Rogue redesign proposal

Classes Rogue
1

The title is actually a bit of a bait because I see a lot of people saying that and then proposing to make rogue more of a dark mage or even a tank… This is not another attempt to make something like this, because rogue doesn’t need that kind of rework. I’m not saying doing everything exactly as proposed is the right way to go, but the proposed changes have some interesting properties:

  1. Preserve what rogue is
  2. Aim to make rogues fun and useful again
  3. Are either bug fixes or have options so simple that they can be changed relatively quickly, sometimes overnight (not all of them though)

I will list the problems and then propose solutions.

1. Problem: stealth breaks when it shouldn’t

It can be things like hunter’s Trick Shots or dots (e.g. Moonfire) that have aoe that are cast on ally while you’re nearby in stealth - you don’t even have to be particularly close to the target, you just have to be unlucky enough. Also things like your rupture damaging a target with thorns-like effect. Effects of our allies that damage nearby allies can also kick us from stealth which is clearly unintended considering rogue has no way to affect this.

Possible solutions:

  • Make Cloak of Shadows have 45-60 sec cooldown.
  • Add large enough absorb shield upon entering stealth, like the one we had since SL until it was removed.
  • Make a permanent aura that prevents rogue from being targeted with other player’s spells unless the attacker/caster is 35 yds from the rogue or less. Or make it 30 yds but disable it if the rogue did any direct damage or CC in the last 3-5 seconds.
  • Disallow spell auto target to target rogues entirely.
  • Make all dots last at most 12-15 seconds on a rogue in PvP and disallow prolonging their duration without direct reapplication (e.g. can’t prolong sunfire duration unless sunfire is used directly again)
  • A dot should only break stealth if the spell was used on you directly, e.g. if a moonfire was used on you, the dot damage should prevent you from entering stealth, but if it was used on an ally and spread to you - it shouldn’t.
  • Only certain spells should be able to break stealth e.g. Flare, Freezing trap, DnD, Blizzard, Rain of Fire, and spells that have animations going from the player (Fan of Knives, Whirlwind, etc.) - everything else should simply be ignored while stealthed - e.g. Can’t get hit by something like a Moonfire unless the druid has true sight.
  • Reduce the number of dots various classes have (especially physical ones) and their duration across the board.

2. Problem: Combat bugs out and denies entering stealth when it shouldn’t

It ranges from just not resetting when there’s seemingly no reason for it whatsoever to silly things like rupture on a target sometimes preventing entering stealth, even after death

  • Make it so rogue can enter stealth if he hasn’t dealt or received direct damage or used a CC / got into CC in the last 5 seconds, regardless of combat.
  • Actually find and fix combat bugs like you care about the combat in the game where the combat is the most important aspect after transmog.

3. Problem: rogue went from the most mobile class in the game to the middle of the pack at best

Almost every spec has access to a sprint and sometimes even multiple sprints when it used to be rogue exclusive.

Possible solutions:

  • Reduce the number of class mobility abilities across the board, leave rogue’s mobility the same.
  • Bring back Burst of Speed. Yes, in the most broken form of MoP. Possibly even make cast instant or off-GCD as well, considering the game became much faster than it was in MoP. It’s the only fair alternative to the first option and either of those must be implemented, otherwise it’s the most important nerf rogue received since day 1 of WoW and a completely undeserved spit in the face to all rogues.
  • Give two additional charges of sprint or reduce its cooldown by 30 seconds. Or give one charge and reduce the cooldown by 15 seconds. The first two options are arguably more fair though.

Probably not the best idea to buff movement speed much for fatebound outlaw with Death’s Arrival though.

4. Problem: Rogue went from an absolutely exclusive CC toolkit to the one that has a meh-to-average one

This is a second biggest nerf rogue received since day 1 of WoW and it would be bearable if either the rogue received nerfs to CC or others received the CC abilities, but currently everyone has good CC AND rogue CC is nerfed beyond recognition.

  • Make blind last 8 seconds in PvP again - this one is not negotiable. Duration reduction down to 5 sec single-handedly shattered 20 years of rogue legacy.
  • Make sap last 8 seconds in PvP again - also not negotiable. A full Sap simply must allow to reliably cap the node on a BG.

Without those two, rogues in BGs are not even on life support - they are on thoughts and prayers.

Also, at least one of:

  • Reduce the number of stun abilities across the board, leave rogue stuns the same.
  • Remove all blinds from the game except Blind.
  • Make monk’s and DH’s Gouge alternatives melee or make them have 1+ minute cooldown or make Gouge 25yd and not requring facing the target.
  • Make Blind be breakable only by the damage dealt by a rogue or SW:D kind of effects.
  • Make Gouge be breakable only by the damage dealt by a rogue or SW:D kind of effects.
  • Make Kidney Shot cooldown be 15 seconds.
  • Make Kidney Shot and Cheap Shot have separate diminishing returns groups again.

