I made this post because i do not like the current trend that Blizzard is taking. Ignoring original design, choping up lore ... making ugly named talents. ( Mutilate... Who came up with that name ??? Is a strike with both your daggers... what dose that have to do with mutilate ???? )

Short example : Blessing vs Totem. Blessings was supposed to be a short term buff that paladin drops in-combat to aid the party. Instead of making them like this : BLessing of Might = Increase attack power by 500 for next 5 swings with a appropiate cooldown .. they made them parmanent buffs. Of course this made them imbalanced vs totems wich were ment to be the long term buffs and we had a whole argument over this.



There are basicly two ways in wich blizzard could have expanded the talent trees of rogues ( from 31 to 41 )

One : Keep in-line with the general theme of the talent trees
Two : Give each tree some of the other , mix-match talents


Basicly rogues have 3 talent trees , each one improving a phase of combat as a rogue. Opener / Actual combat / Finishing

Assasination : The finisher tree with a side theme of poison-related talents.

11/21 Talents are aimed twoards improving your finishers with the 31 talent point allowing you to land your finisher after your initial move.

All talents fit this general imp finisher theme except Cruelty-Lethality but that dosent feal out of place.

Heart of the tree fits the theme : Seal Fate : Allows you to get points faster so you can get your finisher faster.

Combat : The "what you do after your opener till your finisher" tree.

A tree packed with passive talents that ended up scaling with gear better than all rogue trees.

11/21 Talents are both combat moves that you use into actual combat and fit the whole combat theme. 31 point Talent is the ultimate passive :) allowing you do fire more shots ..

This tree dose NOT have a side-theme to it... is packed with imp combat moves and passives.

Heart of the tree fits the whole strong passives theme allowing you to specialize in a certain weapon.

Subtility : The opener tree.

We have all our opening moves improved and also a side theme of stealth/control ( control = cooldown reduction ) your oponent.

11th Talent is out of place ( was tied to setup making some sense in the release ..but now it is just lying there.. it got buffed because was useless )

21th Talent point was preparation ( the ultimate cooldown reduction ) and after the rogue review Hemmo also became a 21 talent point ( the ultimate control move ).

31th Talent point is the ultimate opener . A opener you do from stealth and the enemy dosent even know you did it. Fits the whole theme perfectly.

There is no ..."heart of the tree" talent as most ppl skip or put just a few points in 10% more AP.



As we can see the initial design was perfect... the trees have a certain theme and everything feals right ( Mind you i said DESIGN not balance.. balance is another proces with different people who twink certain aspects )




Now .. Let's see the BC rogue .

Assasination got a 41 point talent that is a Combat Move . Combat got another passive . Subtility got a Combat Ability that you activate in-combat.
Rogues everywhere are upset with lackluster talents and i feal that is not only the balance of them ( they are underwelming .. but it is also POOR DESIGN )

We can tell the poor desing just from surprise attacks.. Your attacks cannot be dodged and they also do 8% more dmg.. WTF is this.. 8% . Is just not good desing.. is there pulled out of the hat and make the talent look ugly.

What i feal is that the people who made the first rogue talent trees are not the same people who did the original rogue design.

We clearly see that blizzard took option B ( giving each tree something out of the others ) .. but i have a 90% feeling that they did that withouth thinking about it. ( WTF 5% reduced dmg in Assasination tree??? )
They just put talents based on Balance changes and didnt bothered to look at the initial desing-theme. And this makes for uninteresting talents wich most ppl say.. MEH.


Lets for a moment immagine that Blizzard would have took option A and would have sticked to initial desgin. ( i will only cover 41 talent points )

Assasination : 41 Talent point : The Ultimate Finisher : Envenom . A finisher that DOSE NOT consume combo points .. but consume poison charges. Make all poisons layered and make the finisher not do normal dmg .. or partial dmg and a additional effect .
Much like the paladin judgement this will bring a exciting new dimension to the class. Envenom 5 layers of Mind-Numbling will ... let's say silence the target for x seconds.

Envenom 5 stacks of wound poison will make the next healing spell fail or something.. . Lots of posibilities.

It fits the whole poison side-theme and it also makes rogue more interesting with managing poison charges. Pls balance this talent as you want ( lower % of poison procs etc .. invent new poisons with new judgement ...erm... envenom effects etc. THat is why we paying money )


Combat : 41 talent point : The ultimate combat move : I feal this tree has alredy enough passives and we can use a new combat move to change the spam SS / BS playstile of heay combat rogues.

