Official Patch 5.3 Rogue Changes: The Breakdown

The third major patch of the Mists expansion arrives in the U.S. on May 21! Several rogue-related changes are on the menu, and they are almost entirely PvP oriented. In a teeny nutshell:

• Shuriken Toss will be nerfed (mostly).
• Cloak and Dagger will be nerfed.
• Find Weakness (Subtlety) will be buffed in PvE and nerfed in PvP.
• Revealing Strike (Combat) will be buffed.
• Killing Spree (Combat) damage will be adjusted in PvP.
• Glyph of Cheap Shot will be nerfed.
• Glyph of Garrote will be nerfed.
• Recuperate will be buffed in PvP.
• Tricks of the Trade will get a minor, extremely specific tweak that doesn’t affect them, but does nerf death knights.

For more in-depth details on each of these changes, step inside. (C’mon in; nothing to be afraid of. Promise. ish.)

Dev Interviews: Rogue Bits from Arena Junkies, Gamebreaker

In the run-up to Patch 5.3′s launch this week, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and Brian “Holinka” Holinka, among other senior WoW designers, have been making the round on various fansites to preview the patch and explain their thinking behind many of the changes in store.

The Arena Junkies interview with GC and Holinka, which posted over the weekend, includes a few highly rogue-relevant bits, as does today’s interview with Gary Gannon and Olivia Grace on a special episode of gamebreaker.tv’s Legendary. Notable roguey excerpts are copied below. (In the case of the Gamebreaker interview, the transcription is mine, since the source is a video. The AJ transcript excerpts will be copy-pasted as-is from AJ’s site.)

The Find Weakness Change: Making Spells Different in PvE/PvP (Arena Junkies)

(I ranted about this one early this morning.)

Sam: PvE and PvP changes seem to collide very often, do you guys believe that balancing both may require a lot of specific PvP and PvE only changes? An example would be Find Weakness in 5.3.

Brian: Yes, and when we do it. Find weakness is a great example where PvE needed a buff and it would’ve cost big problems to PvP. We keep it in mind and Frost bomb is another example. We try not to do it too often, it’s a lot of things to keep track of. We’re the designers and people on Arena Junkies are really passionate players that really keep up on all the changes, but a lot of players are not. To ask our general player base that your spell does this and it does half damage or 25% or something like that, it’s really not something we want to do too often. Especially hey we want eviscerate to hit 10% less on players. That’s really inconsistent and a tough thing. We usually do it when it’s really a significant thing such as Find Weakness is 50% less and Frost bomb is 40% less.

Greg: There’s also this persistent, I’ll just call it a myth, that if we just bite the bullet and make 2 versions of every spell suddenly we’ll have class balance nailed and it’ll never be a problem again. I’m pretty confident if we went ahead and split sub rogues into 2 abilities on every ability with different damage numbers you’ll still see players saying why they can’t just tune down this one ability that’s costing pvp burst problem. In other words players will still want us to make changes even if we have the numbers split up, I don’t think it’ll suddenly make players feel their class is viable in every situation

Why Rogues Are Being Nerfed (Arena Junkies)

Sam: In the history of changes a lot of nerfs and buffs are really large, which usually changes the “balance” of one class from one to another such as warrior and rogues last patch. Warriors were arguably the top notch class in 5.2 but kind of went to the bottom barrel. Rogues basically had the opposite happen to them. Do you guys think smaller changes would be more ideal or how would you look at it?

Brian Holinka: Obviously when we can we would like to make smaller changes. I think what you saw with rogues in 5.2 was that there were a lot of calls for their survival to be improved. So we made Prep baseline, took Cloak off, so they weren’t constantly unpeelable for 12 seconds, and moved it to a short CD. I think these were good changes, but what pushed rogues over the edge was we tried to create some talents to make them more attractive and give them variety. Shuriken Toss, Mark for Death, and Cloak and Dagger, those were all probably a little bit too much. 5.3 Rogues were really about reigning in those talent changes. We kept the survivability changes the same but we wanted to reign in the unpeelable Cloak and Dagger, the ranged play style of Shuriken Toss, and those were I think really smart changes. We didn’t also nerf Mark for Death and a bunch of other changes. The Find Weakness change was mainly for burst on higher armor targets. We thought that wasn’t appropriate. We made some changes in 5.2 that didn’t mean to be buffs, but for talent choices to be more interesting and we needed to reign those in.

