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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This Week in Rogueball: May 17-30, 2013

The first time I published this new weekly roundup, I proceeded to immediately skip a week. Let’s give this another shot. :)

To make up for lost ground, this recap of what’s up in rogue gameplay and the rogue community covers the past two weeks.

If you feel I missed anything or would like to see additional topics/sites/discussions included in TWIRB, please comment!

In the Live Game

• Some patch happened or something, I guess? I don’t know, I don’t keep track of such things.
• Overall, rogues are about the same in PvE post-patch, and are weaker in PvP. How much weaker — and what the result of that will be on rogues’ presence in arena ladders and RBG teams — has yet to shake out. (It’s only been a week and a half, remember.) There’s been a fair amount of new interest in Assassination (and, to a lesser extent, Combat) as specs worth exploring in PvP; more on that below.
• There have been no reported hotfixes for rogues since the patch launched.
• There have also been no confirmed bugs, although PvP chief Brian Holinka said they’d look into reports that Shroud of Concealment is failing to properly conceal allies.
• As with every single patch in the history of patches, there has been a smattering of reports that stealth isn’t working as well post-patch as it was pre-patch. I haven’t seen any kind of consistency to these reports, so if something new *has* gone wrong, it’s likely something pretty obscure.

New PvP Guides & Blog Posts

In just the past few days, a bevy of capable PvP rogues has published or recorded a range of Patch 5.3-ready guides and tutorials:

• All Specs: A range of tips on how to solo a base in domination battlegrounds (e.g., Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm) was posted by LastRogue.
• All Specs: LastRogue also posted an exploration of when you should choose Wound Poison over Deadly Poison (hint: basically always)
• Assassination: A comprehensive new Mut spec guide was created by AcerMVP on ArenaJunkies.
• Assassination: LastRogue explains why he’s decided to go with Assassination for PvP in Patch 5.3.
• Subtlety: EvasionX posted a video running through his talent, glyph and gemming choices.
• Subtlety: EvasionX also posted a video guide to openers.

Theorycrafting and PvE Optimization

• ShadowCraft got you confused? A new video from wavefunctionp (Aeriwen from the WoW rogue forum) provides an in-depth tutorial to help you get the most from our go-to raid gear optimizer.
• Are Real PPM trinkets and enchants making your brain explode? Chase Christian breaks it all down in his Encrypted Text column (and explains why RPPM makes haste so desirable).
• Tricks of the Trade macros: They are good and you should use them. Another Encrypted Text column from Chase walks through some of the most useful ToT macros.

Blizzfolk Get Roguey

• The entire WoW design team answered a range of raiding-oriented questions from Icy Veins. Of particular interest to us (imho) are their comments on the melee DPS role in raids (my rant) and on the success of the Tier 15 four-piece bonus (my summary/analysis).
• Elsewhere in Blizz interview news, Holinka and Ghostcrawler answered questions from ArenaJunkies’ Vanguards on the PvP changes impacting rogues in 5.3, including the Find Weakness nerf and why rogues were toned down overall.
• Similarly, Holinka and Ghostcrawler joined the Legendary Webcast by video to discuss, among other things, the rogue PvP balance changes. (Read my summary of both the AJ and Legendary interviews.)
• EU Community Manager Taepsilum responded to a Recuperate complaint thread in the official WoW forums to say he agreed that the self-heal “seems a bit underwhelming to me, and fitting it into the rotation doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to during Cata,” and added that he’d bring the issue up with the dev team. (If this perked your ears, it should — we don’t see CMs directly express their views like this very often at all — but it doesn’t mean we should expect to see a change anytime soon. Taepsilum was just expressing his own opinion, and there’s no reason to believe the devs would necessarily agree — or have a solution they like better than the status quo.)

And that’s TWIRB. Or, well, TW(s)IRB; let’s see if I can stick to a weekly schedule with these.