Make-it a rip-off from mutilate and aply to it the weapon speed / energy cost forumal from Shiv. Rogue hits with both weapons for 2 combo points .

Aditiona Ideea : The ultimate passive talent : % percentage of the rogue's critical hits will ignore oponent's armour. Everybody loves big crits. Blance-it on %.


Subtility : We alredy got the ultimate cooldown reduction in this tree + The ultimate control-move + The ultimate opener move.
The rogue who got this deep into subtility tree is a master of shadow / control etc..

41 Talent Point : Cloak of Shadows : The rogue is one with the shadows and stays invisible at all time / Moves with normal speed being stealthed. Cloak of Shadows i have in mind is something like Rikimaru in DoTA ... ooc = turn invisible. Very interesting... very fun to play.. if is underpowered buff it to be MOD 5 all the time. It frees 10 talent points in the tree .. so it should be worth it to some ppl.

Aditional ideea : A dmg multiplyer.. A new mechaninc to the rogue. Upon Using premeditation on a target you activate your 41 talent point wich drains energy from you and increases the effect of your Opening move... To fit the theme call it : Mark of the Shadow.

Rogue Premeds and than activates talent... Talent fully charges up and Your next ambush dose 30% more dmg ... Or your Cheap Shot stuns the target for an extra 2 seconds. Add new interesting effects for each opening move so that it permits new strategies.


These are only a few ideas on how talents in one tree should reflect the whole design theme of the tree. I am a big fan of lore / design adn i feal that lately WoW is lacking in this compartment. I hope is not too late to add new dimensions to the rogue class.


/wave Tigole ( pass this one to your fellow designers )

A perma ooc invisibility, a finisher that doesn't consume combo points... Sure sound balanced.
I'm sorry but even tho I agree the 41points are lackluster for rogues, but these are just way over the top. The combat one sounds ok.

I'm somewhat skeptic as to why rogues would need another dimension tho, they do what they're supposed to do just fine, they got quite a few new situational skills(shiv mutilate deadly throw) to make them play a bit different than before, but they still have to be the same class.

I am not commenting on balance changes. The envenom consumes energy and 5 poisons stacks to deal some additional efect . It adds a new dimension but is not overpowered. THe perma invisibility .. is just not having to push stealth button when you are ooc... the buff is moving at normal speed while stealthed.. hardly overpowerd.

Again. I am unhappy with the design theme / The un-original ideas of BLizzard / The unidimensionality of the class ( we just do physical dmg .. combo points management ..... )

As i said. Blizzard can balance them how they want. I just want to see some well-designed talent trees. I just want to see blizzard for once NOT taking the easy way out.

About taking the easy way out.. Paladin VS Shaman .. Should we balance them... nah... Let's give them to each faction so they dont whine anymore.

How about a expansion lore that wont be the easy way out... OH.. the Blood Elves join horde and the Dranei join Alliance. How about taking the logical way and in expansion stick to the lore and make a THIRD FACTION : The Outcasts . Blood Elves / Dranei / Naga / Fel Orcs or smthing vs Horde vs Alliance.
Make wow a 3-way battle .

They have a great potential but alwys take the easy way out .

As a long time DAoC player, please allow me to state, simply:

No.

If you have any appreciation of the problems that occur due to faction population imbalance with two factions, in what way would adding a third faction benefit anyone? Mythic has even seen the error of it and is going down to two factions in WAR.

Two factions in current WoW is not the same as DAoC . There are servers where alliance crushes horde so bad . PVE servers where horde hasen't killed ragnaros and alliance are runing around with might of menethil. Server transfers made it worse and good players are migrating to other guilds to further increse the imbalance on both the server they migrated on to the server where they migrated to.

1 Example : My old server - Sylvanas . All good players migrated and there is ONE horde Naxx guild ( 6 -7bosses down ) vs 5=6 Alliance guilds ( All with better progress ). And is only geting worse in BWL / MC lvl . 20 vs 3-5.


But cross-server battlegrounds made this a whole lot better. I dont feal a 3 way battle would make wow worse than it is now.

Anyway this was about the poor exapnsion that the rogue class got. Talents are all pulled out of the hat and do not fit in their current trees or are some sort of stupid balance change that was poorly implemented ( Lack of dmg in sutility tree was countered with passive scaling talents that are clearly designed for combat tree )

Because everyone else does what we're supposed to do just fine as well.

It irks me a little bit that everyone says things like "Warrior DPS is fine!" and "Shadow priests need more DPS!" then turns around and ignores the fact that if rogue DPS is matched, the class is fundamentally valueless.

