Elitist Jerks - Cataclysm Rogue Changes

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Cataclysm Rogue Changes

With the upcoming changes being announced keep the following guidelines in mind when posting. This is the place to discuss these changes only.

Failure to do so will result in an automatic infraction.

Do not merely link blue post information without any useful contribution of your own.
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Do not suggest what you think Blizzard should do. Neither we nor Blizzard care about your great idea.
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Do remember that all normal rules apply.
Do remember that these are proposed changes and subject to fine tuning and/or complete overhaul.

The changes, for convenience:

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New Rogue Abilities

Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue's current target, helping to ensure combo points aren't wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

Combat Readiness (level 83): Combat Readiness is a new ability that we intend rogues to trigger defensively. While this ability is active, whenever the rogue is struck by a melee or ranged attack, he or she will gain a stacking buff called Combat Insight that results in a 10% reduction in damage taken. Combat Insight will stack up to 5 times and the timer will be refreshed whenever a new stack is applied. Our goal is to make rogues better equipped to go toe-to-toe with other melee classes when Evasion or stuns are not in play. This ability lasts 6 seconds and has a 2-minute cooldown.

Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

We're also planning to make changes to some of the other abilities and mechanics you're already familiar with. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of what we want for each spec.

In PvP, we want to reduce the rogue's dependency on binary cooldowns and "stun-locks," and give them more passive survivability in return. One major change is that we'll put Cheap Shot on the same diminishing return as other stuns. The increase to Armor and Stamina on cloth, leather, and mail gear will help with this goal as well.
In PvE, even accounting for active modifiers like Slice and Dice and Envenom, a very large portion of the rogue's damage is attributable to passive sources of damage. Yes, they are using abilities for the entire duration of a fight, but we want to reduce the percentage of rogue damage that comes from auto-attacks and poisons. More of their damage will be coming from active abilities and special attacks.
We would like to improve the rogue leveling experience. Positional attacks and DoT-ramping mechanics will be de-emphasized at low levels and then re-introduced at higher levels for group gameplay. We are also providing rogues with a new low-level ability, Recuperate, to convert combo points into a small heal-over-time (HoT).
To complement the change to combo points, non-damage abilities such as Recuperate and Slice and Dice will no longer have target requirements and can be used with any of the rogue's existing combo points, including combo points remaining on recently killed targets. This will not affect damage abilities, which will still require combo points to be present on the specific target you want to damage. To coincide with this, the UI will be updated so that rogues know how many combo points they have active.
Ambush will now work with all weapons, but will have a reduced coefficient when not using a dagger. When opening from Stealth, all rogues will be able to choose from burst damage, DoT abilities, or a stun.
As we've done recently with some of the Subtlety abilities, we want to make sure more rogue abilities aren't overly penalized by weapon choice. With a few exceptions (like Backstab), you should be able to use a dagger, axe, mace, sword, or fist weapon without being penalized for most attacks.
Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in the ranged slot. In addition, we hope to allow rogues to apply poisons to their throwing weapons.
We are very happy with Tricks of the Trade as a general mechanic and as a way to give rogues more group utility, but we don't want it to account for as much threat transfer as it does now.

New Talents and Talent Changes

In Cataclysm, the overall feel of each of the rogue's talent trees will change, as we would like each tree to have a clearly defined niche and purpose. The talent details below are meant to give you an idea of what we're going for.

Assassination will be more about daggers, poisons, and burst damage.
Combat will be all about swords, maces, fist weapons, axes, and being engaged toe-to-toe with your enemies. A Combat rogue will be able to survive longer without needing to rely on Stealth and evasion mechanics.
The Subtlety tree will primarily be based around utilizing Stealth, openers, finishers, and survivability. It'll be about daggers, too, but less so than Assassination.
In general, Subtlety rogues needs to do more damage than they do today, and the other trees need to have more tools.
Weapon-specialization talents (for all classes, not just rogues) are going away. We do not want you to have to respec when you get a different weapon. Interesting talents, such as Hack and Slash, will work with all weapons. Boring talents, such as Mace Specialization and Close Quarters Combat, will be going away.
The Assassination and Combat talent trees currently have a lot of passive bonuses. We plan to dial back the amount of Critical Strike Rating provided by these trees so that rogues still want it on their gear.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Assassination
Melee damage
Melee critical damage
Poison damage

Combat
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Harder-hitting combo-point generators

Subtlety
Melee damage
Armor Penetration
Harder-hitting finishers

The initial tier of rogue Mastery bonuses will be very similar between the trees. However, the deeper that a player goes into any tree, the more specialized and beneficial the Masteries will be to the play style for that spec. Assassination will have better poisons than the other two specs. Combat will have very steady and consistent overall damage. Subtlety will have strong finishers.