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Dev Interview: What Problem Did the Rogue Tier 15 Four-Piece Solve? (Updated 5/29)

[UPDATE 5/29: Ghostcrawler responded with a clarification of the Icy Veins interview response; I've added his tweets to the bottom of this post.]

Welcome to today’s edition of WoW’s Developers Used Confusing Wording When Responding to an Interview Question, So Let’s See How Badly We Can Misinterpret It. Our topic for this particular WDUCWWRIQSLSHBWCMI is: the success/failure of the rogue Tier 15 four-piece bonus.

Tier 15 is the raid gear that was introduced in Patch 5.2 with the Throne of Thunder. In the first incarnation we saw on the PTR, the rogue four-piece bonus only reduced by 40% the energy cost of abilities we used during Shadow Blades. The designers listened to player feedback and decided to break one of the game’s basic commandments: “Thy global cooldown shalt not fall below one second, howsoever thee may cryeth about it.”

Yielding to concerns about Combat rogues energy capping if they tried to use Adrenaline Rush with Shadow Blades while the four-piece bonus was active, the designers chose to add to the set bonus a .3-second reduction to our global cooldown. That effectively gave Combat rogues a half-second GCD during Adrenaline Rush + Shadow Blades, thanks to the AdRush glyph that is considered all but required for raiding Combat rogues.

Last week, Icy Veins asked the WoW design team how they felt the experiment turned out. The WoWdevs responded:

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Ruffy Rants: Melee’s (Particularly Rogues’) Raid Role in Mists and Beyond

It’s time for the melee DPS role to be about more than stabbing backs and taking names.

The final looking-back-on-Patch-5.2 WoW designer interview went live on Icy Veins just before the holiday weekend began (don’t they know the rule about trying to get folks to pay attention to news on a Friday?). If you’ve got a passion for end-game raiding, there’s a lot of cool stuff in that interview worth reading — nothing earth-moving or particularly surprising, but we don’t often see WoW designers talk at length about role balance and class mechanics in raids, so this is a rare opportunity to look into the crystal ball and see anything more than clouds.

There are two sections of the Icy Veins interview that I wanted to call particular attention to from a rogue perspective. The first touches on the “ranged-vs.-melee” question in raids and how their respective roles are evolving. (The second touches on our four-piece Tier 15 set bonus; I’ll talk about that in my next post.)

From the interview:

Icy Veins: In the past, melee DPS were seen as having a significant disadvantage in heroic raiding. During Throne of Thunder, however, there are some fights where melee do very well, like Iron Qon, and others where they do really poorly, like Ra-Den. Are you happy with each having their own niche fights, or is it a goal of yours to design fights where both range and melee players will perform roughly the same?

Blizzard: Overall we like for there to be fights that favor different play styles. In Throne of Thunder, there are good fights for range and good fights for melee, and nobody is underperforming to the degree where it is widespread for guild to sit a lot of melee on one fight or a lot of ranged on the next. We agree in previous tiers that melee felt like more of a liability, but we don’t feel that way about the current content (but see the next question).

Icy Veins: Does granting range players the ability to retain more and more damage on the move (as illustrated by the upcoming Lightning Bolt changes in 5.3) make it harder and harder to design encounters where melee DPS are not trailing behind?

Blizzard: Traditionally, the melee advantage was being able to do damage while moving, but now a lot of ranged are also good at movement. We could certainly go back in and prune a lot of cast-on-the-move and instant spells from casters, but on the other hand we know players think those abilities are fun and you can even argue that having to stand and “turret” as a combat mechanic feels a little dated. There is also a continuum here: casting Lightning Bolt while moving isn’t a big balance problem, but something like passive Kil’jaeden’s Cunning might be.

Rather than making casters terrible at moving, we’d rather develop a niche that melee are really good at. For example, we could emphasize that melee are really good at cleaving multiple targets, or they could be more survivable, or both. We are going to explore these ideas more.

