Pre-Patch Outlaw Rogue - What a fumble!

Classes Rogue
1

Pre-Patch Thoughts:

So, here is the thing; Outlaw flavour, from my perspective, is fantastic. I love the whole vibe of the spec, the flavour is amazing, the spell animations are on point, just love it. I am desperate to play it in War Within, but I won’t be.

The issue is it plays like absolute garbage.

2 Fast 2 Furious
You have a fair number of abilities and cooldowns to weave into the base rotation and defensive abilities, so it can be kind of tough to play at times. Combining this with an ability (Adrenaline Rush) that reduces your global cooldown leaves you spamming abilities like wild. My wrist is literally killing me trying to play this spec, physically it is hurting me to play Outlaw right now, I’m not joking. Adrenaline Rush duration is even extended by using other ability/talents AND has its cooldown reduced by Restless Blades. The button spam feels non-stop and I can’t cope with it!

Bye Bye Shadow Dance = Big W
Removing Shadow Dance from the base tree and adding it in to Sub was a huge win. The shadow-magic flavour never gelled with Outlaw thematically and I am glad to see it gone. If it were up to me, Shadowstep would share a node with an ability that let you have an additional Sprint charge or something, I hate using it but there’s no getting away from that one.

HOWEVER!
Having said that, the devs are still pushing stealth-based shenanigans during the main rotation, and there is absolutely no way around it. This absolutely blows for Outlaw, thematically speaking and from a game play perspective – the spec is too complicated and spammy to have these frequent shifts in tempo where you suddenly go to spamming a particular ability.

Mechanically, it also blows; hate the gameplay, hate having to play around Stealth windows using Vanish. For me, Vanish was always a mega cool defensive ability – I used to feel like I was cheating when I would Vanish away from a tricky situation. But now they’ve baked it into the main DPS rotation! If other people like it, great, but my issue here is this: you can’t avoid it. You cannot talent around Crackshot and Without a Trace. Every talent build I looked at that didn’t include these guys was a massive DPS loss, nothing else even came close. Devs need to balance the other talent options such that running Crackshot and Without a Trace isn’t the only option.

Remember when we were told moving back to talent trees would allow us the flexibility to play in unique ways that suited us? Total fallacy. The reality is that you either play the meta cookie-cutter spec, or you are dead weight!

Ghostly Strike – Brain Dead Button Bloat
I mean, what even is this ability? A short cooldown ability you weave in, on cooldown, increases damage for a short spell. Totally brain-dead design. Get rid of it. Replace it with something passive, maybe something that would compete with Crackshot, and buff the other abilities damage to compensate, reducing button bloat in the process. Visually it sucks also, is it supposed to harken back to Legion where the Dreadblade weapons were a sort of spooky ghost pirate relic? You press this ability, one of your blades gives off a spOoOoOky blue glow. Much prefer the flashy yellow of Outlaw abilities. Just get rid.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

edit: forrmatting, last minute thoughts.

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I will never forgive them that they turned the probably easiest rogue spec (combat) into what is currently the convoluted mess called Outlaw…

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Amen.

Not every spec needs to be some big brain affair.

Sometimes you just want to come home from work, drink some grog, sneak about some and punch/shoot/stab some bad guys.

I’m happy to be ~5% DPS below the big brain guys for the most part.

I saw some stuff recently talking about ‘opt in complexity’ or something.

Where is it?

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I was top dps in our guild as combat rogue for most of the end of WoD.
It was so much fun even if my top dps stats where from multistrike auto attacks, auto attacks and sinister strike.
It had awesome flow, good mobility and tons of aoe burst.

Best combo was soul catalyser into ring into another soul catalyser proc. xD

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You’ve made some good points and i just like to toss slice n dice in there cause honestly who likes pressing it?

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If it was the ONLY buff that we had to keep up, then it would be fine, something to keep an eye on every 30sec or so.
But with the current class design its just another ball to juggle…

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Every spec is suffering from the fact that we have way too many buttons to push.

