WotLK Rogue Developer Q & A

Just a brief foreword. I know I normally put all of my commentary at the top, but I think I’m going to try a new point to point analysis breakdown. Blizzard text, like always, will be in blue, and my commentary and analysis points will be in green.

Like what you plan to do with sub?
We recently made some changes to boost it, such as moving Dual-Wield Spec to tier 1 combat.

Sub is a very interesting spec right now. It still feels quite a bit weaker than combat or mutilate, but it’s got a lot of potential I think, especially if used in the correct environement. I’m very interested to see how the build preforms at 80 with all the new abilities and a full 71 talent points.

Why is hemo so bad?
It has a great debuff that boosts raid damage. It’s not intended to be Sinister Strike.

Hemo is not bad, this is a common misconception many rogue players have. With a 51 point sub build you’re looking at a 30 energy move vs. sinister strike which is a 40 energy move. The damage to energy ratio is appropriate, especially considering the debuff.

Why is Shadow Dance dagger only?
We agree with the above comment that it can do a lot of different things. You may just be focusing too much on it as a +dps cooldown.

I agree 100% with the blue poster here, this is another common misconception of shadow dance. Players focus so much on the spam ambush aspect of it they forget how powerful an extra garrote or premed cheap shot can be during a fight. I’ve been playing the build (with swords) since 3.0.2 went live and I’m loving this talent for this aspect. I’ll have a more complete write up on the build later this week.

Whether you feel rogue mobility is fine?
Rogues have a lot going for them in the way of stuns, damage avoidance and “get out of jail” cards. When you get up on other classes, they do have a tendency to die. We’re not sure we want rogues to also be zipping around the battlefield like warriors.

Yes…(sarcastic), we shouldn’t be “zipping around the battlefield like warriors.” 15 second intercept is broken beyond all belief, particularly for arena. Any scrub can successfully play a warrior with mobility like that. I’d trade mobility for lockdown any day.

What is happening with Lightning Reflexes?
We mentioned this as a possible change (or perhaps we even promised it — I don’t recall) but it didn’t materialize because we found other knobs to turn in combat that felt better during playtesting. Because LR is a passive talent, the side benefits would also end up being passive.

Nothing to say here, who cares about LR, I haven’t picked up this talent in years.

What is the deal with the Glyph of Sprint?
If I understand the qustion, I think it’s just a tooltip bug. The glyph was made before the base cooldown of Sprint was lowered from 5 minutes to 3 minutes (2 min talented). If that’s not the issue, can you elaborate a little more?

The dev is wrong, the glyph is bugged, but it’s an irrelevant question as they are changing the glyph of sprint anyway to increase speed at which you sprint and reduce the duration, effectively making it worthless.

Why is there a major glyph of feint?
Basically, rogues have relatively few abilities, and we were desperate for something that wouldn’t have serious PvP balance ramifications. I agree this might be a good candidate for a minor glyph. Remember that we are going to be adding a lot more glyphs over time. You shouldn’t view this as one of your very few useful glyphs is less useful, because you’ll eventually have a lot of choices.

Yet again, another pointless glyph.

Why is Fan of Knives so weak with daggers, and even weak with swords?
It’s designed to give you a button to hit when you want to AE. It’s not supposed to turn you into an AE class, if that makes sense.

See my notes here on fan of knives changes.

Are you happy with Hunger For Blood being horrible for PvP, and like the old Rampage for PvE?
No, not completely. We understand that CC + a short duration limit how often you can benefit from it. Obviously, we think removing MS and Hamstring was a little too good, just because those are generally hard debuffs to get out of.

Nothing really to say here yet, I haven’t personally played the build on live. I’ve heard these complaints before and they appear to be justified, but I’d like to get some experience with the build before I start talking about it’s flaws or successes.

How exactly are expose, mind numbing and wound major raid utility, when they so obviously are not?
Couple of things here, and forgive me for being a little brief.

First, I am reading between the lines a little here that it would be really nice to have a unique buff or debuff. Everyone asks for that, but it defeats the whole point.

Second, Expose is one of the strongest debuffs in the game. The dps increase can be 30% or more. So I suspect what you’re really getting at is that “we’ll always have a warrior with us doing that debuff.” The whole point of the revamp is we can’t assume you have anyone but we still want you to be able to get the buff. Mind Numbing is a cast speed debuff that is only offered by one other class (that doesn’t even exist in the game at the moment). Granted, it doesn’t offer the benefit of Expose. Wounding Poison offers the strongest debuff in the game for PvP, and also offers some dps to not over-penalize rogues who are balanced around poison damage.

Third, ultimately we still want raids to want rogues because they bring good dps. We just don’t want it to feel that only the rogues (hunters, mages and locks) are doing the group’s dps.

