Glimpse of Rogue Review

From the rogue forums:

he review is well underway and we wanted to share a sort of first glimpse into the changes being made for the rogue talent review. Keep in mind that these changes are not complete or final, and the below information is likely to alter as we move into our testing phases. While not everything is listed, the below list encompasses the majority of changes being made in the review.

I'll be working in the weeks to come to get as much additional information as possible, but it is likely that quite a bit of the final information regarding talent changes will not be fully announced until the talent calculators go live. Of course you'll also be able to actually play around with the changes too once the Public Test Realms go up.

I'm going to just list the changes and provide additional information where possible or necessary. Let's get to it.

# The following talents have been removed: Improved Deadly Poison, Improved Distract, Throwing Weapon Specialization, Improved Vanish, and Rapid Concealment.

# Improved Instant Poison is now "Improved Poisons" and increases your chance to apply ALL poisons by 2/4/6/8/10%.

# Rapid Concealment has been merged with Camouflage, by combining these talents you not only get a great talent to start off the tree, but obviously it frees up a number of points to be spent elsewhere.

# Murder will now also apply to all finishing moves. The benefit this will provide to output and attack combinations is fairly straightforward.

# Vile Poisons now gives your poisons a chance to resist dispel effects, in addition to increasing poison damage.

# Improved Kidney Shot has been changed, and will instead increase the damage taken by the target while they are affected by Kidney Shot. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Kidney Shot.

# Improved Sprint has been changed, and will instead have a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when you activate your Sprint ability. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Sprint.

# Improved Evasion renamed to Endurance, and will add a Sprint cooldown reduction.

# New talent Weapon Expertise in the Combat tree, increases your weapon skill with all melee weapons. The recovery of damage with an increased weapon skill should be a good boost to overall output.

# Initiative is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75% end chance to add an additional combo point.

# Elusiveness is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75 sec cooldown reduction to Evasion, Blind, and Vanish.

# Ghostly Strike now has a reduced Energy cost, the reduction of Energy was enough to make it necessary to also reduce the damage output slightly.

# Improved Garrotes damage reduction will be removed. This is being changed as part of an overall improvement for Garrote.

# Setup is being moved higher up in the tree, becoming a 16 point talent with no prerequisites, helping move the talent in reach of specific builds.

# New talent Heightened Senses in the subtlety tree, increases your Stealth detection, and reduces the chance for you to be hit by spells and ranged attacks.

# Hemorrhage will be moved up in the tree to become a 21 point talent. This should help to place the ability in a more reachable position, and allow for a little more versatility with specific talent builds.

# New talent Deadliness in the Subtlety tree, increases your Attack Power by a percentage.

# Premeditation will have its Energy requirement removed, changed to an instant cast, and range increased. Its cooldown will remain the same. Premeditation will now be pre-reqd by Preperation.

# Vanish will now remove effects that allow the caster to remain aware of the rogues presence, such as Mind Vision and Hunters Mark.

# Garrote, Rupture, and Eviscerate are being increased in damage. More details to come.

# Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.

I'll be continuing to speak with the designers and collecting as much additional information as possible in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading.

Rogues just became the new uber gods of WoW. This is by far the best class review so far. I wish Blizzard would of removed the horribly useless talents from other classes the same way they did rogues.

^agreed

and jesus...

# Vanish will now remove effects that allow the caster to remain aware of the rogues presence, such as Mind Vision and Hunters Mark.

Yay!

Now if they just tweaked some of the cooldowns I'll be able to blow my load real good.

# Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.

Does this mean it will stack with sunder maybe?

That'd be pretty sick.

# Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.

Does this mean it will stack with sunder maybe?

That'd be pretty sick.
No, it means instead of reducing that shadowpriests armor by 1500 it will reduce it by 30%.

The patch adds a few minor tweaks which are good and puts all the decent stuff in ridiculous places which will cause you to respec to shit to get one worthwhile talent. nxtplz

have the direct link?

# Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.

Does this mean it will stack with sunder maybe?

That'd be pretty sick.

