To offer a suggestion for adjusting the rogue class (with the caveat that I have much more experience in BG's than Arena), adjust Shadowstep to work out of stealth, in combat, without greater damage, placing the rogue in stealth for perhaps 3 seconds so the rogue could use an opener. For an entire tree devoted to openers it's silly that they defining talent doesn't already do this. Upping the cooldown appropriately would be fine.

I know this only fixes those who would then take the talent. As a general 'fix' I'd like to see larger amounts of dodges on rogues across the board, 3/3 Setup as a built-in class feature (would give an incentive to not train on the rogue), and the afore mentioned CP as a self-buff not target 'debuff' would help a lot.

I don't think that anything I'm proposing would be overbalanced. Dodge would grant a bit more survivability against melee but not against casters. Setup would allow increased offensive output from the /assist train when coupled with Evasion/CloS but not significantly across the board.

The Rogue on that team probably does so well because he's surrounded by 3 other people that most teams will (and should) focus on first

Even Feel the Pain didn't ideally run rogues till the absolutely HAD to. They used to run a balanced set up I think, instead of the insta gib one.

Every single team cept PVE clickers subbed their rogue out or played them ONLY when they absolutely had to (like in the tourny).

The rogues on the team are probably very talented, but the amount of beneficial effects they can provide is outdone. As absurd as it may sound, but as both melee DPS, there is no reason a warrior should be more favorable than a rogue.

We play 3vs3 with two rogues and one paladin. We don't have an interesting rating (1801 atm), but that is because of some Real Life issues (school trouble of the other rogue), so she can spent only 2-4 hours per week online. She had about 7k life until last week and with one lucky run we got a Nether and new trousers for her, we started because of her 4 weeks later with the arena.

Anyways. Double Rogue is devastating. We use blind more like a counter spell, than initially. If everything works really good, we use Double Blade Fury. Combined with wound poison this is double rogue damage on two targets while having reduced healings, a insignia to counter crowd control and the cloak for self protection. We are not very gifted PVP-players, but except for heavy melee teams we score quite well, while being undergeared in most matches.

I think a lot of the bad perception on rogues is because in the beginning of arena times most rogues played defensive (QR-COmbat) an tried to outlast the enemy. So many "famous" rogues (Ming, Nitrana) had serious trouble with that strategy and the news spread..

I usually ignore Mings rantings, do you happen to have a link to whatever post he made?

Not to be rude but at 1800 rating you haven't really experienced true arena play. Once you are at a higher rating, setups like yours simply won’t work against the normal cookie cutter high rated teams.

My main issue with rogues at the moment is they rely on cool downs so much that once they are out of them they basically free for the killing whereas the other melee class (warriors) is a never ending killing machine.

Depends on your makeup, you're kind of screwed if you have 2-3 melee since you either have to split DPS or risk the AE damage, in which case you're wasting 15-20 seconds of not seriously attacking someone.

To address the survival issue, why not buff Deadened Nerves? Instead of 5% physical damage (pretty abyssmal for a talent that high up), make it 5% physical/5% magical or 10% physical.

I'd like to see sprint reduces significant in cooldown and duration, lets say reduced to 1/3 of both, 5 second duration 90 second cooldown, endurance would be changed to 30 seconds per point so the new talented CD would be 30 seconds.

I would also like to see rogues given a non-poison snare so we can put wound poison on both weapons, which would help with it constantly being cleansed off and it's relatively slow application rate with non-mutilate specs.

I would also like murder and quick recovery to be switched in the assassination talent trees, allowing almost every spec to take it.

These 3 changes would greatly improve rogue viability in 5vs5 without, I feel, unbalancing them in 1vs1. QR has no solo 1vs1 benefit as rogues are a non-healing class and a non-poison snare would just put us on par with warriors in terms of snares (call it tendon slice, same energy cost as hamstring's rage cost, same speed reduction, so crippling poison would actually be better, but you'd have to apply it).

Ultimately a talent based buff wouldn't cut it. They could make shadowstep the best talent ever but that's pointless... Blizzard have tried very hard to remove 'must have' talents - that's why Prep got the mini-nerf. Hell, that's why they gave us trained Imp Sap -- because you couldn't not have it if you wanted to be useful in Heroics.

The answer is to change something fundamental or change a trained skill in some way.

