Fixing Rogues, Part 2: Cooldowns

The next problem I'd like to address is that of cooldowns - long an iconic part of our class. In vanilla we were defined - particularly in PvP - by our access to many powerful cooldowns, and we've gained more across the patches and expansions since then. Yet in the modern PvE game, they have become as much burden as benefit, and today I'd like to discuss why that is, and how to fix it.

Let us begin with our utility cooldowns, as the problem with them is easier to identify. We have some that are powerful tools in our arsenal, led by Cloak but also including Sprint, Evasion, and Redirect. These are valuable tools, because we use them in response to specific needs that arise during a fight. We Cloak when we need to shed a debuff, and Sprint when we need to get somewhere faster, and Evasion when we have aggro and Redirect to get a sharper target switch. Compare this to Tricks or (for Assassination and Subtlety) Vanish, which we hit because... its off cooldown.

The key point here is that some of our cooldowns have ceased being things that we hit because we need the benefit they provide to respond to a specific event within the fight - thus requiring a decision to be made about when they are most needed - and started being things that we hit every 30 or 60 or 180 seconds, with little regard to timing within the fight. This robs them of their role as powerful tools to use as needed, and turns them into just another part of our rotation - and I think that's boring. What's the point in having cooldowns (rather than passive benefit) if there's no meaningful decision to be made about when and how to use them? Fortunately, though, the solution is easy - simply remove the DPS component to the abilities, and the problem goes away. There's just no good reason to turn vanish into a (ghetto) DPS cooldown.
For DPS cooldowns, the problem is harder, as by definition, the more times you use a DPS cooldown in a given fight, the more damage you will do. But I think we can do better than we currently are by making them short, intense, and infrequent:

• Infrequent - Consider for a moment how Heroism is used; you pick the one time during the fight when you need it most, and you use it then - because you can only use it once every 10 minutes, and few fights last that long. This is different than, say, Adrenaline Rush or Vendetta, which you spam on cooldown all fight long. It you make the cooldowns longer - 3 minutes, or even 5 - you'll get fewer uses per fight, and thereby more temporal flexibility in when you use them. In a 7 minute fight, a 2 minute cooldown can only be delayed 15 seconds per usage (on average) to get the maximal number of usages in, while a 5 minute cooldown can be delayed by a minute (on average) and still get both usages in.
• Short - Cooldowns provide too large a portion of our DPS - Vendetta 5%, and Adrenaline Rush almost 10%. If the DPS benefit were smaller, we could afford to take more chances - gambling with 1% of the total damage you'll do for the fight is far more reasonable than gambling with 3%. One of the two ways to do this is to make the duration shorter.
• Intense - The other way, of course, is to make them less powerful when active, but I don't see that that's necessarily a good solution; it risks the Cold Blood problem of it not really mattering that much whether you hit it or not. Thus, we make sure the benefit provided is significant and meaningful, and reduce the total damage expectation only via duration.

To illustrate this point: if Vendetta were a 90% damage increase for 10 seconds every 3 minutes, it would give the same average damage increase that it does now, but would be obviously vastly more powerful (and quite possibly overpowered). Even at +40% for 10 seconds every 3 minutes it would be a much more valuable tool - particularly once our baseline DPS was buffed to compensate for the loss of cooldown damage.

With these goals in mind, let us now look at solutions for our Combat cooldowns (I'll deal with Assassination and Subtlety in future installments):

2. Tricks is not a DPS cooldown

• Tricks no longer gives the target a DPS benefit.
• Replace the T10 and T12 set bonuses with non Tricks-linked abilities.
• Glyph of Tricks still removes energy cost but increases cooldown to 45 seconds instead of reducing damage bonus.

I've gone through the full logic of this previously, so I will refer you to that explanation rather than repeating the whole thing here. To summarize: Tricks should be only a threat transfer, and we use it when someone needs more or less threat - not just because its been 30 seconds since we last hit it.

3. Restless Blades removed
When Restless Blades first came out, I liked it - I thought it was a good fit with our usual cooldown-centric style of play. However, upon contemplation, I've changed my mind; as we've discussed, cooldowns that become available too frequently can be detrimental to their quality, and that's all Restless Blades does. Moroever, it doesn't contribute to decision-making in any way; its not like you're going to do more or less damaging finishers based on a desire to control when things come off cooldown; your optimal cycle already involves doing as many as is possible, so Restless Blades is effectively a passive benefit for doing something you were already going to do anyway. If we must have something that reduces cooldowns, it should be tied to something that we wouldn't necessarily already always do. For instance, were it tied to Revealing Strike, we'd get some normal baseline level of cooldown reduction - but if you needed your cooldown sooner for some reason, you could sacrifice short term DPS by spamming RvS in order to get your cooldown back faster. Would it always be worth using? Not if balanced correctly. But the fact that you *could* do it if necessary would add richness and depth to the class.

That said: such an implementation is not without its own problems, and I'm not advocating that as a replacement (yet); but given that the current implementation isn't much different than "your KSp cooldown is reduced by 20/40 seconds and your AR cooldown by 30/60" - and as we've discussed, short cooldowns isn't really a good thing - I do feel confident in saying that Restless Blades does need to be replaced with *something* else.

4. Killing Spree only kills bad guys

• Killing Spree always returns you to the exact point in space you left from

If we look at KSp in the context of our DPS cooldown goals, its actually pretty good. Its short; it provides meaningful DPS boost when active; it only provides about 2.5% of our total DPS, and following the removal of Restless Blades it has a reasonable cooldown. Its a good talent - except for the fact that it kills you.

Now, I've said this before, and I'll say it again: it doesn't really bother me that KSp can't be used on cooldown on all fights. It doesn't even bother me that much that there's the occasional fight where you can't use it at all. The entire point of this post has been that you should have to pay attention to when you hit cooldowns and not just do so whenever they become available, and having to figure out whether its safe to use or not strikes me as wholly consistent with that goal - provided our DPS is not balanced with the assumption that we'll be able to use it the instant it comes off cooldown for the entire duration of every fight.

That said: I think its a little *too* punitive in its current form - very few abilities can kill you irrevokably if mistimed by only a second or two. So to avoid the issues of getting dumped into lava behind bosses and sucked off to strange locations by chaining off adds, lets simply always return to where we started from - you may ping pong all over the place for 2.5 seconds, but at the end of it you're back where you started. Of course, the boss may have dropped a flame puddle or a Shadow Trap or whatever on the location you left from, but that's why you have to be careful; in the age of boss timers there's simply no reason not to know when the next patch of bad will be appearing. It'll still be a cooldown that must be used with caution, but at least now you're in control of your own fate.

5. Nerf AR. A lot.

• Haste buff removed from AR; it again only increases regen.
• Duration reduced to 10 seconds.
• Glyph of Adrenaline Rush removed.

AR is currently almost 10% of a combat rogue's damage; the removal of Restless Blades drops this to 6%; cutting it to half its current (glyphed) duration drops that to 3%, and dropping the (rather unnecessary) haste that was tacked on to the ability in Cataclysm gets us down around 2%. Which is a far more reasonable place for it to be. Its still a significant boost while active, and is still absolutely worth using, but you have far more flexibility in saving it for the moment it matters most.