Hello rogues! Do you still exist? You are a forgotten class that brings nothing to the group, you see no changes the whole expansion, you have the worst single target in the game, you get 1 sentence of a bug fix each time everyone else is getting class and tier set changes and buffs. The happiest day you can get is a random 3% aura buff for a whole season. Good luck! Have fun in season 3 all 1.8% of you that are still playing.
20 Likes
Yo! Rogue main since 2006 here. Donât mind if I hijack your thread to unload on my favorite classâs current issues that, I am confident, will never even get glanced at before the next expac launch where they will fix nothing and introduce new issues literally nobody asked for. I am so excited!
Focusing on Assa and Outlaw because I largely donât play Sub, because Iâve never really liked its overemphasis on stealth talents. (Remember this particular tidbit when I get to Outlaw! 
)
Assassination, doubling as Deathstalker feedback because literally nobody cares about Fatebound (not even the dude who designed it, if Iâm honest)
⢠hey! You know what would be great? If we made the entire hero talent tree require the use of an ability from stealth Assassination players never use! BRILLIANT. Iâve tried looking, believe me, but Iâve been utterly unable to find who even asked for this Ambush From Stealth business to exist. WE USE GARROTE FROM STEALTH AND HAVE FOR THE PAST EXPANSIONS. Especially in AOE where you want to spend your precious few Subterfuge GCDs on bleeds. For the First Onesâ sake, the mark isnât even applied by Blindside Ambushes! WHY? Who designed this and why do they hate Assassination rogues so much?
â Fix: look man, literally anything goes here. Garrote. Blindside. Anything else. This issue has been pointed out by Assa Rogue theorycrafter Whispyr literally since the tree was unveiled in TWW beta.
⢠while Iâm whining about Deathstalkerâs Mark, Subterfuge isnât strictly required, but holy hell do I miss it when getting on my single target spec. Did you get taken out of stealth prematurely for whatever reason? (AOE damage, your target turning around at the last microsecond, or the mysterious whims and moodswings of the capricious Stealth God) Oops! I hope youâve got Vanish up and it doesnât happen again, otherwise your entire hero talent tree doesnât exist until the next Vanish!
â Fix: give a 1 second grace period of Subterfuge BASELINE, no talent point in Subterfuge required. That should be enough time for you to fire off an emergency Ambush From Stealth and have your hero talent tree work for a change.
â âb-bb-but PvP!!! NERF ROGUES BECAUSE I I PERSONALLY KEEP GETTING KILLED BY ONE!!â wait, people still care about PvP? Anyway, the solution here is simple: donât apply this change to PvP. There already exists separate patch notes for PvP, therefore that means they can tweak abilities separately. I donât want my quality of life to be affected by a game mode I, like a majority of the player base, choose to never engage with. Thanks.
⢠Would it be too much to ask for Darkest Night buffed Envenoms to look a little more extra? Itâs the high point of our gameplay right now, and it looks like the thousand other Envenom I serve my targets. Can we make it look plaguier? Purpler? Give it a satisfying sound effect?
⢠Speaking of, requiring max combo points for Darkest Night Envenom when our main combo point builder randomly gives us 2 to 4 of them feels pretty awkward and clunky. Nobody likes overcapping on resources.
â fix: make it â5 or moreâ combo points. Done.
â alternate fix: add a âcombo points over the cap are savedâ component to the Darkest Night buff just like Feral has, thereby keeping the slight rotation adjustment to DN (which, I will admit, does shake it up pleasantlyâbut wasting CPs is not pleasant)
⢠Stealth being required to spread bleeds via Indiscriminate CarnageâŚ
Look. I understand that whoever has been working on Rogues since 10.0 is absolutely, madly in love with stealth. And also probably doesnât main Rogue. Or doesnât care. I have no other explanation for the current state of Rogue talents.
