@JamesWire1 Potentially. If you take Combat for any cleave fight, then Mutilate for the others, you don't have a spec left.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 10, 2012
The bigger question I think this tweet raises is: What should be done about the problem? After all, if it’s only underplayed, not underpowered, you can’t really buff it — that would likely just push the see-saw in the opposite direction.
And heck, while I’m at it: Is this even really a “problem”? Is it automatically a bad thing if we only use two of the three rogue specs in end-game PvE? Is it possible that, in this crazy, mixed-up, dual-spec world of ours, we players simply can’t handle the concept of three truly viable raiding specs?
Hi. Just found this blog. Looks nice.
Sub is underpowered for its difficulty. It has the most sensitive positional, pooling and buff and debuff tracking requirements, and far and away the greatest room for error. Yet, it returns less (although similar) dps to Assassination.
In DS, Sub was similarly challenging to master (i.e. to 100%) yet the single target dps was a good 10% higher than either of the two specs. However, good rogues played it because they wanted to best fulfil their role i.e. by doing the most damage (I had no respect for people that played Combat on Morchok).
In order for Sub to be playable, they either need to simplify the spec (which I really do not want them to do) or they need to buff the damage to reflect the additional challenge of being good at it (which I really hope they do).
It is unfortunate that Assassination is the top single target damage spec because it is SO easy to play, and it does not let good Rogues sufficiently differentiate themselves from bad ones. I personally would also be happy if they made Assassination a bit harder to play and buffed the damage a bit to let good rogues stand out. Combat is a challenge to play and rightly does less single target damage because its cleave is SO strong on some fights. It will always be like that but I think most Rogues are happy to have it as an off spec for the cleave fights.
In summary, I hope they buff Sub. However, I am reasonably confident Sub will return as the spec of choice because of scaling and also because I think they will buff Sub and Combat later on to mix it up, as they did in Cata, and people will stop playing Assassination.
Cheers, Sicárius!
Aye, good points. Sub is arguably easier to manage in Mists than it was in Cata (thanks to the removal of Recuperate from the rotation), but I agree it’s still the most complex spec of the three to juggle. I believe GC and other Blizzfolk have acknowledged repeatedly that they balance not around what the average player can achieve with the spec, but around what a highly skilled player can achieve — which I think is a logical argument, but also supports your point that a spec with a higher skill cap is going to be less utilized simply because we tend to gravitate toward the path of least resistance.
This ties into one of the themes of rogue life in Mists: The fact that passive sources (autoattacks and poisons) make up such a massive proportion of our total damage, which greatly narrows the gap between what a person who plays a rogue well can do and what a person who plays a rogue poorly can do. It makes the class more accessible, which is good — I think we should be happy when more people have the ability to play a class — but for me, it also makes it less satisfying to play if I really know how to play it well, since the difference between me and the person who doesn’t know how to play it well feels so small relative to the time and effort I put into sucking at it less than other people. And while part of me acknowledges that my enjoyment of the game shouldn’t rest on how others perform relative to how I perform, in this case, it’s a situation where the “return on investment” doesn’t feel high enough.
I agree that sub is harder and therefore should have more potential dps than an easy spec such as assassination. That said only blizzard knows the *actual* difference in each spec’s potential, and I’d be very suprised if the margain of error in player-made simulations (SimC, Shadowcraft…) is large enough that subtlety could in fact have a lot more potential dps relative to assassination than we think. Then again could go the other way.
@Rfeann: Not sure if bliz balances around max potential but they definitely take things like AoE and cleave damage into account which would potentially affect a spec’s performance more than other factors.
Rogues are fine. Haste will fix it right? Greg Street is an idiot, thinking he or his team will (or can) fix it any time soon is naive.
Could you possibly have left a lazier, more unhelpful, more useless, more stereotypically poorly thought-out comment?
If you’re going to comment on this blog, how about actually putting some brainpower into it and thinking for yourself, rather than parroting the exact same crap that dozens of whiny, ignorant, petulant players post in less-moderated forums elsewhere on the Web?
Be a part of the community that tries to make this game better for all of us. Don’t be an asshole. Assholes are no fun to be around.
They also stink to have around.
Jumping off of that, useless posts like that give credence to any claim that the devs don’t care what players think, since on a daily basis they have to wade through pages of poorly written, useless slanderous shit written by ignorant morons who don’t understand jack about what it means to be a dev.
That said the fact that evidence (I don’t expect you to know evidence when yous see it so I won’t go through the trouble of showing it to you) overwhelmingly suggests that the devs DO care about what less petulant players think is quite impressive and they deserve to be commended for it.
This is why I have no respect for devs using twitter. If this was a forum post, Ghostcrawler would (hopefully) never dream of leaving such a sloppy analysis any half competent rogue from the forums could give. Even better is the fact that he hasn’t (or cant because of the limitations of twitter) given any thoughts on a fix for the problem.
I concur with this in part, but even when GC took the time to really walk people through where his brain was on any of a number of issues back in his non-beta-forum-posting days, many folks still picked on every little word and phrase and quirk in what he posted, and misinterpreted his words in tons of different ways.
I agree that GC’s tweets often feel incomplete and unsatisfying, but they’re tweets. What else could they be? And is it better to have him say nothing at all, when that just leads many to assume the devs aren’t even thinking about the topic? At least this way we kinda know the direction his brain is going.
Yeah, thats true, but theres also the argument that I’d rather hear nothing than pretty much useless responses like this one. The only benefit from this is that GC is actually admitting that they know that this is a problem, which leads to wanting to know that they are working on a fix, but when you don’t hear anything in that regard, you’re left hanging regardless.
Tldr the grass will forever be greener on the other expansion.