Hello fellow sneakybois (and sneakygals),
I’ve been playing a ton of assa rogue PvP on beta over the last month or so and here I’m going to give my two cents (if it’s even worth that much) on the design of the spec for TWW arena as it sits right now. I also main rogue despite posting on my monk.
So we are all familiar with the CC nerfs to rogues given to gouge and kidney shot. I don’t see these as terribly game breaking but they’re noticeable for sure, especially the kidney shot nerf. While I don’t like these nerfs, I think they did tone down rogue CC enough to the point where we can have a conversation about the rogue toolkit without it being over taken by “But…But…But…You have so much CC”. That’s why I’m fine keeping rogue CC as it is now, provided the rest of the kit can adjust accordingly.
Ok lets get into it.
Assass lost a tremendous amount of burst damage. Kingsbane doesn’t hit nearly as hard, relative to health pools, on beta as it did in DF S4. I’m in full crafted gear with maximum mastery and with full bleeds up, Lingering Darkness (now buffed to 30%), 2 points of lethality, Shiv, and badge trinket my Kingsbane’s are critting for 850k-1m. Not terrible but remember that’s a 1m CD with a lot invested into it, and only doable realistically during a 30s window once every 2m because it requires the Lingering Darkness buff that procs off of deathmark’s expiration.
I’ve tested many, many builds. From kingsbane builds to envenom builds to full rot builds with no kingsbane and maximum bleeds (speccing into tempest, spike, doomblade, etc).
Assass has some excellent spread rot pressure right now. I’d say even more than it did in DF season 4. But lacks a button to secure a kill. Now this would be okay, I think, if the high spread pressure wasn’t so front loaded to the start of the game.
Here’s what I mean: Assass can generate a lot of pressure on beta right now by spreading bleeds with indiscriminate carnage and being able to stun/silence healers more or less on DR. But, that pressure lets up SUBSTANTIALLY once we run out of ways to get into stealth. As in, once you’ve cycled through your vanishes and meld (if nelf), you cant spread your bleeds very effectively anymore as it takes a while to build combo points for rupture, plus you have to deal with garrotes 6s CD, and of course we have to have some mobility available to actually connect to a target to apply these bleeds. Couple this with the fact that rogue’s are fairly squishy if they just face tank enemy damage and the fact that they have to run away a lot and assa finds itself in a situation where it loses most of it’s pressure about a minute and a half or so into the game and doesn’t really have anything it can do to generate more pressure until another stealth window becomes available.
This is a modest problem in Solo Shuffle but I see it being a major hindrance in real 3v3 because dampening doesn’t ramp up as fast in real 3s vs in SS and so healing the very oppressive spread damage front loaded by the assa rogue will simply be easier in real 3s as opposed to SS causing less actual pressure before the game gets to a point where the assa rogue’s damage and CC tanks.
We basically win in the 1st 90 seconds or so or not at all. And that’s in SS (which is all that’s available to test for arenas on beta so I have to extrapolate). Afterwards, assa doesn’t really do anything besides try and keep up ruptures that are doing not nearly enough damage to generate pressure and just running away waiting for another stealth window.
In other words, we don’t have any reliably single target burst anymore, and our seemingly exceptional spread pressure is too dependent on finite resources to actually be threatening enough to make the spec viable in real 3v3 where the enemy healer should be able to keep up with the initially heavy rot and still be in decent shape to continue healing afterwards when the rogue’s pressure lets up. Add the CC nerfs to this and we have a problem, friends. It’s only kind of okay in SS because the faster dampening mechanic in SS forces the enemy healer to use more cooldowns or mana to heal through the assa rogue’s starting damage so they have less later. Not the case in organized 3v3.
My suggestion is to nerf rogue’s spread pressure in PvP. Reduce the damage bleeds do by some amount and increase the damage done by their non DoT abilities such as kingsbane, envenom, and ambush (yes Kingsbane is technically a DoT. Nerf the DoT part of it and buff the initial hit). This would cause the assa rogue’s initial application of spread pressure to still be threatening but not as overly oppressive as it seems now on beta, while still giving assa rogues viable tools to use when they can no longer as easily spread massive bleeds to the whole team so they’re not reduced to upkeeping seemingly meaningless ruptures until the next stealth window.