Since classic? Nah. It got more convoluted since WoD. The basic setup is the same as far as slice and dice and placing poisons and bleeds, but needing to vanish (sub) or completely switch your ranged tool kit (between the eyes) in order to take advantage of something else entirely is what we are talking about. It’s not about being boring. Survival Hunter isn’t boring and it’s not complicated. WW Monk is not boring and it’s not complicated. There are plenty of examples.
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WOD was a perfect level of rotation cadence, I would say legion reworks is where it was overdone and didn’t have a clear design intention for rogues, it was all new flavour for the sake of flavour and since then they just added more and more button bloat as well as stacking mechanics.
Rogue in essence has been all about a fluid rotation and agility, and now its a piano class with no reward to it.
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Yup Rogues used to be about doing a rotation using agility but now revolves more around a priority system which is the Death Knight system introduced in WotLK with so many procs and CDs to keep track of in a priority system. Rogues were never meant to be designed like a piano like Death Knights.
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The addition of constant procs has harmed Rogue gameplay and concept I’d say.
The idea behind Combo Points and Finishers is that of a the agile fighter who doesn’t just swing big everytime but rather peppers you with many smaller hits in order to put you in a position so that they can lay you out. They set you up and knock you down.
Rotations should be simple and purpose driven. Adding in random procs disrupts this flow. There should be elements injected into rotations but they should be at the discretion of the Rogue. I.E. popping a CD to improve damage or something.
Having random procs that create priority button presses makes sense for a War or even a DK but Rogues should be more methodical as suits the class fantasy.
The one exception to this should be the Outlaw spec I’d say if they rework it into something more akin to a swashbuckler / duelist.
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You sound very unhappy with life in your posts. Do you need to talk to someone?
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Initially they said that adding some procs for Rogues was to spice up Rogue game play. Now? Procs dominate Rogue game play for the most part and using multiple CDs on cool down is more of a Ret Paladin thing really. Heavy Procs usage is more of a DK thing if we are to be honest.
Sure Rets and Dks have “combo point systems” now but they also have a lot of quality of life things associated with holy power and runes that Rogues lack with their own combo point system.
Rogues combo point system needs to be modernized to catch up with Monks, Dks and Rets or dial back the non Rogue game play elements of procs and needing to use so many CDs when they come off from timers.
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Taking off the cost of combo points for ks and kidney the energy cost of feint that would be qol. Ks cost combo points and energy. Recklessness generates rage, avatar cost nothing, odins fury generates rage. Stormbolt is a free cast. All of those are instant casts that cost nothing and generate rage. Thunderous roar free cast . So yea that would help rogues out a little let us have the main main damage cooldowns be free cast.
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Also, all of their major CDs are on 45 second or 1.5 minute cooldowns.
You can macro all of their major cooldowns into one button you press every 45 seconds.
Meanwhile we have multiple builders, spenders, and buffs to upkeep constantly.
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Rogues currently have drifted too much away from Rogue design but very little benefits from the new design paradigm that Monks, DKs, Warriors, etc benefit from.
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This is something of an old design philosophy still being around. It’s odd indeed that rogues have to spend both combo points AND energy to use a melee range stun that can be dodged and has a 30 sec CD.
Now to be fair it can last 8 secs. But we also know that very few people or NPCs will experience 8 secs of stuns given all the immunities that exist…or because they die.
A good side by side comparison would be Hammer of Justice from Paladins which at base is 0.7% of base mana for a 10 yd instant cast 6 sec stun on a 1min CD.
The amount of resources it takes to bring Kidney shot into play vs a comparable stun is very lopsided. And it’s hardly the only example.
The one word I’d used to describe rogues is this: Palimpsest
“something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”
And this plays into another issue I’ve mentioned: fear of making rogues powerful because of our existing niche. The reason rogues seem to maintain they’re position in pvp and pve is because they do the basics extremely well. Flashy animations are cool and all but it’s hard to beat 100 stabs per a minute. And when you’re 3 minutes into an Arena match and get hit with a 8 sec stun and smoke after you’ve burned all your resources is practically a death sentence. Now pulling that off is hard and often requires significant coordination and likely a million weak auras telling you when that window is available. But any change in rogues has to be made in the context that.
To be honest this got worst during Cata in which the legendary daggers and several pve trinkets made us absolute monsters in pvp. People have long memories when it comes to rogues.
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A lot of the issue I’m seeing is that they’re doing way too much to homogenize the kits between the 3 specs in a way that makes them just feel bland in the end.
Each spec, even in PVP, used to have their purpose and meaning.
