Celestalon insight about rogues (not mentioned in mmo-champion blue posts)

[Deleted]

"We just don't have many changes to discuss currently; not ignoring or hating. Rogue talents are less impactful than we'd like, but aren't causing any problems, so aren't at the top of our priority list to redesign right now."

-Celestalon

[greeeed]

"We just don't have many changes to discuss currently; not ignoring or hating. Rogue talents are less impactful than we'd like, but aren't causing any problems, so aren't at the top of our priority list to redesign right now."

-Celestalon

looking at other class like shaman...

yeah, I would rather to keep my rogue as he is today they have him get nerf/crush
we still have all of our skill and since nothing change
we won't need to waste time to learn to play our class again at start of WoD for example like Blood DK or warrior

[Spirthealer]

"We just don't have many changes to discuss currently; not ignoring or hating. Rogue talents are less impactful than we'd like, but aren't causing any problems, so aren't at the top of our priority list to redesign right now."

-Celestalon

It is ok they have broken so many class's people will need there free 90 to re-roll to a none broken class.

[Geckoo]

Wow... it's a little sad that we are right with monotony out of fear that they break our class

[Mawnix]

Wow... it's a little sad that we are right with monotony out of fear that they break our class

You must be reading a different quote than I am.

[truevalon]

looking at other class like shaman...

yeah, I would rather to keep my rogue as he is today they have him get nerf/crush
we still have all of our skill and since nothing change
we won't need to waste time to learn to play our class again at start of WoD for example like Blood DK or warrior

Some rogue talents have so little impact on gameplay that nerfing them would not be noticed in any way.

[Geckoo]

You must be reading a different quote than I am.

As i understand the quote... he is saying that since our boring talents work fine, there is no need to change them. And some players here agree... better to have those boring talents than risk our class just to have some fun talents.

This is something really old... we knew that we had boring talents with very little impact since MoP's beta, we talked about it, we told them... they ignored us. The problem is that the rogue community has been dealing with this same crap almost in every expansion. Since our design seems to be so good we usually don't get any meaningful change, but we had to see how other classes got all the innovation that our old reliable design could use.

We mostly get big QoL improvements with WoD, so we feel like we are moving forward and accept that our gameplay or talents don't have any significant novelty, but we still have the same old reliable design, with the same cons and pros it usually had.

[Roshar]

Given his track record in this beta's class changes, rogues should consider themselves lucky that he's being passive.

[Davemetalhead]

This may be a dumb question, but ...

What is wrong with rogues? What needs to change? Why are the talents "boring", as Geckoo has maintained?

Do you want change for change's sake, just to be able to say that rogues have had a good going over? Or are there things that genuinely need changing?


These are honest questions by the way, I'm not trolling, I don't play a rogue (haven't really since Lich King) so I don't honestly know what they're like now.

[Roshar]

This may be a dumb question, but ...

What is wrong with rogues? What needs to change? Why are the talents "boring", as Geckoo has maintained?

Do you want change for change's sake, just to be able to say that rogues have had a good going over? Or are there things that genuinely need changing?


These are honest questions by the way, I'm not trolling, I don't play a rogue (haven't really since Lich King) so I don't honestly know what they're like now.

I don't have a rogue main, although I do play one as an alt and will continue to do so in Warlords, but pretty much the entire talent tree has no choice. Every single tier has one talent that's far and away much better than the other two. So there's no variety and it goes completely against what the talent system was supposed to be. But tbh, I would prefer it be that way instead of letting Celestalon come up with another one of his "bright" ideas about what rogue gameplay should feel like and make changes.

[Feali]

This may be a dumb question, but ...

What is wrong with rogues? What needs to change? Why are the talents "boring", as Geckoo has maintained?

Do you want change for change's sake, just to be able to say that rogues have had a good going over? Or are there things that genuinely need changing?


These are honest questions by the way, I'm not trolling, I don't play a rogue (haven't really since Lich King) so I don't honestly know what they're like now.

