Yup, basically I want my whole kit back, I want to be able to play Assassination, Combat and Subtlety as they were at or before Mists of Pandaria 5.4
2 Likes
Yeah we need quite a bit more to feel as good as we did pre-Legion
Only thing I will say though is that Slice & Dice compliments our Shadow Techniques passive (which is similar to Energetic Recovery) + higher chance to proc poison + attack speed bonus it grants.
So Slice & Dice return for Rogue/Sub is nice & will be as useful as it used to be in PvP.
3 Likes
We need gouge back, it’s gotta be baseline for the class too.
8 Likes
to me the FW change is their poor attempt at replacing Shuriken Combo, they added that new aoe finisher as well that interacts with FW. I’d rather DFA came back, get rid of shadow vault and make FW work as it did previously
3 Likes
Like everyone is saying, gouge would be nice. I also don’t like that prep is still missing. Frost, as much as it has undergone the similar PvE hammer, still has cold snap.
4 Likes
There has been some really good points made and I guess I will add my two copper. I have played this game since about a month after it came out and have played sub since BC.
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Poisons. All rogues should be able to use poison, with assassination obviously being deadlier with them.
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SnD. Good to see it coming back and Rês makes good points about having Energetic Recovery as well. It would be nice to see them return that as well.
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Gouge. This is kind of a no brainer. Gouge was made to land those greasy backstabs before backstabs became front stabs and actually did damage. And it was a beauty in Pvp.
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Backstab. It would be nice if backstab actually did some damage, otherwise it should be replaced with Gloomblade.
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Bleeds. (garrote, rupture, hemo)Pretty sure killers would know how to poke a hole in someone and make them bleed. It isn’t very fun that my only DoT/Slow is a dispellable magic ability. Garrote for extra help against caster, and Hemo after they removed the charges was pretty helpful as well
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Preperation and Premeditation. These two skills gave some heavy duty on demand damage for sub rogues. I have always felt that Premed is better than Marked for Death. Just personal preference, but it ‘feels’ right to me.
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Dismantle/Expose Armour. Because we couldn’t always backstab things and before we somehow became magic users, this is what helped against heavily armoured jerks like pallies and warriors.
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Ambush. Smashing suckers with ambush used to be one of the things that made sub so much fun. A classic opener and probably one of the hardest hitting skills rogues used to have. Now we have… Shadowstrike. Which gives us an unneeded (although hilariously fun) teleport, and when we get there we can hit them with a wet noodle.
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Honour Among Thieves. This should be backed into the Sub spec.
I know some people don’t like having ‘bloated’ abilities piling up on their screen, but after having pretty much 2 abilities as Sub for 2? expansions now, I miss having other things to spend combo points on. Someone mentioned that using skills such as SnD can separate the ‘skilled players’ from the average joe, and I would have to agree. Sure, Sub used to hit really hard, but you couldn’t always blow someone up in one opener so you had to actually pool energy and think about what you were going to do next. Again, this is another thing that made Sub so much fun to play.
Overall it seems like everyone wants Sub to be the way it was before they changed it into a magic based class and I agree with them. Giving us skills that should never have been taken away in the first place and calling then ‘new skills’ feels like a slap in the face. Sub of Old is was fun and had just the right amount of complexity to keep it from being what it is now, which is put up nightblade and use eviscerate. It feels like there are too many passive skills that don’t really add anything besides X mastery or X crit etc.
I can’t really think of anything else off the top of my head, sorry again for the giant post. I hope this can at least get some other folks’ brain juices flowing on the subject.
11 Likes
Thanks.
I probably bounce around classes too much to be in a place to give highly specific feedback about Sub. But I think all that bouncing also helped me appreciate how different the spec was.
This is why I posted the idea here first instead of straight to alpha forum. As bad as FW is now, it might be even worse if they implemented some oddball idea from a druid without asking dedicated rogues first.
3 Likes
There are still important differences between Shadow Techniques and HAT + Energetic Recovery.
The biggest one is that Shadow Techniques requires time on target. For example if you go for a Restealth, or even if you sit in roots for a few seconds, you are not refilling your energy bar like you would if you were actively on target.
To me this exacerbates the problem that we already saw with the cooldown reduction mechanic on Shadow Dances. It rewards sticking to a target when Subtlety’s playstyle should instead be more about picking our moments to burst.
I’ve played Subtlety Rogue for 15 years and I can say that I was furious reading the alpha feedback thread until I read your posts and thought “finally someone is speaking up that actually understands this class.”