I have news for this person, since they donât actually play the class: stealth is something we only do at the very beginning of a fight. As a solo PvE player, if I press Vanish, THE FIGHT IS LIABLE TO RESET ENTIRELY. I mean, it is what Vanish has always been for. Sometimes, it miraculouslyâor unfortunatelyâdoesnât work; see Whims and moodswings of the capricious Stealth God above. I should not have to deal with jank to play my class.
Got a chain pulling GOGOGO tank? Oops! Too bad! Enjoy being frustrated for the rest of the run while you desperately mash Vanish hoping it has come off cooldown!
â fix: add the Indiscriminate Carnage buff to any, or several, of the following: Shiv, Kingsbane, Blindside procs, Deathmark/Vendetta/Hunger for Blood/I canât keep track of the name changes of this cooldown that has always been macroed with Berserker and trinkets and appears as âBURSTâ on my hotbar.
⢠Thistle Tea charges should not be spent automatically if there is a Mastery buff attached to them. Man. What the hell.
â fix : Choice node. Current version VS fully manual version. Iâm pretty sure this has been asked by a majority of Rogue players since the change went down. But as usual, it feels like thereâs nobody listening.
â the actual fix they will come up with: âremove the mastery buff you say? Gotchu!â
⢠boy I sure love watching my needlessly inflated energy bar fill slowly so I can fire off a single Mut!
â fix: Iâm not sure there is one. I still love the class and the spec. But god damn this feels boring and terrible when it happensânearly as awful as playing Subtlety when itâs run out of Shadow Dance. (recoils in horror)
⢠Acrobatic Strikes, or something. Personally I couldnât care less because 99% of my gametime involves enemies hitting me directly in the face, but apparently this change upsets a lot of people who, i dont know, play an mmorpg with other people or whatever haha lol how silly. Anyway, given that this was a broad sweeping nerf to melee range across the board, unless devs suddenly get an epiphany about the notions of fun and convenience I doubt anything will ever be done to revert this change, and every melee main other than Ret should get used to being the unfavorite child.
â fix: play Ret like everyone else who doesnât enjoy hammering nails into their genitals as part of their rotation anytime a mechanic happens. Or hope for devs to stop hating melee hahaha
⢠Can I stop having to reapply my poisons every time I spec in and out of Dragon Tempered Blades? How hard can it be to have it wipe only the lethal and non-lethal poisons with the shortest duration left when I spec out of it?
Outlaw
I want to like Outlaw. I want to play Outlaw. My first main spec was Combat, during Vanilla and most of TBC, until Mutilate was added in patch 2.4. Do you know why ? Because back then Combat was the only Rogue spec not focused on stealth, or hitting targets from the backâwhich was of course impossible for me.
In its present state, as an open world solo PvE player, however, I cannot really play Outlaw.
⢠Killing Spree doesnât kill you anymore. Hurray! Raiders and M+ players, please clap at this sole acknowledgment Rogues are getting for the rest of TWWâs lifespan! RIP the cool skill I had known since WotLK, though. I mean, it sure sucked in execution but the concept was kinda cool.
â fix: again, choice node between the two versions for those that liked the old one, even if itâs clearly inferior in tryhard play. REMEMBER WHEN THEY DID THIS FOR MARKSMANSHIPâS REWORK? (pets) Give them different names for clarity, since the new gun spree just isnât the same concept anymore. I understand that Blizzard nowadays favors axing player choices over actually caring to balance them (I will miss you SO MUCH Mind SpikeâŚ), but I swear, just giving us the choice of flavor for players who donât care to minmax really wonât take this much time away from your bi-monthly Mage, Hunter and Priest reworks! 
⢠Iâve already said enough about it so you know what Iâm going to say:
REMOVE. VANISH. FROM OUTLAW ROTATION.
