There is no situation in which you’re not already creating that distance from the CC target due to unavoidable AoE in your normal single target rotation, like Blade Furry or Secret Technique.
I doubt you would stand in fire to trigger Flickerstrike. In most situations, especially raid or pvp, you’re constantly taking some damage from something. This last raid especially they made a concerted effort to put more constant raid rot damage in so that healers had something to do. That’s why Flickerstrike has an internal cooldown. Without it, you’d be proccing constantly.
There is no world in which the uptime or damage tuning of this makes it better. If the uptime of Faze is low, then you’re just sitting on as many resources and cooldowns as you can and waiting on a five second window to have a panic attack and cram as much as you can in there as possible. If the uptime is high, then you’re just playing your normal rotation and what’s the point? Just apply a 5% aura buff to Tricksters. As for the damage tuning of Unseen Blade and Feint, it will be moderate or even high, otherwise what was the point of putting it at the top of the tree? Killing Spree is not going to be baseline, keep in mind: Secret Technique isn’t either.
Alright, glad to see most everyone agrees Feint is a terrible trigger. Now for my own opinion. I don’t have the energy to rant again, so I’m mostly going to copy the rant I already had in my guild’s Discord.
I’ve read literally just the first node of Trickster and I’m already absolutely furious. I hate using utility/defensives as offensive cooldowns and Feint is far and away one of our strongest. I’m not happy and already don’t want to read the rest.
I am seething with fury. Trickster rogue is an absolute dumpster fire, more so for Sub than Outlaw. Not one but TWO utility buttons as dps cooldowns, one of which I now have to find a keybind for. A five second damage window which, personally, I don’t find damage windows that short to be fun, that’s more of a subjective take, I know. A five second maintenance buff for Outlaw sounds like a nightmare. Mastery is Outlaws worst stat currently, I don’t know why Flawless Form isn’t Vers or Crit for them. I don’t even want the reduced cooldown from Nimble Flurry as a Sub rogue. I have to line up Secret Technique with sometimes two, sometimes three other cooldowns. Now it’s even more out of sync? The one good thing in this tree is Tricks duration being an hour long, that’s hilarious, but NO ONE cares about the other choice it shares a node with. The ONLY people who could possibly be interested in this steaming pile of a Hero Talent are PvPers. I think we’re looking at our first purely pvp hero talent tree. I don’t expect you would plan around the damage window so much as react to it. If it has a poor uptime, you’ll be trying to save as much resources as you can and just panic any time the window does pop up. If the uptime is high enough, then you just . . . don’t do anything. You just play and reap the benefits, which still doesn’t sound fun. And also, how does Distract work now? Can I cast it out of stealth or do I have to cast Vanish to use it? And if it does require casting Vanish first AND it has a 90 second cooldown, do they not realize that Vanish is also an offensive cooldown used on CD? A 2 minute CD? A 2 minute CD that usually gets used in the opening seconds of any fight? And since we’re on that, who asked for Vanish to be an offensive cooldown? It used to be a cool way to cheese certain mechanics or to troll your raid as they all wiped and you laughed. Now I have to use it on cooldown for every spec.
Literally 90% of the tree’s problems could be fixed by using any other non-utility/defensive button to trigger Unseen Blade and take out Distract.
This feels like it was cooked up a hardcore Gladiator and at the last minute they thought “oh crap, that’s right! raids still exist!” And you know what? MAYBE I’m fine with a tree solely dedicated to PvP, but those other two better be absolute bangers.
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Where’s the Assassination hero talent tree?
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They’re releasing them a few at a time so that they get limited, focused feedback.
That makes sense.
I’ve never used Killing Spree so I’m starting to play around with it and it is a fun feeling ability. Instead of Feint, though, maybe tie the core focus of the talent tree to Crimson Vial and introduce some alternate versions of that ability.
Crimson Vial could be a very interesting thing to play around with. Outlaws are supposed to be these swashbuckling rogues so play around with the hanging by the ropes with your sword out throwing drinks all over the tavern idea.
