Short version: Blizz killed the class. Your weapons are 2 long paper rolls and a water pistol or 2 wet noodles, and you topple over when a mob sneezes at you.
Sounds like the easy life has ended. Youâll need to play like every other class.
Indeed, and a long time ago. Like 13 years ago. But even hard times for rogues ended already. Itâs more âhave some mercyâ times or âat least leave the legsâ times now. Give rogues at least hard times back.
When were the hard times for the mages?
2 Likes
itâs ethical
people do not play rogues because people hate rogues
Weâre the scum of Azeroth. We will kill, we will rob and there will be nothing anyone can do about it. And then weâll do it again.
undead laughs
On a serious note, I didnât like rogues when I first started playing. But then I learned to appreciate all the cool things skilled rogues can do. Watch some videos of Reckful, Pshero, Neilyo, Pikaboo, Whaazz, and many others. Especially from some earlier patches when it was simpler to understand whatâs going on) Some of the plays are completely out of this world.
I wanted to add a link to a Psheroâs match in Cata classic, where he wins a game by sapping another rogue that hit vanish after a second or so, while fighting his teammate, just by predicting his movement. Rogue wanted to cheap shot him, but he was faster. Words canât describe how insane it was, you gotta see it for yourself. I couldnât find the link though, so maybe someone else has it.
Also, earlier I said cheap short and kidney started sharing DR in SL, but I think it happened much earlier, maybe in Cata or MoP. Someone correct me please who remembers when that happened.
Iâm tempted to say WotLK even when they started with the DR on cc. But it can be MoP. Itâs been ages I donât remember anymore.
On one hand Iâm still saltt about this but having played other classes itâs understandable and unfair. Not only you have stealth and can gtfo whenever you want but getting someone on 4s+6s stun, enhanced gouge, restealth, repeat and if something fails you had vanish and preparation to repeat the cycle.
That was really nasty, honestly.
It was in Cataclysm.
edit: not sure how my post was deleted by myself
1 Like
Iâm pretty sure WotLK still had them separate. But in all patches before and including WotLK energy regen was very slow. And cheap + kidney combo is somewhere around 70 energy. Some of it regenerated during that time, but not too much - you could only use one ambush + one evis I think, if you wanted to gouge after at least. Besides, in WotLK there was a lot of resilience and with rogue damage not being too great, I donât think it was too strong. Even with auto attacks and poisons being a decent part of the DPS.
In arenas with a mage somewhere around the start/mid of the expansion maybe. And later with shadow priest. Good holy paladin + warrior still facerolled both of those unless rogueâs team played perfectly. Ferals also were very good against rogues if memory serves. Good hunters as well, especially considering how easily they obliterated clothes.
In duels against some classes maybe, but even then I donât remember it being easy to win duels. Every class has something very strong like that, but it was different for each class. Warlocks had succubus, mages had blink, druids had natureâs grasp, warriors - one good rend and itâs over) Restoration shamans and disc priests had a pretty hard time 1v1 I guess. But who said they should even have a possibility to win a rogue 1v1?)
Overall, it made PvP more about thinking and less about using all CDs at the same time and doing the most damage.
Also, Iâm convinced rogue just has to have an advantage in terms of CC. Itâs the most important thing about the class, itâs what makes rogues rogues. Even if that was too good against some classes, I donât think it would be the case now with all the nerfs, especially if you tweak the balance around it, i.e. make rogues have a bit less damage in PvP (though I donât see them doing too crazy damage either) but have better CC again. And make healers mortal again)
I can forget about this DR nerf. Just give something good instead then. Where is our burst of speed?!
And give 8 sec blind back, current blind is utter trash. I still canât believe they killed the two signature moves rogues had for 20 years with a single sentence in the patch notes, just like itâs nothing.
UPD: I said ambush + evis during those two stuns, but KS and evis are both finishers. So it was more like cheap + sd + ambush + wait + ks + wait + ambush + wait + ambush OR evis OR gouge. Something like that. Maybe it could be optimized with premeditation a bit, but I think it was mostly used for SnD from stealth (or you could use evis after premed + cheap I guess, but not sure 5CP KS was possible to fit without gaps in this case). Sometimes you had to use garrote or rupture at the end as well. Speaking of garrote - all specs had garrote with silence but it couldnât be used out of stealth. And it was beautiful.