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To clarify on Combat Readiness: when activated being hit will build up the Combat Insight buff. If not struck within 6 seconds of the last hit it will fall off and the Combat Readiness state will end. If the rogue continues to be hit however Combat Insight will continue to reapply, and it can be applied up to a maximum of 30 seconds total.

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Numbers aren't quite hammered out yet but it restores based on max health and the more combo points used the longer it lasts. While it's introduced as a low level ability it obviously scales with gear and base health upgrades (being based on max health and all) and be useful for more than just leveling.

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Some of you are focused too much on the word "cooldown." Consider for a moment what the abilities actually do. The current traditional PvP encounter with a rogue is to jump out at someone from stealth, then try to burn them down while applying a chain of stuns. One of two things happen (i.e. it's a pretty binary outcome): you kill the target in time, or you run out ouf stuns and the target kills you. Now I know that situation is kind of stereotypical perhaps to the point of contrivance, but you should get the basic idea.

We want to make that outcome less binary. With abilities like Combat Readiness you should be able to go toe to toe with a plate wearer for a short period of time. With Smoke Bomb, you should be able to escape spells for a short period of time, or at least get the caster to move closer to you. Does this mean you're now a plate-wearer instead of a rogue? Of course not. But it means you aren't so dependent on killing things while they're locked down. It means you get to think on your feet a little rather than apply a pre-determined sequence of attacks that either succeeds or fails.

In addition, with the boosts to leather armor and Stamina though, you will be a little tougher to kill even without any cooldowns.

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We've said something similar in some of the other previews, but let me address real quick why we didn't add new damage-dealing openers, cp generators or finishers. It's because you have plenty of openers, cp generators and finishers.

We don't want to add new abilities for the sake of adding them, and in fact we've spent a lot of the last two expansions trying to make sure your full arsenal of attacks had a purpose. We don't want to consider the hypothetical level 120 rogue and imagine that you have four versions of Ambush and a whole action bar of Sinister Strike with various subtle shades of distinction.

We do like to add new abilities, because that's an exciting part of a new expansion. But we like to find roles for them. Some are going to necessarily be more situational, but that's why we offer them as core abilities rather than talents that have a heftier cost.

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One more point: Fan of Knives was not nerfed. I'm not sure where that concept is coming from unless you are interpreting that from changing the weapon it's based on to the ranged weapon. We didn't talk much about numbers, so unless you see "We want this abilitiy to do less damage," then you're just jumping to conclusions. It's safer to assume that every number in the game is changing, but the relative roles of abilities and talents are staying the same unless we specify otherwise (not that we're listing every single talent tree change in these previews - far from it.)

We just want the ranged weapon to be more than a stat stick for rogues. Adding poisons to FoK is actually a pretty hefty buff. Yes, this means that bows and guns aren't of much interest to rogues (after leveling). But in this case we want Fan of KNIVES to be taken literally. :)

Now, having said all that, we suspect you will AE less often in Cataclysm. You'll CC more and you'll burn targets down one at a time more often. But that just means all classes will do less damage with AEs. That's not a rogue nerf.

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On Vanish, the answer is we just don't know yet. This ability was designed to let rogues get back into stealth in order to perform openers again or drop aggro. It was never intended as a spell dodger and because of technical realities between the way the server and client communicate, we're just not comfortable at this point to promise that Vanish can be the Vanish of your dreams. Now perhaps one option is we go the opposite route and say that Vanish will never get you out of taking damage and we give you another ability that will work to do that. It's just too early in development to know for sure. I for one will be very disappointed if we're still having this conversation a year from now. :(

On PvP mobility in general, we're aware of the concerns you have. A trainable Shadowstep isn't something that's in the cards, but we're looking at other ways for rogues to feel like they can deal with opponents who are trying to keep them in range.

On the cooldown issue, another way to consider the problem is how reliant PvP rogues are on Preparation. That's the problem we're really trying to address: you feel invincible when those abilities are available and impotent without them. A rogue with Sprint and Vanish (maybe) feels impossible to lock down, but a rogue with neither feels immobile. We'd rather see a world in which rogues have a deeper bag of tricks, but are not as reliant on any single one of those tricks as they are today. As with all things beta, the cooldowns on the new (and old) abilities are subject to adjustment based on testing and feedback.

Rogue changes are up.

