Rogue's not popular because they can't Stunlock/insta kill people.

[reckoner04]

Cheat death is the only "cheat death" ability that doesn't actually cheat death lol. Its more or less its an animation for you dying and doesn't cheat anything. Purgatory you can not die for those 3 secs, Cauterize you won't die for 2-3secs, cheat death you normally die as it procs lol.

Cheat Death isn't really that much different from Cauterize. Both abilities increase your effective health. Cauterize does this by simply adding some health points once and Cheat Death does it by multiplying the effectiveness of your remaining health. There's almost no difference, except that the increased damage mitigation from Cheat Death makes incoming heals more effective as well and the added health from Cauterize doesn't disappear after some time.

Also, comparing abilities one to another will make for boring design and homogenized classes. I'm glad there is someone like GC who understands the important principles of good game design and is willing to innovate and try out new stuff, even if the team does seem to be pretty slow sometimes.

[venomzxd]

I didn't play in 4.3, but I heard rogues were stupidly OP.

Legendary daggers and vial wew stupidly OP, rogues were the same from the begin of Cataclysm, only some nerfs to 4.3.

[wow]

Cheat Death isn't really that much different from Cauterize. Both abilities increase your effective health. Cauterize does this by simply adding some health points once and Cheat Death does it by multiplying the effectiveness of your remaining health. There's almost no difference, except that the increased damage mitigation from Cheat Death makes incoming heals more effective as well and the added health from Cauterize doesn't disappear after some time.

Also, comparing abilities one to another will make for boring design and homogenized classes. I'm glad there is someone like GC who understands the important principles of good game design and is willing to innovate and try out new stuff, even if the team does seem to be pretty slow sometimes.

The difference is if cheat death procs at 2-3% then you die to the next hit instantly. Cauterize Your health will always go to back up no matter what yes you will still have that dot from it on you but that still gives you more time frame to do something about it iceblock, get healed etc.

An easy fix cheat death would be to make it bring your health to over 10% if it procs below it say 15-20%.

[Raybourne]

I miss the old days in vanilla where you could get naked, put on a level 1 dagger, and one shot people

[Shink]

i think it's mostly because of how resil is a terrible stat


takes a skill that does 50k normally and changes it into one that does 25k

[Slummish]

I played a rogue as a tertiary toon for many years; particularly when I was bored. I mainly just crept into Alliance bastions and would assassinate random flagged people and NPCs for an hour or so and then I'd leave. This hasn't been the case since somewhere in the middle of WotLK. Rogue burst went into the toilet and so did stunlock. As soon as they became garbage, I stopped playing. I guess GC is talking about people like me -- fairweather fighters.

[bt4]

I miss the old days in vanilla where you could get naked, put on a level 1 dagger, and one shot people

Well it wasnt that easy. Took quite a while to win and they had to be bad players. Imo it was fair enough. Gear just didnt increase damage for rogues much which was perfect for people like me who dont like the gear threadmill.

Their fix wich made rogues a gear bitch also bited back this addon in challenge mode, hurray for crappy dps with low itemlvl.

[Wootylicious]

Enter diminishing returns, higher health-pools and resilience, and the class doesn't have the throughput to burn down a target in between a CS > KS > Vanish > CS > KS like they used to.

You still can kill people at ease in a stunlock after you forced their trinket and even more so in 5.2

The class is immensely more complicated to play than it used to be, and there are definitely loads of players who jumped ship because of it.

if someone who played rogue in vanilla and quit wow all together was to come back and play his rogue, he would feel right at home cause the actual class mechanics haven't changed one bit.

[D3athsting]

You still can kill people at ease in a stunlock after you forced their trinket and even more so in 5.2
if someone who played rogue in vanilla and quit wow all together was to come back and play his rogue, he would feel right at home cause the actual class mechanics haven't changed one bit.

I think problem is not the rogue itself but other classes who got many more defensive and offensive abilities, rogue hasn't changed that much, other classes did, in vanilla rogue powned casters but they was pretty weak against hunters who kited him to death and wars because of heavy armor (poison did little dmg back in vanilla), it was some kind of rock-paper-scissor game.