Kalamn i appreciate very much your work. Maybe you could give me a more detailed opinion on our playstyle / whole rogue fealing of the trees / class design in TBC.

Also i would very much appreciate if somebody would post this on the US boards. CMs in Europe are worthless as they have no power.


Just the Judgement FInisher ideea . Consume poisons with finisher gain a judgement effect.

And the drain energy gain additional efect / longer duration on your opener. The whole stalking the pray theme ... so rogue like.


I would love for these two playstiles to be in the rogue class .


1 example of STUPID talent design :

Sinister Calling : 10-15% More agility . Wonderful passive talent . Sutility needed a boost and they gave it. The STUPID design part : THE NAME .

What dose the name have to do with the talent ???? Pls for the love of god hire some original designers.
Name it Shadow's Embrace / Swiftness of the night / Quicknes of the WHATEVER .... But pls make it fit in the tree.

Limiting our 3 trees to specified "Finisher tree", "combat tree", and "opener tree" only specifies them into those catagories with no room to branch out into other areas. Why exactly should we limit them?

I think everyone understands that our 41 point talents are lackluster, however some of the suggestions that you made are options that I personally think would be pretty hard to code in.


Additionally, there is already a pretty awesome BC rogue thread that you should probably check out... http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8133

It really isn't dead, it just seems like we are waiting for a new update on spells/abilities before discussing it further.

I'm going to have to agree with Kalman here.

Rogue dps is *fine* in the aspect that perhaps their dps is where it needs to be this stage of the game. It is not fine in that two other classes with either more versatility/options or more benefit to a raid group can do their primary role as well, or better than they can.

Although to this I think the answer is more like, fix warriors etc, than buff rogues.

To be truly honest I'm at a loss as to what rogues could bring to the table in addition to damage. Having playing things like DnD, UO, EQ for several years alot of my ideas either just don't make sense, would be hard to implement or already have some equivalent form that exists in game.

I gotta say though, bring on prestige classes. I have this painted picture of a shadow dancer in my head that I can't escape hehe.

But...
Without us warriors would get their T3 cheap! We have value for ensuing DKP inflation!

Edit:
And in response to what we could do, there's plenty of uncharted roles in WoW. Until recently there was no way to move aggro from you to someone else aside from lowering your own - well the hunters got the add aggro to someone else move we could have had.

There's no melee range healing, very little melee range debuffing. The only form of tanking is various flavours of mitigation, no avoidance tanking. There's currently almost no use for stealth once a fight is initiated where there's plenty of room to design something. Similarly, the poison mechanic is only just being expanded in TBC.

No, I can see there's quite a few areas the rogue could diversify into - but Blizz seem to want to keep us as solely focused on DPS.

This is exactly my problem, and exactly my worry, except that more and more I've come to either not want or acknowledge that we *aren't* going to be allowed to maintain a real DPS lead.

Since we aren't going to be made irreplaceable in terms of DPS, (and probably shouldn't be), we needed to have some other reason to be taken. Threat control? Oh, wait, that got given to hunters. Party buffs? Everyone *except* rogues. 8 or 9 pages of "making rogues into viable offtanks is *this* close to happening" theorycraft? Well, it was a longshot anyway. There are any number of ways rogues could have been given raid utility such that they'd at least be worth taking. As is, I admit: not confident that's going to be true.

Mutilate looks to be a more interesting playstyle than the current combat daggers, requiring more thought and timing, but it doesn't seem to be any better. Deep combat is a nice, small buff, but again: underwhelming for a class that was already beginning to be overshadowed.

I'm looking forward to the expansion, because I think leveling and 5 mans and not maintaining a 6 night a week raiding schedule will be nice, but as TBC draws closer and rogue changes stay underwhelming, I'm less and less confident that I shouldn't just grind my mid-40s mage to 60 and level on him as my main instead.

Yeah Kalman I'm sorry I have the habit of thinking of PvP before Raid end game. In PvP imo rogues perform just fine, sure they somewhat blow once all their cooldowns are well, down, but with prepa rogues sure have some interesting tricks.
I agree tho that in a raid environement, even tho currently to me rogues are still one of the most secure dps class(mages sometimes get caught in rolling ignites and if they don't pay attention pull aggro, warriors pull aggro pretty much all the time, and hunters don't come close to rogue dps).

