Assuming this post was removed as I was replying due to the manual censoring, since they’ve been doing that a ton lately, so I removed that text in the quote.
Going to be honest, as someone that loves Outlaw, if we got converted into a tank spec, I’d be elated. A lot of other MMOs have done “rogue” tank well, even SoD managed to do it in a way that was fun. I’d still play Outlaw from that perspective. Most likely akin to monk but without the stagger mechanic and with more flair.
Or, as you said, making it more of a “duelist” concept, instead of another bland flavored stealth idea. Drop the offhand for a ranged weapon to make the gun thing make sense, or give us some more thematic kits that don’t rely on stealth at all. A great start is to make stealth a utility skill, but stop relying on it for our rotations.
I’m not a game designer nor any good at playing this game. If you must consider this post then just consider it a layman input.
I like when Fan the Hammer procs and I magdump somebody for a noticeable amount of HP. I like the idea of “pistol rogue” in general. On that note, there should really be a glyph to replace the pistol shots with throwing knives. I feel like the pirate fantasy is too much of a shoehorn sometimes.
I like when pistol shots visibly slow somebody down. Realistically speaking I’d probably also be sluggish if someone shot me six times. I like impairing mobility as much as a frost mage does. Slows are funnier than stuns.
I like the ability to be a nuisance. I like weird abilities that are useful but inherently silly, such as taking away a warrior’s weapons or kicking someone between the legs so hard they can’t cast spells. I expected more of this in the Trickster hero talent tree thing, kind of like a harlequin sub-spec. I don’t have to tell you I didn’t receive that.
I don’t mind piano play. Logically, a thief would have to rummage through a bag of stuff to pull out what she needs. If arcane mages need an actual PhD from the academy of Dalaran to do their rotation, it’s fair rogues need to treat their kit like… a bandit kit. I also feel this complexity filters dummies and makes them go play death knight or something.
People call outlaw disjointed and awkward because it is… but in my unpopular opinion, it kind of harkens back to vanilla when so much of the game wasn’t balanced or tightly planned out. I like that the game dumps a bunch of things into an outlaw rogue’s lap and goes “figure it out.” It’s not meta, it’s strange and interesting. If outlaw was reduced to something like Sub where everything funnels into “and then I shadowdance and spam ambush” I would be really disappointed. I think a lot of people want the rogue specs to feel samey and that’s just no fun.
Yeah Blizz isn’t gonna touch us now except to maybe throw some nerfs at Assassin.
We are listed as S tier going into the first raid.
Busted a 2 million envenom tonight on one of those rare spawns and I’m only 560 gear level with no tier and laughably bad stat distribution so I wouldn’t hold my breath hoping for much attention.
Might be best to just lay low and enjoy it lest we bring down the wrath of the nerf bat on us.
But if anyone at Blizzard is reading this, Assassin being S tier and cranking the damage isn’t a bad thing. Damage is all we have, yes we have a CC tool kit, but it’s entirely useless on bosses in dungeons and raids so let us have this, damage is all we have.
It’s always funny how people seem to think reworks have anything to with how much dmg a class can do. There is a reason rogue is the least played class. Do you think all the classes that got reworked in beta (which was 90% of them) were because they did bad dmg?
I said this in beta, when they kept buffing deathstalker and assassin over and over, They just do that to pull people in then nerf the dmg later and you’re left with nothing but bad mechanics.
Indeed. Apparently they have become much more puritanical since I last visit the forums. Here is the post but with out the no-no word :
"Rogues in general should be elite dps. We are melee range leather wearing squishies with no other specializations outside of damage. So not arguments there except to extend it to all specs.
I think “Cut to the Chase” is adding an unnecessary middle man. Ironically enough “Cut to the Chase” could stand to cut to the chase. With how bloated Rogues are pruning even a single button is welcomed. Especially when it doesn’t really contribute to skill expression. It’s busy work; no one will miss it and whether a Rogue is “skilled” can be assessed by thousand other things.
I won’t argue that Outlaw APM is crazy. Too high for what you get. Maybe a high APM could be justified if what I was doing was really fun. I will admit to really loving firing off multiple banked pistol shots.
I think pretty much everyone here agrees that Outlaw is a mess. The fantasy is not there and I think it may require a ground up rework that entertains some pretty radical changes.
If I were in charge of a rework I would approach it from the angle of, we got the cutthroat/highwayman (assassin) we got the shadow/thief (sub) now we need the swashbuckler/duelist
We need a spec that gets out there and dances into combat all swagger and bravado despite not wearing heavy armor or carrying big weapon. That’s the fantasy niche that I would argue is currently missing.
And when I say entertain radical changes I’m talking about stuff like the spec not having stealth. Adding in a new type off hand in the form of “bucklers”. And if we’re feeling really spicy? Dropping combo points in favor of something new."
Having a CC kit is just baseline now for everyone. You can do a side by side of Rogue kits and any other class in the game and not see much of a difference.
Yet this idea of Rogue CC being the best or overloaded persist. I believe this is a consequence of Rogues infamy from the early era’s of the game. And it is a part of the reason development on our class is so lack luster I would argue.
Non-rogue players HATE rogues. People resent that we can stealth, they resent world PvP encounters with us, and they often misunderstand our abilities adding to further confusion. They see some of us at the highest levels of play do admittedly crazy stuff and think that’s just standard play.
