This is a great take. Most of my thought for UB has been through the lens of how it might feel to press Feint and have it kick back damage and resources. Some of what makes Gouge great (besides the low CD and god tier utility of the keypress) is that it also kicks back resources, so you’re using utility, but some of it does ultimately also feel like a builder. It’s great.
But your points about uptime imbalance are real, and your point about devs stating explicitly that they wanted the talent trees to provide actual choice is very real. I hadn’t really considered the implications of how this would not only make Feint a throughput abilty, but also make any associated nodes formerly attributed to survivability now throughput as well. Technically, Nimble Fingers has always been an indirect throughput talent (ie less energy for survivability = more energy for throughput), but these changes would just cement the selection as damage. Whether or not that’s bad is up for interpretation I guess, but it 100% flies in the face of what the devs claimed wanting to accomplish with at least the class tree.
These talents also make me wonder if we’re seeing changes now that guarantee these hero talents’ implementation in TWW. For example, something I definitely took for granted recently: Float Like a Butterfly being heavily nerfed in PvP. At first glance, I was like, “Ah, okay, that makes sense, maybe Feint does have a severe uptime against other players,” but now it has me worried that it’s design meant to pave the way for the issues you’ve described.
Still, I’m hopeful they can stick the landing with it, but, also, yeah, big gulp.
Thematically, I think the idea of trickster lands for subtlety and outlaw well enough. If we had visuals it might help a lot more for a lot of these hero talents. Gouge, tricks, distract, ect all seem to fall within a trickster’s arsenal and those are sub and outlaw abilities more or less.
That said, making the primary trigger for the talent tree mechanic to be feint, arguably the primary rogue defensive, is an absolutely horrid idea. There is already contention for vanish being used for primarily dps reasons (and to a lesser extent shiv for assassination), so why was adding feint to the list considered a good idea? Not to mention the talents that would be come required like float like a butterfly and nimble fingers (as much as I’d like nimble fingers to remove the energy costs, you have GCD timings to worry about already). I do not think distract being a trigger for fazed is much of an issue personally, since that is a choice, not a requirement like feint, assuming a new trigger condition was added.
Idea for a trigger outside of feint? Honestly I would say that is a hard one. You have arguable button bloat now, but tying it to a defensive is absolutely not a good idea.
As for Killing spree being a focus of the tree, I personally like the idea. I have liked killing spree as an ability for awhile. However, I personally think there is a major issue with it since you have crackshot as a mandatory talent, not an option really. I personally don’t see much of a resolution outside adjusting crackshot (due to its many synergies) and KS just being a finisher with a CD. By resolution, I don’t mean a numerical nerf only because if that was just the case, the talent would not being compelling at all as a keystone. I think it would need something like resetting BtE on gaining stealth to maintain the level of the talent coinciding with a numerical change. (Purely my opinion on that front, not a fan of crackshot being a requirement like others not a fan of KB being one for assassin).
As an outlaw player, other than 1 hr tricks, I thoroughly dislike the entire tree. I’d say move unseen blade to another ability, or scrap the idea altogether, because feint becoming an offensive ability is going to ruin the fast-paced flow of outlaw by forcing in even more abrupt gcds than what we already deal with.
Nobody wants to have to use a defensive cd, that cost energy and is on global cd to do more dmg. Please bake that ability into something else, perhaps abilities that require stealth.
After checking other classes’ hero talents, they just don’t want to fix the original problems of each class’s skills or talents in drganflight, and use those problems as basis of their new hero talents.
Go to sleep grandma, people have been saying that junk since wrath days. Rogue stuff is prob going to change but a lot of what is here is pretty dang good already.
A lot of people aren’t sold on feint, cool. Got it. Beating that horse isn’t doing anything and so some maturity is needed to keep the thread rolling. The end of the day people can choose deathstalker / fatebound if they don’t dig whatever this one turns into and that is completely fine as well.
So far there are some great hero talents released, some ok ones, a few duds that need complete rework.
Trickster is sadly in the last category, imo of course. It is what it is we have to wait and see for the other two trees, and hope they heard the feedback on Trickster!
Point is we know that they are able to do great trees, we know they heard feedback on one of the duds (Oracle) - so now we wait and buff hopium.
For outlaws it’s not okay at all. There’s already too much to track in the current iteration (13 buffs, 1 debuff), with Trickster this would become 14 buffs and 2 debuffs, of which the debuff is applied separately on each target, so you’re probably going to have to track 8+ instances of it.
As an Outlaw, I think the Unseen Blade, activated by Feint, should be a circle area-of-effect ability without a target number limit and the Thousand Cuts activation should be single target that can work with Blade Flurry.
If an Outlaw is feeling lazy, they can leave it as a auto-attack proc. and just have to worry about managing Slice and Dice because of the Thousand Cuts talent.
Outlaw has too many buttons already and feels extremely busy to play well. This is worse. (Posting on my SOD rogue cause it feels soo much better to play.)
Especially when playing KiR in raid with Blade rush… I literally can’t put the buttons in range of my hands, nor have them in the most important part of my bars…
2 buttons to trigger the same burst window.
3 movement abilities
2 active trinkets
4~5 buttons for 100% uptime buffs (counting KiR +1), depending on whether or not you count AR with this set, 6~7 if you include poisons that you have to track
3 defensives, 4 if you count the heal
it’s absurd and something has to be done about this. I highly doubt that the other hero spec will improve this situation at all…
remove crackshot from the stealth window, instead make a CDR button with 2 or 3 stacks so we don’t get punished for holding it a few seconds and have this trigger crackshot instead
remove SnD, like seriously, just remove it already.
remove the duration of poisons
make crackshot reset the CD of BtE when you enter your crackshot window
make crackshot function as dreadblades for all I care so we ever need to only press 1 generator to use our next BtE
Even then with KiR I don’t have enough reachable keybinds and enough action bar slots to comfortably fit everything . Once the complexity is reduced, then we can talk about adding more complexity through hero specs.
. Once the complexity is reduced, then we can talk about adding more complexity through hero specs.