With the coming of invisibility and the supposed good scaling of the new hunters, and the 40debuff limit(damn locks almost forgot them), rogues might lose their point in raids. I think the only way to make them still viable is either making a lot of trash stunnable, in addition to certain bosses, but the biggest issue is, that makes fights gimmickly, cause if you allow stuns, you actually have to code the boss strength under the assumption 3rogues will always get a 5points kidney shot out and random other classes will use the normal stun timer(druids,paladins,warriors) AND that you'll have the 3rd stun category with the proc stuns(blackout/impact/mace procs). So obviously, all the rogues will do on this fight is stunning, or you make too easy content if rogues actually only stun instead of also doing dmg.
You can make gimmick poison fights too, but again, it will just be that, gimmick fights.

So what's the point of bringing rogues in raids if you can bring a class with roughly the same dps... Hard to tell currently. Rogue itemization and threat issues might make them good again. Rogues have vanish, twice with prepa, feint every 10(?) secs and the threat poison(or was that removed?). If threat is an issue, it pretty much negates warrior dps, and mages will spend quite some time casting invis which should cost a decent amount of mana too, so it will reduce their effectiveness. Hunters and locks, hard to tell really, currently they're not in the same category, so until we see the changes in action on raid mobs with new gear can't really tell what their position will be. Maybe they should add one or 2 new poisons that enhance elemental or physical damage, something like curses, just so rogues have raid utility beyond being a good dps class.
I still think they should have given misdirection to rogues, just like FFXI with thieves, so rogues would have had the role of threat multiplier on tanks, which is a very fun thing to do(at least in FFXI) on top of doing good damage.

Oh and I still confirm that a finisher that "only" consumes poisons is overpowered. By the time you get 5points, you can assume you also get 5poisons, and iirc, poison build is in the same tree as seal fate, so you can pretty much chain finishers with a few shivs inbetween, and finishers are more efficient energy/dmg wise than normal attacks. Like, start the fight, get 5points combo with seal fate fast, evisc, there's now 5poisons on the mob, new envenom, use shiv twice, 5points evisc, 5poison envenom(these aren't verified, but that's what I feel I'd see with such a build). Unless you make it so none of these envenom things actually do dmg but only add debuffs, it would be overpowered. Even then I'm not too thrilled about something like this in the seal fate tree. However the whole "judgement" system might make rogues worthwhile in raids. Would be quite a rip off tho, so I'd like something a bit more personal.

There's a ~41 page Rogue TBC thread this could have quite snugly fit in to.

As for Rogues as a class.....surely people have at least noticed by now that the groups found in the throes of claiming Blizzard hates their class and is letting it die, are typically the ones interrupted by major boosts or developments of their class.

Remember mages before their review? Hunters before the TBC talents? Remember when people first ran MC claiming that Rogues and Hunters were useless? In light of the 25 man change, I would at least have faith in the concept that the designers understand the dynamics of their own game, and that while they may want to homogenize certain aspects of classes' DPS utility, they will still want to maintain the implicit dominance of classes that are there to DPS and nothing more. When the warrior and mage reviews came out, tons of rogues could be found ringing the deathknell of the class in face of such major DPS increases for its competitors. The rogue review came out, and by all accounts......didn't really change much. And yet.....we still see every raid populated with a healthy dose of rogues, because (and I'm quite sure Blizzard is aware of this), with the exception of fights that are specifically designed outside of the norm, Rogues have continued to either dominate or consistently compete for the top spot of raid DPS.

So we haven't gotten any earth-shatteringly new developments. So the fury warriors might beat us on a couple of bosses in Naxx. A rogue that understands the limits and potentials of the class and pays attention will always be a valuable asset to any raid, even if he doesn't reign supreme over every single facet of damage dealing. No single class has ever been 'phased' out of the raid game so far, and I think it's foolish to assume that even if Blizzard weren't already aware of such a possibility, they wouldn't take immediate steps to address something like rogues getting consistently benched in favour of hybrid classes.

(ideas)

Assassination:
Envenom:(rank 1)(Finisher)
Strikes the target instantly with a deadly blast of poison damage, dealing 150(200 for rank 2) poison damage per combo points, increased by attack power. In addition the target becomes prone to deadly toxins, increasing all poison damage taken by 10% for 15 seconds.

As each day goes by with no class changes released, how confident are you that we're getting anything updated?

First off, finding a raiding rogue with Preparation is about as likely as me winning the lottery -> which I don't play. And making threat be enough of an issue to make rogues "wanted" is in itself a gimmick, because eventually it just means other classes are forced to sit around.

The only threat-balanced fight in the game that I haven't seen a DPS warrior do well on is Ouro. A well timed Invisibility can carry you through a fight just like Vanish does, and since the -threat is channeled over time, doing it right means you don't need to spend the whole 10 seconds. Hunters have the ultimate in threat management. Warlocks are getting a 50% threat reduction spell, and if Vanish itself did just that I could still get away with all the DPS I currently do.


