Alright, so Patch 5.1 didn’t prove to be the savior that many sadfaced rogues across Azeroth hoped for. Patch 5.2, though: That one tenth could make all the difference.
Or not. Either way, change is a’comin.
Two tweets from Ghostcrawler in the past few days suggest a pretty substantial talent shake-up may be imminent in the next patch:
@SvelteKumquat I wasn't commenting on RvD, but on comparing one ability in a vacuum to another. R talents in 5.2 prob have the most changes.
—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 14, 2012@evangel666777 Would rather you just try them and you tell us. Always prudent to avoid the risk of overhype.
—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 15, 2012
Absolutely no specifics have been offered yet regarding rogues (either in these tweets or elsewhere), but the fact that GC even feels comfortable saying stuff like this suggests we’re getting pretty close now to the first unveiling of the next noteworthy set of incoming class (and game) changes. I can already hear collective breaths being sucked in. Will they soon yield exhalations of glee or disgust? Stay tuned.
———-
EQUALLY VAGUE UPDATE 12/21:
This is from Blizz Community Manager Daxxarri, as the crew over there heads into its holiday break:
@SvelteKumquat Well... a lot is changing right now. I'll just say two things: "I'm excited" and "More information in January."
—
Nik Gianozakos (@Daxxarri) December 21, 2012(Pretty sure he wasn’t just referring to Versatility there.)
Hi,
I play rogue, I have played rogue for the best part of 8 years, I have left the game and come back a number of times, run the gamut of playstyles hardcore raider to ultra casual, both horde and alliance. At the moment i’m in my casual phase. I hate deliberate grinds of any sort (rep tbc, faction rep now), I need it to be fun when I play the game and fun when i play my rogue. I love pvp, I love instancing with friends and I like raiding with said friends if possible and time allows it. I love rogues, I have two (used to be three).
So with that out of the way i’ll say this, most people who play rogue generally like pvp. I’ve always considered myself fairly good at pvp with my class and ofc you have to know another classes abilities and learn when to counter. I achieved a 1900+ rating back in the day when it was arguably much easier with a shadow/disc buddy of mine. The game has changed a lot since then..
The things affecting rogues right now can only be described as a result of circumstance.
To be a good warlock in bg pvp was easy with a basic knowledge of the class, to be a truly skilled warlock in pvp was hard, damned hard. To be a good rogue in pvp for most players was hard, a result of either gear, playstyle, spec, class knowledge, or all of the above. A skilled rogue was arguably less hard to play than a skilled warlock (i’m not a warlock fyi), but they were still very few and far between.
Now I personally do not feel like even with my vast experience of the class, almost ocd attention to rotation detail and class mechanics, that I can play this class how I want to play it, how i’ve played it for almost 8 years, any more.
Most damage comes from passive attacks and poisons, equipment choice and certainly availability of weapons has a lot to do with damage output.
If you don’t do arena now (and good luck getting a high rating without being carried) getting competative weapons is nigh on impossible. Similarly in PvE your looking for raid better go well, but when you get that you won’t be able to upgrade it for pvp anyway without instancing.
Also the class is suffering from shadowdance, this potentially great, but truly the deathknell for rogues everywhere, ability. It defines skilled as sub spec, the ability to sap timely out of stealth and then unload on the second target, forcing the trinket or just catching the opponent unawares when its used. But I hate this ability, its burst and occasional control is literally the only thing propping sub up as far as pvp goes, which should not be the case. It used to be that prep and other abilities lent synergy to the spec which relied on either hemo damage or backstab (which could crit hard), provided escape as well as control, provided marginally less damage than the others but if you could utilise it, the gaining of so much more.
Survivability as a rogue is quite honestly beyond a joke. The glyph choices we are presented with are so shallow that garrotte or cheapshot are basically mandatory. I literally look and I see five or six that are basically pointless, some for fun and the rest (a chosen few) mandatory. The talent trees, some of those abilities look useful, i’ve tried different combinations for weeks. They just don’t change the fact that literally everything we can do can be hard countered. Shadowstep should be at least a baseline tool for every rogue spec. I looked at the choices for other classes and they are far more appealing and make a deal of difference to the rotations of those classes in both pve and pvp.
