Reflections on 3 days of Cataclysm

Having looked at my PMs and the forums here and elsewhere, it seems to me that there are some common concerns that many people seem to be having about rogues at level 85. And while I don't claim to have all the answers, I do think some of the concerns are blown out of proportion, so I'd like to take a few minutes to try to inject some sanity into the discussion.

A major complaint that a lot of people seem to be having is that rogue DPS is, to put it bluntly, crap. And perhaps it is - I don't have enough information to make a straight-across comparison with other classes. I've done a total of 3 pulls of a raid boss in Cataclysm, and in most of them I was in the upper third of the melee DPSers. But with the gear levels being all over the place based on how fast people leveled, how many heroics they squeezed in, and how much drop luck they had, I'm not sure that really means anything. Once a few weeks have gone by and we've had time for gear levels to average out and a larger comparison set for data, perhaps we'll conclude that our DPS is too low. And perhaps we won't. I don't have any basis for commentary at the moment, and I suspect most of the rest of you are in the same boat.

However, i get the feeling that's not what most people are complaining about. The complaints I've been seeing have a lot more to do with leveling and five mans and the general perception that stuff just takes a lot longer to die than it used to. And they're right. It does. But that has a lot less to do with rogues and a lot more to do with the fact that... well... stuff has a lot more HP than it used to. An outdoor mob in Storm Peaks or Icecrown has perhaps 13k HP; even in Hyjal mobs have twice that, and by Twilight Highlands you're running across regular outdoor mobs with 70k HP. The days of finish mobs in a GCD or two are simply over (for now) - mobs are supposed to take some time to kill, and they do. As we gear up throughout Cataclysm it'll get faster, but I don't think we'll be getting back to consistent 2 GCD kills anytime soon, if ever. Blizzard has made a conscious decision that killing mobs should take longer. This is also among the reasons why we have 2-3 times as many HP as before - so we can survive the longer fights.

Similarly, its worth noting that a typical 5man heroic boss has HP rivaling some of the bosses in Naxx 25. Heroics (and the entire first tier of raiding) was really pretty easy in Wrath - many people were able to start in on heroics while still in leveling greens. Blizzard has chosen to make the heroics somewhat harder, so that they take some time and organization to complete at current gear levels. This is again not a problem with rogues - the game has changed, and we're feeling that like any other class.

In short: yes, things take a lot longer to die, both in the world at large and in 5man dungeons. We take a lot more damage in the process. Fortunately, we also have the tools - more HP, self heals, etc - to deal with that. The pace of the game has changed, and that's just something that's going to take some getting used to.

The other major problem I've heard people mention is that of resource mechanics - in particular, energy regen feels a lot lower than we're used to. And I admit, I've felt the same sort of thing. The problem is, its not really true. Right now, most of us have less than 10% haste from rating, so as an assassination rogue our regen is somewhere between 10 and 11, plus another not-quite-3 from venomous wounds, for around 13 total regen. And in Wrath, typical energy regen was around 10, plus another 3-4 from Focused Attacks, for about 13-14 total regen. All in all, very similar. Our perspective is skewed a bit from running around in 4.0.1 for a month with 40% haste and thus 17 regen per second, but realistically our energy intake (barring some major undiscovered bug) should be right in the same neighborhood that it was for most of Wrath.

That said: Assassination, at least, does feel like it plays slower than it used to, so the question that must be asked is why. And the answer is simple: our crit rate has tanked, and that means we get a lot fewer Seal Fate procs than we used to, so we spend a lot more time building CPs and a lot less popping finishers. At 80 a well-geared rogue could easily run 60%+ buffed crit rate, meaning Backstab procced Seal Fate 90% of the time and Mutilate almost 95%. But now one is lucky to push 15% crit, so Backstab and Mutilate both proc Seal Fate less than half the time. Our *energy* regen might be down only a few percent, but our *combo point* generation is easily down by 20% or more. And that's very noticeable in terms of maintaining a cycle.

So at this point, I'm sure some of you are thus saying "well if haste and crit are responsible for this terrible slow-ass cycle, why aren't we stacking crit and haste?" And I suppose its a reasonable question, but the question I feel obligated to ask is: what's wrong with a slower-paced cycle? I mean, its certainly very different than what we're used to - particularly after the last few weeks where at times you literally could not spend energy as fast as you were earning it - but is it fundamentally bad? I for one like having time to think, and a cycle where your ability to manage your energy bar to optimize uptimes matters more in terms of your DPS output than how fast you can mash buttons or how low your ping is. I can see why some people may not, but in the balance I don't think it's wholly a bad thing. So its true, one could restore some of the frenetic pace of rogue play by stacking haste and crit - though not too much of it, as fundamentally our relative gear level is just a lot lower - but it happens to work out that at the moment, for assassination at least, focusing on making the slower-paced cycle hit harder - through agility, mastery, and spell hit - will do more damage.

So, in the end: things have certainly changed. Some of them are shifts in the way that rogues play. Some of them are just the way the game is designed now. And it doesn't surprise me at all that not everyone is fond of all the changes - whenever there's a major overhaul in a game like this, there's going to be a range of responses. But I'd also note that I don't think most of the problems are unique to rogues - while its too early to say if rogue DPS is fully competitive, I do feel confident in saying that it's at least in the same ballpark as most other classes. It might work out that we're 5, or 10, or maybe even 20 percent behind the best single target DPS classes - which would certainly be grounds for buffs to fix the class - but we're certainly not 50% behind. We're not the only class that's finding that mobs take a lot longer to kill. We're not the only class that finds heroics time consuming to clear. And I also think that it may well work out that our DPS is exactly where it should be. So I think those individuals that are claiming the forthcoming demise of the class could use a bit of perspective in that respect. After all - sometimes change is good.