Long time Feral... bottom tier AGAIN. Should I just go Rogue?

Classes Rogue
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TL:DR - Not a FOTM reroll. I’ve been Feral since 11/05/05 and couldn’t care less if all Rogue specs got nerfed to the ground, fact is they’d still be wanted more than my Feral in 90% of content.

I started WoW as a Rogue in Vanilla. Enjoying the paragraph of lore at the character select screen, I knew I was a Rogue at heart. Well, by the time level 20 came around, and I had died a few dozen times due to the fact I had no healing, I decided maybe the mini-Rogue, the Feral Druid, might be a better option. It stuck, and I’ve mained Feral since 2005 until today.

That might change this expansion, another expansion, the 5th in a row, where Feral is going to be useless in PvE without Blizzard giving it OP damage. Any utility it brings to a group, rez, off heals, off tank ability, etc, Balance Druid also brings, plus even more. There is literally only one reason to bring a Feral to a Raid and/or M+ group right now, and that’s because it’s your close friend / girlfriend / boss.

So… ignoring the fact that you guys are currently OP, how does it feel to be a Rogue right now mechanically? Are you enjoying the playstyles / new and old abilities? If numbers aren’t part of the equation, are you having fun?

This may as well be my first ever Rogue, since my original Rogue just got downscaled from level 36, so any tips / tricks in case I do decide to bite the bullet and swap would also be great.

Time to spend a few hours staring at my alts trying to decide if Feral is worth the suffering. I may as well have just made a DK, at least they suffer well.

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Just level one and give it a shot tbh.
I love how smooth and fluid assassination plays, and it’s been pretty consistent for a long time. A lot of people are happy with sub right now and it’s a bit more complicated than sin.
Outlaw… is something that some people enjoy… maybe I dunno. I never liked combat anyway.

3

You will have an easier time getting into groups as a rogue that’s for sure.

Feral has one of the highest skill caps as far as dps goes. All the specs are smooth with Sin feeling off for some people due to the addition of slice and dice. As a feral you shouldn’t have any issue.

The good thing about being a pure is you
Usually have at least one viable spec that is performing well.

4

As a newcomer to Rogue and someone who has tried Feral many times over the years, I’ve found Rogue to be a lot more fun and consistent compared to Feral.

As far as specs, I played Outlaw a little during BFA and enjoyed it but I don’t like the pre-patch changes. It works but you’re juggling having to maintain a lot of maintenance buffs, and people talk about “rerolling” RTB but I don’t see how. You hit it on cooldown and go.

Sub has some maintenance buffs and it can be “slow” outside of shadow dance, but overall I really enjoy it and open-world content is a breeze. It’s also really fun in group content.

I haven’t tried Assassin yet but I plan to give it a shot if I get bored with Sub.

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Just so we’re on the same page, currently in prepatch not a single Rogue spec is in even the top 10 best specs. The same was also true for SL Beta following the akari’s nerf, but the sims are a bit behind the latest changes and theres certainly more changes to come.

As a fellow Feral / rogue; definitely give Rogue a shot.

One of the things that drives me nuts about the Feral community is that they just don’t accept that they will almost never be tuned to be a top damage spec (hybrid tax may be a yesteryear policy but if you are only betting with 1 spec you are betting to fail) and yet they constantly push for keeping the most complex rotation in the game. You can have the most complex rotation, but if you’re highly unlikely to ever be rewarded with top damage for such a rotation, all they’re doing is driving people away from the class. Blizz will give you spec complexity if you ask, but they won’t give you damage. Damage is tuned to a range and where you land among specs is a happy accident.

To give credit to blizz where it’s due, the blood talons changes this time around are much better, particularly the element that charges are only consumed on finishers, and triggering it is guaranteed with energy pooling instead of sometimes risking RNG on 4pt finishers.

Compared to Rogue, there’s no comparison. Everything is better except for offheals and battlerez. Combo point generation feels good. We re-stealth after combat way faster. We have naturally scaling energy regen mechanics. Vanish is baseline at 2min and not tied to a 3min burst ability. Shroud is baseline. Sprint has only a 1min CD instead of Dashes 2min. We don’t have Wild Charge but we do have 1-2 charges of Shadowstep baseline and a conduit to cut the cooldown in half. Cloak of shadows and evasion are arguably much more useful than bearform in PvE. There’s no being forced to choose between aoe and single target. Crippling is stronger than infected wounds. Garrote can easily be stealth empowered on 3 mobs a pull, unlike Rake. The quality of life improvements go on and on.

Things you may miss: Ferocious bites are bigger hits than Envenom. The extended range from balance affinity only exists on Outlaw. Rogue base runspeed is +15 as opposed to Ferals +30, but we do have talents for another +15 (Outlaw, not taken) or +20 (Sin/Sub, taken now for Sub but probably not in the expack until energy regen catches up).

The rotations all feel really good. Assassin may feel slow for the first patch since their abilities cost more, Sub feels fast but plays better with decaf (easy to accidently overcap if you spam Shadowstrike), Outlaw still has RNG but isn’t constantly re-roll tunneling in combat anymore.

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So you knew you were a rogue but gave up on us to be a feral 0.o Traitor!!! :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
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As a feral main im still asking myself if i go rogue or warrior.

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I have no doubt Assassin will feel better to me outside of my occasional desire to tank. I don’t know where specs stand on pre-patch, but on the Beta, Feral is very solid at the middle of the pack for DPS, but the DPS isn’t the issue, and never really has been. Feral doesn’t offer a single piece of utility that Moonkin and Resto don’t also offer. Much like the problem Ret is having compared to Prot and Holy. In M+ at least, there’s no reason at all to bring a Feral instead of a Moonkin, and Feral in general is looked at with a stigma that shouldn’t exist anymore.

Either way, I’ll be 50 in a few hours, and we’ll see how Rogue goes. It definitely doesn’t feel like the Vanilla Rogue I realized I hated so many years ago lol

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