It's possible to get improved sprint with a subtlety build, as evidenced by Phadron's reply. The build he shows is similar to a mace spec one I originally thought about using but decided to take a daggers approach as an answer to resilience; daggers maintains a high crit rate with improved backstab.
Whoa hold on, your answer to resilience is to use an attack whose damage is based around having a 50% crit rate? Are you insane? Resilience is incredibly effective at mitigating backstab damage. About the only thing worse is shatter =p.
As far as kiting is concerned, can I hear specific examples of the problems you're having? I use cloak of shadows when I have to to break magical roots or remove dots, but between improved sprint and vanish I find I can quickly remove any CC on me and stay with my target since I shiv often to keep crippling poison on.
Because Arenas aren't 1v1 games. Sure if I open on someone I at the very least have a few CPs on them for deadly throw, or likely have a shiv'd Crippling Poison, and of course I have the same cooldowns you cite.
Now put me into a 5v5 against 3 dudes, a frost mage, and a hunter. Let's say I open on the hunter and blow Vanish and Sprint to counter being frost trapped and wing clipped. Huzzah, I've successfully avoided being kited!
Now, what do I do about that frost mage? Oh that's right, nothing. I have CoS left to break one of his roots. Sprint and Vanish are down. He's 30' away and I have no CPs on him. He's not an idiot so he doesn't stand there and way for me to show up when I charge him, he just spams icelance and fireblast and cone of cold while running in a circle.
I'm done. There's nothing I can do. Rogues that do not get the opener are at huge disadvantages to any kiter with half a brain. And in the arena you will get one opener, maybe two, and sometimes zero if you mess up. That means that you're relying on your opponents making mistakes.
Now given that this is a team game, you would hope that your priest can dispel you or what have you, but you may as well also note that the enemy's paladin can cleanse your crippling poison. i.e. I don't think you can really enter teammates into something like this.
My point is that a rogue out of stealth that can't get the opener on someone at range is going to be easily kited, and in arenas against people that aren't stupid you're going to get a maximum of two openers. Once your cooldowns are down, you're done. The elephant in the room is that if you were a Warrior it'd be some rage and a 15s timer to get back into melee.
Now given that this is a team game, you would hope that your priest can dispel you or what have you, but you may as well also note that the enemy's paladin can cleanse your crippling poison. i.e. I don't think you can really enter teammates into something like this.
What you're missing here is that if both parties are moving at 100% speed, the kiter will eventually run out of room to kite. You can't kite in a circle unless the one being kited is slower than you are. In this case, however, doing a mutilate/backstab becomes difficult - unless you gouge first. This of course does not apply to combat swords/fists/maces.
I believe if anything should be done to rogues it should be improvements on the reliability of gouge and vanish. Vanish could a better one-time use focus fire deterrent, more similar to ice block. If vanish could be functionally altered to provide, say, 3 seconds of immunity, but also prevent the user from attacking during those 3 seconds. Gouge should just straight up be reliable - unable to be dodged/blocked/parried.
One other change, which is indirectly related to rogues, is I think the warrior's beserker rage - providing immunity to fear/incapacitate - should have a much more obvious and distinct graphical effect. It's looks similar to a lot of the other generic "bloodlust / rage / beserking / zomg" abilities common to warriors. This way it becomes easier to tell when the warrior has used up his immunity and is vulnerable to gouge/fear.
I'm not trying to bag on the frost mage. His build is focused around kiting and obviously they do a great job at it. I am simply trying to highlight how helpless a rogue is if they don't have a crippling poison, some CPs, or one of three long (or at the very least, needed for a lot of other situations in the case of CoS) cooldowns.
Rogues are easy to kite once you survive their cooldowns. Warriors are harder to kite because their cooldown to get back into range is on a much, much shorter cooldown by an order of magnitude.
Staying in melee range is an issue as a rogue, though it's really glaringly obvious when he doesn't get the opening CS / Shiv. That situation happens constantly in arenas. If design predicates a rogue's ability to stay in melee on getting the opening move (which I think it does) then something is wrong when the environment only allows that opening move to happen once or twice.
Conversely a warrior's ability to stay in melee is predicated on an extremely short cooldown. Though to be fair it has it's drawbacks (snare suppression instead of removal, requires rage) as well as advantages (3s stun, not only suppresses snare but also closes distance). I don't think anyone can argue that it's just much, much easier for a warrior to remain in melee.
