Here’s a juicy topic for a new rogue year.
@Alyndra1 It's a common concern of players for sure.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 01, 2013@nerdycanuck And I'm not saying the SMG feel is a bad design. Watching bars chew away quickly can be entertaining too. Diversity is good.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 02, 2013(Quick acronym glossary: “FPS” is short for “first-person shooter,” and “SMG” is “submachine gun.”)
Concerns over rogue damage feeling too “passive” in Mists date back to beta testing, where a number of rogue players posted to the beta forums that they felt too high a proportion of our damage was coming from autoattacks and poisons, particularly in the Assassination spec. This issue sometimes ran alongside a different complaint that was especially pronounced for Mut rogues: That they spent too much time waiting for their energy to regenerate between using their main damage-dealing abilities (namely Mutilate).
To me, the argument here isn’t over whether too much of our damage is “active” or “passive” — terms that I think mean different things to different people. I, for instance, consider Slice and Dice to be an active ability for Combat and Subtlety rogues, because it’s a button you have to push on a pretty regular basis in order to maintain decent DPS. (Plenty of folks disagree, and do so convincingly.)
The real issue, in my mind, is over whether it feels fun, engaging and meaningful when we use our damage-dealing abilities. And, on a similar vein, whether we feel like we’re doing something cool and special when we use those abilities wisely and correctly. Slice and Dice doesn’t feel satisfying to many people because it only enhances damage we have no active control over. It’s little more than background noise in our gameplay.
By contrast, cooldowns like Adrenaline Rush (Combat) are a bit more fun because we can “feel” their impact when we use them — mostly by virtue of the fact that our energy bar is suddenly refilling a lot quicker. It’s still not a game-changer, but it’s more engaging and the “feedback” we get from using it is a little more satisfying. Shadow Blades is somewhat similar in that it really amps up our combo point generation, a change we can actually see on our screens and in our increased rate of button-smushing.
Incidentally, Shadow Dance over in the Subtlety spec is a more interesting example of an engaging cooldown/ability. It completely alters our gameplay while it’s active, which can be enjoyable to those who know how to do it well. Problem is, none of the other specs have that additional layer of complexity. (IMO, this is part of why we’ve seen such dismal Sub representation in raids since Mists launched, despite repeated statements that its single-target DPS is competitive with Assassination’s. If we have three paths ahead of us and they all lead to the same pot of gold, most of us are gonna take the easier road — and that road ain’t Sub.)
The reason I bring up all of this is that I don’t think the answer to “rogues deal too much passive damage” is as simple as many suggest it is — i.e., make autoattacks/poison damage weaker and notch our special abilities upward to compensate. (Although I don’t think even accomplishing that is truly a “simple” task of tweaking a few numbers, given how our various damage sources and modifiers interact.)
I think that may be *part* of the answer, sure. But doing so still won’t change the fact that too many of the buttons we have don’t feel good to use, because even though they do significantly increase our damage when used wisely, they don’t do so in a way that’s fun, engaging and noticeable.
For instance, as just one small example: What if Vendetta, instead of providing a flat damage increase for 20 seconds every two minutes, significantly jacked up our crit chance for several seconds every minute? In addition to those big crit numbers that many PvPers love to see, we’d also suddenly get a rush of additional Dispatch procs, altering our gameplay and giving us extra buttons to mash while continuing to make our DPS numbers look gaudier.
If that general type of adjustment could be made to our other less-interesting abilities — Sanguinary Vein (Sub passive), Potent Poisons (Mut mastery), perhaps some PvE-friendly adjustments to Shiv that make poisons interact in unique ways with NPCs/bosses — how much more fun would the class become to play at end game? What problems would it still leave behind?
One thing I think very few people (including me until recently) consider is how changes will affect stat weights. Right now stat weights are pretty close* between specs. If you significantly reduced the percentage of our damage that comes from autoattacks (white hits an poisons, also factor in energy regen for combat, and oh yeah that affects combat w/ OH dagger more than OH slow wep) then you make haste, which is mostly about white hits, a lot worse than it currently is.
Basically, like Rfeann said, making any change to where our damage lies is going to affect a lot of systems.
*I added up the EP for my gear + appropriate wep for all specs on Shadowcraft, here are the average EP values ((AssassEP+CombatEP+SubEP)/3). There are some things that make this less accurate, like some specs (mut) having low EP values across the board, the result being the EP for those specs are underrepresented.
Agi 2.876666667
Hit 1.576666667
Hst 1.253333333
Exp 1.246666667
Mst 1.173333333
Crit 1.046666667
This kind of brings up the question of dual spec vs all spec, to me.
I run around with Mute and Combat specs for different things, and I’m not prepared to dump either of them to just fool with Sub for awhile, which is what I’ll need to do (again) to get used to it.
The only time I’ve played with sub was during two fights in Dragon Soul where the controlled burst was supposed to be the thing.
I’m one of the few players that switched to rogue as a result of the legendaries and stayed, so I’m a fairly new rogue, but when I need combat and mute for raiding once a week (twice if you count raid finder), I don’t want to switch one of them out all the time – spending the gold is irritating at least, and setting all my buttons back up every time is terribly frustrating – so I have no way to work at it sometimes.