I agree that the “turret” approach to damage-dealing no longer makes sense within the context of WoW — or possibly within the context of any complex MMORPG. Only being able to do serious damage while standing still is not a fun way to play a class, especially in a game as fast-paced and movement-based as WoW tends to be. The must-stand-still requirement also severely inhibits the creativity raid designers can use when crafting new encounters. I embrace the growing trend of ranged classes evolving a greater ability to deal damage on the run, most recently embodied in Shamans’ Lightning Bolt spell being castable while moving in 5.3.

At the same time, if we look at raiding rogues in particular, we haven’t seen — and perhaps we *can’t* see — a similar shift in range/movement flexibility. Yes, the designers have tinkered with stealth speed, Sprint and Shadowstep (and they’ve introduced a worthwhile alternative, Burst of Speed, as well as a formerly-borderline-superior-but-now-extremely-niche alternative in Cloak and Dagger). They’ve also made case-by-case adjustments to boss fights to make it easier for us to hurt them (e.g., making their hitbox larger, or increasing the angle at which we’re technically “behind” them). But these are largely tweaks, bandages and temporary solutions to a bigger, much more intractable issue: When a rogue isn’t within melee range of its target, the player pulling that rogue’s strings is most likely not having much fun.

We can’t, and shouldn’t, expect for every raid fight to be equally rogue-friendly. We *want* variety in our raid mechanics, and if we accept that, then we have to also accept that “variety” is going to include various levels of challenge in us maintaining uptime on our targets.

But there is a difference between a fight that is rogue-unfriendly and a fight that is borderline infuriating for a rogue. Hardly a raid tier goes by without at least one fight that literally murders a Combat rogue who dares to use Killing Spree, one of the spec’s core DPS cooldowns (and, importantly, one of the most fun cooldowns we have when it works properly). And if you had the pleasure of experiencing the Twilight Ascendant Council fight during Cataclysm, then you know what it’s like to spend an encounter doing your impression of chasing after Benny Hill.

This expansion has been better than the last one, to be sure. There are no fights yet in Mists where rogues perform atrociously relative to other classes (the extent to which we may struggle to shine on fights like Council of Elders falls within my range of acceptable variance for the sake of raid mechanic variety), and it’s nice to see design decisions like what was done for the Durumu maze, in which there is both a melee path and a ranged path to allow all DPS to continue dealing damage while weaving their way through trouble.

Meanwhile, our class has gotten a major survivability boost this expansion thanks to the available-to-all-classes combination of Feint (50% reduction to AoE damage) and Elusiveness (30% across-the-board damage reduction during Feint), which can drastically reduce the burden we place on our healers during heavy-damage moments while only costing us a small amount of DPS. And in Patch 5.2, Smoke Bomb was also given some raid utility in the form of an AoE damage reducer. Both of these changes fit with the theme the developers stated above: Trying to offset ranged classes’ additional mobility by giving melee some *unique* tools that provide demonstrable raid utility.

I like this direction. I think our instinct might be to call for 1) harder-hitting melee abilities or 2) more mobility (i.e., additional/more powerful gap closers) to make up for us losing ground to ranged classes in the uptime-on-target category. But to me, that’s not a fun solution. I want raiding with my rogue to be about more than just stabbing a boss repeatedly for six minutes using a set rotation of abilities. I want to be challenged, and I want to have to spend (a reasonable amount of) time off my target every now and then — but I want that to be offset by the greater feeling of fulfillment that comes from bringing more to the table than my DPS.

What if the change to Smoke Bomb were just the beginning? What if we gained a whole host of powerful, but niche, raid uses for our abilities? What if Cheat Death were redesigned into a baseline cooldown that could be cast on yourself — or on an ally — once every five minutes? What if we (and warriors) could use Dismantle on raid bosses once per fight, similarly to how other classes can use battle res? What if Feint temporarily increased our crit by a percentage of the incoming damage we reduced? What if Tricks of the Trade didn’t just transfer threat to our target — what if it also transferred the effects of any defensive cooldowns we used while the buff was active, such as Evasion and Cloak of Shadows?

