Outlaw got completely destroyed by the CDR nerf. They need to revert about 90% of the previous nerfs they’ve made to the spec if they want to keep this nerf. Give us back Take Your Cut, Enduring Brawler, un-nerf Float Like a Butterfly (or at least don’t make the previous 50% nerf stack with the new 20% one…), make it so Ace Up Your Sleeve behaves the same way as it does in PvE. Or just revert the 20% CDR nerf and try something else because that change was NOT it. The entire spec is a delicate balance, and this heavy-handed nerf threw absolutely everything in the gutter, so now we do zero meaningful damage. Meanwhile the rest of the specs in the game have crept up on rogue’s amount of CC, so even that isn’t a selling point anymore when it comes at the cost of not having a single button that hits for a million damage in a world where specs like Havoc (who has a very comparable amount of CC, mobility, and defensive utility) completely dwarf the amount of damage output Outlaw has. Or Arms hitting for 4 million Mortal Strikes into 3 million Executes within 1.5 seconds. Hell, even Survival hunter can hit for 6 million if they get a crit off Flanking Strike. Outlaw just has absolutely zero game-securing kill power so all of its CC and mobility is completely meaningless if your teammate (or you) can just die randomly in a global because of a crit.
We can’t even use the recently buffed stamina talent because we need to dedicate every available talent point to dealing such pitiful damage anyway.
Outlaw’s entire damage profile is 6 seconds every Vanish. That’s it. You save a disarm for it, or literally any other CC in the game, and it’s completely cooked. And when it doesn’t get to spend combo points in that window, it gets even LESS CDR than the 20% nerf.
It’s such a short-sighted change and it genuinely made one of the hardest and most skill expressive specs in the game into the absolute weakest. 100x the effort for 10% of the reward when you can just play a warrior and self-carry with Mortal Strike and Execute crits while your Bladestorm is unpeelable (despite still being able to kick and CC during it lmao). Let’s compare that to Killing Spree, which requires combo points, energy, and has a 1.5 minute cooldown. It breaks roots, but you have to already be within 10 feet of your target or else you can’t even use it for that. Meanwhile you can waste the entire cooldown by having a Binding Shot thrown at your feet, or a monk ranged disarming you from a mile away through your pre-evasion (because monk disarm is special and ignores it), and what’s even better is that when you DO get a full use of this cooldown, you can’t do ANYTHING until it’s finished. So a caster can just hard cast any CC in your face while you can’t kick it or CC them and it’ll complete before Killing Spree ends. Please for the love of god just make this ability immune to CC like Bladestorm, Celestial Conduit, Vengeful Retreat (Glimpse), Metamorphosis, etc. Outlaw is just way too easy to CC out of every tiny window of damage we actually have. Both Subterfuge and Killing Spree are just hard countered by any CC. Literally any CC. It could be a triple DR’d Shockwave from a Warrior and it still instantly cancels Killing Spree no matter how many combo points you spent. And a 3 second Mortal Coil that sends you running away from the Lock is more than enough to completely ignore a 6 second Subterfuge window when they still have to make it back to you (without Shadowstep anymore mind you). And that’s assuming they didn’t just hard cast Fear in your face while you were in the Mortal Coil anyway. Or if you stun them first, maybe you just get Axe Tossed out of it if they’re a Demo Lock. It’s just far too easy to cancel these windows and there are too many checkboxes in the game that need to be checked before Outlaw can do any damage at all. And even then it’s STILL 100% RNG based with Ace procs (which, again, are nerfed even more in PvP).
It’s just… so bad right now. There is genuinely zero reward for playing one of the hardest specs in the game, and I think that’s just a horrible thing to strive for balance-wise. But there are like 10 people who actually play Outlaw so we can’t cry as loud as other specs when they’re “unplayable” (despite never being even remotely as bad as Outlaw is right now). This is what being unplayable actually looks like. The spec straight up does not function right now with these CDR nerfs.
It’s great