Fixing Rogues, Part 3: Cycle Complexity
Posted 08/21/11 at 8:19 PM by Aldriana
In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I’ve provided fairly concrete suggestions for changes that should be made - specific changes to specific abilities that address specific problems that the class is having. And I have a fairly good-sized list of such proposals remaining; I could go several more weeks posting that sort of thing, and at the end of it the class would probably be better off than it is now. But having thought about it for a few weeks, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. There are some major underlying issues that I haven’t fully solved, and its important to get the big picture right before dwelling too much on the details. So today I’d like to explain these problems and provide some rough ideas for addressing them. Not all of these ideas are necessarily good; but I figure the easiest way to figure out which are and which aren’t is to throw them out there, and see what people have to say.
The most fundamental goal of a rebalance such as this is to wind up with specs that are different and fun to play - once you have that right, everything else is at some level just tweaking the numbers to make things work. If the overall concept is sound, you can just pile damage multipliers on to get the balance right, as has been done with Combat (Vitality, Bandit’s Guile, etc.). Ideally the underlying concept should be strong enough that you don’t need too many of these - I think the fact that Combat gets about a third of its damage from such boosts is a sign that the underlying cycle is poorly designed - but so long as your underlying cycle concept is fun and interesting and at least in the right ballpark of power, getting the details of balance correct is easy by comparison.
“Fun” is, of course, relative; some people find Subtlety annoyingly elaborate and would rather play Assassination; others find Assassination boring and would rather play Sub. Clearly, we’re never going to be able to build specs that are all things to all people; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think a major part of this is getting the cycle right - complex enough to allow good players to distinguish themselves, without being unmanageably complicated or containing a lot of pointless busywork. Historically, rogue cycles have been sort of bad at this - it wasn’t until Wrath that you needed more than Sinister Strike and Slice and Dice to do 90%+ of the damage potential of the class. In more recent expansions they’ve tried to add some complexity to the cycles, but we’re still among the easier classes to play, and our cycles still aren’t really that interesting. So what went wrong?
The key, I think, is that rogue cycles are fundamentally repetitive in ways that most class’s aren’t. If you look at most other classes, when listing what moves to do when, they more often speak in terms of “priority lists” rather than “cycles”; at any given time you have some set of moves available to you, and you pick the best one based on what’s off cooldown, what procs you have active, and so forth. Because such rotations are based on the interplay of cooldowns of various lengths - coupled, perhaps, with random procs - the exact sequence of moves performed does not repeat on any meaningful timescale. Rogues, on the other hand, tend to perform the exact same sequence of moves with only minor variations many times within a fight. Ignoring finishers with a duration (SnD, Rupture, etc.) for a moment, in general there is a best finisher to do, and an ideal number of combo points to do it at, and an ideal way to get that number of combo points. Assassination rogues Mutilate to 4+, and then Envenom. Combat rogues SS to 4+, RvS if necessary to get 5, and Eviscerate. Some degree of complexity can be added by adding additional steps to this rotation, but fundamentally: these steps get repeated hundreds of times per raid, and there are only so many different ways to count to 5. Even if you had a different strike to use at each number of combo points and could remove combo points as well as adding them, I suspect you’d quickly wind up with a cycle where the hardest part of doing it is remembering what you’re supposed to do - and to me, that doesn’t sound like much fun.
To fix this, we need mechanics that change what is optimal over time, such that every time I’m at 3 CP I don’t necessarily do the same thing. The simplest way to do this is to introduce abilities with durations, so sometimes I build combo points for an Eviscerate in whatever the optimal fashion is, but sometimes I need to build combo points for a Rupture or a Slice and Dice instead. What move I do next is no longer purely a function of how many combo points I have; its also a function of how much time is left on my various timers, and as my energy and combo point generation is somewhat variable, the circumstances will be a little different every time. However, this is not without its own set of problems, foremost of which is that sort of by definition, such abilities provide their benefit over the next 15 or 20 seconds, thus exacerbating our existing burst problem. And, of course, if all specs rely simply on juggling DoTs for cycle complexity, the specs will not be well differentiated. Hence, while we can use timer juggling for some trees, we don’t want to do it for all three; and I think the natural choice for finding “something else” is Combat, simply because it has a harder time solving the burst issue than the other specs.
Rogues, in general, cannot solve the question of burst like other classes do. We have no notion of long-term efficiency, so we can’t trade efficiency for short-term burst like an Arcane Mage; and the need to build up for finishers means we can’t reorder moves to line up our hardest-hitting moves together like a Frost DK. Hence, the easiest way to get burst is by adjusting the spacing between our moves - we don’t have the energy to do moves in quick succession all the time, but we can save up a bar of energy and do 3 or 4 in quick succession, which for something like shields on Conclave, is all you need. However, this burst will only be meaningful if our energy regen and move cost is such that we normally have significant gaps between our moves, such that removing them gives a significant short term benefit. To make this work, you need relatively low energy regen and a fairly expensive combo point generator. However, low energy regen and an expensive combo point generator means low combo point generation, which is not ideal. Hence, this approach requires either a) a combo point generator that gives more than one point per cast or b) some external means of bonus combo point production. Or, as these solutions are more commonly known, “Mutilate” and “Honor Among Thieves”. Hence Assassination and Subtlety are in a good position to get a working DoT/self-buff based cycle - the numbers certainly need some tweaking, but the underlying mechanics are mostly there. Combat, on the other hand, is not well set up for DoT juggling. SS is cheap, energy regen is high, SnD is extremely long, and Rupture is a marginal DPS gain at best; none of this works for an interesting DoT based cycle. And since we want at least one spec doing something different, Combat seems like a natural choice.
Now, Bandit’s Guile is clearly an attempt to do this - its a periodic buff that works off a different timer than the regular combo point cycle. However, the fact that its completely uncontrollable and affects all damage equally means it doesn’t change our cycle in any meaningful way; what’s optimal at Shallow Insight is (generally) still optimal at Deep Insight. Hence, while its not a bad idea in theory, the implementation is a complete failure - we need to find something different, and better.
With these problems in mind, lets take a look at some potential solutions.
I. Finisher Size needs to matter more.
This one is almost a no-brainer - the only reason its in this article of speculative solutions is because while the *what* is easy, the *how* remains elusive. Right now, the benefit provided from a finisher scales linearly - if that - with the amount of damage it does. If you look at the actual damage done by the finisher, a 5pt finisher almost always comes out behind doing a 3pt finisher and a 2pt finisher - the only advantage it has is that it costs less energy. And as Blizzard’s stated goal is that we build up potential to unleash powerful finishers, not build up potential to do damage in a slightly more energy efficient way, it seems like this should change - particularly since it would also make timer juggling more interesting. Right now we can get away with refreshing with whatever combo points we have on hand - the loss of efficiency is small enough that is not worth worrying about. The solution to this is to make larger finishers do more than proportional damage relative to smaller ones. While Envenom right now does n/2n/3n/4n/5n damage based on the number of combo points you have, it should instead do (say) n/2n/3n/5n/8n damage, so that it’s more important to build up to the higher levels. And while such adjustments are fairly straightforward for Eviscerate and Envenom, its a little less clear for some of the others; should SnD merely get more than proportionately longer, or should it also give more attack speed at higher levels? Is it sufficient for Rupture to do extra damage per tick, or should its duration also increase more than proportionately?
II. Garrote can be used out of stealth
However, its not without its problems, either. In addition to the burst issues, is also further reduces the value of Expertise - coupled with other forthcoming changes, Expertise would become our dump stat, which isn’t necessarily ideal. It also seems odd to gain an essential part of your cycle through a Glyph, and the Glyph winds up being significantly more powerful than all other options - its fine if its clearly the best, but being better than the next 3 options put together seems excessive. And finally, its not at all clear to me that this alone injects enough life into the cycle to keep it interesting; would the existing cycle with Garrotes woven in every 18 seconds be sufficiently more interesting than the current setup, or do we need to find something better?
III. Subtlety drops Slice and Dice.
I’ve always felt it would be interesting to try to mix up which finishers each spec uses a little more, and Subtlety strikes me as a very natural candidate for breaking the SnD monopoly - removing it from the Subtlety mastery, coupled with a much-needed global nerf of SnD probably gets you most of the way there, given the large amount of damage dealt by Sub’s other finishers. The problem is, this turns the Sub finisher rotation into an exact clone of what Assassination currently does - you have one duration-based finisher you hard cast every so often to get bonus energy regen, and a second one that you cast once at the start of the fight and refresh thereafter with your direct damage finisher. This is kind of dull. So to make this work, we should really nerf the rupture refresh mechanism. If, say, each Eviscerate extended the duration of your current Rupture by 2 extra ticks instead of giving a full refresh, you’d still have an interesting and beneficial talent, but you’d need to pay more attention to Rupture - which strikes me as a good thing. I think this is an idea with some interesting aspects to it, but would it actually improve the spec? You tell me.
IV. Rethink HAT
I admit I’m not a huge fan of HAT in general - call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days where combo points only came from hitting buttons. But, as noted above, it is an elegant solution to keep combo point generation high, as well as allowing raid DPS to be competitive without impact small-group PvP, where the spec is already strong - hence, its probably worth keeping around. The only problem is: the combo point generation is too regular. In any raid scenario, you gain a combo point pretty much *exactly* every 2 seconds, and that regularity and reliability means the cycle isn’t as interesting as it could be. If your bonus combo points came a bit more randomly, with droughts and floods that you had to react to, it seems to me that the spec would wind up more interesting as a result, even if the average combo points gained in practice was about the same. So how do we do this, while keeping the nice scaling properties of a larger benefit in a larger group, without reverting to the broken HAT of days of yore?