I donât care about the opinions of high-end players who do nothing but M+ and raids and therefore do not see any issue whatsoever with the use of Vanish as a major DPS cooldown. Honest to god, you guys are cool and all but you arenât the majority of the player base, and I wholeheartedly believe a spec should be able to function in solo and world content play WITHOUT having to rely on tight timing, bugs, and the mysterious whims and moodswings of the capricious Stealth God.
Yes, I could choose to forego Vanish in solo play. You know, the (since 10.2) backbone of Outlaw, that is single-handedly responsible for the most exciting part of Outlawâs rotation right now as well as making its in-combat energy regeneration decent. I could also choose to smash my head repeatedly against a wall and run a marathon on a track of Lego pieces.
â fix: Crackshot becomes an OGCD with 2 charges like Symbols of Death. (Macro it with something else so you donât have to cry about button bloat.) Crackshot gives you Subterfuge for 6 seconds. I knowâthatâs called âShadow Danceâ, but I mean itâs the devsâ fault that they took it away from all 3 specs without touching their overreliance on stealth talents, leaving us with this awkward gameplay. Delete every single interaction Outlaw has with stealth so you donât double dip with Crackshot and the real Subterfuge. Honestly, the fact that The Artist Formerly Known As Combat is picking Subterfuge as a talent makes Combat spin in its proudly stealthless grave.
â alternate fix: make it so Vanish doesnât IMMEDIATELY drop combat. Maybe have it make your targets âconfusedâ for 1 or 2 seconds where youâre all still in combat with each other but they canât target or hit you until you hit them. Actually that would be really cool for routinely breaking casts like in delves. That would be too cool of a Quality of Life change, so I am very confident this will never happen.
Subtlety
This is the stealth tree so Iâm guessing this is where the lone dev working on Rogue hails from.
Him and all four other Sub players in the world.
Whenever I want to experience what fentanyl withdrawal feels like, I switch to Sub and start a fight thatâs longer than 30 seconds. This is mostly all I have to say about Sub.
Anyway. Who am I kidding, this is the EU forum so I might as well be farting in the wind.
13 Likes
It makes absolutely no sense rogues have been so neglected, when in every other RPG the stealthy assassins end up being one of the most popular class fantasies. I just canât wrap my mind around how the responsible class dev still has a job.
11 Likes
Personally if they want the subterfuge gameplay for Outlaw Iâd give the class something like a smoke bomb that enables our Crackshot window inside a certain radius - thematically fitting for a more confrontational Rogue and we get to keep Vanish as a get out of jail card.
For me a wider problem with modern Rogue is our combo points generate extremely quickly and thus our finishers feel less impactful. It almost feels like you could make our finishers be procs off our builders at a 40-50% chance and functionally our rotations would feel similar, which I think kills the feeling of being a true builder/spender class.
Iâd personally slow our combo point generation and rebalance to make our finishers feel impactful, and make it so our burst windows see us generating points faster as opposed to % damage buffs.
3 Likes
Thatâs a great idea with Smoke Bomb and Subterfuge! Actually Iâd love to have the old Smoke Bomb back in regular play too. PVP talents in general are full of neat ideas I wish I could use more often, without my inevitable death at the hands of another player attached.
But man, I just want to play Outlaw solo and have fun without relying on notoriously unreliable Vanish because I am forced to use it against its primary purpose. It sucks. I was against DF giving Shadow Dance to every specâthereâs a reason I donât play Subâbut then they decided to give us the worst of both worlds by leaving all the talents built with Shadow Dance in mind untouched, and leaving us with nothing but Vanish to make do with. It sucks.
The combo point inflation feels weird too. Assassination is the spec least affected by it, but Outlaw and Sub are really prone to (builder gives 6 combo points, WOW!) â (kinda wet noodle spender) â (builder) â (spender). It should feel awesome when it happens, but now itâs become so normal and expected that the numbers have to be middling, because itâs the baseline.
1 Like
thats some passion. love it!
