Are you happy with the state of Rogues?

Classes Rogue
19

Id say put stealth as a 30sec duration so people can get off that train already. Including druids , hunters, and us. Other games do it ffxiv / gw2 / neverwinter and it works just fine.

I don’t care what has to be traded to have impactful damage.

No one blinks an eye when ferals do everything we do , bleed an entire team, have the same control, incarn vanish on a 1 min cd by cdr , and burst at will though.

Abilities need to just slap, not telegraphed at a moment’s notice that anyone with a functioning brain will cc you on as your only moment to do any meaningful damage.

Not saying have strong af damage to put people in a coffin like a warrior / paladin but something to close the gap.

WoD design was that balance hands down and its been silly ever since.

20

Their stealth based control and slipperiness is non-existent compared to what rogue has. That’s why lolferal never pings the sneakyboi radar–a rogue on the other hand has a lot more tools to exploit stealth (which is also why sneaks don’t need to be as strong–they don’t need to be penalty-free invisibilities).

I don’t hate Rogues; to see how Stealth impacts the balance conversation is yet another tax. Regardless, fights break down into the Combat Phase where the value of Stealth rapidly deteriorates. I don’t want the power of Stealth peeling away from the Combat Phase and to exist as the only excuse to leave Shadow Dance as a valid mechanic. I also believe that addressing Stealth, notoriously Stealth Detection, provides a justification to increase the value of effective openers (since they are harder to achieve cleanly). More risk, more reward.

21

This bickering about stealth is amusing.
How many of you have ever fought a rogue while in stealth?

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22

I don’t see it as bickering. I think it’s facing design reality.

Let’s put the question another way. Let’s say they removed stealth completely from the rogue kit. No stealth, no openers, no vanish.

What would you expect to be compensated for it? I doubt your answer would be “nothing, stealth in 2023 has no impact on design” …

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23

Assuming Blizzard did actually remove stealth, I wouldn’t expect any compensation. Not from Blizzard. That’s not what they do.

But I would hope they remove equally important abilities from other classes.

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24

I honestly felt it was a conversation (aside from the cringe L2P comment I simply ignored–I’m not looking at this from a “I need wow to provide me validation in an arena” perspective).

Further, this is not a new stance:

Though I laughed and do agree with this:

25

If anything make us slower again in the old days, ferals and hunters etc as well and call it a day. Bump the damage up back to hitting as everyone else does though, Rogue tax needs to stop.

MM is still going to light people up from camouflage. Base abilities just need to be doing far more and the gimmicks need to go. No reason for it at all.

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26

Stealth in arena allows a strong opener (with a decent amount of counterplay with all of the AOE every class has access to), but complaining that rogues use stealth to stay out of a fight until cooldowns up, really? A rogue sitting in stealth waiting out cooldowns is not contributing at all.

What game mode is this happening in? A 1v1 when a cross kill happens in 2v2 - a very fringe situation. Is it happening in 3v3? If so, great, the rogue is allowing you a free 2v3 by just sitting in stealth. It is almost never a good idea to do it outside of a duel.

If we are talking about world pvp or battlegrounds, the outcome of that situation - while frustrating - is inconsequential. The only thing to lose here is ego.

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27

I feel the same about arena as you do about world PvP and battlegrounds – the outcome is inconsequential. Maybe that’s why we won’t see eye to eye. As long as the game is balanced around arena, the status quo would be supported.

The reason I stopped caring about arena entirely was trying them again in Shadowlands, and 80% of matches when the gates drop, both teams are invisible. That gets boring fast.

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28

@OP

In regards to PvE
A useful raid utility would be nice. Other than that, I’m content with what I can do given the tools I have to work with. I don’t expect to always be top dps. But if it’s all I’m bringing to the party, it should be impressive.

In regards to PvP
I feel rogues are the squishiest class in the game and other classes take advantage of this because it makes us an easy kill target. Blizzard continues to nerf our damage output while refusing to provide adequate mitigation from incoming damage. It’s no fun if a rogue can take you from 100-0 in a stun lock. But when that happens to a rogue, players giggle like little school children on the playground.

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29

If you think that counters to stealth (aoe) don’t matter whilst posting on a class with a specific anti stealth ability then I stand by my original statement, you are bad and don’t know the game and don’t have any valid input here. Which your PvP achievements and stats confirm. Perhaps get some practice, get good and come back to the discussion later.

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30

I’d argue it was their dumb idea to enforce energy scarcity in the game on rogues. They actively nerfed haste to prevent it working like it did in older expansions so our “cool downs meant something”. Prior to that change rogues tended to scale exceptionally well on haste and it got more fun as the expansion went on. Now you just constantly feel energy starved and even when you get bis you’re kinda meh.