Binding FoK to thrown weapons, and permitting an extra poison, has an obvious PVE benefit - you can now have two "rotation" poisons that optimize your outgoing damage (like Deadly/Instant), and a "utility" poison for applying debuffs (Wound/Crippling/Mind-numbing, where applicable). Then again, there may be fights where keeping WP up is so important that if you work FoK into your rotation to apply it, you lose so much DPS that you may as well use WP on your MH.

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Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

While we still know very little about the Smoke Bomb mechanics, the wording seems to suggest that the Smoke Cloud makes the units inside untargetable except by units that are also in the Smoke Cloud (i.e. they can take damage from AOE or general raid damage, but not ranged attacks). In PVE, the question then becomes what this does to threat. The way I'm reading it, either:

1) The enemy moves into the cloud, and reacquires the target. (i.e. pull ranged units that are being tanked into melee range)
2) The enemy loses the target and acquires one outside the cloud. (i.e. don't Smoke Bomb the tank or the healer gets it)
3) One or the other, depending on the encounter design and the enemy AI.

Let's say you have a scenario like in Halls of Reflection, where early on, when people were still struggling with it, you would get to the last barrier and there was that one caster that just wouldn't seem to move any closer, and got wrapped in the Lich King's moving circle of death. You smoke bomb the tank. Does that pull the caster in, or does it change targets? (In other words, what does losing a target do to the target's place in the aggro table while Smoke Cloud is up?)

Hopefully Blizzard will clarify this in a forthcoming FAQ.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Rogue
(For reference, I've also copied the content below, in case the server is down or what not.)

Overall I'm not overly excited about these changes. The combo point transfer is a nice tool, but a) it's on a 1 minute cooldown (most likely for PvP reasons), and the independence of SnD of a target means we'll have to deal with 2 'sets' of combo points then. I think this unnecessarily overcomplicates it a bit.
Smoke Bomb seems like fun in PvP, and helpful in PvE for luring ranged adds into melee range (think of Lady Deathwhisper), so you don't need to run behind a pillar/tree/whatever to get them into AE position. 3 minute cooldown may be too high though if you're dealing with multiple add waves, and/or don't have enough rogues to set up a rotation.

The mechanic of Combat readiness seems interesting, however it being a cooldown directly contradicts the goal to reduce the rogue's dependency on cooldowns. If that ever was a goal, and we'll have to see if and what other cooldowns will get replaced in Cataclysm.

Less dependency on auto attacks is a good thing, and I do like to see my abilities hit harder. So far this has been a problem in PvP, but with the change to stuns (which really is a PvP thing only) they might be able to introduce it without all too much further changes.

Not too shiny so far, but this is the first preview of hopefully many to come, so let's see what Blizzard has in store for us.

This preview seemed much less fleshed out than the others so far. It seems strange that they talk about wanting to make rogues rely less on passive damage, but then seem to tie it so strictly to specific trees. I'm hoping that they still intend to bring white/poison down across the board and then give Mut a little more poison and the other specs a bit more yellow damage.

I'm curious about the change to Ambush. I'm wondering if we'll ever get to a point where combat will want to ambush or whether this is solely a pvp change.

It also seems counter-intuitive that they are giving rogues (and warriors) much more freedom in choosing weapons while at the same time restricting us to throwing weapons in the ranged slot.

Overall it just felt like a vague and disappointing preview.

It was a big surprise to see Armor Pen tied to Subtlety, and Haste to Combat (we had previously been told it would be the other way around).

I have to say, the self hot and changes to combo points (which sound somewhat convoluted, but with some tweaking...) are very welcome. I had always thought the best way to do all this would be to store combo points on the rogue rather than the target, but it appears they want to toy with this way first. Both will be a great help to leveling and dungeon-crawling rogues.

2 of our new abilities strongly favour pvp (I can't see combat readiness being that much use in raids), so clearly won't get the support of this community - but, that said, since our trees are among the *worst* culprits for compulsory and boring talents, we'll probably get some interesting stuff through those

I want to add a few points affecting rogues that weren't mentioned in the rogue preview

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Originally Posted by Warrior Preview

Sunder Armor will be reduced to three stacks instead of five, and still provide only a 4% reduction in armor per stack. We want to make this debuff easier to apply and less of a damage swing when it falls off.

Q: Is only Sunder Armor being changed?
A: Rogue Expose Armor and other abilities that apply a similar debuff are being changed accordingly. They will all provide the same debuff at 12% armor reduction.

As to how they'll make Sunder Armor easier to apply for rogues, who knows - that hasn't been mentioned yet, but I'd imagine they will.