I believe if anything should be done to rogues it should be improvements on the reliability of gouge and vanish. Vanish could a better one-time use focus fire deterrent, more similar to ice block. If vanish could be functionally altered to provide, say, 3 seconds of immunity, but also prevent the user from attacking during those 3 seconds. Gouge should just straight up be reliable - unable to be dodged/blocked/parried.
One other change, which is indirectly related to rogues, is I think the warrior's beserker rage - providing immunity to fear/incapacitate - should have a much more obvious and distinct graphical effect. It's looks similar to a lot of the other generic "bloodlust / rage / beserking / zomg" abilities common to warriors. This way it becomes easier to tell when the warrior has used up his immunity and is vulnerable to gouge/fear.
As another note, that fits along with your ideas there, sap is, at least in the 2v2s that I've experienced in my team so far, horrifically weak in PvP. The fact that it's almost impossible to reapply, broken by DS and Berserker Rage, and melee/stealth required means that the average of 7 seconds I seem to get off of it is almost unworthy of being called CC (blind is much better for a debuff wait/bandage/restealth when it's down to 1v1 after one of us inevitably suicided to burn down the first target.
Granted, this could call into question whether all CCs should get the same thing, especially given the fact that Sap doesn't get hit by the heartbeat check, and the Imp Sap change of recent helped quite a bit in that regard (at least now I don't have to spec 7 points into Subtlety to get usable CC).
Maybe if Sap made BR/DS unavailable, as, say, Sheep would do (I think)? I can't CoS out of Sap/Sheep/Whatever, so I'm not sure what the deal is.
Off the top of my head if I were going to fix rogues:
- make a modified version of premeditation trainable. 25 range. 60e. 1 combo point. spammable. this lets me blow essentially a full energy bar for a 5s ranged snare. (deadly throw is good, but not being able to GET those CPs at range means it's essentially just a counter to Blink).
- make evasion work 360 degrees.
- make vanish make you immune to damage for X seconds or until you attack (or cancel the buff and then attack).
- find some way to make it so that war/pld wasn't the cornerstone of every top arena team, aka change the metagame.
This way rogues have at least an option, as crappy as it may be to blow all your energy for a snare, to avoid being kited. They have a way to discourage melee focus fire (imo stun turning it off should remain, but make absolutely certain that dodge is actually rolling to avoid stun attacks as I seem to have warriors intercept me during evasion with startling regularly). They have an 'ohshit' button that they can burn to avoid just being focused down.
With less war/pld teams you'd presumably see a few more cloth casters out there, which would lead to teams bringing rogues for their superior ability to deal with casters.
First post here. Last season, my 2v2 team was 2241 rating with rogue/mage and won netherdrakes, 3v3 was 2230 and 5v5 hovered around 2100. I consider my battlegroup (Rampage) fairly competitive, so I believe I've experienced many teams first-hand that know *exactly* how to exploit the many weaknesses of different teams/classes, and in particular rogues. Rogues are middle-tier at best in 2v2 and 3v3 and this is mostly due to the dominance of warrior/paladin teams. We are pretty much bottom of the barrel in 5v5.
I agree with the OP and many of the suggestions posted here (besides the few choice posts from people who literally have no idea what they are talking about). There are a few other areas where I feel some changes are necessary and would really help rogue utility in 5v5.
Poisons + Warriors
Most rogues use wound poison main hand, crippling offhand with a spare offhand that has mind numbing to swap in for shiv. Our greatest utilities are Expose Armor and (Improved) Kidney Shot, both of which can be used to benefit the warrior's dps and burst tremendously. The basic strategy here is to drop an expose on the focus target, build up combo points and energy, call for an assist from the warrior who intercepts over, and chain the intercept stun into an undodgable/parriable kidney shot. The warrior gets an expose armored target that can't dodge/parry due to stun to dump an entire rage bar into. But the rogue's 5 stacks of wound poison gets immediately wiped by Mortal Strike, while crippling is usually a non-factor since 90% of the time my target has BoF, leaving us with terrible damage unless we want to roll with mind numbing pre-assist call which is not really an option. And there are countless ways to easily remove the one layer of Mind numbing poison, leaving the rogue with pathetic damage even with the strongest burst combo (mutilate, renataki cold blood mutilate, evis)
Solution: Allow Poisons + similar effects from other classes to stack on the same target but only take the greater effect of the two. A person can be debuffed by MS and wounding at the same time, but will only have -50% healing. The same with Crippling Poison + Hamstring/Frostbolt/etc. The latter should help somewhat with rogues being able to stay on their target due to the relative ease of removing crippling versus stronger snares such as hamstring.
