Well, as I discussed a few pages back, I don't think we're in any real danger of getting totally stripped of all raid spots - even if we had absolutely no advantages over other classes, it'd still make sense to bring one or two. But it's still nice to be needed rather than merely brought along for the ride. And while that has been true for some parts of the expansion, there were definitely times where I felt like I was getting pity raid spots more than anything else.
Regarding the raid leader part: I've actually had the reverse experience (at least for a while) - our GM/Raid Leader was a rogue who wasn't me, which worked out fine for larger raids but it was really quite annoying in the Karazhan days... as if you're fielding 2 Karazhan teams, each with one rogue, and the raid leader always is in one, that means the other 2-3 rogues have to trade off spots in the other, which gets old in a hurry.
At the start of TBC, rogue itemization and raid utility was fairly poor. The starting raid, Karazhan, was especially friendlier to other dps classes with all cloth casters decked out in FSW, Spellstrike, Spellfire, and Girdle of Ruination. The casters would provide AOE, lots of utility via buffs/debuffs/soulstones/healthstones/shackles, and top the charts without getting a single drop from Karazhan. There wasn't an encounter in Karazhan where the casters would have a disadvantage. Meanwhile, rogues were kind of borked on encounters like Maiden, BBW, Curator, and especially Prince. Plus there was no guarantee of Battle Shout or Windfury or Unleashed Rage so rogue dps was kind of lackluster. Also, before the advent of arenas, many rogues would still be rocking Latro's Shifting Sword until T6 and always prayed that Netherspite would drop the Spiteblade. This says a lot as what the devs knew at the time how the rogue class operates.
So yes, raid leaders were kind of biased as to what classes to bring at the start of TBC, rogues were always fill ins, and I can't remember a single raid that has been called just because a rogue didn't show up.
I, for one, hope that the Blizzard devs are reading these discussions as these discussions were accurate before and after the start of TBC and will most likely be accurate for WOTLK. These discussions would allow them to get the rogue class right at the start of WOTLK and they will not have to retroactively make changes to make the rogue class raid viable.
I'm just curious as to what it is that you've read that indicates Rogues are due a Review/Polish still, as I've been unable to find a blue post after 35 minutes of searching here and google. Admittedly it throws up a huge number of results, as its quite a vague query, but all I've found is player speculation that due to our poor talents at the moment its 'going to happen'.
A few things indicate that there is a review coming. First, they have implied that they will be reviewing all classes. Some they have come right out and said and others are left to the implication. Second, they have said that they will be adjusting poisons, and they have not yet done that. Third and most important, there are at least 3 talents that are not even active yet.
Classes that they have worked on (doesn't mean that they are done with them yet):
DK
Lock
Mage
Shaman
Pally
Hunter
Warrior (little)
Driud (little, but a lot of blue posts about them)
The only ones that they havent worked on is Priests and Rogues. If they dont review those 2 like they have/are with the other 8, then that will piss a lot of people off.
After a few minutes of searching I found this. It is about warriors, but the theory is there. Blue post in Warrior Forums
I'm just curious as to what it is that you've read that indicates Rogues are due a Review/Polish still, as I've been unable to find a blue post after 35 minutes of searching here and google. Admittedly it throws up a huge number of results, as its quite a vague query, but all I've found is player speculation that due to our poor talents at the moment its 'going to happen'.
Can you clarify?
Other people have hit the high points, but, allow me to summarize the relevant bits of information.
1) A number of our abilities are currently nonfunctional, which must change before release.
2) No glyphs for us have been announced yet, and I guarantee the game won't ship with every class except one having glyphs.
3) They've stated that they're reviewing the classes a few at a time, which means the lack of progress so far isn't particularly worrisome - they're just doing us towards the end.
Basically: Blizzard isn't stupid. They're not going to intentionally screw us over. And at the moment the talents and abilities we're getting contain a lot of stuff that's unimplemented, poorly balanced, or just plain dumb. And, by comparison to the other classes, who have all received extensive review - not necessarily all changes that they're happy with, but certainly indicative of a lot more time and effort being applied to the problem - it's pretty clear that they haven't thought about us in any detail yet. I have confidence that, because they're not idiots, they will take that time at some point, and give us a more detailed set of changes, fixing some of the current issues. We may not be happy with all the changes, of course, but I feel confident that changes will exist. I fully expect there will come a beta patch at some point where we have the same laundry list of changes that other classes have received.