Sub was your reliable front-loaded nuke to take out things quick, or for big bursts in PVE.
Sin was your reliable DoT spec, helping keep healers in check and good for expected linear damage in a fight.
Outlaw was your PVP duelist spec, meant to contend toe-to-toe with Paladins and Warriors, with escape utility to come back and repeat. And in PVE, a proper Outlaw was the most consistent line of damage output you could get, with us maintaining 90%+ ADR uptime and our RTB procs averaging out over 5 minutes to an even number.
Now? Well, do you want Ninja, weird Hitman, or barely Pirate flavored burst windows with energy starvation?
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I feel our kits are homogeneous in regard to end result for sure. And there is a reason for this: we (as a player base) asked for it.
A lot of people would be upset if they were more or less required to run a particular spec for optimal play in PVE or PVP.
And to be frank I don’t know how to solve this issue. Because again, super hard to compete with 100 stabs a minute. So if your spec front loads nukes they probably are not gonna keep up with the mad lad just stabbing away consistently.
I guess I need to play other DPS to see how they handle it. (I mostly play tanks outside of my rogue)
Rogue do have identity between specs.
The problem is that they need to go a little more further for Assassination to have spec oriented defensives in the talent tree. Outlaw to have more alternative builds that offer a out of stealth/duelist play style.
Rogues are not that far off from proper fixes but BlizZard really dropped the ball with the TWW beta.
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These are not mutually exclusive concepts. It’s a byproduct of ridiculous amounts of laziness and poor planning/time management by Blizzard.
Just looking at other classes with multiple dps specs. Unholy and Frost, all 3 mage specs, all 3 Hunter types, Ele and Enhance, Devestation and Aug, Fury and Arms…
Every single one of these has a clear independent idea from one another, and a very distinct playstyle.
Unholy is DoTs and big CD lineup, Frost is consistent big hits with oblit
Frost mage does more hard casts than the other two specs, Arcane has a lot of cooldown lineups to do, and Fire is about being mobile and maximizing combust windows with repeated instant casts
BM is the pet spec, MM is the rapid fire solo spec, and survival is a unique half-melee.
Ele and enhance are extremely different just thematically. Enhance feels like an entirely different class sometimes.
Aug is an entirely new spec type, making it different than Dev just in that regard.
And Fury/Arms have clear use cases where one outshines the other. Generally Arms was always heavy ST and Fury was your AoE spec. Just the Titan grip on Fury is enough to make it unique as well.
Then you have rogue, where the only current differences are half visual and Outlaw has a gun/3 extra buffs to maintain.
I don’t know a single person who asked for all 3 specs to be this similar. We asked to stop shoving Shadowdance down our throats and for the specs to be more consistent damage profile wise as every other patch one of the specs gets shot in the face.
Them taking that to mean “make them all the same” is a failure of understanding and a sheer massive amount of incompetent and poor planning to give time for ALL of the classes during development.
I’m tired of giving them the benefit of the doubt. We, as a community, gave them actual feedback for the last almost 6 months. They ignored it, tossed it out, and pretended we didn’t matter. They messed up hard and have been doing so with rogue for way too long now.
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Move along troll.
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So much this. Sinister Strike playing second fiddle to Ambush is just wrong.
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Nothing like feeling that all the other classes have a better kit that lets them single target / aoe/ heal better than you. What is the point to be a rogue if you’re not top dog single target DPS… everyone can squash you like a bug… the amount of aoe makes engaging in pvp a joke as well. Before you know it you’re melted… the reward just isn’t there… I just keep loggin in a my priest at this point…
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It was worse in BFA where Azerite powers were over shadowing any Rogue ability but yeah Ambush being the star of Outlaw doesn’t make sense.
Not disagreeing with you per se. I can just recall so many instances of 1 or 2 of our specs being basically only good at say PvE or PvP. It feels like we rarely had 3 functional specs and we reasonably wanted to have all our specs be useful.
That they accomplished that this way is their fault. And as I said I basically never play DPS as any class other then rogue so I have just don’t know how the other pure dps classes are handled truthfully.
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Absolutely. This observation is always treated as merely a “skill issue” for rogues. And suggestions that hybrid classes shouldn’t be better at a given thing then a pure class, is also treated as advocating for the days of Classic when classes like Paladin and Druid were pretty bad under that pretense. “The hybrid tax” it was called.
But the world of Classic has been gone for over a decade now. A totally different world and it is absolutely bull that hybrids have such amazing sustain. I think it’s okay for a Boomkin to do as much damage as a rogue if they have as much healing as a rogue.
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