Rogue BC Talent & Ability Questions Answered

The rogue ability and talent preview for the Burning Crusade expansion has been live for a while, and after collecting your questions and feedback we wanted to provide you with the answers to the most common of those questions and concerns. We realize that this may not cover every question that you have; however we hope that it comprises of the majority of major questions and concerns.

• We wanted to first state that we are currently in the process of redesigning or adjusting many of the rogue talents and some of the new abilities. We wanted to state this first as many of the concerns specific to the current talents won’t necessarily apply as they are currently under revision. The questions we have provided answers for below remain more specific to functionality of talents and abilities, and not necessarily on the side of providing information on the talent and ability design and reasoning, as many of them are already planned to be changed.
  
  
• We’ve seen some concerns that the increased emphasis on stamina in the expansion may negatively impact the ability to do damage quickly or keep incapacitate effects applied sufficiently throughout an entire fight. We do expect that crit-based builds for all classes are going to see a general “rounding” of the effectiveness of burst damage, but from our current testing the rogue class is transitioning quite well into the expansion. We’re of course going to be keeping an eye on everything and making additional changes and adjustments as we see become necessary.
  
  
• There have been some questions on Resilience, which is a new crit mitigation stat visible and modifiable in the expansion. The impact of this stat has been changed and now balances the mitigation between damage reduction and crit resistance. This allows more crits so that abilities depending on them are still viable, but may reduce the damage of the crit still making resilience a worthy stat. We’re going to be continuing to evaluate this mechanic and make any necessary adjustments moving forward.
  
  
• One question that came up quite a few times was how Mutilate will work with Seal Fate. Mutilate, although combining the attacks of two weapons, is only counted as a single attack and thus only gains a single combo point from Seal Fate. The most combo points you can gain from a Mutilate attack/crit with Seal Fate would be three. Although mutilate is counted as a single special attack each weapon is rolled for separately, meaning each has the ability to crit on its own.
  
  
• We’re currently in the process of redesigning Disembowel. We still plan to keep the synergy with poison application to some degree, but we’re currently designing it to use up the poison applications to apply additional damage..
  
  
• New poison ranks will be available in the expansion for those that already scale. We have no new poisons currently planned beyond Anesthetic.
  
  
• We’re going to look at the possibility of increasing application charge amounts for the various types of poisons.
  
  
• Mutilate and Shiv are both affected normally by the off-hand damage reduction modifier, but are also affected by dual wield specialization.
  
  
• Find Weakness works as stated and only increases damage of offensive abilities (yellow damage) and not normal auto-attacks.
  
  
• With our current implementations poisons will affect the vast majority of bosses in the expansion.
  
  
• A new mechanic is being introduced with the release of the expansion that will visually indicate to a rogue that a monster is able to detect or see through stealth.
  
  
• There is a cap on run speed, and Fleet Footed would max out that cap regardless of what else was increasing your run speed. You won’t be able to stack multiple ‘increase to run speed’ modifiers beyond the max 8% increase.
  
  
• The mechanic of thrown weapons is being changed in the expansion to be similar to a normal weapon. Once a stack is used it will remain in your inventory and can then be repaired to refill the stack, similar to repairing broken armor or weapons. This allows us to put stats on thrown weapons and itemize them as we would any other weapon.
  
  
• Although we recently removed the ability for poisons and other temporary item buffs to persist through zones due to performance issues, we believe we have overcome those technical limitations and plan to have the functionality re-implemented for the expansion.
  

Thank you everyone for remaining active on the boards and taking the time to submit your questions and concerns. As we move into future talent and ability updates we hope to be able to address any more that you have. Thanks for reading!