What I’d value even more than a rework at this point might be a global dev-side rethink about how Rogues are even presented/talked about, because so much of what we deal with has to do with optics, and there’s abysmal design sympathy for how much heat we take from the community when official information is off or misleading. And it usually is off.
Here’s an example from the 1/27 bluepost about the then imminent Ret rework…
I remember reading this and wincing at the way in which that these kinds of statements cement bias in the minds of non-Rogues that read it. If you’ve never played a Rogue and/or don’t understand its mobility, you read this funny jab as the incorrect gospel, “RoGuEs hAvE tHe aBsoLuTe bEsT mObiLitY in tHe gAmE.” We don’t. We have good mobility, but there are severe caveats, and we die without what we have. Sprint is middle of the road mobility. Shadowstep/Grappling Hook are solid, but are hardly the ‘best’, and they aren’t the easiest abilities to use defensively. If you take Blizzard’s word for it, though, you have good (albeit incorrect) basis to want Rogue nerfed.
Same with defensive capability and utility. The prevailing myth is that Rogue has both god-tier defensives and god-tier utility. To the former: while technically true in a vacuum, we fall apart outside of our defensives where other melee specs hardily survive long enough to be helped by their healer. To the latter: Rogue utility is wildly overrated because of how it feels to be stunned and how it looks when every streamer impulse adds a spec or two in the MDI S-tier. We have good utility, but, like our defensives, we’re so dead without it.
My most wishful, copeful hope is that we’re entering 10.1 low as part of a larger strategy that understands how disproportionately Rogue suffers when it starts a tier strong. Hopefully it isn’t just the Rogue playerbase that understands how much we’re blown apart because of how jumpscary we are in PvP. Our design needs to account for that caveat from here, because designs to this point have done the diametric opposite.
Things have to change.