I’m starting to understand why Rogue is a dying class. S&D is not an issue and I feel like most people that complain about it just want Rogue to play like every other class. I don’t think keeping S&D is particularly hard, but Rogue itself is definitely harder to play than most others. S&D is most definitely last on the list of things that needs to be fixed.
SnD adds to the mountain of issues rogue has because its another GCD that we lose just to increase our damage by a miniscule amount. GCDs matter a lot in PvP and the ramp necessary to be even a C+ class is astonishing.
Speaking more so for outlaw and assas.
maintenance buffs are bad, SND literally is a waste of button, it is better served as a passive
Yeah, that’s a much better way of putting it. Maintenance buffs.
If you’re like me and HATE addons with the burning passion of a thousand suns, keep track of poisons, bleeds, and buff timers is just frigging stupid for how much babysitting is required.
It’s literally only hard if you’re new at it. It becomes automatic when you’re used to it. Can we stop trying to dumb down Rogue for the sake of ease? I like that Rogue is more difficult to play than most other classes. Do you guys just want to evis/envenom and that’s it?
There should be a level of play where it is SERVICEABLE for entry-to-middle of the road players.
There will always be min/max’ing and I’m not saying make things strictly binary. I’m saying there is no reason to make the BASELINE gameplay a convoluted mess.
I didn’t have this problem playing either of my rogues (I abandoned one of them for the sake of too many characters) during WoD and Legion. Real life didn’t let me back in until near the end of Shadowlands but as much as I hated the expansion features/limitations, at least the class itself was at least fun enough to play so that my solo enjoyment wasn’t crippled because I have severe information overload issues. I was quite able to do what I wanted to do and while I wasn’t pulling ahead of anyone, I still got to play the game and not play Simon Says with a rogue skin attached.
Now it feels like I HAVE to take a needlessly more complex approach just so that I don’t take forever and a half doing basic regular questing or what-have-you. Or dying. Oh god, there’s been a lot of dying.
However, I do want to take a moment and just put my current gripe down for a minute. We can come back to that later.
What is up with Sub talent tree? Why is it that it implies there’s a necessity for just an absolute silly amount of different AoE? Why do they need ALL of that? It’s blatant overkill.
It honestly just sounds like Rogue isn’t for you. But that’s okay because it obviously isn’t for most people. I like that Rogue has a high skill cap. Is it perfect? Hell no, we need some serious help. But the answer isn’t to simply remove core abilities for the sake of ease.
Subs aoe is some of the easiest out there lol.
“Core abilities” lmao
Maintenance buffs, exactly, but also maintenance buffs that are on the GCD. Prior to the GM change, GM mitigated the S&D buff as being one of them & didn’t need to be cast frequently. Outlaw has S&D, RtB, BtE, AND a situational BF.
I’m not too familiar with other classes, but I’m very curious how many of these maintenance buffs other classes have to contend with & if they have GCDs & how frequently they need to be cast.
Just for the record, the AoE portion of my last comment was strictly removed from anything having to do with difficulty of it; I was just very confused why there’s SO many individual abilities for doing AoE period.
At first I thought, ummmmm…is it just a terribly put-together talent tree because they ran out of ideas and just said let’s throw darts at the wall and see what they land on and a lot of them just landed on Sub? Why is there a need for Shuriken Storm, Shuriken Tornado, Black Powder AND Secret Technique? Okay, two of those have a cooldown but why even bother with Secret Technique if you’re just going to basically spam Shuriken Storm into Black Powder for maybe two casts of Secret Technique? Okay, sure, it does more damage but by the time you’d be ready to cast that second ST, would everything not be dead anyway? Is this a mix of PvE and PvP talents all smushed together in the same tight crowded area? Is there something I’m missing…? Seems rather a bit much.
Oh, and I just realized something maybe would have been helpful if it had been deciding to brain-worm me much earlier but at the VERY least, why can’t they make base UI element changes so that S&D has a countdown timer on it for when it it is about to run out? Same thing for any DoT abilities when you have an enemy targeted.
Currently, in the base UI, there is a very tiny little personal ability buff bar that appears on top of my actual character in an overlay that is strictly visual noise because it’s not very easy to read in a high-paced environment and it’s so small that it really just annoys me more than anything since I’d rather not have to focus on a very tiny part of my screen instead of my surroundings so I don’t do particularly dumb things.
