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.
One of the major announcements at Blizzcon was the revelation that the talent trees are being revamped (again) in Mists - and much more thoroughly than they were for Cataclysm. Instead of having a single talent tree comprising both “essential” and “utility” talents, they’ve split these into two different systems. Then, since the “essential” stuff is, well, essential, they simply give it all to you (at appropriate levels) just for choosing your spec, and all character customization...
Blizzcon has come and gone, and among many other announcements, a new class has been announced: the monk. And my initial impression of it is that it has a lot in common with the rogue. Obviously we can’t tank (or heal) like monks can... but it is an Agility leather class, and its resource system has obvious parallels to ours. We spend energy to get combo points, and then spend combo points to do higher-damage moves; Monks are much the same, except they have two flavors of combo points and spend...
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...
Today I’d like to discuss rogue AoE. Its sort of a tricky subject, as its not that our AoE at current is precisely bad - in fact, Combat has quite possibly the strongest cleave in the game, and Assassination sustained AoE on large packs is quite strong as well. However, despite these clear strengths, our AoE as a whole is poorly designed and needs significant reworking.
The first problem is the large discrepancy between specs. Assassination is quite respectable at (some times...
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