And my preferred way would be either/all of:

- Bring our control closer to the level it was at 60 (though probably not all the way) relative to current trinkets and survivability levels.
- Increase our mobility to somewhere close to Warriors; shadowstep was Blizz's 'idea' for this, but it didn't really work out. They need to try a new fix.
- Buff the amount of dodge gained from agility (lets face it, against teams without a warrior/other rogue, we're actually fairly survivable).
- Make Vanish/Stealth more robust - my favourite option initially. Currently outside of openers, stealth is very very weak. The auto-attack bug is still there, and although vanish usually gets you de-targetted for a second, I can't remember the last time I vanished in an arena and wasn't de-stealthed within about 3 seconds by a tick of something or a shout/AE/or plain autoattack. They should increase the 'hiddenness' of stealth and bit and make the vanish buff unbreakable. This would give rogues a true 'out' and discourage training.

I also agree with the above poster about poisons. Without Vile (and currently I'm 41/20 with Imp Expose/Imp KS/Imp EV/Fleet F, so barely any poison talents), poisons can be kept off a target indefinitely, without that much trouble, reducing my Mutilate damage to nothing, as well as removing the snare/heal debuff. Compare to a warrior with unremovable hamstring and train like dps. A mutilate rogues DPS is really fragile and we don't get much back from the extra requirements.

Step 1 in this process would be to simply allow Wound and MS to co-exist. Not stack, just co-exist. Currently in 5v5 I always run with a warrior, so am FORCED to use Crip/Mind Numb. So only ever two stacks to be cleansed, and only one when my target has BoF. They just keep the Mind Numb cleansed and my DPS = basically nothing. Especially as I'm relying on procs to put Mind Numb back on, since they're immune to shivved crippling. Maybe BoF should remove the snare effect but keep the poison there for Mutilate purposes?

Anyway, if Wound could co-exist, at least I could stack it in case the MS dropped off and use it to Mutilate off. Currently MS just removes all 5 stacks instantly very frustrating. I can't imagine 5/5 Imp and 5/5 Vile > Imp Expose and Imp KS when I'm running with a warrior though? Those two stacked up his damage a huge amount...

Has anyone ever tried 5/5 Imp, 5/5 Vile and Deadly/Envenom in a high level arena environment with any success?

OK, I'll get my fire res gear but I don't see why any particular class has to be good in a various arena.

1) PvE > PvP in my mind and any class balancing should reflect that not how one class does in PvP or in a particular arena.

2) Some classes do better in one arena vs another. A warrior, for instance, is nice in 5on5 but far less so in 2on2.

3) From time to time, classes are going to get "nerfed" and "improved", no matter what so best to just make the best of it till your time comes around once again.

4) Flame on.

Sorry, I was typing that at work. I meant one, maybe two changes at most, might help rogues in their 5v5 game.

Many of their timers are archaic. 5v5 Arena pvp being the most important in terms of reward is fine, and rogues might have been decent in that environment, perhaps even very strong, but the changes to stamina and resilience make for longer matches. Past the first minute they start to trail off.

I tried once, basically you have to run Deadly/Deadly for it too stack with any speed that it doesn't get cured off or just fades, and if you do that then the Warrior isn't snared...so you're pretty much screwed.

It's rather amusing seeing people suggest over and over again basically copies of Warrior talents though, you're far more likely to see a change like what Tiiki mentioned where it's making what we have already better (eg Wond Poison exists with MS but doesn't stack).

The reason you hear so many different ideas on how to buff Rogues (imo) is because most Rogues feel that in group PvP our class lacks a "vision," a core concept of what we're supposed to be doing. It's all very well for you to say "stop trying to be a Warrior" -- okay, I'm no longer attempting to assist train and DPS my target...now what? The answer to that 'now what' is not immediately obvious, and that's the problem. What else can I do?

A separate but linked issue is that the outside contributions of other classes are usually more beneficial to my enemy than me, even if I can force a near-1v1. My Paladin cleanses Serpent Sting off me, woop-dee-doo. Their Paladin cleanses Crippling Poison off their Hunter, if I've already blown my cooldowns to get into melee I'm screwed. Where is my dispel of Wing Clip, my Mass Dispel of Frost Trap, my/my group's non-Freedom counter to Hamstring? Kiting a Rogue is too reliable post-cooldowns and high-level Arena is *designed* to be cooldown-unfriendly.

No, I said "stop trying to copy Warrior talents", thats not even close to "stop trying to be a Warrior".

edit: Should have said "talents/abilities" in the last post but oh well. Basically, look at a way to fix the class that doesn't involve giving us abilities that are basically a copy of what Warriors have already.

I find I have the most success in arenas (note: not playing the high-end yet) when I work on shutting down the other team's healers. With mind-numbing, I can ensure that no healer is getting off any spells as long as I am near them. Blind works as a nice interrupt too, like a counterspell. With prep and my racial, I don't really need to worry about being kited. A healer on his own really has no way to get me off him, and if one of their DPS leaves the train to shoo me away, they're splitting their DPS pretty badly.