1 Like
That sounds really cool, I like it.
1 Like
Druids had Faerie Fire, the most disgusting skill in the game. Instant cast and prevented a player to stealth for 60s. Of course it was spammable.
I have never seen in any game a spell that would shut down hard any class ability like this.
I donât know about arenas, I was doing more BGs and world PvP back in the day. But I remember if you did well especially with the energy tea, you could get at least any cloth class down to 75-70% hp if not more with crits. But it was not just the damage itself, it was being able to disable someone for that long.
But it does feel very bad whenever you try to combo CS + KS nowadays.
1 Like
I have 4 rogues and I played with them quite a bit since shadowlands. Why I dont play with them too much anymore is the class fantasy. For me sub and assassin feels the same and i dont like this dice roll piraty stuff with outlaw. Playing with them on epic bgs still feels good tho.
It would be cool to have more ranged and thief like ability. One spec for ranged gameplay, or havin an ability that can steal spells from classes and npcs would be neat too.
1 Like
Oh yeah, faerie fire was stupid as hell. It shouldâve had 15-20 sec duration at best. It was a magic debuff, so thatâs probably one of the reasons why playing with a priest was so popular. Well, that and the priestâs ability to dispell enemies)
I donât think itâs easier today though. When playing BGs, it absolutely feels like if youâre in the same half of the map with a moonkin thatâs alive and not afk, you will have moonfire. Iâve got it in stealth multiple times, without seeing a druid anywhere near me. A couple of days ago I was just sneaking to the mines at the deepwind gorge after resurrecting, got the debuff in the middle of the road to the mines while in stealth. The druid was closer to the middle pit, I was only able to see him when I turned the camera ~150 degrees, he was almost blocked by terrainâŚ
Not to mention everyone has dots now. It used to be that rogues were mainly afraid of warriors for bleeds and druids for the faery fire. Now thereâs not only more dots, it feels like their duration is much longer than in, say, WotLK. What was 15-18 sec is 20-26 sec now. I havenât checked it, maybe Iâm wrong on this, but it definitely feels like it to me. Rupture is lasts too long as well, which messes with rogueâs CC AND rupture currently deals around 10%+ of the damage, so you canât really skip it either. How does it make any sense at all to the designers is beyond me.
Also, warriors still have bleeds, but you canât realistically win a warrior with your bleeds as a sub at least. Before when you fought one, you relied on your CC and bleeds, while only facing warriors if you had evasion up. Otherwise you will get rend and wouldnât be able to restealth to repeat. Every spec had good bleed damage. How are rogues supposed to fight warriors now? I mean, I can cheap shot, pop all cooldows and try to do something, it even works sometimes. But before there was much more thought into those fights. I tried to fight a warrior 1v1 as in the older days as a sub recently, full rupture removed about 10% of his hp and thereâs no garrote or poisons either, poisons are about 1% of the damage now. Auto attacks are 8% or something. You just have to pump a warrior face to face with all your CDs. Am I the only one who finds it incredibly stupid?
Tea coudlnât be used in arenas.
All in all, I donât think rogues were imbalanced. They had the best CC and it definitely felt like it when you played both as a rogue and against one. But it didnât feel easy to play against a good druid or a mage either, for example. Cyclone x3 + root x3 + repeat was possible and warriors could only rely on reflect, bladestorm or trinket against it, rogues relied on vanish or trinket (sometimes cloak, but it was needed against natureâs grasp), etc. Same with poly and novas. Everyone had to rely on their teammates if not for dispelling, then at least for not letting enemies CC you. If anything, Iâd say rogue was even rather weak in WotLK, considering how good and prevalent warriors and DKs were, especially towards the end. You had to play perfectly or most comps would just stomp you. But the overall design was still miles better than now, itâs moslty the PvE gear that was busted.
In 1v1 rogue didnât quite feel overpowered against most classes either. I would just go so far to say that good frost mages, ferals, DKs and ret paladins were much stronger than rogue 1v1. Paladins could even use an int shield + weapon and were practically immortal. I remember farming rogues on my warrior in areans, bgs and duels. Even the ones who tried to dead zone didnât succeed much, except a few who did it absolutely perfectly.
