Sublety is too complicated and outlaw is lame

Classes Rogue
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Shadow Dance as apart of the core Sublety loop. It is unfun extra complexity. Stealth abilities outside of combat are just normal abilities that add keybind complexity.
It used to trigger Vanish on a timer. Creating actual stealth - it was kind of fun, but you guys lost the plot when you tried to balance it around agro dump. What is the fantasy of this ability even??

Symbols of Death is just a mandatory damage button, but it doesn’t actually DO anything. It has no gameplay value apart form being a forced extra button on your toolbar.

Slice and Dice and Roll the Bones are basically the same thing with some flavor to be honest. It’s just stuff you maintain, there is no real gameplay decision there. It’s just a button that does nothing that you HAVE TO press.

Outlaw is Han Solo, Cowboy, Sassy-Archaeologist, Pirate fantasy. All things that are lame and only fit for romance novels targeted at women aged 13-34.

Most rogues are elves, because elves are hot. Rogues are played by dudes.
Because it is a clever-technical-killer-type-fantasy.

Guns should be some other class fantasy thing.
As Outlaw I want to throw daggers, axes, shuriken, spears, nets and do acrobatic fight-y moves with some thief stuff mixed in there.

What is so hard to understand?

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How does roll the bones not have game play decision?

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Because your goal is to keep it active in order to maximize your dps.

Pressing a button is not dynamic when:
Players or mobs don’t change their behaviour in a game.
There is no reaction from you, nor the world or mobs after you press this button.
You are not pressing this button as a reaction to anything.
Your behavior doesn’t change due to the pressing of this button.
You do not get a noticable change or outcome from pressing this button.

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Don’t look at what they did to sub rogue in the midnight alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJkJKdTVX58

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I just watched the entire thing and got considerably more depressed.

This feels like beyond incompetent design. This feels like deliberate decision making by a person that is thinking extremely narrow. An evil dumb person.

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Whoever designed symbols of death as an ability needs firing that’s for sure. Let’s make an ability that restores a good chunk of energy instantly but also buff the character for some % dmg. So you are telling me I have to have this buff to have optimal opener but also wanna use it when I’m low on energy? Ability’s own effects are contradicting and it’s a terrible button to press either way. It’s actually insane this ability somehow keeps getting away from any pruning or change attempts at this spec while being the most worthless thing ever made in this game.

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How is shadow dance “unfun extra complexity”? It’s more than a normal burst button and it’s more than an extra vanish and this is what always made it cool. In fact, I would say it’s one of the best buttons in the game and I really like how it works right now. The only thing wrong with it is how little damage backstab does compared to shadow strike and how little both contribute to overall damage, leading to a gameplay with damage ONLY during SD. Maybe you meant that but in that case you expressed it rather poorly in my opinion.

And what keybind complexity due to shadow dance are you talking about? That during a SD you get a whopping ZERO extra damage buttons and two CC buttons, out of which you can just not use both and be fine in 99% of cases in PvE? Most rogues just make it so their panels are almost or exactly identical in all stances and it plays absolutely fine. Current sub doesn’t even have that many buttons compared to some previous iterations. The only buttons that are kinda out of place are:

  • Goremaw’s Bite (should be removed or reworked)
  • Flagellation (should be baked into Shadow Blades)
  • Thistle Tea (it’s awful)
  • Symbols of Death (should be baked into SD if simplification is one of the goals)

I agree with abilities clashing on AoE and how unintuitive it is. This mostly applies to TWW as well. I also totally agree with haste - hasted CDs are awful and need to go, CP version is much more fun, intuitive and useful. Rupture, on the other hand, should exist at least for PvP (and not as a PvP talent!) and it should do good damage, so I completely disagree that it needs to be removed. So far, alpha changes seem like one step in the right direction and ten steps in the wrong one.

Star Wars, westerns, Indiana Jones and all the pirate stuff are for 13-34 yo women? This is such a wild take that, after reading it, it’s hard to take your whole post in any serious way whatsoever.

Rogue has a lot of problems, probably more than any other class, but this post has little potential to help resolve them.

100% agree with this though

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The target audience for Vampire, Werewolf, Pirate and misunderstood-monster-rebel-protagonist stories are targeted at women between the ages of 13-34. Women are a statistically very significant majority of 82% primary consumers of these type of narratives.

