Suggested Roll the Bones change.

[Malefic]

Currently Roll the Bones is very frustrating, very punishing with bad RNG and only rewarded when the stars align.

I thought of something that would diminish the bad RNG, would reduce the effect of extremely good RNG and would balance things out a little so Outlaw Rogue is more consistent.

Instead of Roll the Bones rolling 6 die, that can give 6 buffs. Have it roll 8 die. The maximum buffs you can get is 4. This drastically lowers the chance at getting 1 buff, and removes the ridiculous god mode during 6 buffs. This to me would make Outlaw more consistent.

[Schyzmo]

I actually would be happy if we just got a weapon trait or something (Tier set bonus?) that caused it to never roll less the a 2-Buff. Basically add the chances that it would roll a single buff to the 2 buff. That would help minimize the variance in DPS we have by quite a bit (barring a 6 roll). Stays in the spirit of the randomness of the buff, but lowers the rage of rolling the same 1 buff over and over again....

[Alfador]

How much do we really know that it is actually rolling 6 separate dice in the system anyway. The modeling already makes it clear that it's not really rolling 6 separate 1/6 chances There's already a minimum threshold in there for 1 buff, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could enforce the same with 2 or more.

That said, I'd really rather them not cut the top or the bottom off of it too much. I agree maybe bringing it a little closer to median would be nice (in particular reducing the need to reroll) but there are 2 other specs to go with if you don't want to deal with the randomness. Averaging 2 buffs isn't a ton of effort, even if it is a little frustrating, and the rewarding feeling of rolling a 6 is nice.

Personally what I want most out of RTB (forgive me but this is a little bit of a tangent) is actually a single trackable buff that marks the duration.

[Voij]

Personally I'd prefer for them to remove both the 6-buff and the 1-buff versions. Having both of them in there doesn't "just" make it random, but can cause DPS to fluctuate by INSANELY huge margins with no change in playstyle, based purely on procs.
Alternating by 100k dps or more with equal environments just isn't fun and only gets worse the shorter fights end up being.
Also makes it disgusting to actually try and balance the spec.

[shaunika123]

Currently Roll the Bones is very frustrating, very punishing with bad RNG and only rewarded when the stars align.

this is objectively wrong unless you dont play the spec right

[Xanatu]

K I stole this but: I think I finally heard a good iteration of the "loaded dice" concept: it'd replace SND on the tier (so still same tier as MFD), and would change RTB. You would get an automatic 2-buff (no chance for 3 or 6) that could not be re-rolled for the duration minus the pandemic window. It takes away the top-end swing but for people who hate the string of 1-buffs it's actually a viable alternative. It's not an automatic because you replace MFD which is super super strong with true bearing. It's the only concept I've heard so far that isn't super OP and respecs the concept of the class.

It has drawbacks (no 6-buff, no 3-buff, MFD, can't reroll shit like broadsides during curse) but removes the huge 1-buff strings so many people fear. It might be a small net DPS loss but I think a lot of people would trade that in for consistency. This is way more interesting than lame-ass SND, still has that outlaw flavor, but less frustration.

[loktark]

I think if there's a talent to remove the RNG from RTB it should remove all of it so I would propose something a little different. I always had the idea of a "loaded dice" talent that would would replace slice in the talent tree. My idea of the talent would just be a lesser version of 5 buffs whenever RTB is active. +1 combo point would be excluded because it is hard to split something like that without it feeling like shit.

[kumarshah]

Just build in RNG protection. Each time you roll 1 buff your chance of rolling 2 buff increases. If you roll 1x 5 times, 2x is guranteed on the 6th roll.

If you have any talent that takes away RTB RNG completely, then it basically becomes a must have talent.

[ymirsson]

I wish my run through would crit more often. Not critting really tanks my DPS and makes me feel bad.
Maybe everytime i don't kill a raid boss, it get's a stacking crit chance increase.

