The Blue Post Thread: Cataclysm Edition - Page 4

• Aldriana · 09/13/11, 6:21 PM

Interesting, though I'd treat as unconfirmed at this point:

There's one more piece which is an announcement that we're releasing a rogue legendary weapon. Specific for rogues, so it will be a dagger. There will be some sort of quest, traditionally we've done these quests that players need to participate in order to create the legendary weapon in this case we'll be focusing on rogues that will try to make that happen...

We haven't decided on the name and how it's going to work, we just know that we really want a legendary weapon to come out of this tier and we really want it to be a rogue dagger. That's really all we know at this point.

Source

winst · 09/14/11, 3:20 AM

Rogue Legendary and Patch 4.3
Another interview showed up today in The Escapist. The most important part is the Rogue Legendary dagger and new raid level difficulty, but the important points are all below.

Rogues will get a legendary dagger and exciting quest line to go with it. The lore for the dagger has not been decided upon yet.

Will be interesting to see how that one plays out. Legendary 1.8 speed making everyone go Assassination, or legendary 1.4 speed stat stick?

Mirror of the interview which got taken down Here.

omnimon3000 · 09/14/11, 8:30 AM

Ah, but there is where you are underestimating Subtlety, every point of raw weapon MH damage equates to 7+ EP value for a Sub rogue. Unlike assassination wherein most of the damage comes from poisons, i say Subtlety has quite a better edge in using a 1.8 legendary dagger (assuming you know how to play Subtlety) and then there is the off chance that it's a 2.0 speed MH dagger, which will only mean subtlety domination all the way.

^ The reason at which I fear that it won't be a Main hand dagger

Antiarc · 09/14/11, 10:04 AM

As a combat rogue, the idea of a legendary dagger is sort of bittersweet. Unless they make it a 2.4 speed dagger, which I would be dandy-okay with.

• Aldriana · 09/14/11, 12:57 PM

A 2.4 speed dagger doesn't really fix the problem, as it'd still be normalized to 1.7. If they're going to enable rogues of all specs to use it, they either need to make it OH (which would be sort of odd, but I won't reject the notion outright) or make it available in multiple forms - i.e., upon completion of the legendary questline you can get either a dagger or an axe. Note that this would also open it up to Enhancement Shaman, which, depending on your perspective, may or may not be a good thing.

eylieen · 09/14/11, 1:27 PM

The cleanest option I could see would be to make it a standard 1.8 and then to edit Sinister Strike to function similar to Ambush and Hemo, with a higher modifier for daggers to allow combat rogues to use 1.8 daggers (perhaps make normal 1.8 daggers sub-optimal by a small margin, so that swords are normally favored, but the legendary proc or buff or whatever would make it worthwhile).
I'd prefer this to a 1.4 legendary stat-stick, or for combat to just not be able to use the dagger, but we'll have to see what happens (assuming this is even confirmed and not just a massive hoax).

Brotherbear · 09/14/11, 1:33 PM

Honestly I'd love to see the final "legendary" be a pair of daggers so that all three specs get at least some use out of them, but while maintaining the aesthetic of not having an out of proportion offhand.

But I'm a bit biased by my guild getting 4 offhand glaives in TBC...all the rogues and a warrior running around with mismatched weapons for over a year and a half was just aggravating.

On the other hand, allowing for the final choice to be an axe or dagger does open the quest up to shamans, as well as setting a precedent for the inevitable tanking legendary (which pretty much has to be a choice of a 2hander or a sword/shield combo just to balance out the various tanking classes) which I expect to be in the next patch.

• Aldriana · 09/14/11, 1:40 PM

The other option for a tanking legendary would be something for a different slot - I can, for instance, imagine a legendary helm working.

A weapon set could make a lot of sense, though; given that dual wielding is sort of one of the class defining features of rogues, I could see it happening. They just need to make it a single quest that gives both pieces (or, per the above discussion, options for both pieces) such that you don't have the Warglaive problem of RNG wreaking havoc with the relative rate at which different guilds assemble it.

Regardless, I think we're starting to get pretty speculative here, so at some point it might make sense to table this discussion until we have more information.

saedo · 09/14/11, 7:37 PM

Since it's a quest, they just can make it only available to rogues. There's no concern about shamans or warriors or tanks anyone else getting it if their goal is a rogue only legendary.

To put my own 2 cents in. How bout making it like how the old hunter epic quest bow was. It allowed you to change the weapon from bow to staff. So just make ours dagger <-> sword. The old problem/complaint with that was that it'd lose all its scopes/enchants whenever it was done, so hunters hated doing it. But why not just leave that problem in. It'd purposely make switching back and forth prohibitive/costly so most rogues would pick one for their spec and go with it.

