Remove Ghostly Strike - What does it say about a skill when its best iteration is when its macro’d to everything and forgotten about? It’s a boring and annoying to optimize, punishes target swapping, which is supposed to be one of our feelgood strengths as a flat dmg profile spec, it’s extremely uninspired and flavourless, and it needs to be removed from the game.
Move away from Stealth-Centric Rotation- It was a fun experiment, but it’s overstayed it’s welcome. It’s a major flavor fail to have a traditionally brawly fantasy revolve around… stealth-windows? Not to mention, having to use vanish in solo-content is absolutely horrible.
Keep the intensity and rythm - Quickly Reacting to Ace procs and Snapshotting RtB buff procs are great reflex testing mechanics and one of the core enjoyable things about Outlaw. Maintaining AR is okay too, but it’s gotten to the point where it just feels HORRIBLE if you ever drop it. I rather have it be less impactful during uptime if it means the lows aren’t so miserable.
Those are the most important, along with overall cleaning the clunky outliers in the class and spec trees, but here are some other fun ideas:
Embrace the swashbuckling fantasy. Make more use of the pistol, make the spec somewhat work mid-range (take some ideas from the new DH spec maybe?) as a solid filler for when stuff is out of melee reach. As it stands, any kind of downtime is HELL for outlaw.
Have something interact with Instant Poison, or get rid of it. The flavor doesnt justify the annoyance of reapplying a minor dmg gain every hour. Let dagger specs have poison as their identity.
Try to recapture some of that Legion launch 6-buff roll magic. Make people recognize when we get a god roll. Maybe make it separate from the regular roll logic, like 1 in 100 times the dice give double the amount of their bonuses. Something strong enough to be felt, but rare enough that it doesnt need to be tuned or expected to be played around.
Hero talent trees and their flavour are a good enough base, their mechanics just need to be less clunky, and they need to feel flashier. Coup-de-gras has a great slashy sound, apply that logic to the rest.
So basically what you’re asking for is Survival hunter?
I think restless blades is fine and makes Outlaw/combat what it is. It’s just the fact that you need 6 buffs/keep it rolling, vanish/subterfuge and AR to do any meaningful damage.
IMO just give outlaw back shadow dance (effected by restless blades) take the damage out of blade flurry and put it back into your rotational abilities/finishers, make crackshot refund max combo points and take roll the bones off of GCD
doing dps as outlaw requires stealthing, why not remove shadow dance and vanish uses from outlaw at all. there was nothing wrong Legion & BFA versions of outlaw.
Agreed. Stealth should be irrelevant to combat performance for both Outlaw and Assassination.
Partially agreed - speedy response to procs is the fun part of Outlaw, and the hectic APM is what makes it tick. However, RtB is cancer and Outlaw gameplay would lose very little (it’d likely gain, even) if RtB was removed and the fun bonuses (Ruthless Precision and True Bearing) were baked into the kit, and the rest were just gone. In fact, Ruthless Precision should also not exist and BtE should just have a 100% critrate, because it’s just strange to have an ability that is consistently 85%+ critchance but not really 100%.
At this point, Outlaw has three actual sword abilities (and Shiv, I guess). Perhaps it’s time to bite the bullet (pun intended) and give us a way to play Outlaw by solely gunslinging (replace Sinister Strike and Dispatch with a pistol-based version, remove Ghostly Strike). Even if not, making downtime less punishing would be appreciated, as current spec tuning seems to point at either target dummy 100% uptime or incredibly planned-out gameplay of top-tier Outlaws being able to minimize downtime very well.
Both Sub and Outlaw need to have poisons looked at. They’re borderline pointless for either spec outside of utility benefits. There’s a lot that can be done, but I honestly figure Instant Poison should just be dead and gone now, make every spec their own lethal “poison” and adjust visuals on the worthwhile ones. For example, Outlaw can have both Instant and Wound poisons replaced by “Splash o’ Grog” that does fire damage, sets the target ablaze visually, but otherwise behaves like Wound Poison. Sub could have something similar by coating their weapons in living shadows or somesuch.
Please no, You should know they will always tune to outlier performance and not to actual performance. In general, S2 Outlaw was unusually stable and it was probably the best time to play Outlaw in years. Just remove RtB completely, mastery of Outlaw should be from being able to deal with APM and procs, not fishing for good dice rolls.
Fatebound is terrible in every aspect and I would honestly just hope for it to be removed or reworked entirely in Midnight. Worst hero talents in the game, bar none. Trickster is…the default Rogue Hero spec, but somehow less entertaining than Slayer is for Warriors. DS is the best thematically and the most clunky mechanically, it’s as though the author had no experience with how the game works outside of PvP or training dummies.
Yes. Additionally, it’s time to just make Soft Fall ignore fall damage altogether.