Revisiting Rogue Talents for PvP: 5.2 and 5.3 (Legendary)

Gary Gannon: How do you feel the [PvP class] balance has been in 5.2?

[...]

Brian Holinka: I think there were some situations where we were trying to make some talents more interesting from 5.1 to 5.2. For example [...] there was a rogue ability called Versatility, and it was not really seeing much play. So we created a new one called Marked for Death. In other situations, like, for instance: [...] Preparation was another ability that we actually thought all rogues could benefit from having. So there we had to create a new one, Cloak and Dagger.

So, we were doing a lot of talent work, and in some places, we just overshot a bit. We felt like it made some classes a little bit too good and the talents were just a little bit too good, so we tried to rein those in.

We base our balance feedback on a lot of factors: We look at representations; distribution of ratings across all specs and classes; how people are faring within our team, how they’re playing; we talk to some of the very high level players on a very constant basis. We try and get a sense of where problems lie, and then we try and fix things that we feel are big problems for the overall gameplay of the game — where it just makes everybody’s life a little bit less fun — and we try and affect those.

There’s situations where maybe you can say this or that has made this class even more competitive, but there’s also situations where this talent is just one-shotting people. So we have to look at that, and we have to understand that it’s made the game less fun to play.

Our goals are basically: try and make specs and classes competitive; try and make the overall gameplay environment fun; and then, we wanna say, try and make some talents interesting, and try and make rotations interesting and fun to play. Sometimes we make changes that are a little bit out of priority there, but that’s generally what we try to do. And I think, going in from 5.2 to 5.3, that was a lot of our goal, was to kind of rein in some of the things that got out of control.

Though these three chunks were especially rogue-directed, large sections of both interviews are likely to be of great interest to any PvPing rogue, so be sure to read/tune in to them for a more complete discussion of upcoming changes — and some changes potentially in store for 5.4 and beyond.

 

Ruffy Rants: Patch 5.3 and the PvE/PvP Ability Chasm

For once, the ginormous pit of nothingness that is my WoW PvP experience may actually be a good thing.

As I have often stated on this blog, I am a PvP wuss. Although I’ve dabbled in it a few times during the 4.5 years I’ve been playing WoW, I’ve inevitably quit for two primary reasons:

• The feeling that I’m actively playing against other human beings, most of whom probably know what they’re doing a hell of a lot better than me, makes me crap my pants a little. OK, a lot. And I only have so much money to spend on pants in a given year.
• That feeling is reinforced by all the times I feel like I’m maybe actually doing things kinda-sorta right, and yet I still am getting my ass handed to me by someone who simply outgears me.

For the first time since I started playing, I feel like a PvP-related patch is actually speaking directly at me. “Hey, Rfeann,” it’s saying. “Don’t be afraid, man. It’s cool. You can come back in the water again. I swear the crocodiles aren’t… well, OK, they’re still there, and they REALLY want to eat you. Like, they’ve already drawn up a whole 10-course tasting menu based around your various internal organs. But their teeth are blunter, so it’s totally cool. Just take a quick dip, maybe?”

And I’m gonna do it. It helps that, shortly after the patch drops, I’ll be starting the part of the legendary quest chain that involves some battleground play; that’ll be my opportunity to dive back in and see how bloody I get.

I’ve got hope that the main systemic PvP changes in store for 5.3 — in particular, resilience going baseline and PvP gear being scaled and removed from the upgrade system — will make it less likely that I’ll find myself demoralized and obliterated in the blink of an eye by ubergeared players who are salivating at the chance to chop off my arm, beat me to death with it and then carry it with them over to the graveyard so that when I respawn, the first thing I will see is my own arm giving me the middle finger as I’m instantly murdered again.

The question is: Are these changes going to be enough to make me *stick with* PvP long enough to get over the other problem I listed above: That I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and am intimidated by all those other players who do?

Two of WoW’s leading design folks, the ever-present Twittermongers Brian Holinka (PvP chief) and Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street (lead systems designer human guy person), were recently interviewed by ArenaJunkies’ Sam “Vanguards” Kwok about the big changes in store for Patch 5.3. Included in the interview is this exchange, which drives straight to the heart of my lingering worry over PvP design:

Sam: PvE and PvP changes seem to collide very often, do you guys believe that balancing both may require a lot of specific PvP and PvE only changes? An example would be Find Weakness in 5.3.