I'm just gonna copy what I just said in the Rogue forum:

Our main concerns are that we didn't change in 10 years.
We're stuck in WotLk thinking.
Every other class gets our iconic abilities.
Their reasoning for changes or more so non existent changes don't make sense.
Classes that are in much better places get reworked while we are staying ignored.
Bad design stays because "it's iconic".
Absolutely NO talent choice freedom.
Multiple talents that were and should be baseline.
(Subjective but: ) No flashiness.

Also what Kael said in the same thread:

The primary rogue complaints (these don't change):

1) our talents are boring/insignificant/rarely a choice.
2) "Haste will fix it." A spec shouldn't feel like your drowning in tar to play before the 2nd tier of raid gear.
3) Rogues are 8-day(year)-old bread. This doesn't mean that playing a rogue is really, genuinely a bad experience but... it's stale. If you've played a rogue for any expansion, you can hop back into it in less than a day without feeling conceptually behind.

More minor/controversial complaints:

1) Bugs. CP that vanish (still not slated for a fix in WoD).
2) Other classes getting "iconic" rogue basics (long term stealth, overwhelming CC - now less than previous in comparison)
3) We keep hearing "rogues are in a good place" from the Dev team.
4) Things that used to be base got shoved into talents (like Shadowstep)


There are many more, of course (killing spree - one of the few attacks in the game where you can murder yourself more than 1 second after clicking it... backstab, the game's pointedly last remaining positional requirement attack), but the ones highlighted above are repeated over and over and can be found across numerous threads, spanning from the time they were first a problem (years before I was a mod) up to the current day. Most of them haven't even been addressed by the community managers or dev team.



To respond to your post directly, though, Rogues are smooth. For the most part, rogues have been smooth (spec dependent, repeat: spec dependent) since vanilla, at least with respect to almost every other class. "Smooth" doesn't really easily translate into compelling, and the jarring elements that don't fit the "smooth" feel end up grating that much harder because of it. Assuming you're talking about assassination, which is very smooth, but also requires next to no mental awareness. It's neither difficult to predict nor to execute what needs doing - in pre-raid gear, there was a point at which I tabbed out of the game for a full 9 seconds (gawd, low haste) to change my music and read a short e-mail... without losing any damage. Then I pressed 1, 2, 2, and tabbed out again. It was smooth, but uh, there wasn't anything to bite into. Iirc this was at the start of cata, for reference... but it remains fairly accurate across all pre-WoD expansions (with venom rush providing more rotation speed).

[Geckoo]

This may be a dumb question, but ...

What is wrong with rogues? What needs to change? Why are the talents "boring", as Geckoo has maintained?

Do you want change for change's sake, just to be able to say that rogues have had a good going over? Or are there things that genuinely need changing?


These are honest questions by the way, I'm not trolling, I don't play a rogue (haven't really since Lich King) so I don't honestly know what they're like now.

There is nothing wrong, there is nothing broken. It's simply old design that is so reliable that hasn't changed too much over the years.

Imagine that we are at christmas and every class is opening his christmas present.

They all have nice new toys every year, but rogues always have the same wooden toy car. Over the years some of our friends also got a wooden car, but painted in a fancy way, or even with lights... even the new kid got a fancy new plastic car with stickers, lights... (we call him monk). But rogues always get the same car, every year. And hey! our car works fine and we have a lot of fun, but the past year our good ol' warlock friend got a full set of transformers... maybe we could have more fun with that kind of toy!

This time around though... we are getting something different, the problem is that it still isn't a new toy, it's simply the same car with the little extras that our old friends got other years. But since every other kid is getting some kind of broken toy... we are even happy with our new-old car!

For a more direct answer... the talents are boring because they have 0 impact in our gameplay and when it has some impact is in a passive way that doesn't change even slightly the way we play.

[Deleted]

You must be reading a different quote than I am.

its ok, we know blizzard can do no wrong in your book.

ontopic: well, like i said in "that other thread". celestalol has no idea what hes doing, and he keeps on proving it over and over again.
like one said already, you can consider yourself lucky that it more or less stays how it is atm (for rogues that is ^^)

[Deleted]

Didn't play beta but didn't the nerfed stunlocks for PvP? Isn't it significant change for rogues?

