Mists Beta Thoughts: Feint

Beta is upon us, giving us our first big-picture look at the rogue changes planned for the next expansion. Previously, we’ve seen talent calculators, ability lists and other fragments of information, but we also had to rely on a certain amount of guesswork to fill in the gaps. Now, we can observe and test everything Blizzard has planned - and hopefully convince them to change it. There are serious flaws with the current implementation.

As a simple example, the changes to Feint are likely to cripple its utility. To understand why, we must first consider how it is currently used - starting with the fact that some rogues don’t use it at all. Feint is purely optional. As many classes lack a comparable survivability tool, no fight can require its use; hence, you can completely ignore it and still win. Clearly it is suboptimal to do so, but it’s important to remember that Feint is not mandatory like some of our abilities and mechanics are.

In reality, though, most people do make at least some use of Feint. Judging by applicants to my guild, top parses from other guilds, and parses sent to me by readers (remember that?), the most common usage pattern is to Feint primarily to mitigate large bursts of incoming damage, such as Electrocute on Nef. This is certainly an improvement over not using it at all, although it still does not utilize the full potential of the ability. It’s a usage pattern dating back to when Feint cost energy, so there was a real tradeoff to be made between damage done and damage taken - while it was there if you needed it, you only wanted to hit it if you really *did* need it, and most of the time you didn’t. Such players often glyph Feint to lose less damage in those circumstances where they find it worth using, but they miss (or at least, do not significantly adjust their usage in response to) the key realization:

Glyph of Feint doesn’t just make Feint cheaper. It makes it free.

There is no reason to reserve Feint for “only when you need it” if you have the glyph. You can hit it to mitigate big chunks of damage. You can hit it to mitigate small amounts of damage. You can hit it as a precaution when there’s even the slightest chance you might take damage. You can even hit it just for fun. It’s free. On most fights there’s little stopping you from hitting it on cooldown all fight long - and you’ll take (on average) 30% less AoE damage by doing so. Given that AoE damage is by far the leading source of damage that rogues take, that’s a significant reduction, and absolutely worth doing.

Of course, while on some fights, such as H:Ultraxion, Feinting on cooldown is as good as you can do, there are others - such as Zon’ozz and Ragnaros - where you can do significantly better. Feinting on cooldown is unlikely to catch all bounces on Zon’ozz, but if you keep an eye on where the shadow orb is you can easily mitigate them all. By paying attention to fight mechanics and learning the patterns of incoming attacks, you can optimize your Feint usage to significantly reduce your damage taken on most fights in modern raid content. The more attention you put into your Feint usage, the larger benefits you reap.

Hence: Feint is one of very few rogue mechanics that scales well with player skill - exactly the sort of mechanic that you want to see in games. It provides meaningful benefits to those players with the skill and interest to optimize its usage, without excessively punishing those who don’t (or can’t) use it at all. In practice, you can often tell more about how much attention a rogue is paying to optimizing their performance by looking at their damage taken instead of their damage done - purely because of the influence of Feint. It’s almost certainly the best ability PvE rogues gained in Cataclysm.

...Which is interesting, given that it’s not a new ability in Cataclysm. Feint as a damage reduction cooldown has existed since Wrath; what changed in Cataclysm is only our ability to take the Glyph that makes it free. Feint, when we had to pay for it with damage, was an occasionally useful button we hit in emergencies; Feint, once free, became a dynamic and interesting mechanic for good players to optimize. And this is exactly what is being lost - in the Mists beta, Feint costs 10 energy.

When Blizzard updated the talent trees in Cataclysm, a major theme was the realization that when you give a DPS class a choice between damage and utility, or damage and defensive abilities, it’s not really a choice at all - DPS wins. Yet this is exactly what they’re trying to do with Feint. Energy spent is damage lost, so any energy cost on Feint will put it in direct competition with damage done. We might still use it for Electrocute on Nef and similar raid-burst-damage situations; but for most fights, it simply won’t be worth the cost.

Moreover, there’s no cooldown, so you never have to worry about whether to use it now or save it for later - if there are two attacks that are both worth mitigating, you will always be able to mitigate both attacks. In combination, these changes take an ability that rogues can use extensively to optimize their performance in many interesting ways and turn it into one that we’ll use rarely and mindlessly - if at all. The current Mists implementation wrecks everything that was good about Feint in Cataclysm.

So why are they doing it? Why would they take an ability that, for the first time since vanilla, is seeing good and interesting usage patterns, and revert its mechanics to an era where it was barely used at all? I can only assume they worry it is too powerful in its current form. Certainly, being able to take 30% less average damage and 50% off bursts is a significant (if oft-overlooked) advantage; I can easily see Blizzard wanting to rein this in to some extent. But there are far better ways of doing so. They could easily make it weaker but still interesting and worth using by doing something like the following:

Feint: Free. 10 second cooldown. 5 second duration. Reduces AoE damage taken by 30%.
Glyph of Feint: Increases Feint mitigation to 40%, but reduces duration to 3 seconds.

It would still be an interesting ability (and still worth using) despite being half as powerful as it is at present. Moreover, there would be an interesting glyph decision to make as well - you can choose to have better average mitigation for fights like Ultraxion, or better peak mitigation for fights like Nef. But instead, they’ve made the one change that risks killing the ability entirely - and that would be a shame. I can only hope that they change their mind.