[Deadite]

Personally I think he's absolutely right. Almost every time I would hear someone talk about why they like playing their rogue is because they could gank people.

Rubbish. Rogues haven't been able to do that for years. Pop out and insta kill people died out years ago. So that is not something new players would be able to miss or choose as the 'best' thing about being a rogue. New players play rogues and *Yawn* and move onto a more interesting class. Imho no bugger plays them as they are a boring class to play. They have been left in the dust.

Since he thinks that is the reason why people play rogues and since they hate that play style and nerfed it years ago then this class has no hope. They will never try and fix it. He also tweeted that they know Rogue numbers have been going down for years and they have done nothing about it. Now we know why.

[Coldkil]

While during Vanilla the "gank" idea was really op for rogues, that let us to have a "special place".

Obviously they balanced the game with the years, but they slowly stripped our uniqueness and gave much of waht we have to other classes. In PvP we have a lot more flavour due to our playstyle, but PvE mechanics make it less effective.

Same goes for PvE: many of our abilities are tied to the PvP enviroment and have mechianics/effects (stun being first in the list) which are no more than useless in a PvE enviroment.

While other classes evolved and their spells modified to become uselful in both aspects or to have dual mechanics (like Wild Strike/Bloodsurge for warriors) our toolkit has remained the same apart for the occasional addiotion of another CD or a new spell which the class was missing.

I can agree that rogues were originally desgned really well and now are dificult to touch; this doesn't mean they don't need a revamp.

[D3athsting]

It's not that hard, they're just lazy, there are tons of feedback and suggestions made by players on rogue boards, i think that atleast 1% of those suggestions might be implemented into the game to improve rogue's qol and make for a better rotation/gameplay/fun, they always came up with the world famous sentence "rogues are fine", in the meanwhile rogue pop started to drop dramatically and now we have more rets than rogues while GC says it's because we can't gank anymore, LOL he just makes clear he doesn't play a rogue at all... (remember the tweet where he asked which was rogue's blanket silence?)

[RedMosquito]

From a game design standpoint, a class that surprises the enemy with stunlocks can only exist if every other class has a reliable way to break free from such stunlocks, and the factor that determine who wins is the rogue's ability in keeping his target locked vs. his target's ability to continuously break free from it and fight back.

Unfortunately, most classes simply don't have that many tools to escape stuns and retaliate, so Blizzard had to reduce the rogue's ability to stunlock as well. Under that light, there's some logic to what GC has said.

Speaking from my experience, as someone who spends 90% of his time on PvE, the reason why I don't play my rogue as much anymore is because what used to be my favorite melee spec in the game, Assassination, is now incredibly slow, and most of the buttons I press are lackluster, since most of my damage is passive. If they fix those issues, I will gladly go back to my rogue even if we don't have the same stunlock game we had before.

[D3athsting]

I'd gladly give my stuns away for more raid cd's, utility and more active dmg...

[kennyisnotdead]

The one thing Ghostcrawler and Blizzard cannot possibly know for sure: why people do or do not play a class. They may have circumstantial evidence, or inclinations, or even a poll that was kept fairly secret.

But they don't know why I quit playing mine. Or why you quit playing yours. And until GC understands energy starvation sucks as a play style, he'll have to keep sticking to his pet theories instead.

Blizzard uses data to make decisions but they fail to properly measure sentiment. When was the last time they survey anyone who has a lvl 90 or 86+ rogue that has over 100 days played... That would be to qualitative for them to handle.

---------- Post added 2013-03-04 at 03:31 PM ----------

A friend of mine recently came back to playing after quitting during WOTLK while pursuing his PhD. His first thing to me was "wow they ruined rogues what a bland class now". He also played a mage from vanilla thru tbc as his main and had something very similar to say. Goes to show its not just class burnout or features. New 5.2 changes are band aids to a major class problem.