Fixing Rogues, Part 5: Filler
Posted 09/24/11 at 7:36 PM by Aldriana
When Blizzard redid the talent trees for Cataclysm, a major part of the design was the notion of filler points - that is, a max level rogue, in filling out any of the three trees, will spend most of their points on obviously essential talents, but have a few leftover to spend according to personal preference. From a PvE perspective, this usually means that there are a handful of talents that do not increase personal DPS, but provide a variety of survivability or utility tools. And its a good idea - allowing meaningful customization of one’s spec certainly seems like an appealing notion. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked. Thus the question: what went wrong, and how do we fix it?
Fundamentally, the problem is that “filler” is not a binary characterization. While the DPS/not DPS distinction seems reasonable at first glance, it really doesn’t capture the whole story - some talents straddle the gap. Quickening, for instance, is not a DPS talent in the conventional sense - it provides no benefit on a tank and spank fight. But run speed is quite useful on many other fights - both in terms of DPS and survivability - which means in practice pretty much all Assassination rogues take it. It may not be a DPS talent, but it does border on mandatory. More generally, DPS talents range from the very strong (Relentless Strikes) to the very weak (Initiative) and utility talents range from the nigh-essential (Quickening) to the nearly useless (Blackjack). We draw a line somewhere around the divide between weak DPS talents and strong utility talents and declare that everything on one side is a utility talent, but in reality the distinction between mandatory and optional is simply a question of relative strength and available points. If we had 3 more filler points in Assassination, most PvE rogues would be 3/3 Deadened Nerves and 1/2 Deadly Brew - not because they’re amazingly strong talents, but because they’re the best thing available. “Filler” is not a question of talents of a particular strength; its simply what exists on the boundary between “I have points to take this” and “I do not”. The idea that filler provides choice only works if everything is of roughly equal quality in that range. The problem, then, is creating a selection of talents of comparable quality to choose between without making them all equally useless, as has happened to Combat in the current incarnation of the trees.
The obvious away to address this is to have different things be better under different circumstances - this is, for instance, how Assassination’s utility talents are currently balanced. If you need an AoE snare, Deadly Brew is excellent; if you have to keep up Expose Armor for whatever reason, Improved EA is the clear winner; and if you don’t need either of those, you take Deadened Nerves, as while the benefit is much smaller it applies on (almost) all fights. So you can imagine loading up our “utility” talents with options like the following:
Impale: Your Backstabs and Mutilates also strike a second target within 5 yards.
Collateral Damage: While feint is active, all AoE damage you take is also applied to your target.
On a fight like Domo, Impale is clearly better; you take no damage and need to cleave a lot, so an ability that grants a cleave would be very useful. On Beth’tilac, on the other hand, the cleave does very little for you, but the ability to redirect some of the AoE damage you take back onto your target could be a fairly healthy damage boost. With an assortment of such options available, you can easily imagine building a set of talents, all of which were useful but none of which were clearly dominant across a full tier of raiding.
The problem with this is that its a recipe for having to respec multiple times a night while clearing an instance. In practice, we wouldn’t pick one of the circumstantial talents and just accept the fact that we were going to be good on Domo and Rhyolith and not so good on the other fights; we’d respec between every fight if we needed to so as to have the exact right combination of talents for each fight. And this, I submit, would get annoying in a hurry; talents should be something you can spec at the beginning of the instance and be pretty much fine for whatever comes along. There will always be some small benefits to be gained by more frequent respecs, but if you make the talents involved good enough that you actually want them - as in the example above - it risks becoming mandatory, and I don’t think any of us want that. Hence, the goal cannot be powerful talents that eclipse each other based on the circumstances of individual fights. There can be a few of those - if we’re choosing between Impale and Deadened Nerves we’ll probably all pick Impale and just run it all instance, even if Deadened Nerves is better on a couple of fights - but for the most part utility talents need to be often useful but rarely essential lest we be forced to respec multiple times per night.
