This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Rogues in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.
Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.
Apex Talents
Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.
To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:
How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?
For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.
Thank You
We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!
Assassination has seen numerous changes in Midnight to focus it on its core damage-over-time maintenance and Energy management gameplay. We’ve removed a number of special case ability uses from its rotation, such as applying Caustic Spatter with Mutilate, and reduced the number of abilities used in its cooldown windows. We’ve updated its AOE gameplay to remove the need to enter stealth to apply bleeds to multiple targets - you now periodically re-apply Garrote and Rupture and use the new Crimson Tempest to spread them to nearby enemies. There have been multiple updates to its Hero Talents as well to make them play well within Assassination’s rotation. We’ve also added an element of Energy management and timing. Assassination Rogues are deliberate fighters, and choosing when to spend Energy is an important part of their gameplay. There are strong new rewards for maintaining unbroken strings of Envenoms, so you’ll want to bank Energy then stretch every Envenom to its limit to keep the pressure on your targets.
Outlaw
Outlaw before Midnight could be a very demanding spec to play. The factors involved in when to cast Roll the Bones could be complex, performance relied on a lot on how long you could keep Adrenaline Rush going, and its shortened global cooldown could result in a high rate of actions per minute. In Midnight, we intend for Outlaw to be a very approachable rogue spec while still embodying its fantasy of a tricky, resourceful, sometimes underhanded fighter that is willing to roll the dice and take a chance. Roll the Bones now grants a single bonus of varying power, Outlaw no longer uses Vanish offensively, and Adrenaline Rush has a consistent duration but provides a bigger boost while active. Outlaw gameplay is based around building and spending combo points and managing your Energy, with several random bonuses that can trigger and change up your rotation. Crackshot has been removed, but talents enable Between the Eyes to reset its own cooldown and stack its bonus multiple times. We hope you enjoy taking up your blades and pistol and living the life of an Outlaw!
Subtlety
Coming into Midnight, Subtlety had a multitude of overlapping damage increases from cooldowns, conditional bonuses, and temporary effects that needed to be precisely aligned in unintuitive ways to produce good damage results. It overly punished players for getting it wrong, and even when getting it right it could make Subtlety’s rotational gameplay feel much more rigid than it should for a spec that is intended to give players flexibility and control over its cooldown-driven damage windows. Subtlety’s Midnight updates are focused on giving cooldowns and effects a clear purpose while also reducing the number of conditional effects that need to be tracked. This will better reward intuitive decisions and produce more reliable damage output and satisfying rotational gameplay. Additional changes are aimed at further improving approachability by reducing total rotational button count, culling unimportant buff icons, removing effects that punish downtime, and creating more value potential for historically-weak secondary stats Haste and Critical Strike.
Fatebound Hero Talents
Midnight’s changes to Fatebound are intended to make its benefits more reliable in different types of content. Fateful Ending’s “all or nothing” benefit that ended at the end of combat has been replaced. Several Fatebound talents didn’t scale well against multiple targets or trigger effects like Caustic Spatter. Those have been updated with new designs with more universal value.
Can’t wait to see the additions to the Hero Talents. I haven’t played Rogue in 6 years because I lost all love for it in Shadowlands. I used to main it since 2010!
Playing it on the Alpha after struggling with Feral, this is the first time in 6 years I adore Rogue again.
As a casual player, I have no complaints right now. Good stuff.
Hello,
Assassination rogue veteran player for 16 years straight, I want to talk about changes I’ve tested on Beta version 64339.
First I will talk about my experience at level 80, since we don’t have access to Apex talents yet, then I will come back to those talents later on.
Class Talent tree:
Class talent tree hasn’t received any significant changes, although there are some new talents added few weeks ago and we are still waiting to see them implemented, so I will not talk about them for now. Overall class tree looks fine, if we consider the Shadowheart “placeholder” (ignored for 2 years!!) will be replaced in the future build. The change to Cold Blood was somewhat expected and it is not a bad change, although little weak for a capstone talent, it could be a bit better if you add some additional effect to it, rather than just flat 10% crit increase.
The major objection I have in the class tree is against “Thistle Tea” capstone. This throw-back talent is bad in many ways. First one, its auto proc and you cannot control it. The second one, its too weak for a capstone, doesn’t take the fact that we have 250 energy and not 100, it serves more like a bandaid for a bad design of energy regen and it just simply doesn’t fit for the current game. I would rather see this talent completely gone and replaced by more fitting Relentless strikes passive as this capstone is almost exlusively used only by the Assassination spec.