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Originally Posted by Warrior Preview

Overall, heals cast by players in Cataclysm will be a lower number relative to players' health than the current game. So to make the Mortal Strike debuff less mandatory but still useful in PvP, Mortal Strike will reduce healing by only 20%. All equivalent debuffs, including the Shadow priest and Frost mage debuffs, will be for 20% less healing. At the moment we aren't considering giving this debuff to anyone else, though we will certainly consider PvP utility for historically under-represented specs that use other mechanics.

Which doesn't really change much - we'll still use wound when we use it now.

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Originally Posted by Warrior Preview

Improved Pummel, a Fury talent, will cause a successful interrupt to generate 10/20 Rage.

This seems like part of a design decision to reward interrupters who do their job, so it's quite possible there'll be a similar setup for rogues. This, however, is pure speculation.

As far as the Fan of Knives change goes, there's first of all the question of whether it'll work with anything but a throwing weapon, which seems unlikely.
Now, it's possible this is all part of an attempt to homogenize point blank aoe (looking at the whirlwind change, it sounds like they're working on something atleast), but it does bring about some issues and improvements. First of all it'll remove the requirement to weapon swap to double direct damage poisons on shall we say "FOK suitable weapons". That's all fine and dandy as FOK these days seems to balanced on the assumption that the rogue weaponswaps when using it. On the other hand it could be an issue with regards to poison application. While the situations where you're relying on FOK to spread poisons are definitely situational, loosing a chance to apply Mindnumbing on stuff like Anub'arak Burrowers or Crippling on Lich King's Valkyrs could prove to be a nuisance - that is of course if you aren't able to spec into Deadly Brew which presumable should still work.
As for PVP I wondering what exactly the point of the Deadly Throw slow is if you can apply Crippling through Deadly Throw.
Last but not least: I think it's safe to assume the synergy between FOK+Blade Flurry is dead in Cataclysm. With regards to the forum rules I should probably add this can be both a good and a bad thing; FOK is likely to be balanced so it's viable but the lack of synergy can reduce the AOE burst potential.

I've got no real comments on Recuperate and Redirect; they sort out a couple of niche problems, which atleast at the moment aren't all that critical. They're nice additions for PVP, but not so much in a raiding enviroment; Saurfang's Blood Beasts will still pose a challenge, so will Putricide's oozes and Deathbringer's numerous adds - a challenge, but nothing more. For PVP I can certainly see the potential in a Redirect+Shadowstep+Kidney Shot macro, but if Redirect is supposed to change rogue gameplay, it needs make combo points all together a self buff. The difference between what abilities can be used on dead mobs seems more confusing than helpfull atleast.

When it comes to Combat Readiness and Mastery bonuses I'm getting genuinely worried.
They're stating they want rogue's to rely less on binary (and if I may, long) cooldowns and react more, and furthermore that they want to rogues to do less passive damage. While doing so they present us with yet another "use and forget" cooldown and Mastery bonuses which largely boost the passive components of our damage breakdown. Admittedly, Combat Readiness requires you to react, and it isn't a "dodge or die" binary ability, but it's still a "use and forgot for 3 minutes" ability. Is this thing even usable while stunned Where did the brilliant concept of more Feint like abilities go? A potential 12.5% reduction in damage taken at max effect is really quite alot, but I honestly feel the distribution needs to be different for it to change our gameplay at all. Lower CD, lower duration.
Furthermore, where did the increased energy regen go? If you want to increase ability damage, you either need to increase the damage per hit or the frequency of said hits. The first is easy to control through modifiers which they've apparently gone for in Combat+Sub Masteries, but this historically presents a problem in PVP. The latter is controlled through resource regen. Slice and Dice currently accounts for a fairly large part of our energy regen, but is also the reason why passive damage makes up such a large portion of our damage breakdown. Perhaps it's time to grab the root of the problem and tweak the knobs previously used for balancing rogue damage before settling on what sort of Mastery bonuses would be a good idear.

I guess we should expect Tricks of the Trade to be brought in line with the 4 second duration of Misdirect. As the main function of Tricks of the Trade (for me anyway) is to be able to start DPS straight away, I wouldn't care too much about such a change.

On a final note I was surprised there was no movement changes. So far both priests, warriors and shamans have seen improvements to movement in Inner Will+Life Grip, Heroic Leap and Spiritwalker’s Grace. Admittedly, Smoke Bomb will allow us to negate alot of crowd control while it's up, but I can only what a nightmare it'll be to play against say hunter+priest - even with Shadowstep.

I think people are over complicating the issue of combo points here. As it is now, combo points still exist on a mob while you attack another until you generate some on the new mob, if you don't generate new ones you can go back to the first target and they are still there, all this is doing is saying that you can use them without retargeting the first mob.