For outlaw I was thinking that you don’t really want to use killing spree during your crack shot window and during certain moments on a pull or encounter that can be a bit risky, to make better use of it or to want to use it more often maybe a change could be that when you use killing spree during adrenaline rush it increases the duration of ar by 0.5 seconds per combo point used. You need to use combo points and energy to cast killing spree so why not get a benifit from it making it extend ar and keeping the rotation going. Killing spree would get used on cd more and the crackshot window won’t take a hit as you can spam crackshots without thinking about killing spree . Numbers won’t need to be adjusted that would be a quality of life change for us outlaw rogues
I think Blizzard should redesign melee combat before they redesign any more specs. By that I mean, every target should have zones defined around it. Tough zones for tanks to generate more aggro, and where a portion of damage converts to fatigue damage on the enemy (like break bars in gw2 or monster fatigue in monster hunter). Soft zones where melee damage get a solid damage boost and have special skill interactions to increase their group performance. And lastly lucky zones, which act as soft zones for damage done and always provide the maximum of the 5% built in direct damage variation.
Then, rework kits from there, with Rogues being the advantage-seeking opportunists that enable their allies by widening soft zones and create lucky zones for allies to do more damage. For performance seekers, they instead would opt to build into the lucky multipliers but it would require considerably more precise play with moving into lucky zones to maximize the build. Lastly, for solo play, a healthy amount of fatigue and misdirection to augment and amplify their position-based attacks.
Stealth is still there but again takes a backseat as a non-combat flavor enhancement, and decoys and stuns enable the new flanking mechanics to 10x the Rogue gameplay.
Big enough for you?
I want more than a fresh coat of paint.
I want WoW 2 (or WoW 5, depending on your perspective of expansions).
I was only contributing to the higher-level rework context, not you specifically.
Gank’s comment kind of sank into my head yesterday, about picking the low hanging fruit and taking the laziest man solution to throwing bandaids on a spec and calling it “reworks”. Most of the thread is numbers tweaks and QoL updates. I wanted to expand the borders a bit.
The main issue I believe over the years has been that all the new classes or reworked classes got the changes rogue’s would have so rogue’s never did.
Easiest example monk when it came out it was a rogue without stealth but better in everyway when it came to it’s resources. Look at every class they have redone version of combo points (chi, holy power) on notice anything? Set finisher costs can’t vary, has baseline overflow for storing over max costs, Builders don’t rng what they give, finishers only cost 1 resource, on themselves resources rather than on the target. Yes rogues have this now but how many years did that take after all of those occurred for that to happen a lot. And this is just one example there are many many more.
When it comes to just about anything bar stealth another class has be better version of it. The real issue is the only people still playing rogues are people that think “I can do max dmg doesn’t matter how anything else works.” And that’s why no one really plays one anymore.
Don’t get me wrong I’ve played a rogue for years and years but at this point it’s just not as fun putting in all the extra work to get the same or worse results. Yea it does high dmg right now but for how long? We know 10.2 dmg didn’t make it long. And once that’s gone it’s back to trash mechanics that are even worse than before to try to keep up.
And even worse it only does high dmg in pve as pvp was prenerfed in beta while everyone else is going wild on live lol. Better be sure to nerf the envenom burst in pvp before anyone can ever even do it (it was nerfed in pvp as soon as it was put in the game that’s why there was never any notes on it happening). Meanwhile points at literally everything every other class is doing lol.
Doing things like that but having the hero specs not even work half of beta and are what they are really bad, and not replying to rogue’s not even once really shows you where their head is on the class.
While they are never fast to fix anything rogue they are always faster than any other classes hotfixes to nerf something. So we’ll see how long the dmg even lasts in pve.
Tldr: Many classes over the years have got upgraded versions of what rogues had. So while it always seemed like they never had any new ideas for rogues and so they never really improved on rogue. But they did have the new ideas for things from rogues but put into other classes instead.
Acrobatic Strikes back to increasing melee range, it feels like we got hit with a double nerf due to this change as many more trash mobs have AOE abilities that force us to leave melee range compared to Dragonflight.
The second charge of Vanish needs to go back to a Shadowdance charge, or the two Vanish charges need to recharge independent of each other. A second charge of Vanish is stupid as a capstone talent as it only gives you access to one extra Vanish in a fight, and so much of Assassination depends on being able to regain stealth due to Deathstalker’s Mark and Indiscriminate Carnage.
Indiscriminate Carnage changed. I was critical of Indiscriminate Carnage being changed with the mid Dragonflight Rogue rework but it was workable due to Shadowdance and talents being changed to tree Shadowdance as true stealth. With the removal of Shadowdance Assassination has terrible problems in dungeons if we’re not able to get out of stealth due to tanks chaining packs of mobs together or the encounter design not allowing us to get out of combat(Darkflame Cleft’s Blazikon boss fight for example does not allow you to get out of combat while waiting for the boss to spawn). Indiscriminate Carnage should be returned to pre-rework design or be changed so that in addition to how it currently works when something dies while affected by Garrote or Rupture it causes your next Garrote and Rupture to apply to 2 additional targets.
. Numbers won’t need to be adjusted that would be a quality of life change for us outlaw rogues