...I haven’t the faintest idea. But I still think its worth thinking about. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
V. Rework Bandit’s Guile to be more like Eclipse
As noted above, one of the major problems with Bandit’s Guile is that it boosts all your damage equally. What if it didn’t? What if, say, it only boosted your magic damage, but not your physical damage? And, further, what if we also had a move - lets call it Shadow Strike - that is similar to Sinister Strike, except it does Shadow damage instead of physical? Assuming proper balance, we could wind up with a situation where at low stacks of Bandit’s Guile, you use Sinister Strike, and at high stacks, you use Shadow Strike. It could even be balanced to make you switch between Eviscerate and Envenom as well. This would clearly be a bit more varied than what we currently do, and it’d definitely be a step in the right direction. But we can do better still by addressing the other major problem with Bandit’s Guile - its uncontrollability. This is where the Eclipse comparison kicks in.
Eclipse, to give an oversimplified summary for those of you that aren’t familiar with Balance druid mechanics, is a mechanism where performing Nature spells makes your Arcane spells better, and performing Arcane spells makes your Nature spells better. While its a bit more complicated than that in practice, I think we can adapt this general principal to spice things up for rogues. Instead of Insight being purely something that stacks up and drops, lets make it stacks of a (de)buff that gives, say, +3% physical damage, -3% magic damage (or the reverse). As we do more Shadow Strikes, we gain stacks that increase our physical damage at the expense of our magic damage; as we do more Sinister Strikes, we lose those stacks and gain ones that increase our magic damage at the expense of our physical damage. And lets further make Shadow Strike always give 1 combo point, as opposed to Sinister Strike which has a chance to give 2.
Now, it seems to me that it should be possible to balance this in such a way that its “normally” optimal to keep your stack somewhat balanced - say, to keep your +physical buff between +3 and +12%. You’d use about the same number of physical and magical attacks to keep your buff in this range, while also exploiting their different combo point returns to minimize the number of combo points you waste (sort of like you use RvS at current). You wouldn’t purely alternate the two moves - you’d need to response to Glyph of Sinister Strike procs and do a few more or a few less Shadow Strikes to make things work out. Furthermore, you’d gain the ability to sacrifice some damage in the short term in exchange for long term benefit by stacking your buff all the way up to its maximum (whatever that happens to be) in order to get a significant string of highly buffed Sinister Strikes in a row - thus giving you significantly more control over when you do more or less damage than is currently possible - that is, burst.
Now, I’m sure there are many problems with this idea as well, as well as a lot of picky details necessary to get the balance right. I make no claims that this is the ideal solution - or even a good one. But I do think its an interesting solution, and thus worth consideration - it is going to take something of this magnitude to fully fix Combat’s broken mechanics. So feel free to tell me what you like, what you don’t like, or what you think should be done instead; as until we get the big picture sorted out, the details don’t matter.
The most fundamental goal of a rebalance such as this is to wind up with specs that are different and fun to play - once you have that right, everything else is at some level just tweaking the numbers to make things work. If the overall concept is sound, you can just pile damage multipliers on to get the balance right, as has been done with Combat (Vitality, Bandit’s Guile, etc.). Ideally the underlying concept should be strong enough that you don’t need too many of these - I think the fact that Combat gets about a third of its damage from such boosts is a sign that the underlying cycle is poorly designed - but so long as your underlying cycle concept is fun and interesting and at least in the right ballpark of power, getting the details of balance correct is easy by comparison.
“Fun” is, of course, relative; some people find Subtlety annoyingly elaborate and would rather play Assassination; others find Assassination boring and would rather play Sub. Clearly, we’re never going to be able to build specs that are all things to all people; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think a major part of this is getting the cycle right - complex enough to allow good players to distinguish themselves, without being unmanageably complicated or containing a lot of pointless busywork. Historically, rogue cycles have been sort of bad at this - it wasn’t until Wrath that you needed more than Sinister Strike and Slice and Dice to do 90%+ of the damage potential of the class. In more recent expansions they’ve tried to add some complexity to the cycles, but we’re still among the easier classes to play, and our cycles still aren’t really that interesting. So what went wrong?
The key, I think, is that rogue cycles are fundamentally repetitive in ways that most class’s aren’t. If you look at most other classes, when listing what moves to do when, they more often speak in terms of “priority lists” rather than “cycles”; at any given time you have some set of moves available to you, and you pick the best one based on what’s off cooldown, what procs you have active, and so forth. Because such rotations are based on the interplay of cooldowns of various lengths - coupled, perhaps, with random procs - the exact sequence of moves performed does not repeat on any meaningful timescale. Rogues, on the other hand, tend to perform the exact same sequence of moves with only minor variations many times within a fight. Ignoring finishers with a duration (SnD, Rupture, etc.) for a moment, in general there is a best finisher to do, and an ideal number of combo points to do it at, and an ideal way to get that number of combo points. Assassination rogues Mutilate to 4+, and then Envenom. Combat rogues SS to 4+, RvS if necessary to get 5, and Eviscerate. Some degree of complexity can be added by adding additional steps to this rotation, but fundamentally: these steps get repeated hundreds of times per raid, and there are only so many different ways to count to 5. Even if you had a different strike to use at each number of combo points and could remove combo points as well as adding them, I suspect you’d quickly wind up with a cycle where the hardest part of doing it is remembering what you’re supposed to do - and to me, that doesn’t sound like much fun.
To fix this, we need mechanics that change what is optimal over time, such that every time I’m at 3 CP I don’t necessarily do the same thing. The simplest way to do this is to introduce abilities with durations, so sometimes I build combo points for an Eviscerate in whatever the optimal fashion is, but sometimes I need to build combo points for a Rupture or a Slice and Dice instead. What move I do next is no longer purely a function of how many combo points I have; its also a function of how much time is left on my various timers, and as my energy and combo point generation is somewhat variable, the circumstances will be a little different every time. However, this is not without its own set of problems, foremost of which is that sort of by definition, such abilities provide their benefit over the next 15 or 20 seconds, thus exacerbating our existing burst problem. And, of course, if all specs rely simply on juggling DoTs for cycle complexity, the specs will not be well differentiated. Hence, while we can use timer juggling for some trees, we don’t want to do it for all three; and I think the natural choice for finding “something else” is Combat, simply because it has a harder time solving the burst issue than the other specs.
Rogues, in general, cannot solve the question of burst like other classes do. We have no notion of long-term efficiency, so we can’t trade efficiency for short-term burst like an Arcane Mage; and the need to build up for finishers means we can’t reorder moves to line up our hardest-hitting moves together like a Frost DK. Hence, the easiest way to get burst is by adjusting the spacing between our moves - we don’t have the energy to do moves in quick succession all the time, but we can save up a bar of energy and do 3 or 4 in quick succession, which for something like shields on Conclave, is all you need. However, this burst will only be meaningful if our energy regen and move cost is such that we normally have significant gaps between our moves, such that removing them gives a significant short term benefit. To make this work, you need relatively low energy regen and a fairly expensive combo point generator. However, low energy regen and an expensive combo point generator means low combo point generation, which is not ideal. Hence, this approach requires either a) a combo point generator that gives more than one point per cast or b) some external means of bonus combo point production. Or, as these solutions are more commonly known, “Mutilate” and “Honor Among Thieves”. Hence Assassination and Subtlety are in a good position to get a working DoT/self-buff based cycle - the numbers certainly need some tweaking, but the underlying mechanics are mostly there. Combat, on the other hand, is not well set up for DoT juggling. SS is cheap, energy regen is high, SnD is extremely long, and Rupture is a marginal DPS gain at best; none of this works for an interesting DoT based cycle. And since we want at least one spec doing something different, Combat seems like a natural choice.
Now, Bandit’s Guile is clearly an attempt to do this - its a periodic buff that works off a different timer than the regular combo point cycle. However, the fact that its completely uncontrollable and affects all damage equally means it doesn’t change our cycle in any meaningful way; what’s optimal at Shallow Insight is (generally) still optimal at Deep Insight. Hence, while its not a bad idea in theory, the implementation is a complete failure - we need to find something different, and better.
With these problems in mind, lets take a look at some potential solutions.
I. Finisher Size needs to matter more.
This one is almost a no-brainer - the only reason its in this article of speculative solutions is because while the *what* is easy, the *how* remains elusive. Right now, the benefit provided from a finisher scales linearly - if that - with the amount of damage it does. If you look at the actual damage done by the finisher, a 5pt finisher almost always comes out behind doing a 3pt finisher and a 2pt finisher - the only advantage it has is that it costs less energy. And as Blizzard’s stated goal is that we build up potential to unleash powerful finishers, not build up potential to do damage in a slightly more energy efficient way, it seems like this should change - particularly since it would also make timer juggling more interesting. Right now we can get away with refreshing with whatever combo points we have on hand - the loss of efficiency is small enough that is not worth worrying about. The solution to this is to make larger finishers do more than proportional damage relative to smaller ones. While Envenom right now does n/2n/3n/4n/5n damage based on the number of combo points you have, it should instead do (say) n/2n/3n/5n/8n damage, so that it’s more important to build up to the higher levels. And while such adjustments are fairly straightforward for Eviscerate and Envenom, its a little less clear for some of the others; should SnD merely get more than proportionately longer, or should it also give more attack speed at higher levels? Is it sufficient for Rupture to do extra damage per tick, or should its duration also increase more than proportionately?
