Three Things Rogue Needs

Rogue
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I don’t want to compare Rogues to Druids or Necromancers because as far as I’ve experienced, they make WT4 Legions and World Bosses look like a complete joke even when they’re at level 60. I don’t want to compare Rogues to Sorcerers either because, well, who wants to do that to themselves. I just want to focus on what Rogues need to feel better, and balanced, at least in how I understand balance amongst the five classes. I’ve a combined 200 levels in Rogue right now, with over 300 hours of experience with them, and I do believe Rogue has a good foundation that is neither overpowered or underpowered. Unfortunately I have no experience with the other classes, and so can’t personally speak about their capabilities aside from what I’ve seen. I’m also not including PvP because 1) One step at a time, and 2) Who gives a **** about PvP in this game when people are running around with ~15k health and doing >500k damage against minions 50 levels higher than themselves.

  • Dark Shroud. Whether it’s one of the three linked augments to Dark Shroud, or just part of the skill itself, Dark Shroud needs an ICD for when an orb can be “used up.” It’s pretty stupid using a 20 second cooldown, and then being shot offscreen by one porcupine that in less than a second destroyed all the orbs and made the skill and it’s cooldown completely worthless. I think a .5s or a 1s cooldown between orb charges would be fine, so the shroud can at least function for 2-5 seconds, which would equate to 12%-25% uptime of 40%(1 skill point) - 72% (5 skill points and a maxed aspect) DR.

  • Siphoning Strikes. The change to Siphoning Strikes last patch is proof that very few people working on Diablo IV are actually playing Diablo IV. Which is understandable. When you don’t have your own QA team, that leaves only the art, design, sound, programming, etc. teams to play the game, but that’s not their primary job. They have a lot going on right now in their own fields given this beta that was released as an official game and upcharged to at least $70. So expecting them to ALSO play the game is a bit ridiculous, no sarcasm intended. They can’t work on class balance issues, they need to fix the actual game. Unless it’s the new norm to be able to play a game for an hour, and then restart the computer, to rinse and repeat until work, exercise, real-life social activities, or bedtime?

You have skills with a base lucky hit chance, and you have two different kinds of procs in this game. A non-lucky hit proc (The Vile Apothecary Malignant Heart): simple, easy, tried and true for decades. Then this new lucky hit mechanic proc (Siphoning Strikes), stupid, unnecessary, and most likely to be treated like a must-have gimmick eventually when lucky hits are buffed because the dev team can’t figure it out. So you take your usual awful lucky hit chance from the skill your using, compound that with your crit chance, and then apply a lucky hit chance on top of all that to find out that Siphoning Strikes is pretty bad. If you wanted Rogues to use other methods of sustain, then you could’ve buffed the other methods of sustain.

I was running around 50% crit on my TB rogue, with Siphoning Strikes, hitting about >15 mobs on average, and that things proc chance for the amount of health it restores is a joke. As soon as I ditched those skill points and grabbed the Momentum Aspect, it meant I could comfortably do T50’s again. All you’ve done is traded 3 skill points for an aspect slot.

You need to ditch Lucky Hits altogether, make things a simple to understand proc chances and make the Lucky Hit item affixes work with those base proc chances, or significantly buff lucky hits. One way gives you a coasting method with decades of data, and another gives you a gimmick that people will latch onto when the devs inevitably buff it.

It also only working for close combat is a bit unfair for the ranged builds out there, because what exactly is their sustain? Health Potions? Victimize with the aspect? Being close combat like the melee builds, in which case… Why do you have item affixes for Distant Damage when they’re going to be utilized like 10% of the time, vs. a close affix which could be utilized 100% of the time? Which leads me to #3.

  • Swords, Daggers, Bows and Crossbows: It’s great you guys wanted to diversify builds, but you’re Icarus flying too close to the sun, and well, it’s clear over the past month that your wings have melted off and you’re free-falling now. Nerfing the damage types Rogues depended on, like 99% of the players out there, with no actual recourse, was one of the most small-minded design decisions ever made in the history of the world, not even just gaming. That’s like wanting everybody in the country to drive an electric vehicle by 2030, but not decreasing the costs or increasing the domestic manufacturing while decoupling from the suppliers of the components that make the cars possible.

The solution is either simple or more complicated. 1) Swords and Bows = Crit Damage, Daggers and Crossbows = Vulnerable damage. or 2) Decrease the attack speed of Bows to 1, and Crossbows to .8; while giving Bows +Attack Speed, and Crossbows +Crit Chance.