That said, there are some serious problems that need addressing with this, and the big one is fear. I can trinket one (if I haven't used it already on HoJ for example), and if I'm keeping an eye on who's targeting me I can CoS another, but then I have exactly zero tools for avoiding fear. Once I'm fearing off, I'm useless. Deadly Throw interrupt works if I get a dispel, but if I'm out of range/not viable, there's nothing. If we had a more reliable way to counter CC, I think rogues would be just fine. We're not going to be exceptional primary DPS without cooldowns, our CC is dodgy at best (especially with the new trinkets), and so we are left with our suite of interrupts.

Am I off track here, or is this a viable road to take?

EDIT: And despite my armory profile, my 5v5 is rated 1750 and climbing fast.

Rogues do not need more tools to force a target into meelee range. Only mages provide a serious problem.
They only need those tools to actualy work. Crippling poison and deadly throw VS BlessingOfFreedom.
BoF is the true problem.

While I have to work super hard to get away from a rogue as a druid (the primary escape class). With access to BoF I can simply run away in bearform.

If they got rid of BoF most of our mobility issues would disappear in arena.

Some short pointers in my own defence. This is probably my first post here, although I've been happily reading along for some time now. I quit for nearly a year though, only to return now. I can't say I've experienced arena's properly yet, although I definately intend to.


It seems the problem with rogues is that they have no way to survive once the cooldowns are gone. Why not make it so that if rogues are not doing as much damage anymore they get better survivability? It's pretty late over here, and I'm tired, so let me explain this a bit more with a very stupid example:

Rogue opens up on his target, doing the usual burst thingy. Survivability is pretty "low" like always. Something happens, be it target dying or rogue being cc'ed and unable to put out more damage. Rogue gains more survivability so that it's harder for the opposing team to get him down, at least buying time for his team to put out damage or whatever (or even keeping him up). That way, he'd at least be able to do something for the team, even if it meant dying but playing boxing bag for a bit.

I'm not sure if this higher survivability should be dodge, as that doesn't help against caster teams. On the other hand, were quite strong against casters (when were doing damage to them at least), so in order to balance it dodge may in fact be the way to go (even though I always imagine me being Keanu Reaves and dodging frostbolts in slowmotion).


Some other points mentioned here are very valid. Poison coexisting with MS to help Mutilate a bit more, the stupid desyncing (even though I don't see that happening, I take it that is very, VERY difficult to fix), and last but not least: vanish; fix it damn it!

Dahis wrote an article about about "gib" teams. Changing the focus from mititagion and mana war to assist train and burst damage.

I always thought the cooldown on BoF was way too short, and a nerf to its cooldown would go a long way towards balancing the arena away from MS warrior/paladin combos.

I've been playing quite a large amount of 3v3's and 5v5's. Yesterday the 5v5 we used consisted of 1 warrior, 2 rogues, palla, priest. We aren't rated high yet and I can definitally confirm that real Arena starts at 1800 rating for the 5v5, 1900 rating for 3v3, tho we ripped apart targets pretty well. We had 15 wins, 4 losses with Paladin, Priest, Warrior, rogue x 2. 2 Saps and assist train down 2 targets quick, usually gets the job done. I can imagine us getting pwned when we reach higher ratings.

In the 3v3. We had a shaman, frost mage + rogue. We get near 1900 very often, but after that there's 80% chance you face a paladin/warrior team and warriors just aren't fun anymore. I got 2-shotted yesterday by a 3.5K ms and some brutal HS or autoattack. Had 6.2K health and instant died. So I can only conclude that shaman/mage/rogue is an uncommon and therefore probably unsuccesfull balance for higher ratings. With a combo like shaman/mage/rogue there is no margin for error. With a setup like paladin/warrior/warlock there is a lot of margin for errors.

The main problem with my rogue (specced 16/21/24 atm) is MS warriors. Once they see me, they will not stop until I die and boy, how I die. It cannot be outhealed. All I can hope for is a succesfull sheep from my fellow mage, but if i try to get away from him I don't dodge anything (coz he's cleaving my ass) and when I try to confront him he'll only hit harder. Also seem to have about 30-40% of my stuns resisted on the warrior. So hey.. i'm leather, do less dps, hit for less (coz he's plate), basically can't stun him and its supposed to be balanced? The rogues' stun is being overrated gets resisted too often. Main issue is as said before by someone else, melee range. Blade's edge Arena is like a big sign saying "no melee please".

The only reason you should take a rogue instead of a warrior is the rogues ability to shut up a caster and CC. If you want dps, get a warrior. Warrior = rogue x 2 + plate.