how are rogues these days?

[Deleted]

Hi aeser, i'm not at level 90 yet but I believe my point is still valid.
I'm having a ton of fun on my rogue and so far haven't had problems in random BGs even if I play against players who outgear me in their MoP gear. Rogues have utility, so even if what everyone says about rogues at 90 is true (regardin' dps), we still have a lot of utility which is enough reason to play a rogue.
I love my rogue and would suggest anyone to play a rogue. PvP isn't about 1 vs 1 it's about 2+ vs 2+ anyway, so even if you aren't able to kill shit you're able to lock down, control and determine the flow of the game more or less.

I don't quite understand the "control" argument. Sure, we do have some control, but not to a higher degree than any other class. Control alone doesn't win a fight. Monks have quite a bit of control as well. As do warriors. However... They have damage to go along with it. They have mobility. They have survivability. We have neither, or at least don't have them to any satisfactory degree.

- Our damage isn't "bursty" enough and too finisher dependent
- Our damage is also too cooldown dependent
- Our control comes at the heavy cost of damage; something most other classes do not have to worry about
- Our survivability comes at the cost of damage (Recuperate) and extraordinarily long cooldowns (Cloak, Vanish, etc...)
- Our mobility is very limited and also very cooldown dependent/costs a shit-load of damage (Sprint/Burst of Speed and... Well, either Shadow Step or nothing else at all)

The lack of mobility is really a heavy blow; Control is absolutely useless if you have no mobility to go along with it. My brother mains a Paladin and is a "pvp-only" person; He's kiting rogues without issues.
Paladins...
Kiting...
Rogues...

It's ridiculous.

[ayako]

I don't quite understand the "control" argument. Sure, we do have some control, but not to a higher degree than any other class. Control alone doesn't win a fight. Monks have quite a bit of control as well. As do warriors. However... They have damage to go along with it. They have mobility. They have survivability. We have neither, or at least don't have them to any satisfactory degree.

- Our damage isn't "bursty" enough and too finisher dependent
- Our damage is also too cooldown dependent
- Our control comes at the heavy cost of damage; something most other classes do not have to worry about
- Our survivability comes at the cost of damage (Recuperate) and extraordinarily long cooldowns (Cloak, Vanish, etc...)
- Our mobility is very limited and also very cooldown dependent/costs a shit-load of damage (Sprint/Burst of Speed and... Well, either Shadow Step or nothing else at all)

The lack of mobility is really a heavy blow; Control is absolutely useless if you have no mobility to go along with it. My brother mains a Paladin and is a "pvp-only" person; He's kiting rogues without issues.
Paladins...
Kiting...
Rogues...

It's ridiculous.

Just enjoy pve until the fixes come. We're plenty fine in pve atm.

[teverin]

Just enjoy pve until the fixes come. We're plenty fine in pve atm.

I'm at 459 ilvl and I can't seem to pull over 45-47k dps on most fights. Pretty much every class with sim gear just destroys me even with cool downs. Not sure what I can do differently

Edit: and that dps is on a perfect fight with perfect rotation.

[Coldkil]

DPS wise we are not in a bad shape, we have a very good cleave as combat, just happens that there are some classes with insane aoe and burst damage and tanks with infinite-scaling vengeance and again huge aoe which results in them padding the meters.

PvP-wise we have some design problems that are traduced into very low damage and less control/mobility that we had before. I guess if they're not fixed, people will find workarounds to resolve them.

[Deleted]

DPS wise we are not in a bad shape, we have a very good cleave as combat, just happens that there are some classes with insane aoe and burst damage and tanks with infinite-scaling vengeance and again huge aoe which results in them padding the meters.

PvP-wise we have some design problems that are traduced into very low damage and less control/mobility that we had before. I guess if they're not fixed, people will find workarounds to resolve them.

Not sure how people are supposed to work around a solid brick wall?
- Our damage is specifically tuned in a way that makes our output very predictable, very slow, and very "outspread". There are no huge crits, only a series of small crits. These mechanics cannot really be undone by skill and are very PVP-unfriendly by design, unfortunately...
- As I mentioned previously, we now have two mobility cooldowns AT MOST. Shadow Step and Sprint, or just Burst of Speed. Or hell, just Sprint... Can't really work around that either.
- Our control is mostly a non-issue. However, it still does cost us quite a bit of damage to use any CC ability. Combined with the problem of dps, this minor problem becomes are rather noticeable one.