5 Likes
Rogues have one of the more cooler aesthetics in the fantasy world but unfortunately the playstyle doesnât match it. I agree when people here say that the vanish to damage playstyle is unfitting for assassination and outlaw. I really want to play outlaw myself but the current playstyle feels very unfitting for what i imagine the specs is. I see outlaw as a warrior/brawler type with little to no moral standards and not the sneaky stealth type that subtlety is.
5 Likes
Rogue is back BOYZ
- ROGUE
- The Single-Button Assistant and Assisted Highlight now recommend more appropriate weapon poisons based on your talents and adjust their recommendations towards Wound Poison in PvP content.*
What a joke! Just fire the guy already.
8 Likes
Well i try, but it is just so hard. Our self sustain defensive is just so weak and when comes into Delves, Good luck with that when Bran dies after 15 seconds and arenât able to keep aggroâŚ
I guess we are doing ok in raids and mythic, but solo game is just hard.
3 Likes
Personally rogue is just boring to play and has way too much crap in its rotation for no reason at all other than hey here is another button to press that doesnât even have any cool visual.
The class fantasy of the class is also all over the place. What i want from Rogue/Thief archetype is i want to be an outlaw a dashing scoundrel a Han Solo type not whatever the hell wowâs version is. Somekind of James Bond? A washed out pirate who has almost all pirate themes taken off from it? Kurt Wagner wannabe?
The class just feels Extremely outdated and unfun to play hell even in open world it feels like a absolute chore to play.
6 Likes
I dont understand how anyone can enjoy rogue gameplay in pve(i dont pvp so dunno about that).
Feral is the better version of assa rogue in m+. Assa is just frustrating alt tab dot spec with bloat to track.
Outlaw has the worst damage profile of all specs probably. Bad st, no mass aoe, no burst. Okay for 5-8 mob pulls. That is if you can keep on constant pressure with hyper gameplay using the right gcd every 0.8 seconds without ever loosing momentum or the damage drop to tank level and it will. Atleast in pugs. Its balanced around perfect gameplay in premade comps. I play 6 classes/10specs at 3k+ m+ level and i just gave up on rogue. Rather play feral druid for my ârogue needsâ. I like the mobility and defensives of rogue but the gameplay just suck big time. Just slow down outlaw and give it more impactful abilities you are just spamming weak hitting finnishers to reduce cooldowns of adrenaline rush and vanish. Audiovisual experience is lame too. Atleast they change killing spree. Its so bad to play in m+ loosing control of movement and swirls and what not target you so its a nice suprise when the channel ends. But its not nearly enough to keep me investing my time to play this class and actually no1 play rogue anymore its 1% class just delete it from the game, its low quality content in this game.
2 Likes
No change will come until they fire the guy that is NOT working on the class and get someone actually useful and capable for it. The only thing that can happen is 1 week before season start rogue will get a random 3%-5% aura buff that literally WONâT change anything. Just unsub at this point, donât play what they want you to.
3 Likes
Sadly I canât see them even with the bubble talent that let me see them.
It seems they rerolled.
1 Like
there is 1 maybe 2 devs who work on all classes thats why its so bad
2 Likes
Rogue is all about surprise and domination in PvP. You choose when the fight starts - and often end it alone. Thatâs it.
Everything else is just fluff.
Then why are ret paladins the 1v1 kings now? In dueling tournaments there is no rogue participants anymore.
3 Likes
We need Gunslinger spec on rogue, there, problem solved
I always make the final opener after his buffs Wings and Freedom, and almost always secure the kill.
every opponent is the mouse, not the cat
You as a Class with DH should just simply be abolished. You are hated and simplified. No wonder Reckful kissed the pavement over a teengirl.
J-Just ⌠coming here to finally throw my voice.
While my MM hunter of the same ilvl as my rogue pulls off 4m+ burst damage, my rogue barely does 1.2m q.q
The ST is horrible on a rogue⌠I just want us to be good again, manâŚ
5 Likes