But what if you're having CPs on multiple mobs? How will you/the game chose which CPs to use?
How will it differentiate between the mob you're currently attacking and the mob you previously attacked?

You need to put some good thought into game mechanics and game UI to make this work, which seems a bit overcompliated to me, as stated before.

That's right, but why not using an UI which shows you your actual amount of combo points when you loose your main target. If you target it again the UI may show us that this target is actually comboed.

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Originally Posted by sp00n (Post 1613026)

Overall I'm not overly excited about these changes. The combo point transfer is a nice tool, but a) it's on a 1 minute cooldown (most likely for PvP reasons), and the independence of SnD of a target means we'll have to deal with 2 'sets' of combo points then. I think this unnecessarily overcomplicates it a bit.

Let me preface this by saying I play with both a UI fame mod (x-perl) and a combo point counter mod (nugComboBar) so I'm not entirely positive this is how the default ui behaves, but I suspect it is relevant even if not: when I kill something with combo points left on it, say it dies to a mutilate, my ui still displays the correct number of CPs on my target despite the fact that it's dead. This leads me to heavily suspect that there is no notion of two different "sets" of CPs. You either have them on a target or you don't, and that target is either alive or it isn't. And more importantly, when you generate CPs on a living target, all other CPs are cleared, specifically, off of both living *or* dead targets. I've heard more than a few people complain about needing 2 CP counters because of the changes, and I really don't think that's the case.

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Originally Posted by sp00n (Post 1613060)

I'm gonna guess that once you start generating combo points on a new target, you lose whatever combo points were stored on the previous target, unless you use the new Redirect.

And since it will have a 1-min cooldown (at this time, anyway), we'll be using SnD when switching targets unless Redirect is up. So essentially, there shouldn't be wasted combo points anymore: either SnD or Redirect.

EDIT: I more or less agree with what StoicRoivaS posted while I was typing.
EDIT2: The UI does need modified a little: it needs to show combo points when no target is selected (perhaps attached to the rogue's portrait). But that doesn't mean it will work any differently.

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Originally Posted by sp00n (Post 1613026)

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Rogue
Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

So my first thought upon reading this was of the Zerg ability Dark Swarm in Starcraft. For those of you who unfamiliar it is stated as(edited for objects not found in WoW like buildings and Hydralisks):

Dark Swarm

Dark Swarm appears on the battlefield as an orange smoke cloud. The cloud encompasses a 6x6 matrix area. Units within the cloud take no damage from ranged attacks. Only units with melee, splash, or special weaponry are able to affect a unit underneath a Dark Swarm. Note that the Swarm will only protect units.

Going forward we might be able to further understand how it works with this as an insight.

Also, I am curious to see how the ranged weapon in regards to FoK works. Might it include poison tipped arrows and we throw em from our quiver or perhaps radiation type bullets? Hopefully they are taking this into consideration instead of pigeonholing us into thrown weapons only.

I think smoke bomb could be useful in fights where you want to control who's being targeted by adds. Take the Putricide fight for example. Want someone with a speed boost to be targeted by the orange ooze? Everyone but that person/people fight inside the smoke cloud when the slime attempts to target someone. It wouldn't be appropriate for all fights (and I'm not suggesting it would be ideal for Putricide, was just an example.) That ability is going to be one that has a lot of potential, and it should be interesting to see how it actually functions when it goes live.

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Originally Posted by Tanstaafl (Post 1613017)

I don't think the aggro table will change at all. To me, it sounds like Smoke Bomb will create a line of sight obstacle which will draw the target inside the cloud. If the tank is outside the cloud, the mob will stay where it's at and focus on him. If the tank is inside the cloud, the mob will have to come in, the same way it would run around a corner if you LOS'ed it.

I don't think they force us to range weapon only. My interpreation is that FoK damage will be based off the ranged weapon no matter what type of weapon of equipped, however we will be able to poison our thrown weapon. This situation would point to FoK poisons only being able to proc if the weapon is a thrown and has a poison currently applied to it. This would lead to a situation where by we have a choice to apply three poisons for say crippling poison to slow the target with for a quick deadly throw using a previous example.

I like the idea of redirect. I imagine that passive buffs such as SnD will use those on other targets first until they are all gone. Intresting to see how this is going to work espcially with mulitple targets. Do they queue or will it be that if we have some on mulitple target they can stack to 5 max before the rest are wasted? Intresting to see how this mechanic turns out.

Smoke bomb I'm a bit on the fence on. My initial thought was that it was an Archavon reduces chance to hit any target in cloud mechanic but then I read it properly.