I'm not saying working around these problems is impossible; Gearing may or may not change our viability by a lot. But if this is to be how we remain, I, for one, don't see HOW we're supposed to make do. Our issues are mainly caused by design of mechanics and not by a very steep learning curve or skill cap. You can improve your skill but you can't improve the class.

[Coldkil]

Absolutely agree. This doesn't change my pov - most of the times rogues have come out of problems by their inventive and not by class developers fixes.

Not saying it's good, just telling the state of things now. With my gear i manage to pull around 45k pretty consistently as sub in a single-target fight, which i think it's good. My gear needs upgrades and optimization.

Our pretty bad situation in pvp is made worse by some classes which are completely out of bounds like second wind warriors, mages in general, elemental shamans.

the class design revolving around a fast flurry of small attacks is well done, and actually it works in PvE. As you say anyway, it simply doesn't deliver in PvP, which is all about controlled burst and big crits - i don't want my class to become a warrior in leather, but i will be more than fine if 1 spec become completely non-viable in PvE in exchange to be the PvP spec.

[Kael]

Not sure how people are supposed to work around a solid brick wall?
- Our damage is specifically tuned in a way that makes our output very predictable, very slow, and very "outspread". There are no huge crits, only a series of small crits. These mechanics cannot really be undone by skill and are very PVP-unfriendly by design, unfortunately...

I'm not saying working around these problems is impossible; Gearing may or may not change our viability by a lot. But if this is to be how we remain, I, for one, don't see HOW we're supposed to make do. Our issues are mainly caused by design of mechanics and not by a very steep learning curve or skill cap. You can improve your skill but you can't improve the class.

This is MOSTLY right, but I'm finding that (in combat) my burst (when CDs/procs line up) is astonishing. On a 63k Guardians pull I peaked around 270k DPS during AR/trinket/SB/lust/potion/windsong/windsong/deep insight. Yeah, that doesn't happen often, but that's over 1 million damage in 4 seconds, when on average I'm doing less than 1/4 of that. O.O

I was expecting burst out of vendetta/trinket/potion/SB during Dispatch or in sub (which I haven't had enough chance to play with yet), but that was astonishing. The rest of the fights, it's very even and predictable :P

NOT even going to try to talk about how this affects pvp; I do suspect we'll see more options open up as we get more gear, but only time will tell for that.

[rt7]

rogues don't even have that much "control" in pvp anymore as so many classes now have multiple control abilities

they give an aoe disorient to paladins on a 2 min timer.

that makes no sense, why do paladins need a group disorient.

stunlocking someone is pointless if you can never do appreciable damage in that time frame, I have 463 daggers but am doing 12k mutilates to a pvp geared mage

you can't "outplay" that kind of low damage.

they gutted so much of this class like taking out the bonus damage on backstab/ambush/mutilate and gave nothing back for it except to increase cooldowns from 2mins - 3 mins basically.

[Splatter]

rogues don't even have that much "control" in pvp anymore as so many classes now have multiple control abilities

they give an aoe disorient to paladins on a 2 min timer.

that makes no sense, why do paladins need a group disorient.

stunlocking someone is pointless if you can never do appreciable damage in that time frame, I have 463 daggers but am doing 12k mutilates to a pvp geared mage

you can't "outplay" that kind of low damage.

they gutted so much of this class like taking out the bonus damage on backstab/ambush and gave nothing back for it

Rogues are in a really bad place atm for pvp. Still seem decent for pve but damage is lacking for pvp. Survivabilty in pvp seems laughable as well. I had two good battles with rogues today where i was able to out heal their dps while still bursting them down easily as a ret pally. I felt like i could just about ignore them and focus on the real threats in the BG's. I've played a rogue since vanilla and really dissapointed with what happened to them in cata and it only seems to have gotten a lot worse with MoP. Here's hoping blizzard give them some love quickly.

[Solidseal]

My hunter was killed by a rogue yesterday. I was idling.
I checked the combat log and it took me a whole while to scroll down

I was 87 atm and the rogue was 88.

[teverin]

Not saying it's good, just telling the state of things now. With my gear i manage to pull around 45k pretty consistently as sub in a single-target fight, which i think it's good. My gear needs upgrades and optimization.

