Hi. For some background, I was the fourth highest damage tank rogue in Sunken Temple on Warcraftlogs, have several rank 1s in the current raid tier on heat 2, and have been rogue tanking since Phase 1. I’ve been on this train through the highs and the lows and have a very solid understanding of this niche class and specialization.
To be clear right off the bat, I understand the need for nerfs. I don’t necessarily think 20% is even too heavy handed. The issue with this nerf is that it simply is not going to cause the desired impact among the people who are invested enough to maximize the potential of the class. We will still be a balance issue after these changes.
For context, back in Phase 2 and Phase 3 it was very common for rogue tanks to forego Blade Dance in the leg slot and to opt for Envenom instead. We had about 50% baseline avoidance with WBs at this point in time, so this meant going from dodging 40% to 50% of attacks (25% damage taken physical increase) and losing our 20% physical reduction. In an optimized speedrunning raid this tradeoff would never have been worth it for the mediocre dps gains of envenom versus the extra healing required, but this was the situation regardless. Going into Phase 4 a lot of conjecture was made of a 440 defense build which dropped JAFW as well as continuing to run envenom in the leg rune. Neither of these setups ended up lasting, not because they were impossible (although the 440 defense setup dropping JAFW was admittedly unrealistic for threat and consistency reasons), but because the gains off of playing the intended way with JAFW, BD, RWTP didn’t justify taking either of them seriously.
From my point of view, there are four primary problems with Tank rogue in the current phase.
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The damage is way too high. Even with a 20% damage nerf, we’d still be the top dps.
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While 1) is also true, we are also the best zero-dps tank vs physical (IE, tanking Garr adds or any mega-high damage output situations). By running a subtlety build with Ghostly Strike and preparation we can cycle Ghostly Strike → Evasion → Ghostly Strike → Preparation → Ghostly Strike → Evasion → Ghostly Strike for nearly a minute of incredible avoidance. I haven’t bothered to calculate going into the next phase but it is extremely likely that with ghostly strike up we will be hitting 90%ish avoidance in this setup.
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Our gear and knowledge requirement to play properly is extremely high. We have a lot of options that are either fully traps (dagger tanking, currently) or are extremely situational. This leads to a lot of very poor performers in the spec that can’t function in the role and give us a bad reputation generally. There’s also a lot of jank in that Unfair Advantage rewards us with a ton more single target dps for having more mobs on us.
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We have weird incentives that make us struggle badly as offtanks. We lose an incredible amount of damage not having aggro, as well as losing RWTP stacks for our hp.
These are the things that, in my opinion, should be the priority to change. Specifically giving -20% physical damage with Blade Dance and Just A Flesh Wound together up together will, in most situations, change none of them.
Simply put, as a general rule rogue tanks will just stop running blade dance (most of the time) again. We will end up running some combination of DPS and PvP gear, most likely 4 piece T2, and some purple PvP gear and off pieces, so we don’t have to worry about not having DEF scaling anymore. This will amount to a noticeable physical damage taken increase but the vast majority of the time it’s not going to matter. Even if, say, on Lashlayer and Nefarian we can’t be healed through doing this we can just run Blade Dance for those specific fights. On fights where we don’t need taunt, we can also run 440 defense and just run Blade Dance without taunt, and this option will be even more appealing as time goes on and we get closer and closer to full avoidance cap. Or, on fights we can’t tank in full dps gear, we can just DPS and have some other class with a full tank build for those fights. The worst aspect of this is on tank swap fights we will also have the option of having a dramatic upwards spike in damage when we’re not tanking (using Carnage instead of UA) and potentially just running 2p t2 to maintain RWTP stacks. This will essentially lock us in as the optimal offtanks in most situations, filling the role that feral druids have been in various points in classic.
This also won’t affect our performance in 0 dps situations. We will still be incredible in our ability to do things like tank Garr adds, we will still be insanely tanky if we choose to play things straight and probably still outdps other tanks in a lot of situations. There will still be an incredibly large difference between the tryhard tanks in the know of all this who pick and choose when to use all the different pieces of our tanking kit and the ones who play the ‘standard’ path straight. All these issues won’t change.