We have a few such abilities already - Deadened Nerves, Cheat Death, and Enveloping Shadows are all the sort of thing that will help to some extent on almost any fight. They’re not without their own set of problems - Deadened Nerves in particular annoys me in that its completely passive (and thus somewhat boring) as well as seeming somewhat thematically inappropriate for a rogue. But in general “improved survivability” is the sort of thing that benefits us on many fights, so a certain number of such talents - hopefully trending more towards the “Cheat Death” end of the spectrum - are reasonable options for inclusion amongst our utility talents.
“Mobility” is another such category - Quickening and Shadowstep are both sorts of abilities that we’d benefit from having on most fights, though they’re rarely truly essential. The only concern is that they tend to be very strong; as staying in melee range is critical for maximizing DPS, anything that helps you do so tends to be highly desirable; hence options for improved mobility must be apportioned out carefully lest they dominate other available options. Still, mobility, like survivability, can certainly be a portion of our filler talents. But we will need other options as well.
As a final note before I get to specific suggestions, I will note that we needn’t (and probably shouldn’t) replace *all* our current utility talents, as there are things that are very valuable and interesting for PvP rogues even if they’re largely useless in PvE. For instance, while Deadly Brew might not survive on its own merits as a PvE talent (as its fairly situational and in most cases Frost DKs with Chilblains do a better job), my understanding is that its valuable enough in PvP that it probably makes sense to keep it around. Each talent tree currently has something in excess of a dozen talent points that provide no PvE DPS benefits, and we only need about half that to have reasonable choices from a PvE perspective; choosing where to spend 3-4 points amongst 6-8 reasonable options would be a completely reasonable amount of customization (and a vast improvement over the status quo) and leave plenty of room for the PvP-specialized talents that also need to exist.
And to be clear: I don’t have anywhere near that many proposals. But here’s a few ideas:
A. Glyph of Feint gets some competition
In a lot of ways, Glyph of Feint is one of the great success stories of this expansion. It converted feint from an ability used rarely if at all to one that we use dozens or hundreds of times per night; its gone from an occasionally useful gimmick to a powerful tool allowing good rogues to distinguish themselves by lowering their damage taken to levels that other classes can only dream of.
The problem is that its too good - all PvE rogues, of all specs take it in all circumstances - there’s no choice anymore. One solution would be to reduce the power of the glyph - make Feint free by default and have the glyph improve it in some other way. But realistically there are a few other utility benefits that fall under the same category - the run speed increase of Quickening, for instance, is something that most rogues would like to have if possible, and probably would be a viable competitor for Glyph of Feint - if forced to choose between them, I don’t think there’s an obvious “wrong” answer for the raiding rogue.
However, making them competing utility talents has a few problems - first, it flirts dangerously close to the “respec every fight” issue mentioned above - Feint is probably better on Rag, but Quickening is better on Domo and neither does anything on Baleroc. Second, coming up with enough such things - 3 or 4 per tree, so 10-12 total - is actually pretty hard.
But if we instead make these things into Major Glyphs, these problems vanish. While it shouldn’t be mandatory to switch for every fight - the above philosophy of “often useful, rarely essential” still very much applies - for those players that choose to, swapping out Glyphs is certainly much easier than changing talents. Additionally, as Glyphs are equally accessible to all specs, we don’t need to create a dozen of them - if we have 5 or 6 good and competitive Major Glyphs of which users can pick 3, that would be a big step forward on the customizability of our spec.
Hence, rather than nerfing or removing Glyph of Feint, I’d like to see a handful of new Major Glyphs that are good enough to legitimately compete with it. The run speed bonus of Quickening strikes me as one such option; reducing positional dependence of specs might be another (though would need to be done carefully to avoid issues with PvP balance). I’m sure there are others as well, though I admittedly haven’t come up with any yet.
B. Make existing tools better
Rogues already have a lot of utility - its one of our major distinguishing features as a class. We have stuns and interrupts to control mobs, and cooldowns to mitigate incoming damage (or avoid it entirely). While many classes can produce DPS similar to ours, we can do it while requiring less healing, clearing some of our own debuffs, and managing our own threat (though admittedly that last one is less relevant of late). Its this sort of self-sufficiency that made us the go-to class for the shadow realm on V+T, as well as being a strong option for kiting on Atramedes and for DPS in general on Al’akir. Boosts to existing abilities - be it in duration (Enveloping Shadows, Glyph of Evasion), cooldown (Elusiveness), or intensity (Glyph of Sprint) are thus prime candidates for broadly useful utility talents. Glyph of Sprint in particular is probably no longer strong enough to be a Major Glyph in light of the previous change, but would make a perfectly reasonable utility talent.