[Deleted]

I'm just gonna copy what I just said in the Rogue forum:

Our main concerns are that we didn't change in 10 years.
We're stuck in WotLk thinking.
Every other class gets our iconic abilities.
Their reasoning for changes or more so non existent changes don't make sense.
Classes that are in much better places get reworked while we are staying ignored.
Bad design stays because "it's iconic".
Absolutely NO talent choice freedom.
Multiple talents that were and should be baseline.
(Subjective but: ) No flashiness.

Also what Kael said in the same thread:

ALL these points are subjective, sorry to smash the illusion. As are most of the complaints Kael has put together. Most of it boils down to "We didn't change much and I don't like that!"

Well, then answer me this: Why don't you just reroll?
If change is that important to you, why not going to change? Why are you guys sticking to a class for which apparently "keeping the old" is a trademark? "Because I like being a rogue"...well, being a rogue includes staying relatively stable over the expansions, and apparently that's not what you want in your class, so kind of a big hole in that statement, isn't there?

Are rogues broken? No, they are not. We deliver cutting-edge melee dps since vanilla, we are arguably the most mobile melee dps class ingame, especially with warriors losing mobility in WoD, our survivability is outstanding, we can compete in any dps situation, be it single target, cleavefights, bomb-heavy encounters or special role assignments. We have a high amount of CC, effectively ignore half the boss mechanics, are easy on the healers mana and we look mighty fine while doing so. Despite all that, we are underplayed in PvE, can easily find raidspots. And to add sugar to the cake: We are the ONLY class that gets to roll on Agi-Daggers.

There really is no technical reason to complain about the rogue, and I would rather see it stay that way, than fixing something which isn't broken for the sake of change. If you think the rouge is to bland, that's your personal opinion, but not a real problem that needs fixing.

[Feali]

Well, then answer me this: Why don't you just reroll?
If change is that important to you, why not going to change? Why are you guys sticking to a class for which apparently "keeping the old" is a trademark? "Because I like being a rogue"...well, being a rogue includes staying relatively stable over the expansions, and apparently that's not what you want in your class, so kind of a big hole in that statement, isn't there?

Because I have a safe raidspot with a great guild. I can't just go "oh yea btw I'm a warlock now".

[Deleted]

Because I have a safe raidspot with a great guild. I can't just go "oh yea btw I'm a warlock now".

But if other classes are, as you say yourself, and I quote: "in much better places", then how is that possible? Either your guild is doing something incredibly wrong, by keeping a spot for a class which, technically, cannot contribute as well as another one could, OR the rogue actually performs so well, that they have good reason to keep it. So which is it?

And you can admit to something: That's also one of the reasons why YOU keep your rogue. Because, in theory, any melee class could fill that spot. And there is NOTHING that prevents you from rolling an enhancer, fury, ret, ww, feral, whatever, especially with the upcoming new expansion and gear reset. So its just as I said: A purely personal opinion.

To which you have every right of course. But please don't expect changes based on what you personally desire, if there are tens of thousands who like the stability and reliability of their rogues. And don't try to make it sound as if there was a real problem, because as you have to admit, there isn't.

[Kaganfindel]

Here's the thing about being in the control group: you never get the good drugs.

[Nozuka]

But tbh, I would prefer it be that way instead of letting Celestalon come up with another one of his "bright" ideas about what rogue gameplay should feel like and make changes.

so people have learned nothing from ghostcrawler and still think that the one talking to the community is deciding all things and everything is his fault?

[Ryme]

There really is no technical reason to complain about the rogue, and I would rather see it stay that way, than fixing something which isn't broken for the sake of change. If you think the rouge is to bland, that's your personal opinion, but not a real problem that needs fixing.

The talent system is objectively terrible in PvE.

T1: Shadow Focus wins, perhaps there is occasion where you can game Nightstalker in red BG, but that's rare.
T2: All close to useless.
T3: Elusiveness wins, Leeching is a bad choice always and Cheat Death is occasionally useful for cheating a mechanic - when it works.
T4: C&D is not just bad, but fundamentally always a terrible choice. BoS and SS fight it out until haste makes the debate irrelevant and Blizzard nerfs BoS.
T5: All close to useless.
At the very least, you must concede on T6 when statistics show over 95% of combat rouge's using the same talent.