Kitability/Survivability/etc
While I think we need buffs in both these areas, I'd be happy if they improved us in just one of these areas. Currently, you can heavily focus fire a rogue, which is a *huge* mana sink for healers. This forces your healers to basically chain cast heals, leaving them no room to mana burn or such. Meanwhile since the rogue is being shut down, he can't disrupt enemy casters leaving them free to drain/mana burn, so the opponent team has a huge advantage in the mana war. Alternatively, you can pretty much disregard the rogue by coordinating cc's and snares such that the rogue pretty much contributes nothing and does terrible damage. I think there are many ways that could help rogues here. My favorites are that of a trainable shadowstep (lolintercept) to improve kitability or a vanish revamp that puts it closer to iceblock/divine shield in terms of survivability. Evasion being 360 degrees or making it more difficult to land hits against you (ie shadowfiend) would be nice too.
Target Switching
Rogues are the worst target switchers bar none. Making combo points a self-buff or allowing rogues to have combo points on more than one target at a time would be a huge help with this respect (preferably the former)
I also agree with a lot of the other suggestions here. Gouge being reliable and acting as a peel a la scatter/death coil would be nice. They'd have to revamp combo points or make gouge not gain a combo point for this to be achieved. The energy cost would have to be lowered as well, but they can shorten the duration to balance it. I'd like to see subtlety revamped to be *the* arena tree. There is a lot of potential to improve rogue viability in competitive high level 5v5 and I can only hope that Blizzard chooses to do something about it.
Satomi- as a similarly specced and geared (though probably much less skilled) Muti Rogue, I give you this content free post of unalloyed agreement.
[And I was the first to say that poisons should stack with similar effects ]
Incidentally, I go Mind Numb 90% of the time for the reasons you state, at the moment. Otherwise I can't damage a target with BoF- and half my usefulness is assisting WITH a warrior to stop BoF'd targets escaping.
I'm very tempted to try Deadly too. Sure it's a DoT, so harms CC, but it stacks quickly, does good damage and you can get off a clutch envenom through DS if you're lucky. Any thoughts? I've not tried it though, yet.
Satomi- as a similarly specced and geared (though probably much less skilled) Muti Rogue, I give you this content free post of unalloyed agreement.
[And I was the first to say that poisons should stack with similar effects ]
Incidentally, I go Mind Numb 90% of the time for the reasons you state, at the moment. Otherwise I can't damage a target with BoF- and half my usefulness is assisting WITH a warrior to stop BoF'd targets escaping.
I'm very tempted to try Deadly too. Sure it's a DoT, so harms CC, but it stacks quickly, does good damage and you can get off a clutch envenom through DS if you're lucky. Any thoughts? I've not tried it though, yet.
It only stacks quickly if you're using Deadly/Deadly, the ability to interrupt heals 99% of the time against FoL spam Paladins will provide far more "damage" then the 2,000 you gain using Envenom.
Fleet-footed to enable you to use Surefooted and a valuable meta gem like the stun-resist or snare-resist one.
Personally, I'd rather lose 6agi or 3 stam on my boots and put the fleet-footed points into iKS for the added "utility" when attempting to make it (X vs. X-1) ASAP, but I see your point.
Has it been confirmed, though, that the snare-resist gem stacks with the snare-resistance from Fleet-Footed?
Personally, I'd rather lose 6agi or 3 stam on my boots and put the fleet-footed points into iKS for the added "utility" when attempting to make it (X vs. X-1) ASAP, but I see your point.
Has it been confirmed, though, that the snare-resist gem stacks with the snare-resistance from Fleet-Footed?
Use the stun resist gem anyway- but yes they should stack.
I don't think poisonable throwing weapons would help much against BoF.