Of course, these sorts of talents do tend to be rather boring, so should be used sparingly - but having one or two per tree seems totally within the realm of reason.
C. Share the Wealth
While we’re long on personal utility, we’re a bit lacking in the raid utility department - not just in the sense of covering buffs and debuffs (though we’re pretty weak at that as well), but in terms of utility tools that benefits the raid as a whole and not just ourselves. Warriors have Rallying Cry, Druids have Stampeding Roar, and DKs have Death Grip - and all these facts are relevant on a weekly basis. Whereas we have Tricks, which, in a world where threat is largely trivialized, is mostly a means for part of our DPS to be dealt by someone else (and shouldn’t even be that). And while admittedly casting major whole-raid buffs isn’t exactly the rogue’s style, I think there is room for some interesting utility talents by allowing us to share our wealth of personal utility with others.
The simplest example of such a thing would be a talent that allowed Feint to also benefit an ally within 5 yards, so not only do we take significantly reduced damage, we can help the whole melee pack (or anyone else that has particular need of it) take less damage - and that’s useful. Theoretically you could extend this to our other cooldowns, but I think Feint is probably the strongest choice in general as its the one least likely to result in us standing next to the tank popping cooldowns to keep them alive (Evasion and Combat Readiness being the most obviously problematic in that respect, but even Cloak could have some pretty profound effects on tank survivability). However, options here extend beyond simply adding targets to our cooldowns; for instance, back when threat was still relevant, a means of transferring a portion of a fury warrior’s threat onto ourselves (as we can dump it with Vanish and they can’t) would be potentially quite useful. In general, this feels like another area where some interesting utility talents could be found.
D. Lower Opportunity Costs
What makes Glyph of Feint a success is that by itself, the ability is too costly to use regularly; but with the glyph, the opportunity cost of using it is low enough that we can use it freely. The same principal could be applied to other abilities that we currently choose not to use do to having better options available. For instance: giving up a full Eviscerate to Recuperate is only rarely worth it; but if Recuperate allowed you to keep the combo points (much like Imp EA does) it would be far more reasonable to use. It still costs energy, so you wouldn’t run it all the time for no reason; but at times when you were taking significant incoming damage, you could afford to help the healers out without massively disrupting your cycle or otherwise gimping your damage. Hence, a talent that allowed such things might make for an interesting filler talent.
E. Vigor
While the effect has been rolled into Assassin’s Resolve, I think it was better as a utility talent. Vigor (for those that don’t remember) increased maximum energy by 10, and it was always the sort of thing I wished I could take but never quite had room for - and that’s exactly the sort of thing we’d like to see as utility talents. As a 2 point talent raising max energy by 10 per point, it’d be a welcome addition to Assassination’s filler options.
F. Range
Currently, melee range is 5 yards. What it we had a talent that raised it to (say) 8 yards? I can’t think of too many PvP encounters where this would be truly essential; but it would speed up target switches and give us a bit more flexibility with positioning, and thus could be an interesting option. There are obvious implications in terms of PvP balance that I’m not entirely sure how to solve, but if a way to do so could be found this might prove to be an interesting option.