II. Garrote can be used out of stealth
- Glyph of Garrote changed to: Prime Glyph. Garrote can be used outside of stealth, but no longer silences the target.
- Venomous Wounds proc reduced to 6 energy.
- New 1pt talent which allows Garrote to be used even when not behind the target.
However, its not without its problems, either. In addition to the burst issues, is also further reduces the value of Expertise - coupled with other forthcoming changes, Expertise would become our dump stat, which isn’t necessarily ideal. It also seems odd to gain an essential part of your cycle through a Glyph, and the Glyph winds up being significantly more powerful than all other options - its fine if its clearly the best, but being better than the next 3 options put together seems excessive. And finally, its not at all clear to me that this alone injects enough life into the cycle to keep it interesting; would the existing cycle with Garrotes woven in every 18 seconds be sufficiently more interesting than the current setup, or do we need to find something better?
III. Subtlety drops Slice and Dice.
I’ve always felt it would be interesting to try to mix up which finishers each spec uses a little more, and Subtlety strikes me as a very natural candidate for breaking the SnD monopoly - removing it from the Subtlety mastery, coupled with a much-needed global nerf of SnD probably gets you most of the way there, given the large amount of damage dealt by Sub’s other finishers. The problem is, this turns the Sub finisher rotation into an exact clone of what Assassination currently does - you have one duration-based finisher you hard cast every so often to get bonus energy regen, and a second one that you cast once at the start of the fight and refresh thereafter with your direct damage finisher. This is kind of dull. So to make this work, we should really nerf the rupture refresh mechanism. If, say, each Eviscerate extended the duration of your current Rupture by 2 extra ticks instead of giving a full refresh, you’d still have an interesting and beneficial talent, but you’d need to pay more attention to Rupture - which strikes me as a good thing. I think this is an idea with some interesting aspects to it, but would it actually improve the spec? You tell me.
IV. Rethink HAT
I admit I’m not a huge fan of HAT in general - call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days where combo points only came from hitting buttons. But, as noted above, it is an elegant solution to keep combo point generation high, as well as allowing raid DPS to be competitive without impact small-group PvP, where the spec is already strong - hence, its probably worth keeping around. The only problem is: the combo point generation is too regular. In any raid scenario, you gain a combo point pretty much *exactly* every 2 seconds, and that regularity and reliability means the cycle isn’t as interesting as it could be. If your bonus combo points came a bit more randomly, with droughts and floods that you had to react to, it seems to me that the spec would wind up more interesting as a result, even if the average combo points gained in practice was about the same. So how do we do this, while keeping the nice scaling properties of a larger benefit in a larger group, without reverting to the broken HAT of days of yore?
...I haven’t the faintest idea. But I still think its worth thinking about. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
V. Rework Bandit’s Guile to be more like Eclipse
As noted above, one of the major problems with Bandit’s Guile is that it boosts all your damage equally. What if it didn’t? What if, say, it only boosted your magic damage, but not your physical damage? And, further, what if we also had a move - lets call it Shadow Strike - that is similar to Sinister Strike, except it does Shadow damage instead of physical? Assuming proper balance, we could wind up with a situation where at low stacks of Bandit’s Guile, you use Sinister Strike, and at high stacks, you use Shadow Strike. It could even be balanced to make you switch between Eviscerate and Envenom as well. This would clearly be a bit more varied than what we currently do, and it’d definitely be a step in the right direction. But we can do better still by addressing the other major problem with Bandit’s Guile - its uncontrollability. This is where the Eclipse comparison kicks in.
Eclipse, to give an oversimplified summary for those of you that aren’t familiar with Balance druid mechanics, is a mechanism where performing Nature spells makes your Arcane spells better, and performing Arcane spells makes your Nature spells better. While its a bit more complicated than that in practice, I think we can adapt this general principal to spice things up for rogues. Instead of Insight being purely something that stacks up and drops, lets make it stacks of a (de)buff that gives, say, +3% physical damage, -3% magic damage (or the reverse). As we do more Shadow Strikes, we gain stacks that increase our physical damage at the expense of our magic damage; as we do more Sinister Strikes, we lose those stacks and gain ones that increase our magic damage at the expense of our physical damage. And lets further make Shadow Strike always give 1 combo point, as opposed to Sinister Strike which has a chance to give 2.
Now, it seems to me that it should be possible to balance this in such a way that its “normally” optimal to keep your stack somewhat balanced - say, to keep your +physical buff between +3 and +12%. You’d use about the same number of physical and magical attacks to keep your buff in this range, while also exploiting their different combo point returns to minimize the number of combo points you waste (sort of like you use RvS at current). You wouldn’t purely alternate the two moves - you’d need to response to Glyph of Sinister Strike procs and do a few more or a few less Shadow Strikes to make things work out. Furthermore, you’d gain the ability to sacrifice some damage in the short term in exchange for long term benefit by stacking your buff all the way up to its maximum (whatever that happens to be) in order to get a significant string of highly buffed Sinister Strikes in a row - thus giving you significantly more control over when you do more or less damage than is currently possible - that is, burst.
Now, I’m sure there are many problems with this idea as well, as well as a lot of picky details necessary to get the balance right. I make no claims that this is the ideal solution - or even a good one. But I do think its an interesting solution, and thus worth consideration - it is going to take something of this magnitude to fully fix Combat’s broken mechanics. So feel free to tell me what you like, what you don’t like, or what you think should be done instead; as until we get the big picture sorted out, the details don’t matter.
Total Comments 27
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Couldn't agree more on solution 1. I get that the rogue class isn't necessarily about huge one hit nukes, but our finishers, at least for assassination and combat, are laughable. Doing a 50k-ish crit (if you're lucky) with all that juice stored up is underwhelming to say the least. As you suggested, there needs to be way more of an incentive to save up the full 5 points; either the extra multiplier as you mentioned or perhaps an increased chance for a crit (say 20% or so). On the same subject, rupture is a joke. Just plain stupid. Ferals have 2 bleeds that can crit for over 20k a tick and the best we get is 5-6k? There has to be a much greater incentive to do something for combat other than spam eviscerate. Either buff rupture to where it's significantly better than it is or give us a new, unique finisher that hits quite hard OR puts some useful raid debuff on the boss (maybe a minor slowing effect, increase to arpen for a couple seconds, etc...)
I like the idea of garrote being usable out of steath, but does it need a glyph? How about a mechanic where the "silence effect may only be used every 20 or 30 seconds?" That way it's not broken in pvp. Not a fan of point 5: I'm not really sold on the whole see-saw balance thing. I dislike BG as it is, seems like added complexity for the sake of complexity but that's neither here nor there. What I'd prefer to see is SS either cost more and hit way harder (combined with the above buff to finishers) or cost LESS (yes less) and hit like a wet noodle but be a super fast combo generator and allow for those HUGE (buffed) eviscerates or brand new debuffing finisher. That helps with the "we do too much passive damage" issue by making us actually press buttons to do dps. We would rely on finishers (ie: holding our finger on the 5pt nuke button) to do a much greater part of our total damage and make it so we're not mindlessly watching 65% of our damage come from clicking the boss once. |
Updated 08/22/11 at 3:17 AM by Shadowblade |
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I think Eclipse is a wonderful example of how a cyclic damage bonus should work. In addition to what you mentioned, glaring differences to Bandit's Guile include the fact that you can throttle it on demand via spell choices. For combat, nothing short of switching SS to Shiv or completely stopping all active functionality does the same trick. This is especially highlighted on encounters where the mechanics dictate what you're attacking, and I believe class mechanics should bend to award good play in these circumstances. Meaning, the exact opposite how BG functions on e.g. Lord Rhyolith. It should really be a self-buff anyway, as our issues with target switches are also numerous. But the main point remains in it being controllable so you can, say, save the biggest damage peak for a burn phase, but still function rather normally before that.
Another aspect of it is that combat desperately needs a way to make an impact on high-armored targets, so an ability like Shadow Strike (I believe it is also a fitting ability from Warcraft 3) would be welcome. A magic damage boost would also be welcome for FoK purposes, and just generally allows a higher level fine-tuning than a SS-Evis rotation. I remember a while back (early Wrath-era I think) you wrote about how unique rogues were in terms of ability usage, since to us "what" is a lesser concern as "when". And that is exactly what combat needs back. Disregarding the more drastic changes, making combat's resources matter again would be a good start. |
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Garotte out of stealth is a very interesting idea. On the topic of spicing up the rotations, I've thought a lot about giving Rogues a 'Rake' like ability (ie. Feral's CP generating bleed) via Deadly Poison. It was actually your blog about DP changes that got me thinking about it and I think that making DP a CP generating DoT is a viable alternative to the flawed DP we have right now. I won't get into details because it's off topic but essentially it would cost ~30-40 energy and require the same poison on both weapons (in order to keep poison options the exact same as today), and the DoT would be either short so that it's used often in CP building (~8-10 seconds) or long (24 seconds). Envenom would be based solely on CP (the DP stacks aspect rarely mattered anyway) and if untalented will remove DP.
