Let’s kick off a new year of rogue-relevant Ghostcrawler tweets with this recent one, fresh from the “no duh” pile:
@EvilAipac Generally, if a healer can't outheal 1 DPS, then they have no hope against 2 in an Arena - doesn't mean healers auto win duels.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 31, 2012
Hardly a day goes by in which @EvilAipac doesn’t throw a bitter tweet at Ghostcrawler in which s/he asks GC to comment on his/her latest invented example of why GC and the design team willfully neglect rogues. Although this one is pretty silly, it reflects a sentiment I’ve seen before (and never been able to understand): the idea that somehow a rogue is “supposed” to be able to kill a healer in a duel, and that the healer should not be able to heal more quickly than the rogue can damage it.
In game that is designed and balanced around dueling, arguments like that — which I have seen spew forth from minds other than @EvilAipac’s — might have merit. But WoW is primarily balanced around the expectation that people will play in groups, both in PvE and PvP, and that the healers in those groups will sometimes be responsible for healing a potentially massive amount of incoming damage to multiple players. It’s ridiculous to expect that a rogue would be able to outdamage a healer’s heals in a straight-up comparison.
And regardless, I hardly know a thing about PvP, but even I know that rogues aren’t built to take out healers simply by spamming damage abilities and hoping they go down.
I have to respectfully disagree on a certain aspect of this argument.
I agree that a rogue should not be able to do more damage than a healer can heal in a space of time, otherwise healers become fairly redundant.
I think his would probably stem from the fact that a rogue can control the fight perfectly, stuns, interupts etc and still potentially not take down the target 1v1, which is unbelievably frustrating.
Sure its not nice that the healer feels cc’d to hell for it to happen, but lets face it our single target burst in most specs is awful, so we are forced into the cc loop. I’d love to get to spam 80k+ non-crit frost strikes, followed by a 30k blast, while the easily applied dots tick away through 6k resi…whilst running around in my plate.. and warriors even worse…. but you know what… i can’t. For that kind of unanswerable fast damage I need to be subtlety have set up snd for energetic recovery(that took a little while), and rupture on the target (for the 16% buff), and before either of those drop off I need to have pooled energy, vanished and reopened with find weakness up… made sure they are in a non-dr affected stun chain and have blown their trinket so I can spam some ambushes and eviscerates….if i was clever i might have used anticipation talent..but its so rare that this perfect scenario happens that i may not have specc’d it.
See the difference? Neither do the wow devs apparently…