Those are some of the worst ideas I've ever heard.

In S2/early S3 shadowstep rogues were great for locking down a caster...you could put your rogue on a mage and know that the mage wasn't going to be doing much that game besides kiting for his life. To temper the fact that you can virtually NEVER escape from a shadowstep rogue, they used to do relatively low damage. Personally I think rogue as a class should go back to this niche, as the caster shutdown melee.

If a DK or warrior can peel a rogue off their healer and get them in a 1v1 it shouldn't still be a fight in the rogues favor - that's the long and short of it. Where is the downside to mutilate even now when you can just dominate every other DPS class even if they miraculously manage to peel you from their healer?

Thanks for bringing the sheer mind-numbing level of stupid to a new level here. Stuns are by far the most offensively dangerous CC in the game, preventing the target from dodging, parrying, moving, or responding, until they are trinketed or removed by another (a very rare) means, like Hand of Freedom. That is why they are shorter than Out-of-Fight CC's like Polymorph, and that is why longer stuns like 5pt Kidney and Hammer of Justice are so powerful. Duration and cooldown count for nothing if the entirety of it is spent getting a first class workover from your friendly neighborhood McStabby Rogue number 24336.

Anyone else find the Ring of Valor arena to be the least enjoyable arena?

The teams seem to start too close, especially since a fortunately placed Death and Decay (and similar AoEs) can de-stealth Rogues and Druids instantly, and the LoS elements just aren't reliable enough, and the flame trails are frankly silly (environmental damage in arenas just seems like a bad in general).

Both of the Wotlk arenas are inferior imo. ROV is clearly still overflowing with issues, some of which you outlined. But even the much cooler concept dalaran sewers would benefit from some work. It's too los heavy, especially with the irregular lines around middle waterfall. On the plus side we won a game because I feared a rogue into the RoV fire, twice.

I didn't know where else to post, but i felt this needs mentioning and im wondering if any other rogues/stealthers feel the same way.

We can all agree that damage is out of control/games are alot quicker then they used to be. An opener in arenas as a rogue is usually gamebreaking, and luring a cs/ks/gouge/blind into your vanish is not an easy way to turn a fight or even reliable (bugs). Blizzard said they don't like talents that people are forced to take in order to function, then my question is - why do they insist on stealthlevel/stealthdetection racials/gear/enchants/talents.

I don't know any selfrespecting rogue that would do arenas without 3/3 Master of deception, 2/2 Heightened senses, and i don't know any feral druids that manage to skip feral instinct. In the same manner, you won't find any rogue without shadowarmor enchant on their cloak - and engineering goggles more often then not in the top brackets.

Which begs the question, whats the point of having these talents, enchants and racials - if one getting them means everyone has to have them in order to stand any chance against said person. It's an inward spiral which has led us to the point we are at today, every rogue has 25 points in subtlety, shadowarmor enchant on their cloak, engineering head for serious 2's/3's and human/nelf rogues still get gamebreaking openers more often then not. (And their other racials are not bad enough to warrant this advantage against 10% of the playerbase).

To illustrate, rogues in 2's are doing arenas with green level 40 engineering goggles because they give approximately 3 levels of passive stealthdetection and require 220 engineering to make.

Solution:
Master of Deception/Feral instinct gets baked into normal stealth so rogues/ferals are still able to open on people. All increased stealth/detection talents and enchants get removed from the game, with a possible exception of heightened senses - which gets moved abit further down subtlety to give the whole talenttree an edge - instead of making it available/a must for every rogue out there.

Thoughts?

In the current game, getting the opening is very good, but not game breaking. Also, all the stealth enchants in the world won't let you out stealth a pre-Vanished Rogue.

At the moment, choosing stealth enchants/talents has an oppotunity cost. Giving Druids/Rogues those stealth mods for free is an effective buff which I really don't think they need.

My big gripe about rogues is not even that they're powerful, it's that most of the things Blizzard has done to them since about S3 have been designed to make them easier and easier to play.

