On Twitter: Stealth Not Working, Got You Down? Try Holinka’s Workaround

Let’s take a quick break from the Patch 5.4 madness for this important little nugget from WoW’s PvP mastermind.

.@skidsh There is a bug that if the player casts stealth after the gates open, they can be seen for 3 seconds. Stealth before gates open.

—
Holinka (@holinka) June 12, 2013

@SvelteKumquat @skidsh Yes, it is only the initial 3 seconds

—
Holinka (@holinka) June 12, 2013

These tweets refer to the stealth issues folks have been reporting since Patch 5.3 hit. We got a confirmation from Holinka last week that the issue is related to zoning into a new area. While we wait for a permanent (fingers crossed) fix to the problem, Holinka’s advice above should provide a handy workaround.

At least, a handy workaround if you’re in battlegrounds or arenas. If you’re out in the world on a PvP realm — or if, say, you’re about to start a Challenge-mode dungeon in which you need to use Shroud early — you may want to periodically hit your stealth button in order to “keep it fresh,” since the same problem may be occurring whenever we pop into or out of cross-realm zones, instances, etc. (I have no confirmation of this at all; it’s just a hypothesis.)

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WoW’s Developers Star in CSI: Missing Stealth Unit

Think obvious bugs in WoW — like, say, the fact that stealth has been behaving oddly since Patch 5.3 launched — should be easy to find and fix? Take a look at this:

.@SvelteKumquat @Sknilegap We are working on the stealth bugs—
Holinka (@holinka) June 06, 2013

@SvelteKumquat @holinka Like being able to see/target rogue easily w/o normal stealth broken. Was stealth level changed?—
James Moynihan (@Fromnowear) June 06, 2013

@SvelteKumquat @Fromnowear It seems related to newly zoned players so arena and BGs are big problems—
Holinka (@holinka) June 06, 2013

Firstly: Man, I duno who that Kumquat loser thinks he is, but he sure made a lot of stupid assumptions about stealth bugs in the new patch.

Secondly: Holy sleuthing, Batman! The new problems people have been experiencing with stealth recently appear to be linked to zoning into a new area? How many of you would have guessed *that* was the cause of a bug like Shroud of Concealment taking three seconds before it actually concealed a rogue’s party members?

I’m getting weirdly nerd-giddy over this, I realize. But keep in mind that the entire reason I started this blog is because I enjoy learning about virtually everything there is to know about what’s going on with our class. Getting to the bottom of what causes certain problems to occur — and how to fix those problems — fascinates me.

This is a potent reminder that sometimes, especially in a game as complex as WoW, the cause of a bug may not even be remotely close to what it might seem or what one might guess. And figuring out to fix that bug — without breaking something else in a completely unpredictable and hard-to-track way — can prove to be an extremely complicated challenge, as it clearly has in this case.

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Flex Raiding? Meh. But Flex *Killing Spree*? Now You’re Talking.

So concludes my sorry attempt to tie a little teeny possible development in the lives of Combat rogues into the much bigger development that broke this week in the lives of many WoW raiders.

On to the quasi-news!

Thursday on Twitter, we got our first glimpse into plans in the works to make something happen that lovers of the rogue Combat spec have long clamored for: the ability to force Killing Spree to only attack a single target, even if other targets are within range.

At present, Killing Spree is random: While it’s active, you’ll perform a total of seven attacks within 3.5 seconds on targets within a 10-yard range. That could mean one attack on seven different targets; it could mean seven attacks on a single target; the point is, you have zero control over it. Given that Killing Spree is one of Combat’s major burst damage cooldowns, that means major frustration when you want to dish out serious damage on a target (be it a raid boss or a battleground flag carrier) but the game doesn’t give you that option.

If this exchange with PvP honcho Brian Holinka is any indication, that may be about to change.

@Sknilegap Hear a lot of complaints about Killing Spree...we have some ideas..

—
Holinka (@holinka) June 06, 2013

@holinka @Jeff_S_Walsh I think a glyph for KS which makes it only attack your current target could work well.

—
Sam Duggan (@fuggan_) June 06, 2013

@fuggan_ @holinka Rather than forcing a glyph why not make it work off bladeflurry? Bf is up it acts as it does now if not only your target.

—
john jones (@jjones186) June 06, 2013

@jjones186 @fuggan_ ;-)

—
Holinka (@holinka) June 06, 2013

That wink is far from a confirmation, of course — but it’s at the very least a coy suggestion that they’re strongly considering doing exactly what @jjones186 suggested:

• If Blade Flurry is on, it’ll behave the way it always has, indiscriminately jumping to and poking holes in whoever is within range (and, if you have the glyph equipped, returning you to your original spot afterward).
• If Blade Flurry is off, all seven attacks will be directed at your current target.