Regarding Subtlety, I don't think that removing a finisher from the rotation will work unless Subtlety's CP generation is nerfed. Right now it's 5 CP every 3-6 seconds (or so), and if I'm honest it fits the finisher rate almost perfectly. I'm not sure that the rotation could be made less complex without completely redesigning many of the aspects of the spec, but personally I don't think it should be made easier at all. It may be selfish or even elitist but I really like that we still have one truly difficult (yet oddly rewarding) spec left in the game for us masochists. I know we're at odds about some of the mechanics and abilities (ie. Shadow Dance) but I do think that the overall spec is in a great position right now, with a relatively complex rotation, an active damage source accounting for ~30% of our damage (Backstab) rather than passive and a fast ramp up (7 seconds to get SnD/Recup/Rupture and a further 3 seconds for DP to stack to 5 on my latest Shannox log). On the topic of an Eclipse-esque bar, I like the idea of a progressing damage increase, and this allows it without tying you to your target at the same time. The kicker is that I think Blizzard are purposely trying to design Rogues as 'the tunnelvision class', so they may be hesitant to undo all the issues we have with target switching. I do completely agree that Combat needs a revamp of Bandit's Guile (and the energy regen.). |
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The garrote change is different. You could also swap the glyph and talent mechanic to reduce the value of the glyph, which in turn makes glyphing for fights more interesting. The talent in either situation would be mandatory. Another potential solution of course is that they could also just change Overkill to something else, and take Garrote out of VW, but there needs to be something else in return then.
I can't imagine that Sub dropping SnD would help much. Maybe if they added another finisher called hadouken or something, but even with a new Rupture mechanic it would still be very similar to Mutilate's gameplay. It would still be just Rupture once (in awhile at least), Recuperate up as much as you can, and Eviscerate to extend Rupture. Rupture wouldn't be as boring as Cut to the Chase, but in the end it sounds an awful lot like the Mutilate rotation. I would be fine with dropping Slice and Dice, but there should be another mechanic or aura put in place on top of the existing gameplay, otherwise it loses its appeal. The only solution I have to changing HAT while making it function similarly is to make it a 10% (12 or 14% might be better though) chance to generate another combo point when using any skill or ability, and have that increase with your group size (including yourself) at a max of 5 players. For instance, a Backstab in a group of two would have a 20% chance of adding another CP, a Backstab in a 10 and 25 man raid would both have 50%. There are a few issues with that idea as it stand though. Firstly it doesn't feel elegant to me, secondly it just screams Seal Fate clone, thirdly I don't expect it to scale as well as HAT currently does for people not in a group relative to those in a raid. If we assume 2 of the 5 CP's per finisher come from HAT, then this fits fairly well with Backstab as 3 Backstabs would generate an expected 1.5 CP's per finisher at 10%. Outside of a group, 3 Backstabs would be .3 which isn't really close at all. I don't play Sub when solo so I don't know how often HAT procs for those who do, but I'm pretty sure it's not .3 CP's every 3 seconds (10s per CP). Overall though I like the roll Sub fills. It could certainly use some changes in my mind, but they're all convenience ones (positional requirements can suck). Believe it or not, I actually like the reliability of Sub. 100% chances to refresh Rupture aren't interesting, but due to the butterfly effect it stays interesting. On an unrelated note, I was thinking about the Mutilate rotation on a long flight the other day and I was toying with the idea of Envenom also buffing the chance of VW procs. You would have to reduce the rate of VW without Envenom to like 30%, and cause the buff to increase it by maybe 35% (or maybe even 20/50, something to that extent), but I think it -could- change the playstyle of Mutilate a ton. You would have rogues pooling before a Rupture, then trying to sustain Envenom throughout Rupture as best they could. I don't think it would quite work out because if you have a high energy generation with envenom and rupture up, then you're likely to sustain enough energy through the rupture to keep both up the entire time. In other words, it could end up being played essentially the same as it is now if the numbers aren't right, but with higher envenom buff up times. |
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Updated 08/24/11 at 2:22 AM by Pathal |
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Wonderful read, as usual.
I've been wondering for long why rogues (and hunters, and paladins) tend to describe their actions in cycle format instead of priority list: after all, any cycle can be expressed in priority list format if we wanted to (it just so happens that cycle format is easier to digest). I've come to the conclusion that it has a lot more to do with the tools we use to analyze our classes (formulators), than to the actual play-style: it's only natural that we describe our "rotation" in the same terms our tools use (repetition and averages). Priority list thinking is not better per-se: it only reflects the fact that the game-style is just as scripted as a cycle based one: yes, there's only so many ways to count to 5, but there's only so many ways to use 6 runes too. Mapping the 4 main abilities/moves we have (openers, finishers, cpg and poisons) to the 4 most common kinds of abilities in game (direct damage, damage over time, movement impairment and buff/debuff), out of the 16 possible combinations I could point up to 15 we have (some are spec dependant, though); if we want to map the spells/physical/bleed distinction into that, we could come out short, but I would argue that distinction is ultimately flavor, and more related to rpg issues than to game-play as an abstract problem. If I'm reluctant to scrap dp as a stacking dot it's because it covers one of those 16 combinations (much like garrote is the only one that covers the dot opener). In general I don't think we need more abilities, or different ones for that matter (maybe less, and sinister strike is a good candidate for deletion): we are more than set with our toolbox, we only need better implementations for it. introducing new buttons to push is rarely a good thing: RvS was the answer to a problem that didn't exist, and see how it scores in the "interesting stuff" scale. I believe it was Aldriana the one mentioning that a spec with 30 buttons that you pushed in succession was easier (and, more importantly, less compelling) than a spec in which you had one button that you pushed at different intervals so, arguably energy management is the right choice, not necessarily having more ability combinations (which is not bad either but, if it can be avoided, it should, I think). That said: -If I were to implement that shadow strike, I would bake it into sinister strike: if it's the same thing, well let it be the same thing and act as a buff, or as a proc. -I like garrote being an opener move and not a cpg; using it more often would be nice, but I believe the correct way to do it is letting us again drop combat and re-enter stealth; make it so it's not worth doing always (the benefit, both in energy regen for assassination and find weakness for subtlety should be lower than 5 seconds without performing actions), but good enough as a utility move during travel time (from ony to nef and the like). Hack'n'slash game developers have learn over the years that 4 is the number of main abilities you should have; I'm not saying wow is a hack'n'slash, but it certainly is drifting to that implementation. In those games, the choice you usually make is more related to the environment than to the intertwining of your abilities: you pick one spell or the other based on a 2x2 map: range/close-quarters and aoe/single-target; especial buttons are always cool-downs and/or utility actions like push-backs or heals (or change stance, or character even, depending on which game we're talking about). It's a clear goal of wow devs to have the players make meaningful choices during combat, but they're reducing the tool-set to the minimum possible; furthermore, they're trying to convey the idea that making the wrong choice is not too bad as long as you keep pushing buttons (very hack'n'slashish indeed). One other thing some of these games do very nicely is to cap the amount of actions someone can perform every minute to about 35. Wow set a cap of 40 once the gcd was introduced and realized the figure was too high in bc (retribution paladins) and also during wrath (frost dk, enhancement shaman); when a spec reaches this figure they try and change it a bit so it sits back in line with a 30-35 actions; combat rogues, currently have the ability to go well past 40 and I believe it to be damaging the game: I'm sure some people enjoy smashing their keyboards, but the game is frantic enough already; producing these specs only pushes back decision making to very dark corners. Energy regen needs to be revisited, not only for combat specs. I played the energy starved assassination spec during early wrath (for a change after so much bc combat) and I longed for the day when energy was more abundant (was it not weird not being able to rupture for risk a snd refresh or, worse, hfb drop?), now you move swiftly between abilities, and pooling is very natural, but in retrospect, I think energy starvation was (is, kinda, compared to combat at least) what I enjoy about the spec. I believe ideas are cheap (implementing them is what counts), so these may be the cheapest thing I ever compiled. It all revolves around short term energy efficiencly in the end, as pointed in the OP, and even assassination (the starved spec) has a very smooth regen. But the article was asking for ideas, so here are mine: As pointed out above, resource management is (was?) good design: what matters is "when" you perform each move; this, stealth aside, is the only defining factor we have as a class: our cycle may be scripted just like any other class, but we're the ones for which timing should mean a lot more: after all that's the whole concept behind energy. Death knights were designed as rogues in plate: build up time based on double resource management and a handful of cool downs. Now, supposedly, the master of runic power is frost, and they sport a cap of 130; well, assassination has a higher cap than normal in one resource (120 energy); but the main difference that sets them apart is that their resources are the opposite of ours: the pink bar is the sub-product of their actions (ours is the combo points), while the passive, ever ticking, resource is their runes. The rogue master of resources should not be the spec that gains vigor (the passive resource pool), but the one that can pool on combo points: the one that can have more than 5 cp that is. I could imagine an assassination spec where vendetta granted you access to a 6th and 7th cp that could only be used on a really hard hitting, non linear, evis (any other finisher would only use 5 and leave you with 1, 2, or 3 if ruthlessness procced): you would use it for burst on demand at the expense of not refreshing the envenom buff that often and, interestingly, you could perform a mutilate while at 4 cp without capping. If I was to pursue this implementation I'd have dp stacks actually fall off like they used to, so you have a hard hitting finisher but you couldn't spam it for lack of envenom buff; cut to the chase would only proc at or under 4cp, for some rp reason, so you would be forced to perform a lower than 5cp envenom now and then (which, now that we're at it: it's about time they change it to a 1 point talent). The pvp ramifications are not many: assassination lacks burst and movement and it's a hardly ever played spec in arenas so I believe this change would be on the right path. In the same line of thinking about pooling resources is bandit's guile: it's not a bad talent per se (it's only badly implemented, or shoehorned if you may, into a spec that couldn't hold more than it already did). I should point out the most recent discussion in the combat thread: bandit's guile has a lot to offer and plenty of stacking possibilities; we simply lack the power to make choices about it. If energy pooling for longer than a fraction of a second was possible in combat cycles, we would see rogues pooling on the 2mark of the buff, to extend its duration, or line it up with other cool-downs or procs. Combat was about stacking cool-downs: we no longer do it because delaying a cool-down (pooling on time itself, actually) risks one or more usages of it. Now, current bandit's guile is very much in line with devs thinking: you can safely ignore it and you should be good to go, but if you want to really squeeze the last bit of damage you'd need to take a look at it. However, I really dig the eclipse implementation you propose even with the addition of a new cpg (I'd like it a lot more if the way to control your stacks was tied to finisher choice between rupture and evis). As for subtlety, I don't think it's particularly hard to play as it is: cp generation is at the right place to maintain everything nicely, you only need to have some bazillion more timers on the screen. It's not especially punishing: running for some seconds without snd or recoup only means you have less access to some resources; the only real punishing factor is having rupture drop, so you'd need to expend a hefty amount of resources to put back up, then again rupture only drops if your game-play is really clumsy. If people feel leet for playing it, well, I don't really understand where are they coming from but, be as it may, some people believe it to be hardcore and enhance the perspective and experience of gamers that actually play the spec (so, maybe, it's in the right spot already and we haven't noticed); I personally see it as the bastard child of the cat specs of the past with a twist: spending resources only to gain more resources (the self heal is to be ignored in pve cycle analysis), is nice and all in wall-street and such, but it strikes me as odd in an rpg. Anyway, Aldriana can envision a world without snd and I always loved the idea, non-automatic rupture refresh is sweet icing: the auto-refresh is the assassination thing, not the rogue thing that combat lacks. Going for out of the box ideas, I'd go for a spec that could cap energy and let it be a good thing; broken hat wwasn't that bad a spec had it not be so imbalanced (it had some decision making on it, and resource management): you had to pool on energy or risk not being able to eviscerate the second you got the 5th cp; I know the whole thing was little more than evis spam, but the idea of energy caping as the lesser of two evils was there, so I'd like it to be not a lesser evil but an actual mechanic. I have not put much thought into it, but here goes: maybe you pool some other volatile energy resource while capped that dictates the length of your next shadow-dance; you'd want to cap here and there to maximize shd but not for too long since you'd still want to keep up with your cycle. It's volatile because it depletes once you enter stealth and hat eats on it to generate combo points too (thus making the cp generation a bit more staggered), so you'd always want to cap some, even if you don't intend to shd immediately. I'm aware this sounds silly: it is, and the ramifications are even worse; however, the idea of energy capping on purpose could be explored. |