Originally Posted by Cally
At the start of TBC, rogue itemization and raid utility was fairly poor. The starting raid, Karazhan, was especially friendlier to other dps classes with all cloth casters decked out in FSW, Spellstrike, Spellfire, and Girdle of Ruination. The casters would provide AOE, lots of utility via buffs/debuffs/soulstones/healthstones/shackles, and top the charts without getting a single drop from Karazhan. There wasn't an encounter in Karazhan where the casters would have a disadvantage. Meanwhile, rogues were kind of borked on encounters like Maiden, BBW, Curator, and especially Prince. Plus there was no guarantee of Battle Shout or Windfury or Unleashed Rage so rogue dps was kind of lackluster. Also, before the advent of arenas, many rogues would still be rocking Latro's Shifting Sword until T6 and always prayed that Netherspite would drop the Spiteblade. This says a lot as what the devs knew at the time how the rogue class operates.
So, to be clear: rogue itemization in early BC days was not notably bad. Edgewalker Longboots and Skulker's Greaves both were quite well itemized; Spymistress's Wristguards were a very solid option for quite a while, and, of course, DST was (and is) killer. In fact, if you look at the stat distribution of the best T4 drops, they really are about as well itemized as one could hope for - it's not until Sunwell and the last round of badge loot that we started to see gear with better stat distributions in a lot of slots.
Now, the fact that the tailoring items were a bit overpowered for casters means we were perhaps a bit underitemized by comparison, but I don't think that was the major problem in Karazhan days. I think the larger problems were more the things you discuss later in your post, specifically:
1. The aforementioned discussion of our scaling with buffs. Rogues right now excel in 25 man raids because you can set up a melee group and feed them lots of buffs. In 5 and 10 mans, you rarely have the composition to give them all those buffs, which means that our damage numbers were not where they needed to be. And this is just a systematic problem: we need buffs to do well, buffs are lacking in those intermediate-sized groups.
2. Encounter design. A lot of Karazhan was simply not designed to be particularly melee friendly. I mean, there were a number of fights where we did okay, and one (Aran) where we excelled, but most of those fights were designed to be more ranged-friendly and less melee-friendly. I think had Karazhan been designed and balanced more along the lines of, say, Sunwell, we'd've had much less trouble with raid spots.
I'm not sure where everyone's getting that Karazhan is melee unfriendly. A list (leaving out the beast bosses):
- Attumen - no major melee issues here (perhaps curse being AE application, but I think that affects everyone similarly, especially on a fight with a minimum range charge)
- Moroes - only melee issue would be the whirlwinding warrior add, and he can be stunned
- Maiden - you're realistically limited to 4 melee on this fight (beside the MT) but that seems reasonable enough to me. I suppose at low gear levels it was better to have only 3, so we'll sort of count this one.
- BBW - some melees definitely have a harder time getting away if they're chosen to be Red Riding Hood, but rogues can simply vanish and stay stealthed and avoid the effect altogether - the only issue being if he kills you before you can get the vanish off.
- R&J - no melee hate
- Oz - no melee hate
- Curator - if you think this fight is anti melee, you're doing it wrong.
- Illhoof - no melee hate
- Aran - 'the rogue fight'
- Netherspite - I suppose it's somewhat dangerous to melee him during the banish phase, even then, as long as your tanks aren't knocked back, this is safe
- Prince - definitely anti melee.
So I see ... Maiden being kinda-anti melee (only in a 'max # of melee allowed sense) and Prince being definitely worse for melee over ranged... but other than that? Karazhan was fine.
Edit: I know this week in particular I've been doing more devil's advocate than anything else, but I do think it's reasonable, in general to combat the distress/'sky is falling' feeling that's coming about because our beta changes are at the tail end of the schedule.
I think you are looking at these bosses as they are now. Not as they were at the start of TBC. At the time many bosses had 360 degree cleaves, Aran was a much harder fight, etc.
Shaker, you're forgetting that when TBC released, boss cleave attacks were 360 degrees. (Edit: Sorry, I need to refresh before posting...) This was a big reason why many fights were melee unfriendly (even if they aren't now). I know Attumen has a cleave and I think Nightbane.
Curator is definitely not melee friendly. Casters can stand in one place and DPS both adds and the boss, while melee are wasting a large amount of time running around while also taking a lot more AOE damage from the adds. And there's no way you are going to kill the adds fast enough with melee sitting on Curator the whole fight at that gear level.
I think you are looking at these bosses as they are now. Not as they were at the start of TBC. At the time many bosses had 360 degree cleaves, Aran was a much harder fight, etc.
