Questions for Devs about Rogues.

#0 - Sept. 19, 2010, 6:04 p.m.

Have a few questions. I'll try to format it it like the healing thread. Anyone else who responds please don't add any crying.

1. What is going to be done to reduce the amount of passive damage we do? Slice and Dice, Poisons and the 20% Haste buff pretty much makes up over half our damage. If not half, definitely the majority. Is there a way that poison damage can be more interactive via shiv?

2. There is much dissension amongst the ranks that each tree has basically the same rotation. Ignoring the claims that all the rotations are "boring," do you feel they are too similar besides when the cool-downs used?

3. Are you happy with Shadow Dance? It has been an ability that was historically shunned due to it not being as good as its initial incarnation. The UI was not implemented until well after the game was released leaving many to wonder what lies ahead for this ability. Stampede is far superior and is also something that was specifically suggested by rogues for Shadow Dance. Is it possible we can see the shadow damage idea or stampede Reckful idea implemented some time after release?

4. Earlier you said Prep was holding Rogues back. I believe one of the main problems rogues have disliked is have one (sometimes two) trees that are so far behind in damage that they are stuck being a class that can only use one tree. We feel as though choosing between great damage or great mobility is not a choice that feels good. Choosing between Deadly Brew and Cheat Death however is a fine choice. Utility vs. Utility. Do you see anything being done to the other two trees that don't have prep so as to lessen the gap between mobility and damage?

5. Utility gets thrown around a lot. Recently it was announced another class would get the 20% haste buff. Many thought this was finally a chance for Rogues to get a buff that was deemed necessary. Instead it went to hunters. Between Hunters bringing every buff in the entire game and Mages/Warlocks bringing Heroism and Battle res, Rogues are left scratching their heads in terms of utility. I don't really have a question here. We just know when groups see buffs like 20% haste or Heroism missing someone is porting back to Ironforge to recruit for it. I have never seen anyone recruit for 4% damage.

6. Can you explain the Combat mastery? I'm not sure I can grasp it really. Assassination's mastery makes you prioritize Envenom even more. Subtlety makes you want to do as many finishers as possible making haste (which should increase energy regen) or mastery rating a tough choice. What exactly does the combat mastery do?

7. Many Rogues complain about simple rotations. I will agree with the sentiment that a Rogue that plays just okay and a Rogue that is playing for optimization usually do not see much difference in their damage. There is really nothing to do better than the other rogue. You don't ever feel like you did a good job because everything is set up and predetermined. If Revealing Strike doesn't affect Slice and Dice I suppose remembering not to use it for SnD can be a difference. What do you feel about the "simplicity"?

8. Cheap shot and Kidney shot were nerfed on DR. Much needed change as the game is moving away from killing people while they can't fight back. This nerf was done under the contingency that rogues would be made less reliant on CD's. We got three new CD's. You can skip this one if you want. Its controversial and I'd rather something be answered rather than all of them being skipped due to this question.

9. This'll be it for the questions but I do believe from reading many threads and posting some myself, this question is fresh on the minds of many. Deadened Nerves, Reinforced Leather and Enveloping Shadows are 3 damage reducing talents equaling 8 points in our reduced point trees. As much as the answer given was "saving healer mana in cataclysm will be more important" do you understand that it feels pretty bad to use points for that, or even have that many of them taking up spots for more exciting talents. The assassination tree is very short on interesting non-dps talents as it is and the qualm is more with the amount that exists rather than that they exist at all. Do you feel there are enough talent choices in the trees, particularly Assassination, to give a pure DPS class a damage reducing talent in each tree? (Given that this standard of mana saving damage reducing talents is not applied to other classes nor is it fun to put points into?)

Ghostcrawler

#33 - Sept. 20, 2010, 10:16 p.m.

Passive damage -- While the combat log says that you are doing a lot of auto attacking, it's not telling you the full story. A lot of what rogues have to manage (say SnD and Envenom) then boost your autoattacks or poison damage. If we changed SnD to instead be a separate dot for the same overall damage, all of a sudden your combat logs would show less "passive" damage. As long as good rogues can do better damage than bad rogues, we think it's fine.

Combat's mastery -- The big missing piece of the puzzle was that Main Guache was supposed to proc Combat Potency. Without that (which it now has), it is pretty lackluster.

20% melee / ranged haste buff -- This is something we're evaluating. It's a really serious buff for rogues and warriors particularly, to the extent that your dps drops significantly without it. This suggests we need to nerf the buff (in the same way we changed e.g. Curse of Elements from 13% to 8%) and buff affected classes to compensate. We just don't want the swing to be that big when you don't have it.

Mana reducing talents -- We just disagree that rogues are singled out here, though if you see some dps classes that can spend all of their points on dps and skip anything utiltiy related, please bring them up so we can evaluate them. It's always possible that the community (correctly or incorrectly) perceives a talent we intended to be optional utility as mandatory dps.

Ghostcrawler

#47 - Sept. 20, 2010, 10:59 p.m.

Mana reducing talents = the OP was concerned about talents like Deadened Nerves that for PvE really translate into reducing the mana healers spend on heals. Apologies if I short-handed too much.

We want dps classes to consider these useful talents rather than just dismissing survival as the healers' jobs while they go into dps tunnel vision mode. The OP was expressing the concern that rogues had too many of these talents relative to other classes. I responded that I didn't think that was the case but players are welcome to point out other dps trees that don't match.

Ghostcrawler

#196 - Sept. 25, 2010, 6:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I don't understand GCs thinking here. Isn't any damage done as a result of an auto attack non yellow? There is no action the rogue needs to take to perform the poison damage because of slice and dice. The only way a rogue can apply damage directly as part of an action is Shiv and Envenom.

Imagine a rogue could do 80% of their damage just by right clicking on a target. That means that at best, you've got 20% of damage to play with to separate the best rogue in the world from the guy who just autoattacks. That's largely what we mean when we're concerned about too much damage coming from white attacks.

You can argue that Slice and Dice doesn't take much effort on the part of the rogue, but it does take some. Managing your energy and cooldowns takes a little more, and so on, until we reach a point where the best rogues in the world do significantly more damage than those who just autoattack and perhaps let Slice and Dice occasionally fall off.

I think viscerally, some players just don't like spending their resource on buffs. They want to convert it all into big numbers, because big numbers are fun. Those self buffs serve a purpose though. They help serve as a damage buffer. They provide a little bit of ramp up time. They account for one more ball you need to juggle to keep in the air. It wouldn't be hard to juggle just the one ball, but you're often asked to do a lot more than that.

Q u o t e:
They "stopped the arms race" by disarming rogues of stunlocks, which were already taken care of with the increased HP pools, but didn't remove the reactionary (and far more OP) skills that negate the emasculated stuns.

That wasn't the problem with stunlocks. It wasn't a balance issue per se of whether or not the rogue could kill someone or not. The problem was that the situation was too binary. If the rogue executed a perfect stun chain, then they would win. If they screwed up or were countered, they would lose. Both the rogue and the opponent might as well have 1 health in that scenario because there is no room for fractions. Imagine instead that getting 1 stun off makes you half as effective instead of not effective at all.

There are ways for some classes to mitigate stuns, absolutely. (The alternative is the awesome rogue just always gets a stun off.) But there are fewer than before, and the talents that just provide mechanic duration reductions are all gone. That was the arms race we were talking about. If rogues can just never stun anyone and are kited all the time, then we'll fix it. But very few of you have experienced level 85 PvP yet, so it's hard to for us to react too strongly to supposition and hypothesis.

Try out the Tol Barad tests we're doing soon and see how it feels in appropriate gear at max level.