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So just to confirm - Feedback should be happening here or in the Rogue discord as it usually does?
I will admit, I typically play Assa but I would like to echo what others are saying that I don’t think Feint should be made into an offensive ability. It is meant to be defensive. You’ve already made this mistake on Assa by making our utility (Enrage dispel) part of out DPS rotation. Don’t do it again.
If you would like to lean in to a currently non combative ability as part of it, maybe you can lean into Pick Pocket? Make the keystone augment it in some way so that you pull things from the target and place things in their pockets to apply the fazed debuff.
Edit: This idea was mocked in the Discord - It’s just an off the cuff idea if they are going to be insistent on making all of our abilities offensively orientated I’d rather it not be the defensive ones. Besides, Sub is classic pick pocket and Outlaw would be more of a mugging - The fantasy fits.
You could use the same basic structure where shadow hands hold the target preventing parrying, and the hands play tricks on the target - stealing objects from them to cause damage or distractions. It would fit into combat and Sub because it would be seen kind of like a mugging, or a shadowy trickster respectively and doesn’t change the basic structure of a core defensive?
Distract making a smoke bomb like effect is kind of a cool idea tho. Keep cooking on that one.
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Feedback is requested here so here we write it. Its definitely good to have such conversations here and there as well.
Still, usually rogue engagement on forum posts is relatively low, so keep it coming, the more we voice our opinions on this thread the better.
So far I think majority in the thread agree that feint should be left alone, at least. I’ll reiterate my stance, for Sub; this tree adds bloat to an already overcrowded burst window. And delete shadowdust while we’re at it 
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For PVE yes, but for PVP it is something difficult to juggle.
Also the Trickerster Rogue tree isn’t really designed for PVP either because a debuff to keep track of on a target is hard with a short duration and Unseen Blade will break any Saps, Gouges, and Blinds I have up and I might not have time to create distance because someone hit me with an AoE attack while I am next to a target I have CCd.
This all entirely depends on what you thought hero talent trees would be. I didnt think theyd have a huge impact on the rotation. In my mind youd use feint at most before every Vanish/Shadow Dance if the Faze debuff wasnt already on the target. Small impact, but not negligible and perfectly acceptable assuming the goal was for players to fill the (few) gaps.
… you can already cast distract without stealth or dance.
It would be nice to have Flawless Form grant Crit instead of Mastery though. Crit can be capped and its annoying getting mastery from a bunch of random sources when its already the stat we gravitate towards when we reach Crit caps. Opinions on Outlaw mastery would be made assuming its staying as it is now.
personally, I think it looks interesting. Depending on how they’re going to change the talent trees, I am not really able to give an informed opinion. As is, I almost constantly have feint rolling, so I don’t see a problem with unseen blade. How many targets does it hit? can it crit individually on each target? Are they fixing the major bugs with killing spree? is killing spree going to become baseline?
so many questions
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Thanks for posting this, I like the effort to really go into rogue utility and make it interesting, but this has some major button bloat problems. Needing to use distract in combat is going to feel bad even if the smoke bomb is super cool, it would be great if this was attached to something we want to press anyway.
Feint as a rotational button is, not great. I think we already feel weird needing to vanish for DPS for every single rogue spec when vanish is an great utilility ability you can’t even use. We don’t have great active mitigation, forcing us to use that for damage will mean we just don’t have it when we need it which doubles down on rogues place as a class that is passively tanky, but not actively tanky. This could be extremely limiting in raid content, and would likly make this hero class unusable in raid entierly outside of maybe a we want a permanent tricks add fights, which is a well disappointing.
To add feint seems like it will hard to balance between sub/outlaw with Float Like a Butterfly. Outlaw could be using this button and have targets taking the extra damage with fairly high uptime, where for sub this is a pretty infrequent thing so its likely to be strong for outlaw but be weak for sub unless the numbers are different per spec, but this also would make Float Like a Butterfly mandatory for outlaw which also feels bad. Maybe remove feint from Float Like a Butterfly (feels bad) or make it baseline for outlaw/trickster and give the base ability some CDR to feint for combo point usage like sectech/shadowdance to make the uptime similar across.