Recuperator talent is bugged for 4 years!! already as it will always stop working in specific scenarios, and deserves complete overhaul or replacement.
Leeching poison should deserve some buffs as this talent is very weak. (Suggestion - Leeching poison also increases healing taken by 10%).
Stillshroud talent is another “never pick” talent, that has zero value for the gameplay and should be replaced.
Spec Talent tree:
Assassination tree has received many new changes and talent placements, but there are still few flaws I want to talk about, so lets take it step by step.
Deadly Poison - this talent is core part of the Assassination spec that is used in almost every scenario except PvP, where it is outperformed by Wound poison in every aspects, it is a complete waste of a talent point for no reason and because of this, Deadly poison should be made baseline for Assassination!
Venomous Wounds - this is another important must have talent, which I will talk about later on. What I don’t like is its current position in the tree. Leveling Assassination rogue in the last few expansions is extreme pain and boredom and one of the reasons is energy starving. If anything else, Venomous Wounds should be put at the very top of the tree, as it is core functionality of the spec, replacing Deadly Poison’s position which should be baseline at this point.
Doomblade - the only purpose i see for this, is the Lethal Dose talent, apart from it, its basically unimpactful and pointless talent in the tree. Also this talent should be part of Venomous Wounds and refund energy.
Internal Bleeding - Same as Doomblade, all bleed abilities should be part of Venomous Wounds with no exception to Internal Bleeding.
Lethal Dose - This talent was very important during DF and TWW providing minor damage boost, but after Deathmark change and removal of Serrated Bone Spike, this talent now falls behind and its rather underperforming. (suggestion - increase its damage to atleast 5%.)
Amplifying Poison - the position of this talent right now doesn’t make sense and should be moved somewhere else, as it locks you from picking up Avulsion. Also there are two scenarios in which you never want to pick this talent - Mythic+ dungeons and PvP, which makes it another wasted talent slot.(suggestion - move it aside of the tree as optional, or just swap its position with Avulsion.
Dashing Scoundrel - For a capstone, this talent is very weak and there absolutely no reason to pick this over Kingsbane, DTB or Sudden Demise. (For a suggestion here, Assassination rogue lacks of a proper execute ability, that could replace Mutilate spam during execution phases and for that reason I see two similar options: replace it with old “Dispatch” execute ability which will cost 30 energy and be usable only during execute phase. The second option is to use Ambush for the same purpose as this ability serves no other purpose in the spellbok. Ambush now deals nature damage, can be used without stealth at or below 35% of target’s health, costs 30 energy and has a chance to proc Blindside. This change would fit perfectly into the left side of the tree, synergizing with Blindside, Systemic Failure and Zoldyck, while also providing a strong option as a capstone talent.
Deathmark - What I still hate about this talent, its the only burst cooldown in the game, that forces you to go one target. In PvP it has also tons of counterplay in forms of short cd dispels and racials. Combining this with its very long cooldown make this ability one if not the worst spells in the game. (suggestion - make this talent undispellable and unable to be dodged or parried.)
Fatebound Talents:
Fatebound received many significant QoL changes in Midnight, while it also removes its randomness, it is clearly a go to hero talents for Midnight.
The only objection i have against Fatebound talents is the lack of defensive options. Compared with Deathstalker’s damage reduction to both CoS and Evasion, Fatebound provides only very weak heal which I believe must get some tuning prior to release, and Tempted Fate which is again a random chance to minor absorb 10% of damage taken. There is no synergy or direct impact with rogue’s core abilities which I found weird. (suggestion - replace chosen’s revelry with talent that reduces cooldown on Cloak of Shadows and / or Evasion by 15-30 seconds.)
Another thing I don’t understand is why Hand of Fate still deals “Cosmic Damage” instead of Nature or Shadow, which would make more sense from a fantasy standpoint.
Deathstalker Talents:
Now this is one of the biggest mess I’ve ever seen since its introduction in TWW. While in Midnight Deathstalker’s mark is finally available out of stealth through garrote, (After two years of complaints asking for this!!) the whole talent tree lacks creativity or synergy with any of the rogue abilities. Apart from flat rupture damage increase, there are also three different talents for some reason, that are only affecting only Fan of Knives and has absolutely no value or impact for Single target.