I’m sure there is plenty of nuance that you are missing from not being a Rogue main, but please, keep speaking up because what you are saying makes a lot more sense to us than what other people are saying in that thread.
I’ll go ahead and quote some of my own feedback and feedback from others further down in this post, as others have been doing in this thread to centralize it to one place, and please let it inform your feedback on the alpha forums if there is anything with which you agree strongly:
PvP Rogues have never been fond of Shadow Techniques. If you are Stealthed after a Vanish and closing in for the re-opener, or if you get stunned or rooted, your baseline income of resources (both energy and combo points) drops. It feels terrible to play this way. Also the Variance introduced by the “3rd attack has a 50% chance to proc it” business is annoying for Subtlety which has historically been a very low variance spec in its rotation. Yet another instance where the actual gameplay is being homogenized towards other classes/specs while Blizzard claims “look at the flashy animations and purple particles, Subtlety is more unique than ever before!!”
For these reasons, ShT should be rolled back to HAT and Energetic Recovery.
For similar reasons, Premeditation should return. Players that enjoy the First Dance trait can simply macro it to mimic that behavior when Premed is available but more importantly it gives us 2cp from Stealth before we open so that SnD can already be rolling when you leave Stealth. One of the most unique Subtlety mechanics ever, also lost in the great prune.
Symbols of Deaths should be completely removed because it’s a terrible, low interactivity, flat % dmg increase - and that will free up the necessary bind space for Premeditation. The history of Symbols of Death is a complicated one that involves Blizzard trying to fill a void that was left after they initially removed Find Weakness, Slice and Dice, and Premeditation (in its various versions that have been tried, it’s attempted to replace aspects of each of those abilities) but it’s time to face the fact that this ability just isn’t working. It’s not built on a strong foundation of Rogue identity to begin with, and the gameplay was better before which Blizzard obviously realizes because both Find Weakness and Slice and Dice are returning. Complete the job: delete SoD and bring back Premed.
There is also the major concern of Find Weakness being still the weak 30% form (vs. 70-100% before it got pruned in the first place) and randomly procing from Backstab and Fan of Knives (my Rogue uses Knives, not Shurikens, sorry). This completely defeats the purpose of the ability and provides unfortunate evidence that Blizzard didn’t truly understand the feedback to bring back Find Weakness in the first place. First of all, this rotational variance feels horrible for Subtlety which for most of its history has had a high level of determinism. Secondly, this high FW uptime build runs directly counter to the stated goal of making Dance burstier and available less often. Because FW can’t possibly be tuned the way it should to give bursty Dances and openers from Stealth when it’s also up constantly, they are really backdooring the same steady damage profile onto us, we just get to press Shadow Dance less often.
Finally, Gouge. Gouge was pruned because, and I quote Celestalon directly from 2015/2016, “we’re giving you more CC with more Shadow Dances so we’re taking some things away to compensate.” WELL? We’re giving back the dumb Shadow Dance charges which we never wanted. Bring back Gouge now. There is no excuse anymore, and their complete refusal to even discuss this ability indicates a large degree of dishonesty where they won’t even openly state what their hangups are.
Subtlety was essentially a superior spec in every way prior to Legion
And:
I was very active on the arena forums during that era and I do recall those conversations about CC disarmament but I believe both the community and Blizzard got it wrong in several key ways:
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About Gouge specifically, complaints about it were mostly related to it being used as an pseudointerrupt when Kick is on CD. I agree it feels bad as a healer when you juke Kick and die anyway because the Rogue just Gouges you. I think there are better solutions to this problem than pruning what is arguably the most iconic Rogue ability of all time. -
The consequences of losing Gouge are vast, and one that I see discussed the least is the impact that it has on positioning and movement as a PvP Rogue without Gouge, which has changed COMPLETELY. There is no longer the interplay between running behind someone to Backstab and in front of them to Gouge, no longer the satisfaction of running through the DK that is murdering your healer teammate and spinning 180 degrees to Gouge them across the face. I no longer feel like I am moving like a Rogue in PvP after losing this button and I cannot overstate how much this feeling ruins the gameplay experience! -
Another consequence is comp diversity. Gouge is less useful in Rogue/Mage compositions because it shares DRs with Polymorph, while it allows Rogues to build useful compositions with classes that don’t have a DR in that category, e.g. classes that have primarily a Fear/Cyclone DR. Furthermore, it opens up unique playstyles for those compositions rather than doing the scripted RMX Kidney --> Sheep setup over and over again. For example, in Rogue/Druid 2s, Focus Gouge into Clone on Healer with Stuns on kill target, but you have the option of hard swapping if the healer trinkets because you didn’t commit a stun DR. That button breaks us out of the one dimensional script in setups. -
Gouge hadn’t changed much over the years going into WoD but the pace of gameplay around it had. Energy was coming in faster than ever. The proper tool to address the pseudointerrupt issue discussed in #1 is a moderate increase to the energy cost and cooldown of Gouge. In a world where pruning and the Legion version of so-called “class fantasy” isn’t already the agenda, these changes are perfectly suitable at addressing balance concerns.