Fundamentally, the problem is that “filler” is not a binary characterization. While the DPS/not DPS distinction seems reasonable at first glance, it really doesn’t capture the whole story - some talents straddle the gap. Quickening, for instance, is not a DPS talent in the conventional sense - it provides no benefit on a tank and spank fight. But run speed is quite useful on many other fights - both in terms of DPS and survivability - which means in practice pretty much all Assassination rogues take it. It may not be a DPS talent, but it does border on mandatory. More generally, DPS talents range from the very strong (Relentless Strikes) to the very weak (Initiative) and utility talents range from the nigh-essential (Quickening) to the nearly useless (Blackjack). We draw a line somewhere around the divide between weak DPS talents and strong utility talents and declare that everything on one side is a utility talent, but in reality the distinction between mandatory and optional is simply a question of relative strength and available points. If we had 3 more filler points in Assassination, most PvE rogues would be 3/3 Deadened Nerves and 1/2 Deadly Brew - not because they’re amazingly strong talents, but because they’re the best thing available. “Filler” is not a question of talents of a particular strength; its simply what exists on the boundary between “I have points to take this” and “I do not”. The idea that filler provides choice only works if everything is of roughly equal quality in that range. The problem, then, is creating a selection of talents of comparable quality to choose between without making them all equally useless, as has happened to Combat in the current incarnation of the trees.
The obvious away to address this is to have different things be better under different circumstances - this is, for instance, how Assassination’s utility talents are currently balanced. If you need an AoE snare, Deadly Brew is excellent; if you have to keep up Expose Armor for whatever reason, Improved EA is the clear winner; and if you don’t need either of those, you take Deadened Nerves, as while the benefit is much smaller it applies on (almost) all fights. So you can imagine loading up our “utility” talents with options like the following:
Impale: Your Backstabs and Mutilates also strike a second target within 5 yards.
Collateral Damage: While feint is active, all AoE damage you take is also applied to your target.
On a fight like Domo, Impale is clearly better; you take no damage and need to cleave a lot, so an ability that grants a cleave would be very useful. On Beth’tilac, on the other hand, the cleave does very little for you, but the ability to redirect some of the AoE damage you take back onto your target could be a fairly healthy damage boost. With an assortment of such options available, you can easily imagine building a set of talents, all of which were useful but none of which were clearly dominant across a full tier of raiding.
The problem with this is that its a recipe for having to respec multiple times a night while clearing an instance. In practice, we wouldn’t pick one of the circumstantial talents and just accept the fact that we were going to be good on Domo and Rhyolith and not so good on the other fights; we’d respec between every fight if we needed to so as to have the exact right combination of talents for each fight. And this, I submit, would get annoying in a hurry; talents should be something you can spec at the beginning of the instance and be pretty much fine for whatever comes along. There will always be some small benefits to be gained by more frequent respecs, but if you make the talents involved good enough that you actually want them - as in the example above - it risks becoming mandatory, and I don’t think any of us want that. Hence, the goal cannot be powerful talents that eclipse each other based on the circumstances of individual fights. There can be a few of those - if we’re choosing between Impale and Deadened Nerves we’ll probably all pick Impale and just run it all instance, even if Deadened Nerves is better on a couple of fights - but for the most part utility talents need to be often useful but rarely essential lest we be forced to respec multiple times per night.
We have a few such abilities already - Deadened Nerves, Cheat Death, and Enveloping Shadows are all the sort of thing that will help to some extent on almost any fight. They’re not without their own set of problems - Deadened Nerves in particular annoys me in that its completely passive (and thus somewhat boring) as well as seeming somewhat thematically inappropriate for a rogue. But in general “improved survivability” is the sort of thing that benefits us on many fights, so a certain number of such talents - hopefully trending more towards the “Cheat Death” end of the spectrum - are reasonable options for inclusion amongst our utility talents.
“Mobility” is another such category - Quickening and Shadowstep are both sorts of abilities that we’d benefit from having on most fights, though they’re rarely truly essential. The only concern is that they tend to be very strong; as staying in melee range is critical for maximizing DPS, anything that helps you do so tends to be highly desirable; hence options for improved mobility must be apportioned out carefully lest they dominate other available options. Still, mobility, like survivability, can certainly be a portion of our filler talents. But we will need other options as well.
As a final note before I get to specific suggestions, I will note that we needn’t (and probably shouldn’t) replace *all* our current utility talents, as there are things that are very valuable and interesting for PvP rogues even if they’re largely useless in PvE. For instance, while Deadly Brew might not survive on its own merits as a PvE talent (as its fairly situational and in most cases Frost DKs with Chilblains do a better job), my understanding is that its valuable enough in PvP that it probably makes sense to keep it around. Each talent tree currently has something in excess of a dozen talent points that provide no PvE DPS benefits, and we only need about half that to have reasonable choices from a PvE perspective; choosing where to spend 3-4 points amongst 6-8 reasonable options would be a completely reasonable amount of customization (and a vast improvement over the status quo) and leave plenty of room for the PvP-specialized talents that also need to exist.
