I currently do not have access to beta, so hopefully this is a good place to put my feedback. As a disclaimer, I only really play outlaw, though I do understand conceptually how the other specs work, and my focus is primarily PvP.
Rogue Class Tree
- The pathing of the class tree overall feels very restrictive. The “branch” of the tree you want to traverse must be decided at the top level as there’s no way to cross paths to other parts of the tree. As a PvP player, I want to pick up Shadow Dance, which gives me very little choice in picking other talents. Comparing to other class trees, the Rogue tree feels excessively restrictive.
- Thistle Tea and Echoing Reprimand as capstones do not compete with Shadow Dance. I like the idea of Shadow Dance being open to assa and outlaw, but we shouldn’t feel forced to take it because the other capstones are simply not good enough. I’d imagine as sub it feels very bad to have no choice but to go down the right side of the tree to get their second charge of dance. It takes 12 talent points (11 if you are sub since sap is free) to path down to Shadow Dance. That’s almost half your class talent points, just for sub to get a 2nd dance charge. I think for this to work sub needs to have more compelling gameplay outside of dance, so that they can afford to not have 2 charges, and also for there to be more connecting paths so you can at least have some choices on the way to picking up dance.
- The latest change of placing Marked for Death under Alacrity is awful. Alacrity being a 3 point talent already feels bad enough, and now it gatekeeps us from getting Marked for Death. This is especially bad for sub rogues, which benefit greatly from MfD in PvP but have no use for haste and likely will not want to spend 4 points to get it.
- Lackluster talents: Improved Sap, Tight Spender (2 talent points and value is too low - 15% energy reduction on Dispatch brings the cost down to 30 from 35), Virulent Poisons (useless for sub and outlaw), already mentioned ER and Thistle Tea
- Find Weakness is deep in the “sub” part of the class tree, but seems to benefit outlaw mainly. Sub already does shadow damage which bypasses armor, and assa does nature and bleed damage, again bypassing armor. Outlaw is the only spec that relies purely on physical damage, so Find Weakness seems disproportionally strong for us.
- The energy talents are mostly useless for sub, which has no energy issues currently thanks to Relentless Strikes.
Outlaw Tree
- Again, would like to see some connectivity, though changes since the first preview before the alpha have already helped a lot in this area.
- Blade Rush feels weird in the ambush build side of the tree. All of the blade flurry talents are on the right side, seems Blade Rush would make more sense over there with AoE centric builds since it does bonus damage in AoE with blade flurry up.
- While some of the ambush talents don’t work, the ones I’ve tested so far have been really fun. Shadow Dance fits surprisingly well with Outlaw.
- I really like the gun talents on the right side. GSW is unfortunately bugged but I’ve been having fun with Fan the Hammer. I would like for it to be even faster to give off more of the Concealed Blunderbuss feel, either a lower GCD on the pistol shots or maybe have pistol shot consume multiple opportunity stacks at once for a quick burst fire.
- Dreadblades on Restless Blades feels great, though it might need a CD adjustment. The uptime on it feels a bit too high. From a PvP perspective, especially with higher uptime, I think the self damage is annoying. We have Combat Stamina and Enduring Brawler to increase our max HP, so Dreadblades doing 5% of our HP in damage for each finisher is extra punishing and hurts our sustainability, which is the identity we have in PvP currently. This is especially noticeable in 1v1 situations.
- Lackluster Talents: Triple Threat (low proc chance for only a small amount of extra damage and costs 2 points), Improved Main Gauche (mastery is already weak for outlaw, again 2 points), Ace Up Your Sleeve (low proc chance on a finisher that has a CD, especially if you don’t take any of the deeper strat talents)
- A lot of the energy talents are weird. Fatal Flourish is basically mandatory to not be energy starved, though at least it’s easy to get. Then we have stuff like Dirty Tricks, which directly conflicts with Rushed Setup and Improved Sap. Why are there two talents that make sap cost no energy, and then one talent that makes it cost 20% less? Makes no sense. In general, I don’t find it very exciting to talent into things that make energy management not feel bad. I think some talents for energy management are ok, but there are so many across the spec and class trees.
Overall I think the outlaw trees looks fairly good, it could just use a few tweaks. I think the class tree needs a lot more work to feel good for all three specs and encourage more variety in builds. When I first saw the rogue trees I was very excited, but now seeing what some other classes are getting (Warrior, Priest, Shaman, Monk in particular) it feels like Rogue fell behind somewhat. If I understand correctly we are also the most broken class on the ptr/beta. Rogues are basically unplayable right now since so many core talents and interactions are bugged, leading to less feedback. I hope we get some more updates from the devs soon, and for there to be more work done to get Rogues in an actually testable state.