This massive block of text sounds more like a complete cop out for…”just kidding, we aren’t giving rogues real raid utility, see you in the next expansion!”.

Will there be a mutilate/HFB/cold blood/Assassination oriented glyph made before release?
Probably. We do want to add more glyphs over time, just like new gems started to show up in BC.

Rhetorical, why do players waste the dev’s times with questions like these? Side note: is it ironic that I would respond rhetorically to a rhetorical statement?

Overkill - why is it the pre-req to mutilate?
It’s always a hard call to decide what prereqs to what. We do like talent prereqs, and it seems like a good talent regardless. Are you wanting to skip it?

Quite ironic that mutilate rogues would be crying. Assassination is decked top to bottom with kick ass talents, most which would be 5/5 stars…so the 4/5 star talents just seem like filler now.

2. It has been stated that there is a plan to still have some poison immune mob/bosses in WotLK, what can a mutilate rogue do during these situations. Mages were helped with frostfire to combat the fire immune/frost immune mobs, but the poison requirement on mutilate still exist and when dealing with poison immune mobs, we’re(for the lack of a better term) seriously screwed in our dps. I still don’t understand why our signature move(for assassination) still has this requirement when it still cost 60 energy.
Poisons are what the rogues are balanced around, so we need to be pretty careful about that now. I can’t promise there won’t be any poison immune bosses — resistance and immunity are things we can change on a boss to make the fight play out pretty differently from the previous boss. But there won’t be a lot of them.

This is a valid issue, but one which I think blizzard understands and is fully capable of balancing encounters and talent specs around. I don’t expect mutilate rogues will have many issues dealing with poison immune encounters.

WotLK Rogue Changes - Beta Build 9038

Pretty minor changes this time around for rogues. I don’t recall even seeing the nerf to blade twisting, which had it remained 4 seconds, would be completely unjustifiable. It’s good to see they are changing it back to a full 8 seconds. What worries me about these changes, especially considering how late they are coming during the PTR process, is the fact that they are quite minor.

Let’s face it, combat and subtlety are a far cry from mutilate. Mutilate is without question the best PvP spec, and will be very competitive against combat for PvE purposes (potentially better). Unless we see some major improvements to the other rogue trees I think there will be a complete swing to mutilate builds when patch 3.0.2 goes live.

Rogue

Combat

• Blade Twisting - Your damaging melee attacks have a 10% chance to Daze the target for 8 sec. Up from 4 sec.

Subtlety

• Enveloping Shadows - Reduces the damage taken by area of effect attacks by 10/20/30%. Up from 5/10/15%.

Rogue Opportunity Changes - Build 8982

There’s been some pretty big changes to the rogue class during this wotlk beta, none larger than the change to mutilate and positional attacks, but blizzard just tossed out yet another curve ball…take a look at the rogue changes for beta build 8992.

Assassination

• Focused Attacks changed to : Your melee critical strikes have a 33/66% chance to give you 1 energy. (Old - 100%/100% , wasn’t implemented)
• Find Weakness damage increased reduced to 2/4/6%. (Old - 3/6/9%)

Combat

• Killing Spree cannot hit invisible or stealthed targets anymore.

Subtlety

• Opportunity now works all the time. (Old - Only increased the damage of attacks from behind)

Not quite as major as taking the positional requirement off mutilate, but certainly close. With this change mutilate and backstab rogues will enjoy the benefit of both opportunity and dual wield spec 100% of the time. This is a pretty huge change as it firmly places mutilate at the top of all rogue specs in my opinion, certainly for PvP purposes.

Combat still may , and in all likelihood will, remain a narrow first as far as PvE DPS is concerned, but considering all the buffs mutilate is receiving it won’t be far behind. It’s great to see a virtually unused rogue talent build such as mutilate getting some love for expansion, but I can’t help but wonder if they’ve taken it to the other extreme.

What do you think about the mutilate changes? Too much too quickly or just a generally bad build getting some much needed improvements?

Druid / Warrior / Rogue 3v3 Arena Strategy

If there was a team that could sum up the season 3 3v3 bracket it’d be druid / warrior / rogue matrix. Not to say that this is the most popular combo, but it’s a team which really started the ball rolling to break up the endless amount of rogue / mage / priest teams.

Early in S3 RMP was insanely popular (even more than it is now if you can believe it!), and this is one of the combos that led the forefront for other similar double melee gib teams attempting to gain a leg up on RMP teams.

So let’s get down the basics of the strategy. In essence, it’s a gib team. The basics of every game revolve around a few central spheres. First, the druid’s crowd control. Cyclone, cyclone, cyclone, feral charge, bash, root, root, root, rinse repeat. Shutting down the crowd control on your rogue and warrior is of absolute importance.

