“BlizZard balances PVE now with utility in mind also not just PVP and Shadow Dance on a 1 minute CD was too OP which is why they chose to do it that way.”
You’re still not explaining.
You said a thing, but that in no way answers my question.
My guess? it was removed to simplify abilities. now all specs get shadow dance, effectively, and it doesn’t need to be a separate button. They did this with bone spike.
Then they slapped on another half-dozen new abilities. womp wah.
It didnt simplify anything. SD was already a button dedicated to giving us access to stealth abilities in combat. Vanish already had its uses to dodge abilities being casted on you and allow you to leave combat. Now Vanish is doing both. It made things more complicated for no reason. SD itself being a button is a nonissue, its off the GCD. You just bind it to a button youd be pressing rotationally.
Blizzard doesn’t follow anyone’s feedback, lmao. Shadow Dance as a class capstone was such a problem that even they couldn’t ignore it.
The irony is palpable.
Which homogenized all three specs to the point where Blizzard felt forced to take it out. The extra pity charge of Vanish was simply something to assuage the hysterical minority who, for some reason, simply don’t want to play Subtlety.
“Which homogenized all three specs to the point where Blizzard felt forced to take it out. The extra pity charge of Vanish was simply something to assuage the hysterical minority who, for some reason, simply don’t want to play Subtlety.”
Can you link to any quotes, posts, tweets, or any first hand communications to support this? Because I doubt this kind of thing highly without direct proof. You’re saying Blizzard felt “forced” to take something out, and then needed to “assuage” the minority, so put something essentially the same, but worse, right back in.
This makes zero sense, and I’m calling total BS without a source.
A vanish is also a defensive the trade off and not the same as Shadow Dance. Also, Shadow Dance doesn’t require entering stealth and BlizZard doesn’t want Outlaw and Assassination to be balanced around Shadow Dance because it becomes very complicated for them.
Vanish only has a 1.5 second immunity now so in PVP that makes it harder to use as control + offense. Shadow Dance has always been for Sub offense + control.
Vanish is either Control + defense, or Control + offense.
Never Control + offense + defense.
Now with Subterfuge lasting an extra three seconds it could be argued that Vanish is Control + offense + defense but is highly situational.
I have to agree that it was a paltry half way measure replacing Shadow Dance with the second vanish charge.
My feedback was the Prep should have been the cap stone from the start before they went down the shadow dance road.
You’re talking yourself in circles man. You said Shadow Dance is OP.
Then you said, “BlizZard doesn’t want Outlaw and Assassination to be balanced around Shadow Dance because it becomes very complicated for them.”
Where are you getting this? Who says it’s complicated? Having Dance is LESS complicated, BECAUSE it doesn’t require entering stealth. Can you at all explain how you believe that vanish is less complicated than shadow dance? Can you provide any substantive support to indicate “blizzard doesn’t want…” or what they do want?
“Vanish only has a 1.5 second immunity now so in PVP that makes it harder to use as control + offense.”
So? They still gave us another charge of it…and Shadow Dance provided ZERO immunity. Which again seems to fly in the face of your point.
“Vanish is either Control + defense, or Control + offense.
Never Control + offense + defense.”
Yo what does this even mean? Shadow Dance was never all of those things at the same time either. They provide the exact same functionality, only vanish allows the extra and mutually exclusive option to escape, while dance does not. You’re gonna have to explain how you think Shadow Dance is superior to Vanish here…
Mixing up terminology of “control” and “defense” doesn’t help either. They are practically the same thing. We get defense through control…
the only difference is the ability to escape.
That is my reading of the situations really because they went around doing PVP nerfs to Kidney Shot again while doing PVE buffs to CC while removing Shadow Dance as an option for Assassination/Outlaw.
In fact the second nerf to Kidney Shot was pointless for PVP because increasing the CD was a bad change to 30 seconds. Kidney Shot was already inferior to Cheap Shot in DF because of the 5 second restriction in PVP which was the first nerf. That was in fact an indirect buff to Cheap Shot and the second nerf just was another buff to Cheap Shot. Why use Kidney Shot on a 30 second CD for five combo points and energy just for a five second stun in PVP? Pointless. That is why most Rogues just now do vanish + cheap shot off targets instead because Cheap shot can not be dodged. Kidney shot value for off target stuns went way down due to two very pointless nerfs in PVP.
Shadow Dance in DF was everything with CC, offense and utility and they didn’t want to balance around that.
So step 1 they removed the ability of Outlaw and Assassination to even have Shadow Dance as an option. Outlaw has damage cool downs already and so does Assassination. BlizZard didn’t want to balance around a CD doing it all.
Step 2 was removing Soothing Darkness healing from Shadow Dance which literally was over shadowing other healing of Rogue tools. Doesn’t help that Recuperator is bugged.
Keep in mind that BlizZard is okay with Soothng Darkness healing from vanish and also the ability to use CC as that remains untouched by the nerf bat.
Shadow Dance on a 1 minute CD is obviously better than 2 charges of Vanish from a player view point. From BlizZard view point they have a better control and balance of Rogues this way.
This is a repeat of MoP where it will take while for BlizZArd to undo a lot of these nerfs after they wake up from their slumber.
Yup I brought up this point before many times as well.