Brian: Yes, and when we do it. Find weakness is a great example where PvE needed a buff and it would’ve cost big problems to PvP. We keep it in mind and Frost bomb is another example. We try not to do it too often, it’s a lot of things to keep track of. We’re the designers and people on Arena Junkies are really passionate players that really keep up on all the changes, but a lot of players are not. To ask our general player base that your spell does this and it does half damage or 25% or something like that, it’s really not something we want to do too often. Especially hey we want eviscerate to hit 10% less on players. That’s really inconsistent and a tough thing. We usually do it when it’s really a significant thing such as Find Weakness is 50% less and Frost bomb is 40% less.

Greg: There’s also this persistent, I’ll just call it a myth, that if we just bite the bullet and make 2 versions of every spell suddenly we’ll have class balance nailed and it’ll never be a problem again. I’m pretty confident if we went ahead and split sub rogues into 2 abilities on every ability with different damage numbers you’ll still see players saying why they can’t just tune down this one ability that’s costing pvp burst problem. In other words players will still want us to make changes even if we have the numbers split up, I don’t think it’ll suddenly make players feel their class is viable in every situation

I’ve seen this argument many, many times over the past few years, from designers and players alike. It used to make a lot more sense to me then that it does now. There is a perpetual, stated reluctance within the WoW design team to create PvP and PvE versions of every spell, and the justification given is concern that 1) it’ll be confusing for players and 2) it won’t necessarily solve balance issues.

Those are both valid concerns. But here’s the thing: I am *already* confused out of my gourd by the difference between PvE and PvP. They are, at the most basic level of gameplay, utterly and completely divergent from one another. When I am fighting another player, virtually *none* of the rules apply that apply when I’m questing, dungeoning or raiding. A player enemy has a different health pool from an NPC. Has a different toolkit. Has different strengths and weaknesses — and those strengths and weaknesses vary depending on the person’s class, spec and knowledge/experience level. And a player enemy is often impossible to predict, particularly for a casual player like me with very little PvP experience.

And on top of all of that, the spells that really matter are *already* entirely different for PvP than PvE. To know that — and to have my brain turn to mush right out the gate — I don’t need to look any further than my crowd control spells. Not only do they have a fraction of their duration in PvP than they do in PvE (Blind: one minute? nope: EIGHT SECONDS), but they also are affected by diminishing returns, which is a stunningly intricate, exceedingly complex system that I’m pretty sure works more or less like this:

I open from stealth with a stun. You are stunned! Take that, nefarious ne’er-do-well!
The stun ended, but I don’t like it when you move. I stun you again! Ha, pusillanimous pig! I shall perforate you with my pointy petards of piercing!
Oh, crap, you came out of that quicker than I expected. Now you’re hurting me. I’m going to Blind you and get some distance. Look at me, I am so clever!
Wait, that didn’t work at all. You’re still hurting me, and now someone’s laughing at me in BG chat because they said I can’t use Blind on someone who was just feared three times in a row.
OK, um, crap, I’m gonna Disarm you OH GOD THAT BARELY LASTED TWO SECONDS WHAT IS HAPPENING EVASION VANISH VANISH OGOD MY ARM I’M BEING BEATEN WITH MY OWN ARM

Arm removal aside, I realize that’s probably not the most realistic example, but I wanted to break up this long-ass blog post with something listy. :) My point is: There are so many types of CC — and what shares diminishing returns with what and for how long feels so arcane, inaccessible and difficult to track — that it’s all a huge confusing jumble in my head. Which is bad, because as a rogue, I know CC is my PvP livelihood, and driving other people mad in battlegrounds seems like it’d be a lot of fun if I knew what the heck I was doing.

But I don’t. For me, PvE and PvP are already vastly different from one another. So, when I read that designers are reluctant to alter the amount of damage a specific ability does in PvE because it’d be different from PvP, it almost makes me laugh. I think: Do those guys think I’d even *notice* something like that?

Top PvPers would notice it, sure — it would be *huge* for them. But they already know PvP inside and out as it is; they will adjust to a change the same way raiders adjust to changes, by factoring it in, adapting and moving on (or complaining about it endlessly in forums and on Twitter).

Me? I’m still too busy trying to remember whether it’s been 18 seconds or 14 seconds since my last stun ended to give a crap whether my Eviscerate will be slightly weaker against a player target than it is against a raid boss who’s three levels higher than me and has 1.2 BILLION health.