I also, get ready to gasp in horror, am a mouse-clicker. I have tried keybinding way too many times over the years but I wind up hand-mashing the keyboard and don’t get ANYTHING done. No amount of practice is going to improve my personal situation. Ever since I started playing during the AQ war effort event way back in the day, I have always mouse-clicked and my brain cannot change from that.
So, as such, I watch my ability bar a LOT and pre-cast on the last millisecond or so for when cooldowns and the like are what I need at any given time. I’ve been suggested that I, and I quote, “try some addons” to find something that makes my life easier.
Well, 3 or 4 gigabytes later of “trying some addons” (which, in reality, was a disgustingly large array of them) later and they ALL not only NOT do what I want from them but they also frig around with a whole bunch of other stuff that overshadow any little detail that I could ever have hoped for in such a way that it makes it LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE FOR MY BRAIN.
Even if I did wind up finding something that was so hyper-niche, so tiny of an addon that it’s almost, just almost a hilarity that anyone with coding abilities would have even bothered to package something so ridiculously small to fit my exact wants/needs, who wants to bet that with my luck, any hypothetical addon of the sort would break constantly and not be supported anymore…
So yeah, if I have to, no choice in the matter outside of not playing it at ALL?
At least I would want Blizzard to implement the barest of minimums for UI elements that I could toggle on for myself. I’d still be fumbling a bit but at least it would meet that baseline accessibility.
I’ve invested a LOT of time (been playing the characters since WoD, it may not be my main but I have a lot of genuinely fun memories of playing as an alt) and gold (one day…one day I’ll finish druid t3, the most beautiful set in the game, still missing shoulders, belt, and bracers, I refuse to level a druid just to get the base materials to have someone craft them because I was recently informed that while t3 isn’t class-restricted to mog the items, the new method is MANDATORY class-relevance) into this character and I’ll be damned if I’m just told to suck eggs and get out wholesale.
UB3R 1337 players can have their cutting-edge, min/max playstyles WITHOUT crippling the ability of others. There are many avenues for skill expression and it’s blatantly obvious they are utilized every day but if S&D is the hill they want to freaking die on, then let the rest of us have something like the base UI being more intuitive.
You’re right, the talent trees are bloated, and they could and hopefully are receiving some rework soon.
I see no issue with S&D having a countdown timer on the ability itself too. Not a bad idea.
Honestly, Rogue is not an easy class to begin with, but it’s really hard if you click. I won’t rag on clickers because that’s how some people choose to play and that’s fine. But yeah, Rogue definitely requires quite a bit of key binds to play optimally tbh.
If I may make a suggestion. If you want to give keybinding another chance, take it slow and one step at a time. I didn’t start keybinding until Burning Crusade. I started getting used to 1-5. I made 2 my generator (SS) and 3 my Eviscerate. Got used to those and then added 1 and 4, 1 was throw dagger and 4 was slice and dice. This is just the order I got used to but basically just get used to it 1 to 2 keybinds at a time. Then try out shift + #'s. Again 1 or 2 at a time. Then you can eventually toss in letters around your WASD like F, C, V, and so on. It can be overwhelming if you try it all at once. But step by step you can definitely get used to it.
Lastly, idk if you have weakauras, but I highly suggest that for cooldown tracking. It’s great for not only CDs, but energy and combo point maintenance too. I use Luxthos, but Afenar is also great. WA’s are also lightweight compared to many addons. As a fellow addon amasser, I understand well.
no we don’t, we aren’t druids or monks, or warriors.
Support is offered through control and being quick witted in pve and pvp to disable targets. Hybrids are not what us rogues are.
We are made to kill and sabotage and that is it. 4th “spec” sure but not changing any of the existing 3 by any means.
All three rogue specs play the same. There is no reason to even have specs on a rogue atm. Press Blade Flurry or press Shuriken Storm / Black Powder…your game play experience is the same.
Bosses cant be controlled, many elites cant be controlled … trash really only matters in Mythic+ and AoE control is much better there than our single target CC.
Rogue having some sort of flanking/double teaming/debuff-style support, where you increase damage dealt by allies to your target, or maybe even pick an ally and you both deal increased damage or increase a secondary while both are wirhin range of the enemy, is perfectly in-flavor
No, they don’t. Not even close.
I raid with Assassination and PvP with Subtlety. They are very different.