And with Shadow Dance available to Outlaw and Assassination you started to see some strange talent changes in those respective trees. Outlaw lost dreaddblades as a result of Shadow Dance/Crackshot and Assassination started to shift into a strange territory. Kspree still remains pointless CD really and AR is just an energy CD now. Outlaw literally had Crackshot/Shadow Dance proping up the spec which is just straight up bad. I am not against Sublaw game play but it shouldn’t be the only option or subvert the entire 3/4 of the tree and be neglected.
Except now with their normal availability of use, it has the paradox effect of making every other ability do less damage by comparison and therefore feel worse to press by itself or when choosing to opt out of the supporting talents. The gap isn’t closed by talents to support non-stealth options but instead only double down throughout the tree with multiple infestations of this particular feedback loop, “maximize uptime of Subterfuge.”
This underscores the issue. The class at large should not be that reliant on a single class talent, yet here we are. Shouldn’t it be baseline instead if it’s actually that important?
skill issue.
i have macros that change what ability they show based on true stealth and psuedo stealth (aka subterfuge).
with some savvy macro buttons, you can make your buttons function differently based on [stance:0] and [stance:1].
#showtooltip
/use [stealth][mod:alt]sap;[nostealth]eviscerate
/stopcasting
/use [harm,stealth]pick pocket
@Ichos said the stance conditional for subterfuge broke due to patch, but it turns out i don’t use stance conditional macros at all anymore, except in cata classic.
[stealth] and [nostealth] still work.
for the record, i love subterfuge. no cooldown on spreading garrote is godly, plus those 3 combo points. i wish it lasted longer.
I disagree.
It should be removed completely and so should 2 charges of vanish, they should be then added into the sub tree.
Then assass and outlaw need reworks away from that degenerate play style
the last patch screwed that up, subterfuge is no longer considered stealth, so these macros only work on the first hit. Is anyone else having this issue?
God forbid a stealth playstyle exists for the stealth based class. As long as it does you sad losers will strip it away at every turn instead of proposing your own playstyles. Literally the worst of the rogue community and most of yall dont even do content where your chosen playstyle matters.
For the longest ever time there was a very clear theme with rogue specs.
Sub played around stealth, did high burst in stealth windows and had a bag full of tricks.
Assass had big burst and big dots.
Combat/outlaw didn’t play much around stealth and had high consistent damage and was built a little thicker.
Now literally all 3 rogue specs play around stealth windows
It’s called Subtlety. Been there for twenty years.
Irony.
And it feels great. I cant understand if you straight up dont like it. Thats not a reason to get it removed though.
This is literally the problem that got us to this point. Rogue was never iterated upon from the moment i started playing in Legion til 10.2. Sorry you cant handle the specs being more than “big burst” or “heavy sustain”. If you truly want just that, Classic is that way. Let Retail move on.
I think subterfuge should be removed entirely and vanish should be decoupled from offensive usage too.
But in the mean time, the way I handled this was I use Dominos and have subterfuge page stealth bar when it occurs to stop the confusion.
Sure it feels great, except you don’t need to do it via vanish to accomplish said feeling, removing subterfuge and giving shadow dance as baseline would of solved the issue for a lot of people, in terms of Outlaw, they could simply flavour shadow dance per spec basis, like Adrenaline Rush happens during shadow dance or killing spree usage.
So yeah it feels great, until it doesn’t because notorious staple abilities that were historically defensive is now offensive for no reason.
Retail isn’t moving, at least not forward, Classic has a greater appeal because prior to legion, rogue was FARRRRRRRr more fleshed out and had a clear direction of what each spec is, now its all conditional damage and stacking mechanics, it’s awful and I’m actually surprised anyone would even remotely say they enjoy rogue as it is currently compared to the golden days of rogue design (pre-7.0.3).
So no, lets not let retail move on, because there is a severe bucket of issues with rogue and we would like to play rogue in retail 
And bring Shadow Dance back right?
I hate shadowdance and I rather bring it back if it removes subterfuge as a bandaid fix for the expansion, because realitically speaking there isn’t any major reworks coming, let alone any actual changes to rogues.
bUt fEiNt iS NoW OfF ThE GcD ThAtS HuGe
Yeah Shadow Dance truly was the perfect capstone spell and did what i expect any class capstone to do. Change the gameplay. What actually made it bad previously was nightstalker before hand. Every spec used it differently though.
I dont blame blizz in this instance for a lack of spec direction. Weve seen them trying these last few years. At the same time, every thing they implemented is hated by the playerbase for being overpowered and then is the first thing the playerbase wants removed. Hero talents suck but the little work theve done in their half donkeyed reworks have been good. Those should be kept while we replace the actual useless stuff like Thistle Tea. We shouldnt be removing Shadowdust, we should be making it baseline to expand upon it.
Each spec does have its niche.
Sin is still dot focused with burst windows.
Outlaw is still sustained.
Sub is the big burst by stacking as many CDs as possible.
The talents were always supposed to give options for them to be more than that. Some people hate Crackshot, but its the only thing giving Outlaw any semblance of a burst window.
Shadowdust is disliked for Sub but without it, youre just not bursting as frequently and Sub has 0 sustained damage.
Sin is currently the only spec able to efficiently branch into other niches, however its strangled by slow energy regen in ST.
Each spec has its issues. None of them are getting fixed by removing the stuff that actually had thought put into their creation.