There’s a lot of appeal to this approach. It avoids the frustrations of adding a spec-specific glyph to the game that would feel all but required in most PvP and some PvE situations. It gives a player the power to decide when s/he would rather spread KS’s damage around or focus it on one enemy. And it may offer this flexibility in a balanced way, by forcing us to choose between a significant amount of AoE burst and a significant amount of single-target burst (as opposed to being able to keep BF on while KSing a single target, which allows us to have our damage-dealing cake and eat it too).

Finally, it may be the nudge that finally makes Combat worth seriously considering as a competitive arena spec.

With signs increasingly suggesting that Patch 5.4 may hit the PTR very soon — likely within the next week, and possibly even tomorrow — we could get our confirmation shortly on what, if any, changes are in store for one of Combat’s signature spells.

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On Twitter: Recuperate Change Is on the Wind. And Also on Twitter, as I Mentioned Earlier in This Headline.

For once, I don’t have 1,500 words to say about something a Blizzard developer recently said about rogues. Please don’t be too disappointed in me.

@VerainOfUrsin We've actually heard the Recuperate feedback a lot lately. We'll look into it.—
Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) June 06, 2013

The “a lot” that Ghostcrawler is referring to may include this recent thread over in the EU WoW forums, in which a player tongue-in-cheekishly (I think) proposed eliminating Recuperate entirely and replacing it with a range of enhancements to our first-aid skill. Blizz Community Manager Taepsilum was so moved by the conversation that he felt compelled to respond with his personal support. For a Recuperate buff, I mean, not for the bandaging thing:

Personally, the healing effect of recuperate does seems a bit underwhelming to me, and fitting it into the rotation doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to during Cata. As always, we’ll make sure to share your concerns with the dev team.

Clearly, those concerns appear to have been shared. :)

Complaints about the power of Recuperate stretch back about as far as the ability has existed — as have calls for it to be buffed or nerfed depending on who’s doing the calling. The recent adjustments to PvP Power and Battle Fatigue may have pushed things to a new tipping point, though, with players offering detailed arguments to support the contention that Recup is distinctly too weak despite getting a boost from the new bonus on PvP gloves.

I’m starting to get my first tinge of a sense that Patch 5.4 may provide at least a minor reprieve to PvP rogues who feel that 5.3 went too far in reversing the gains 5.2 had brought.

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WoW Rogue Population Update, June 2013

The extraordinary Cynwise published his latest class distribution numbers over the weekend; let’s take a quick look at the rogue bits.

I very much recommend reading Cynwise’s summary of the new data, in which he takes snapshots of various class-population measurements on U.S./EU servers at the start of Patch 5.3 and compares them to earlier patches (and expansions). There are oodles of charts and lots of numbers and it’s all very overwhelming for a former English major like me, but there are several key takeaway points worth noting:

• At the start of Patch 5.3, 6.2% of toons at max level were rogues. That’s up from 5.8% at the start of Patch 5.2, but still the lowest percentage of any class other than monks.
• Not including monks, rogues were the least-popular class in heroic raids and the second-least-popular class in competitive arena (after hunters). It may be that the PvP overbuffing we got for Patch 5.2 wasn’t around long enough to seriously alter rogue representation in arena, although it does look like the proportion of arena players who were rogues did increase quite a bit. (It’s just that the percentage was so low to begin with that increasing the proportion “quite a bit” still wasn’t enough to make them objectively “popular.”)
• Despite their low overall representation, rogue popularity at endgame grew more than any other class except monks during Patch 5.2. The number of level-90 rogues jumped 32%. (They just appear not to be finding their way into heroic raids or arena as frequently as other classes.)
• The total number of rogue toons in the game (across all levels) dropped during Patch 5.2. The drop was slight — only about 1% — but rogues were the only class who saw a reduction in total toon number between the start of Patch 5.2 and the start of Patch 5.3.

And then there’s this (quoting Cynwise):

At all levels, there are more Rogues than Monks, Warlocks or Shaman. There are almost as many Rogues as there are Priests! But Rogues are not making it to level 90. [...]

Some of this might be due to Rogue populations swelling in late Cataclysm for the legendary daggers. A large number of leveling PvP rogues might also account for it? I’m sure that the Rogue community will have much greater insight than I over it.

But right now, Warriors are behind the other hybrids by a little, and Rogues are behind the other pure DPS classes by a lot.

[...]

Rogues are more popular than they seem but are struggling to make it to the endgame. Those Rogues who make it to the endgame can do well, but so few of them do compared to everyone else that there’s something abnormal with them. Rogues are less likely to experience Pandaria than any other class, and that is worth investigating.

To illustrate his point, Cynwise showed us this chart:

It shows that, compared to all other classes, people are much less likely to finish leveling a rogue. This made me wonder: Where the heck are they “stopping,” and why?

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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.

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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

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On Twitter: Patch 5.3 Rogue PvP Changes Are Likely Done, Holinka Suggests

And with this, PvP rogues may finally have a chance to exhale. Or to take a breath between howls over the planned class nerfs.

@fate47 happy with rogue/hunter changes. Still talking about affliction, holy pally and mage.