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Yeah, i actually counted and Sub has 8 cooldowns/burst windows that only overlap once or something like that. xD

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bring back combat

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Loosing SD is not a Win. I’d also like this entire stealth dependency to just get trashed but this change is bad. Yes, we might have 1 less button to press, but dps/rotation is gimped as now you cannot have both SD and Vanish on CD and thus benefit from out cd reduction, meaning we have less stealth burst windows. Also, we cannot reliably use Vanish in solo pve content, meaning we are unable to fully utilize our kit in tougher solo fights. Don’t think there’s another spec that has a problem like this.

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I still accidentally call outlaw combat all the time

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I agree with everything in OP here but unfortunately our feedback will be completely ignored

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Agree. I don’t really understand people hyping up the shadow dance change, its essentially cosmetic. The issue isn’t shadow dance itself, its subterfuge windows, which are still very important (sin got most of the subterfuge benefits baked into their spec talents at least but outlaw still needs to spec into it). So we still has the exact same stealth-heavy gameplay, but like you say, losing SD means we just have less burst opportunities, which already weren’t great to begin with. Until they remove our dependency on stealth effects, losing SD was probably a bad thing, unless you are really RPing hard and have some deep down hated of requiring a particular button on your action bars.

The only good change to come out of it is having a second vanish charge but that could have happened independently.

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Combining this with an ability (Adrenaline Rush) that reduces your global cooldown

AR doesn’t reduce GCD anymore.

The devs are still pushing stealth-based shenanigans. This absolutely blows for Outlaw, thematically speaking and from a game play perspective

Outlaw is a rogue spec, still. I love subterfuge/crackshot windows.

Maybe try fury warrior if you don’t like the stealth theme?

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Outlaw (and combat that it replaced) was always about picking our engagements and then sticking with them until we either HAVE to disengage with Vanish, or we kill our enemy.

It was the uncomplicated spec for rogue, where we did not HAVE to juggle stealth windows, cooldowns and damage windows.

It was like a slightly faster fury warrior with more tricks in our bag and higher mobility and invulnerabilities on demand.

I for one dont want to play Warrior, and like Rogues but I am bad at juggling multiple things and like the straight forward rogue spec…

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I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.

The ‘play warrior’ bros will never really get their heads around this, looking at the game from a pure gameplay perspective, WoW is more than hitting certain buttons for me, I love the theme and flavour of rogue, but it’s just unplayable to me and that is frustrating.

The talent builds are hard locked and you cannot talent around one specific playstyle for Outlaw and that sucks big time, bring back the previous talent tree iterations; fewer but more meaningful options that were easier to balance.

I like having stealth, it’s a real cool ability, maybe one of my favourite abilities in WoW, but Combat/Outlaw always had it as a cool side ability to me, the mainstay of the flavour for me was in sword swinging and (later on) gun slinging!

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That’s not true, it reduces GCD based on haste up to 0.8s max, which is the value it was in DF.

Or you know, go back to not depend on stealth the way it did before UHUH and crackshot.

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Hell yeah.

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I wholeheartedly agree with every point made by the OP.
I’ve been playing Combat/Outlaw since the very beginning of the game and this is the first time the Specc felt “off” and “not fun”. (Yes throughout the whole DF expansion)

  • Wrist Pain: Not sure how or why but this happened to me as well in DF - and not during SL or BFA. Sure, high APM play style is fun, but maybe tone it down just a notch. This has become tedious and awful.

  • Shadowdance had absolutely no place being in Outlaw’s rotation at ALL! Thank goodness it is gone. Also another great point made by the OP suggesting Shadowstep becoming a double node.

  • Same logic applies to Vanish being used as a temporary DPS boost, it doesn’t fit and it sucks mechanically. It feels weird and it adds superficial complexity at best. No matter how you slice it, most Outlaw players despise playing around “Stealth Windows”. Get it through your heads.

  • Ghostly Strike is literally there just to add unnecessary bloat indeed.
    Nobody likes it, nobody wants it, why is it still there? Better question yet why is it strong enough to force players to pick it? Needs immediate replace or an equal competitor talent at least.

  • In my opinion, the Devs need to take a step backwards and try to make the Specc more like it was in Shadowlands, rather than the direction they seem to be headed now.
    But like I’ve said a million times before, I think this is super intentional, with the single purpose of steering people away from this Specc or Class even.

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Ghostly Strike should honestly just be a passive buff on Sinister Strike.
Make it give a stacking damage buff or something. xD

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