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31

So had I posted on a character without anti-stealth tech then it would have been valid? So … are you being willfully obtuse or are you just below average IQ? Because it’s one or the other.

Was hoping for thoughtful discussion. You are clearly incapable of that.

ALSO … good job with NEVER once answering simple questions and engaging in the actual conversation over 3 different posts. Impressive. Why think when you can insult, amiright?

32

Rogue stealth is fine in fact no other class other then druid and rogue should have any stealth mechanics.

One of the most iconic aspects of rogue is the ability to permanent stealth. Asking for it’s removal or fundamentally changing it makes no sense. Removing core iconic aspects of a spec makes no sense.

Rogue damage is just falling further and further behind and will just get worse in 10.1 with the CC/crit nerfs. Rogues in PvP have always had a CC utility role with fluctuating seasons where damage is either tuned high or low.

Rogues also are extremely cd/cc reliant for survivability and extremely squishy and susceptible to being killed in single cc/stuns (again rogues getting hit harder by the 10.1 changes). Rogues also innately have lower health pools then most other specs in the game as a baseline while having less physical mitigation as a melee class. The class/spec is not designed to stand toe to toe with things and just zug PVE things down like plate melee specs

Anyone complaining about stealth is simply just crying because they find the mechanic frustrating to play against and are extremely biased. I could list a multitude of iconic spec defining abilities for other classes to remove but that would be equally nonsensical.

Stealth has counter play and ultimately is balanced. It’s been around since 2004 so thinly veiled biased nerf posts won’t change much. It’s been around forever. If they ever messed with stealth they would have to completely change rogue and might as well rename the class at that point

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33

This is why rogues are so squishy. Players who have never played rogue with a comfortable level of competence do not understand this. Other classes have the means to mitigate incoming damage. They press a button and damage gets modified. Rogues, by original design, survive by AVOIDING incoming damage. There’s a huge difference between these two methods.

The iconic method by which rogues avoided damage was the “stun lock”. We avoided damage by preventing our opponent from doing damage. Unfortunately, other classes cried, a lot, claiming it was unfair.

Blizzard’s response was three-pronged. First, others classes were given a variety of similar stuns and cc effects. Next came the “PvP trinket” and various other methods for breaking cc. Finally we have diminishing returns. With these three changes, cc effects are pretty even across all classes. Excepts other glasses also retained their various levels of damage mitigation.

This brings us to our current state. If Blizzard feels rogues are too “tankie”, we get nerfed. If they feel our damage is to high, we get nerfed. When rogues are balanced, we are the proverbial “Glass Cannon”. Unfortunately, Blizzard’s tendency is to gimp our cannon and put a few cracks in our glass. Resulting in rogues being the the squishiest class in the game.

It’s so frustrating to unload a burst of damage on some classes and barely move their health bar while they unload on me and I’m dead within a few globals.

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34

I agree. Increasing baseline player stealth detection is not a fundamental change to Stealth itself. It was easier to detect in 2004 than it is in 2023–it has slowly moved away from being a Sneak to being an Invisibility.

The frontal cone of players in a thin 5 yard radius at 20 yards out should be sufficient to spot an enemy Rogue (I debate myself on whether Rogue/enemy movement should buff/nerf detectability, but that’s more about depth than demand).

Right now, I’m not seen, sometimes even being directly on you. That’s not sneaking–thats invisibility. There are plenty of tools to make that a non-issue for rogues (step, vanish, sprint) that people asking for adjustments wouldn’t substantially impair the current state.

Not listening to the concern is not an attack on the legitimacy of it.

That seems related to traffic flow rate problems, which are largely solved engineering challenges. If you have a big enough pipeline, your flow rate stays positive. But as soon as inflow exceeds outflow, you get a clog. The goal of energy is something like, without bonus regen, you are clogged (energy starved). Once you are no longer clogged, getting an even larger pipe does nothing.

So as a system, Energy is designed to be good in a game with a GCD surplus–when the game is designed for players to stand around waiting for rotational cooldowns, thinking about what they’re going to do next. In that framework, the theoretic max for Energy is perfect GCD availability which, by design, is not what players are supposed to have. That’s what the game was like in Vanilla.

In today’s actual version of the game, rotational cooldowns are designed to fit nicely together with no or minimal gaps. That is, the game is built on a GCD deficit–you high a very high APM and need to quickly choose the highest value GCD, plan to avoid losing available GCDs, and not delay making the next choice. Gaining haste doesn’t suddenly make class rotations “fit”–gaining haste makes the already well-fit rotation faster.

