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...

• 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....

• Aldriana

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

Let us begin with our utility cooldowns, as the problem with them is easier to identify. We have...

• Aldriana

After reading the recent Ask the Devs article, there are a few things that need to be said. While I appreciate the effort being put forward to try to involve the community, the simple fact is that some of the statements made show a certain lack of awareness over the realities of rogue play; which isn't to say that there aren't people at Blizzard that understand these issues, but they don't appear to be the people who were writing up the answers.

...

• Aldriana

Ever since Blizzard released its Cataclysm Talents Tree Post-Mortem, I've been thinking about the structure of our class and talent trees; as for all that Blizzard asserts that the trees are mostly good with just a few "clunker talents" and "traps for the unwary", an honest assessment of the Assassination tree reveals more talents and abilities in need of fixing than not, which seems to me to go a bit beyond the handful of talents that Blizzard seemed to indicate. Additionally,...

• Aldriana