Hey rogues, I know there’s a lot of hate for Roll the Bones being complete RNG swinging our DPS, but it seems like Blizzard is keeping it. Their planned improvement is to make it an energy-cost cooldown that is lowered by Restless Blades, rather than a finisher. This might feel better but in my opinion doesn’t solve the problem that some rolls suck and others are too strong, it just takes away your tool to address that (re-rolling the buff).
So I got to thinking, what if it was just always two buffs (maybe with a 1-2% chance of five buffs if they are really attached to that concept). Sure, you could still get your ‘worst’ two, but there are exponentially more possible combos of two buffs than one, so the relative chance of any given set of two is lower, and in many cases a ‘worse’ buff is balanced by a ‘better’ buff on that particular roll. This should reduce the variability no matter how balanced each individual buff is with the other five.
What do you think, would this fix the problem? Do you have a better idea? I unfortunately can’t post this on the Alpha forums but I hope Blizzard is still listening to our feedback here.
I’ve personally always wanted RtB to always roll two buffs, no more and no less. There was a player in another thread that made the suggestion for Mastery to increase the chance to roll additional buffs alongside Main Gauche damage, this could make Mastery for Outlaw much more interesting.
RtB doesn’t quite effect our DPS as much as it used to, with it being turned into a CD and the ability to fish for ideal buffs gone having a mastery to increase our chances or just giving us a flat amount of them each time wouldn’t pose any balance issues. If it ends up staying the same on launch it’s still a big improvement from live and you won’t see much variation pull-to-pull on our DPS.
I do hope it stays a relatively small part of the damage, but with the change on Alpha what makes you say it will be a low difference from pull to pull? Wouldn’t rolling your worst buff vs your best still be as big a difference on that pull as it is today, cooldown or finisher?
I’d worry a bit about the mastery idea with scaling. You’d start the expansion with a pretty poor chance of a roll you want but by the end be rolling your best much more often, and with the way the buffs work it would compound with player strength and become too strong and hard to balance. More of a curve rather than a linear increase in power if I’m making sense.
With buff fishing gone you won’t be spamming RtB back-to-back for ideal buffs, even if you get bad rolls you will continue your normal rotation, you won’t get stuck in those RNG holes like you occasionally get on live. On a smaller factor the buffs also don’t last as long so even if you get good rolls it’s only for 30s base opposed to 42s on live, this is not including pandemic duration increases. During Adrenaline Rush or Lust you can get RtB off cd relatively quickly for rerolls though.
I could definitely see how it could end up like that, with it being low early on but scaling way too high by the end of the expansion. I wouldn’t mind if they just took away Main Gauche damage increase from mastery and had our mastery increase the potency of our RtB buffs instead. Outlaws mastery has been so bland for so many years and it’s never been in a spot where rogues even wanted it for Outlaw.
Yeah with mastery Blizz always seems to have a tough time, either it scale wonky (spriest), or is a non-interactive general buff that is either tuned strong or weak (outlaw).
I always thought Rogue mastery should be a different section of damage for each spec, so Subtlety mastery should buff openers (because dance allows them to use them throughtout combat), Outlaw’s buff mid-combat (Sinister Strike, Blade-Flurry etc, since they interact the least with stealth), and Assassination’s with finishers because they multi-dot rupture and the fantasy of ‘finishing someone off’.
I think we can knock it off with the “delete Roll the Bones” feedback, there’s been many threads to that effect for over a year now and Blizz doesn’t seem to want to take that option.
tbh i liked roll the bones while leveling my rogue, but i know your damage being based on randomness is frustrating, at least thats what a lot of outlaw mains have told me
It’s one of those things that sounds better in theory than in practice. In a one player game it would be fun, but WoW has competition. No one wants to be worse than someone else because they by chance did 20% less damage for two minutes of the fight than the could have with another role.
