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.