2 Likes
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The problem with Dark Shroud that you illustrated is how quickly it evaporates in combat. The class fantasy is about speed & elusiveness. Rogues should be hard to hit and I feel strongly that DS should instead give dodge. The aspect that gives more mitigation can remain the same, although who in their right mind would sit still for 15 sec to fully recharge. You could even reverse it and keep DS as mitigation and the aspect giving dodge instead. Umbrous aspect really bugs me. For a defensive aspect it gives no further mitigation. That tells me that they fully understood the flaws with the skill and made this aspect as bandaid to help cover it up. If DS is giving dodge then it may actually be useful but I’d like to see a different mechanism involved. Make it proc when a cooldown is used, or at the very least whenever you evade.
While I’m going on about dodge I have to say that it’s pretty garbage that the two current aspects that involve it require you to be hit first. I’ll have to go back and read them again as currently I have no ideas how to make them desirable.

1 Like
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    Definitely agree with your post. Sustain was wrecked when they changed siphoning strikes and we do not have much in the way of sustain (maybe stolen vigor ) but that locks you into momentum and you have to use an aspect for it and it is still not as good as siphon was.

Whoever designed the rogue initially, did a fantastic job and made it the most fun class in diablo because there were so many options on how to play it. Obviously the changes in the patch that will not be named were done by someone who does not play at a high level with rogue because instead of playing your way, you are forced to play the way they want you to.
So what should they do?

  1. Revert the changes to siphoning strikes back to before the patch
  2. Change Dark shroud to be 20% DR and 5% dodge but no more stacks so they don’t drop. Each point gives 1.5% more DR. It should last 20 seconds and have a CD timer of 30 seconds.
  3. Add in a skill that each point give 4% CDR up to 3 points for 12%.
    I tried changing around my setup a lot to compensate for the massive siphon nerf but I had to sacrifice aspects and movement speed and still was not where I was prenerf in terms of just being fun and fast. I decided at that point instead of being forced to play their way, I would just sit out and find another game until they get a dev team that is more knowledgeable about their own game. A lot of us testing had sent feedback during beta that basically said we understand the need for balancing and nerfs but you need to be very careful with massive nerfs because it can wreck entire setups. Small moves. That advice was summarily ignored and you see the results across many of the classes.
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I’ll say the TB rogue was very well designed, especially the poison TB rogue. There are massive holes in the other core skills. Why is the lucky hit chance on Flurry 10% while TB is 33%. They both natively do a small level of AOE damage. They both require close distance. There’s no reason Flurry is so low.

Even if you take their respective aspects into account it doesn’t make sense. Flurry’s aspect adds a small amount of damage and extends it to 360 deg. TB’s aspect makes it 360 deg but it circles the player twice and increases damage a small amount. It just doesn’t add up.

There are issues with the ranged abilities as well and their aspects are completely lackluster. OOOO, it ricochets a few times (on a lucky hit no less).

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Flurry hits 4 times so the lucky hit is reduced to account for that. So it says 10% but it In reality in 10% x 4

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Which works out to a generalized 35% chance to proc over the 4 instances. While TB with the aspect hits the primary target 3 times and every one else twice. This works out to a per cast lucky hit of 70% for the primary target and 55% for all other enemies.

They tend to greatly over value multi-target abilities when it comes to procs. They had the same sort of thing in D3 as well (just that the numbers were hidden). It’s one of the reasons that certain builds really struggle with single target damage as there’s so many barriers in place that assume you are attacking a large group of enemies and things are balanced around that. When that condition isn’t present the abilities suffer.

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Yeah when I’m fighting groups of mobs my lucky hit is proccing constantly. But in a boss fight I will sometimes spam my basic move to get lucky hit to proc

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This is an extremely bad and uninspired idea.

The way to fix this ability without completely destroying the other parts of the game that interact with it like the aspects is simple. Make it so they are only used up when some threshold is met. Like some damage amount that white monsters typically don’t reach, or simply state that only elites destroy the orbs. That way it’s a solid defensive layer that isn’t immediately rendered useless by 3 white mobs.

Give it dodge per stack with DR at max stacks so that it’s useful against everything but isn’t completely overpowered since elites won’t be able to destroy it that quickly. And it fits better with the theme.

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WoW, ouch lol. Not judgmental of others opinions at all are we? Lol
I didn’t realize the criteria for posting was that the idea had to “inspire” you.