I don’t play Outlaw because it’s not fun to me. It’s like playing Wack-A-Mole where you hit whichever ability lights up.
Something like Tricks of the Trade?
Yeah, they do, of the 4 main hot bars I use per spec, 3 of them have the exact same skills in the exact same spaces (ie, 36 identical main skills per spec) and the remaining 12 do the same thing with a different name and spell effect.
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50% of the talents are identical between specs as the class talents are shared. The other 50% of talents affect spec specific skills that are for the most part renames of the skills all specs have a version of.
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If you think one spec having gouge and another spec not having gouge, or one spec having shadowstep and another having grappling hook, or one spec having sinister strike and another having gloom blade makes it play noticeably different…well, more power to you.
Having similar abilities doesn’t mean the specs play the same.
I have my bars and buttons set up just as you described. Stuns, vanish, stealth, combo builders and finishers, ranged attack, AoE attacks, each share the same respective button positions. I even do these with other classes I play. Stuns all share the same button as do builders, finishers, self heals, etc. That’s just common logical sense and has nothing do with how a class / spec plays.
However, their play styles are very different because each spec prioritizes abilities in different ways. Assassination is about managing DoT’s, Subtlety is about managing Shadow Dance burst windows. With Outlaw, it’s managing all the short CD’s.
If you truly feel all three rogue specs play the same, you’re doing something wrong.
Nah, Legion was a good expansion with good ideas, made by human beings. Unlike Shadowlands, which was a bad expansion with bad ideas, made by an AI.
Huge difference.
I mainly want Subtlety to feel good outside of Shadow Dance as well. It only feels decent in Dance. Outside of Dance it feels plodding. Hemorrhage should return as a 2nd out-of-Stealth builder and Sanguinary Vein should interact with Backstab somehow. Hemorrhage could easily be a choice node with Gloomblade.
I’m completely fine with Slice and Dice as it is and I don’t want to see it removed. Instead, SnD should become a choice node with a passive, but slightly weaker version for people who don’t like it. The difference in dps should be minor enough that both options are viable. Or, they could improve SnD so it has more tangible gameplay feedback. Even just taking it off the GCD would be great.
Legion was a C tier expansion with great content marred by hit-or-miss class reworks, borrowed power grinds and RNG Legendary drops.
you start muddying the waters and then it turns to a greater nightmare.
Druids as you are were split from feral into guardian and feral.
Once upon a time an unofficial hybrid tax was put on hybrids, then some shifts in creeping and other stuff and druids gained more rogue stuff to “fix their issues” when they aren’t rogues.
Us rogues don’t need special abilities to be “brought to groups”
- make your own keystones, sucks but it is what it is.
bladeflurry is not the same as shuriken storm and shuriken storm isn’t the same as fan of knives.
Are ferals the same because they apply moonfire like the other druids do? Are they unique compared to moonkin even though they can use some cat abilities too? The list goes on is the point. Are ferals too similar because they can use a lot of bear form abilities for defense / offense? Should they not mix how they choose to equip themselves in their kit for what they want to do? - Rogues are “fine”, the soft mage like “rework” we are getting could use more options as our guy already told us 3 truths are coming from it.
- New talents for all 3 specializations, class tree will be worked on, and a 4th row gate is being added instead of at row 3 (similar to all other classes).
- shifting in cost of talents / combining of talents
- POSSIBLY 10.2 this will be released if they have time. More choices are all that needs to sincerely happen, and players arrive at their own conclusion on what they like and don’t like and leave it alone from there.
A class’s “specializations” shouldn’t feel alienated from one another especially due to people’s personal agendas on morphing things further.
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Sanguinary Vein was a very good tool for us Subtlety rogues and should be a choice node as an example. In Legion, they removed SV and had to add night blade at another day to fix the carnival of nonsense and fart pillows that we turned into. People whined and got SV removed and now we are stuck in dance all the time where SV was absorbed into dance instead of a choice node.
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Poisons went away with legion too and that was complete trash and robbed rogues. SnD could be a choice node for weaker ones to be “passive” like people keep necroing up, but the active ability stays. They aren’t going to give us 50% attack speed for doing nothing. If people dislike pressing it, then take it off your bars as well.
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Subtlety energy regeneration is garbage without SnD as Shadow Techniques is just a random Honor Among Thieves (would give anything to just have backstab glyph back that refunded energy + energetic stabbing from cataclysm even though recuperate isn’t around either).