Dev’s don’t have any idea how to fix rogue. They also don’t understand what made rogues great to begin with. It’s not because of stunlocks and endless cc chains, sure those are fun but its more about the way you GET to choose what you want to do with your energy and combo points and the relationship between all of those abilities and the interactions.
Everyone says rogue is fine because of stealth. Druids can stealth, hunters can stealth and mages have an opener with invis. It’s not stealth.
Stealth breaking constantly has always been a thing. Vanish breaking constantly has always been a thing. However, with the new client post legion you can’t really vanish blinds or shs charges or intercepts or do any of the flashy things you can do on previous cilents which sure they’re flashy outplays but they’re also necessary outplays.
Additionally, the rogue class as a builder spender with procs now doesn’t work. It feels awful to play.
Assassination plays more like sub than sub plays like sub without dance in 2024.
CC changes over the years have gutted and ruined the setup to the point and the game is so fast paced now with so much aoe that doing a good setup is usually not even worth the cd’s your going to trade to do the set up.
wrath/cata/mop/wod sub felt good to play because of the pace of the game was much slower overall and you could actually execute setups with breathing room. The rogue class is based on energy which if utilized properly allows for the ebb and flow of combat. Stunning and ccing in dr windows and running to reset.
The modern game is not played in this manner whatsoever and trying to place the rogue class into an aoe spam “rage dump” zug cleave meta simply hasn’t ever worked. Classes need to be able to fit into a m+ group, and specs that can bring group wide buffs, utility, and off heals are going to be chosen over a rogue. Rogue brings cc which isn’t really needed and stealth to skip packs which can be done via other means. Yes rogue usually does good damage but other classes can do the same damage and bring utility. The same goes for pvp, you can do RMP setups with a DH…
Mobility is another strong suit of the rogue class…or so people say. We already have WAY too much mobility creep in the game and if anything Mobility needs to be gutted by 85-90%. Yet again, M+ and gotta zoom takes precedence in the modern era.
Rogue without CD’s feels even worse than a warrior or feral without cds or any other class without cds. You don’t exactly do damage. At least a mage can still spam ice lance and hunters can just shoot arrows. What can a rogue do? They have to run to the pillar and try to re, good luck with the aoe spam, borked stealth and vanish mechanics and all the other random abilities that pull you out of stealth. Can you do it sure…is it rewarding sure. 1 min long dk frost fever dots that do 0.0001 damage (but are an essential and PASSIVE part of their rotation) and ruin your whole plan just to have you in floor pov feels bad man and thats just the start of it.
Ferals can also heal and cast cyclone. Have you actually played the game and fought one of these monsters recently? Rogue REQUIRES CD usage to use it’s CC. Sap requires stealth and blind requires…blinding powder, i mean oh that went away…it has a cd. Regardless of DR’s Cyclone, sheep and fear and other spammable ranged cc will always, always be better than sap in 99.9% of cases except for the times the stars align. Yes, sometimes they do and it feels great to be able to get a re behind the pillar and get the sap on the fear or out of the MC or whatever. yes…but man it’s alot of work when you can just press a button x3 on arena 1 and then 2 and then 3. So you’re doing twice the amount of work and using your cds to do it. Logic states you’ve lost something in those trades man. It’s not 2005 anymore see other points!!!
Class fantasy outside of assassination doesn’t really do much for most of us. Shadow ninja and pirates…meh
The game really needs another total class revamp at this point because in order to bring rogues up to the other classes in their own unique way they would have to modify all other existing classes which doesn’t work in an M+ aoe spam meta.
Sure, they could separate out pvp talents but even then that’s a couple years worth of full time work and then the balancing patches that would need to be done afterwards would be immense and another couple years full of work. There simply is no way currently that blizzard has this on the table.
More on the topic of PvP -
World PvP - sure rogues rip in the 1v1, if you have cds…cd’s are short enough you might be able to get away with a few more fights. But you also heavily rely on either getting distance or LOS to reset neither of which occur regularly in the open world.
Playing arena with a rogue or as a rogue now requires your partners to also understand how limited rogues actually are both in the damage department and cd department. To excel you need to play with patient people who also have a soild understanding of DR management. good luck finding patient people in LFR in 2024. Sure it can be done but its just easier to bring a better class to the table. Our culture as gamers is this way. Rogue simply doesn’t match the current meta or culture we see in the game.
It’s been bandaid fixes for rogues since legion and I don’t see that ever changing because of the modern era of wow.
Is it unplayable, no.
Could you do the same thing on another class better, yea.
Thats just the way it is.
I hope they can fix it because we all love the class, but it needs some serious love.