I wish people would quit calling sub complex. There is nothing inherently more complex about sub then about assassination. Combat is likely the most complicated rogue spec in the current design. Sub isn’t played because it has two basic problems, it is second best at everything almost. If you need execute you have assassination, if you need AoE you have assassination, cleave-combat, target swapping-anyone else.
At this point I’m ready to give up on people who want “BIG CRITS!!!!!” if thats what you want go play a DK a warrior. Passive damage is a problem where it reduces the complexity and gain of dps optimization in PvE however that requires more low level changes then simply moving damage around.
Sub is undeniably harder to play than Assassination. First of all, sub has to keep up Rupture and SnD, while Mut only needs to keep up Rupture since SnD is trivialized by CttC. Sub also has a lot more actions per minute due to HaT and cheaper abilities. It also has to be better at managing CP, since it can waste them a lot easier via HaT. At high levels of play sub gets the most out of optimizing Anticipation than mut and likely combat too.
Sure combat and sub are pretty close, though I think sub’s CDs are harder to optimize than Combat’s. For combat KS does nothing to the rotation and AR/SB do only as much as SB does alone, which all specs have. Compare this to sub which has to think about if it is the right time to use their CDs (want full duration of FW and to not have to refresh SnD/Rupture during the duration of FW either). Sub rogues also has to make sure they use Ambush at the end of ShD/Subterfuge so they don’t miss out on FW uptime.
Basically yeah, sub is the hardest spec to play. That said, while sub is harder than other specs, it really isn’t by much, so difficulty is no reason to not play it.
I agree with the sentiment — it’s not harder by that much — but it only takes a fractional increase in relative difficulty for a few noteworthy players to choose another spec. And then for hundreds to match those players’ decisions because they trust those players know what they’re doing. And then for thousands to follow the example set by those hundreds.
This is how perfectly viable specs end up crying alone in a corner: They are initially deemed to be inferior in some way by a few notable people, and then if not quickly/thoroughly proven otherwise, the snowball goes over the top of the hill, and we’ve quickly got an avalanche.
I don’t think APM is a particularly relevant consideration to difficulty. Its a manual dexterity check rather then an actual skill check. Sub is in practice more complex then assassination but in terms of the mechanics it has that are inherently skillful they are no different. This probably isn’t the place to go into my theory of inherent skill (maybe I should start one of these newfangled blog things so I do have a place for it) but to put it simply both assassination and sub pool energy and pool cps, they do so to different degrees and to different ends but both engage in the same inherently skillful actions.
Regarding combat I’m not sure I agree with your assessment of anticipation, combat (ab)uses anticipation to push cd usage and finishers into later bg stages, while sub uses cp pooling to attempt to align with high damage phases. I don’t think you can conclusively call one of those more difficult then the other. I also think you underestimating how AR changes the rotation given that is allows you to move through BG phases substantially faster.
While we may disagree on exactly which is harder we do appear to agree on the overall difficulty assessment that all specs are relatively close to each other in difficulty such that difficulty shouldn’t be a limiting factor.
Rfeann, I agree on principle the playerbase tends to be a bunch of lemmings but I think the fact that we are seeing so few players, even players at the top end experimenting with sub indicates there are more problems for sub then just difficulty. There are plenty of people who enjoy difficult rotations and I’m sure would seek one out if it was reasonably viable.
Also I realize I am posting under my real name here, I post as Fierydemise on the forums.
Lol you have a real name? Fool.
But yeah, I have to admit I haven’t played assassination since Cata so I can’t really judge whether or not it is *that* easy, just seems to me that it offers a lot less changes in the normal rotation, which I deem more difficult.
You need to keep SnD up in most spec’s therefore it is an ability you have to actively keep pressing, furthermore the fact you need to have generated a certain number of combo points to determine its length means that your forced into waiting for at least 4 or 5cp, you cannot afford to screw that up and let it drop or you lose dps.
This problem becomes even worse in pvp where you are likely to be cc’d to hell while your trying to force the opponent to trinket, need a decent long SnD up for energetic recovery (lets call setting this up 10s) already have rupture applied to the target for a decent duration (guess what thats more cp so another 10s or so), so you can then pool energy (more time), vanish, reopen, find weakness proc’s, and you now need to have that target controlled so you can sit on it and spam ambush and eviscerate with anticipation for any kind of desireable burst.
Rogues used to balance a decent amount of damage in almost any spec..that may have looked like burst…but it really wasn’t… the activated attacks just did more damage in terms of the relative health pool of the targets. With more passive damage coming from combat (offhand attacks bonus) or assasinaton (envenom proc + poisons)… sub didn’t have any of that bar maybe applying hemorrhage to get 40 (80 if it critted woo!…) extra damage on a backstab… so was never really the spec of choice..hence all the hemmorhage buff is it raid viable, is your personal dps loss worth the raid’s dps gain from the debuff discussion threads….
Anyway my point is rogue abilities do not do enough straight up damage, i don’t particularly want to reduce skillcap or anything.. but when you need to do what i described above to get a decent burst thats crazy… you think i need to set a chain up like that on my feral druid to do that damage? Nowhere near.