The days of pigeonholing classes into single roles with narrow definitions of “success” need to be over with. MMOs like WoW — and the people who play them — have matured past that point. For a class like ours, DPS should always be relevant and important, but it’s time we moved on from the idea that we somehow deserve to be the DPS kings in raids because we’re so handicapped in other areas. It’s time we instead called for those handicaps to be removed or altered in ways that make rogues as a class, and melee as a role, feel unique, more compelling to play and genuinely useful in ways it’s never felt in raids before.

At the same time, it’s time for WoW’s designers to truly practice what they preach. Developers such as Ghostcrawler are fond of chastising players for paying so much attention to DPS meters, and rightly so. But they’ve provided so few alternatives for us to feel *tangibly* valuable in raids outside of damage-dealing that it’s no wonder we continue to latch onto our DPS performance as our only real measure of success. In last week’s Icy Veins interview, they promised to explore new niches in which melee could be valuable. Let’s hope they really push the envelope, take some risks and get creative in doing so for the next expansion.

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Dev Interviews: Rogue Bits from Arena Junkies, Gamebreaker

In the run-up to Patch 5.3′s launch this week, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and Brian “Holinka” Holinka, among other senior WoW designers, have been making the round on various fansites to preview the patch and explain their thinking behind many of the changes in store.

The Arena Junkies interview with GC and Holinka, which posted over the weekend, includes a few highly rogue-relevant bits, as does today’s interview with Gary Gannon and Olivia Grace on a special episode of gamebreaker.tv’s Legendary. Notable roguey excerpts are copied below. (In the case of the Gamebreaker interview, the transcription is mine, since the source is a video. The AJ transcript excerpts will be copy-pasted as-is from AJ’s site.)

The Find Weakness Change: Making Spells Different in PvE/PvP (Arena Junkies)

(I ranted about this one early this morning.)

Sam: PvE and PvP changes seem to collide very often, do you guys believe that balancing both may require a lot of specific PvP and PvE only changes? An example would be Find Weakness in 5.3.

Brian: Yes, and when we do it. Find weakness is a great example where PvE needed a buff and it would’ve cost big problems to PvP. We keep it in mind and Frost bomb is another example. We try not to do it too often, it’s a lot of things to keep track of. We’re the designers and people on Arena Junkies are really passionate players that really keep up on all the changes, but a lot of players are not. To ask our general player base that your spell does this and it does half damage or 25% or something like that, it’s really not something we want to do too often. Especially hey we want eviscerate to hit 10% less on players. That’s really inconsistent and a tough thing. We usually do it when it’s really a significant thing such as Find Weakness is 50% less and Frost bomb is 40% less.

Greg: There’s also this persistent, I’ll just call it a myth, that if we just bite the bullet and make 2 versions of every spell suddenly we’ll have class balance nailed and it’ll never be a problem again. I’m pretty confident if we went ahead and split sub rogues into 2 abilities on every ability with different damage numbers you’ll still see players saying why they can’t just tune down this one ability that’s costing pvp burst problem. In other words players will still want us to make changes even if we have the numbers split up, I don’t think it’ll suddenly make players feel their class is viable in every situation

Why Rogues Are Being Nerfed (Arena Junkies)

Sam: In the history of changes a lot of nerfs and buffs are really large, which usually changes the “balance” of one class from one to another such as warrior and rogues last patch. Warriors were arguably the top notch class in 5.2 but kind of went to the bottom barrel. Rogues basically had the opposite happen to them. Do you guys think smaller changes would be more ideal or how would you look at it?