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Updated 08/23/11 at 3:38 PM by nextormento |
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Really enjoying your blog - with the exception of the comments you make on Sub. I'm not sure whether you simply haven't tried it in a while (other than V&T gimmick spec) but, as a number of people have mentioned, the rotation really isn't *that* complex and in my opinion provides the kind of active participation that you seem to be looking for in the other 2 specs. Maybe the positional requirement is a bit onerous, but in all my years of WoW good melee always attacked from the back to avoid parry / block ... and with the revamped Hemo, stacking in front of the boss for raid mechanics doesn't hurt nearly as much as it used to. In my raids (granted they're no-where near the level of you guys) I regularly see 3+ seconds go by with no HaT proc, and I have often had to BS at 4 CP to prevent capping while pooling for the last 2 points. Managing 3 different length timers also means that I'm frequently faced with decisions as to what button to hit next, e.g. whether to pop ShD for 5 immediate CP's or let Recup/SnD drop for a couple seconds so I can align it with my trinket, etc.
I do agree that finishers need to re-balanced so it feels like we're doing more than managing resources, and really like Nextormento's idea of 1 or 2 additional CP's that can only be used in a certain way. Or possibly the extra 2 points don't provide additional damage, but modify the attack in some way. For example, the 6th point gives Daze effect or something equally lacklustre, but 7th point gives SnD or Rupture refresh (for Assassin / Sub) or gives +1 to Bandit's Guile for Combat (max of 3 as at present, but ramp-up time is actively determined). This would give us that little bit of extra control and rotation variety. Finally, I like the idea that Vanish is a DPS cooldown. Any fan of bad martial arts films will tell you that Ninja's always vanish from their enemies to surprise them from behind ... Just keep a stack of savoury deviate delight handy and get into the zone! Garrot out of stealth seems a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and breaks the whole "powerful stealth openers" idea which I think is core to the rogue class. I've mentioned before that I'm in favour of allowing stealth openers after a redirect to mitigate our target swapping issues, but to make an opener available in regular combat they'd need to severely nerf its output. |
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Subtlety Complexity
Given some of the feedback I see - both here and elsewhere - I get the feeling I'm doing a poor job of representing my intentions towards Subtlety. I realize that some of you like the fact that its a bit more involved than the other specs, and don't consider it to be "overly complicated" or any other descriptor I may have applied to it. And lets be clear: it is not my intention to remove that. On the contrary: I think having things that are hard to do in the game is a good thing. I just think its somewhat poor design that the only way you can find the challenge you seek is to play a spec that lets you do more work for no benefit. I'd far rather that there was enough strategic depth in all three specs to allow you to put the extra attention in - and receive some benefit for doing so. You may have heard the phrase "easy to learn, hard to master". Or, alternately phrased, "easy to play, hard to play well". Now, Subtlety definitely does better on the second point than either Assassination or Combat; while it may not be "hard" to play in an abstract sense, its certainly harder. There are more moving pieces - more buttons to press, more timers to watch, more optimization to be gained by managing energy going in to your cooldowns. Whether you think its "too hard" or not, the skill ceiling is definitely higher for the spec - and that's a good thing! In fact, I think there's a totally legitimate argument to be made that to truly get the last half of a percent out of your spec should be even harder still. But that doesn't mean that all is right in the world of Sub; while it may do better in the "hard to play well" department, I think it falls down badly in the "easy to play" category. And that matters - not just for getting new players into the class, or for explaining it to your alt. There are times in raiding when you can't devote your full attention to your cycle, or your cycle is otherwise harder than usual; for instance, when you're in front of Rag, getting parried and needing to reapply some of your moves, while dodging World In Flames, your execution of your cycle is naturally going to drop. It can happen because of parries, or needing to interrupt, or simply because its just that important to move at the right moment for Defile; and its completely understandable that your DPS will drop *some* in these circumstances - if it doesn't, it means your cycle is too easy. But I fear that Sub goes a bit too far the other way - you risk your cycle collapsing entirely, and I don't know that that's necessarily good. Basically: I think the way Sub plays for Baleroc is fine - it could even stand to be a bit harder. But how it plays for ground duty on Alysrazor, or H:Rag P2, and other such situations strikes me as a bit more questionable. Its not that you can't do it; but, particularly while learning the fights, I think there are more important things than dwelling on the minutae of your spec, and I find Sub a bit too unforgiving in that regard. So its not that I want to make Sub easier; its that I want to make playing Sub *well* exactly as hard as it is now - and make the other specs that hard as well - while making playing Sub *adequately* a bit more accessible. Dropping SnD while making Rupture a little harder to optimize strikes me as a reasonable step in this direction; it definitely makes the class more accessible, while still leaving some room for skill/optimization. However, it might make the class too easy; this is where the second suggestion comes from, to make combo point generation more variable. The notion of "I get bonus CPs and need to spend them" is still easy to understand, but making optimal use out of them when you get 10 seconds droughts with none and 4 second bursts with 5+ would require careful management to get full use out of - don't underestimate how much harder this would make the spec if everything else remained the same. That said: its entirely possible that the net effect of these changes would leave the spec easier than it is now, and if that's the case, then perhaps some other change is needed. But I think its also fair to say that just because you, as a good player, enjoy the spec in its current form doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be improved; I think it would be better if you could achieve the same level of challenge and interest by squeezing the last little bit of DPS out of any spec, rather than needing to specifically respec to one that's harder but provides little other benefit. I don't know if my proposed changes do that - which is why I put them forward for discussion - but I want to be clear that the goal is neither easier nor harder, but deeper - easier to get the big pieces right, but providing more room for optimization via getting all the little details right. What vs When The notion of what vs when is indeed one that I have discussed in the past, and it is indeed one of the things that make us relatively unique; however, I think there's more to the story. For instance, Envenom has a nice mechanism for making you manage when you hit the move; but the difference between doing it perfectly and not worrying about it at all is only a percent or two; hence, it is ineffective as the primary source of rotational complexity for rogues. To build a cycle around it, you need something that applies more often, or provides a larger benefit, or both. But its hard to do this in a way that's actually interesting. For instance: lets say Sinister Strike applied a stacking self-buff that causes your next strike to do 10% more damage for every second that elapses between the Sinister Strike and the next move, to a maximum of 30%; this gives you an incentive to wait 3 seconds (if possible) between successive moves and space them out as well as you can, and initially this seems like sort of an interesting mechanism... ...but I'm of the opinion that after a full raid of waiting for every single Sinister Strike to stack up, you'd go bonkers. Doing the exact same thing, hundreds of times a night, multiple nights a week, for months on end would get *extremely* repetitive. I think its fine to design a mechanism where sometimes the right thing to do is wait; but equally important, I think, is making sure sometimes the right thing to do *isn't* to wait. If every single Sinister Strike or finisher is the same, regardless of how clever the mechanic is, its going to get boring. So while introducing a "when" based mechanic is fine, but what I think is more important is a mechanic that changes over time - it can be that the "what" changes over time, or that the "when" changes over time; the important bit is that *something* changes. Now, there are certainly ways to do this, but a lot of them prove really contrived. For instance, if you made Sinister Strike do bonus damage whenever the tens digit of your energy was divisible by three, or gave Sinister Strike the stacking damage thing only when you were at 3 combo points... okay, fine, it changes with time, but its completely unintuitive and ridiculous. The fundamental question that must be answered is "is there an intuitive way to make what is good now and what is good later be two different things" - and I think that's a hard question to answer. This, I think, is the problem with energy-capped based mechanics. Its hard to come up with a way for energy capping to be sometimes beneficial. If, say, "wasted" energy gives a damage multiplier on your next move, either that damage bonus will always be small enough that it can be ignored, or it will always be large enough that you will stack it to its maximum; its hard to see how you make capping "sometimes" worth it. And given those two options, i suspect the one that involves pressing buttons to do damage is likely to be more fun and interesting in practice than the one that involves not pressing buttons. I won't say its fundamentally an inviable idea, but I don't see how to get there from here. The other option is of course to make the existing mechanics matter more - for instance, making the damage gain of the Envenom buff significantly larger, be it by interaction with Venomous Wounds or direct numerical increases. Envenom does a pretty good job of making the wait variable, as there are times it makes sense to wait and times it doesn't; the only concern is that Envenom *also* needs to have its direct damage buffed to help with Mutilates shield-busting type burst; and while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with buffing both the direct damage and the DoT to the extent needed, it does wind up with an *extremely* powerful finisher in terms of total damage dealt, which seems like the sort of thing you want to be careful about. So its worth considering, but I'm not yet completely sold on the idea. |
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A very interesting read with some good original ideas - thanks. I wonder - to what extent do you think that putting these detailed ideas out there in a high profile forum like this one make Blizzard less likely to actually implement them? E.g. I'm Blizzard rogue dev X and I read EJ regularly to see what the rogue community is saying. I read an idea like your (fantastic) Eclipse-type mechanic in place of Bandit's Guile and think "Wow! That's a good one!" but then follow that up immediately with "Well, if I put that in game it'd look like we were just pandering to Aldriana and EJ." I personally don't care where Blizzard gets their class concepts from - in house or out - since they are the ones that have to code them and balance them. But I wonder if they factor idea source into their considerations.