Personally I wouldn't really care what it is, as long as it's functional. Rogues have cried out for one of two things since the raid game was defined: Utility or King of DPS. If we get neither, we're wastes of space.

Nothing is overpowered without numbers.

Lucky day dude.
I'm a raiding rogue with prep.

About the only ting 1.12 did do was raise the viability of Hemo as a PvE build.
Sure, I don't put out as much as CD or CS - but I do deliver more than SF. And I take up a noticeably less amount of healer resource.

And add Imp. Sprint, and improve the PvP viability of combat daggers by giving it access to AR... 1.12 was a nice patch for rogues of pretty much all specs save perhaps SF.

That is exactly the point. Adding a third faction will just make this worse -- especially this late into the game.

Evy's got the problem nailed.

If mages, warlocks, and hunters do more damage than rogues, from range, with threat reduction available to them, while bringing utility to the raid, then why would you want rogues that do inferior damage at melee range, who take a lot of damage and thus require a lot of healing, and don't otherwise increase the raid's overall power?

I think one of the key bellweathers of our class will be when the T4 comes out, and we can see the different sets available to everyone.

If, as I suspect, rogues are limited to a single set of Tier 4, while literally every other class (save mages? perhaps) gets a second set that is based around them doing damage, then I will be really disappointed. If they somehow can give rogues a second set, based around some kind of utility (either stuns, or avoidance tanking) then I think things MIGHT be looking up.

Then again, personally I was a big fan of the tanking rogue idea, so I just really hope we can get the blue drop itemization to make that viable, because currently you can only really do it with an acceptable number of epics.

Again when talking of overpowered idea of envenom not using combo points, I was referring to PvP(yea I know I then talk about raiding). As someone pointed out, the biggest issue is balancing PvE while keeping rogues to an acceptable level in PvP. In PvE, it might not be an issue to be able to chain finishers if the numbers are low enough. In PvP, it's usually a problem cause even if the numbers aren't too big, finishers are by definition more efficient than combo builders. However, all this talk is nothing without actual numbers so whatever.

I doubt King of DPS is gonna happen. Just because it would probably mean rogues would 2shot everything that remotely ressemble a cloth user in PvP, and probably do it up to mail+shield. Threat, maybe it would make it gimmickal, but who knows, BWL was a threat based raid dungeon, it didn't feel TOO gimickal, and fury warriors(there weren't any back then tho) would have sucked quite a bit. I remember back in these days, hunters were cool, cause it was the safest way to dps mobs. Rogues were 2nd, mages sucked unless they were using arcane, warlock were even worse and, at least in my guild, there was no dps warriors. With mages losing their passive threat reduction, and warlock only having a 50% reduction, you might see more threat based fights(well knockback fights) in the expansion. Then again, it's just supposition, assumptions, who knows what's really in the raid content, since we've been stuck at 67 for like 2months now ^^

So yea, adding utility to rogues. On a side note, rogues ALREADY had utility, it just doesn't work. Expose armor, Wound poisons, Mind Numbling poisons. All those would be valid utility if they actually stacked or worked(or scaled better for wound). They could add some stuff that already exist(the 5% melee dmg on bleed effects from warriors, could work with garotte/whatever the dot is, the name escapes me right now), or maybe new mechanics(improved adrenaline rush, adds a +haste aura for the duration? Tear Limbs, finisher that applys a chanelling dot for 3secs with a big evisc like effect at the end, obviously worthless in pvp, but awesome for pve?).

Problem with our "utility" is that even when it does work, someone does it better.

Expose Armor is inferior to Sunder, aside from the blocking issues.
Wound Poisons are easily replaced by a single MS warrior using his primary damage ability.
Mind Numbing can be replaced with Curse of Tongues.

The one thing we do better than anyone else is stuns. Rogues are a major asset on Sartura because each of us can throw a 6-second stun every 20 seconds. Stun rotations can lighten the load on certain trash, too, but for the most part, they've been completely negated in a meaningful manner from raiding because they are simply so powerful. In order to allow for stunnable bosses, the boss has to do absolutely ridiculous amounts of damage when they aren't stunned, which just hurts rogues further since we a) have to be in melee range to build CP, and b) need CP to stun. If just one stun is needed, paladin fill that role easily enough - 10 yard range, 6 second stun, but a longer cooldown.

Either Stun needs to become a significant mechanic in the raiding game, or somethign big has to give.