I think they should just remake the class again. Combat was good, they made outlaw for no reason and it became an AoE only spec…I don’t think there’s a way to fix a class that has no place existing in the first place.
Like we don’t even get guns for loot!!! Where TF do we randomly pull guns out of???
Honestly, having the mastery increase rtb as well would be a cool addition to the mastery along with main gouge damage.
Either increase the proc chance or honestly make rtb always give 2 buffs, that’s it with a really rare chance to get more.
With SnD baseline, does anyone think they would change any of the buffs?
They might change Grand Melee since Slice and Dice already does attack speed increase and it might be ridiculous stacked with Grand Melee. So far I don’t think any have been adjusted though. Broadsides is the one to balance around since it’s effect is so static, so I think a couple could be slightly buffed.
id like to see rerolling bones doesnt repeat the current buff. I know this works both ways and would stop lucky roll strings but getting the same buff 3 rolls in a row that I dont want feels so bad.
They changed Grand Melee. It now adds 2s of SnD per combo point spent. Not sure if it’s intended or not, but if you spend enough points you can get SnD up to 2m long.
If it was up to me though, I’d try limiting it to the 3 better buffs and potentially granting combo points. Say you roll 2-4, you get one buff, 5-7 is 2 buffs, and 8 gives all 3. Rolling 9-12 would give 3 buffs and 1-4 combo points based on the score.
With only 3 buffs, the delta between a bad and good roll would be smaller, and one would be getting 2+ buffs 75% of the time. Or more with loaded dice.
Right I totally forgot about that change. Seems pretty weak to me since it doesn’t increase your DPS beyond eventually saving you a finisher cast.
I like the ability of adding a couple combo points to balance things out, but I think having more variability in the range (from one buff scaling up to 3 buffs and four points) makes the problems we have with RtBs worse and tougher to balance.
Fewer buffs might seem more balanced, but the delta has the potential to be larger in this way. Consider if I arbitrarily assign some values: Roll A is 10% the potential DPS gain, B is 50%, C is 100%. That gives you a 150% difference between a bad and good roll. If you are locked to two buffs every time, there is only a 90% max difference between any two rolls. Balancing the buffs better would scale that range closer in equal amounts so it’s a better system regardless of how well Blizz does tuning the buffs.
Mix , match , change and balance all 6 buffs into 3 different ones , 1% chance to roll all 3 , other times only roll 1 . Details on that would need some work …
You now have a strong buff no matter which roll , all while them changing the way your rotation plays out with that 1% to hit the jackpot and do huge dps during that RTB with all buffs .
This would work so long as they do a good job balancing the buffs, and I agree with the idea especially because some of the buffs do similar things now. Buried Treasure returns energy, but you also get energy from Grand Melee proccing more Main Gauche. True Bearing reduces cooldowns, but so does Broadside by spending more points faster.
Unfortunately, I think they also need to account for the factor of balancing perception along with actual numbers. Once people get the idea that “X is bad” they assume it is complete trash even if it’s quite close to a “good” buff. That’s probably a issue game-wide though…
I agree along those lines as well. Also in a possibly to give something as well to the loaded dice talent option instead of only when you have adrenaline rush activated or as currently a vision of perfection proc. Somewhere, something has to give and I’m curious about this missing talent with have in the row of Loaded Dice, and, Alacrity.
If they wanna keep Main Gauch, ok, but lets make it useful. Mastery should not only increase the damage but also the proc chance. Instead of always have a 30% proc chance. Maybe it could increase the chance of getting a Sinister Strike proc? We’re the toe-to-toe duels type, perhaps it could give a defensive benefit. Destro gets reduced damage from part of their mastery. Demon Hunters get movespeed. There are so many good ideas. What if it made our Crimson Vial heal for more?
We were once “combat” rogues. What if we had a buff that depended on us being in combat. Like you do x more damage the longer youre in combat to a certain point or take less damage or whatever. Put some emphasis back on the combat part of this spec.