Val's Response to the Rogue Class Review

WoWInsider highlighted a Rogue Class Review on the official Europe servers. I'm not going to go into every part in depth, but I will highlight some of the ones I found to be most interesting.

Rogues versus Warrior & Feral Druids Rogues feel they don’t bring enough to raids. Warriors give shouts, loads of HP/armour and equal DPS. Feral Druids give buffs, raid abilities such as resurrect, innervate and are also good in DPS. Rogues feel left alone because they are suppose to be the jack of all DPS classes but they don’t bring buffs, raid abilities or high DPS. Improving DPS overall would help. Giving buff abilities is an option but doesn’t really fit in with the Rogue profile. An option would be to introduce more debuff abilities for Rogues like Hemorrhage (acid reducing armour for example). Also giving less immunity on bosses could boost Rogues’ DPS.

I think this is what Rogues have been asking for all along. Either make us the unquestioned gods of DPS or allow us to bring a little bit more to a raid. As it is, there is no question that Hunters dominate the DPS charts on end game and do so standing 30 yards away from the dangers of the mob. Instead we stand within arms reach of our targets wearing the second to weakest type of armor.

Rogues are reporting they are missing a lot of +hit rating on the Arena PvP items. +hit is very important for Rogues so that their melee abilities land on the opponents. Also with a lot of abilities/gear having +stealth detection, it makes Rogues easy targets in some situations (Warlock with Paranoia + Cast Eye Goggles for example). Giving some +stealth on gear would help a little.

This has been one of my major hesitations to picking up PvP gear. A lot of classes can pick up PvP gear and replace pieces of their PvE gear with it. This isn't true of Rogues. The majority of rogues benefit highly from +Hit and rogue PvP gear is completely lacking in +Hit. Instead, Blizzard gives us +Crit which everyone who wears PvP gear has resilience to counter. Rogues need a significant boost in PvP. In my opinion our PvP gear needs:

• Less critical strike rating.
• More hit.
• More stamina.
• More armor.
• More stealth.

Until this occurs, Rogues will continue to suffer in PvP.

Going in PvP with a Rogue versus Range the range class wins most of the time. Rogues only have two abilities (Sprint and Shadowstep) with huge cooldowns. This makes them an easy target. Giving Rogues more chance to reach their range target would help a lot. And example would be shorter cooldown and longer effect on sprint.

Oh yes. Yes please. With Sprint being our only boost, I'd love to see the cooldown reduced. Honestly, I'd love to see Rogues get a run speed boost that is passive.

Expose Armor currently has a fixed value and does not improve against good geared players. To give Rogues more scaling, let Expose Armor have a percentage of armour reduction depending on the opponents armour. Letting this ability stack with Sunder Armor and also stack with AP would increase the usefulness of this ability.

Expose Armor is worthless and has been since beta. It needs to stack or do something in conjunction with Sunder Armor.

Rogues are saying that once all their cooldowns are on they are having a hard time killing people in PvP. Giving a few key abilities lesser cooldown would help. An example of class versus class would be Rogue versus Paladin/Warrior. An example of abilities would be Evasion, blind & Adrenaline Rush.

Yep, exactly. Every one of our "tricks" is on a cooldown, usually around 3 minutes. This gives us one good span of 15 seconds in PvP in order to drop our targets. If it doesn't happen, it's over. I'm not sure what can be done about this however. If these cooldowns changed, they would significantly change how Rogues perform in PvE. Perhaps a change in Rogue cooldowns would fix a good majority of the issues listed here.

Eviscerate seems to be lacking the Rogues choice of ability. They are saying Bleed and Rupture are doing way more damage then Eviscerate. Improving Eviscerate would help a lot on Bleed immune mobs. And example of this would be let it stack more with AP and/or weapon damage. Another example would be adding a percentage to ignore armour.

I think there should be ways that every finisher, including Eviscerate, should be a possible choice for a rogue depending on the situation. However, having Eviscerate as just a damage finisher for when you can't use Rupture doesn't seem to make Eviscerate special enough to keep as a finisher. Rupture does more damage and does so when a Rogue's target moves away. Eviscerate needs to do more damage since it is instant in order to be considered.

To be able to help on grouped mobs, giving Rogues the ability to hold combo-points on targets even if they are building more combo-points on other targets would help. This would also boost the PvP Arena DPS. Another way to do this is to make combo-points a buff and it will keep on holding those combo-points for a certain time before the combo-points go away (including when switching targets!).

Combo points are so essential to the way rogues are played that something should be done to allow all of these wasted points to be used. A change like this would make Blade Flurry even more vital to most builds, something I'm not sure that Blizzard really wants to encourage. An interesting idea would be to return the combo points as a target dies to the Rogue as a buff that could be reapplied to the next mob with a new move or just enchances a Rogue much like Remorseless Attacks an essentially useless talent was meant to.

While I appreciate the moderators on the European forums consolidating these concerns, I would much rather hear what Blizzard intends for the future of the Rogue class.