The only downside is simply the fact that Outlaw has a fast paced rotation on par with Enhancement while also doing less damage than Enhancement. I really like Outlaw’s combat flow once it gets going. But then I look at Enhancement, who has a rotation just as hectic, and they’re doing twice the damage of my Outlaw at similar item levels. Why put so much effort into Outlaw when I can put similar effort into Enhancement and do more damage?
Part of Outlaw’s issue is what I’ve continuously been calling the “Roll the Bones” tax. When you’ve got Broadside and/or Skull and Crossbones, the spec feels even better and is able to start pumping out more damage with the extra CP generated. But as soon as you don’t have either of those buffs your damage drops back down again. Ruthless Precision is nice if you manage to get it before entering your Vanish+Between the Eyes spam, but otherwise its a useless buff on par with Buried Treasure, Grand Melee, and True Bearing. The spec really needs to drop Roll the Bones, integrate some lesser form of RtB buffs into its talents or base kit, and then maybe Outlaw can stop doing less damage than other fast-paced specs because Blizzard won’t be too afraid to give the spec more damage only to have RtB turn it into absurdity.
And don’t even get me started on the RNG Hero talent tree. The Outlaw developer has such a stupid hard-on for RNG mechanics, to the point I feel like Trickster is deliberately undertuned for Outlaw just to make sure folks are playing Fatebound, especially since Trickster requires Killing Spree-- the one spell that is almost guaranteed to kill you when you teleport in front of a mob’s heavy damage ability.
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What devs need to do is stop pretending to be stupid and own their mistakes:
“We’re going to make a quintessential cleave class into a ST basically warrior class when it was never designed to be that way. Why is everyone quitting or not playing the class? Herp-a-derp.”
Oh yes, lets make Resto druid only do DPS instead of healing, suck at it, and pretend to be too stupid to figure out why nobody enjoys it anymore. It must be ‘class fantasy’ instead of our faults [new devs] trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
Oh no waits, it’s the players fault, because they magically have a direct hand in screwing up class design when they literally don’t touch the game’s code. It’s their fault. Devs are idiots if they don’t see this problem.
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Because my entertainment is far more valuable than some funny number on a chart that no one cares about and is completely invalidated in 1-3 months, when the muses hit the devs to destroy the meta with nerfs again.
Our issue isn’t even RTB right now. It’s the target cap. The sole reason we aren’t being brought to keys right now is we can’t hit the majority of trash in these dense pulls in most of these dungeons. If they lifted the hard cap with even a 90% reduction soft cap, we’d be instantly doing more damage in basically all of these dungeons.
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I am not a Rogue main, but in my opinion Rogues need a complete rework.
Subtlety should be the highest burst DMG in the game with a high a crazy high skill cap where it is easy to F up but if you are good and play it well you can cloak and burst and recloak and burst and do insane dmg. Then you get group utility by cloaking your team and maybe an ability that you could cloak an ally like a healer when they are about to die and take them out of combat to heal for a few seconds or something.
Assassination should just lean hard into poisons and dots and have a hero talent tree that lets them deploy toxic gas grenades and stuff like that like a pestilence rogue.
Outlaw is where they could lean into their pirate fantasy that they love and just focus it around crit pistol shots, crazy high mobility and luck/gambling based mechanics.
That is just my opinion though what are your guys thoughts?
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I could link probably thirty or more posts just since the expansion’s initial PTR, from this forum, basically asking where our rework is at in some form or another. We’ve been asking for it for going on 2 years, longer if you consider that the mid-Dragonflight changes are barely worthy of being considered an actual rework.
Shaman got 2 waves of reworks in that time, and they are notorious for being the step-child class that gets nothing. So, apparently Rogues are the new Shamans.
We’ll see one as soon as they replace the current person in charge with someone that isn’t stuck in 2008 mentally. Remember, this is the same group of devs that fought tooth-and-nail for multiple expansions to force players to hit Slice-and-dice solely because “it’s a ritual that every rogue must do.”
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Come on stay on brand, where is the “Middle management” blaming
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To be frank I do not think a rework is necessary.
Hybrids complained about the tax but it appears they are now attaching a tax on Rogues because of stealth. Stealth is no longer that powerful since they have put more anti stealth tools in the game since Legion. Worse, all three specs rely on stealth to do damage.
Remove a lot of the penalties Rogues have taken due to stealth and vanish aka Pre Legion and the Rogues specs come back to life. Watch and see how popular Rogues are in MoP classic as further proof.
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What do you think a ‘Dev’ is? It’s a meaningless euphemism for middle management - yeah, I worked with people like this for years. 90% of their ideas are stolen, and they don’t develop anything, they just tell other people what to do and steal credit for it.
The ‘developer’ title is like the ‘director of’ title. It’s BS to put on your resume when you don’t have any real talent ‘developing’ or ‘directing’ anything.
