Now, I realize that the patch notes are subject to change.  In this case, I really hope they will change.

Annihilation

• Annihilate now deals more damage and costs 4 Rage.
• Pulverize has been reworked. It now offers a flat 3/6/9 seconds reduction in the cooldown of Rupture passively, instead of resetting the cooldown when other abilities are used.
• Indefatigable Onslaught now also makes the Damage Over Time effects from Rupture and Deadly Saber uncleansable.

These, you say, are good changes.  Annihilate does more damage and costs less.  RNG has been pretty much removed from the rotation with the change to pulverize.¹  And there’s a PvP aspect to the uncleansable dots.

The problem with these notes is: Annihilation wasn’t the problem!  These changes are great but they missed the boat.

Annihilate didn’t seem to have problems keeping up with competitive DPS.  More DPS is of course nice, but not necessitated by the numbers.

Annihilate is not a rage-starved spec.  A reduction is extremely nice, but not woefully needed.

But what really struck me is this: Annihilate’s RNG is not the one that really needs attention.  Annihilation’s RNG portion is vaguely annoying but does not make the class difficult, cumbersome, or frustrating.  While a non-RNG version is obviously better, there are other serious RNG issues that go unaddressed.  I’m talking here about Carnage.

Yes, poor Carnage.  I often find myself rage-starved in Carnage, so a reduction to anything would help.  But the biggest problem in Carnage spec is the two RNG-based procs (Slaughter and Execute, for those of you keeping track at home) that are terribly random and can seriously affect your DPS output.

I hope they’re not done with these patch notes.  With all the quality-of-life changes that they’ve been doing to rid the playerbase of annoying RNG (arsenal mercenaries and dps sorcs in the last patch), it would be a shame to overlook or even delay changes to the RNG-based classes/specs that are struggling with it.