Hey guys fellow Outlaw player here. So to get to the point 9.1.5 class tuning with AOE cap adjustments. Heres how I think blizzard could prevent our spec from dying as we are currently only tuned for m+ (without borrowed power).
Spec problems:
Dreadblades: The buff to dreadblades is welcome and good change. But with it on the alacrity row, it will never be taken, due to how outlaw currently stacks its stats, high crit and vers. Without alacrity our spec will have constant energy famine (more than it does now). Or we sacrifice damage to stop long periods of downtime. (Not able to push anything always feels terrible).
Capped AOE: At the moment alot of outlaws feel they are worthless in big pulls. This is due to other classes already having essentially uncapped aoe or a powerful CD, it never feels good when tanks can outdamage you without really trying. personally this does not bother me but I know it bothers many other outlaws. When a dps spec gets outperformed by a non-dps spec even on one pull it can be very disheartening.
Potential spec solutions:
Dreadblades: two options to make this talent/ability more viable, firstly move dreadblades from the alacrity row. The other option is to make dreadblades or alacrity baseline. Dreadblades, if it becomes baseline will give our spec burst which we currently lack. Alacrity baseline will result in the same as it will allow the choice of picking Dreadblades. I believe Blizzard are worried in doing either of these due to restless blades. To conclude if blizzard are worried about uncapping our aoe, one of these abilities needs to go baseline, this will allow outlaw to be more viable in raid and pvp and dare i say m+. This will now give the spec burst, better ST and aoe. Yes we will still be capped but our priority damage will be more beneficial to an M+ group as we can nuke the dangerous prio trash etc.
Uncapping AOE, probably the easiest fix, is just to allow blade flurry to hit as many targets with damage reduction past 5 targets, but i feel this will not fix outlaws other main issue which is lack of burst. Uncapping AOE will not make us more viable in raid encounters and pvp.
In conclusion outlaw is currently only good in m+ but as this expansion goes on more and more people feel that outlaw is not a great spec as they only look at damage. not our interrupts and cc. I can 100% say that if both changes are made outlaw would be too strong in most forms of content, but thats what tuning is for (e.g alacrity baseline: 4% instead of 5% per finisher) and would make the spec feel amazing.
So far i feel blizzard have done a great job in overall balance compared to previous expansions. But i feel like the current iteration of the AOE cap has been implemented poorly you have hard capped classes and essentially uncapped (soft capped classes) at this time in writing, whilst others can freely destroy huge packs which makes the hard capped classes feel poor. No-one wants to feel bad they want to feel great whilst playing there class and spec. If Blizzard kept the aoe cap it should of been a blanket cap for example, melee dps can only hit 5 targets, ranged can hit 8. no exceptions.
I could go on but I feel like this is a lengthy post as it is. Thank you for reading my first ever forum post, but I really enjoy Outlaw and dont wish to have to change spec or re-roll as no-one likes sitting in lfg for hours on end because the community has a negative view on your spec/class.
Good luck and have fun my fellow players.
Please comment if you agree or disagree (please state why and your solution).
Also prune the spec.
Tbh. it has too many buttons to click! I multi-class and this is by far the most challenging spec I have played. Its fine to have something to click all the time - but you also need a bit of mental capacity to deal with cc’s and mechancis
Whenever I click a button or CD I don’t feel the impact of it a tall.
Every button is around 7-8% of my damage - I don’t feel powerful clicking anything.
I’m just dancing on my keyboard for the sum of things.
“Whenever I click a button or CD I don’t feel the impact of it at all. Every button is around 7-8% of my damage - I don’t feel powerful clicking anything.”
I believe dreadblades or alacrity needs to become baseline for this reason, so we have a decent CD to push every now and again.
“Tbh. it has too many buttons to click! I multi-class and this is by far the most challenging spec I have played.”
Keep going with your Outlaw takes a while to get the hang of it, just keybind an extra button every few days and you’ll be like a grand pianist in no time.
Fingers crossed we get a bit more love heading towards 9.1.5. Thank you for your input.
I’d actually go for the direct opposite: remove SnD, Alacrity. Lessen the impact of passive damage sources and increase the impact of Active Ability usage. The reason pressing buttons doesn’t feel meaningful and fun is because they don’t have a noticeable direct impact. If, instead, our damage profile was balanced on our active damage, instead of autoattacks, it would change everything, and I dare say, for the better. This applies to all Rogue Specs, actually.
Hey Kaldea, Rogue has one of the highest apms in the game due to not really having a GCD to slow us down, our energy managment is essentially our GCD. Thats the main reason our active abilities feel less impactful than other classes. Yet our overrall damage is good/okay. So instead of a decent CD you would prefer if our passive melee damage was nerfed, so our active abilities could be buffed. I can’t see that being negative at all, this would make all rogue specs more engaging, I just worry that would mean blizzard would increase rogues overall GCD which means everything is slower. SnD and Alacrity are both buffs we have to maintain just to keep our damage at a certain level, so I would have to agree SnD never feels good to push, and Alacrity stops us from having to stack X amount of haste, yet if it falls off it always feels bad to have to ramp Alacrity back up before we are at 100% output, generally feels bad at the start of a raid encounter when it’s lust on pull .