It used to be that I could juke out rogues who were too stupid to stay on me. Then Blizzard buffed shadowstep to give rogues a way to stay on druids, with the result being that even the most slackjawed rogue could hit one button to get back on me if I shook him off. Since then...
-Rogues who were too stupid to save energy for Kick got Deadly Brew and a reduced Kick cost option, guaranteeing that no matter when the target starts casting, it's always possible to interrupt
-Rogues who were too stupid to get behind their targets got the Mutilate facing requirement removed (albeit with less effectiveness from the front)
-Rogues who were too stupid to deal with targets who don't just stand still and take it got reduced energy cost, beefed up damage on openers, and the ability to vanish chain openers onto other openers so they could do more of their damage while the target can't move or respond

Changing this would just exacerbate the problem by freeing them from having to make decisions like this.

Between all your love for rogues, you fail to see the point where increased stealth/detection is not a decision - you either have it or lose to any rogue teams out there with equal skills to your own. I'm not saying anything useful has to replace the talents. Most important thing however, is to place heightened senses lower in sub tree to allow hybrid speccs and removing the effects from items and enchants.

Would stealth become useless if you just removed all these effects/talents all together?
Why should you get the benefit of a 3pt talent for free all of a sudden?

Like someone posted here already, removal of these things would just be a straight up buff on all levels for a rogue(&feral). You really feel that is needed?

I'm feeling more like deep sub needs to be buffed compared to the lower tier talents. I mean with 25 points in sub you get the best stuff out of the whole tree:

- Relentless Strikes (still a requirement for any spec really...)
- Higher Stealth Level (this is pretty much a pvp requirement so should stay low in the tree)
- Increased movement speed while stealthed and shorter stealth cooldown (same as above)
- Reduced CD on Cloak/Vanish Blind
- Increased range on sap/blind
- Preparation, the best talent in the tree
- Reduced energy cost on CS and Garotte in addition to "passive execute talent"
- Stealth detection

So if we spec full sub we get
- +15% agility
- +10% ap
- +10% damage when attacking from stealth and 6 secs after
- cheat death
- premed
- shadowstep which is alot weaker now then it was pre wotlk
- shadowdance which is extremely weak now after the ambush nerf
- cheap hemo/bs
- hat

So deep sub mostly gets some % increases on damage done for a spec that already deals the least of all 3 trees, a mobility move that only works when not rooted and some new/cheap combo point builders that are inferior to mutilate. The only good stuff is cheat death and hat really (and hat is only good in 5s).

If i was blizzard i would move heightened senses up in the tree next to sinister calling out of reach for mutilate. Then i would rework overkill and turn it into something like "increases energy regeneration while stealthed by 100%" to make it less overpowered but still not useless (and maybe a good leveling talent) - overkill atm is like increasing energy pool by ~50 in pvp. Combine this with some sub talents + glyphed vigor and a mutiprep rogue can do 2x mutilate and 2x 4+ evisc while the target is in cheap shot. Another option could be changing relentless strikes into "regenerates 25 energy over X seconds" and make it 2 or 3 points only.

Deep sub does not need to get buffed, mutilate prep needs to get nerfed, hard.

If you point out that an obviously overpowered tree makes your other trees look bad, the problem isn't that the other trees are not powerful enough. Do you think frost mages should ask for buffs since right now arcane is a no-brainer? Should MM hunters get buffed so they can keep up with survival?

The only class that has a luxury of having 3 overpowered PvP trees is deathknights, but god knows what they want to do with that class.

Deep sub doesn't need to get buffed that much, just some of the toys available to mutiprep need to be moved up. For example swap prep and premed, or make prep 15min cd so you need the high talent in sub to actually use it in arena. I also think they should change the backstab glyph to something similar what feral druids have, so it's for example 20% to maybe poisoned or bleeding targets instead of stunned. In addition they could change the hemo debuff to work exactly like mangle/trauma to make a rogue bleed build more viable.

I will say that Arc Mages are the "imba" caster right now, but I feel that Rogues are by far more ridiculous. I 2 with a Resto Shaman. Rogues just flat out rend us. Dual burst teams are stupid and it annoys us to no end when we fight one. Mind you I have never comped dual burst so I don't know what it's like, but just seeing skilless people able to smash buttons for an instant kill is annoying. Arcane by itself is honestly balanced in my opinion. It requires time to cast to deal any damage that isn't easily healed through, and it's burst is easily survivable by anyone that knows how to gear themselves for arena. Only in a dual damage comp (Most notably Rogue/Mage) is Arcane overpowered. Maybe that's just my observation, but I don't see a Mage as a threat honestly. If you know how to lock an Arcane Mage down they cannot do shit for the next 1 Minute 45 Seconds that is threatening if they are by themselves. The sustained damage that can be dealt by a Rogue, Ret, or DK massively outweighs that of an Arcane Mage.