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Basically: I think the way Sub plays for Baleroc is fine - it could even stand to be a bit harder. But how it plays for ground duty on Alysrazor, or H:Rag P2, and other such situations strikes me as a bit more questionable. Its not that you can't do it; but, particularly while learning the fights, I think there are more important things than dwelling on the minutae of your spec, and I find Sub a bit too unforgiving in that regard. So its not that I want to make Sub easier; its that I want to make playing Sub *well* exactly as hard as it is now - and make the other specs that hard as well - while making playing Sub *adequately* a bit more accessible.
Considering SnD rolls while your off the boss, and you can even refresh it while dancing on Ragnaros with HaT combo points, I'm not so sure that removing it from the rotation is the right move, since it's not particularly hard to keep up in any situation. Recuperate is essentially the same (ie. you can refresh it off the boss quite easily), leaving Rupture as the main thing to drop. Rupture being extended still leaves the problem of Rupture dropping (or moving to a new target) causing a loss of damage in the new Rupture (because the new one is not buffed by MoS or initial pot/trinkets). I think that simply buffing Rupture damage and changing Serrated Blades to not roll the Rupture on the initial buffs (and instead update the Rupture on each refresh or maybe even not refresh Rupture at all) is a good move and makes all Ruptures essentially the same value. In the line of extending Rupture, I'm not sure it will work because that would typically mean that it's the same Rupture being extended for the whole fight, and then we run into the Serrated Blades issue again (having your super-buffed Rupture drop is a hefty loss). Dropping SnD would unbalance the CP generation:finisher rate a lot, essentially making the spec into Evis spam and refresh Recup every now and then, and with Subtletys incredibly CP generation I don't envy that playstyle. It could work, but Subtlety's CP generation would need to be nerfed for it to feel fluid and non-spammy. Another alternative is to remove Rupture from the rotation instead (by changing Serrated Blades into something else). It seems clear to me that Subtlety will need a few core mechanic changes to escape it's need to be glued to a target no matter which was Blizzard was to go about it. |
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Quote:
I wonder - to what extent do you think that putting these detailed ideas out there in a high profile forum like this one make Blizzard less likely to actually implement them?
That said: my best guess is that a few of these ideas might make it in, possibly in some modified form, but most of them probably won't. And I think that would be true even if the hired me and put me in charge of balancing the class (which they almost certainly won't). And the reason for that is simple: while I have attempted to propose good ideas, I fully expect that some - even most - of them will turn out to be flawed under deeper investigation, and will need to be significantly modified if not replace outright to yield the desired effect. And I fully expect that there are other smart people out there with good ideas, probably better than my own. And I suspect Blizzard will disagree with me in places about what needs to be changed. So they may use some, if they study them and conclude they are the best available solution - it wouldn't be the first time they implemented community ideas - but I severely doubt that all, or even most, of what I propose will actually make it live in recognizable form. Synek: if I may pick on you a bit, it seems that a recurring theme of your comments is that it would be necessary to lower combo point generation to drop a finisher. Fine. What happens if we lower HAT regen? What happens if we make it a 3 second ICD, or a PPM proc off autoattacks, or replace Energetic Recovery with a combo point proc? Sub is going to need to a fair number of tweaks regardless - a solution to positional dependence, a clear role for Hemo, some room for filler points, less DPS talent points that you only use during Shadow Dance and Vanish. It seems to me the focus right now should not be on what other changes are necessary to get a given idea to work, but what we'd want the cycle to look like if we had the freedom to change anything we wanted to. Maybe that involves dropping SnD as I've proposed. Maybe it doesn't. But it seems that its worth exploring these ideas and seeing if something good can be made out of them; if it can, great, and if not, there are plenty of other ideas out there to explore. But the simple fact that we'll need to adjust combo point regeneration is not enough to sour me on the idea - that's *easy* compared to a lot of the problems that need to be solved. |
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What really irks me regarding rogue playstyle atm compared to other classes is, hand-in-hand with what Aldriana said about our cycle being too repetitive and unchanging, is that our toolbox is so limited. Shadow priests, for example, have an amazing toolbox, and it's vaguely absurd when you compare it to the rogue one. For sustained damage, they have their 3 dots, nuke, filler rotation, similar to assassination playstyle. However, their burst toolkit is so much better than ours in the form of mindspike+mindblast, and their AOE is extremely solid, easy to use, and has no real downside. In addition to this they have their CD which also manages to function as both a sustained CD and a burst one. Rogues on the other hand, regardless of spec, have only ~3 abilities to use, plus a CD or two with varying levels of effectiveness. I play assassination primarily, and the fact that the spec has a) virtually non-existent burst, b) terrible target swapping, and c) overly lengthy ramp-up on its AOE seems really ridiculously when you look at almost any other spec. Not to mention of course, outside of BF, the other two specs have a virtually non-existent AOE, which would be fine if we were appropriately compensated with a sustained single target advantage (which we lack). While I have no issue with assassination's single target rotation, in fact I find it smooth and balanced, the lack of a bursty ability and/or burst AOE seems a glaring fault in the spec's design. The same applies for combat, KS used to be a strong burst CD, and it was made into a marginal dps boost you used pretty much on cooldown.
If I had to recommend changes, I'd suggest implementing something similar to mind spike, in the form of an ability that did a large chunk of instant damage, but didn't generate combo points, giving us the option of trading longer-term damage for quick bursts of damage. I'm awful at roleplaying names and whatnot, but something that perhaps costs 60 energy (fairly expensive, but still able to be chained in the short term like back-to-back frost strikes), and did whatever was decided as a fair number. Something just under the combined damage you would gain from a mutilate, its poison procs, and the combo points it generated - if say someone mathed out that a mutilate, its poisons, and 3 cp was worth 100k damage over the next 10 seconds, make it do 80k off the bat with no longer term effects. This would allow us to switch to things like Cho'gall's elementals, or Domo's cats, pop off some real burst, and get back onto target without losing a heap of sustained damage to do pathetic 'burst'. In addition to this, the easy, rapid deployment of AOE enjoyed by other classes should be implemented into FOK - for example Swipe or Mind Sear have no ramp up, but are very respectable even in small bursts. One Swipe on 5 adds will be better DPE than the 1.5 Shreds you would otherwise get, whereas until you're going to commit to long-term AOE as assassination it's pretty much not worth doing at all. One or two FOKs on the molten elementals in Rag will almost certainly not be worthwhile, and as combat/sub it's absolutely not. Remove the poisons from assassination's FOK to make it easy to balance the entire spell for all 3 specs - if it was basically Swipe I'd be happy (it would lack flavor or whatever, but you wouldn't be sitting rogues on fights where that sort of AOE is nescessary). The last thing I would comment on would be combat's playstyle, which to me feels exceptionally clunky - sometimes it flows, sometimes it's so congested you can't possibly use your energy fast enough. While I'm aware of the fact that energy capping isn't bad itself if you're still using every gcd to maximise damage, it's simply not compelling gameplay. Making, for example, Sinister Strike cost twice as much and hit twice as hard during AR would, in my opinion, make the cycle far more interesting, as you perform differently during different parts of the fight, instead of pressing 2 extra hard during your CDs. Long story short, I feel rogues are lacking options in how they deliver their damage - we should have compelling choices about whether we want (less DPE efficient) burst right now, or more sustained damage in the longer run, and our AOE should actually be a viable ability, not useless for most specs, useless for burst for the one spec it's actually good for, and overpowered in situations of sustained AOE for that spec. I won't even touch on things like DP stacking or Bandit's Guile as they've already been discussed, but the above issues are the ones I feel would most benefit rogues to be looked at. |
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I actually do better on Alysrazor as Sub than I do as any other spec. A cursory glance at other top Rogues that have tried different specs shows that they do as well on the ground on Alysrazor (or better) as Sub too. While there may be some fights where there's just too much going on for Sub to be reasonable to play, Alysrazor doesn't seem to be one of them.
