I’m impressed with many of the changes they’re making to many of the classes (Druid, Hunter, etc). Long time coming, even if players can find niche reasons to complain about many of the changes.
Yes, it’d be nice to see more changes to Rogues on here (like bug fixes with our abilities, in particular), but Rogues are (or at least were) in a pretty good spot. Yes, lots of talents taken away from PvP which may be “devastating” to players that were reliant upon them, but I imagine many of those talents were just straight-up frustrating to play against. Rogues have also generally been dealing great damage in pretty much every spec for the entirety of season 1.
There are still a lot of fundamental changes and improvements I’d like to see (like Outlaw not relying on stealth at all for its DPS output), but I believe Rogue’s “turn” will come soon (sooner if it’s struggling on DPS meters).
Personally, I think something like the following could go a long way in helping the Rogue’s gameplay loop feel more like an ebb and flow:
ROGUE
Developers’ Notes: We’ve noticed that energy efficiency and gameplay pacing feel very inconsistent throughout the Rogue’s leveling and gearing process. While we want to maintain a high skill ceiling for good Rogue play, we also want to make the class more accessible for everyone to learn at all stages of its experience.
New Ability: Payup – Damaging abilities which generate Combo Points consume up to 20 Energy for each Combo Point generated up to your maximum, and deal up to 5% additional damage for every 20 Energy consumed.
New Ability: Payoff – Restore 20 Energy for every Combo Point consumed.
Deeper Strategem is now a 2-point node with slightly varied effects:
Deeper Strategem – Increases your maximum energy by 20/40 and your maximum combo points by 1/2.
The energy cost of all abilities has been adjusted. Active abilities which only deal damage no longer have an energy cost, whereas active abilities which have a utility or survivability component now have an energy cost and have had that cost adjusted.
Developers’ Notes: Current Rogue gameplay generally revolves around picking when to use a combo point generator, a finisher, or a utility based on your current resources – optimizing your survivability and damage output without over-capping your resources. This new system maintains that dynamic and awards skillful gameplay while removing the frustrations associated with “energy starvation”. As a result, we’re also looking to update or replace various talents and abilities associated with the Rogue’s Energy resource, likely moving many of those onto the class tree to help better support the Rogue’s utility.
This would fix so many problems without really changing anything about how the class currently plays (aside from just making it significantly more playable at all times simply because it isn’t so limited by its energy resource anymore).
I just do not like the idea of piling Rogue survivability all into Feint.
Feint spam is not only boring but not really engaging game play if Feint is a do it everything cool down.
That is downside of loading up different damage mitigation traits into a single CD like Feint and Evasion. Sure, it helps with button bloat but the downside is that you are punished more for having less CDs to use and you use the CD at the wrong time.
This happened in Legion where Rogues had less defensive CDs to work with and it ended up being harder on newer/inexperienced Rogues.
Rogue was incomplete in 11.0, too, and everyone said let them cook. We got compensatory bug fixes and nothing else. I’m not holding out on this anymore, they have no direction for Rogue at this time. Tier set looks good, tho.
what an absolute joke. in arena SUB is doing 20-25% less damage in every lobby at 2k cr. and you dont buff anything but take away a massive tool. wtf are you doing blizz? and if the spell is too OP and everyone cries, then so be it, remove it. BUT at least give us more damage in another form to make up for the only spell that can get us a kill, because it sure as heck isnt coming from shadow dance.
Blizzard need to fix cloak of shadow. Our 2
Min cd cant cloak off mage slow. Dk disease reapply right away after the first second cloak. Basically do nothing vs unholy Dk. And Cloak of shadow been over 20 year and over due for improve. It need to be 1 min cd when every class has 1min dot atm.
Sin’s biggest issue right now is Energy and reliance of Thistle Tea
Sub’s would probably be button bloat more than anything, granted you can help it with macros, and maybe better dmg on aoe, idk still kinda learning Sub since i changed from Sin
Outlaw’s crime is that it exits, aka remove Roll the Bones or make it an optional choice talent, add non-gun glyphs like throwing a knife or a small bomb, rework animations so it works for other weapons besides swords, cause they currently look stupid, also heard that its currently shackled by a Crackshot Build that people arent fond of.
Honestly I put Crackshot on the back burner and have met with pretty good success not using any Roll the Bones Talents.
I use Killing Spree as my big hitter. I find it does loads of damage with far less finicky set up.
I think it’s odd that Outlaw has two different 45 Src CD big hit finishers in its loadout. Maybe the answer is to create a Killing Spree build path and a Between the Eyes build oath in the talent tree.
ALSO. with vanish being complete rubbish… MY GO TO ESCAPE IS SHADOWY DUEL.
subs lacks CC utility that it used to have. longer the fight goes, the less useful sub rogue becomes due to DR and lack of CDs. shadowy duel fills that void.
and the CC utility to stop heals/casts puts stuns on DR like crazy thus where shadowy duel fills that “void”.
i dont see why shadow dance isnt giving us CDR on our abilities anymore. that was a big nerf. with shadowy duel we at least can have a chance at a kill, but without that and without CDR being reset sub rogue is just absolute trash. they wont buff us at all, they just keep taking our abilities away 1 at a time and leave us out of any patch notes besides removing abilities. so they obviously think that rogue is balanced and a perfect class since there isnt any changes for literally months at a time.
I was optimistic 11.1 was going to start fixing things. As I scrolled through the pages and pages of changes for Hunters and the other classes I started to get my hopes up.
Then I got to the Rogue section.
Hopefully these notes are actually incomplete as people have mentioned, otherwise I’m shelving it for the time being. Too little reward for too difficult a class.
that’s every snare. it broke in DF (i have posts complaining about it and idiots commenting about it saying “oh yeah well if it was ACKTSHULLAY HAPPENING then there would be a lot more posts/videos about it so its probably your UI”, and here we are with all the rogue players ACTUALLY seeing the problem) and its still broken. Magical snares -might- get removed but if they’re in the middle of being applied then they WILL apply during cloak (magical)
