roq

It isn't that dicey, trust me you can drop WF at the begining of the fight and it isn't going to make that much of a differnce. But like you said, if a rogue runs in at zero sunders bs-> bs-> BF-> AR -> whatever trinkets they have they are going to pull aggro but that comes with undestanding the class and threat.

 

• Digo

In Dark Age of Camelot, any kind of disease debuffs work like Mortal Strike. Wound poison kinda does the same thing, but there aren't nearly enough PVE applications for this, which means it's a rarely used PVP poison. For PVP, I almost always use crippling and mind-numbing. More mobs need HoTS that have to be negated, out-DPSed, or dispelled, imo.

I'd love to see more reactive combo chains. In DAOC they are the norm, and produce staggering results. Of course, pulling them off isn't easy, especially in PVP, and I don't think WoW devs want to go down that road because it: a) requires trusting the client, b) is too confusing for newbies (roughly 7 million people).

 

• Wodin

Most of us who raid also play with some of the best tanks in the game. So he's sorta spoiled in regard to threat generation as well. But yeah, I'm really, really looking forward to Salvation as it will let me go harder faster.

As far as the whole class balance thing goes, I think that Blizzard is going to let raiding and heroics shake out before making significant changes. The Mage/Hunter balance tweaks were pretty obvious(when mages are topping every single DM coming out of the raid zones you know there's an issue) and those problems had been raised in beta so there was time to think about it. I certainly am not looking forward to the pernicious AE that the heroic instances have, but the new content is fun enough that I honestly don't give a shit. Of course, I can afford not to give a shit because I have awesome guildmates who aren't going to leave me in the cold because I'm suboptimal for a raid instance, which is a luxury a lot of people don't have.

What I don't think we'll see is any sort of group synergy. That's not really the kind of thing that can be added in through a talent tweak, and they're not just going to hand us a new ability. That said, there is some hope. I would really love to see Blade Twisting actually do something along the lines of Misery, and there's already precedent for that with Improved Kidney Shot, and it seems like a natural way to do it.

I actually think they got PvP balance more or less right with Cloak and the Prep changes. There are certain things I won't attack(Feral druids, paladins that are known to be intelligent, Demo warlocks, Disc priests), and certain things that make me grin(seeing a mage cast Dragon's Breath, druid in treeform or moonkin, dual-wielding warrior). Everything else is in between. I've won some fights, lost some fights, and generally had a blast.

And if worst comes to worst, there's always speccing 41 sub, getting a nice dagger, and going to grief newbies with Shadowstep.

 

• Glass

I hear you on the spoiled for tanks Wodin. I'm quite spoiled by our MT (who is also a friend of mine, that is still very biased toward me playing his healbot on my priest). With him tanking, yes, getting aggro is based mostly on dumb luck (namely him having bad luck lol).

As far as everything else, I have to say I feel exaclty the same. I'm not sure why, but it just doesn't feel like there's anything in the game left to offer that isn't done by another class. To come up with something for us in pve would require a downright groundbreaking, unexpected change. Sorry for being cynical, but I just don't see it coming from blizzard. Maybe they'll find a way to surprise us, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

Luckily I'm in a guild that values me as a player, not as a class spot to fill. I'm sure 99% of them would rather me be on my priest.. but I'll go pally before I take another stroll down raidhealbot lane again.

 

Lamaros

A good rogue is useful pretty much only for damage in my book.

Mage CC > Rogue, because it's recastabable, more obvious, and can be used on more targets.
Warlock CC > Rogue, because we can OT, Seduce, Banish, Fear, Enslave Demons.

Warlocks and Mages also do similar DPS. And they are ranged, which is very useful in a number of situations. Threat is not an issue for good warlocks and mages, especially once you hit level 66.

Druids, Priests, Pallies and Shamen can all heal if needed. Druids, Priests and Shamen can all DPS while giving very useful group buffs. Druids and Pallies can Tank.

Warriors can tank (that's about it, I've yet to see a Warrior who can do decent DPS).

Rogues problems for me in 5-mans are:

Not many in combat tricks that are useful to people other than themselves.
Hard to play very well (in the context of the average player and picking people for a pug group); not getting aggro, not breaking CCs, jumping to the proper targets, maximising damage, etc
No group buffs (no water/food, no healthstones, ss, auras, totems, etc)

A good 5 man group is all about control, and control of the enemy group. The Rogue specalises in control of a single target, but most of these control abilities aren't as useful in groups because:

A: The Warrior is tanking it, and if the Rogue is tanking he puts more pressure on healers.
B: There is more going on than one single target very often.
C: The single target fights (Bosses) are usualy ones where these Rogue skills cannot be used. (And bosses often AE and rogues are melee.)