Dharenna · 09/14/11, 7:59 PM

There is already another example of "dual" item from vanilla WoW - priest staff Benediction/Anathema. (Benediction - Item - World of Warcraft)

Mu little priest used have one in Vanilla and I think both sides kept their own enchants when you swapped. So the mechanic of dual-item is already in game, our legendary dagger-sword would not be first one utilizing this feature if developers would like it that way.

yanhero · 09/14/11, 8:41 PM

There's no need to worry about the wpn being an OH"stat stick", is dragonwrath just a statstick because casters don't swing it at ppl? The most interesting part of a legendary has always been a proc, so an OH with an awesome proc would be better than a MH that only 2 specs can use IMO. And since this would be only for 1 class, they can do something very unique to us like making all our abilities cost half the energy, or perhaps give us a max of 6 combo pts, or let us have a max of 200 energy.

• Aldriana · 09/19/11, 3:34 AM

More info:

Can you talk a little bit about the new legendary for this patch?
Ghostcrawler: Sure. It is a pair of daggers – a main-hand and an off-hand dagger. We are designing them such that all three Rogue specs will be able to use it. We have a little tweak in there so that Combat Rogues will be able to Sinister Strike with the daggers without it being a big DPS loss.

The story of these legendary daggers has to do with the last remaining pure black dragon egg. So kind of how we got here is the black dragons are a really cool enemy in our universe, they have been for a while, but we’re kind of killing them off a lot. Onyxia has been killed and brought back so many times that we’re starting to feel bad for the old girl. Nefarian is dead, again, and Deathwing is going down. So we thought we were running out of black dragons, and we really didn’t want to do that because they’re a really great enemy and we really want to use them again in the future.

So players who play through the Cataclysm quests in the Badlands will remember a questline around this uncorrupted black dragon egg. It was free of the taint of the Old Gods. So what is going to happen is that black dragon egg eventually hatches and there is a black dragon prince who is pure – he’s not a minion of Deathwing; he’s not corrupted by the Old Gods. But that doesn’t mean he is necessarily a good guy. He’s kind of out for himself, he’s kind of got his own agenda, and to bring his plans to fruition he contacts the Rogue because Rogues are a little shady, always working in the shadows, always playing a number of games and has other things going on. The black dragon prince reaches out to the Rogue character and says “If you help me out, I’ll reward you with these increasingly more powerful daggers”.

How did the team decide to make a Rogue weapon rather than a tanking weapon for this legendary?
Ghostcrawler: It’s really funny because every player out there wants and almost expects the next legendary is going to be for them. We try not to let it fall into too much of a pattern. We want legendaries to be something exciting, something that is earned, not something that you “deserve” because it is “your time to get one”. We thought that we liked part of the Rogue story. We thought that Rogues had maybe felt a little bit not special in this expansion with all the high damage numbers that were being done by classes like Mages. We thought it was just the right opportunity to make them shine and feel kind of special. Unless you count the bow, we haven’t done any class specific legendaries to this extent before, so we thought it would be fun to make the legendary quest VERY Rogue-themed. There will be stealthing and pickpocketing, things we know that a Rogue can handle. Then, the weapons themselves, their proc, we’re still building, but the idea is that their proc will tie in something very Rogue specific as well.

Rerox · 09/19/11, 7:46 AM

Originally Posted by Aldriana

A 2.4 speed dagger doesn't really fix the problem, as it'd still be normalized to 1.7. If they're going to enable rogues of all specs to use it, they either need to make it OH (which would be sort of odd, but I won't reject the notion outright) or make it available in multiple forms - i.e., upon completion of the legendary questline you can get either a dagger or an axe.

In his latest interview Ghostcrawler mentioned "I should mention is that the mechanics are such that Combat rogues will be able to use the two daggers just as fine as well."

I was wondering if it might be enough if they tweaked Sinister Strike to "An instant strike that causes 200 damage in addition to 100% of your normal weapon damage ((100 * 1.45)% if a dagger is equipped)." like they did with Ambush and Hemorrhage?

Probaton · 09/19/11, 8:00 AM

The simpler option (and one that wouldn't permanently affect the swashbuckling nature of Combat game-play) would be to edit the item rather than the ability. '<Weapon name> does additional damage if used for Sinister Strike' or '...changes to a 2.6 speed with corresponding damage range changes when specced into Combat'.

Brotherbear · 09/19/11, 10:42 AM

That was my feeling as well. If we assume there will be a proc associated with the legendary, then they could tweak the proc based on the spec of the rogue using it.

I'm envisioning either:

1) A stat proc, which procs mastery for Assasination and Haste for combat/subtlety

2) A damage proc that just does more damage if you're combat/subtlety

Either way, it makes the most sense for the item to compensate for potential dps differences, rather then the spec suddenly changing. Additionally, this would allow them to tweak the item if it was turned out that it dramatically benefitted one spec over another.

Hopefully 4.3 will hit the ptr soon so we can get some more concrete data, but you can colour me thrilled that it's a set of daggers!