I will cede the fact that it could be rough on inexperienced or "learning" players, but that's more so because of the positional requirement than the rotational complexity since the mobs turn and move around a bunch. After you play Sub for 2-3 weeks the rotation is just second nature. Enough to the point where I would say that Sub is arguably the best spec for any high mobility non-cleave fight and role. All of that is slightly off topic though. The more and more I deal with Subtlety, the more I'm coming to like it. My only remaining gripes are the positional requirement, but moreso just for CD's like Shadow Dance, and the fact that there's no UI event that states where combo points come from. I know that in the past I've lambasted things like Shadow Dance for being a stupid cooldown, but it's effective in that it allows good players to do better than the rest. All in all, I don't think Subtlety needs much work at all, not in comparison to Combat's energy generation and Bandit's Guile or Mutilate's simplicity. I would much rather see Combat's energy gen go down, CP generator's and finishers go up in damage, Rupture hit harder to be more prominent, and fix Killing Spree so it doesn't get people killed on perfectly valid and reasonable times of usage. People dying to being teleported to the opposite side of Alysrazor's area and killed, or teleported to the middle of nowhere on Rhyolith and then getting finished off by magma lines should not be blamed on the player but the mechanic. Killing Spree's issue is the teleportation, and that it hasn't and won't be truly effective and bug proof, ever. Make it a major glyph, make it baseline, but there are definitely better ways to create the feeling of a Killing Spree without causing the player to jump around and give them the looming threat of "I could die from this'. I know you like the immersive quality of it, but it's a rose by any other name and I'm sure there are alternative ways to get the aesthetics of a Killing Spree without causing the player to run around like they do. As for Mutilate, the time has come to make it no longer have 1.5x crits, and it could use some other mechanic to watch. I was interested in having VW interact with Envenom, but since I'm worried that it wouldn't work out as planned. Some other poison dot would still be fitting for the class though, possibly in a Lifebloom like manner to fit the role of assassinating someone (I think Warlocks have something more fitting but I can't remember). I'm still toying with the idea right now, but if it could also interact with Envenom that would be perfect. Maybe something like x damage over 10s, y damage when the effect expires, and your next Envenom within 3s leaves a poison dot for 20% of the damage done over 5s. This would require forethought by the rogue to have the energy and CP's for the end proc, be somewhat forgiving at 3s, and should be clear that it's something you want to watch and manage properly. |
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While I do enjoy the aspect in games, learning something challenging and developing a fondness to it is basic psychology. Another notion is the fact that as a pure class, there will be encounters where the mechanics "strongly suggest" switching to a certain spec (V&T, Staghelm), which may or may not be an enjoyable respec for many. Hence, it's rather perilous to settle for a design where a particularly more complex spec exists. Especially so when, as mentioned, Blizzard has been quite active in trimming the ability lists from other classes with similar issues, and Sub definitely falls into the "hard" box when comparing specs all around.
I did in fact have a list of some prominent N:Baleroc logs (from back in the day when heroic kills were few), where I broke down the number of different actions and actions per minute for them. The averages were something in the nature of: Assassination - 35 (about 28 pre-execute, 42+ during) Subtlety - 39 Combat - 44 Now consider the amount of abilities used (assuming no overly fancy macros), Assassination has 9, Combat 6-7 (Rupture) and Subtlety something like 12. And the fact that this is before things like Feint or Kick come into play, we're already operating in the region of what is the gcd cap for most casters. The more wishy part: What I'd really like to see for Sub (as a somewhat minor change) is to rework Serrated Blades into a damage boost for Eviscerate rather than refresh Rupture (something in the nature of SW:P & MF for shadowpriests). Hypothetically, if SnD were to go away from the Sub rotation, it would also go around the issue of being too similar to Assassination. Also I'd argue that an extra DoT is probably not the thing Assassination would need, at least before the existing ones are dealt with. Especially since target switching mechanics are once again well represented in the current raiding tier. Copying shadowpriests more, Shiv could be boosted by a talent to something in the nature of applying several doses of your poison at once. Or redirect to apply Envenom buff based on your DP stacks on the initial target. Or just modify Eviscerate to be the "switch and burst" finisher. |
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Why wouldn't another DoT or other aura be reasonable? Target swapping can be rough, but that's shared by all Rogues, which means the root of the problem isn't really tied to a spec's rotation and mechanics, but the fundamental nature of how CP's are generated and used. Trying to make a spec specific change for Mutilate to have better target swapping leaves Combat and Sub out in the cold, unless I'm misreading that of course.
I think something else that would be a 4-5% DPS increase when done right over non-usage DPS for Mutilate would be perfect. I also think that something else to track, perhaps a dot but not necessarily, would be ideal and a mechanic like that should fit with the class on many levels rather well. What I described kind of feels like Revealing Strike the more I think about what it would do, but there's a lot of room for what could fill that role. |
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Updated 08/26/11 at 4:55 PM by Pathal |
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I'm not totally sold on the notion of adding another DoT to Assassination - it does certainly have unfortunate interactions with our burst that will require solving. However, Assassination is probably the simplest spec we have right now, and many people have critiqued it as somewhat boring; I think there needs to be something to the spec beyond Mut Envenom Mut Mut Envenom occasionally disrupted by a Rupture. There's just not enough strategic depth to the spec right now. Making finisher timing matter more would certainly help, but i don't think that's enough. So if not another DoT... what? I mean, you've seen my proposal for adding complexity to Combat; while Mutilate might not need anything quite *that* elaborate, that is the sort of level of sophistication that we're talking to get a properly interesting rotation without adding more DoTs. So while I'm happy to consider options other than unstealthed Garrote, I don't really have any good ideas for what that might be.
Its also worth noting that not all specs need to have killer burst; rogues are certainly not the only class with issues in that department. Pretty much all classes rely on some degree of DoTs or debuffs for damage. Hence, I think its fine that the nature of energy and combo points limits our ability to do arbitrary target swaps; its just that we need to either a) have few other mechanics that limit our burst, or b) have other compensating advantages. For instance: an Aff Lock doesn't have brilliant burst damage, but has the ability to multi-DoT to gain significant amounts of damage in any multi-target fight, which is useful under other circumstances. So: while its true that adding another DoT to Assassination might not be ideal, if the burst issues were limited in scope via buffs to Envenom and Mutilate and compensating advantages could be found in other areas, i think it could be made to work. Its not an ideal solution - and if you have better ideas by all means let me know - but I feel it may be necessary to inject proper variety into our cycles. |
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I think there needs to be something to the spec beyond Mut Envenom Mut Mut Envenom occasionally disrupted by a Rupture.
Overall, I think that more variance in CP generators and a less repetitive is the way to go and there's a lot of good ideas floating around here. |
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My beef with a new DoT is the fact that most often, you want to either not have the ability in your bars at all, or keep it up as much as possible. (The latter case is obviously more interesting here.) Now, if it's a finisher, okay, you have to juggle resources to maximize uptime. I.e., an interesting mechanic by WoW standards - except that we already have Rupture, so it wouldn't be very exciting. The other option for rogues is that it's a CP builder, meaning that unless the opportunity cost (Energy) is peculiarly big (>60), you will be able to put a new one up pretty much just as the previous one is falling off. Now it is a question of refresh frequency. If the duration is rather long (~20-30 s), it might remind you of some ability Assassination had in WotLK, which didn't exactly get amazing user reviews. But effectively, a low-opportunity-cost DoT is pretty much the same thing. In the case of a bit shorter duration, okay it could be interesting, and combat/sub sort of have a similar thing going on with RvS/Hemo-weaving. However, if I'm 100% up to speed with those specs, neither of the abilities is a particularly notable DPS increase (along the same lines as managing Envenom timing), so I'm a bit reserved on how the number tweaking can succeed in order for the proposed new ability to be worthwhile.
This is why I'm more inclined to hope for an ability with a conditional damage increase, and as Assassination is a far cry away from being too good/popular in PvP, you could easily up the numbers of a certain ability by a fair bit. Additionally, at a cursory glance Assassination already has two (de)buffs with an average uptime in the interesting region (5%-95%) for these kind of abilities. Addendum: a perilous aspect of non-stealth Garrote would be its interaction with VW in AoE situations. I believe shamans recently got a similar kind of thing for AoE and not all of them were too excited about it. |
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The problem with Enh Shaman, as I understand it, is that their AoE requires multiDoTing to be effective, and as a melee class that's quite a pain. However, ours would not; you'll note that a Garrote costs 45 energy and currently returns an expected 36 energy - which is reduced to 21.6 by the proposed VW nerf. Hence, DoTing up mobs with Garrote is a net energy loss and is thus only worth it if the actual damage done by the DoT is greater than what you lose in FoKs. On small enough numbers of targets, that might be the case, but any reasonable sized pack it will be better to just straight FoK. So the Enhancement Shaman concern, at least, shouldn't apply.