Clos’ing vanish where before a fairly noobish trick (because its basically a failsafe) is almost mandatory again as an aoe with increased radius will be incoming.. Its almost as if getting the opener doesn’t even matter now.
I want to play a class where melee damage is reasonable, only on one spec is poison damage a significantly large portion of my damage, I want my active attacks (backstab, hemo, mutilate, whatever) to be the deciding factor (along with my finishers) in a fight. Recuperate, who is going to use it now? Who do they expect to use it in its current form? It was fine in the sub pve rotation, a bit disturbing, but still fine.
Seriously blizzard are halfway there, do not make subtlety rely on shadowdance alone for massive burst (remove it if you like), do not make our autoattacks and poisons our biggest portion of damage. As whiny and hard as i’m making it sound playing a rogue right now, make sure it has a reasonably high skillcap still. I heard that classes are balanced around really high end players now so maybe i just can’t play this class to that level anymore, I just don’t know. All I know is any theorycrafter worth their salt could have told you with a bonus to agi sub would be the best spec come end of cata, just like it will become the most damaging spec end of pandaria by the same token. This will affect both pve and pvp. How don’t the devs realise this, how did they not see the travesty that was rogues at the end of cata with that obscene burst. It isnt to hard with the amount of play testers and feedback surely?
I have not even covered everything here, mobility, survivability, to much reliance on one ability, (blade flurry for combat, shadowdance for sub), shuriken toss usage mechanics etc and this is just the rogue problems. On top of that its not the frankly “nuts” damage we have to endure through basically 6k resi from some other classes that seem to have remarkably improved control over previous expansions.
The age old arguments also get trotted out. I still sympathise with every rogue about this. Can you really tell me that rogue, hunter, mage and warlock as the “damage only” classes in the game, should not be at the top of the damage on any given encounter? Taking this a step further, possibly because all those other classes can have pets and are all ranged, then on most encounters, unless substantially outgearing the rogue or on a target that is more magic damage/range friendly, shouldn’t they do slightly less damage? I’m all for a warrior who specs into dps and goes about to the best of his ability to gather the gear for his class and spec, when that warrior comes to a fight and a rogue is in the group, that rogue (all other things being equal) should probably be above the warrior in damage. Why you may ask? It should be obvious that the warrior will take less damage and therefore need less healing, but also because they will be generating rage whereas we will be in the same energy state all throughout the fight and in most specs if we had to drop off the rotation ramp up time is quite long. This is not the case for the warrior although time away from rage gen would hurt them also, so I am not unsympathetic to their plight. However I get told we have all the tools neccessary to mitigate this. If you talent for combat readness you have to hope to be hit every 10 secs with a melee attack to keep the effect up, plate wins. If you use evasion this is useful, provided the attack is a melee attack or ranged physical (like some hunter attacks) but by the same token, the encounter is designed so that rogues cannot tank these bosses and they have better potential to hit us (being boss level) so evasion is rarely truly useful anymore in pve. Feint specced with elusiveness talent is a dps loss no matter which way you look at it, especially if you had to keep it for an extended period. Recuperate is a dps less also. Clos generally isnt glyphed, but even if it was its saved for the magical damage not the 40% physical mitigation it may give. Given all of the above, apart from evasion, its clear just having plate is more beneficial in terms of general (not one off) melee damage mitigation. So why shouldn’t the damage be higher or at least the feeling of usefulness be higher? I would love to know how blizzard think these things through. I’m aware you shouldn’t design an encounter with this in mind, but once the theme of the encounter is laid out, it can’t be ignored, how can a feral druid dps higher than a rogue on an encounter? competative yes, all other things being equal (skill, gear) higher, no.
While i’m being honest, I got bored in cata and by the end had basically stopped playing all together, shadowdance made it too easy, so I started playing mutilate in battlegrounds and arena. I like a challenge, not a total faceroll.
I hope I have been constructive, I’m sure all my views are not exactly shared by the rogue community, some are personally my own, such as wanting to see shadowdance gone, finito, nada. Then balance sub without it. I want that class that has just seen the enemy rogue go into stealth to get that shiver of fear that you can imagine they once might have got, they need to be worried about the enemy rogue, not think “ahh easy kill, then we can move on”.