And to be clear: I don’t have anywhere near that many proposals. But here’s a few ideas:
A. Glyph of Feint gets some competition
In a lot of ways, Glyph of Feint is one of the great success stories of this expansion. It converted feint from an ability used rarely if at all to one that we use dozens or hundreds of times per night; its gone from an occasionally useful gimmick to a powerful tool allowing good rogues to distinguish themselves by lowering their damage taken to levels that other classes can only dream of.
The problem is that its too good - all PvE rogues, of all specs take it in all circumstances - there’s no choice anymore. One solution would be to reduce the power of the glyph - make Feint free by default and have the glyph improve it in some other way. But realistically there are a few other utility benefits that fall under the same category - the run speed increase of Quickening, for instance, is something that most rogues would like to have if possible, and probably would be a viable competitor for Glyph of Feint - if forced to choose between them, I don’t think there’s an obvious “wrong” answer for the raiding rogue.
However, making them competing utility talents has a few problems - first, it flirts dangerously close to the “respec every fight” issue mentioned above - Feint is probably better on Rag, but Quickening is better on Domo and neither does anything on Baleroc. Second, coming up with enough such things - 3 or 4 per tree, so 10-12 total - is actually pretty hard.
But if we instead make these things into Major Glyphs, these problems vanish. While it shouldn’t be mandatory to switch for every fight - the above philosophy of “often useful, rarely essential” still very much applies - for those players that choose to, swapping out Glyphs is certainly much easier than changing talents. Additionally, as Glyphs are equally accessible to all specs, we don’t need to create a dozen of them - if we have 5 or 6 good and competitive Major Glyphs of which users can pick 3, that would be a big step forward on the customizability of our spec.
Hence, rather than nerfing or removing Glyph of Feint, I’d like to see a handful of new Major Glyphs that are good enough to legitimately compete with it. The run speed bonus of Quickening strikes me as one such option; reducing positional dependence of specs might be another (though would need to be done carefully to avoid issues with PvP balance). I’m sure there are others as well, though I admittedly haven’t come up with any yet.
B. Make existing tools better
Rogues already have a lot of utility - its one of our major distinguishing features as a class. We have stuns and interrupts to control mobs, and cooldowns to mitigate incoming damage (or avoid it entirely). While many classes can produce DPS similar to ours, we can do it while requiring less healing, clearing some of our own debuffs, and managing our own threat (though admittedly that last one is less relevant of late). Its this sort of self-sufficiency that made us the go-to class for the shadow realm on V+T, as well as being a strong option for kiting on Atramedes and for DPS in general on Al’akir. Boosts to existing abilities - be it in duration (Enveloping Shadows, Glyph of Evasion), cooldown (Elusiveness), or intensity (Glyph of Sprint) are thus prime candidates for broadly useful utility talents. Glyph of Sprint in particular is probably no longer strong enough to be a Major Glyph in light of the previous change, but would make a perfectly reasonable utility talent.
Of course, these sorts of talents do tend to be rather boring, so should be used sparingly - but having one or two per tree seems totally within the realm of reason.
C. Share the Wealth
While we’re long on personal utility, we’re a bit lacking in the raid utility department - not just in the sense of covering buffs and debuffs (though we’re pretty weak at that as well), but in terms of utility tools that benefits the raid as a whole and not just ourselves. Warriors have Rallying Cry, Druids have Stampeding Roar, and DKs have Death Grip - and all these facts are relevant on a weekly basis. Whereas we have Tricks, which, in a world where threat is largely trivialized, is mostly a means for part of our DPS to be dealt by someone else (and shouldn’t even be that). And while admittedly casting major whole-raid buffs isn’t exactly the rogue’s style, I think there is room for some interesting utility talents by allowing us to share our wealth of personal utility with others.