I'm not calling them balanced as if they are lucky enough they can burst something down almost as fast as a Rogue, but I dislike when people compare us to a Rogue/Ret/DK as we are MUCH more managable than the previously listed classes if the opposing team has any intelligence whatsoever.

And honestly I am starting to fear Fury Warriors as well. 16k Damage in 1 round without any special buffs is ridiculous.

My hunter buddy quit the game because he has been too busy IRL, and my rogue partner is currently incapacitated, so I am doing 2s with a DK guildmate to gather points until he gets better.

DK/priest is ... interesting. It loses quite badly to most paladin comps, but other than that it does OK - my DK partner is not really a hardcore PvP'er so we are sorta learning the comp bit by bit (it is Zephos the guy who does the Yogscast). We haven't been able to play nearly as much as I'd like, but if I have the time, I just like playing arena more than most.

Death knights have a high volume of relatively low damage attacks, which as Lanky pointed out results in very high sustained damage but surprisingly mediocre burst (now that gargoyle's been nerfed), especially if the DK can't maintain his diseases... so it's not too surprising that dealing with paladins is very troublesome.

What are you talking about, dumping 4 runes worth of your primary power when you have Death Runes up is terrifying burst, not to mention RP dumps like Rune Strike, DRW, Garg, Frost Strikes, etc.

Except that they know it's coming, because it takes 20 seconds to warm all that shit up. You have to close, use the attacks that start your death runes, wait for your death runes to come back up, and close again if you got peeled earlier. If they did something in the meantime that forced you to use other abilities, this time gets longer. There have been fights where the DK NEVER got the chance to do that burst because he kept having to burn runes to even get some DPS time. Even shadow priests can do 15k damage in 3 seconds with a crit combo, but nobody calls them burst because there's such a ridiculous amount of easily interruptible windup.

Death Knight 3x obliterate blah blah blah is absolutely nothing like rogue burst, where it comes from stealth and you're pinned in place, unable to respond.

Prot warrior.

*removed because the discussion about dominance or buffs and nerfs isn't really something anyone would like to read*

Uhhh no, Spriest have tons of burst. But no one mentions them because they're almost completely absent from arena.

Yes, DK burst is different from Rogue/Mage/Hunter/whatever burst. That doesn't mean they don't have any. The fact that much of their burst is magic and goes through armour doesn't hurt. In addition, they have DoTs/garg/DRW that work in parallel to their burst.

Oh, I would argue that shadow priests are more bursty than DKs because they actually ramp into their burst. If you were to plot a DK's DPS on a burst it would be a peak sitting in a trough. When I fight a DK and he tries to do this burst crap on me, he's trading his very scary level of normal pressure on me for the chance to do maybe 12k damage on a target that will be at full health because he's doing crap for DPS while waiting for his runes to come up. Given that I've been hit for 9k by shield slam alone, this is just not impressive. In particular, since we were discussing paladin comps I don't see why a paladin would be afraid of this.

You can call it what you want. All I know for sure is the empirical fact that DK burst isn't threatening to me. I don't feel a significant difference when confronted by a DK who pools runes to attack than when I fight a DK who just tries to stick on me. Rogues and hunters simply don't have to make this decision; they can stick on me and then burst when they feel like it.

I'd be interested in hearing how.

As mentioned, I've been hit for 9k by shield slam. That's more than I've been hit for by AP Pyroblast. Ergo, shield block->shield slam->shockwave->devastate->shield slam+HS. Sword and Board is not a rare proc, and this set of attacks only requires about 50 rage. On this combo you'd expect an average of 1 shield slam crit, and at least 1 other crit, so even with a more conservative 7k crit shield slam estimate and slightly below average crit luck, you're looking at 14k+ damage against 25% physical DR and 20% crit reduction from resilience. If for some reason you take an attack and can replace devastate with revenge, the combo only gets bigger.