Feedback: Rogues

[Locke-echo-isles]

Patch Notes

Undermine(d) Development Notes

The Undermine(d) Public Test Realm (PTR) will be available for testing after the new year. These changes are for the first week of PTR testing and do not contain the full patch notes for the update. The War Within: Undermine(d) Development Notes UNDERMINE Players will travel deep into the goblin city of Undermine, the capital of the goblin’s trade empire! It is a city like none other seen before in World of Warcraft and stands as a testament to goblin intelligence and creativity as experts in…

Patch Notes (Rogue Excerpts)

@Linxy

ROGUE

• Blind and Gouge now break on a damage threshold instead of breaking on damage.
• Outlaw
  • Sleight of Hand’s bonus now also affects Roll the Bones’ chance to roll 5 combat enhancements (was only increased chance to roll 2 combat enhancements).
  • Sleight of Hand’s bonus chance for Roll the Bones to roll additional combat enhancements reduced to 12% (was 15%).

@Linxy

ROGUE

• New PvP Talent: Preemptive Maneuver – Feint decreases your damage taken by an additional 40% while stunned and its energy cost is reduced by 30%.
• Veil of Midnight (PvP Talent) has been removed.
• Outlaw
  • The following PvP talents have been removed:
    • Enduring Brawler
    • Take Your Cut
• Subtlety
  • Shadowy Duel (PvP Talent) has been removed.

[Roninbones-sargeras]

As a DK/Rogue player I really hope these notes were only part 1… Cause Rogue feels like it was less than an afterthought all xpack.

[Locke-echo-isles]

As a preface, I find Rogue to generally be the funnest class to play across all forms of content, and I’ve tried them all (both classes and forms of content, across lots of different characters). Rogue offers gameplay loops that others simply don’t (feral druid comes the closest, but stealth by itself falls flat in terms of fun by comparison to what Rogues offer).

Here are the things I find the most frustrating about the Rogue class and would like to see fixed:

1. Energy Management – This makes the leveling process a slog, particularly since so much of the Rogue’s “power” is tied to energy management and many of those talents and abilities aren’t unlocked until later levels. It also creates starvation for Assassination Rogues in single target fights because their mechanisms (while unlocked earlier) are different than the auto-attack based approaches the other two specs have.
   
   
2. Bugged Abilities – Grappling Hook still consumes it’s cooldown even if it doesn’t move you to the desired location (players shouldn’t have to pre-emptively jump just to try and help ensure it works). Killing Spree doesn’t jump between targets while Blade Flurry is active, but this also causes it to end prematurely if the primary target dies mid-ability even if additional nearby targets are available. Random stuff still seems to be breaking stealth too outside of what is expected.
   
   
3. Worthless Talents – Shadowheart is #1 on this list. Otherwise, I think it’d be best to follow the new pattern of talent design seen with other talent revamps: utility on the class tree with throughput on the spec tree. Having throughput talents in both places makes it that much more challenging to acquire utility over throughput, and utility is often only taken because of lockouts and pathing. This doesn’t feel as fun to engage with as a design similar to the monk talent trees (lots of choice nodes, almost entirely utility in the class tree, etc).

I have lots of other ideas that I’ve shared elsewhere throughout the forums, but I’d like Blizzard devs to concentrate on these 3 the most.