Unshakeable Drive - This talent that was formerly part of Deathstalker’s mark now replaces Fatal Intend, which was also very underperfoming, should consider that both mutilate and ambush are not a heavy hitters and only generators, and should provide way more damage increase.
Shroud of Night is another placeholder that is never picked, due to absolutely no value for any content. Increasing duration by 5 seconds, for a 6 minutes cooldown, that is almost never used, due to eyesights and stealth detection changes in dungeons and restrictions for rated PvP. It is just another waste of a talent spot and deserves to be replaced by something more impactful for a rogue class. (suggestion - change Shroud of Night to reduce cooldown of Vanish by 15 seconds.)
Singular Focus - this talent, while sadly still one of the strongest in the tree is still bugged and keeps you in combat forever, breaks your stealth, breaks your vanish, and even gives you combat when you die and release, in PvP it also breaks crowd control because it doesn’t ignore controlled targets and has unlimited range. Despite numerous bug reports and complaints over the years of TWW, this is still not changed. My suggestion ? - Wake up and fix this talent for sake of the players that are paying your salary.
Fatebound continues to be a go to spec for Raids, PvP and possibly Mythic+ in Midnight, While Deathstalker keeps to be a miserable failure of a talent tree, that should deserve overhaul or complete rework.
Assasination gameplay at level 80:
Since we cannot test Apex talents yet, which i believe will have a great impact on the class itself, I want to share my current impressions about Assassination gameplay without them.
Rotation - The major change in Midnight is the removal of need to restealth in able to spread your bleeds, which is for sure one of the greatest changes done to the spec. Another thing is that Shiv is no longer part of the rotation and again serves as the utility button, which is also a welcoming change. On the other side, the value of damage increase Shiv has provided should be compensated elsewhere, so I hope there will be more damage tuning before this goes to Live. I have also concerns about Ambush and its usefulness, since its no longer needed for Deathstalker. I personally think it would be great idea if we return Ambush as our old execution ability the “Old Dispatch” as I talked about earlier in my talents review.
Energy Regeneration - First thing I want to say, I’m not a fan of energy pooling as this gameplay throw-back should stay in the classic wow in my opinion. In the past, every class had to perform some form of resource management, but thats no longer true, so why assassination rogue should be the only one of the 38 specs to still have this form of handicap ?? While playing a class, what you want from it is to feel good to play, have fun with it of course do a good damage. The current state of Assassination at level 80 on Beta doesn’t give me any of that feelings. I have all the energy talents possible and once I’m out of Thistle tea, there comes the 3-4 seconds of downtime we all know from TWW on single target. The insane nerfs to Venomous Wounds, make the class energy starved even worse than before and the new Motivated Murderer talent doesn’t compensate it at all. Another thing is that in TWW you’re never starved of energy during AOE fight. But in Midnight you starve almost instantly. Again thanks to nerfs to Venomous Wounds, making the multibleed for energy having absolutely no value. I have 22% haste and it makes nearly no difference. What I understand that you want us to play around Apex talents to pool energy for Envenom and get energy regen from this gameplay. But here is the flaw: What if I don’t pick Apex talents ? Does it means my class is not playable without it ?
The Apex talents Flaw - I know there is like zero reasons to not pick those talents, but what if i do ? The class will just not work without it. You will be energy starved forever, your damage will suck, and the class will not be fun to play. Why instead of forcing us to play around pooling energy, why not give us the option to choose whether we want to play pooling minigame or not ? If the whole Assassination spec is designed to work only around Implacable talent, why it is so down in the tree or even optional ? Apex talents should be strong addition to your toolkit, but it shouldn’t be a mandatory in a way, that without them the class just doesn’t work. Neither Subtlety nor Outlaw has this issue with Apex talents and i believe other classes also.
Final Suggestion - I have one final suggestion related to gameplay and energy management, first thing is that Venomous Wounds needs to be drastically buffed. Its impact on AOE is undeniable and with its current state, the energy returns are simply not enough to keep the combat flow. Second thing was suggested earlier in my talents review and that is return of Relentless Strikes as replacement for Thistle Tea back to the assassination spec. With this talent, the class should still work even without Implacable.
Final Thoughs:
Since Shadowlands I don’t have a strong expectations, that another expansion will fix rogue class problems, but I never gave up my hope, that one day, I will have fun playing rogue again.