The simplest example of such a thing would be a talent that allowed Feint to also benefit an ally within 5 yards, so not only do we take significantly reduced damage, we can help the whole melee pack (or anyone else that has particular need of it) take less damage - and that’s useful. Theoretically you could extend this to our other cooldowns, but I think Feint is probably the strongest choice in general as its the one least likely to result in us standing next to the tank popping cooldowns to keep them alive (Evasion and Combat Readiness being the most obviously problematic in that respect, but even Cloak could have some pretty profound effects on tank survivability). However, options here extend beyond simply adding targets to our cooldowns; for instance, back when threat was still relevant, a means of transferring a portion of a fury warrior’s threat onto ourselves (as we can dump it with Vanish and they can’t) would be potentially quite useful. In general, this feels like another area where some interesting utility talents could be found.
D. Lower Opportunity Costs
What makes Glyph of Feint a success is that by itself, the ability is too costly to use regularly; but with the glyph, the opportunity cost of using it is low enough that we can use it freely. The same principal could be applied to other abilities that we currently choose not to use do to having better options available. For instance: giving up a full Eviscerate to Recuperate is only rarely worth it; but if Recuperate allowed you to keep the combo points (much like Imp EA does) it would be far more reasonable to use. It still costs energy, so you wouldn’t run it all the time for no reason; but at times when you were taking significant incoming damage, you could afford to help the healers out without massively disrupting your cycle or otherwise gimping your damage. Hence, a talent that allowed such things might make for an interesting filler talent.
E. Vigor
While the effect has been rolled into Assassin’s Resolve, I think it was better as a utility talent. Vigor (for those that don’t remember) increased maximum energy by 10, and it was always the sort of thing I wished I could take but never quite had room for - and that’s exactly the sort of thing we’d like to see as utility talents. As a 2 point talent raising max energy by 10 per point, it’d be a welcome addition to Assassination’s filler options.
F. Range
Currently, melee range is 5 yards. What it we had a talent that raised it to (say) 8 yards? I can’t think of too many PvP encounters where this would be truly essential; but it would speed up target switches and give us a bit more flexibility with positioning, and thus could be an interesting option. There are obvious implications in terms of PvP balance that I’m not entirely sure how to solve, but if a way to do so could be found this might prove to be an interesting option.
Total Comments 9
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Quote:
The simplest example of such a thing would be a talent that allowed Feint to also benefit an ally within 5 yards, so not only do we take significantly reduced damage, we can help the whole melee pack (or anyone else that has particular need of it) take less damage - and that’s useful.
They'd have to balance encounter damage around the assumption that they'd have Rogues using it... for if they didn't, it would very likely create a position where guilds were stacking Rogues like early ICC. Certainly, Rogues are quite under represented population-wise right now, but a talent like that would swing the pendulum way too far the other way... after all, what's to stop a raid from bringing 4 Rogues to negate some serious AoE effect for everyone in the raid? Could you imagine how much easier the last phase of Anub'arak in ToGC would have been if you'd had 4 rogues popping Feints to negate the Leeching Swarm? I think Blizzard's problem with giving us a raid-wide utility buff is giving us one that doesn't make bringing us mandatory. What's the solution? I don't know that there is one, save giving us a raid buff that replicates someone else - but then you run into the homogenization issue, not to mention the thematic one you mentioned. Leader of the Pack seems like it could be one that would lend well to Rogues, though. |
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What's to stop people from doing that already?
I mean, if taking less damage is so important that stacking feint is important to beating the encounter... you can. You just need a lot of rogues. Notice that that's not really happening, which implies to me that while the damage reduction of feint is nice, its not powerful enough to induce guilds to significantly alter their raid composition. Hence, it seems to me that extending that benefit to other nearby allies would be in the same category - nice, but hardly essential. |
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Updated 09/27/11 at 1:09 PM by Aldriana |
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Well, I don't disagree with that, but it's one thing to stack rogues to make healing them easier, but it's a whole other kettle of fish altogether to extend that benefit to other players... now, if they were to *reduce* the amount of damage reduction a Feint could cause based on the number of people near the Rogue... similar to an AoE bubble, so-to-speak?