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 07, 2013

Obviously, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that the door is finally closed on the rogue adjustments for Patch 5.3; the developers may well change their minds, and there’s always a chance that they decided on additional changes last week and we just haven’t seen them yet. But this strongly suggests that the end of rogue PvP nerfs is in sight.

It also strongly suggests, of course, that any PvP buffs folks may have been hoping for to offset the nerfs probably won’t be happening for Patch 5.3 either.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: The reactions I’ve seen in forums from rogue PvP players run the gamut from “these are minor and expected changes that won’t gut me” to “this is so catastrophic for rogues that I’m cancelling my subscription and burning my house down,” and everything in between. That wide range of opinions leads me to suspect that, in competitive arena, we may well see rogues dip a bit in terms of their presence within top rankings. But we’re probably not looking at anything resembling the barren pre-Patch 5.2 landscape, particularly not given the adjustments being made to other classes — or the adjustments that may yet be made to other classes, as Holinka suggests in the tweet above.

It’ll be interesting to see the effect that all of these changes — to rogues, to other classes (especially hunters) and to PvP Power — have on popular arena comps. It can be hard to predict which classes/specs really synergize well with one another until arena players have really had a chance to dive in and check out all the changes, which tends not to happen until the patch actually goes live. (The devs have noted previously that players tend to spend very little time on the PTR testing PvP changes in arena, so the changes they make to their initial patch plans are based more on theory and feedback than on actual play data.)

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On Twitter: PvP Chief Compares Shadowstep to Other Classes’ Baseline Mobility

BlizzBlues typically avoid, in plaguelike fashion, any direct class-vs.-class comparison of a single tool in the toolkit. They’re fond of saying — and rightly so — that classes aren’t created to be hard counters with one another, and that if they all had the same tools, they’d all basically be the same class (which might be very nicely balanced, but would also be the most boring thing in the history of ever).

That made it a little surprising that WoW PvP honcho Brian Holinka engaged in some back-and-forth last night over Shadowstep, and how the ability — which is currently a level-60 talent option — stacks up against the baseline mobility-aiding spells that other classes get. It’s a bit of an odd comparison, and as you’ll see Holinka doesn’t just talk about the ability in a bubble (since its synergy with other abilities, such as Cloak of Shadows, can add to its strength). But it’s one of those cool little glimpses into the way the mind of a senior PvP designer works and how he regards the strengths and weaknesses of rogues compared to other classes.

@objectirl Low cooldown and instantly on target. Comparing to Ret, Enhance, Death Knight and even Warrior it's very good. Monk may be better

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 06, 2013

@objectirl not to mention automatically applied snare and shiv'd 70% snare.

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 06, 2013

@Bludzeu @objectirl DK mobility = grip?

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 06, 2013

@Bludzeu @objectirl cloak and ams are a wash, chilblains is a talent (unlike crippling), potentially many cc breaks but not mobility

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 06, 2013

@Bludzeu @objectirl but I agree warrior is a stretch

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 06, 2013

@Bludzeu @objectirl to be fair I forgot ferals which are also very mobile

—
Holinka (@holinka) May 06, 2013

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On Twitter/Patch 5.3 PTR: Cloak and Dagger Nerf Clarified (It’s All About the Stealthjamins)

Amidst the hue and cry over our latest rogue PvP nerf revelation (in Patch 5.3, Cloak and Dagger likely won’t work when Subtlety rogues try to use it during Shadow Dance), WoW PvP honcho Brian Holinka dropped this little nugget:

@JRoosy CnD's range is back to 30 yards, but no longer usable unless stealthed—
Holinka (@holinka) May 03, 2013

Holinka and Ghostcrawler have been tweeting like CRAZY over the rogue changes since word of this CnD adjustment got out; read my previous post for a (mostly) complete listing.

Between Twitter, datamining and official patch note updates, the Patch 5.3 rogue change revelations have been pretty rapid-fire lately, so just to recap where we think we’re at right now:

• Cloak and Dagger will still be usable at 30 yards; the nerf to 20 yards will be reverted. However, rogues will only be able to use CnD while stealthed — this is why it can’t be used during Shadow Dance, because you’re technically not stealthed when ShD is active. (I’m assuming we will also be able to use CnD during Vanish or, for those of us who play a night elf, while Shadowmelded, but I haven’t seen any solid info on this yet.)
• All the Shuriken Toss changes are still happening. (Energy cost doubles, damage doubles, damage bonus at range removed.)
• The crowd control glyph nerfs (to Cheap Shot’s stun and Garrote’s silence) are probably still happening. (Aeriwen notes in the class forum that the Glyph of Cheap Shot tooltip hasn’t been updated with the nerf, but it’s still in the official patch notes.)
• The Find Weakness PvP nerf/PvE buff is still happening.
• We still haven’t heard a thing from anyone official about the datamined Revealing Strike buff.
• The Recuperate PvP buff is still happening (though that’s not a rogue-only change; it’s part of the broader PvP Power adjustments the devs are implementing for 5.3).

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