And Now For Something... Different.

So, I've been a bit harsh on rogues lately perhaps. I don't hate the class, of course. However, I am very concerned that in Blizzard's attempt to fix rogues for 5v5 they will do something stupid (blind change anyone?) which will have too much impact on 1v1.

In my opinion, rogues face two very identifiable and defined problems. First, they lack in 5v5 arena. Second, they can't beat certain class builds with stacked resilience. Now, the first problem exists simply because rogues were never designed for group combat. They were designed from the ground up to be a solo hunters and killers. The long cooldowns were put in place to curtail the pace of their solo killing. Things... have obviously changed. Blizzard broke their promise of delivering meaningful world PvP and IMO took the easy way out and moved all PvP of importance into the arena under the banner of group PvP. That, alone, was a huge nerf to rogues.

How do you fix a class for group combat, that was never meant for group combat, without overpowering them for the thing they were designed for, 1v1 (*I'll address resilience later) killing? This is a difficult problem, and you've seen Blizzard grasping at straws trying to solve it. A lot of rogues try to come up with solutions, but their solutions would be disastrous for certain 1v1 matchups.

Someone recently mentioned having sprint on a 20 second timer. Pardon me? Sprint on a shorter cooldown than a priest's fear, which is their only built-in defense (and a rather weak one at that) from rogues? These things have to be thought through carefully. Yes, some classes will have advantages over other classes in 1v1 matchups. There is no way to stop that. But NO class should ever be labelled the winner-by-default just because their abilities totally overwhelm another classes' abilities. That must be avoided at all costs.

The second issue at hand is how rogues do versus classes with high resilience. The overall consensus is poorly. But, that does not necessarily mean that rogues are broken. What that could very possibly mean is that resilience is broken! IMO, rogues have all the tools and abilities they need to confront any class 1v1. Resilience is the villian here, not what rogues can or can not do in terms of abilities. You can't fix resilience by buffing rogues. It's not going to work. My advice to the rogue community leaders is to get off of this "buff rogues!" bandwagon and get on a "fix resilience" bandwagon. It's the gear that's causing the problem, people. It's the gear.

As far as things that can be done for rogues... BUG FIXES. OMG, there is nothing wrong with that. Venick linked to a post that listed some things that could be done to help rogues. Several of those things were bug fixes. It would be truly unreasonable to disallow any class of that.

1. Pets should lose aggro when a rogue restealths. I'm not just talking vanish here, I'm talking about any restealth. It is absolutely ridiculous that a pet can chase you all the way across a battlefield even though you might have disengaged and restealthed from the battle MINUTES earlier. It's retarded. Unfortunately, Blizzard says it's "working as intended." IMO, turn up the heat on this issue. FRAPs footage some of the truly ridiculous and retarded ways pets knock you out of stealth. It just makes Blizzard look like retards when they say that kind of thing is "working as intended." What they are really saying is "we are too lazy to fix that." And people will know it.

2. Vanish. Blizzard will never be able to fix this problem without a heavy-handed approach. The network code has built in features to make it a "fair" game for people with slower connections and thus has a pretty liberal interpretation of events that happen "simultaneously." Any time the game engine decides that two events are simultaneous (even when they really aren't) and one of those events happens to be vanish, it's likely that vanish is going to get screwed. BTW, this is not just an issue that effects vanish. It effects EVERYTHING. However, vanish is extremely important to the rogue and it should be addressed. IMO, they should give vanish an immunity buffer on both sides. What that means is that you would not vanish immediately, but you would be immune shortly before your vanish and shortly after your vanish. How much cushion is needed depends on how much cushion the game-engine gives when decided two events are simultaneous.

http://oozolives.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-vanish-bug.html

3. Poison and rupture should not break gouge. Hey, if it's good enough for druids, then why not rogues? Now, the author of the post above also suggested blind and sap but I think that would be entirely too abusable. I mean, premed garrote, shiv, 5 pt rupture w/ deadly poisons and then blind. HAHA!

4. Non-damaging AoEs, except fear, should not break stealth. I strongly believe that fear should break stealth, but other non-damaging AoEs such as demoshout, earthbind (fixed), mass dispel (fixed) should not. Perhaps fear should have small frontloaded damage attached to it. ;)

5. Some kind of mobility buff for lengthy 5v5 matches. Yeah, once a rogue's CDs are spent they are extremely kiteable and controllable. And, I'm sure this happens quite often in lengthy 5v5s. But again, how do you buff mobility for this situation without having too much impact on 1v1s? Hrm.. not so easy to solve is it? The author of the post linked above suggested a passive speed buff, perhaps talented. Maybe, if it goes in the least popular PvP tree. ;P

Perhaps, they could look into something like the DAoC sprint. Which uses energy to increase footspeed. In WoW, energy replenishes much faster so it would not completely disable the rogue. They just wouldn't be able to launch into heavy-energy combinations immediately after sprinting to catch up to someone. Balance could achieved by adjusting the energy per second cost of sprint. The effect would be similar to a channelled spell, but not break on damage. However, it would break when energy reaches zero or the rogue takes some other action. Even this causes me some trepidation to think about in 1v1 situations, however it would mean that as long as the rogue is regaining energy that they won't ever be totally helpless to kiting.