The book publishing industry refers to this as “Paranormal-Romance” or “Spicy-Romantasy” - This is a well known and statistically accurate stereotype.

ShadowDance does not stealth you for a long time now. In PvP the extra stun triggers diminishing returns and is practically useless.

You have more buttons that do the same thing as other buttons do.

Blizzard should:
A: transform existing buttons (instead of adding extra buttons) during Shadow Dance.
B: Merge the damage boost Shadow Dance provides into existing abilities as a passive bonus. Remove button swapping as a vertical of complexity.

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Initially you said:

which is Star Wars, westerns, Indiana Jones and, well, everything about pirates I guess. Star Wars and Indiana Jones are not targeted at women, I would be very surprised if you find me a reliable stat that shows otherwise. Westerns are for mean and boys, women mostly hate that stuff. Saying women watch those mostly for like Harrison Ford or Clint Eastwood is one thing, claiming it’s “girl stuff” is completely different. And “pirates” is kinda vague, but Pirates of the Carrbbean, for example, are great, at least the first ones, and definitely not targeted at girls or women first and foremost. There are other examples like Black Sails which is pretty ok series and pretty masculine as well, at least at the start-middle, I kinda dropped it at some point)

And btw, Han Solo is a smuggler, which is arguably much deeper and more interesting rogue kind than most others that are often mentioned like ninja. Ninja is just a glorified Japanese assassin of a certain era, whereas smugglers existed basically forever and everywhere, they must be stealthy and outsmart the ones who’re after them. Yes, it might not be as combat oriented as ninja, but it’s much more “rogue” in its own way. That said, outlaw doesn’t remind me of anything like that.

Vampires and Werewolves - different thing, not in the original post and most importantly - not a rogue theme at all. Those are mostly for girls, I agree, especially given that one of the most famous things about this stuff in the last 20 years is Twilight.

I also dislike the pirate theme as a theme of the spec, even with them trying to mask it with different names and tooltip descriptions. It’s only the way you phrased it that put me off.

Btw, you also said most rogues are elves because they are pretty. I disagree here. Rogues are elves because rogue is a PvP class first and foremost and NE is completely overpowered for rogues with the most useful racials including Shadowmeld, which is insane for all three specs and especially for assa/outlaw. Blood elf is second because their racial is useful in m+ or something… well, ok they are pretty as well. Then I guess human because people like human and because it was OP for PvP in Cata-BfA period. Then undead which is THE rogue race (nostalgia and style).

Who said it grants stealth?

Could you elaborate what you mean by this sentence? Do you want Cheap Shot removed or what?)

I kinda love all my buttons. I wish there were more. Not saying I can press them perfectly, but I’m not ready to part with any of them except SnD, Goremaw’s bite, Flagellation, Symbols of death and Thistle tea. In fact, I want many buttons back, like disarm trap, burst of speed, deadly throw… I even want to craft the damn poisons, but ok, that one is not everyone’s cup of thistle tea)

What exactly are you saying? You want something removed? What specifically and why?

When you use SD, you can use Shadowstrike, Cheap Shot, Sap, Detection and Shroud of Concealment. Just do as most rogues do and put Shadow Strike on the same button you have Backstab on out of stealth. As far as I know, you can still assign different spells in and out of stealth, but if you don’t you can use a macro. It’s pretty simple and every self-respecting rogue should be able to write something like this:

#showtooltip
/startattack [nostealth]
/cast [stance:1/2] shadowstrike; backstab

I don’t care about 1% of people weaving in backstab during SD for extra 1% of DPS, this is as relevant in a real fight as switching to a different race because their racial is better this season.

As for the other buttons - Cheap Shot is not the same as Kidney Shot, Sap is not the same as Gouge. Those can’t be merged. If they are ever merged, rogue will be even more dead than it is now, which should say a lot.

Rogue has SO MANY problems and you really picked those? First and foremost, Blizzard should fix stealth breaking when it shouldn’t and combat persisting longer than it should. Then they should make specs make sense and have more synergy instead of crap like haste reducing cooldown of SD. And then they should think what to add to rogue or what to remove from others so rogue’s toolkit becomes the best again.