Due to that last sentence in #4, I therefore conclude that balance concerns were not the dominant factor in pruning Gouge (if any Blues want to comment, please confirm, we are dying to know) but at most were an exacerbating factor. Therefore since we (community+Blizzard) have decided to roll back pruning and re-connect with REAL class fantasy, I argue that Gouge should come back in the form discussed in #4 above, for reasons which are obvious.
Regarding the wider conversation around CC disarmament as a justification for ability pruning, this is probably the worst and most destructive misunderstanding that Blizzard has ever committed with regards to class design philosophy. When did CC complaints reach their clear apex? MoP is clearly when it was worst. And what drove the increase in CC power in MoP, was it the addition of a bunch of new CCs to the game? NO! The biggest change to CC in MoP wasn’t a change to CC at all, it was a change to dispels. For PvE reasons, Blizzard introduced an 8 second cooldown to defensive dispels, which had disastrous and unintended PvP consequences. I can give specific examples of how this played out if anyone is interested, but I do feel that it’s probably quite obvious if you just think about it.
So the solution to CC complaints all along should have been addressing the problem with dispel mechanics (possibly further differentiating PvE/PvP if necessary) but Blizzard was already predisposed towards pruning for other reasons (making classes easy to learn for new players that could buy character boosts for the first time, “class fantasy”) so they convinced themselves that this was the right solution for this problem too. I believe this has been a hugely impactful and poorly understood mistake.
5 Likes
I would also like to have backstab back for all 3 specs, and make it required behind target, and make it do truly brutal instant damage and make sure it’s energy cost is 60 to ensure it cannot be spammed.
I would also like the TBC or Wrath version of shiv back, you know the one that cannot be dodged, blocked or parried and applied poison instantly and removed enrage on warriors.
Also I want expose armor back for all 3, and make sure it uses combo points and the rate would be like 30,40,50,60,70% armor penetration.
There are many more things, also dismantle, that should also be base line too.
Also smoke bomb, also baseline.
5 Likes
Now that you mention it, Energetic Recovery is one of those things that didn’t really cross my mind. When swapping around from, say, destro (brbafk chaos bolt) to feral to mut to sub, the latter is going to feel faster regardless.
And, with regards to gouge and comp setup, losing that was painful for feral+rogue. I have a friend who used to almost exclusivity play feral (before quitting the game in BFA…), so I’d switch to rogue just to diversify a bit. With pounce being rolled into rake in WoD, the subsequent loss of gouge was a DR nightmare lol.
3 Likes
Yes I agree.
However i’m just happy that we still have the “energy-pool” mechanic with Slice because of Shadow Techniques, just unfortunate that it still promotes a “stay-in” playstyle rather than going for restealths.
They need to remove Shadow Techniques (and CDReduction on dance as well) and bring back Energetic Recovery (Even returning Garrote would promote a playstyle where going for restealths is important too). Unfortunately since Energetic Recovery is not currently in the game and Shadow Techniques is, I don’t see blizzard switching the two.
4 Likes
Pooling energy and management of combo points, let me tell ya I had gotten real rusty due to retail wow, and the vanilla experience has restored that to me, I tinkered with my retail rogue and even playing a reportedly slow spec like mutilate felt ridiculously fast and easy with all that extra easy fast energy. That does kinda make me think a bit about energy and management and are these semi passive activated energy flow increase mechanics actually good for the rogue class overall?
Think about it a min, like really think about it, they are hella nice I’ll say that for sure but is it worth the trade off in abilities like backstab or mutilate doing no kidding 1/10th the damage they really should? Not entirely sure what the abilities are even called now because I truly don’t feel like they really are all that meaningful to use, that’s kinda been bugging me about the retail rogue, it’s just so blah to play, sure it does great damage, it’s very impressive like that but it’s all kinds of dull, nothing exciting happens, that’s a trend that when I think about it really started in cata but didn’t go totally rotten until legion wod spec depending.