Death Before Dishonor: Reduces Area of Effect damage you take by 50% for 6 seconds, reduced by 10% for every nearby ally within 5 yards, up to a maximum of 5 allies. (aka, just you: 50% reduction. You +1 = 40% you, 10% them, You +2= 30% you, 10% and 10%... etc.) That keeps things thematically accurate, which I agree is important - "I'm the Rogue, I get the lion's share of the effect, but here's a little bit for you and your pals." Also seems like it would have some moderate arena use, especially in 5v5. You could see some interesting boss mechanics develop out of it - similar to the blue dragon shield popped to survive Kil'jaeden's Darkness of a Thousand Souls. |
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It could easily be done and balanced, without any need to stack Rogues. Maybe two at most for fights like Beth with consistent and hard hitting AOE.
"Your Feint reduces the damage you take from AOE by 50% for 5 seconds, and causes all friendly units within 8 yards to take 10% less AOE damage for 5 seconds." Glyph, talent, baseline, whatever, it would be some neat utility. 10% would be a big deal, but not enough to completely redesign an encounter, especially if it only had an 8 yard range. I'm not sure I would like how the original idea plays out, if it were to just be a single ally, as multiple Rogues could overwrite each other's buff. Although that's a miner issue. I can't see the second idea being of any real use though, so long as people aren't in danger of being one shot it would have no real net value as raid utility, since it's going to reduce the damage taken overall by the same amount as if it had reduced it for just the rogue (Preventing 50k damage is the same as preventing 10k 5 times). And even then, raid cooldowns like Aura Mastery usually do a better job than that would. Another ability that's lacking in PvE is Dismantle for Rogues. I don't have anything substantial to add to this, as the only ideas I've thought up deal with reducing the damage dealt by the target if the disarm fails through some debuff, but I'm not a fan of any of the ideas. I like this post though, I didn't see anything I disagreed with. The only thing I want to add is that it would be really cool for Mutilate's cleave if it involved poisons and was called Infectious Splatter. |
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I think making Feint into a straight AoE cooldown is sort of a recipe for making it overpowered and/or mandatory. Raid cooldowns already are pretty powerful - think about how much use hardmode raiding tends to make of Power Word: Barrier and its ilk - and while your proposed Feint variant is certainly weaker (10% instead of 25%), the fact that its on a 10 second cooldown and has 60% uptime (more, for Sub) is a pretty big advantage. Running 2 rogues to keep a 100% feint rotation up on the raid would be nearly essential in some circumstances. I'm trying to avoid making it something you'd optimize raid strategies around, and just have it be something that you use like you'd normally use feint but get a little extra benefit out of. If that requires dropping it to 20% reduction on secondary targets (or whatever) so be it, but having an uncapped AoE damage reduction cooldown sounds... rather powerful.
Also, i think it works a little better thematically; its hard to imagine what a rogue might be doing to protect the entire raid, but the notion of dragging a buddy to safety as you dive for cover strikes me as completely reasonable. |
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See, this is why I think you *get it* - while a lot of rogues don't give two shits about the back story, you at the very least give it some thought.
If Feint were to remain at 10s, then without a doubt there'd be some issues... so they'd have to tinker with cooldown timing... which could then influence PvP balance (perhaps? I don't know how prevalent Feint usage is in PvP). So here's some food for thought - reduce CloS back down to 60s, have Feint (or whatever it would be renamed to) share a CD with it, but make the effect a little stronger. This would allow rogues to have a bit more choice per encounter - "Do I need to wash my debuffs... or is something big on the way I need to worry about?" That fits thematically: if the Rogue doesn't take care of his fellow raiders, he's as dead as the rest of them... but the majority of the time, it's CloS to take care of yourself. Here's hoping we see some sort of improved raid utility in the future. |
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I'm still not a fan of the potential for overlapping the buff though, nor do I consider keeping Feint up for a 10% AOE reduction to be that overpowered, it could be dropped to 5 or 6% and I would still like the idea. Maybe it's just because I don't see an issue with Feint being "mandatory", since it would fall under the category of every other AOE mitigation mechanic being "mandatory" yet guilds can get by without them. It is possible to do Heroic Rag without a Holy Pally or Disc Priest.