Brian Holinka: Obviously when we can we would like to make smaller changes. I think what you saw with rogues in 5.2 was that there were a lot of calls for their survival to be improved. So we made Prep baseline, took Cloak off, so they weren’t constantly unpeelable for 12 seconds, and moved it to a short CD. I think these were good changes, but what pushed rogues over the edge was we tried to create some talents to make them more attractive and give them variety. Shuriken Toss, Mark for Death, and Cloak and Dagger, those were all probably a little bit too much. 5.3 Rogues were really about reigning in those talent changes. We kept the survivability changes the same but we wanted to reign in the unpeelable Cloak and Dagger, the ranged play style of Shuriken Toss, and those were I think really smart changes. We didn’t also nerf Mark for Death and a bunch of other changes. The Find Weakness change was mainly for burst on higher armor targets. We thought that wasn’t appropriate. We made some changes in 5.2 that didn’t mean to be buffs, but for talent choices to be more interesting and we needed to reign those in.

Revisiting Rogue Talents for PvP: 5.2 and 5.3 (Legendary)

Gary Gannon: How do you feel the [PvP class] balance has been in 5.2?

[...]

Brian Holinka: I think there were some situations where we were trying to make some talents more interesting from 5.1 to 5.2. For example [...] there was a rogue ability called Versatility, and it was not really seeing much play. So we created a new one called Marked for Death. In other situations, like, for instance: [...] Preparation was another ability that we actually thought all rogues could benefit from having. So there we had to create a new one, Cloak and Dagger.

So, we were doing a lot of talent work, and in some places, we just overshot a bit. We felt like it made some classes a little bit too good and the talents were just a little bit too good, so we tried to rein those in.

We base our balance feedback on a lot of factors: We look at representations; distribution of ratings across all specs and classes; how people are faring within our team, how they’re playing; we talk to some of the very high level players on a very constant basis. We try and get a sense of where problems lie, and then we try and fix things that we feel are big problems for the overall gameplay of the game — where it just makes everybody’s life a little bit less fun — and we try and affect those.

There’s situations where maybe you can say this or that has made this class even more competitive, but there’s also situations where this talent is just one-shotting people. So we have to look at that, and we have to understand that it’s made the game less fun to play.

Our goals are basically: try and make specs and classes competitive; try and make the overall gameplay environment fun; and then, we wanna say, try and make some talents interesting, and try and make rotations interesting and fun to play. Sometimes we make changes that are a little bit out of priority there, but that’s generally what we try to do. And I think, going in from 5.2 to 5.3, that was a lot of our goal, was to kind of rein in some of the things that got out of control.

Though these three chunks were especially rogue-directed, large sections of both interviews are likely to be of great interest to any PvPing rogue, so be sure to read/tune in to them for a more complete discussion of upcoming changes — and some changes potentially in store for 5.4 and beyond.

 

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Ruffy Rants: Patch 5.3 and the PvE/PvP Ability Chasm

For once, the ginormous pit of nothingness that is my WoW PvP experience may actually be a good thing.

As I have often stated on this blog, I am a PvP wuss. Although I’ve dabbled in it a few times during the 4.5 years I’ve been playing WoW, I’ve inevitably quit for two primary reasons:

• The feeling that I’m actively playing against other human beings, most of whom probably know what they’re doing a hell of a lot better than me, makes me crap my pants a little. OK, a lot. And I only have so much money to spend on pants in a given year.
• That feeling is reinforced by all the times I feel like I’m maybe actually doing things kinda-sorta right, and yet I still am getting my ass handed to me by someone who simply outgears me.

For the first time since I started playing, I feel like a PvP-related patch is actually speaking directly at me. “Hey, Rfeann,” it’s saying. “Don’t be afraid, man. It’s cool. You can come back in the water again. I swear the crocodiles aren’t… well, OK, they’re still there, and they REALLY want to eat you. Like, they’ve already drawn up a whole 10-course tasting menu based around your various internal organs. But their teeth are blunter, so it’s totally cool. Just take a quick dip, maybe?”

And I’m gonna do it. It helps that, shortly after the patch drops, I’ll be starting the part of the legendary quest chain that involves some battleground play; that’ll be my opportunity to dive back in and see how bloody I get.