Maybe 5.2 will improve things, but maybe the rogue i know that used to eke out every last iota of dps in a raid or thought of a myriad of spec combinations and tested them for pvp utility has gone. Maybe that kind of player has become the death of the class as a whole, we always used to overperform I thought as the people that played at a high end really thought outside the box.
An example someone suggested on the rogue forums just the other day, why don’t we equip the caster pvp dagger (we can see it if we turn off the ui option) it has much bigger +pvp power, would we really miss the offhand damage in pvp? Its a good thought I suppose, but I haven’t done the math. This thought could go through the mind of people who play any class… but rogues always seem to mention this kind of potential loophole first, i guess its just in the nature of those that play.
Ironically I have two accounts and pay for two subs, today was the first time I thought about stopping playing altogether. What my class was has seemingly gone, maybe its been gone a long time, and that realisation really saddens me. We have lost the unique defining core of the class, you could pick any spec and it half feel like were stuck in a time warp and have not improved at all over time (due to the nature/theme of those specs), but in reality they have all changed and not for the better, combat is poor without blade flurry and the rotation has been complicated just to make it more interesting, assassination is basically autoattacks and dispatch after 35%, and sub is shadowdance. It was never really like that before, no spec was truly defined by a single key ability. In pvp, you could win fights if you needed to without using your best activated abilities, because you out thought, and out manouvered opponents and only vs the skilled (or geared) ones did they make sure you really have to use them and use them at the right time.
The thing is… I logged in today, did some BG cause i quite like it, got disheartened, changed spec, marginally better but still meh, went on my other rogue, same story, didn’t have the confidence in the class and as a result of that, my own ability with the class anymore to do arena with a friend of mine (who has asked me every season i’ve been around and i’ve accepted, we both play fairly casually). I then logged in on my druid and after twenty minutes of messing with specs I just logged out.
I do not want to play another class,it is just not an option.
I just want to play my rogue (as was).
It should also be noted that we scale well, something unheard of pre-wotlk.
Now we scale very well with gear upgrades, but its very easy to scale something well if a majority of damage is delivered through auto attacks, thus making the scaling predictable.
I’m reluctant to get into a theorycrafting discussion, because my brain is incapable of sustaining it or contributing to it in a meaningful way, but I have no idea what you just said.
Firstly, let’s be careful about references to what proportion of a rogue’s damage relies on autoattacks. *Passive* damage does indeed usually account for a majority (meaning more than half) of a rogue’s total damage in a boss fight — damage that includes autoattacks, poison procs and other bits that we don’t have to push a button to make happen (like Main Gauche procs for Combat).
Strictly speaking, autoattacks themselves — the melee swings — don’t even come close to a majority of our damage. That can vary pretty widely by spec, but I don’t think it generally exceeds a quarter of our damage at most — and even then, autoattack damage (as well as other passive sources of damage) is hugely enhanced by Slice and Dice, which we have to actively maintain throughout a fight unless we’re Assassination.
That clarifyingish stuff aside, I don’t get how scaling would suddenly become “predictable” if a majority of damage did indeed come through autoattacks. Gear scaling in WoW is still a tremendously complex thing, with a ton of different variables coming into play that impact it — and with hotfixes, patch changes and gear adjustments/additions occurring throughout the expansion that can potentially mess with whatever equations our brightest minds came up with to predict how well classes/specs would scale as they become better geared. Or to predict how much “better” our class will necessarily scale compared to any other DPS class/spec.
I’m aware i just replied in the incorrect section… damn you wordpress confusing me :P !!! Can theorycraft, can’t use wordpress…. bit ironic.
Rogues have a complex calculation cycle but the core of the class has essentially remained the same except that passive damage (which is the term i should have used rather than autoattacks) is now a bigger portion of our damage than ever previously before.
Pre-wotlk many rogue finishers were flat damage, that was set and did not scale with attack power, this saw the class pretty-gimped for a while and eviscerate usage almost totally dropped off until the redesign to scale finishers with attack power.
Without getting into math and equations, the more your damaging stats (str/agi/ap/mastery/crit/hit/expertise/haste) increase the more damage you do vs a set target. Usually for the simulations the target picked is something melee friendly and of raid boss level (like Patchwerk in Wotlk or even the raid level target dummy) to simulate high end gearing and potential damage on a melee friendly fight.