The evolutionary “nail in the coffin”? Enter, Demon’s Bite versus Demon Blades. In low haste environments, Demon’s Bite allows filling gaps in rotations while generating Fury. In high haste environments, Demon Blades allows virtually gapless succession of high-coefficient spending abilities. The nature of these abilities radically changed the nature of resource generation (so much so that Crusading Strikes had to be nerfed before release to make Templar Strikes a less hideous competitor).

Again, I’m not really sure how to suggest fixing it, so instead I’ll circle back to flow rates to make a pun about rogues needing to apply their Poissons before combat…

2 Likes
35

Firstly this concept of sneak vs invisibility is your own biased definition. Stealth has always been a complete invisibility. Bringing up how innate detection was higher in previous iterations of the game doesn’t change that fact.

This one sentence alone I could literally take and write essays to invalidate everything you have to say past it. My original post was more general and not directed at anyone.

But if you are going to bring up previous iterations of the game as ad hoc reasoning to stipulate that stealth now is too powerful and completely ignore how the game has evolved, not really sure what to say as that is honestly borderline delusional…

Just as an example

Hunters:

  • Used to have a deadzone
  • Mana that could hard deplete
  • Traps out of combat
  • An actual DEADZONE
  • Traps could be disarmed by rouges

Warriors:

  • Used to have actual stance restrictions
  • Weapon restrictions
  • Rage as a resource actually had to be managed (for the above reasons)
  • Actually had a deadzone that rogues could abuse lol

Rogues:

  • Yes rogues would move slower in stealth back then
  • Stuns/CC lasted way longer and could be chained.
  • Rogues actually had way higher stun/lock kill potential back then when played right with cds
  • There were far less CC removal tools back then too
  • Rogues had actual positional requirements on abilities
  • Even approaching an enemy in stealth required more positional awareness as in large you wanted to do it from behind

Though these stance restrictions and positional requirement restriction that warriors/rogues had back in the day honestly don’t fit anymore in the current iteration of the game. Though I personally loved the original stance/weapon swap iteration of warrior.

Hybrids:

  • Don’t want to break down each spec but in summary in Vanilla were basically severely gimped specs. Ret/Moonkin/Feral/Shadow/Enhance/Eley etc. These specs systematically started getting improvements TBC onwards.

Are we also going to be reverting classes/specs to those previous iterations as justification to revert stealth back to its previous iterations???

All classes specs have drastically evolved since previous iterations of the game. Using those previous iterations as current justifications again I will repeat is borderline delusional. Not to mention that general improvements to stealth are counter-balanced by the fact that stealth removal mechanics have also drastically increased over the years. Specs that historically had little to no answers to stealth now have ways to remove a rogue from stealth or keep a rogue from re-stealthing.

All classes specs have been homogenized to have:

  • Offensive CDs
  • Defensive CDs
  • Mobility tools
  • Interrupts
  • CC
  • Then you have spec specific utility/mechanics/abilities/nuances sprinkled in for the various specs.

If we are going to bring up previous balance iterations of how spec mechanics worked as justification as to how they should work now, and completely ignore the entire evolution of specs over the years, that is akin to comparing Jupiter to the size of an atomic particle and saying they are similar in size…

TDLR:
There is probably a reason why rogue stealth has evolved and improved over the years…because all specs have evolved and improved over the years. Classes have also evolved at the same time to keep rogues from re-stealthing or break stealth so the counter play has also proportionally improved. It is called parity in light of balance.

7 Likes
36

No, this thread is about Rogue. I appreciate your opinions though.

I see it a lot like those superhero shows where they keep breaking the power ceiling only to realize they’re stuck in a perpetual cycle or where the lid is so far blown off that it creates a paradoxical effect and causes it to be even less exciting with the next ceiling.

There’s a reason Classic was insanely popular too. I don’t want Retail to be Classic but I think it’s clear there are lessons in it.

(Essays on relativism are incredibly boring–they can’t stand on anything if they purport that everything is founded in “its own biased definitions”.)

3 Likes
37

Not buying it. If you can see me from 20 yards, there’s no point to being in stealth.

If you remember some of the original iterations of hunter’s Camouflage. You could see the hunter if they were moving but you couldn’t target them. I’m sure there’s reason that it now works like Stealth.

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38

Arena is rated content, so it carries much more weight than much more unbalanced activities such as world pvp and battlegrounds.

If you want to make it much easier to detect people in stealth, than achieving an opener should also be much more punishing to the target of the rogue - and I don’t think you’d like that either.

It doesn’t seem like you’ve ever taken arena even somewhat serious in any expansion you ever played, so its very hard to take you serious when you want sweeping changes to a somewhat easy mechanic to counter by multiple classes.

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