LDW: It would be somewhat helpful for a strategy where you clump up all adds near Deathwhisper, so that the caster adds are running into melee range and can be AoEd down. You can use Grip, Counterspell and/or the pillars there to achieve the same thing now.
Saurfang: In our first tries we suffered from mages getting marked, which was an extremely bad call for us, due to them being so squishy. Thus the encounter really felt very RNG for us and we still joke about how unlikely it is that two mages in a row get a mark (which of course did happen right after the comment was made back then). A Smoke Bomb would have been helpful there.

I surely hope they do. I do not want to imagine having both talents AND an increased energy regen through haste. Escpecially during ARush, which already sometimes feels like a smash feast.

Did you even read what I typed?

Marrowgar: He *can not* spike tanks, thus the cloud prevents all spikes, not just confines them to melee.
LDW: The adds are not the ones casting the MC, LDW herself is, and as far as I know she can't move during P1, thus potentially no MC is cast at all.
Saurfang: No, he does not always mark melee. He marks a random raid member, tanks included, and by putting your whole raid (other than tanks) under smoke, you force the mark to get put on a tank, which is a pretty big advantage for any guild still struggling with normal mode or working on hard mode.
Princes: The effect that the empowered vortex produces is an aoe effect, but the application of each "debuff" so to say on each player which produces the aoe effect is a single target ability. That's like saying mages will be able to living bomb a rogue under smoke, I highly doubt this. Just like empowered vortex, LB is a single target spell which eventually produces an aoe effect.

I don't mean to pick nits over somewhat tiny perks, but you seemed to have misunderstood every single bullet on the list, and I agree, these aren't huge perks to any guild that farms normal modes, but I'm more thinking of guilds on working on hard modes or guilds struggling on normals. Likewise, my original intent was not to entail all of the overpowered applications, I was just giving a brief list (emphasis on brief, many more applications exist) of why I believe boss abilities are going to ignore this mechanic entirely.

@Princes: There is no benefit to having only the melee/tanks get Emp Vortex. If anything you'd want RANGED to be the only ones targeted since they should already be spread apart, thus allowing the melee to stay in place and not get a stack of the movement debuff (for hard mode).

@Saurfang: Blood Nova makes this a bad idea if it occurs near Mark timing.

@BQL: Depending on fears the entire raid likely wont be able to get to the same location

Do you mean for your strategy to work only during Bonestorm? Because Smoke Bomb is not intended to prevent targeting when in melee range, so unless you have everybody move out of melee range and into the Smoke Bomb (which is an overall DPS loss), you will still be in melee range of the boss, and thus, the Smoke Bomb would not make you immune.

@ Skul & Ald: I don't mean to imply I'm trying to somehow "break PvE" and I know it's silly to think about trading 5 seconds of dps time to get everyone in a certain spot for a chance to "aim" a boss spell, but I'm imagining groups that aren't completely farmed out. I mean, we just got our first put-25 kill two weeks ago, we aren't as good in 25s as we are in 10s by any means. And yes, I realize that bosses that are inside the smoke will still see players also inside, any time I referenced a smoke cloud, it was under the assumption that the rogue would run out of melee range, then place it, and all applicable people could then head inside. Again, it seems sort of silly to trade many seconds of raid dps for these benefits, but when you're working on heroic saurfang, getting a tank marked over anyone else is a massive advantage, and I'm sure any group still working on him would gladly trade 5 seconds of dps time for this guarantee.

On what will and won't hit people under a smoke bomb, obviously neither of can can say for sure yet, but my interpretation of "only aoe spelling hitting" was a completely non-targeted area-aoe spell. I'm thinking blizzard, DnD, RoF, Volley, etc. When I imagine someone applying multiple things to single targets, that spell just as easily could have had that TargetCounter variable set to 1 to hit a single person. I don't see spells of that nature applying inside a smoke. I can't think of any player spells off-hand that mimic this sort of thing, but if there were, I would still not expect them to work in smoke. Again, it's pretty pointless to speculate, but that was my impression of the info given thus far.