The only boss I remember having 360 cleave is Attumen, it hit for 4k, and couldn't crit. Not melee FRIENDLY, but not overly punishing. Yes, there's trash that cleaves - but there's trash that is 100% magic immune as well.
I'm not sure where everyone's getting that Karazhan is melee unfriendly. A list (leaving out the beast bosses):
Edit: I know this week in particular I've been doing more devil's advocate than anything else, but I do think it's reasonable, in general to combat the distress/'sky is falling' feeling that's coming about because our beta changes are at the tail end of the schedule.
Well, I there's a number of fights on that list that, while not specifically melee unfriendly, are sort of ranged-friendly which works out to the same thing:
Attumen - As I recall, the curse is just melee and ranged hit, not spell hit; so it doesn't affect casters at all (other than aggro issues - but each melee you bring is one extra person to decurse).
Moroes - Again, not specifically melee unfriendly, but you need to bring enough CC, tanks, and healing to control all the adds, which reduces the number of melee you can afford to bring.
Maiden - While we were learning this fight we found it best to have at most 2 melee DPS, so the tank + 2 DPS could spread out and not chain each other. And since you probably have 2 tanks in your group, that doesn't leave a lot of room for additional melee DPS.
R&J - Asymmetric. Melee do fine, but there's nothing that says you have to bring them, while you *do* have to bring ranged to get the fight done. So a balanced raid is fine, and a ranged-heavy raid is fine, but a melee-heavy raid is really not.
Oz - Like Moroes, there's a certain set of CCers you need to control the fight, which, again, reduces the number of available melee slots.
Curator - This fight is more melee friendly the better your gear gets. If you can control adds with only a couple of DPS and let the melee all pile up and burn the boss - sure, great. But in the early days, when you needed everyone or maybe everyone except one person on spark duty, you really wanted ranged DPS to deal with that, and at most one melee on the boss.
Illhoof - No melee hate... but it sure is important to have a lot of AoEers in.
So, while it's true that a lot of these fights aren't explicitly bad for melee, it's also true that almost all of them require a bunch of ranged folks to get the job done; hence, if you're putting a raid together for the instance, by the time you get all the classes in to satisfy these requirements, there's not a lot of room for melee.
But, that said: I agree with you that it's far too early to panic. Blizzard has, historically, been pretty good in terms of learning from their mistakes, so even if Karazhan was the most melee unfriendly instance in all existance, that doesn't mean 10-man Naxx will be. So I think we need to wait a bit longer and see what they come up with before we start worrying too much.
But, that said: I agree with you that it's far too early to panic. Blizzard has, historically, been pretty good in terms of learning from their mistakes, so even if Karazhan was the most melee unfriendly instance in all existance, that doesn't mean 10-man Naxx will be. So I think we need to wait a bit longer and see what they come up with before we start worrying too much.
ZA serves as a particularly good example of this. While it's true that we're at a small disadvantage on an encounter like the Dragonhawk, Eagle, or Hex Lord Malacrass (though it could be argued that Rogues make Malacrass easier because, while we ourselves are at greater risk, the Rogue souldrain is among the less dangerous ones), we bring enough of an advantage on Halazzi, Nalorakk and Zul'jin to consider things evenly. More importantly, the trash is significantly more melee friendly insofar as the abilities we bring to the table to lock down and control trash mobs were much more useful and effective there. It's nice to run a raid instance where Kidney Shot is my trash finisher of choice.
ZA serves as a particularly good example of this. While it's true that we're at a small disadvantage on an encounter like the Dragonhawk, Eagle, or Hex Lord Malacrass (though it could be argued that Rogues make Malacrass easier because, while we ourselves are at greater risk, the Rogue souldrain is among the less dangerous ones), we bring enough of an advantage on Halazzi, Nalorakk and Zul'jin to consider things evenly. More importantly, the trash is significantly more melee friendly insofar as the abilities we bring to the table to lock down and control trash mobs were much more useful and effective there. It's nice to run a raid instance where Kidney Shot is my trash finisher of choice.
Not only that, but rogues are especially valuable in a timed run due to using energy as opposed to mana, and are pretty good on the Eagle phase of ZJ. And I'd argue that Blizzard has most certainly learned given that their latest two instances, ZA (cf. the last couple of posts) and Sunwell, compared to Karazhan 1.0, are remarkably more melee-friendly (basically Felmyst aside, but you get my point).
Last edited by Arindelest : 08/14/08 at 4:57 PM.
