Or: How give rogues a tanking spec would be an interesting choice, and what Blizzard would need to do to complete the role.
(This mostly a repost of a thread I started on the WoW forums here).

It seems that with the new rogue talent trees in Burning Crusades, along with the shrinking raid size, it may now be possible to use Rogues as in offtank capacity, at the cost of DPS. As warriors are the best tanks as well as respectable DPS, rogues could be the best DPS as well as respectable tanks. This would be a nice way to get better class balance in smaller raid sizes, however, there are few things that would still need to be done to make this a complete reality.

What's the spec?
First, let's start off with a reference spec ( 3/13/45 ) for discussion. Talent Link
So what are the key talents that would make this work?

Key Ablities
* Lighting Reflexes: +5% dodge
* Deflection: +5% to parry
* Riposte: Disarm after a parry
* Sleight of Hand: -2% to be crit
* Ghostly Strike: +15% to dodge for 7s
* Setup: 45% to add combo point on dodge or resist spell.
* Heightened Senses: -4% to be hit by melee or ranged spells.
* Preparation: Reset key skills like evasion.
* Cheat Death: +20% chance to not die (How many MT's would kill for this? Its +20% not to wipe the raid!)
* Enveloping Shadows: +15% to avoid AOE effects (I.e. Cleaves, Blastwaves, etc)
* Sinister Calling: +10% to Agility
* Cloak of Shadows: +90% to avoid spells for 4s

Superior Magic Damage Mitigation
One interesting note is assuming similar stamina and resist gear as warriors (itemization), Rogues could potentially have superior mitigation against mobs that are heavily spell damage based (as opposed to melee). Warrior have shield wall and a passive 10% reduction from defensive stance, where as Rogues have Enveloping Shadows, Heightened Senses, Cloak of Shadows, and Cheat Death.

Limitations
The major limitation of a Rogue/Avoidance tank is that is very luck based. This comes down to Consistant vs. Unpredicable Damage. Armor, Block and Shield Wall are 'consistant mitigation' which healers love. In leather, with no shield, damage is still going to be spiky. Dodge, Dodge, Dodge, 3k, 3k, 3k, Dead. Oops, rogue down, somebody pick up the loose mob.

So the ideal rogue would be a fight with many fast but smaller attacks. Lots of fast 1k/2k hits, or lots of mobs with 50 damage hits (ala Fankriss) Huge spike damage fights would be really rough without some form of consistant mitigation. Much of this comes down to Blizzard's fight design in the expansion. If bosses have huge spike damage melee attacks (i.e. Broodlord/Patchwerk), a rogue tank would be like playing russian roulette with your raid.

Don't Leave the Role Unfinished!
In addition, there are still a couple of things which Blizzard will need to change which would make Rogue tanks viable as opposed to just a gimmick. Nothing earthshattering, but small concrete steps which would give rogue's a new viable raid roll. There are two key issues I see, along with a few minor ones.

1) [b]Itemization (Key Issue): To start with, none of this works if we don't have the gear to tank with. We need leather with high armor (i.e. NecroKnight's Garb for starters), defense (need probably +75 to avoid getting critted along with Sleight of Hand) and especially lots and lots of stamina.

2) Threat generation (Key Issue): If we can't hold agro, we can't really tank. Threat generation through damage could easily be the way we do it, just like Paladins. Paladins have a skill (Righteous Fury) to increase their threat generation. We need a way as well, because passive threat generation for us is -29% now. Elegantly solved by giving us a poison that increases threat generation. See Threat Poisons below.

3) Crushing Blows: These guys are going to be the rogue tank killer. Warriors have shield block (which reduce crushing blow chance) and high armor (to reduce the damage). Druid's extremely high armor makes crushing blows less damaging. We on the other hand, would take full damage and have no way to reduce the frequency of them. This I don't have a great solution to, but maybe they can change Heightened Senses to "reduces the chance you are hit by spells, ranged attacks and crushing blows by 4%.