So, yes, I’m looking forward to hopefully having my arm handed to me less often when I dip back into the PvP pool once Patch 5.3 launches. But I’ve already spent years trying to master the complexities of end-game *PvE* on my rogue; even if I’m staying alive longer in PvP come 5.3, I’m not sure I’ll have the energy to wrap my brain around that morass of details as well. And the complexities of PvP — which even *casual* players like me need to understand in order to achieve satisfying success — don’t look like they’re changing much anytime soon.

This Week in Rogueball: May 10-16, 2013

Time for a new experiment!

Here’s a quick roundup of stuff relevant to WoW rogues that happened, or was said, in the past week:

In the Live Game

• It looks like sometime on May 16 they implemented a hotfix that inadvertently nerfed the crap out of the legendary meta gem for melee DPS. It was quickly reverted, but if you’ve got that gem equipped and your DPS weirdly dropped yesterday, now you know why.

Patch 5.3

• PvP chief Brian Holinka reaffirmed that, despite the nerfs in store, he thinks rogues will still be better in Patch 5.3 than they were in 5.1.
• Patch 5.3 PTR: Death knights (particularly Unholy) got a damage nerf — via a targeted nerf to *our* Tricks of the Trade spell. It doesn’t affect our DPS at all, but let’s be annoyed about it anyway.
• We still have no launch date for Patch 5.3, by the way. It’s looking pretty likely that shit’ll go down next Tuesday (5/21) or the Tuesday after. Also, I think “shit’ll” just became my new favorite word. [Updated] Patch 5.3 is likely launching next Tuesday (5/21), by the way, as announced by Blizzard a few hours after I initially posted this. “Shit’ll” is still my new favorite word, though, and I’m sorry I struck through it. Forgive me, shit’ll!

Blizzfolk Interactions + Random Tidbits

• We learned that you can’t use a Potion of Luck on a Vine-Cracked Junkbox in hopes of getting extra loot from it.
• Holinka appeared to disagree with players who felt that Marked for Death was overpowered in PvP.

From the World Wide Ninjaweb

• Encrypted Text this week provided a rundown of five particularly helpful rogue macros.
• A few of us had a pretty cool conversation in the WoW rogue forum, for a couple of pages starting here, about how much rogues have changed (or haven’t changed) since Cataclysm.
• Similarly, a forum thread on how people would redesign our three specs has been impressively cordial and constructive (for the most part), and is now five pages long.
• I started a comprehensive collection of rogue-related Blizzfolk tweets that you all should visit every single day and share meals with it and hug it and tell it it’s very pretty.

And that’s this week in rogueball (TWIRB).

R-Cubed Site Update: You Can Haz All the Warcraft Rogue Tweets

Yep, it’s a blog post about a post on this blog. That feeling you just had? It’s your BRAIN BECOMING ESPLODED.

Since I started this little roguey home on the Web half a year ago, WoW designers’ and community managers’ use of Twitter to communicate with players has shot up into the stratosphere. For people like me, who use Twitter for Warcrafty chatting way more often than is healthy, I have never felt more directly engaged and tuned-in to what the brains behind the game are thinking about and working on. It’s pretty freaking cool.

The blessing, for all of you who read this blog and other rogueish fansites, is that we have more to tell you than ever about what designers and CMs have been saying about the class. The curse, for those of us who manage to somehow fool you into thinking our words are worth reading, is that there’s more info than ever to try to keep track of and summarize.

For a while, I was creating a new bloggy post on here every time a new Twitter conversation took place that was relevant to our class. Earlier in the spring, though, shit just got too real: When folks like Ghostcrawler and Brian Holinka are flinging dozens of tweets per day into the ether, it’s a serious challenge finding the time to do anything more than scan them with my eyeballs and quickly save links to the roguely ones.

Enter the Roguetwitpendium. Formerly the Home for Wayward Rogue Tweets (a place where I dumped tweets that I hoped to write up in a future blog post), it’s now a mostly-in-date-order, mostly-sort-of-kind-of-grouped-by-topic listing of every single rogue-related tweetversation I’ve seen that involved a WoW designer or community manager. It’s meant to be a single page that I — or you, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing — can turn to browse through a full timeline of rogue-related Twitter conversations with the folks behind the game. Which is hopefully kind of handy.

