's time to refresh DoTs already. It's fun, it can surprise someone once, but it the end it doesn't feel like it fits in the spec too well.
We could just try to see what happens in both scenarios. Let's say you use Vendetta and blow everything, Kindey, TB/Exsanguinate, trinkets etc etc. What then?
1) there is a build allowing you to Kidney every 30s and have 20% more nature damage during it and the following 3s as well as casting a double envenom boosted by that. You'll do that three times and then have Vendetta again.
2) there's another build that makes you either delay Kidney to use Exsanguinate on a stunned target, so you'll wait 45s to stun instead of 30, and then 45 again instead of 30 resulting in wasting one full Kindey window (15+15 is 30, hehe) just to line up Kidney and Exsanguinate. Not to mention you'll need 45s again to use Exsanguinate which means delaying Vendetta or using it without Exsanguinate. OR you could never delay Kidney but then you'd never use exsanguinate on a stunned target and that's a lot less pressure. And that doesn't solve the "you need to delay Vendetta or not use Exsanguinate" issue.
Of course in real scenarios you'll not always use everything on CD, but Exsanguinate will just screw the Kidney pressure Rogues can have.
I think the overall sustained AND burst gained is clearly superior in team Toxic Blade. And, simply damage-wise, getting 20% for 9s on envenoms and poisons is certainly not far from getting double bleed damage for 10s at the cost of wasting CP, Gcd, and energy reapplying bleeds earlier. And the cd of the first option is shorter ;)
Hope that helped somehow. People might disagree. I'd actually like to see what an Exsanguinate defender has to say :p
In my opinion Toxic Blade is better right now. It does boost your envenom damage by 20%, which is insane even outside of Vendetta. And it also boosts Deadly Poison damage by the same amount. If you look at recount and combat logs when you score kills you'll notice Deadly Poison is far from negligible. Oh and of course System Shock and Poison Bomb benefit from Toxic Blade.
And that was only why the spell is good BY ITSELF.
Now think on that: Kidney lasts 5-6s depending on relentless/orc/none of the two. Then you have a 20s DR before you can stun again. That equals to 25s. Toxic Blade CD? 25s. Convenient, I know. That means everytime you lock your target down you can have 20% more damage on a good part of your damage. You're half under Vendetta.
Now let's say you pick MfD as well. 30s CD. That means you don't use TB on cd and don't use Kidney on DR but you wait 5s. And now every 30s you can Kidney into TB into double envenom, a nice chance to proc a bomb, and all the damage that entails. And since you should always plan on killing/bursting on Kidney windows that fits pretty nicely!
On the other hand we have exsanguinate. 45s CD. Doesn't line up with Kidney. Doesn't line up with Vendetta anymore. Using it means more DoT damage for 10 seconds MAXIMUM and more energy regen that you will spend like this: mut mut envenom mut mut and it's time to refresh DoTs already. It's fun, it can surprise someone once, but it the end it doesn't feel like it fits in the spec too well.
We could just try to see what happens in both scenarios. Let's say you use Vendetta and blow everything, Kindey, TB/Exsanguinate, trinkets etc etc. What then?
1) there is a build allowing you to Kidney every 30s and have 20% more nature damage during it and the following 3s as well as casting a double envenom boosted by that. You'll do that three times and then have Vendetta again.
2) there's another build that makes you either delay Kidney to use Exsanguinate on a stunned target, so you'll wait 45s to stun instead of 30, and then 45 again instead of 30 resulting in wasting one full Kindey window (15+15 is 30, hehe) just to line up Kidney and Exsanguinate. Not to mention you'll need 45s again to use Exsanguinate which means delaying Vendetta or using it without Exsanguinate. OR you could never delay Kidney but then you'd never use exsanguinate on a stunned target and that's a lot less pressure. And that doesn't solve the "you need to delay Vendetta or not use Exsanguinate" issue.
Of course in real scenarios you'll not always use everything on CD, but Exsanguinate will just screw the Kidney pressure Rogues can have.
I think the overall sustained AND burst gained is clearly superior in team Toxic Blade. And, simply damage-wise, getting 20% for 9s on envenoms and poisons is certainly not far from getting double bleed damage for 10s at the cost of wasting CP, Gcd, and energy reapplying bleeds earlier. And the cd of the first option is shorter ;)
Hope that helped somehow. People might disagree. I'd actually like to see what an Exsanguinate defender has to say :p
3 Likes
Well, thank you for the detailed explanation. I'll try to take it all in.
That was an amazing explanation! Thank you! <3
Haha, no problem. My intent was to post with my rogue, and I’m using Toxic Blades. Exsanguinate is cool on paper, but TB feels more powerful right now. <3
Indeed. I actually played two games with Exsang but aside from the opener where it really surprised the enemy healer because of the empowered garrote it wasn’t so good as it meant I needed to refresh dots before the Kidney for maximum efficiency but that meant no real pressure before Kidney and waste of the bleeds remaining uptime and since the bleed duration was halved I had to reapply dots soon after Kidney which was also a loss of pressure… Maybe something can be done with this talent now that we can’t play Deadly Poison but it really feels weaker than TB anyways 
Toxic blade is very nice, never really considered the other due to just how to use it and the number of times exsanguinate got nerfed.