Quite frankly, I’m gonna say undoing the work of Legion to give Outlaw the corsair/pirate identity and removing Cannonfire Barrage has been a step back, visually and from a design perspective. Making Outlaw some generic thug just visually doesn’t have much space and the hero talents have come out for the worse because of it.
Fatebound is so visually boring, when you could be calling cannonfire, a Ghostly Ship with its crew doing a ghostly barrage as a visual. One of the capstones is virtually called Ghostly Strike, even if it lacks meaningful visuals (like most of the rogue animation roster outside Subtlety skills).
You already have the Dreadwake ship mount as an asset for any ghostly ship effects.
Please give back the Plunderlord and Dreadblades lore and theme to Outlaw.
Bring back Death from Above, give back Parley, Run Through, etc.
For trickster it’s understandable you don’t want a cursed pirate theme, but you could make the shadow strikes much more visually present, calling shades of your character to perform the several strikes, and improving the visuals as well as addressing the GCD issue of Coup de Grace.
When it comes to the shadow clone stuff, this would ultimately fly in the face of Trickster’s and Outlaw’s visuals and themes by incorporating visuals into identities that are the complete opposite of what said visuals are associated with. Even if it were to address gameplay issues, this would take the identity issues and make them even worse for it.
How would this be animated in-game though that wouldn’t result in it just being a copy & paste ST from Sub? I can see one or two ways to incorporate the visual, but the question would still remain; this further goes into my point about the issue of visual association, that even if the description of the visual is different from another, how it is represented will affirm itss association with one thing or another; how likely is it that shades/after-images are going to be associated with Sub than Outlaw?
In some aspects, I agree, but that’s a whole other topic about WoW’s presentation of animation in its gameplay overall, but Rogue traditionally across many games are pretty low fantasy classes so muted and minimalistic is Rogue’s schtick in that regard.
The way I see it is what Outlaw and Sub share is the nimble, quick strikes. So the afterimages are just visual feedback for your flurry of strikes from multiple angles catching the opponent by surprise.
I do not think it is the rogue schtick to be visually muted. Final Fantasy has rogue archetypes as well as other Asian MMOs that have significantly impressive rogue visuals.
Even a game like ESO with the Shadowblade has its visuals, and Guild Wars 2 has good, meaningful rogue animations.
But WoW rogues have really lagged with visual innovations to the game, and I think that’s partly the reason why the class has become so unpopular outside PvP (where it’s played for obvious reasons, it’s broken in open world PvP and has been a viable staple in arenas).
Whatever is decided to be done, the current hero talents and visual kit for outlaw rogue just feels entirely bland and generic, you feel like you actually don’t have hero talents as well, and your single visual feedback to the spec is double sinister strike procs.
The fact Between The Eyes and Pistol Shot copy-paste the same animation, have no real black powder smoke visuals or sense of impact, as well as our dispatch, kidney shot, Blade Rush, and Ghostly Strike lacking meaningful visuals is a problem.
The same applies to Echoing Reprimand.
The visuals and identity are just not there, and removing Cannonfire Barrage among other Dreadblades lore from Legion only made it worse.
Rogues deserve their visual updates and identity expansion alongside hero talents just as much as other classes.
To which I will point out my previous reply that that is a whole other topic about WoW’s presentation of animation in its gameplay and the problem not being exclusive to just rogues. As well, all the games you pointed out treat their animation to a higher fidelity in certain aspects than WoW does when it comes to gameplay and have a higher fantasy ceiling especially FF14 and even more so with other Asian MMOs like Lost Ark.
Sure, but if you have immense discrepancies between, say, warlock, DH, DK, enhancement shaman, and on the other end hunters and rogues, that’s just unacceptable.
And seeing that at least hunter is getting reviewed, shamans are getting some animation updates as well, and we’re likely to see more visual updates for hero talents, I wanted to give my feedback for Outlaw’s visual and design direction.
I think rogue is even in a worse state than hunter was, and it could use a huge pick me up from a good set of visual updates.
That’s understandable; I wasn’t against updates to rogue visuals or visuals in general, plenty of classes and specs need them tbh and that’s not just talking about spell effects like with the specs and classes you listed. It’s just that I don’t want those visuals coming at a cost to identity or themes around them to make it happen and I want to respect that.
I think Legion did a good job of taking the directions. You had your ninja/shadow cultist, your traditional hitman poisoner/alchemist assassin spec, and finally outlaw was taken from some generic thug with little visual space into an iconic corsair/pirate outlaw, for which there’s plenty of existing WoW lore and assets, including most of Boralus.
That reversion for Outlaw after Legion where its abilities were renamed into generic abilities and Cannonfire barrage removed has hurt it, and I merely want them to remediate that if not through the spec tree and spec specific abilities, to at least allow Fatebound to be the hero talent tree for those who appreciated the Dreadblades cursed pirate crew fantasy.