There is also some awkwardness in the talent. A dps increase that generates combo points naturally wants to go before a finisher, but the whole increasing builder damage makes for potentially awkward usage where you might want to use rotten or some other builder built with it to maximize the benefit of that talent, but by making it a generator you force the player to finish within the window anyway or overcap. If the right answer is overcap it feels bad, if the answer isn’t it feels like the increased generator talent is wasted and you’d just use it into a finisher anyway. (Please put our current set int he talent tree so we can sometimes chain finishers in the window!).
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dont worry it bloats the hell out of sub as well 
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Sub Rogue perspective here. I haven’t touched Outlaw since Legion.
We hardly ever use Feint in raids today, so I’m absolutely fine with making it part of our damage rotation damage. (I assume it’s not replacing what Feint already does.)
Folks are worried about losing a damage button, but in reality what this would do is massively boost our already high survivability. We’re looking at upwards of 40% uptime on Feint: That is insane.
Folks are talking about button bloat, but everyone should already have Feint bound today. I’m very happy that I don’t have to bind something new.
Folks are complaining about Cloud Cover (the Distract talent), but for Sub, you’d never take it. Feint and Sec Tech both cause Fazed, so we’ll just Feint, Shadow Dance into normal rotation which includes Sec Tech and everything will be Fazed anyway. Personally, I love the idea of Distract being given some cool extra effect (for the first time ever?), but I’m not sure if this is it.
I feel like folks are missing the most annoying part of this update though, and that’s having to track a bunch of new things in your UI:
- Duration of Fazed on the target.
- Progress towards Coup de Grace.
- Flawless Form stacks and duration.
It’s going to be very important to track Coup de Grace progress given the random Unseen Blades procs from Thousand Blades, or the chaotic source of extra Unseen Blades procs from Flickerstrike. Messing it up and not having a Coup before every Sec Tech is likely a big mistake.
I’m in the camp of Sub is already fairly complex rotationally, and I’m not in favor of adding complexity without taking some away.
You know what, fair. I made a poor assumption that Distract had a stealth requirement because I almost never use it otherwise.
That is a lie sir and your healers secretly hate you.
You wouldn’t need the effect of Distract my man. This is saying Distract has a new, additional effect. So even though “distraction” of Distract doesn’t work, the new affect of Cloud Cover will.
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Cant distract enemies in combat man, unless they are allowing that moving forward.
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You actually can’t cast it if the target is in combat. If something in the circle is in combat it fails and says “You can’t do that!” So they need to make sure that’s removed.
Yeah they say they request it here but…
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You are aware that a lot of the features and changes in the rogue rework happened due to the feedback forum right??? A lot of the killing spree changes happened from forum feedback among other changes as well
Having read other hero talent trees I can say i was wrong about the extent to which I thought they would affect the rotation and damage. The tree itself is solid baseline but is missing some synergy and feels lackluster because of it.
I like having Feint used in this manner to have some offensive capability. It fits thematically, and once again, Feint is the only defensive we need to spend resources on in order to use. I never thought itd be spammed on CD as others have said, but as the tree stands, its forced usage is too high. Since it would have been used before Vanish or Shadow Dance anyway, I think those abilities should proc the Unseen Blade as well with Feint being reserved for those moments where you would have stepped away from the target.
Surprising Strikes needs to have every subsequent builder stack crit damage for your next finisher as well. Builders are not the primary source of damage for rogues and only giving them such effects is awkward.
Cloud Cover needs to only affect enemies in combat or else Distracts original functionality wont ever work.
Flawless Form is a bit ambiguous. Id still like the buff changed to crit, but I think it should be every Faze application that provides a stack, not every Unseen Blade / Sec Tech / Kill Spree. Basically buff per target hit, not per ability usage.
Flickerstrike has been an overdiscussed talent. Feint lasts 5 seconds. Faze lasts 5 seconds. Outside of PvP youre at best hoping to refresh the Faze debuff after avoiding taking damage until the last second of Feint. It should just be changed.