They already stack currently, changed in one of the recent patches.

They already stack currently, changed in one of the recent patches.
You sure?

EA stacks with SA, confirmed by Drysc himself.

DarkDonut']EA stacks with SA, confirmed by Drysc himself.

I absolutely have to see a link to this. That skill has been dead to me for quite some time.

Holy jesus on the Vanish, Poisons, and Kidney shot.

Rogues just became the new uber gods of WoW. This is by far the best class review so far. I wish Blizzard would of removed the horribly useless talents from other classes the same way they did rogues.
Woohoo!!! Hehe ... and here I am with a lowly level 60 rogue that is about halfway through collecting his armor set ...

Now if I could just convince Plugger to drop my damned dagger ...

:D

P.S. Pessi, what are your thoughts on the changes? Of all the rogues that post, your input (while we argue elsewhere) I value the most on talent trees.

Rogues just became the new uber gods of WoW. This is by far the best class review so far. I wish Blizzard would of removed the horribly useless talents from other classes the same way they did rogues.

To be fair, for a year and a half Rogues have been waiting while other classes got insane improvements that rendered Rogues less and less effective. There were also a ton of subtle nerfs to Rogues.

Priests/Mages got better physical damage mitigation with the changes to PW:S, Ice Barrier, and Inner Fire.

Warlocks got a 2 min Death Coil that allowed them an escape route from stunlocks.

Hunters have always owned us. Hunter's Mark used to persist through the death of the hunter that applied it, resulting in 2 mins of him knowing where you were at all times.

I seriously doubt "UberGods" as every DoT in the game still removes us from stealth, as do probably Demo Shout, and rank 1 AEs. On top of that we don't know what the trees look like. The way it sounds Combat Rogues will get a lot of bonuses.

DarkDonut']EA stacks with SA, confirmed by Drysc himself.


Umm no?

Just yesterday some newb rogue in my pug scholo group would EA mobs and I would receive the "A more powerfull spell is already in effect" when id try to sunder.

EDIT: And yes, what JX said. It all depends on what the tree's look like and the values of what they have stated. But overall it seems like a boost to PvP for rogues and a meh for PvE (depending on some of the values of the talents they described).

They might stack on the Test Server (is that even up??). But they don't stack right now, they never have since day 1. Rogues have always had "joke" abilities, like Expose Armor, and Disarm Traps.

Disarm Traps for example...
had a horrendously long cast... 4 secs? Lowered to .. 1? 1.5?
It was probably gonna be impossible to get past an invisible flare to disarm (they -finally- fixed the invisible flare)
the disarm was active at like 11m and the trap radius is like 10, so it was pretty much impossible to use unless you toggled walk or something and half the time it would go off on you

Expose armor was something you used if you wanted to piss a warrior off, as he needed to keep using Sunders for the most efficient threat generation outside an ability like Revenge. EA on = More Powerful Spell messages and a pissed warrior.

I still wish we had a much longer ranged disarm of traps.

um hey, what's your dodge when you get stunned?

enjoy getting instagibbed in group pvp still

P.S. Pessi, what are your thoughts on the changes? Of all the rogues that post, your input (while we argue elsewhere) I value the most on talent trees.
EA Stacking with Sunder is hot.

+weapon skill in combat means I need to change my shorts.

Vanish clearing mark is retarded, but I'll take it.

Subtlety seems like it got cleaned up a lot for PvPers, removed some of the useless crap, Went 5 --> 3 on some stuff, combined talents, etc.

Getting Hemo with 21/8/22 has potential to be an *incredible* 1 on 1/small group build.

The +% AP talent in Sub. sounds cool, but will probably be out of reach for any serious DPS build, so not really worth much. If it's actually 1st or second tier, it has potential to be awesome.


I'll probably evalutate it a little more thourougly once they release actual numbers. It's hard to judge stuff when it's just the overview. i.e.: +5% AP for 5 talents = lame. +20% for 5 talents = wtfsex.

The patch is 100% shit to raiding raids

Our damage doesnt scale at all, and they arent changing it.