4) Snap Agro: If we are looking at an OT role, this probably won't be an issue, since we can dump energy for threat to start with. Snap agro skills might be left to warriors and paladins. However, it could be solved with a Taunt poison. See Threat Poisons below.

5) Heavy Subtlety Investment (Minor): To get the all the damage mitigation skills in the subtlety tree, you need 45 points. The only 'free' points are the 3 in Enveloping Shadows and 1 in Cheat Death, both of which are key mitigation talents at the top of the tree. Points in Camouflage are wasted, and it would be nice to free them up somehow. Tying serrated to hemo also limits points flexiable. Not a huge deal, but it feels like you need a bunch of unhelpful talents just to max mitigation, when a rogue tanks will need more damage to hold agro (from the combat/assassination tree).

In addition, since rogue tanks are going to need high stamina values to make up for lower armor, vitality (31pt combat/+4% stamina) would be an ideal talent. Unfortunately, its out of reach for this spec.

Threat Poisons
As mentioned above, we need some way to increase our threat generation. The most elegant solution is poisons. Here are two poisons that would do the job. The first we need, the 2nd would be useful, but probably workable without.

Aggravating Poison
Use: Coats a weapon with a poison that lasts 30 minutes. Each strike has a 30% chance of poisoning the enemy, increasing all generated threat generated by you towards the enemy by 59%. Hemorrhage and Ghostly Strike abilities you use on this target will generate a high amount of threat.

Note: This basically gives us the threat generation of a warrior in defensive stance, without defiance. In addition, it lets Hemo/GS act as sunder/heroic strikes for threat generation. Without this poison, or a mechanic like it, we just won't be able to hold agro without our passive 29% threat reduction.

Enraging Poison
Use: Coats a weapon with a poison that lasts 30 minutes. If the target has Aggravating Poison on it, each strike has a 1% chance of poisoning the enemy, taunting them to attack you for 1s. Has no effect if the target is already attacking you. Increases the cost of Shiv by 20 energy.

Note: This poison would be used on the off hand, along with the new skill "Shiv", which allows you to spend 40 energy to apply your OH poison. It would in effect give us a taunt ability, though it comes with some conditions. The added energy cost to Shiv, and the low application chance means you need shiv to apply it, and you can't do as often. Duration of the taunt is less important than a way to snap agro.

Minus % to be crit
Paladin's are getting -5% to be crit, and druid's may be getting it (according to speculative leaks). If rogues got their sleight of hand talent buffed to 5/5 for -5% crit, that would radically simplify the need for new itemization, since we wouldn't need to stack defense. Again, the same set armor could serve both druids and rogues (since neither would need +defense on it).

Resilience
Given the presence of resilence, it make a much better target stat for rogue tanks over defense, which has wasted effects that we don't want. Plus we know we are getting PvP itemization which has resilience.

Based on known information here http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa … p;pageNo=1 , here is what we know.

* @60: 25 Resilience Rating (RR) = 1% Resilience (R)
* @70: ? Resilience Rating (RR) = 1% Resilience (R)
* Crit Frequency Reduction: Reduces the chance you will be critically hit by R %
* Crit Severity Reduction: Reduces the damage dealt to you by critical hits by 2R %.

So at 60, it would take a combination of Sleight of Hand (-2% to be crit) and 75 Resilience Rating to be uncrittable by level 60 mobs. I'm assuming we would need sleightly more for level 63 mobs (maybe 80-85 RR or so). We don't know the numbers at 70 yet, but it seems like it might be an obtainable number.

The PvP Arena sets already have a high amount of resilence and stamina, both of which are stats we would want our hypothetical 'rogue tank' itemization. The complete Gladiator's Set for rogues has +145 resilence rating right now according to http://www.thottbot.com/beta?set=577 by way of comparison.

Misdirection
Blue posters have already stated they are not planning anymore posion beside anethetic (-threat), so we are still left in a lurch for a way to increase our threat on our own. However, with the hunter talent, Misdirection, we do have a way of increasing our threat, beyond our own damage.

Main problem is, its just 3 attacks every 2 mins, so its not nearly as good as temporarily disabling (or reversing) our passive threat generation aura. Not great, but its something to work with.