The problem is that while 45k is good, I am constantly getting beat by other classes with similar ilvl (hell, even lower ilvl depending on the class). I was in a heroic with a dps monk who was doing 70-80k on bosses.

Now I will say that I don't mind right now. It's heroics and as long as the boss dies I am fine. But I can't help but think what happens when I go for a raid spot and do lower DPS compared to the other classes? I don't know how well it will go if I say "Well, once I get better gear I'll do more, so you'll have to trust me on that". Not to mention that some guilds tend to want to gear out their tanks first and we now share gear with a tank class.

I'll keep playing my rogue, because I know things will get better. It just kinda sucks now I think.

[Dabrix32]

The problem is that while 45k is good, I am constantly getting beat by other classes with similar ilvl (hell, even lower ilvl depending on the class). I was in a heroic with a dps monk who was doing 70-80k on bosses.

He had to have been in full heroic raid gear, or was the tank. Monks are at the very bottom of the DPS pile with Ret right above them.

[Rory]

First, if you're using heroics as a gauge for dps: stop it and shut up. Heroic boss fights last less than a minute for the most part and never last more than 3-5 so they are completely meaningless as a gauge of class balance. Raids are the only real indication and rogues are fine.

Second, if you think we are a dps class in pvp: where have you been for the last couple years? Other than last tier with legendaries our pvp damage has been abysmal because we got categorized as a control class to be paired with a DK or Mage or other high dmg class. We still have kidney shot, gouge, blind, sap, smokebomb, dismantle. You can play prep or shadow step with any spec, there is a lot of flexibility for decent players.

Does gear hurt us? Of course, get a full set of epic pvp gear and quit whining. You guys are running around in blues and quest gear and think it means something. A couple pieces of gear and I went from 30k to 45k sustained and I'm nowhere near raid quality gear. Seriously, this is a gear dependent class and this happens every two years when an expansion comes out. Rogues are fine, get better gear.

[teverin]

He had to have been in full heroic raid gear, or was the tank. Monks are at the very bottom of the DPS pile with Ret right above them.

I actually forgot to mention that it was the last boss in the seige of the temple (I think) where you get that damage boost at the end from knocking off that bosses armor. My fault that was a bad example. Problem is, it was still 10k or so more then I was doing as combat. And according to Sim Craft (not totally reliable, I know) a monk in heroic raid gear will be doing about 100k dps according to those results.

http://simulationcraft.org/505/Raid_T14H.html

Like I said, I don't want to sound like I'm whining, just throwing out some numbers I have been seeing.

[Kael]

The problem is that while 45k is good, I am constantly getting beat by other classes with similar ilvl (hell, even lower ilvl depending on the class). I was in a heroic with a dps monk who was doing 70-80k on bosses.

I'll keep playing my rogue, because I know things will get better. It just kinda sucks now I think.

This is truly circumstantial. My guild cried OP when we did Niuzao temple and chained 2 sap packs, leaving me with giant increased damage, fresh SnD from Deadly Momentum, and dragged a mob for blade flurry onto the first boss. I ran 210k during that boss in ~452 gear... for all of like 20 seconds.

Edit: as for Raigonn, if you save CDs for the broken armor you'll rip him a new one. Usually run 70-120k there as well >.> unless I'm burning AR up top.

I'm not really saying we're chart-toppers or awful... but we're not so badly off as all the Q_Q would suggest.

[Rory]

I actually forgot to mention that it was the last boss in the seige of the temple (I think) where you get that damage boost at the end from knocking off that bosses armor. My fault that was a bad example. Problem is, it was still 10k or so more then I was doing as combat. And according to Sim Craft (not totally reliable, I know) a monk in heroic raid gear will be doing about 100k dps according to those results.

http://simulationcraft.org/505/Raid_T14H.html

Like I said, I don't want to sound like I'm whining, just throwing out some numbers I have been seeing.

Don't forget that on fights without cleave combat is the lowest dps. Single target sub has been the highest for at least the last couple tiers. Mutilate isn't viable because the reforge/gem/enchant is incompatible with combat. Since on fights with cleave we are basically required to run combat that leaves us with sub/combat.