Shadowed: I very rarely hop on to Paladins anyway though. I'd much rather lock down a DPS clothie most of the time. We tend to win mana fights but lose when someone gets burst down at the beginning through one of OUR healers getting CC'd.
Sorry, I thought this forum was for intelligent discussion? There's nothing intelligent about "our class is broken, we need massive buffs". What is intelligent is discussing what we can do to play to our strengths.
But you're right, you all have a number in your profile higher than mine, so therefore you must automatically know better than I do. I'll just keep playing and enjoying my role and you keep posting on forums hoping for sweeping changes. Clearly it's a sign of greater skill and intellect to resort to base QQ.
Has anyone tested to see if the Blade Twisting daze proc goes through BoF like the npc daze mechanic does? I saw mention of this issue earlier in the thread but no conclusion so I thought I would bring it back up. Blade twisting + Mace spec could be your saviour for pesky kiters.
Sorry, I thought this forum was for intelligent discussion? There's nothing intelligent about "our class is broken, we need massive buffs". What is intelligent is discussing what we can do to play to our strengths.
But you're right, you all have a number in your profile higher than mine, so therefore you must automatically know better than I do. I'll just keep playing and enjoying my role and you keep posting on forums hoping for sweeping changes. Clearly it's a sign of greater skill and intellect to resort to base QQ.
Identifying why a class is inferior to other classes in a situation is the first step to finding an acceptable resolution
Originally Posted by Melnor
Has anyone tested to see if the Blade Twisting daze proc goes through BoF like the npc daze mechanic does? I saw mention of this issue earlier in the thread but no conclusion so I thought I would bring it back up. Blade twisting + Mace spec could be your saviour for pesky kiters.
I will be speccing sword spec and blade twisting tonight for my weekend arenas (we take a break from thursday to sunday on raiding) and can get back to you on whether BoF clears blade twisting's dazed debuff. From a cursory look around, it appears that commentor #192 to this post by ming claims to know that the dazed effect is cleared by blessing of freedom.
Personally, I'd rather lose 6agi or 3 stam on my boots and put the fleet-footed points into iKS for the added "utility" when attempting to make it (X vs. X-1) ASAP, but I see your point.
Has it been confirmed, though, that the snare-resist gem stacks with the snare-resistance from Fleet-Footed?
They all stack with fleet-footed, I had all 3 at once and it was very noticeable, particularly against frost mages where snares are attached to so many spell resists. Well, I should say I never sat there and let someone hit me with hamstring for an hour to make sure all the %'s are stacking additively, but it was clear I was getting 15%+ resist. I'd value fleet-footed over imp kidney shot, hands down.
I am also trying out the 20% snare resist build. When it works, you absolutely demolish frost mages. When it doesn't work, well, you're just as screwed. Still, winning 20% more fights than before vs. mages is pretty decent for a minor adjustment of two talent points and some enchantments.
I will be speccing sword spec and blade twisting tonight for my weekend arenas (we take a break from thursday to sunday on raiding) and can get back to you on whether BoF clears blade twisting's dazed debuff. From a cursory look around, it appears that commentor #192 to this post by ming claims to know that the dazed effect is cleared by blessing of freedom.
I would be amazed if it worked, Concussion Shot (I believe) is called a Daze and so is Piercing Howl which are "player dazes" and can be removed by Druid shifting, BoF, trinket and so on. Just because it says Dazed in the tooltip doesn't mean it's actually classified as an NPC daze.
And of course, you also have the fact that it's a 20% chance to proc on abilities not on white attacks.
I am also trying out the 20% snare resist build. When it works, you absolutely demolish frost mages. When it doesn't work, well, you're just as screwed. Still, winning 20% more fights than before vs. mages is pretty decent for a minor adjustment of two talent points and some enchantments.
You're right but it's a trade.
Check my talent spec/gear - I'm similar. But the problem is those 2-5 pts in Assass make all the difference. Mages I don't find that hard to stay on top of, but shaman or paladins spamming cleanse can keep poisons off themselves quite easily, since I don't have much imp or vile poisons. So sometimes my muti damage is negligeble
What to take? Fleet for anti-kite, Imp Expose (given, imo), Imp Eviscerate (always take, but getting more dubious about), vile for anti-dispel, esp. on Blind, imp for more applications, imp KS (for the assist train - I like this a lot, but see above), etc...