Conclusion
Smaller raid design could greatly benefit from having multiple classes which could act as tanks. With the talent trees Blizzard has laid out, Rogues are potentially 90% there as a potential tanking class. With a few more changes plus viable itemziation, there is no reason why rogues can't get their turn in the tanking spots.

Your thoughts and comments on this are welcome.

Special thanks to Celandro and Kalman for putting this idea into my head, and their feedback on refining it.

Updates:
* Balanced Enraging Poison so that it would not be a completely spamable agro lock.
* Added info about -% to be crit talents based on paladin and possible druid trees.
* 10/18/06 - Updated to add Resilence and Misdirection to the discussion

Enraging Poison plus Shiv would be too good - anything tauntable we could hold permanently, since Shiv has a 40 energy cost, and Enraging lasts 6 seconds. However, Shiv combined with a high threat poison - call it Irritating, and give it an N% chance to proc a threat increase of 300 or whatever - might be interesting (e.g. Aggravating MH, Irritating OH - Shiv becomes a Sunder-like skill, only without the debuff). If we did get a taunt poison, it would have to be a 1-2s duration taunt, or Shiv would simply be too good.

If we got threat-increasing poisons, it would pretty much come down to itemization - with an evasion tank, you're basically playing roulette and hoping not to get two hits in a row, but with the benefit of healers generally being able to use more efficient regen strategies - since you don't need to chain cast, you can wear gear optimized around high HPS output and worry less about HPM, overall. If we had enough itemization to support rogues being able to take *one* crit or crush without getting one-shotted, plus threat generation poisons, we'd be there.

This could all end up being a debacle like the Ninja/Warrior profession in FF11, I don't think Blizzard (or the players for that matter) should be looking at such ridiculous avoidance mitigation as a viable way to tank a large amount of mobs, even though we're receiving talents that are pure non-avoidance. Could lead to some really crappy encounter tuning in my opinion?

I'd welcome some utility though. They're dividing and making a lot of the healing classes very unique, along with Paladins being obvious viable tanks in some encounters, etc etc. Rogues are still watching the Damage Meters in '07 though.

Screw tanking, give me more damage talents/skills. If I wanted to tank I'd reroll a warrior.

It'd be nice not to be pigeonholed totally into one role without any group benefit, don't you think?

And we won't get significantly more damage than other classes, because that has PvP implications. It's utility vs. focus, same as always, but it's a viable utility path for us.

Or you could just use a warrior!

29% inherent threat reduction does not a viable tank make.

Or you could have a rogue and get hemo + improved expose armor for higher raid dps on the target at the cost of more healing and higher spike damage. The whole point is options. Blizzard is obviously trying to push more classes into a viable tanking role. Paladins, druids, rogues and even warlocks all have a tanking spec, while warriors are being given a reason to go arms spec for total raid dps.

I'm a warrior and I have 0 issues with rogues being able to offtank if speced for it, so long as after thier cooldowns are down, they aren't as good as other classes at dmg mitigation. With the improvements to warrior protection spec, there is going to be a lot of pressure on warriors to spec that way unless there are viable alternatives.

Or we could just bring a mage!

Andrise, your point was addressed in the post.

Did you not read the post?

Edit- b10!

Defensive Stance 10% passive.

I had that same thought but didn't have a better idea. Shiv having no cooldown is the issue. I would say a 1 second taunt would be sufficent. Really we just need some way to get back up to the top of the threat meter after we get knocked back by the Molten Giant. Having no snap agro at all is really dangerous for the raid. Additionallly, since shiv already says, costs more energy with slower weapon, maybe they could increase the cost of shiv if you using Enraging poison. But I was going for the path of least complicated coding.

I'm not looking to make it imbalanced, and I don't know if we would need +59% threat, since we would do a lot more damage than a Sword/board warrior. The specific numbers would certainly need to be balanced.

Roles and Class Balance
Of course you could use a warrior! Just bring 6 to all your 25 man raids and tell all your warlocks and shamans they can't come because there isn't room. This isn't about taking an MT role, its about adding flexiablity. And it presents an interesting choice, which a fundamental principle of fun game design.