Reason: Punctuation
So I see ... Maiden being kinda-anti melee (only in a 'max # of melee allowed sense) and Prince being definitely worse for melee over ranged... but other than that? Karazhan was fine.
Back in the early days of Kara, you wouldn't bring too much melee to Curator at the risk of too much running around dpsing and chaining flares. If you had only 1 melee, you'd stick them on Curator, but it also meant fewer raid spots for a rogue.
Illhoof is not so much anti-melee as it is AOE friendly. More reason for a raid leader to bring a warlock/mage over a rogue.
On Oz, you'd also be better off bringing a warlock/mage since they can kite Strawman, and in case of the warlock, throw fears on the other adds. Plus they can stay spread out when the Crone appears.
On Netherspite, again, not so much anti-melee, but other classes offer a lot more for this fight. Spriests for raid healing and other buffs if no other priests were present, warlocks for tanking the blue beam, extra healthstones for the raid, soulstone rezzes etc.
I guess my point is that, sure, you can bring a rogue but other classes offer a lot more and I would like to see that resolved for the starting raids in WOTLK, and especially in smaller raid settings now that every raid can be done in 10 man versions.
Try speccing 51 combat and use the top tier talent. The non-functional talent is enough proof for me, that they havent looked at the rogues as class in depth.
Deadly brew is unimplemented aswell, just playing rogue on beta feels very... placeholder-like atm.
Really, so far, the only classes to get huge changes patch after patch are death knights and mages. Just looks like a case of waiting for them to be happy with them classes before they move onto others.
In all honesty, I think we've just about come to the limit of what we can discuss intelligently about Rogues in WotLK until more changes are made. While discussing talent builds and as-yet unimplemented talents\abilities at this point is just conjecture, talking about TBC raid fights and boss designs is certainly no better in any way. This thread has rapidly been reduced to reminiscing on the "old days" of TBC raiding and the current state of Rogue raiding in relation to T6 boss fights. It's silly to make any kind of comparisons or have any discussion about TBC-release KZ in relation to WotLK. Without any real clues as to the level 80 raid itemization, discussion of Warglaives is moot and almost completely without value for WotLK. This is all going nowhere beyond turning this thread into an argument about TBC Rogues. We're all just repeating the same comments and points over and over again when these points have little if anything to do with the future of Rogues.
History is the sum total of mistakes that can be avoided.
For that reason, if Blizzard Devs are reading this thread (which I'm hoping they are), then the previous discussion had merit, worth and will hopefully provide results.
History is the sum total of mistakes that can be avoided.
For that reason, if Blizzard Devs are reading this thread (which I'm hoping they are), then the previous discussion had merit, worth and will hopefully provide results.
If they read EJ, then they came to a conclusion several months ago when this was all discussed initially in the Roguecraft thread. Us harping on the same mistakes over and over for months does not uncover anything new or worthwhile for the developers, if they read this thread in the first place. There's merit in the conclusions we've come to, yes, but rehashing the exact same ones time and time again out of boredom does nothing.
This may sound somewhat of blasphemy, but I for one don't want rogues to gain much more, if any, more group buffs. The only group buffs I would like is possibly hemo being improved. This would better match the model put out by many other top DPS classes. (Warlocks/Hunters for example) Destro Locks and BM Hunters put out alot of personal dps, with very little raid dps, but then a warlock can chose to spec affliction for a trade off of personal for raid, as well as a Survival Hunter. Simply giving rouges an untalented raid utility would very much ruin the role of our class.
Imo, the purpose of your rogues currently in BC, is to "use" group buffs. If you honestly made a raid without rogues, you basically wouldn't even bother putting together a melee group, because rogues are what the group is centered around. No other class can literally double in DPS just from a proper group/raid setup. If they gave us more raid/group "utility" blizzard would have to severely nerf our personal dps to match it. This would also come as a large pvp nerf, as raid/group buffs are hardly useful in arena. (Look at enhancement shamans for example, necessary in every raid but very very lacking in arena.)
The option to spec for the tradeoff of personal to raid is nice, but being forced to be utility is not what we want.
Regardless as to whether you think discussing this sort of thing is worthwhile or not, I assure you that discussing whether it's worth discussing is not. So if we could drop that conversation, at least, that would be good. Thanks.
In terms of the larger issue of whether this sort of discussion is productive or not: it's probably not the most useful thing in the world, but I don't think it hurts anything to try to better understand our exact role and the issues with it, so as long as the conversation remains constructive, it's a legitimate subject to discuss.