That said: with things as proposed, the optimal way of DPSing a small number of targets probably would be to roll DP, Garrote, and Rupture on all of them, which a) is sort of a pain in the ass and b) is much weaker than most cleaves. Hence, a more compelling solution for "cleaving" 2-3 targets probably is needed (whether Garrote out of stealth is added or not); its just not obvious to me what the best way of doing that is. |
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I still think there's potential to giving Mutilate a DoT. It would have to be short, the total damage from casting it would need to be greater than Envenom (at least), which means it should probably do at least 55k or so for most people in high end Firelands gear. I'm just not sure if the suggested additional mechanic would be interesting enough and not come across as a Revealing Strike clone that takes longer to come into effect. But fair enough, it certainly isn't the most entertaining of concepts.
I would imagine you would run into issues with Rupture, Garrote and DP durations pretty quickly if you tried to get all 3 up on multiple targets at once for AOE. Even if on some theoretical level your Garrotes did more damage than a FOK, you would end up spending your entire time putting them up rather than you would doing actual AOE. I do have a couple other ideas (though I'm sure I'm not the first to consider them), one of them I haven't quite nailed down. Firstly, I was thinking of turning Deadly Poison into an ignite like DoT. This insures that rogues will keep it on the OH, not weapon swap and removes the IP ramp up time. Side effects would be an increased value in haste, the damage would need to be gone over again so the three specs use "intended poisons", and that the base damage for Envenom would need a new method of being calculated, but I can't see any other issues at this point in time. It likely wouldn't change much about our playstyle, but should give more room for tuning in other ways and should let things like Mutilate and Envenom hit harder. Second idea is to have an ability like Shiv consume CP's. I have -no- idea how I can get this to work though. As having Shiv consume 1 CP could allow Envenom to get to 5 CP more reliably if Mutilate gave CP's reliably, but Seal Fate makes that unrealistic. Shiv could buff some other part of Rogue DPS in the process, but I get the feeling it would be more of a "hit this every x seconds", or "hit this x number of times per finisher". It seems that something like that would end up requiring a massive mechanical redesign that wouldn't fit the class or be appropriately timed. A third would be to give Shiv an added effect during the Envenom buff. This definitely lacks depth, but it would at least be something else to do if it did something like extra poison procs. The CP generated would need to be revised though, as it would significantly reduce the number of Mutilates cast in a fight otherwise. Lastly, I acknowledge the lack of events that occur during the Mutilate cycle, and that there are very few reactive mechanics. I'm thinking that introducing something, or revamping MI to randomly proc a cheap Backstab or Mutilate throughout the fight would definitely be reactive gameplay. For example, hitting a target above 35% health can proc a 30 energy Backstab, hitting a target sub 35% health can proc a 30 energy Mutilate on top of the already present MI range. It's basically just energy generation, but it would require some level of attention to gain the effect of it. |
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I play Sub and believe it is by far the most fun spec for a rogue to play and therefore NOT an area that requires particular attention. Sometimes, due to time off the target, you may have to take a chance with a 3 point evis and hope it refreshes rupture - I actually quite like that mechanic and, in any event, having rupture drop isn't the end of the world as you can vanish/ambush for FW and renew it pretty quickly much of the time. I do not think removing SnD for Sub is desirable - though I must admit being able to realistically spec Imp SnD might make it more managable.
All I would change about Sub is the positional requirements that make it impractical to play in certain fights - this could be done by keeping the positional requirements for a full damage bonus but reducing them somewhat (20%?) when unable to say stab/ambush from behind (e.g. on Rag). So a backstab in the face does less than one in the back for example - but it is still doable. Sub is fine on Alysrazor - in fact it is very good indeed. You just don't bother with Rupture and when you Glyph hemo glyph (as one should) you don't need to - just roll Snd/Recuperate and otherwise play as you would without Rupture considerations. Nothing lives long enough to make rupture matter anyway. It's the other specs that need the re-think with Combat being (in my view) in desperate need of attention because of the energy capping/spammy nature of the way it is played. I find myself almost hoping I don't crit so that I CAN use RS at 4CPs without wastage - but often with energy capping the way it is you cap out if you don't think ahead to plan (and often execute) a move like RS. I think we need to focus in on what makes certain specs fun to play versus not and lobby for change based on that. Sub is terrific fun because it is complex, mobile, hugely variable in terms of moves to use and timings for CDs during a given fight........whereas combat is a spam fest. |
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Its interesting that you bring up the notion of a move that removes combo points from your target; its actually something I thought about in the context of writing this blog post. The following paragraph appeared in earlier drafts, before being cut for length:
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As an illustrative example: lets say rogues had the ability to pull 1 combo point of their current target and store it, and then at some point in the future transfer all stored combo points to their current target. Would this make rogues more dynamic and interesting to play? Not really - Assassination would just use it every time it hits 3 CP to be able to get to 4+ without ever wasting combo points, and Combat would use it whenever a Glyph of SS proc takes them from 3 to 5, so they can RvS every finisher without wasting combo points. Its one extra thing to check, but its pretty easy to understand and do, and thus doesn’t really make the playstyle any more interesting.
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I'll admit I'm a bit late to this party, but having just read through all of the recent blog entries on fixing rogues I'm shocked by the general dislike for both Bandit's Guile and Tricks of the Trade. I honestly think both can be really interesting mechanics and I think a lot of the changes you're suggesting would make them more worthwhile.
I loved tricks in wrath -- using it on other people was as boring as you describe, but getting it made life a great deal more interesting because it was worthwhile to pool energy or hold cooldowns for a couple of seconds to get the benefit on that next evis/KsP/etc. I'll grant you it wasn't an enormous shift in overall damage done, but getting an extra 15% damage on one eviscerate in five or so (or a KsP) was enough of a damage boost to be worth chasing and the only mechanic other than pooling for SnD that didn't reward spending energy the second I got it. A 1% dps gain for super advanced play and planning with someone else seems totally reasonable, and I'd love to see tricks return to/become that. Now, given the changes to Tricks (10% instead of 15%) and the changes to combat's cooldowns (shorter cooldown means a larger percentage loss to delay for a few seconds) it may be the case that the benefit simply isn't large enough to matter any more. Fair enough. If, however, blizzard made evis hit harder and changed cooldowns as you suggest, I think we could get to a place where it made sense. I'll admit there's still a fundamental tension here because the interesting mechanic is coming from what someone else does to you rather than your own tricks (and also on a lot of fights it's not clear that rogues should be the ones getting tricks...), but it would add some value to dynamically delaying from time to time. I feel sort of similarly about Bandit's Guile. As the system is currently, you're right that where you are in the cycle doesn't matter very much. If evis hit a lot harder though, and slice and dice were worth a lot less, we might well find it optimal in the short run to forgo both rupture and SnD entirely during the high damage periods and focus on building them back up during the low damage periods. That wouldn't make the combat rotation interesting by itself, but it seems like it could be an interesting part. |
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I think the idea that you can get a 1% damage increase by optimizing Tricks is... optimistic, to say the least. And its going to be hard to make letting SnD drop worthwhile while Bandit's Guile still affects autoattack damage. Fundamentally, I think any solution that makes Bandit's Guile interesting is going to need to limit its damage gains to only a portion of the damage one does, and provide some means of control over when you have what level of buff. It needn't be as involved as my Eclipse-like solution, but it definitely needs some fairly significant adjustments.
In other news: loony idea of the week. I still like the notion of dropping SnD from the Sub cycle, but most of the Sub enthusiasts don't like the idea of losing a DoT. So what about - via talent or straight up ability rework - making Expose Armor an essential part of the Sub cycle, such that the three duration-based finishers are Expose, Rupture, and Recuperate? Its not without a whole host of other problems, of course, but it'd definitely be different from the other specs. Thoughts? |
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It could work, you would need to nerf SnD's base effectiveness rather significantly. If Expose Armor gave some sort of additional Armor Pen and a slightly shorter duration, like a Find Weakness you have to be proactive about I could see it being viable (or maybe the mechanic could interact with FW). Off the top of my head, I have no clue where the values would need to be, SnD would have to do less damage than an Eviscerate which means the haste percentage will have to be pretty low or the energy cost would need to jump up a ton.
It's also kind of strange that, in order to not touch the Combat and Mutilate cycles you might have to buff SnD in the other two trees*. I am also curious to the PvP side of this change. To the best of my knowledge, SnD isn't really used in PvP, but I would expect the bonus armor mitigation would be used a lot for controlled bursts. I don't think poison and white damage is that big of a factor in PvP. * That said, it might be the case that we don't want Combat to keep SnD as strong as it is, just one that would be of enough value to warrant it's usage still. It would certainly reduce the CP procs, move damage out of white attacks and hopefully they would in turn buff Sinister Strike or, dare I say it, Rupture. All in all, it's definitely workable, but since SnD is just that good in every regard (lower energy cost, fairly long duration, good damage in of itself) it would need to be nerfed pretty hard. I've also had the impression that the devs want SnD to be the iconic PvE ability, which means I doubt they would drop it from the Sub rotation. I wouldn't mind using EA instead though, it seems like there's a lot of potential for something interesting there. |
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Lets assume for the moment that the balance consideration can be solved (because it can be). The question is whether it would make the class better/more fun/whatever. You wind up with a target debuff instead of a self-buff, but one that doesn't need to be refreshed as often. And in return you provide a free raid buff (albeit one that's generally pretty easy to get). Net positive, or net negative?
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Recent Blog Entries by Aldriana
- Ten Things Blizzard Should Change About Rogues Before Mists (08/30/12)
- Mists Beta Thoughts: Feint (03/29/12)
- 5.0 Talents (11/13/11)
- On Monks (10/25/11)
- Fixing Rogues, Part 5: Filler (09/24/11)