Maybe poisons are the go for rogues, but I think thay while they suffer from being Melee DPS only then their buffs will need to be at the "must have" stage before you want one before another DPS class. Or they have to be #1 DPS. (and as a Warlock I've yet to be anywhere but #1 on the DM in 5 mans)

 

GrizleyCQ

I've got a really good feeling that rogues are going to see improvements in the dps department sooner rather than later. Even before heroics and raids really kick into gear.

Wodin is right, I'm only talking about a really talented tank who knows how to spec, gear and play his class. Johnny McPug has about no chance to hold agro, but thats not my problem.

Things I would like to see for rogues...

1. Top dps in most fights by a margin of no less than 10% without the need for absolute maximum buffage from other class.
2. Sap while not stealthed and in combat as long as the mob to be sapped isn't attacking you. I could care less if this works on players in pvp.
3. More ae avoidance. There are too many fights that will outright kill a rogue with AE damage (hi2u cleaves for 8k non-crit) or deal so much damage to the rogue over the course of the fight that it becomes better to have him plink with his bow from range. The whole massive AE thing takes us right back to MC where rogues were top damage by a mile but they couldn't actually fight but about half the mobs.
4. Flourish. Ok, its not too likely to happen, but man that would be a sweet ability. Combine with some sort of agro move and rogues could be a sort of situational tank for mobs that do elemental damage on hit. If damage is mitigated by resistance instead of armor then only things like dodge/parry make a good tank.

 

Sherriffroot

As the above poster stated, 5 mans are all about crowd control, and rogues bring a fair amount of that to the table. This is especially so in TBC with the number of humanoid mobs. My opinion is that rogues are fine, and especially moving into heroic instances you can have pulls that last a fair while, which can be taxing on caster DPS mana. Rogues just keep on going, a little like the energizer bunny. Im always happy to have one along.

 

pf

I think buffs are something that is really holding the rogue class back.

In the best of the best gear, a rogue will have 1700ish ap with 29% crit and 17% hit (dagger/fist spec and precision assumed there). This same rogue fully buffed out with marks hunter/feral druid/enhance shaman/fury warrior group as well as moonkin, MS warrior, and a survival hunter in the raid will top out about 3700ap 38% crit and 20% hit. So now, this fully geared rogue does about twice the dps he did previously under the best of circumstances. The problem with this is that now, if blizzard balances around an average group, whenever a rogue gets these kinds of buffs, his dps will be 20% more than anyone elses and balance issues arise. So, they must balance around pretty close to top of the line buffs or else people think rogues do too much dps, but this of course is only for at best 4 rogues in a raid since you must have a tank/healer group and then 4 groups setup for rogue dps, lol. So, imo the problem isnt that rogues dont have buffs themselves, its that other classes buffs are so strong that it hinders your average rogue in balance. (and the AP flask dooms rogues even more btw).

 

GrizleyCQ

Yeah, thats why I mentioned the buffs.

In a raid rogues have been pretty comfortably top dps for a long time. Solo its not really the case. A mage or warlock gains much less in terms of dps from buffs, with the obvious exception of the flask.

Hopefully the move to add attack power and agility both to gear will result in a larger base attack power and a smaller percentage of attack power coming from buffs. That will help rogues out solo and pvping without making them over the top crazy when buffed with a bunch of other peoples stuff.

I think what we are looking at in TBC for a dps group is something along the lines of 2x rogue, 1 fury/arms warrior, 1 enhancement shaman, 1 feral druid with ilotp. That will provide strong melee dps from all 5 of the group members, especially the rogues. It will have pretty decent regen healing from ilotp. Good group healing from the shaman with chain heal and lesser healing wave. Great melee buffs from battle shout, windfury, strength of earth, unleashed rage. Good sustainablility from shammervate, innervate and of course the rogues and warriors are good to go as long as they get heals.

 

• Whiteknight

@AOE:

I recall a D&D 'talent' (it's been so long I forget the name they used for these) that melee classes could pick called Evasion (not confused with the wow one), which basically would allow the character to make a roll to take half damage from AoE. The Improved Evasion one allowed half damage by default and a roll for full avoidance. Basically this allowed classes like Monks to 'dodge' fireballs (fireball in D&D being a 20 yard radius aoe spell similar to wow's flamestrike).

Borrowing from this concept, I could imagine a talent or ability which would allow rogues' dodge to apply to AoE damage. Granted it already applies to Cleave, but stuff like pulse/aura damage could be reduced significantly in this way. For more interactivity, this might be an activated ability which costs a little energy and requires some minor skill to put up in the right fights.