Sub is *very* unforgiving to player error and rotation mistakes. A good sub rogue will rock the charts, a bad sub rogue will look like a bad alt. practice your rotation, study your class, then when you think you're good start over and do it again. People who post about their rotation being "perfect" so their dmg is "max" for the class are probably terrible and not even in a guild that completes raid tiers prior to nerf. I'm not currently raiding because of work constraints but I have been in a top 50 guild for the past couple expansions, I'll say it again: rogues are fine.

[Hungrydingo]

Do they ever listen to Rogues during the beta of an expansion when we give them feedback? Every single expansion we launch in pretty poor shape and they end up buffing us anyways. I find it very hard to believe any of these developers play a substantial amount of the Rogue class and actually try to PVP on a Rogue.

[muffinss]

Lvl 90 assassination rogue for both PvE and PvP here.

PvE DPS is lower than every other class in an equally geared environment from what I, and many other assassination rogues have noticed.

PvP DPS and survivability is extremely poor. So many classes these days have a ton of survivability cool downs and CC's. We simply don't have enough to control the battlefield anymore or an ample amount to overcome other classes CC and survivability. Cloak of Shadows, Evasion, and faint if you have it glyphed is all we have and they are nothing spectacular. With them making you choose between either shadowstep or preparation you either have to sacrifice mobility vs kitting or extra needed survivability. What sucks is that shadowstep doesn't even break CC. Energy production is also very slow. You can sit there for five - seven seconds doing nothing but auto attack's waiting to get enough energy to do another ambush, and because of that, the needed burst damage in PvP is very low.

Overall, for at least assassination, rogues in PvE and PvP is very low. I went ahead and switched to a Monk since they appear to be getting love from Blizzard.

[Deleted]

I don't quite understand the "control" argument. Sure, we do have some control, but not to a higher degree than any other class. Control alone doesn't win a fight. Monks have quite a bit of control as well. As do warriors. However... They have damage to go along with it. They have mobility. They have survivability. We have neither, or at least don't have them to any satisfactory degree.

- Our damage isn't "bursty" enough and too finisher dependent
- Our damage is also too cooldown dependent
- Our control comes at the heavy cost of damage; something most other classes do not have to worry about
- Our survivability comes at the cost of damage (Recuperate) and extraordinarily long cooldowns (Cloak, Vanish, etc...)
- Our mobility is very limited and also very cooldown dependent/costs a shit-load of damage (Sprint/Burst of Speed and... Well, either Shadow Step or nothing else at all)

The lack of mobility is really a heavy blow; Control is absolutely useless if you have no mobility to go along with it. My brother mains a Paladin and is a "pvp-only" person; He's kiting rogues without issues.
Paladins...
Kiting...
Rogues...

It's ridiculous.

Well, we can compare apples to oranges and bananas to Mercedes-Benz all day long, or we can settle at the solution that each class and spec works differently.
You cannot compare X ability of class X with Y ability of class Y.
Doesn't add up like that, this isn't a simple math question where cooldown X of class X is the same as cooldown Y of class Y.
I'm enjoying my rogue, that is why I think rogues are fine. If I didn't enjoy my rogue obviously something would be wrong and that could be with the rogue class, other classes or myself.
TLR
I think rogues are fine and that the topic is very subjective.

[Deleted]

Well, we can compare apples to oranges and bananas to Mercedes-Benz all day long, or we can settle at the solution that each class and spec works differently.
You cannot compare X ability of class X with Y ability of class Y.
Doesn't add up like that, this isn't a simple math question where cooldown X of class X is the same as cooldown Y of class Y.
I'm enjoying my rogue, that is why I think rogues are fine. If I didn't enjoy my rogue obviously something would be wrong and that could be with the rogue class, other classes or myself.
TLR
I think rogues are fine and that the topic is very subjective.

Yeah, except that I didn't compare apples to oranges...? I was specifically discussing the functions/mechanics of the class, and they are undeniably NOT PVP friendly.
- PVP demands precise, hard burst. We do not have that.
- PVP demands great mobility. We do not have that.
- PVP demands great survivability. We do not have that.

Some classes have more damage than mobility or survivability. Some classes have more mobility than they have damage. And so on... That's where apples and oranges become relevant. Us rogues, however, lack all three.

To put this into perspective, what you're saying can be summed up into this:
"Sure, the apple in this scenario can fly, has artillery support, a medic in its back pocket and shoots lasers out of its eyes, while the orange only wields a wooden stick......... But we're fine because sticks are kinda fun."