Think of the encounters in ZG, where you have a large number of mobs that need to be tanked. With a 25 man raid, you can only bring 3 warriors, so if warriors are the only tanks, then your encounter design options are limited. No single tank is taking large amounts of damage, and healers are primarily healing reactively, not proactively, like on a single target boss fight.

It a situation like that, damage avoidance is better than damage reduction, as it prevents the need for heals at all. Even warriors with more avoidance based specs (high dodge/parry) are better in a situation like that than traditional MT specs (high stamina, lower avoidance)

Update: Oops forgot about 10% spell reduction damage, updating.

I think it will all come down to what types of bosses / encounters bliz throws into the expansion, you could design an encounter that would faciliate needing a rogue spec'd for cloak of shadows, or you could make encounters where rogue tanking would be a terrible, terrible idea. Going against everything that I had just said, if we look at current encounters and gear, even with all the new "gee whiz" talents rogues would still be very, very bad at tanking almost all encounters to date. We just don't have the mitagation, or hp to do it effectively at the moment. Add to that the fact that paladins and druids are only going to get better at tanking (or even warlocks if you consider high magic fights), I just don't see the need nor the place for rogues to try tanking save some gimmicky encounters.

The interesting/fun part of it would be in how reactively it would be played - you need to spend energy/CP to maximize aggro, but you also need to save energy/CP to allow you an escape via Flourish/Ghostly Strike. How do you balance aggro generation vs. not dying - rogue tanks would be less able to *controllably* keep aggro off their party members but would have as many tools or more than warriors to personally, reactively - not die. It would require different strategies, and would be good in different situations, and wouldn't replace warriors as the all around tank king (*especially* with the revamped prot tree), but it would provide an interesting secondary role to a class completely lacking in secondary roles at the moment.

Since it would mainly require changes in subtlety and in base skills/itemization/poisons, rogues only interested in damage can ignore it as not affecting them, since the damage trees don't tend to touch subtlety.

Something like http://www.wowhead.com/?talent-bc=iZ0xxdZVrxohGooeqt would be the base dodge-tank build, with the 3 spare points potentially going to either Imp BS (improve DPS when not tanking) or Precision (reduce missrate effects on your threat generating moves). Pair that build with something like a Widow's Remorse/DS weapon combo.

It is absolutely a potentially useful idea, and could be a lot of fun if done right.

Agreed Kalman.

The basic gist is that is new interesting choice, which doesn't overpower us in PvP (its a PvP spec already) and gives subtlety rogues a viable raid spec. It would take smart player I think to get the most out of the spec, and that is what making it really compelling to me.

A properly specced rogue in *existing* gear can hit very high mitigation rates. In the extreme case, look at the profile labeled "Retarded Dodgetank" in my ctprofile - with that build, you're looking at 55.6% *unbuffed* dodge and 10.1% unbuffed parry. And probably there are better choices to be made, since that profile was specifically targeted at maxing out dodge, not min/maxing mitigation.

That gives you 73% *full* mitigation, base. 55% dodge, 9.6% parry, 8.4% miss rate, after adjusting for a level 63 mob, slightly better for 60-62 mobs which a rogue would more likely offtank. With GS up, that's an unbuffed full mitigation rate of 88%.

Unbuffed.

With consumables/buffs, you're looking at around an extra 6.87% dodge for alliance (MotW, Mongoose or Greater Agi, and Kings) or 7.83% as horde (GoA3+talent, MotW, Mongoose/Agi).

That pretty much settles the too much overall damage issue, I'd think. It comes down to whether a rogue can survive a single large hit (crush/crit) - at that point, it's up to the rogue/healers to reactively use skills to prevent a second hit from taking the rogue down before healing can get them back to full.

(profile I speak of is http://ctprofiles.net/341395)

tank = high sta/ac class that innately mitigates large amounts of damage, has abilities to snap reduce damage, and snap aggro abilities. the lack of snap aggro for paladins in release wow made paladins poor tanks.

leather armor and the fact that most of the talents add a very low amount (+15%, -4%, +10%, etc) to an already low base number make a rogue tank questionable.

