Well now you have me curious, and i’m afraid I might have an answer for you.
How would it play then? Would you want it to stay mobile? Whats the damage profile look like? Would it get grappling hook, shadowstep, or something new?
To be honest, it seems like a lot of the points that have been made so far (admittedly from other threads) seem like pre-melee survival hit all of the marks that would make a ranged rogue.
I do want to make it clear that I’m against this idea, but as a fourth spec (which iirc blizz has already said they wont do again) it could be interesting
Quick concept.
Use shadow shot from stealth, build combo points with sinister shot, keep up slice and dice and rupture on the target. Use crack shot with excess combo points and throw a poison gas bomb for aoe spender.
Basically its very similar to the core rotation for sin and sub but ranged. Overlaps thematics heavily with sub and sin currently with poisons, bleeds and shadowy stuff and less with outlaw which is more like a skirmisher.
Fully mobile while attacking from range, no cast times, but has lower damage baseline than other classes. New mechanic to compensate is ‘hidden shadows’ where after standing still for x seconds cast a shadow in a small area of affect around the rogues current position. increase damage dealt while within the shadow and reduces aoe damage taken while in it.
You have a fully mobile poison themed ranger that fights from the shadow and has incentive for staying still but isnt completely crippled by it. For movement you can pool energy while running to your next spot, set up your shadow and spend pooled energy for more damage.
This is a pretty basic core that would feel very familiar for rogues, feel very versatile without being OP. If damage is too high on movement power can be shifted to hidden shadows.
Shadow step changed to function like door of shadows on venthyr, legion artifacts can still be daggers and rogue throws them instead. (in fact make daggers a ranged weapon blizz pls)
As for pre-rework survival, i think it should have been reworked into a ranged rogue spec. Poisons are really rogues thing. I think a rogue archer would do the job much better tbh.
Well, at range they both look like rogues after all, but if you look closer, you’ll see Sin have mechanics and bonuses focused around bleeds dmg (PvP potential - and poisons), and Sub have not. Even Dragonflight solutions only make wider gap, because Sub gain mechanic linked to Rupture but… makes it shadow dmg or adding a shadow dmg bonus to it.
Sin’s Poisoned Knife applies an active lethal and non lethal poison (so it applies varies of effects as a consequence), Sub’s Shuriken Toss only applies some white dmg.
This “big woop” you mentioned from Sub + different type of dmg output and all mechanics attached to it (find weaknes, bonus dmg as shadow, more Shadowsteps, Shadow Dance mechanic) are all what it makes a whole different spec form Sin. It is what it is.
As I said in other thread, I respect your opinion, I appreciate you are not trolling and you’re posting with class not all have, but your arguments simply didn’t clicked with me.
In fairness i might be underselling the nuances but those nuances are great things to lean into with talent choices.
If we made the basic skills baseline for the spec and made talent nodes for upgrades and removed all mandatory talents you could easily create room in the trees for both specs to coexist and even new specs to exist.
i like both but when playing sub i cant help but think how boring the baseline abilities are, and when playing sin i cant help but think how boring the CD is (not so much in s4 with the 4 set and CDR leg but i digress). I think merging them would compliment them immensely and the new talent system is the perfect place to implement that.
One branch can focus on the bleeds, one other the poisons and the last the shadows. Current sub would be something like most bleed tree and all shadow tree, sin would be all poison and bleed etc.
It wouldnt be hard to remove the boring passive %damage talents and replace them with the mechanical ones that make the spec more interesting.
The fact that they focus on different aspects of what is essentially the same kit is the exact reason they should be merged into one. Subs focus on CDs is a great choice to opt into while sin adds more power to other parts of the kit. The bones are the same but passives or upgrades boost different aspects of the kit, which is what different talent paths should do instead of just giving you back what should be baseline or boring %damage increases.
Honestly i think its a great idea to merge them even without considering a new spec but a new spec would be a great excuse for it.
I think the current differences between specs, you see as nuances, and that make you think they are too close to each other.
That’s way your (interesting) concepts about ranged rogue’s couple of WoW players here consider as conception of a whole other class / hunter, not a rogue.
Agreed, they gave hunters a specialized meld spec, they should give rogues a ranger spec , perhaps similar to DH class make a special pistol weapons that are only rogue avaliable for that
They are having their rogues in Diablo 4 being ranged and meld, they should do the same with WoW rogue
Deadeye main starts sweating… TBF, it’s the only elite build that feels closest to Thief – a lot of stealth resets for power. Daredevil is more monk (though dagger condi daredevil is solid) and Specter is Support Thief (aka, the better condi thief build).
Honestly, I am against the idea of Rogue getting a ranged damage spec. I’ve played P/P Thief in GW2 for a long time and it’s nice but it’s not the “Sneaky-Stealth” mini-game that I look for as a Rogue. At that point, just make a new class instead of reinventing the wheel. Personally, the existing Rogue specs could be a bit more robust in the Stealth category (Shadow Dance is not the path forward here). The pickpocketing quest has not returned since Legion, despite being a major class selling point since Vanilla. I’m sorry, but the negligence of Pick Pocket is at the detriment of the RPG description of the game.
Honestly, I’d be all for a tank or healing spec at this point, but almost exclusively for LFD role bags – I need those augment runes and gold bump!!
I might have said this before. In my opinion, rogues don’t need a whole spec dedicated to range. Hunters fill that role. Instead, a few good ranged abilities would really spice up the class.
I envision a few abilities based on a crossbow. A simple “shoot” to build combo points and a simple finisher to use those combo points. Something that adds a bleed or poison DoT. Maybe toss in a CD or proc ability to amp the damage or reduce energy cost.
There could be a choice between a crossbow and a shuriken
The crossbow has a high initial damage with low damage poison DoT or effect, similar to Shiv.
The shuriken has a low initial damage with high damage bleed, similar to Rupture.
They could also be different than MM hunters by giving their ranged pistols a mid length range. So we can have the Gunslinger rogues be like 20-30 range vs the 40 of MM hunter and their attacks will be weaker combo based with strong finish like we already have between the eyes . Duel wield small crossbows like in Diablo 3 and dual wield pistols would give the spec a great fresh flavor.
You could have said the same about hunters mele spec that we don’t need a mele hunter as we have rogues fill that role already but as you can see survival hunter feels different than playing outlaw rogue and so they can do the same with a gunslinger spec for rogues
I will say I always saw a ranger being more of a rogue spec and not a hunter. Because hunters had pets rangers that we know of did not. Rangers used ranged and melee weapons. So they could do a reverse of a combat build make it mostly ranged and if you get close you use swords. Give it dual pistols hell even give it access to the dark rangers xmog.
Again I never saw the dark rangers as hunters they never had pets and IIRC they used stealth and 1h weapons.
Rogues used to have an ability called deadly throw. It was removed at legion basically you throw a knife and it would slow the target based on how many combo points you used. I used this a lot in pvp and in pve for runners. Again something nice that was removed thanks to legion.
Maybe they could throw glaive and dagger. In Vanilla you had knives you could throw. And they could teleport. So they could be NE warden but in leather armor instead of mail or plate