But I can’t see Blizzard re-working all three rogue specs for a .5 patch. But Sin and Sub currently have decent CDs where as Outlaw has once again a passive attack speed increase and buffs to our energy regen. So I feel in the meantime give Outlaw a decent CD without the cost of damage looking at the Alacrity and Dreadblade talent row.
What I really feel as a diehard Outlaw main that Blade Flurry bugs out way too many times, stealth breaks in a lot of dungeons, which is annoying since now with conduits being enhanced its a 90% chance you get a buff you currently do not own from RtB buffs. Also I do feel like getting it for 5s from Dispatch is just not enough. Our legendary is about having a chance, Sinister Strike has a chance, Roll the Bones depends on luck, Adrenaline Rush is basically just some extra attack speed and a longer 8% damage boost and the legendary only gives it for 3 seconds.
I do believe the Legendary itself should be buffed, or atleast take it to an equal level of other legendaries from other spec. Having the spec basically full of ramp up damage but even after ramping up it is not that big of satisfactory.
GCD and Energy Cost on Blade Flurry and RtB is silly and should be removed asap.
Also I don’t think its only me, but seeing a 6 combo point dispatch hitting for 4k damage is just beyond madness with 2 252 weapons in hand.
I still cannot play anything else than Outlaw, but the spec is in desperate need of some QoL changes.
Not really what this post was looking for. But to answer your question I am not a FOTM class/spec person. I enjoy Outlaw and so do many others, I play this game to have fun not to roll whats had the best buffs per patch etc.
Since I mainly play Outlaw like 99% of the time, it is hard for me to tell about the two other Specialization. But since I’ve tried them, having another Rogue in the guild who plays all 3 specs, says the same. The class itself has so many bugs, it is just unbearable. We’ve been into Shadowlands for quite a while now and NOTHING has been fixed and it is going to look even worse if they continue doing nothing about it. I’ll probably just unsub if Outlaw does not get fixed. I don’t enjoy anything else besides Combat Rogue. I’ll just go ahead and play some other games if this does not change.
Rogue issues are nothing new, really. Stealth has never really functioned great, since Vanilla it could break from anything happening, or because nothing did. For Outlaw specifically, Blade Flurry is kinda the biggest strength and the largest handicap the Spec has, and no version of it has ever felt balanced. It’s always either way too simple to use for how powerful it is, or just not strong enough to use at all. Looking at the Target Cap changes, I think they have a long way to go, to make Blade Flurry feel good.
Historically, Rogues haven’t really got that much attention since Mists. The Class has always performed adequately, and been competitive enough. It has always had at least 1 Spec performing well enough, and usually 2/3 have been able to hold their own. Since it’s never fallen that far behind (nothing just turning a knob to a bigger number wouldn’t fix), Blizzard hasn’t had any reason to invest in updating the Class. There’s a lot of dead Talents in all Trees, lots of archaic mechanics, a whole lot of redundancy in how each Spec functions.
This is a long way to say, while there is plenty of things we think the Class needs, in terms of being brought up to the standards of the contemporary game, I’m not holding my breath for much to actually happen. When it comes to Rogues, Blizzard will likely continue to only do the bare minimum they can, to make it function, regardless of how it feels. Rogues will be fine, but being held back by 17 year old design paradigms shows, especially when compared to the newer Classes added into the game.
Yes, that’s the focus of this spec. Cooldowns have little impact, and you use them as soon as they are available, because restless blades is reducing the CD anyway.
It’s a relentless button smashing from start to finish. It was like this back in the days when it was called combat (with less RNG tho).
If you don’t like it, don’t play it. We have enough “press one button and win the game” specs already.
Got back to my Rogue after returning to the game recently and, while the class seems fine, Outlaw does feel a bit cluttered. I really wouldn’t complain if either some buttons would go off the GCD or SnD would get baked into something (or had a reliable way of prolonging it like Assassination).
Right now it just feels like there’s not enough GCDs to go around, or maybe I’m just rusty.
Yes, Outlaw Rogue has to deal with too much GCD right now. Would be really happy if either RtB or BF happened to be taken off of gcd and energy cost. I really feel like when the off hand hit does not generate that energy back for a while, even though it is at 75% chance, it really feels bad to press RtB. Although, I still want to emphasize, RtB is a good ability, it is just badly balanced.
I mean, at this point I don’t even think Blizzard can see Outlaw as a spec, they rather throw the spec into the trashcan for the rest of Shadowlands.
I’m trying to remain calm and patient, but it just looks unfair. I mean SCK is one of the hardest hitting ability which just got soft capped and they were able to (pre-soft capping) hit 100k dps on big pulls. Meanwhile I’d just sit there watching him shine whilst doing my 20k dps after applying 300 different types of buffs and hitting my keyboard as hard as possible.
I just really hope we can make a difference and make the devs mind broaden to remove the cap. Its just silly, really.
I don’t care too much because i am not sure about will be good enough outlaw with uncap(not soft) blade flurry. Probably it is won’t contest with current monk. Do not trust the hope, it has forsaken these lands. A suggest for you. Play popular classes or don’t pay money for gametime. Posting on the forum is the biggest waste of time. I don’t think they know enough about the game to understand the feedback posted here. I am ambitious about it. I can play 1v1 with the best developer. Where is any breave developer!! I will wait front on Orgrimmar.
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