Yes, if a mob starts running towards clothies a rogue can pull aggro off healers, pop evasion, and tank for a few seconds until a druid/paladin/warrior gets it back. But whats the point of having a high damage dealing class now start tanking non-trivial off-mobs while soaking up healer mana?

Anything is do-able, shadow priests can tank well, warlocks tank TE's very well, and there will probably be a few gimmick fights in BC where rogues may have to tank a few mobs.

Alternatively you could have raid encounters designed like PVP encounters, where bosses are smart and go after squishes first ("KILL THE HEALERS!"). Then I agree rogue tanks would be great. A front line of plate to hold most of the waves, a middle line of rogues to slow anything that might get through, and squishes in the back dealing ranged and healing. I hope for the day blizzard designs encounters like this instead of the "duhhh... i'm a retard... lemme attack this warrior first cuz he keeps calling me names!" bosses. But no matter what rogues shouldn't be up front, they are the subtlety class that look for the opportune moment to strike, that hide in the shadows, that are bodyguards to the healers, etc...

No, tank = class taking the majority of the hits. It doesn't matter exactly how they survive those hits or how they make sure they're taking them, as long as they do survive the hits and they are taking the hits.

Evasion-tanking classes have been quite successful in other games (FFXI, apparently, and pre-xpac Anarchy Online saw a fair amount of fixers using Grid Armor to tank - speaking as someone who tanked endgame mobs in GA, it worked just fine). If Blizzard doesn't want to design in that mechanic, that's one thing, but people saying "It can't work" are just talking from ignorance.

No matter what priests should be only able to keep other people alive, no matter what druids should alternate between saving lives and hugging trees, no matter what paladins should buff and cleanse, no matter what warlocks should just come to CoR/CoE for the real DPS classes, no matter what shamans should just sit back and heal, etc, etc, etc.

What about choice and options scares people so much? Expansions are the times when major changes occur in a game. Expanding people's choices and options seems to be a goal of Blizzard's, and rogues are one of the classes which *isn't* seeing an expansion of role or options. This is a proposal about how to change that.

fight by fight ranking out of 5 possible, will only do fights i have fought personally, someone else can add others. A 4 is approximately equal to warrior with 15 prot.
BWL
5 Razorgore P1- can tank orcs (and I bet most rogues already do)
1 Razorgore P2 - emergency
4 Vael - 30s of no melee dmg and 8s of no spell dmg is great on a short fight
2 Broodlord - due to knockbacks could tank for about 30s then would need to vanish, risky though
1 Drakes - emergency
1 Chromagus - emergency
3 Nef P1 - can tank adds, especially the big guys

AQ40
2 Skeram - can tank splits for short periods
1 Trio - emergency
2 Sartura - stuns help, would be much better if given a taunt
3 Fankriss - can tank worms or bugs, esp if given an aoe taunt
1 huhu - emergency
2 TE - emergency or could take an entire tank rotation

Naxx
2 Instructor - can help pull
4 Anub - can tank adds, stuns help

The main issues in the fights above agro or spike damage related. I would suggest only fixing the agro issues, as fixing spike damage would make rogues too powerful.

No stretch of the imagination required. Think of it as the subtle touch of a skilled fencer rather than brute toughness of hulking guy in plate. The guy who parries every blow and narrowly avoids every hit and you just can't touch. Fantasy literature is strewn with these archtypes (Think Drizzt Do'Urden from the R.A. Salvatore Forgotten realm series)

Flourish wasn't listen on the WoW site; it may be something they're testing/playing around with, or something they've already discarded (which would make me sad).

The reason you can't continually execute 1 CP Flourishes is because a 1 CP Flourish costs more energy than you'll generate during the 3 seconds of parry when you include the cost of generating the CP.

What's weird is that if a rogue wants aggro, a rogue really doesn't have a problem getting aggro.

It's almost like those feint and vanish skills are still handy even with that -aggro modifier. Why is that?