I also don't think Sub should have a stronger raid CD. It should only last, at most, 5 seconds for all specs. It certainly seems like there's a lot of wiggle room in this department if we rely on the definition of Feint as well: - a mock attack or movement in warfare, made in order to distract or deceive an enemy. I still think that an 8y range is viable if you were to imagine it as the rogue encouraging their target to deal damage in another location which reduces the damage taken near you. For instance, the target throws a fiery explosion and you get them to throw it in a different direction, your nearby enemies are saved from taking a greater force of the blast. This is also more akin to the mechanic of Feint than hiding with a raid member, as that would imply you (and them) not doing DPS during the Feint, which isn't true. I care about immersion, but I'd rather have a decent mechanic first. That's just my priorities. |
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Major glyphs like Feint or Blade Flurry are indeed rather uninteresting in the sense that if you're going to use the abilities at all during the encounter, they increase your dps, hence are must-haves. And that's pretty much as far as the thought process goes. Compare it to say, Fan of Knives or Sprint: you might or might not get any extra dps out of them, depending on the fight and how you go around it. E.g. H:Maloriak, you can do just fine without FoK glyph, but it sure does make life easier. On the other hand, it'd probably be invaluable for add dps on H:Anub'arak. Similar things apply for Sprint and encounters like Al'akir, Ragnaros and Alysrazor.
This is further highlighted by the fact that the group of fights where you end up using Feint is almost all of them, and the Tricks glyph I sort of took for granted (though it does have some switching potential as well, maybe after a bit of tweaking). So you really end up with 1 'free' glyph slot - or zero, if you're combat and need to cleave (and as much as trash is trivial, BF is a dps increase there, too). And that all is sort of disappointing (and doesn't make me a big fan of 'Glyph of Quickness'), as we do actually have some good non-dps-increasing major glyphs. We would probably be better off with a baseline 0-energy Feint, and have the glyph decrease its cooldown or increase its duration (like, up to what the current incarnation is, as it is very powerful already). That way you could might as well not have the glyph for e.g. Nefarian, but have it up when it matters, without a dps cost. |
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I think you missed one of the key points of the Major Glyph design - yes, if all we had (that was good) for Major Glyphs is Feint, Quickening, and Tricks, that'd be stupid - we'd use those three and nothing else. But if we had 6 or 8 glyphs all of that power, and you had to pick which 3 are most immediately useful... that's a lot more interesting, I think.
The problem with Major glyphs right now is that there are a few near-mandatory glyphs. But they're not mandatory because of their power level in the abstract; they're near mandatory because they're better than any other option. What is necessary to create choice is to have more options of roughly comparable power than you can take, so you have to pick what's most important; this can either be done by nerfing the powerful stuff down to the level of the weaker options, or by buffing the weaker options up to the level of the stronger ones. I've chosen the latter option because I think its more interesting, but there's no fundamental problem with the other approach, provided that you wind up with enough stuff all around the same power level. As another option, we could make Major Glyphs all around the Sprint/FoK/etc. power level, and scrap the current prime glyphs in favor of the Feint/Quickening/etc. type stuff. As was pointed out to me by a guildmate recently, the prime glyphs system in its current incarnation is pretty much entirely redundant with talent points - you look up the right choices for your spec on the web, and then never touch them again, just like DPS talents. So replacing them with properly balanced (but powerful) utility talents might well be an improvement there as well, and leaves Major glyphs open for abilities of more moderate power. The relevant point is creating choice by having more stuff that you want to take than you actually can, rather than the current system which has little choice and most of what there is consists of figuring out which option is the least useless. As a final note, I think focusing on the applications of Glyph of Feint on fights like Nefarian to some extent undersells the glyph; its effects on fights like Rhyolith and Omnotron are in many ways more profound than what it does on fights like Nef. And that may in fact be a reasonable argument to make it free by default rather than only free with a glyph. But that discussion is a bit on the lengthy side to be held here, so I shall save it for another day. |
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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)