This is the reason tools like shadowcraft and the spreadsheets from elitistjerks can exist and help guide the rogue to gear choices, stat weights for their spec and so on. (I’m sure you know this i’m not trying to teach you to suck eggs by the way, i’m just putting all this down for clarity)
The reason its more predictable now is that the calculation for poisons, autoattack damage and other such generally passive damage sources is usually quite easy compared to the complexities of a rotation cycle. Poison damage has been simplified and thus is way more predictable in MoP, they are all chance-on-hit rather than PPM, which randomises it slightly but still makes it quite predictable, also they use the melee hit chance (rather than the old spellhit) which makes things easier again, The redesign of Deadly makes it easier to calculate compared to previously as “stacks” have been removed.
Anyway, our rotation cycle of activated attacks and finishers would account for a greater proportion of damage than now. As this has now changed to be 60%ish+ from passive sources provided snd is kept up (which it always should be and hence is always counted as up in any sim calculation) then a majority of damage a rogue can do with the next gear levels (or by comparing simply all “best in slot” ilvl463 to all ilvl476 currently) can be determined using some very simple equations compared to what was needed previously. If you know passive damage is 60% of your damage then working out the other 40% in an ideal situation isn’t too difficult.
Any increase in damaging stats (agi) to subtlety of course is greater still than those to the other trees due to sinister calling, hence the sub craziness at the end of cataclysm that was easily predicted by anyone who looked at that kind of thing.
As you mention changes to talents, hotfixes, maybe set bonuses on gear even all might make a difference to those calculations, but once factored into the spreadsheet it all becomes predictable once more. The point being that a good dev and class design team who just simply have to pay attention to their own game should spot these problems from the start and not have to continually hotfix things most of the way through just because they don’t understand how their own game works. Its obvious to me personally that the reason most of our damage is now passive is quite simply because, they need to make us scale, but in a predictable way in PvE that doesn’t end up with the incremental changes to the game in gear leading to a 1v1 PvP dominator like the end-of-cata sub rogue. Thus they have toned down our special attacks damage and made our thinking, “if the opponent can move away, most rogue damage over a period of time won’t hit them”. Its a good thought, but it seems like we push buttons for nothing now, the active damage of abilities needs to be higher. i’d settle for 60% active/40% passive or even 55%/45% damage.
Imo in any game, most of your damage should come from things you do, not things you don’t do. Even a bad rogue could keep snd up all fight if even if they didnt use any other finisher.
Ironically Fire mages right now are craving, the kind of consistency from damage we get post-5.1 as theirs is ability RNG laden, where as I wish to see us have less passive and more active damage.
For example Tova (Druid) on his blog has done the math on druid stat weights with the intorudction of “tooth and claw” to guardian druids, he’s probably not 100% right, but that is the kind of thing blizzard should know about. They introduce an ability, suddenly another “secondary” stat is better than the previous top “secondary” stat. So obviously a full eq reforge toward said stat might take place. Then suddenly the have to look into “how xx class damage got out of control”.
Sometimes i’d rather they just admit they have no idea what is going on in their game half the time and bandaid fixes (like the firemage fix, or the mutilate fix in wotlk) often make things worse in the long run, because they fixed the ability not the actual problem. FYI Mutilate got nerfed because high level PvE weapons were being used in arena so “mutilate was doing too much damage”. Incorrect of course, mutilate did too much damage because improving a rogues weapon increases his/her dmaage more than anything else really, it almost always has. So having weapons way above the top pvp arena gear and its ability to mitigate that damage is going to cause a problem. But they fixed the ability instead of the problem.
Not unusual for blizzard. So hope for 5.2 maybe… i hope it isn’t ill-considered however, I wouldn’t want us to be OTT like end-of-cata sub in two gear sets time.
Anyway…another wall of text from me. Sorry bout that…
So do I commend Blizzard for making us more “simple”, so they can stop non-rogue complaints of being hurt by abilities, more effectively know how we will scale and make us easier to predict in pvp. Or do I damn blizzard to hell for making us 60% passive damage because it is the lazy way (maybe the only way) for them to keep their sanity before they get to confused with their own game.