Hell, has anyone tried Deadened Nerves?
The problem with Fleet+gems etc. is that it's the same as BoF. But there's no way to duplicate the deep Combat anti-stun talents with a buff...
Oh, and indeed, the problem with Blade Twisting is (and I tried it on test once) the extremely low proc rate.
Check my talent spec/gear - I'm similar. But the problem is those 2-5 pts in Assass make all the difference. Mages I don't find that hard to stay on top of, but shaman or paladins spamming cleanse can keep poisons off themselves quite easily, since I don't have much imp or vile poisons. So sometimes my muti damage is negligeble
What to take? Fleet for anti-kite, Imp Expose (given, imo), Imp Eviscerate (always take, but getting more dubious about), vile for anti-dispel, esp. on Blind, imp for more applications, imp KS (for the assist train - I like this a lot, but see above), etc...
Hell, has anyone tried Deadened Nerves?
The problem with Fleet+gems etc. is that it's the same as BoF. But there's no way to duplicate the deep Combat anti-stun talents with a buff...
I'd rather have 5/5 Vile Poisons over Imp KS + 1-2 Vile, the extra 9% damage is nice but I find poisons actually staying on the target far more useful for either the cast time reduction or simply being able to get a 5 stack of Wound Poison.
Deadened Nerves is too far in for 5% damage reduction, for the reasons above I'd probably have to drop 5/5 Find Weakness for it, in which case I'd rather get Master Poisoner and Improved Poisons.
I think that the support points in assassination should be customized entirely to what you're doing. If you're running with a warrior, you'll want Improved Expose to debuff so that he can come over and destroy things with an Intercept -> HS/MS/WW ragedump. If you're in a 4DPS Feel the Pain style setup, you'll definitely want Imp. KS so you can make the Shadowburn x2/SW/CB Mutilate burst hurt as badly as possible, and you'll want Vile Poisons so that your debuffs(MN/Wound/Crippling) actually stick. If you're going to be mostly acting by yourself, Fleet Footed+Surefooted enchants seems like a really, really good idea. QR is just generally amazing.
What I'm running right now in terms of Assassination tweaks is:
Imp KS (needed IMO)
Fleet Footed (testing the build with enigmatic skyfire and surefooted, not sure I like it)
5/5 imp poisons
2/2 murder
I mostly play 3v3 so the only person I'd be exposing for is me, and most of the time I'd rather drop a KS. I took imp poisons because as we're not running a warrior I need to be able to get wounding up fast, but I just can't give up the ability to shiv crippling, so I mainhand wound. I am considering dropping this and seeing how it goes just using wounding OH with shiv, and picking up some vile poisons instead. I grabbed murder because even with my CP generation, I don't find myself eviscerating all that much. Mostly my burst comes from CB Mutilate Renataki Mutilate on a stunned target while my lock shadowburns. I decided to try out murder to see if I really even noticed eviscerate being gone and I don't like it. I'm not sold on Fleet Footed but I'm giving it another few weeks to see if it pays off.
I think that if I were to do it over again I'd take 3/3 eviscerate and 4/5 vile. Expose would work amazingly well if I had a warrior to chain it to, but I don't. The only thing I can never see myself dropping is imp KS. It's just too damn good when the environment is about focus fire. Someone want to sell me on imp EA? I've often considered taking it for PVE as my guild has few warriors and many druids, so plenty of times I end up EA'ing in raids.
I dropped Imp EA this season as well, I dumped my physical dps 5v5 and my 3v3 is with a lock/priest, no reason to have it. I'd stick with your choices, expose still has its uses but for 3v3 other talents shine more.
Anyone know exactly how the dispel resists work with Vile Poisons and the various poison removing spells? Does Stoneform still work 100% in removal? Does Abolish Poison make a resist check every tick? What about Poison Cleansing totems? I'd imagine cleanse is easy to predict, 1 click and 1 resist check. Can anyone enlighten me?
I guess this thread is kinda turning into the rogue PvP thread...
06/28/07, 3:14 PM
]
/CB Mutilate burst hurt as badly as possible, and you'll want Vile Poisons so that your debuffs(MN/Wound/Crippling) actually stick. If you're going to be mostly acting by yourself, Fleet Footed+Surefooted enchants seems like a really, really good idea. QR is just generally amazing.
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