@Synergy:

I really like the idea of cross class synergy. It makes the game so much more cooperative. Mage ignite stacking before it got nerfed, and shadow priest + warlock synergies now are good, but they only scratch the surface of what's possible. EQ2 has the concept of Heroic Opportunities - where one class begins an opportunity and other classes in your group get a popup allowing them to respond contributing to it, with yet another class finishing it for some stupendous synergistic effect. Granted my EQ2 experience goes up to level 5 or something, and I understand these weren't all that useful in raiding, but that doesn't mean it's a poor idea.

Applied to WoW, I'd imagine some class would stack an opener debuff on the mob. Once up, another class would cast a specific spell to take advantage of it, changing the debuff to something different, and perhaps a third class applying an appropriate finisher.

For a silly example, imagine that a warlock getting an improved shadowbolt debuff on a chilled mob would suddenly cause the mob to be much more vulnerable such that a rogue applying a 5cp evisc would get triple damage and remove the debuff. Ideally you'd want some effect that would be created on purpose with intentional cooperation and very unlikely to go off by accident.
Imagine a buff players can stack on other players akin to misdirection where a portion of your energy/damage by using specific abilities goes to 'charging up' that player's buff which can then be discharged for some super effect (raid-wide mass heal, a significant damage spell boost, temporary raid power buff, etc)

Granted this concept is not rogue specific, but I see rogues as an ideal finisher/delivery class because they already have the concept of finishers, and they can vanish after delivering some gigantic damage synergy :P

 

• Digo

See, that's part of the problem. Do you ever feel like you could be helping the raid more if you played a priest? I know I've often considered it. I'd reroll a shaman or draenei priest if my work schedule and current gear weren't prohibitive.

Wodin, this is why I still have 2 active DAOC accounts for when I'm not raiding. Speaking of, anyone play/ed a stealther in DAOC? I never played a stealther at 50 -- only battlegrounds -- so I can't speak for them at end-game. What do you think the WoW rogue could stand to copy from them?

 

• Wodin

Well, I play EVE so I'm not one to talk about alternate pursuits when frustrated with WoW. :P

I'd be fascinated to hear about DAOC though - it's one of the games I just haven't really had any experience with.

 

• Glass

Of course I do. What's sad is, I'm the rogue class officer. :( I think it's one of the reasons we see so many heavy-lifters rerolling.

Regarding the buffs and average/solo'er and rogue's dps spot. I think that pretty much sums up the rogue class in the past and currently. We are the best user's of everyone else's talents :P Buffs, yes, thank you, heal me, of course! What can I offer you? Well.. did I mention buff me?

 

Nadsat

What I got from the Sap upgrade Is that sap now lasts the duration listed on the tool tip. If I am reading this correctly then blizzard is at least taking a step forward on making rogues more viable for the 5 man instances. IMO they fixed the "let us sap in combat" argument by adding in this change. 45 seconds and no heartbeat resist makes sap one of the best CC's in the game now.

I like the idea of a stacking rogue debuff. However, it should be something that would give us strength in the PVE element, but at the same time it can not make us too powerful in the PVP element.

Although this is an awesome idea, it would be hard to balance around PVP(Unless they made it usable on non player mobs only?), and to a lesser extent duo grinding. A solution to the problem should be to bring more then one rogue per raid. A poison debuff would bring one rogue into a 25man, kind of like bringing in those few warlocks to MC for the banish. I was thinking along the lines of a finisher to replace SND as THE dps finisher. Somewhere along the lines of..

Silly Rogue Ability Name (5 Finger Bleeding Heart) 45 second cooldown.
Costs 25 Energy, 5 Combo Points
Medium DPS dot(Scales with AP) that can crit. Crit is based off applying rogue's crit chance.
Damage is multiplied by the number of rogues that cast. Stackable up to 3 times.

Problems with designing a finisher based on number of rogues is scaling. Bring 10 rogues to a 25 man and a ability like "ninja attack" and my silly idea would quickly become very, if not overly, powerful. How many rogues will you bring to a 10 man? I am guessing one, maybe two. Then the reverse would be true, without enough rogues the ability becomes not worth the energy, making rogues rely on the old school DPS strategy.

Just some random ideas I had /shrug.

 

Pyria

It'd look silly! Who just knocked my friend out cold and rammed two daggers into my spine? Oh, it must have been that guy in plate armor standing twenty feet away and waiting for me to run over to him.