I would like to instead propose the following changes are made, in order of what I consider most important / optimal thing to change to least important. The numbers are not incredibly precise but fundamentally the aim with these changes is to hit our DPS, move avoidance cap further away, and make the “standard” playstyle of JAFW RWTP BD a bit weaker but still the best option we have in most situations.
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UA has needed a nerf since the rework. It isn’t healthy that even on extremely large target counts it beats out carnage, and it also rewards gameplay of stacking all the mobs on one tank which I’m not a fan of. I think that both nerfing the % of damage dealt by the hit and increasing the timer should be done together. Note that according to the sim (which is the best thing I have), if UA became worse than carnage that would already be a substantial dps nerf on single target, and more in situations where you’re tanking multiple mobs but only one is relevant. Even if it’s still the best option a large hit to UA would do a lot to both rein in tank rogue, make daggers more interesting as an option, and decrease the incentives to do things that I subjectively consider “unhealthy”, which are big contributors to our damage on certain fights. Reducing it to 70% main hand damage and every 1.5 seconds, or something else that hits more precisely how much you want to reduce its damage, would be a great change that wouldn’t impact playstyle.
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I don’t have as long a write up about this but simply put Saber Slash is extremely strong and it’s a contributor tank rogue being so strong and DPS rogue isn’t exactly floundering. I think that Saber Slash should be nerfed. Keep in mind as well that if tank rogues were forced to switch to daggers based off of current phase mechanics it already would have been a very large dps decrease.
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If reasonable hits to these don’t get our damage to where you want it then if you need to add a global damage reduction just be careful that it is done in a way that doesn’t incentivize either playing 440 defense with blade dance and no JAFW or playing DPS gear with JAFW and no blade dance. If there’s a lot of tank swaps coming up, you can probably get away with just tying it to JAFW, which is a much better idea than tying it to BD.
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Furthermore, I think that our defensive tools should be hit as well. I think that 30% is simply too high on roll with the punches, I think it should be dropped to 25%. I also think that blade dance should be dropped down to 5% parry to help move the avoidance cap a bit further away and weaken the ghostly strike evasion ghostly strike setups. I don’t think it would be as bad to have us top DPS if we weren’t also so durable. Absolutely Roll With The Punches should be nerfed a bit but I think the hit to blade dance would be a good idea as well.
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As an aside, what I would ABSOLUTELY not do is attach negative incentives to Blade Dance. People were already not running it in previous phases. This is the first phase where we have been appropriately incentivized to run tank-oriented gear and all our runes and I think that, balance issues aside, this is the healthiest we’ve been playstyle and gearing wise. Nerfing either the defense to AP scaling or anything along the lines of what we’ve currently datamined simply ends in blade dance not being run or defense gear not being run. I like Blade Dance being incentivized and I don’t think its better for anyone if tank rogues get split into a group using it doing normalish damage and another group doing way more damage than any other tank.
These are just my thoughts and I’m just one person but I want to stress again that the current changes will not have anywhere near the intended results and you will be forced to come back to the design board again to figure out a way to fix these problems again. I think UA and SSL getting nerfed is a much better idea than what is currently planned, and if an appropriate hit to both of them doesn’t do what you want then I’d attach the damage decrease to JAFW.
As an aside, I don’t think the tier 2 tanking 6pc playstyle would be very fun, and at the same time I think it would be a potential balance issue being able to spam indefinite 20 energy sinister strikes, especially with weapons that use procs that aren’t affected? By the 20% physical damage reduction. I’m not saying don’t do it if you’ve tested it, but I think you should see about potentially doing something else for our T2 tank bonus if you want to make a main gauche oriented set. Even if its not as strong as I feel like it might end up being, I don’t think its going to be fun to be GCD capped clicking buttons forever with energy no longer functioning as a resource.