I don't particularly want to go too in depth on this subject, but for correctness/completeness' sake (and parts I'll agree with were just left out of the quote):
Originally Posted by Aldriana
Attumen - As I recall, the curse is just melee and ranged hit, not spell hit; so it doesn't affect casters at all (other than aggro issues - but each melee you bring is one extra person to decurse).
Moroes - Again, not specifically melee unfriendly, but you need to bring enough CC, tanks, and healing to control all the adds, which reduces the number of melee you can afford to bring.
Maiden - While we were learning this fight we found it best to have at most 2 melee DPS, so the tank + 2 DPS could spread out and not chain each other. And since you probably have 2 tanks in your group, that doesn't leave a lot of room for additional melee DPS.
R&J - Asymmetric. Melee do fine, but there's nothing that says you have to bring them, while you *do* have to bring ranged to get the fight done. So a balanced raid is fine, and a ranged-heavy raid is fine, but a melee-heavy raid is really not.
Curator - This fight is more melee friendly the better your gear gets. If you can control adds with only a couple of DPS and let the melee all pile up and burn the boss - sure, great. But in the early days, when you needed everyone or maybe everyone except one person on spark duty, you really wanted ranged DPS to deal with that, and at most one melee on the boss.
Moroes: CC the adds, sure - but every single one of them is kickable, stunnable, blindable, gougeable, and rarely hit hard enough to worry about. Honestly, if you were shy a shackle/trap a rogue was your 3rd best option (certainly over a warlock, or elemental shaman ... boomkin could have cycloned I suppose)
Maiden: Early on we did no more than tank + 3, but I'll concede that the fight was far easier if you just kicked all the melee out :P
R&J: I must be missing why ranged is required, unless you're talking about spellsteal for Julianne, which isn't necessary at all. (assuming you have a priest or shaman there to dispel it off her and Daring off of Romulo)
Curator: The 'melee friendly' strat is to just stack everyone at Curator's ankles, forcing all the sparks into melee range and making the transition from dps on spark to dps on Curator a non-issue (combo points are more of one, but being able to blade flurry during evocation and soloing a spark in 3 seconds more than made up for loss of finisher damage). As I hinted at above, there are 'ranged friendly' strategies, and 'melee friendly' ones - both are very functional, and make the fight neutral in my eyes.
As I recall, one of R+J (I forget which) had some sort of backwards cleave attack that made melee DPS on them decidedly risky. And on Moroes: okay, a rogue may be 3rd (though I think we usually used paladin fears as well, so I'd say it's more like 4th)... but why bring 3rd best when you can bring first best?
I guess the real thing about Karazhan is this: while not a lot of fights were specifically melee unfriendly, the instance as a whole required ranged, casters, and/or AoE in many circumstances, but never specifically required melee, which led to a fundamentally imbalanced situation. It's fine if ranged is required on some fights, so long as melee is needed on others; and it's fine if no fight requires melee, so long as no fight requires ranged, either. But having ranged required and melee not strikes me as fundamentally a balance issue.
It does require a 'reverse wall tank' (i.e. |wall| Melee -> Romulo -> <- Tank) position so the melee don't get ejected out of position, but other than the positioning requirement and a small healing load (Easily covered by Prayer of Mending or a renew/rejuv) it was not a big deal.
I guess I see it differently because Aran was soooo big in our favor - kicks and kick timing were so important, and melee were so dominant on the fight, and other than Nightbane, our guild ONLY stalled on Aran, so the general tone for Karazhan was that they wouldn't run without a rogue, because Aran was the hardest fight in zone. This wasn't even in regard to me raid leading (we ran 3 Karazhan groups, only one of which was run by me, but all stalled on Aran)
Blizzard can do a lot with the way they design raid encounters beyond making them based just ranged- or melee-friendly. I can't find the blue quote right now, but something they mentioned was raid encounters where a players control a series of dragons. E.G. one tanked a boss, one did AoE damage to adds, etc. (if someone can find and quote the link it would be greatly appreciated). This doesn't require any particular set of a classes in a raid, but rather focuses more on individual skill, play, awareness and reactions, etc. Something of this nature isn't quite incorporated into WoW as we know it right now, but encounters along similar lines already do exist (Teron's Constructs, Gurtogg to name a couple). Raids haven't been designed yet, so this wasn't exactly telling what a certain encounter was going to be, but it did let us in on the way of thinking in terms of the type of encounters Blizz wants in the future.
