Rogue 9.1.5 Wish-list

Classes Rogue
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Hey all! I love Rogue and want it to be the best class that it can be. So far we have been light on changes, but its like people say the list of updates is not final. So before we get a final list I would like to jot down some personal wishes for the class. Some of these are Spec specific and some are Rogue general changes.

Alacrity VS Deadblades and Loaded
Alacrity is an awesome talent. Who doesn’t want free haste? But its pretty boring. It performs really well, but it takes up a spot where an active ability with potential is in, and a passive that modifies how an active ability works. Both Loaded and Dread are more interesting to play with, but in practice Alacrity ends up doing better in PvE. Dead can somewhat be used in PvP, but in PvP burst is everything. Spamming a few dispatches can become decent burst. I don’t even know whats the best option here. Removing Alacrity? Make it baseline? Would love some variety!

General Talent Diversity
We all have that one talent thats BiS in the row too. I wish I could run a big Exsanguinate build as Assass, pop some bleeds and watch them roll. Alacrity takes up space there too, while for Sub Alacrity takes up a dead talent row. Haste isn’t as valued for Sub, so something more interesting could replace it there. Something fitting to changing how Shadow Dance works since that whole row seems to be focused on buffing that.

Blade Flurry Not Uncapped (Or softcapped)
This is likely going to become a problem in the future. I don’t think people want to see BFA M+ with Double Outlaw Rogues in all LFG queues again, but we don’t wanna sink either :frowning: so…we will see what happens. I still hold hope that we get softcapped.

Conduits
Since conduit energy is going away conduit switching would be cool, but a lot of our conduits are kinda specific. Like fan of knives for Assassin (Poisoned Katar). Its good on paper if you are going to Fan a lot, but its not a good choice for M+ since not every fight is a Fan of Knives fight. Other middle ground options tend to be more optimal because they work for AoE and ST. I suggest changing conduits to be more flexible in situations, while being generally strong for AoE or ST. Add an extra effect to Katar, like the 5% increased crit strike change to work for all abilities.

Or rework it all together to have less AoE focused and more general damage buffs for conduits. A lot of tier sets, azerite traits, and artifact weapon traits could take its place. Some adding different mechanical gameplay changes. Imagine Blood of the Assassinated returning as a conduit. I would love to mess around with a Bleed Build. Would it be good? No idea, but it would be more interesting. It has flexibility.

Backstab conduit! What a cool idea, but its not worth investing into since Backstab doesn’t really hit hard. You can cheese it with Gloomblade and a Lego in PvP, which is fun, but its not really a thing in PvE (wish it was). Ambidexterity Outlaw Conduit (Mastery has additional X% to strike while Blade Flurry is active) isn’t ever played. It was going to be part of Mastery Build for Outlaw but got slapped down in Alpha/Beta. What if we got something more interesting instead of that?

Conduits have a few dead spots that could be filled with interesting options. I know a lot of people don’t like it when Blizz removes certain tier sets, traits, etc and brings them back in a new system. I don’t like that either. But I would be happier with stuff I had than with stuff I won’t really use (unless they giga buff things or something)

Raid Utility
I don’t think we are doing bad in raids, currently all 3 specs are doing pretty well. Cloak is a good immunity ability that we get use out of the current tier. Our damage is competitive at the moment, especially if you are Sub with that juicy WF buff from your friendly Enhancement Shaman. But we would be the first melee to sit if certain classes need to be brought in. We aren’t boomkins with their AoE. We aren’t buff/debuff classes, and melee spots are few and competitive (depending in guild and composition of course) so…Smoke Bomb? Yes? Maybe expose armor? I don’t really know what they would give us honestly, but no one likes sitting bench if they can help it.

Getting sat because I am useless feels bad. But it feels worse because I just don’t bring enough to the team no matter how hard you try to pull your weight and then some to make up for the lack of raid utility.

In dungeons we are pretty good! But with monks crane kick getting soft capped I could see us being passed by them. Unless the group really needs a shroud. Its uncertain but we will see how things go.

Anyway, feel free to share your thoughts. Do you agree with my list? Have one of your own? I just want Rogues to be fun and good in future patches!

Also, why does Backstab hit like a wet noodle while needing positional requirements? Buff it! Or remove positional pls! Ty

2 Likes
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There haven’t been a lot of changes because overall rogues are in a very solid spot.

The one change I think needs to happen is have the aoe cap on outlaw especially bladefurry removed.

4 Likes
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Blade Flurry needs to be uncapped. I’d be fine with a softcap if that’s the compromise. I don’t like playing musical chairs with specs and classes and I don’t intend to start now.

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If you’re worried about talent diversity than they should just bring talent trees back in general to solve the problem. The limit of asking for more with only 3 talents per row isn’t helping matters or will cause them to fix anything about it. They’ve had many chances to fix this specific issue and they haven’t besides adding systems to try and balance it out.

Rogues don’t need a raid utility no matter how much you content creators want to push for it. Rogues can still be viable in raids without adding more nonsense to the game just for a pity sake of a raid utility. Guilds still have rogues without being sat for all bosses in content. Just because it’s not what these 2% doing WF content showcase isn’t justifiable to add a raid utility.

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All Rogue needs is an expose armor raid wide finisher, crimson vial can heal targetable allies for a 20% max health heal overtime, and smokebomb reduces ally damage by 20%.

Its really not that hard conceptually and will provide a huge incentive across all content.

Smokebomb moving to baseline too * whoops.

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If we do NOT get uncapped, the entire spec will be gutted.
Why take Outlaw 5 hard capped when you can have warrior AOE’ing 20 mobs. Our stuns/kicks will never replace 30k dps in aoe.

It will destroy OL in higher keys.