Edit: Guess I should have read RandomOne's post before typing. I agree with the trend you're seeing here. A lot of the rogues that liked the preview seemed to be the ones that were still leveling or alts (or pvpers obviously), and a majority of the ones that didn't like the preview were the hardcore pve rogues. I think Ald put it well when he said the changes were sort of dependant on where you thought the class was on the whole, and I agree there wasn't much that I wanted from my preview from a pve perspective. The first and almost only thing that I really would have liked was trainable shadowstep, which has pvp balance issues. I guess my only concern is that Mut rogues will still be hitting mut, mut, env while combat rogues will be hitting SSx5, evis up at 85. There is still plenty of room for our gameplay to change, just not within the new abilities it seems.

Ok, I re-read your responses Ald and I get what you're saying now. You thought that I thought that smoking in melee would prevent melee applications, and thus corrected my list based on that. I guess it's my fault that I didn't specify the rougue would always be running out to smoke away from the boss (otherwise it would be pointless, like you asserted). I didn't mean to be so snarky, but it just seemed like you misread every single point, but I get what happened now. Sorry for that.

The problem is that the preview may be badly phrased. Consider this:

It talks about losing your target. That means the discussion above about melee only getting spiked on Marrowgar or marked on Saurfang makes sense: the boss can't target ranged players, therefore the melee gets it.

But then it says this:

When LoS'ing a mob, they don't lose their target. They simply have to run closer to be in line of sight of you again and keep beating on you. I'm not aware of any way to force a mob to drop its target in the game at this time (if I forgot one, do tell), except for abilities that affect threat, such as Vanish. That's why some people were initially assuming this new ability would affect threat.

So if it doesn't affect threat, we have a new mechanic that combines LoS and detargeting. And I suspect we don't really know how existing bosses will react to that, because it's never happened before.

Either that, or the preview is badly written.

For the PvP aspect of smoke bomb, I'm curious if the "interferes with enemy targeting" would apply to enemies outside trying to heal people inside the bomb. It would essentially open up very powerful options for bursting non-healers and/or forcing healers to move from safe locations in arena/battlegrounds, given the area is not miniscule. If that will be the case, then the long-ish cooldown is quite fitting, albeit too long for anything but an emergency button in PvE.

Your quoted line doesn't mention losing your target. It simply says the smoke will create a LoS obstacle.


Edit: both bolded parts are important

Re-read it. There are 2 quotes. The key part my comment referred to is:

The LoS was the second quote, which kinda contradicted this losing-target thing.

Combine that with the post Tinwhisker quoted and we find that the preview was indeed badly phrased. It's not that mobs lose their target, contrary to what it says, it's that they can't use their single-target abilities, but maintain the current target.

So to use one of the examples above, on Marrowgar, if everyone but the tanks is in a Smoke Bomb and outside of melee range, 2 possible things can happen: 1) Marrowgar runs into the Smoke Bomb to spike people, while still maintaining threat on the tank and running back to him afterwards; 2) Specific boss abilities such as Bone Spike will simply ignore abilities like Smoke Bomb. My money's on 2) and if you haven't noticed, you can be Bone Spike'd during Killing Spree already, even though you're untargetable during KS.

All this to say... don't expect to use Smoke Bomb often on boss fights. Blizzard will make damn sure we can't cheat basic encounter mechanics such as Bone Spike with Smoke Bombs.

Why is everyone trying to find use of a new ability (smoke bomb) in the current content and "blowing it off" as useless? How do you know it wont be of very good use in new encounters with unseen mechanics?

All of those abilities that you listed wouldn't be hampered by Smoke Bomb because they are either a) Conal abilities that have no 'target', b) are "on-next-swing" abilities and are melee, or c) on your highest threat target, which is where you want them to be. In any case, there is little use contemplating how it can affect current end-game fights, because by the time we'll have the ability to actually use the new mechanic, everything will be farmed to death already, or the mechanic is going to be drastically different than it is now.