5. Problem: There’s no non-dagger spec outside of outlaw and many people hate outlaw

Possible solutions:

  • Make RtB a choice talent with an alternative of an improved SnD (possibly not automated), that sims around 2-3% less damage compared to RtB crackshot build. Of course, move the nodes in such a way that you can skip all the RtB related nodes and pick something useful. That will make outlaw immediately less hated and more played spec, as well as calm “bring combat back” crowd down a bit.
  • Bring combat back.

6. Problem: Assassination is designed around having a large pool of slowly regenerating energy that you actually have to pool before cooldowns

When you run out of thistle tea it feels clunkier than in WotLK, which is actually crazy.

Possible solutions:

  • Give 2+ more charges of thistle tea while you think how to fix this mess.
  • Fix the mess.

7. Problem: Thistle tea is used automatically when low on energy

lol

Solutions:

  • Make it a choice node between automatic and manual.
  • Don’t let the person who decided it was a good idea to ever work on rogue again.

8. Problem: Sub deals negative damage outside of cooldowns.

Backstab, autoattacks and poisons combined are around 10% of the total DPS. To my knowledge, not a single spec in the game has anything even remotely as ridiculous as this. This simple number alone should tell you everything you need to know about the state of rogue right now.

Possible solutions:

  • Make backstab great again.

9. Problem: Shroud of Concealment is almost useless

Possible solutions:

  • Make only bosses and rares have true sight. It is not even up for debate, true sight mobs is unbelievably stupid.

10. Problem: Pick Pocket is useless

Possible solutions:

  • Allow pick pocket to actually give gold and chests again. Currently actual content mobs give a few silver coins and that’s it.
  • Allow pick pocket to apply either a buff to rogue or a debuff to target. Can be limited to non-group PvE (open world, delves).

11. Problem: Rogue can receive magic debuffs while under the effect of Cloak of shadows

Solutions:

  • Fix the bug.

12. Problem: Shadowstep above ground level fails most of the time

Solutions:

  • Fix the bug.

13. Problem: Agility no longer grants dodge

Possible solutions:

  • Fix the bug guys, it’s been like 10 years or something.

14. Problem: you probably laughed the previous point off, but I wasn’t kidding

Possible solutions:

  • Actually bring back dodge from agility.
  • Give a passive that grants 35-45% dodge.
  • Give Evasion 2 additional charges.
  • Give Evasion 1 additional charge and make elusiveness baseline.
  • Give Evasion 1 additional charge and Cloak of Shadows 1 additional charge.
  • Give feint 3 additional charges or 1 additional charge and make it cost no energy. At the same time, make both elusiveness and cheat death baseline AND make cheat death debuff last 3 minutes instead of 6.

I don’t actually want rogues to have 3 evasions or 5 feints, but if you think how much survivability we lost without dodge from agility only something like that could make up that loss. And given how paladins nowadays have seemingly infinite amount of cooldowns, it doesn’t even sound that crazy by comparison, even though it absolutely is.

15. Problem: Disarm trap and trap detection removed

Solutions:

  • Bring back disarm trap and trap detection. This is not up for debate again, even if your old stats show nobody used it.

16. Problem: CoS, Blind, Gouge and Evasion are in the talent tree

Solutions:

  • Make CoS, Blind, Gouge and Evasion baseline, as they always were. Bring dismantle while you’re at it. Because without all of that there is no rogue at all. Putting it behind talents is giving an illusion of choice, which is bad taste at best. And bring old shiv to sub and outlaw as well.

17. Problem: Blizzard doesn’t care about rogues

Possible solutions:

  • Close rogue discord.

18. Problem: Blizzard has no idea what rogues need long-term. Most forum rogues don’t seem to have any idea either

Possible solutions:

  • Hire multiple prominent rogue players like Whaazz (modern PvP), Pshero (old PvP) and some good guys who are good at PvE rogues and have been playing rogue since at least Cata (help me out with the names here) as at least temporal consultants. Hire a professional class designer who hasn’t been involved in the rogue class design in the last 5+ years but appreciates the class archetype. Put them in the same room and let them fix the rogue.

I could go on for x10 length of that easily, but this is already long enough for some people to use AI summaries, so thanks to everyone who’ve read it without them. If you agree with the list, consider reposting on US forums or anywhere else.