I’ve got hope that the main systemic PvP changes in store for 5.3 — in particular, resilience going baseline and PvP gear being scaled and removed from the upgrade system — will make it less likely that I’ll find myself demoralized and obliterated in the blink of an eye by ubergeared players who are salivating at the chance to chop off my arm, beat me to death with it and then carry it with them over to the graveyard so that when I respawn, the first thing I will see is my own arm giving me the middle finger as I’m instantly murdered again.

The question is: Are these changes going to be enough to make me *stick with* PvP long enough to get over the other problem I listed above: That I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and am intimidated by all those other players who do?

Two of WoW’s leading design folks, the ever-present Twittermongers Brian Holinka (PvP chief) and Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street (lead systems designer human guy person), were recently interviewed by ArenaJunkies’ Sam “Vanguards” Kwok about the big changes in store for Patch 5.3. Included in the interview is this exchange, which drives straight to the heart of my lingering worry over PvP design:

Sam: PvE and PvP changes seem to collide very often, do you guys believe that balancing both may require a lot of specific PvP and PvE only changes? An example would be Find Weakness in 5.3.

Brian: Yes, and when we do it. Find weakness is a great example where PvE needed a buff and it would’ve cost big problems to PvP. We keep it in mind and Frost bomb is another example. We try not to do it too often, it’s a lot of things to keep track of. We’re the designers and people on Arena Junkies are really passionate players that really keep up on all the changes, but a lot of players are not. To ask our general player base that your spell does this and it does half damage or 25% or something like that, it’s really not something we want to do too often. Especially hey we want eviscerate to hit 10% less on players. That’s really inconsistent and a tough thing. We usually do it when it’s really a significant thing such as Find Weakness is 50% less and Frost bomb is 40% less.

Greg: There’s also this persistent, I’ll just call it a myth, that if we just bite the bullet and make 2 versions of every spell suddenly we’ll have class balance nailed and it’ll never be a problem again. I’m pretty confident if we went ahead and split sub rogues into 2 abilities on every ability with different damage numbers you’ll still see players saying why they can’t just tune down this one ability that’s costing pvp burst problem. In other words players will still want us to make changes even if we have the numbers split up, I don’t think it’ll suddenly make players feel their class is viable in every situation

I’ve seen this argument many, many times over the past few years, from designers and players alike. It used to make a lot more sense to me then that it does now. There is a perpetual, stated reluctance within the WoW design team to create PvP and PvE versions of every spell, and the justification given is concern that 1) it’ll be confusing for players and 2) it won’t necessarily solve balance issues.

Those are both valid concerns. But here’s the thing: I am *already* confused out of my gourd by the difference between PvE and PvP. They are, at the most basic level of gameplay, utterly and completely divergent from one another. When I am fighting another player, virtually *none* of the rules apply that apply when I’m questing, dungeoning or raiding. A player enemy has a different health pool from an NPC. Has a different toolkit. Has different strengths and weaknesses — and those strengths and weaknesses vary depending on the person’s class, spec and knowledge/experience level. And a player enemy is often impossible to predict, particularly for a casual player like me with very little PvP experience.

And on top of all of that, the spells that really matter are *already* entirely different for PvP than PvE. To know that — and to have my brain turn to mush right out the gate — I don’t need to look any further than my crowd control spells. Not only do they have a fraction of their duration in PvP than they do in PvE (Blind: one minute? nope: EIGHT SECONDS), but they also are affected by diminishing returns, which is a stunningly intricate, exceedingly complex system that I’m pretty sure works more or less like this:

I open from stealth with a stun. You are stunned! Take that, nefarious ne’er-do-well!
The stun ended, but I don’t like it when you move. I stun you again! Ha, pusillanimous pig! I shall perforate you with my pointy petards of piercing!
Oh, crap, you came out of that quicker than I expected. Now you’re hurting me. I’m going to Blind you and get some distance. Look at me, I am so clever!
Wait, that didn’t work at all. You’re still hurting me, and now someone’s laughing at me in BG chat because they said I can’t use Blind on someone who was just feared three times in a row.
OK, um, crap, I’m gonna Disarm you OH GOD THAT BARELY LASTED TWO SECONDS WHAT IS HAPPENING EVASION VANISH VANISH OGOD MY ARM I’M BEING BEATEN WITH MY OWN ARM

Arm removal aside, I realize that’s probably not the most realistic example, but I wanted to break up this long-ass blog post with something listy. :) My point is: There are so many types of CC — and what shares diminishing returns with what and for how long feels so arcane, inaccessible and difficult to track — that it’s all a huge confusing jumble in my head. Which is bad, because as a rogue, I know CC is my PvP livelihood, and driving other people mad in battlegrounds seems like it’d be a lot of fun if I knew what the heck I was doing.

But I don’t. For me, PvE and PvP are already vastly different from one another. So, when I read that designers are reluctant to alter the amount of damage a specific ability does in PvE because it’d be different from PvP, it almost makes me laugh. I think: Do those guys think I’d even *notice* something like that?

Top PvPers would notice it, sure — it would be *huge* for them. But they already know PvP inside and out as it is; they will adjust to a change the same way raiders adjust to changes, by factoring it in, adapting and moving on (or complaining about it endlessly in forums and on Twitter).

Me? I’m still too busy trying to remember whether it’s been 18 seconds or 14 seconds since my last stun ended to give a crap whether my Eviscerate will be slightly weaker against a player target than it is against a raid boss who’s three levels higher than me and has 1.2 BILLION health.

So, yes, I’m looking forward to hopefully having my arm handed to me less often when I dip back into the PvP pool once Patch 5.3 launches. But I’ve already spent years trying to master the complexities of end-game *PvE* on my rogue; even if I’m staying alive longer in PvP come 5.3, I’m not sure I’ll have the energy to wrap my brain around that morass of details as well. And the complexities of PvP — which even *casual* players like me need to understand in order to achieve satisfying success — don’t look like they’re changing much anytime soon.

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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: New Subtlety PvP Nerf; Devs Respond to Flood of Patch 5.3 Rogue Tears — Updated 5/8

[UPDATE 5/4-5/8: Since I first posted this, Holinka clarified the new CnD change and noted that the previous range nerf is being reverted. I've also added a whole mess of additional, related tweets from Holinka and Ghostcrawler at the end of the post.]

Since the most recent Patch 5.3 PTR build yesterday, a number of Subtlety rogue players on the PTR have reported that Cloak and Dagger no longer works while they’re in Shadow Dance. The synergy between these two abilities has been one of the bread-and-butter rogue combos during Patch 5.2, and has helped propel rogues — specifically Subtlety rogues — to the top of the arena heap.

When added to the other changes already in store for Patch 5.3, what we’re seeing is a very clear attempt to 1) tone down rogue burst and CC abilities in general, and 2) try to make Assassination and Combat feel like they’re worth trying in PvP as well (mainly by making Sub less attractive).

PvP chief Brian Holinka and Ghostcrawler let forth a flurry of tweets (many featuring his refreshingly unapologetic tongue-in-cheek humor) in response to the frustration many rogues have expressed with this steady flow of rogue PvP nerfs for Patch 5.3. I shall unleash them on you below the cut; I’m too lazy to set up anchored links so you’ll have to scroll through them, but they’re split roughly into these minicategories:

• Tweets Clearing Up the CnD Change
• Offsetting the 5.1 Changes
• What About Subterfuge?
• Has Rogue PvP Been Ruined for 5.3?
• Re-Examining the Mobility Talent Tier (Part I)
• Re-Examining the Mobility Talent Tier (Part II)
• Ignorance About Being Ignored
• What About Patch 5.4?

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