If anything, I’d rather Rogue got more CC that isn’t useless in PvE (right now, mass Blind is just a 1 min hard stop, and maybe KS has a use sometimes in M+). Defensive CDs coming from a Rogue is weird class fantasy-wise. I’d be very partial to a DH-style “gather them all in one spot” contraption.
I tend to agree with you. I’m really struggling to enjoy Outlaw now because the number of conditions I have to meet in order to do useful damage is overwhelming. I am ADHD and ancient, so I know I’ll never be top at anything, but this is ridiculous now.
I can sort of manage when stood pummelling a dummy, much less fine when constantly moving around, watching mechanics, trying to figure out the timing between some mob activity and your upcoming ‘only hope of being useful’ window. A few randomly badly placed floor mechanics can destroy my whole setup. Die or hit thing. Hmm, tough choice.
Hero talent wise Trickster is quite fun, Fatebound absolutely not.
The class fantasy is also borked for me by the excessive gun use and the sheer weirdness of the rotation. Basically I have to sneak around someone, chug my drugs (AR), roll my dice, shoot, then stab, shoot, then vanish again to get some benefits from being stealthy, repeat then hope everything works out and i’m not stuck in a dead cycle waiting for AR for ages. It’s not so much swashbuckling daredevilry, more like being middle management over a squad of hyperactive, resentful, alcoholic squirrels who will take any opportunity to undermine you. I guess that IS a bit like Jack Sparrow when you think about it. But not in a fun way.
Compare that to Havoc DH which is basically a nice walk briefly interrupted by some hard stares and a bit of arrogantly contemptuous zipping about. So much more satisfying.
Restless blades is what outlaw makes what it is and what dooms outlaw at the same time.
How can this spec have any viability when it demands full uptime? The actual fix for this spec is to remove some spells from restless blades to allow for them to be tuned appropriately and reduces the ceiling for highroll situations. The skill floor of outlaw is far too high as it stands, it should be enough that restless blades punishes you for mistakes with less stealth uptime, less bte casts, less killing sprees, less ghostly strikes and lower rolls on average - AR doubles down on this and it arguably the most problematic part of the spec.
Only fire is as close to as punished as outlaw by downtime and that spec is effectively bm hunter with how little it hardcasts.
They’ve gone too far with it, it’s time to make AR passive or give it charges to allow us to play around downtime without bricking our current damage if not highrolling.
So been thinking about the Restless Blades issue that was brought up and it makes a lot of sense as to why it’s the make or break of Outlaw Rogue. So I thought of a rework to Outlaw that might fit the theme more and make Outlaw rogue slightly better to play/less taxing.
Restless Blades rework
Passive, Restless Blades now increases Energy Regeneration and Attack Speed by 5% for every 5 seconds spent not attacking, stacks up to 5 times.
This would make it less punishing when sitting downtime and could create some fun hit and run style tactics.
All abilities that are reduced by current Restless Blades have there CD reduced. Or add in a talent to compensate. I’m mainly thinking of Adrenaline Rush with regard to a talent.
Adrenalize Me: New Talent, choice node with Improved Adrenaline Rush.
Every combo point spent reduces the CD of Adrenaline Rush by 1 second.
With the other abilities I’d say reduce the base CD. Accordingly given the strength of the ability but for the main ones 30-60 seconds should be okay.
As for Vanish, I don’t know about anyone else but due to the Crackshot talent I don’t really use Vanish defensively anymore which is what it should be used for. Vanish was always an “Oh Sh!t!” button, now it’s used offensively more often, especially on Outlaw. To combat this either make Vanish 1 min CD or add a modifier talent to Distract similar to the Trickster Hero Talent Cloud Cover.
Distract now creates a smoke cloud for 10 seconds, this allows the use of stealth based abilities while inside the cloud. Distract now has a 45 or 60 second CD.
This would allow Vanish to remain at 2 min CD and become more defensive again. It also allows for counterplay by forcing the Rogue out of the cloud.
In my opinion some of these changes or ones like them could make Outlaw more fun to play with a lower punishment level for misplay/downtime. Also it could very much prevent the need for any flat %dmg increases (which at present we could do with) due to more access to the Crackshot talent while not diminishing Adrenaline Rush or other abilities by reworking Restless Blades to provide a short mini burst after not attacking for a while. I also don’t see why this couldn’t be done in a weekly tuning as apposed to a full patch rework.
Honestly I don’t want Outlaw to be some midrange spec. Just get hunter with a rifle. They already struggle to keep Outlaw in a good spot to add another layer to it.
Moving from Combat to Outlaw, a pirate-wannabe spec was already cheesy enough.
That said, Rogue really needs some revamps, they are plagued with class gutting from years ago, bad decisions and outdated mechanics.