1 Like
2

Yes please

3

Also just came up with an actual proposal that would be very effective at making rogues relevant and don’t actually need much time to implement (except the blind part maybe):

  1. Move evasion and blind baseline as suggested earlier
  2. Put smoke bomb instead of one of those. It was baseline in Cata and MoP and it should’ve stayed that way, but we could live with it being a class talent instead, at least until the class tree gets a broader rework
  3. Put a choice passive after it instead of the second one of the now baseline abilities:
    - Make it give 80-100% evasion, 20-30% DR or some nice % chance to avoid any damage to everyone inside
    - Make it instantly blind (shorter, maybe 2-3 sec, but with a separate DR from the Blind) every non-boss enemy (including players) entering it

That is an actual example of a very simple design proposal that gives rogue both utility and flavor at the same time. This is what we need, not a dark mage or a rogue tank.

Now that I think about it, DH only got Darkness because it was a new hero class, the spell doesn’t make much sense - what does “summons darkness” even mean? It clearly sounds like something a smoke bomb should do. We were robbed in broad daylight and they say we are the thieves.

4

Going along on this line and others above how about this. Shiv is baseline, replace with Smoke bomb. Evasion is baseline, replace with choice node to modify Smoke Bomb, option 1, Smoke bomb CD reduced by 1 min. Option 2, Smoke Bomb grants 50% dodge while inside it. Cloak of Shadows is baseline, replace with Dismantle.

Blind is technically baseline as you can’t unlearn it from the TT, it’s already given at no cost.

With regard to Outlaw rogue (my favourite spec even when it’s bad) I think a simple RtB change could be good, for starters just add in a talent node that makes RtB always grant at least 2 buffs, follow that with a choice node to guarantee one of two buffs, each time. Energy regen, or attack speed. To balance it you could make them activate at a % less then they do now as you’re always going to get whichever one you specc into.

Also revert Killing Spree to original. Make it only attack multiple targets if Blade Flurry is active just as always. New KS is rubbish and so easy to counter by so many classes by just moving away 8 yrds. Also the fact that pets, totems and all that kind of thing count as targets is beyond logical. It was always players only (yes talking about PvP for this one) even when BF was active and you’d hit different targets.

Just a few thoughts of my own.

5

All of those should be baseline tbh, but I’m fine with 1-2 of them being on the class talents, just not all of them.

You can absolutely unlearn blind though, if you’re sub or assa. As I understand it, you can’t unlearn the talent “corresponding” to your current spec, so sin can’t unlearn shiv, outlaw can’t unlearn blind and sub can’t unlearn CoS. I can see where they were going with this but I hate it. You can’t play without CoS in PvP or PvE, you can’t play without blind in PvP at least, shiv is situational outside of assa, but it’s only shiv. Out of those three if anything has to be on a talent tree, let it be shiv. I still won’t like it but I can live with that. Blind and CoS - definitely not, those should be baseline 100%.

I’d love to be able to reduce shiv cooldown for outlaw and sub somehow though, maybe via a choice node that assa can’t pick or something like that. Or even better - allow assa to pick it too, but make it so shiv’s damage boost for assa is 2-3 times less powerful when the node is chosen or something (can be balanced if the second choice is something as good).

50% evasion would be very weak for a smoke bomb though, it’s too low of a number - unreliable to be useful for tanks and doesn’t provide anything to others. Either it’s close to 100% evasion or it should be another stat - either chance to avoid any damage or generic damage reduction. For the second option, the blind thing is much more interesting than just cooldown in my opinion, but it could be a three choice node (I doubt the system is actually limited to just two, that’d be stupid).

6

The only good thing so far will be cloak reduced to 1 minute.
There are too many spell dots in the game. That 2 minutes is damn too long.
Also what the heck with boomie refreshing moonfire and sunfire? Whoever came up with tht talent please stop using chat gpt for pvp.

7

This is pure cancer. First time I saw it I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The range, initial duration and the absolute lack of effort required to apply these dots is also completely imbalanced in PvP. You can be behind you team with a lot of space between you and the fight, with druid clearly busy fighting your teammates, and yet when you get out of stealth to mount up or anything you instantly get moonfired and can’t stealth for 20 seconds. I have no idea if they have a way to apply it in AoE, have some ricochet crap talent or are just fast AF with mouseover macros (or maybe even use some scripts?) but this doesn’t feel right.

What frustrates me the most is that most people can just ignore it - it’s not that much damage. But for rogues, and to a lesser extent ferals, it denies our core gameplay mechanic for too long with far too little effort.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about that, since before they had even more cancerous 1 min FF (though I think it had shorter range), but it still feels absolutely horrible to play against. And almost every BG has multiple boomies so almost every BG rogues have to deal with this crap. If it had shorter max range or 15 seconds duration for example, it would already be much better.

8

Once you got doted whenever they refresh it refreshes on you too no matter your range. Even if you are in stormwind and he in ironforge.

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