Typically you shouldn’t have to shut it down for long, because a free rogue and warrior will tear into a target quick. Speaking of which, the rogue and warrior have a fairly easy job. Drop the bombs.

Make sure you choose a target that 1) isn’t going to get away from you, and 2) is squishy (preferably, sometimes “squishy” is relevant, many games we just bomb warriors, IE, mirror matches). You go in, drop the big bombs early and get a quick kill. It keeps the pressure up and forces the other team to play very defensively.

Druid / Warrior / Rogue Arena Strategy:
The druid is going to be a fairly stand restoration build. 8/11/42 is a fine spec or any similar variation will work fine. Check out my arena druid talent specs guide if you need further advice on the approriate spec.

The rogue has a few options. Now, I’ve played the matrix as all 3 talent specs, and I’ve got to say shadowstep just offers the best overall advantage. Since fights don’t last long you can blow cool downs early to avoid being crowd control and maintain constant control and pressure. I’d recommend a 20/0/41 (once again check out my rogue arena talent specs guide for further talent spec break down).

If you are really comfortable with mutilate you could also try that, though you open yourself up to being crowd controlled unnecessarily, which can simply destroy all your chances of winning.

And finally the warrior, MS? haha, but really any variation on 35/23/3 or 33/28/0 will work well for this setup. Hit up my post on warrior arena talent specs guide if you need additional help.

Druid / Warrior / Rogue Arena Matchups:
Rogue / Mage / Priest

Priest / Rogue vs. Mage / Rogue 2v2 Arena Strategy

The big thing here is understanding your opponents. The mage is going to be deep frost, the rogue is probably going to be shadowstep. So what does this mean? It means gtfo because he’s got way higher stealth and stealth detection than you do. If you are combat or traditional mutilate you’re basically a sitting duck until the openers are over.

In essence, do NOT get sapped. If the rogue is allowed to sap you and open on the priest it’s probably going to be game over. You can’t afford a trinket on the sap because you need it for the blind. So, stay near your priest, but wait for the rogue to open on your priest. As soon as he does you counter open on the rogue and start locking him down.

Beyond that, just do everything you can to stay on the rogue. I always set the mage as my focus so I can keep an eye on his cast. My vanish, cloak, and blind all go towards preventing sheeps by the mage, allowing me to put a ton of pressure on the rogue.

If you can prevent a few early sheeps you’ll be able to put more pressure on the rogue. This puts him in a defensive position and allows your priest to take a more offensive role, IE, he can probably dispel you. Once you’ve got the rogue on the run it’s going to be game over for the other team.

Can’t get enough arena strategy? Check out the complete priest / rogue 2v2 arena guide!

Rogue / Prest 2v2 Arena Strategy

The rogue / priest (healer) combo is one of the most dominant setups in 2v2 currently. The combo dominants because of it’s ability to play both incredibly offensively and also turtle down and spam drink for long games. This type of flexibility makes the team a threat vs. all combos.

Let’s start with the basics, the talent specs. We’ll begin with the rogue.
Rogue’s Arena Talent Spec
The big thing on the rogue’s talent spec is having a build which can maintain long duration and high sustainable damage. Fortunately there are a couple of specs which fit this criteria. Basically, you’ve got deep combat (20/41/0) or mutilate (41/20/0). Now there are several variations of each spec, I prefer the 16/45/0, but there are an endless number of possible specs.

Some will try to argue shadowstep for this team setup, but in my experience you just don’t have enough damage to be a big enough threat in longer battles. If you need further advice on specs checkout this page, rogue arena talent specs.

Priest’s Talent Spec
The big thing about the priest’s talent spec is maximizing your offensive capabilities. Even though you are the healer it’s important that you can toss out strong damage against particular combos.

I strongly suggest going with this spec, discipline priest spec. This is the talent spec that my priest uses for 2v2 and it allows him to drop some serious damage burst. As with any talent spec you’ve got some options, but the number one thing to remember is you absolutely must maximize your offensive capabilities with the talent spec.

That’s enough about talent spec, let’s get right into the team vs. team strategies.

Rogue / Priest 2v2 Matchups:

Druid / Hunter
Druid / Warlock
Druid / Warrior
Druid / Rogue
Mage / Rogue
Mage / Warlock
Paladin / Warlock
Paladin / Warrior
Priest / Rogue
Priest / Warlock
Shadow Priest / Rogue
Shadow Priest / Warlock
Shaman / Warrior
Warlock / Rogue

Can’t get enough strategy? Check out the complete rogue / priest 2v2 arena guide.