Now every CC is less meaningful, but itâs more spammy in terms of both CC and escapes. That in terms makes the damage the most important part. You basically just try to stay on target and do damage damage damage. Thatâs no what rogue gameplay was ever supposed to be. I didnât pick rogue for this. And I donât think any of the other rogued did either. All other classes have always been better than rogues at zug-zug gameplay. Why would anyone ever pick a rogue instead of a paladin or a warrior now if not for nostalgia?
I tend to drop my rogues pretty fast after hitting max level on them (I love leveling and pickpocketing) cause I feel so super squishy.
Iâm 100% playing it wrong, cause I play rogue the least, but it still scares me off fast.
Youâre not alone. Rogues lost dodge from agility and are absolutely balanced with the Elusiveness talent in mind, so you have to use feint before receiving heavy damage. In PvP, the damage and CC is so high, that unless youâre fighting 1v1 or maybe 2v2 it gets overwhelming rather quickly (and even for 1v1 and 2v2 you have to have some experience).
It is also balanced around cooldowns and stealth, so if you canât start from stealth or donât have cooldowns, it can be hard even against normal monsters while questing. Most classes donât even have to think in the open world now, you just pull whatever you want and youâre fine unless itâs some very strong rare or a world boss. I fight rares exclusively in sub for example, with all the CDs it does pretty good ST damage. And assassination is good for normal mobs / quest elites if you can start from stealth, since it gives AoE to bleeds and bleeds carry most of the weight. Not sure about outlaw, I canât play it at all now.
I think the problem here is with how Blizzard sees Rogue as a class. Either they just see it as problematic from the point of being âtoxicâ and effectively want it gone, but canât just delete it like they did with the spit emote. Or they still think it has too good of a toolkit and thus rogues are balanced with the active usage of that toolkit in mind, which is not entirely wrong, but not quite right either. You canât really relax and do what other classes can do with their brain being completely somewhere else on a rogue. And I have no idea why someone would still think rogue has the best toolkit. Paladins definitely have a better toolkit now, for example, the only thing where paladin is worse than a rogue right now is stealth - paladins are not too good at it (though sometimes they can be sneaky with the two horse charges). But since stealth is weak and bugged as hell, that doesnât seem like a big advantage either.
2 Likes
Things that hurt rogues the most in my opinion.
- Removal of passive dodge.
- Shared DR with cheap and kidney shot
- Removal of blind into sap.
- Flying mounts
- Faster gameplay
2 Likes
Feral is in that boat too of stealth-issue, and squishy.
It feels a bit âlostâ in the sauce with these speccs.
Feral being so wishy washy with what itâs depending on - spinning plates instead (Bleeds + Executes).
I feel like both rogue and druid could use some overhauls, tbh. (Maybe let Resto and Balance be, but do something better with Feral and Guardian)
Just picked Outlaw today, the rotation guide was pretty clear but omg until I spent an hour writing WA for all the priorities the cognitive overload even on dummy was gigantic. I really donât understand why there are 3 finishers(+ coup de grace) that do the same thing but require different binds since there is no choice between them, you just always press the highest priority one. On the other hand the RNG was pretty refreshing (after mage, warlock and survival hunt). Sure the buffs are not equal in dps numbers but it allows for some variation in the rotation (even if itâs just the amount builders between spenders) after 0 variants arcane rotation it feels awesome. But my god it almost impossible to play without personalized addons.
1 Like
The problems are very noticeable in delves for both, rogue and feral. They just donât have the right tools for what new content looks like today.
Combat used to be the simplest spec, you had to track snd and rupture (and sometimes even rupture wasnât used), then you had to track the banditâs guile or whatever it was called as well, which was a bit more involved. Now itâs one of the most complicated specs if not the most complicated one for some reason and dealing damage without tracking 10 buffs all the time is impossible. This is a significant nerf, even if it can still do good damage when played right.
In delves you can put tricks on brann healer which makes it not so bad. I actually did t11 deathless in sub with ~675 ilvl. It took a while though, because I had to use all my cooldowns for every beefy pack and at least one shadow dance for even smallest mobs.
Because people are often curious to try a class that theyâve seen their friends play and rogue players have no friends.