I’ll still write up individual blog posts for tweets and other developments I think are worth me using my own words to bore you about. But for those of you who want an easy way to stay up to date on the entire Blizzard rogue Twitterverse (read: masochists), now you’ve got it.

At the moment, I only have May’s tweets all set up the way I want; March/April will follow shortly, and after that I’ll push further back in time as my future time allows (and assume I don’t breach the space-time continuum in the process). But I’ll do my best to update the page at least once a day with new rogueBlizztweets as they flit through the ether.

Patch 5.3 Note Update: Tricks No Longer Buffs Some Death Knight Diseases

We got a hint last week, from a series of Brian Holinka and Ghostcrawler tweets, that our Tricks of the Trade spell was likely to get a poke to reduce its synergy with some death knight diseases — particularly the so-called “festerblight” rotation, which gives Unholy DKs some pretty amazing damage potential in a way that wasn’t entirely intended. (Think what would happen if we found a way to extend Shadow Blades indefinitely. Kinda like that.)

Last week, a patch note update included some direct nerfs to festerblight that surprised and frustrated many Unholy players who felt the change was coming out of left field. The devs took a closer look and decided that it wasn’t festerblight itself that was causing the biggest issue — it was how festerblight was being enhanced by the 15% damage boost granted by a friendly nearby rogue casting Tricks of the Trade at the proper moment(s).

Which led to those DK nerfs from last week being reverted in today’s official patch note update, and replaced with this:

• Blood Plague no longer benefits from the damage increase granted by Tricks of the Trade.
• Frost Fever no longer benefits from the damage increase granted by Tricks of the Trade.

This concludes the part of the post where I continue to have any clue what I’m talking about. (Actually, that part may have concluded about halfway through the first sentence.) But because I want to find some closure to the post, I’m going to try to stretch this into some kind of meaningful statement about how this provides a nice reminder that rogue changes aren’t always about balancing rogues in particular; they’re about trying to keep rogue abilities and rogue strengths/weaknesses in balance with the other classes in the game, and trying to ensure that no single grouping of classes becomes clearly superior to others in situations like progression raiding or 3v3 arena (where, for instance, rogue/hunter/priest has proven extremely strong in 5.2, and is seeing hits across that team as a result).

On Twitter: How Rogues Made Death Knights OP

Ask not what your rogue can do for you; ask what it can do for your entire raid team.

Here’s an exchange that PvP cap’n Brian Holinka had with players on Twitter earlier today around some planned DPS nerfs to Death Knights. I’ve got no deep/useful analysis to provide here, except maybe to note the glimpse this gives us into just how complex class-change decisions can be, no matter how small they seem. It’s also an important reminder of how, sometimes, a change that we may think is a slam-dunk ends up having entirely unexpected consequences in PvE and PvP situations.

@holinka Reason behind Unholy Might nerf? Dks only receive nerfs in 5.3 (NS, Unholy Might, Sudden Doom), probably back to 5.1 state now—
Another (@skanot) May 08, 2013

@skanot We're looking at it still. We think it has more to do with Tricks of the Trade than diseases.—
Holinka (@holinka) May 08, 2013

@Aulper7 @skanot Rogues can give you 15% more damage with tricks of the trade. It allows DK's in PvE to get a lot of high spread damage.—
Holinka (@holinka) May 08, 2013

 

[UPDATE 5/9:] Ghostcrawler added these responses a bit later on.

@Fromnowear The PI problem was it was a talent, so it felt too mandatory because you could use it on someone else.—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) May 09, 2013

@VerainOfUrsin @holinka ToT is fine overall. We just didn't want it to push all DKs into Festerblight rotation.—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) May 09, 2013

Patch 5.3 PTR Note Update: Stuff We Already Knew About Becomes Super-Official

WoW Community Manager Rygarius is back from his vacation, and that means an update to the official Patch 5.3 PTR notes. On the rogue front, the update certifies three changes we already caught wind of last week, either via developer tweet or datamining:

• The sharp right turn on the Cloak and Dagger change is now in the notes. Instead of having the range nerfed, it will only be usable in stealth (which doesn’t include Shadow Dance).
• The Find Weakness PvP nerf/PvE buff mentioned by Brian Holinka is now in the notes.
• The Revealing Strike duration buff that was datamined last week, but otherwise wasn’t publicly discussed by anybody official, is now in the notes.

For a full rundown of rogue changes coming up in Patch 5.3, you know where to look!