Would be nice to have abilities that feel meaningful again, positional abilities also like gouge, backstab, mutilate, ambush and garote. Those things would be better if they required position, it’s kinda the same story for combo points, I like them on the target, I do like the redirect ability, it was a good add, and it was good that it had a cool down, and that you could glyph for a much shorter cool down, I liked being able to MFD a totem, slice and kill it with a focus throw weapon and then go hamburgular on the kill target. I likes to mfd totems and recup on a restealth, pillar and thow kill the totem for the reset, there were so many great options with the old combo system that just died with the new one, also bad choices like making totems immune to combo points and mfd, dude blizzard hates rogues. Sorry, had to get that out.
3 Likes
More bleeds you have the quicker your energy will regen from Venemous Wounds. But with Slice, you gain the increased attack speed with the increased poison application (which works well into Assa’s style, with the heavy emphasis on poisons being the most powerful in this spec)
Then obviously as Sub the increased attack speed with increased poison proc% is nice, but then you also have Shadow Techniques which allows you to pool energy. So again, Slice & Dice flows well with Sub too.
I think the biggest reason for this is that Blizzard’s design philosophy as of the past 2 expansions has been for BIG finishers with SMALL builders.
You can make the argument that Sub’s backstab used to do a decent amount of damage, but I can tell you for sure one thing is that Blizzard has been SCARED to buff things like Backstab due to the multiple dance charges. Now that we will be going back to 1 dance, i’ll be interested to see if they revisit a possible tuning change for Backstab.
1 Like
In theory they could just add the energy regen part to a new rank2 for SnD instead of of having 2 (or, well, any) ranks of $RandomDarkSynonym_Techniques.
If gouge could come back I’d be open to losing a charge of shadow step or whatever is needed for balance.
1 Like
I’d trade Dance cooldown reduction and Shadowy Duel for it – CCs (duel and cheap shots / saps) for CCs, arguably this is a net nerf. I want the gameplay of Gouge back. I want to run in front of someone and press ‘4’ like I have for over a decade and hear supremely satisfying sound of Gouge happening.
Hell I’d trade those AND the 2nd step charge for it.
4 Likes
Yes this was talked about before with Assassination having low APM for several expansions.
The older devs understood that with low APM you need to have higher impact abilities which is why Mut used to hit hard as it also used to be a positional ability as well.
If in shadowlands the addition of SND thrown in the rotation slows down Assassination they can compensate by having Mut and Evenom hitting harder again to make it feel impactful.
Sub Rogue is in a similar boat because Blizz is trying to make it being very spammy in Legion and BFA but backstab isn’t satisfying to hit.
They need to make Sub Rogue a middle ground between the Outlaw and Assassination. Assassination being very low APM while Outlaw being very high APM.
Sub was always a balance between solid CP generation and energy while having moderate APM.
4 Likes
Would be certainly nice to see more impactful abilities rather than what feels like auto attack filler
4 Likes
tbh I think they need to buff Backstab & bring back Sanguinery Veins.
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Having Slice/Poisons back is amazing, but re-adding Sanguinery Veins along with our returning Poisons/Slice & Dice would make Sub feel quite nice again.
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Buffing Backstab makes it to where our sustain will feel okay outside of Dance’s (but not anything crazy) and Backstab might actually feel decent to press since we have the damage buff from Sang Veins + Energy regen & attack speed from Slice.
Also think they need to make Find Weakness go back to its old form while also removing CD-Reduction passive on dance.
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Not only is old version of Find Weakness better, but if their concern is they want it more “accessible” in PVE, then perhaps they could make a talent where find weakness gets buffed for a small period of time when your backstab crits or like Josefine said in the Alpha forum, a talent where your backstab crits extend find weakness.
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I love Shadow Dance, its unique. I also love the style of going for restealths. But CD-Reduction on Dance forces a playstyle where your hardly rewarded for restealths because its more valuable to stay in and get ur dance CD lowered.
4 Likes
What if they not only buffed backstab, but also gave ambush a 2 part effect for sub.
Ambush when used from stealth, actual stealth can do silly high damage, but when used in dance it delivers an extra combo point above normal and does the same damage as backstab, perhaps make ambush apply 70% expose armor debuff?