I like the idea of redirecting threat, though. Rogues are supposed to be shifty miscreants, adept at manipulating fights and pulling the wool over their enemy's eyes. Imagine a fight where it's very difficult and yet vital to hold aggro; Now give the rogue some interesting aggro management abilities. You could have a "Disguise" ability that lets you impersonate a fellow mage (thus taking over any aggro they have) and then Vanish/Feinting, or mimicking a tank who just died and then popping Evasion while the raid recovers. Or a hallucinogen poison that causes the mob to see mirror images of players that it'll attack and one-shot when the respective player overaggros, warning them that they've overstepped the aggro threshold. Heck, give us something like the Hunter Misdirection that can temporarily make the mob attack it's fellow NPCs!

All idle musing and would take ludicrous amounts of design investment to implement, of course, but it'd be a fun PvE addition and could leave rogue PvP entirely untouched (Except for disguising, I'd love that in PvP). Having the supposed distinction of "top DPS class" just isn't something I'm comfortable with, there will always be fights that simply aren't melee friendly and preclude the need to have any rogues at all.

 

Mem

Imho one step in the right direction would be to make the talent impr. Sap a default ability. I remember quite a lot of discussions in 2005 about Impr Sap being a must have talent for 5 mans.
Imho misdirection should have been a rogue rather than a hunter ability.
I also agree with the sentiment that we depend to much on the buffs of other classes because we gain more from them than any other class in the game (this is especially true regarding Buffs affecting our AP).

One of our "buffs" in PVE has already happened (at least when we look at the competition for DPS slots in raids): ranged classes got nerfed as a whole (dot nerf, fireball/frostbolt nerf, hunter nerf). I'm not sure that there will be further follow ups for us.

 

• Glass

Tell that to an equally geared/skilled hunter or mage. Who by the way also have better cc at the same time.

I could give a crap about pvp. If I could spec out of every pvp talent we have to be a better raider I would do it in a red hot second. This game is not, nor has it ever been a pvp game. Using the argument that we can defeat any class in pvp as a justification for being a zero-support, mana sponge in pve is not a valid argument.

edit note: cleaned up my grump language.

 

Emily

Make stuns do SOMETHING on immune raid bosses. Not a stun, but some sort of weakening debuff. At least let Imp Kidney Shot work. Let Gouge apply some sort of debuff. Make the boss hit less hard, let other players hit the boss harder, anything.

 

• Glass

That was an incomplete thought on my behalf, I made the mistake of letting work distract me. I meant to point out that mages have better cc and hunters indirect cc by use of thier pets as offtanks along with traps etc.

On a related note, just got word from one of our friends who's group is starting Kaz, stating that his druid is sitting at 6500hp, 30% crit and 2400 attack power at 70, with 6% to hit (no dual wield penalty). Of course he's in absolute love much to my disgust. When asked how his rogues were doing in the group he stated that "we don't ask them to come", and then apologized. Ugh.

 

Abaxial

If the Imp kidney Shot debuff still worked on stun immune mobs, that would be a definite improvement.

But personally, I like playing my rogue and would rather not have to change class. However, if the guild called on me to be a class that brought more for the raid, I would more than likely switch over to my warrior. We actually had "alt" runs on weekends where we did MC, BWL and actually started doing some AQ40 before expansion where we had a seperate dkp system in which people could bring their main for gear they still wanted and missed or gear up an alt and I was actually the main tank.

As long as I feel that I'm needed to be there on that character I don't really see a reason to switching.

<Unregistered> what happens in 2.3?
<Kalman> Skill is eliminated from the game.

 

• Kiz

I am in the camp that Blizzard will not be buffing rogues any time soon. I don't believe Blizzard thinks there is anything wrong with the rogue class as a whole.

Glass and I watched the DVD included with our CE and listened to one of the game designers talking about the various classes. His comments about the rogue class basically sealed the deal in my mind. His comments were (and forgive me for paraphrasing off the top of my head -- I'm at work at the moment): "Well, we were thinking about calling them 'Assassins' instead of Rogues, but that implies that their only job is to kill stuff and we didn't think that was very much fun..."

If Blizzard doesn't think that their job is to kill stuff, what is their job? Until they figure that question out, rogues will remain in limbo.

 

• Digo

Exactly.

As raid leader, why would I take a rogue over a feral druid who can a) put out disgusting damage, b) offtank, c) cure, d) buff, e) heal, f) cc beasts/dragonkin? Or a fury warrior? Or a hunter? There's a ret paladin in my guild who's keeping up with our rogues in Tempest Keep on the damage meters. How is that balanced? I'll even have him start tracking the stats for documentation.

We need some kind of group support option, preferably that does not involve crowd control. I think a debuffing line that promotes redundancy is the best solution. I'd thought about a group haste proc, but I know how wary they are of haste elements. I'm not even sure poisons is the best answer, because then you just take one rogue and have him swap weapons in combat.

 

• Fres

Ok, my usual static 5 man is druid