The fact that 10man versions of all 25mans will exist leads me to believe that this style of design will be more prominent in WotLK; unless of course they completely rework the basic gimmick or idea behind bosses between 10 and 25 raids, but I just don't see that happening. There's an almost unlimited extent to which raid encounters can designed around having people that possess qualities that make them good player, rather than just their class being a good melee\ranged\healer\tank, etc. Logically, it only makes sense that, given the number of classes and specs that will be available when DKs launch and the 10man versions of all 25man raids, design will move away from the more strict, class+role based encounters towards ones that many different compositions can do. Obviously there will still be benefits to stacking a certain role or class on certain fights that makes it easier, but the extent to which that will be the case should decrease.
EDIT: When I refer to Teron and Bloodboil, I mean in the sense that people have to do something outside of just play their class normally as DPS, healing, tanking, etc.
Has anyone heard any more of the rumor about respecs/multiple specs recently? There was talk quite a while back about Blizz looking into the respeccing system, possibly giving the option of having 2 seperate specs, with the ability to switch between those. While some would see it more as a neat way to switch between whatever PvP and PvP spec, I'd also be interested in mid-raid respecs, for example, to switch some key abilities which could make a a fight simpler through added utility.
This may sound somewhat of blasphemy, but I for one don't want rogues to gain much more, if any, more group buffs. The only group buffs I would like is possibly hemo being improved. This would better match the model put out by many other top DPS classes. (Warlocks/Hunters for example) Destro Locks and BM Hunters put out alot of personal dps, with very little raid dps, but then a warlock can chose to spec affliction for a trade off of personal for raid, as well as a Survival Hunter. Simply giving rouges an untalented raid utility would very much ruin the role of our class.
On this note, there was a portion of a post on the warrior forums recently (specifically on the subject of Arms vs Fury, but the answer broadened it to encompass all classes and specs), that may offer some insight into what Blizzard's thinking is on this sort of thing (or rather, not what their thinking is, but at least that they're internally debating the issue):
Yes. We wanted to make Arms as attractive as Fury for raids, but we probably tipped the scales too far. We're currently discussing whether it's okay for any class or spec to bring no real synergy to a group other than mad dps. But granting buffs to traditional high dps classes might also mean their dps needs to come down a little in proportion to everyone else.
Has anyone heard any more of the rumor about respecs/multiple specs recently? There was talk quite a while back about Blizz looking into the respeccing system, possibly giving the option of having 2 seperate specs, with the ability to switch between those. While some would see it more as a neat way to switch between whatever PvP and PvP spec, I'd also be interested in mid-raid respecs, for example, to switch some key abilities which could make a a fight simpler through added utility.
It was (re-) confirmed a few weeks back as something that's in the works, but they haven't decided on a precise implementation yet (see here)
Has anyone heard any more of the rumor about respecs/multiple specs recently? There was talk quite a while back about Blizz looking into the respeccing system, possibly giving the option of having 2 seperate specs, with the ability to switch between those. While some would see it more as a neat way to switch between whatever PvP and PvP spec, I'd also be interested in mid-raid respecs, for example, to switch some key abilities which could make a a fight simpler through added utility.
In principal, I think it's a great idea, and one I'm hoping that they stick with. Going along with what I posted before, it'd open the door to having much more diverse encounters if they implement it right. If it's something along the lines of "go back to X city and talk to Y trainer to change your spec" then it's really not any different than things are now, just minus the gold cost. If it's something that could be done, say, when you're out of combat with a button\spell\ability and perhaps a cooldown, it could be pretty cool I think (locked out in Arenas most likely, but then again, maybe not). Everything I've read from Blizzard has pointed towards having a less strict design of boss fights, and allowing many different ways of succeeding. If that line of thinking holds, this would play into that concept nicely. As Kharen said, I remember reading recently that it was still an idea they were thinking of, so let's keep our fingers crossed.
The original Romulo and Julianne made it nearly impossible for melee to attack him from behind. Perhaps many of you weren't in Karazhan when that version existed. But when we got to Karazhan (and we were there fairly early) in our dungeon blues, we concluded there was no realistic way to have a rogue sit on Romulo. The ability was nerfed, our gear has gotten better, whatever. Between the glancing blow issue, the cleave issue, etc. it wasn't a fun time to play rogue. Clearly, enough changed by the time most of us got to SSC.
That said, a group buff is the ticket to relevance in Lich King. As is an ability to bring enough damage on one's own. Especially for a class who is so often identified correctly as a one-trick pony. It's safe to conclude if some version of both is not present, rogues will have an awfully tough time commanding their "2.5" raid slots. I'll reserve judgment for the time being, but the silence does give one pause.
08/14/08, 1:15 PM
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