It’s clear nobody is happy with just flipping a coin or the other spec just being an occasional 3 sword swipes with a yellow gash. So it’s a matter of offering brainstorming, but ultimately we have to hope they will come up with satisfying and separate identities to accommodate all rogue players.
I mean, I’m pretty happy with passives. But I’m a simple creature who’s long felt that many specs have become bloated with pointless busywork buttons, Outlaw especially.
I adored it in Legion–the pirate flare was quite appealing, I definitely miss Cannonball Barrage–but it has gotten steadily worse. I’ve seen folks describe it as a Spinning Plate Simulator, and at times that certainly feels accurate, and I’m probably the only person on earth who never had a problem with Roll the Bones, lol.
I would happily trade Blade Flurry for Cannonball Barrage. It feels bizarre to use the former in single target situations as is. Like… why is that a thing. I should be using AoE for AoE, not turning AoE into a pointless maintenance buff. Likewise Ghostly Strike feels extraneous, it’s just an occasional replacement for Sinister Strike.
Speaking of pirate flare, I miss Dreadblades, too. I would much rather have that than Echoing Reprimand, but I despise all the Shadowlands nonsense in general; should’ve stayed in the Shadowlands imo. Overall I feel like the disdain for the pirate theme was mostly a side effect of general anger over changing Combat into something else at all, though I certainly understand not jiving with the theme, as I felt similarly about Shadow priest when that was shifted toward the void/old god theme vs nonspecific spooky power.
Yeah I want to clarify, it’s not the passive aspect of the hero trees that bothers me, but the abysmal visuals and bland design.
Outlaw is an already busy spec, so they could tie summoning the ghostly ship barrage to popping adrenaline rush, make blade flurry call a cannonfire barrage, etc.
I just want the visuals to be worked on and the cursed ghost ship pirate themes to be returned to the spec or for Fatebound to properly provide that fantasy.
the whole point of outlaw is that its’ quick bladework and dirty tricks, NOT magic. Fatebound already pushes the package for me and I’d hate to get yet another “basically a melee mage” VFX/SFX-wise.
There’s no quick blades and dirty tricks, just a yellow slash not much different from the autoattacks of other melee dual wielders. That’s just a bad fantasy.
Fury warrior already does what you want more impressively in visuals, and as far as dirty tricks that’s one of the most visually lame options to explore. What, you’re gonna throw a banana on the floor or sand in someone’s eyes?
I’ll take my cursed pirate who’s an unmatched saber duelist and a deadly marksman to boot, thank you very much.
Outlaw is the least played rogue spec of the least played PvE class. Clearly something has to change. The spec is not selling itself to players.
Getting rid of Cannonfire Barrage was a real setback, IMHO. it had cool visuals, was a nice AOE, and played with pistol shot.
now we’re losing echoing reprimand a 200K damage capstone and just getting an empowered sinister strike for 40Kish.
there are many cool ideas they could take from DH/Fury/SV Hunter and incorporate.
why on earth does outlaw have a 7min cooldown? this isnt vanilla. DK’s dragon nukes and Pally’s wings are now on 1 min cooldowns. Even Hero, a use once per raid, is less CD. a 7 min cooldown should nuke the arena/raid. For one of the fastest specs in the game - the longest CD makes zero sense.
if they want to get rid of the pirate theme - thats fine - but they dont seem to know where they want to take it which means any touching is bad touching.
Sub should be attack from stealth and void-linked attacks.
Assassination should be DOTs, like unholy DK was/is. so many DOTs building and bursting.
oulaw should be where SV/Fury/Tinkerer meet. grenades, bola whips, death chakram type damage abiity. and we definitely should be beefier in sustain than the other rogues. not DK/Fury level, but we should be able to empower leech to high-heights, or drop a shield/parry. Whatever Finn is - we should have.
not as a concept but the fact that it has always had a deadzone in it. so if your AOEs arent dead then you have literally no other talent to press to hit more than 1 target.
and modern wow loves throwing packs in pve especially since DK/Pally/Enh/Fury do so much cleave aoe. they are always capable of hitting more than 1 mob. meanwhile Outlaw has this time of up to 30secs of no other AOEs
Funnily enough is the rogue spec with the most visual flair, sub, is the least played, and the the spec with the least visual flair, assassination, is the most played. At least according to the first week of the season
More ppl playing rogue than druid, monk, evoker and DH. Around the same amount of ppl are playing rogue, pally, shaman and DK. A large amount of ppl play hunter, warrior, lock and mage.
I feel like much of this has to do with the themes, oddly enough. When people think of rogues they think of the typical assassin archetype, not ninjas or pirates/brawlers. Couple that with 'sin being the easiest to play, and there you go. I myself have always played 'sin, mostly for the latter reason, but I do find the ‘slow death by poison’ trope appealing.
I would play Outlaw in a heartbeat if it was a tad less busy. I adored it in Legion.
(Edit: just realized I said “I adored it in Legion” twice in here, hah. Head of the Department of Redundancy Department, me.)