TL;DR - Classes that end up iced by the devs end up iced by the community. Where’s our bluepost?
Also: This post is not necessarily meant to be an indictment of any specific developer or the renovations already brought to Rogue in Dragonflight. I love playing this class, and I want our designer to succeed.
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This final week before the launch of 10.1.5 is probably a good moment to soapbox at our future a little. It’s a holiday week in the states. It’s the onset of summer’s full swing. Other games like D4 and FFXVI have been rolling along in ways that pull the attentions of subscribed players. People in our community have likely accomplished close to or all of what they were hoping for out of the early season - or not, and they’re breaking until new content and changes arrive. It’s a familiar moment of pause as we get to think about what comes next.
It’s also a unique time with regard to our class outlook. Though, you probably wouldn’t intuit that without being a close audience to our class server on Discord. For some time, players have clamored about the glaring omission of Rogue changes suggested in both the May 11th preview for Fractures in Time and the subsequent rework-level changes afforded to all classes named (and various others unnamed) in that same preview. That is openly known here online. However, if you have been following the rogue Discord closely, you’d also learned the following: the aforementioned Rogue changes have been delayed because reasons, seemingly until 10.2, but only maybe.
Fair enough. But where is our bluepost?
There are many posts on the forums about how Dragonflight has been problematic for rogues, but few seem to get at the biggest specific challenge we’ve weathered this tier - the lack of bluepost acknowledgement amid aggressive changes. We’ve watched our representation in Mythic languish. We’ve watched our applications in M+ LFG slam against the brick wall of bimonthly Afflicted weeks. We’ve eyerolled in the mire of our traditional gripes, in addition to the continued mire of veiled (and overt) nerfs across all aspects of our alleged remaining niche. We’ve dealt with a lot of this before. It’s been a time.
However, what hasn’t been contextualized well enough is how marginalized our class has become within the stagnant definition of what people think we are in the absence of clearer communication and design.
For example, let’s talk about M+ - The devs are big on talking about designing for all levels of play, as opposed to just designing for the very topmost of players. Yet, rogues (particularly Sin and OL) are stuck in the incredibly awkward position of being at odds with current design (Afflicted? Hello?) while also being judged by the evergreen standards of the topmost static groups that don’t need to sweat their comp if they decide to include a rogue and specifically plan around their success. We’re constantly found in LFG situations where keyholders pass over our applications while also mocking any claim that we’re underrepresented in keys. Rogues were great for very specific reasons for a long time, and you can always find a rogue in the highest-timed keys. That, in addition to frequent sloppy tier-listing by streamers, has stuck with people as an indication that nothing’s wrong with our class.
“You’re a rogue,” they say, declining our application for a lust/hero class that can trivialize affixes with a totem. “You’re overpowered and have absolutely no problem getting invites.”
That reaction doesn’t really account for how the game has changed over time, and it isn’t exclusive to M+. Though, M+ LFG is where you find the most extreme examples of these biases form up. Rogues have been frozen in time in the minds of folks that simply don’t know better and/or don’t want to admit that, when building a key in 10.1, they’re either building with redundant hybrid benefits in mind or building with excessive damage in mind - or both at once. In almost every LFG situation, there are better options than Rogue, a fact that is clearly supported by S2 RIO data.
And all of this is a problem of communication that is only really made worse by silence, which is what we have now. Regardless of the reasons for delays, depriving class communities of insulating bluepost updates has always led to the rest of the playerbase to assume that devs design in isolation and that the class in question is being ignored for a player-positive reason. What’s worse, if the bluepost silence is only ever broken by hyperbolized, articulated posts like the following, which is taken from the January 27th writeup on the then-imminent Ret rework,…
…then we not only have the former problem, having people assume that maybe we’re being ignored by our devs for good reasons, but also a new problem and new bias that has people incorrectly thinking that we’re still something we merely used to be. We have immutably S-tier mobility. We always have. Nothing needs to change, even if we do end up with dev attention. Wrong.
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Blueposts matter. The game has clearly changed plenty over time, and, outside of having the RNG slot machine of spec FOTM balloon one of our kits every season, rogues have perennially struggled to keep up in WoW Nouveau™, due in no small part to the willingness - or lack thereof - of officials to explain their decisions when they make them. The inclusion and then omission of Rogue in the plan for 10.1.5 has made it clear that so much of that starts with how designers and managers choose to acknowledge certain classes when things come up. Optics matter. Player perception matters.
For now, it seems like we get to slide into 10.1.5 without an official mention for what might have happened, why we didn’t have more communication, and what we can expect following a really rough half-tier. It doesn’t seem like we’re getting a clear answer for why Afflicted was designed the way it was, why certain specs had to sit RIO gains for weeks at a time while others were able to feast. We remain unanswered in our role-immobility in a game landscape that has the roles of other classes expanding outward to meet new challenges. In an expansion billed as a sea change in how devs connect with communities, we get more of the constant Priest → Shaman’ing in every class update.
Forget tuning. Forget reworks. Forget niche. The only buff we need in 10.1.5 is blue acknowledgement.