2 Likes
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That works as long as our damage is fine and good enough. But if we draw the short straw and damage isn’t there then we are sat. Essentially in any fight where you can swap anyone out a ranged is better than a melee. Warriors/Monks/DKs all at least bring something to the table. Rogue would be sat. its a sacrifice you make for the raid to prog, but it doesn’t feel good.

This is less of a problem if Rogue is ahead in damage, but that hasn’t been the case in every tier. Its why Rogues reroll from time to time, at least my friends do, so they are at least playing something beneficial.

But its not just Rogues, personally I’d prefer every class/spec to have some form of raid utility. I like it when the game isn’t always about ook ook damage.

1 Like
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Its just how the meta goes. Big pulls are a lot of fun, and its natural to want to do 2 or 3 trash packs at once instead of one. But it also doesn’t feel amazing in older content, going back and reclearing old raids or dungeons for transmog. So hopefully they do something.

1 Like
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Well said mate. On one hand everyone wants to play a melee class over range which is why a rogue’s spot may be in jeopardy but, still I’ve seen a lot of rogues still doing mythic level progression content one way or another. My buddies guild just did cutting edge and that included two rogues in the group make up. People rather also sit a rogue if they can cheese mechanics at times which is why some of these WF guilds sometimes think and, everyone has to follow suit like lemmings. A bit of the monkey see, monkey do moniker. They may not have certain classes in their raid doesn’t mean they still aren’t valuable in another way otherwise.

You have to think also that those classes you listed are also classes that can do more than one thing be it tanking or healing as well which makes sense of why they can bring a raid utility as well to the table. If they didn’t take away specific personality of classes with maybe only a handful that still stay true presently then we wouldn’t be in this situation we are now.

Another thing is Blizzard did it to themselves with this. It came to the point taking away from a rogue to give to another class in a different variation down dating back to the implementation of DKs. People complained about how OP rogues used to be so Blizzard had to spread out things to make it seem fair, unfortunately.

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  1. Encounter design has not favored rogues in a long time, see Tomb of Sargeras where smoke bomb was long gone.

  2. Rogues were often seen as a safe pick for dps spots in the past because of good personal survivability and always acceptable damage output, when blizz was more aggressive with the nerf bat based on ptr performance. Nowadays the trail blazers have seen the strongest specs remain dominant from ptr to live like venth boomkins. So class stacking based on ptr showings is more common and safe picks like rogues are not utilized as much.

And back to raid design, Sanctum’s usage of immune intermissions has catapulted specs that gain the most from cooldowns to a higher standing and being able to control and coordinate cooldown usage gets a very high return this tier.

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Thank you for being a valued member of the WoW community.

+1 Good post.

:surfing_woman: :surfing_man:

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You missed BTE buff management. Trying to hit BTE on a “most likely to survive” target, and then focusing down that target to get the mileage out of the ability is actually one of the worst parts of the multi-target rotation.

One such solution:
BTE as a buff on the player for 20% ability crit instead of a debuff on the mob. Further, Ruthless Precision causes BTE to apply a single-target debuff for the other 20% to all strikes (swapping the second part of the RTB shark with BTE passive buff). This causes BTE to be useful in multi-target without Ruthless, but functionality of using both abilities in conjunction to be preserved.

Alacrity should be baseline for Outlaw only. In that talent slot, a new talent Control Your Luck which causes Roll The Bones to guarantee at least one dice roll based on last ability used (with one ability being a Random selection). This solves the RNG issue for skill ceiling on rolling, and incentivizes players to pick a good time to roll rather than just assuming roll before combat and reroll ASAP on specific poor buff rolls.

Backstab with conduit is one of the hardest hitting burst abilities for Rogue.

Blade Flurry cap should be 3 targets with a higher damage conversion as the base ability. That would really give Outlaw a powerful niche. Abilities like Killing Spree and Blade Rush should be uncapped on use with BF up and get CDR from Restless Blades. The other existing BF talent should modify Blade Flurry to increase target cap at a cost for the damage conversion. This lets players choose to use uncapped Blade Flurry, or a more focus-target specific Blade Flurry with high AoE burst potential.

Raid utility

I feel Rogue should be the only class that brings a cooldown debuff that is effectively a shorter duration, raid-wide Vendetta.

Another option is Tricks of the Trade PvP talent as a baseline ability – tank spec players get Threat Redirection and damage buff. Everyone else just gets damage buff. Should non-tank spec players gain an equivalent e.g. 15% threat reduction for the duration? Alternatively, damage class pulls aggro, and the Rogue uses Tricks on them to redirect to next highest threat player (reduces the total active threat on all targets of the targeted player by 15%)?

1 Like
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Imagine if we had a talent where you could get 5 buffs controlled with a 5 min CD to max out our burst. That would be kinda fun

Thanks for your post fun read I agree with BTE thing, that would be better imo

3 Likes
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TBH this is what i think loaded dice should have been.

2 Likes
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Anything is viable. You can play feral or survival if you want and probably find a guild who’ll take you (there are a lot of 4/10 guilds bleeding players). Viability is irrelevant. Performance and perception matters.

They should just get rid of all raid buffs. No one really wants to bring a warrior that plays like crap, but you might if you need battle shout if it’s worth more than 1-2k dps combined. That’s a problem. The crappy warrior player should be stuck in a crappy guild instead of getting carried in a guild above his level (just using warrior as an example, no offence to warriors).

  1. Get rid of all raid buffs
  2. Have melee do 1% more dps than ranged.
  3. Have all DPS classes have a spec that’s within 0.5% ST (optimal / sim) performance of all other ST specs.

Then you just bring the player.

1 Like
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Remove slice and dice and between the eyes. Roll the damage into RtB.

Outlaw has too many maintenance buffs.