[Lustrick]

I was thinking of a system where RtB has 3 charges. Every successive roll you do cannot roll existing buffs, and it will not refresh the duration of previous rolled buffs. The charges would have their own cooldown so using all 3 back to back will leave you stuck with what you have, but for on demand situations you will have at minimum 3 buffs.
If you roll a 6 on your first charge it's the same because rolling again will do nothing, whereas when you roll 1 buff your first roll you will at least have 2 or more buffs on your second roll.

[Maelstrom51]

this is objectively wrong unless you dont play the spec right

Actually, just take a look at the sims. There is a massive variance in damage with just one standard deviation compared to every other spec in the game. The minimum/maximum deviation is over 50% as well.

The RNG aspect of outlaw is not a case if not playing the spec right.

[Baracuda]

Just build in RNG protection. Each time you roll 1 buff your chance of rolling 2 buff increases. If you roll 1x 5 times, 2x is guranteed on the 6th roll.

If you have any talent that takes away RTB RNG completely, then it basically becomes a must have talent.

Pretty much this is all it needs.

[shaunika123]

Actually, just take a look at the sims. There is a massive variance in damage with just one standard deviation compared to every other spec in the game. The minimum/maximum deviation is over 50% as well.

The RNG aspect of outlaw is not a case if not playing the spec right.

did not say it was

but it's also not "only rewarding when the stars align" or "punishing when you have bad RNG"

[Notter]

My suggested fix:

Roll the Bones now renamed: Reroll the Bones.

[Maelstrom51]

did not say it was

but it's also not "only rewarding when the stars align" or "punishing when you have bad RNG"

I disagree since with average RNG we are behind most other classes, with bad RNG we are one of the worst specs in the game, and with good RNG we are upper middle.

[PessimiStick]

How much do we really know that it is actually rolling 6 separate dice in the system anyway. The modeling already makes it clear that it's not really rolling 6 separate 1/6 chances

What? No. It does exactly what it looks like. It rolls 6 random 6-outcome numbers and then looks at the result. It's exactly like rolling 6 dice IRL.

[Actarius]

I think Roll the Bones should grant 3 buffs no matter what, and the 3 that you get are random from the pool of 6. Lower the damage of Outlaws elsewhere, just to reign in consistency.

[Hisholyness]

Add the gold trait:

Ready Raider:
Significantly increases the chance to roll multiple buffs after rolling single buffs from Roll the Bones.

How it works: When you roll a single buff from Roll the Bones, it adds an additional 10% chance for your next Roll the Bones to roll multiple effects. This effect is hidden, lasts 30 sec, and stacks up to 5 times.

[Nikkaszal]

How much do we really know that it is actually rolling 6 separate dice in the system anyway. The modeling already makes it clear that it's not really rolling 6 separate 1/6 chances There's already a minimum threshold in there for 1 buff, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could enforce the same with 2 or more.

Six separate dice is actually the way it works though. Let's simplify explanation and call the buffs 1-6 instead of by name:

● six dice are rolled
● whichever number comes up the most is the buff that is applied
● if two or more numbers are tied for most appearances, both (more) buffs are applied
● thus if 6 appears twice and the rest of the dice are say 1-4, buff 6 is applied on its own
● if you roll five 6s and one of another number, you still get that one buff
● if you roll two 6s and two 3s, with the other two numbers being 1 and 2, then both buff 6 and 3 are applied (6 and 3 tied for highest appearance)
● if you roll two 6s, two 3s and two 5s, all three of those buffs are applied (all three numbers tied for highest appearance)
● if you roll 1-6 with no doubles, all six numbers are tied for appearances with one each. That's when you get all six buffs

This is why you can only get one, two, three or all six buffs - not four or five different ones at once

[SSJones]

My opinion now is that they won't be able to balance RtB as long as the buffs are in any way DPS related without gutting the skill anyways. They could change all of the RtB buffs to be non-dps related buffs such as movespeed, leech, avoidance, etc, and re-tune outlaw damage to be independent of what RtB rolls.

Otherwise, they just won't ever be able to deal with the possibility of 3/6 buff and endless 1-rolls happening, making the class much harder to tune reasonably. We've known since the start that the swings in damage were incredibly wide. This causes a problem balancing for shorter fights, and for PvP.