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Truthfully it is a collection of individuals doing their own thing which is why we see such disparity between hero talents from each spec and class.
Some are very well thought out and some are just afterthoughts. If it was a collective team working all together they would either all be well thought out or after thoughts all together.
It’s just very sad when someone who actually did software development for a company can point out how they keep fumbling everything that should be very obvious to anyone who can do basic algebra.
Do they honestly think nobody noticed they added fatigue RnG to RtB? This has been another stupid shadow nerf since they added it, because part of what made Outlaw strong was being able to reroll to stack the odds, and took away the much more manageable CD off Slice and Dice. How is that a nerf? It added a more extreme variation to needed damage output on progression by justifying every other nerf afterwards to compensate for the change, because it altered the outliers of 5 buffs on io logs - not difficult to follow, they act like it’s impossible to understand, because ‘algebra hard’.
Every lazy alteration they do (like this one) just ruins the class and gameplay, and it’s getting to the point where they don’t even know how to fix it because these changes span over years now.
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I play rogue for PVP RP. That includes combat, but also having the element of surprise, quick kills (sin/sub), sustain for outlaw, escaping alive, and sneaking around.
Sin bleed + poison build is good for sustained combat and CC. Sub shroud has a 100% speed buff that can help some important but niche scenarios.
I don’t think PVP rogue needs a complete rework, but outlaw could use some help with its identity and group utility. On the PVE side of things, I agree rogue skills aren’t leveraged well in dungeons/raids.
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Funny enough, its mainly cause i liked the stealth gameplay, particularly from TLOU and Batman Arkham.
I would probably blame those 2 games in particular for me liking being a sneaky guy, and Rogue just ended up being my pick for that reason, have been maining it since MoP.
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Honestly I could take or leave the gameplay, for me it was always the invisibility and the style of duel handed swords.
I can’t scratch that invisibility itch with any other class……I don’t like to stare at cat rear.
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I have always been a fan of the fantasy aspect of rogues. Just the whole idea of stealth and bleeds and poisons has always intrigued me. From DND rogues to here. Plus, the ability to stealth past 90% of the stuff in this game just feels sooooo awesome.
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Any fantasy game, I have to start out a rogue or thief of some sort. I ran a rogue through legion and figured out how to do great damage in all specs. Those were the days… Now it’s warlock day in and day out, not that I’m complaining, warlock’s been with me 11 years!
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The reason Trickster is undertuned compared to Fatebound is just because of the Lucky Coin (+7% Agility). The lucky coin isn’t hard to get either, once you learn how to stack the coins, you can maintain it for +80% of the fight. If they took out that coin, and balanced out Tails/Heads, they both would be closer on par.
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its the only class where you perpetually can level. there is no plateau
Long, ubiquitous stuns are amazing in combat. In fact, moving Kidney Shot to being the longest low-cooldown ST stun and allowing Cheap Shot to be a longer stun from stealth–easily some of the better parts of this expansion for us. In open world play, the ability to breezily stealth/sap (and, in some cases, simply remain stealthed) while questing never gets old. Also, while sometimes frustrating due to reliance on others to create reset opportunities, Rogue PvP can be real satisfying when it works out well. Bleeds and poisons and guns are just thematically cool. Sprint is great. Improved Evasion, Elusiveness, Cheat Death, and Cloak are great. AoE Blind is pretty good. Gouge has had better days, but it’s still fun. There’s a lot of uniqueness within the kit that makes us stand out at times.
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There’s also depth to why someone wouldn’t want to play Rogue, though. Here’s the biggest one that comes to mind for me these days…
We’re the only role-immobile, pure DPS class (ie. we can’t tank or heal) lacking a lust/hero/brez, which then 1:1 translates to receiving far fewer group invites in the blind via LFG past the first week of a season. Mages and hunters have lust. Locks have a brez. We lack any of it, and the absence/omission hasn’t ever been super clear or explained by designers.
That said, parts of our kit truly are beneficial to allies when raiding or running keys, but they are easily confused in the minds of pugs as their own play improving as opposed to our CC/DR helping them. Ironically, the fact that we don’t have the larger must-invite abilities feels like how devs used to design omni-role classes with hybrid taxes in mind because they could more or less cover anything the game threw at them. Our survivability is overrated. The power of stealth is overrated. Our damage (and, and particularly, our ability to cover a lot of damage scenarios/profiles at once) is overrated.
If you check up on it, our M+ participation numbers routinely go up a little in the topmost difficulties, but we’re otherwise rock-bottom. If you play rogue, expect to need friends or pray to the gods that someone lets you into their ~10 keys. We’re all too often misunderstood as a wasted invite. I’ve had hilariously confused moments where the same group leaders declining my invite will scoff at the idea that rogues have trouble getting M+ invites.
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