With the upcoming Anniversary Patch here are some of my thoughts on the Rogue Changes.
As I am mostly an Assassination player I am going to focus on the general class changes and Assassination changes. First of all I want to say that the general feel of our Class is not bad(although I think that Crackshot Outlaw is horrible and I want to fall back to older iterations of Outlaw without all the vanish windows.), I do enjoy Assa but it is just missing important factors that would enhance its gameplay even more.
The Good:
- Slice and Dice is passive now
- Subterfuge not overwriting with countless passive effects
- Feint off gcd
The Bad:
Please. Stop trying to lower the general skill ceiling of our class. Raise the skill ceiling in some parts of our rotation and lower it in others. Just removing buttons or making abilities passive is not helpful in all cases. If you really want to raise the skill floor, create more choice nodes for the “lesser skilled or invested players”. Also please stop adding more 2 point nodes, WW Monk is a good example for how it should be done - try to cut down the amount of 2 points nodes to a minimum.
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Thistle Tea auto proc at 30 energy. Just why? Who asked for this? Just look at how we use this ability it is such a bad and unnecessary change.
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Echoing Reprimand being gone might not be something that everybody hates, but I personally dislike losing another button here and replacing it with an overloaded Shiv ability. I dont know how Supercharger is gonna end up being played, I am just a bit worried that you will have to sync ur Shiv with ur Darkest Night procs from Deathstalker which might be very annoying if it doesn’t line up by itself. Getting a really big Envom is cool, but I am not optimistic that this is gonna be great for the overall rotation of Assa. What I also dislike about the change is Supercharger being another 2 Point node, our whole Class Tree needs a revamp at this point, since there is not really an option for us taking other stuff in the bottom half of the tree, technically there is, but not if you want to play the optimal build - you are always forced to take Deeper Strategem and Thistle Tea.
What I have been missing:
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The Big One, our Hero Talents. Why are the main problems of our Hero Talents not being tackled at all. Deathstalker is heavily reliant on stealth, give us another possibility to proc Deathstalkers Mark even if it is still up on another target, we already have really bad target swapping so make it a bit easier for us. Apart from that Fatebound is kind of the opposite, where downtime of just a few seconds already loses us the biggest buff of the whole tree - Lucky Coin, with how M+ and some of the bosses are designed this needs to be addressed too.
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Vanish node in Class Tree is bad, giving us another charge that we can randomly put somewhere in our rotation does not do too much for us at all. Instead it should just reduce the Cooldown of Vanish in half.
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This is a big one for me - Visuals. Where is the power in the visuals of our abilities, we have classes summoning literal pitlords and meanwhile you change the baseline look of echoing reprimand, which was one of the only cooler looking abilities to begin with. Especially the Hero Talents are so lackluster, Deathstalker just giving us a random small purple X on the target and some minor purple effect on our character when we use envenom. Why cant Darkest Night change the visual of our envenom entirely, make the icon turn purple and give us a special animation. For me the best example of the perfect Hero Talent is Deathbringer, you get a new button with a nice visual and audio effect and then you also get the scythe which just feels even more incredible. I do not think we even have to start talking about Fatebound, it is just boring af.
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Coming back to the hero talents once again. I do think they need major overhauls not just visually, but just the whole design entirely. Deathstalker needs to be the Deathbringer version Hero Talent of Rogue(just copy it and turn the Scythe into a Dagger, I dont care still better than what we have currently lol.) and Fatebound is just the most boring and passive thing we have. It is not bad to have passive Hero Talents, but atleast make them noticable in your rotation and on your screen.
There is alot more I would love to talk about and discuss with other Rogue enthusiasts and the design team behind our class, these are just some of the points that came to my mind right now and I did not even go into proper detail.
Pls make Flagellation a class wide ability, I would love to have it as a new button for Assassination after Echoing Reprimand(one of my fav buttons) is gone. Thanks for taking your time and reading all this stuff that some random Rogue enjoyer wrote 