Do rogues still have burst?

[Deleted]

Hey. Old player here, not sure if i should renew my subscription.

Left the game mid wotlk, never leveled to 80 (74 atm) on my undead rogue. Do rogues still have their signature burst damage (think rogues in vanilla, warglaives in tbc, sub backstab in late wotlk) in pvp?

I`m not so sure i want to come back if in world pvp if all a rogue does is apply bleeds and spam snd for that white damage, that just reminds me way too much of spamming ss, rupture and snd as a combat rogue back in bc dungeons. Boring and slow gameplay is not my thing.

Also, do rogues have good survivalability with CD:s? From what i`ve been reading, we do shitty damage AND have bad survivalability. Is that true, and if so, in which context? (RBG, WPvP, arenas)

I`m mostly interested in WPvP and arenas.

[Fus Ro Yay]

Well, i've been playing my combat rogue this patch (mind you, i started playing rogue again this expansion, had not played rogue since vanilla..) and the opener + burst seems okay.. but goddamn the downtime is horrible, whenever shadowblades/adrenaline rush or Killingspree is on cooldown all i do is just reapply bleeds, keep snd up keep recoup up (if needed) and stuns /interrupts as i wait my next burst.

my exeperiences are just from duels and arenas 1-1800 rating, nothing amazing.
all in all, the rogue is fun, but the downtime is a pain.

[Jiigeri]

Maybe you should look a few pvp videos to see for yourself. Just don't let yourself get fooled though, world pvp and arenas are totally different after the gear scaling and such.

[Deleted]

mmmm, I think we still do, at least, when I start the fight with Vendetta+Trinkets+Shadow Blades the burst is kinda insane, PvE or PvP :/

[Deleted]

Maybe you should look a few pvp videos to see for yourself. Just don't let yourself get fooled though, world pvp and arenas are totally different after the gear scaling and such.

Care to explain how it`s different?

[Deleted]

Rogue pvp isnt what it used to be. The old strong stunlocks are gone. Burst is high with cooldowns not without them. Everything is more cooldown based.

[Artorius]

Care to explain how it`s different?

When you get into a "pvp zone" (Arena/BGS) all the ilvl that is above a certainly cap near the pvp ilvl is normalized and scaled down.
Therefore, Ilvl outside of Arenas/BGS is insanely higher, including legendary cloaks, metas and PVE itens at their original ilvl.

[Feali]

Welcome to MoP PvP: Where everything is based around CDs

[Verain]

These responses are mostly unhelpful. Antonias has a good response, but come on!

So, here's the story:

Lets break PvP into world pvp and instanced pvp. In world pvp, your gear is just your gear. Generally speaking, you'll see things like, tanks with over a million health, while your pvp gear gives you less than 500k. If you raid (as I do), you will really be able to push over people who do not. My killing spree is shocking burst, especially if I bring an isle buff. The only piece of pvp gear I normally wear in the world is my pvp trinket. Rogues in general have solid burst damage, but you will often want to open with cooldowns going if you can- if you open on a guy as sub with full slice and dice and recup already active from some mobs, you'll pretty much be able to just push right through him, and he'll have to blow immunities and cooldowns to not get in trouble right away.

In rated PvP, the game is much more balanced and serious. In instanced pvp, which includes arenas, rated battlegrounds, and random battlegrounds all my raid gear gets shrunk down to some item level that is around 512. Honor gear is 496, and conquest gear (from arenas and rated battlegrounds) is 522, and is never shrunk. An item level means the same thing it has always meant, and 13 item levels generally increases everything by about 15%. Catching up conquest gear isn't too hard, and I recommend you download the addon "oqueue" and use it to find matches until your gear is kind of better, at which point (after a couple weeks) you will start to get a pretty solid rating.


Sub is the favored spec. It has shadow dance, which allows you to ignore 50% of a player's armor if you hit them with garrote, cheap shot, or ambush, and of course, it allows you to cleave stuns to peel people as well. It has a short cooldown, and you can and should line it up with a trinket. All the old rogue tricks- gouging or blinding a trinket, chaining CC correctly, following up opponent CCs, shadowstepping kicks (any CC really)- still work and are useful. Sub lacks sustained damage, however, and it needs to maintain slice and dice to regenerate energy (the extra attacks don't matter much), and it needs a bleed on a target (hemo works fine). You will want to ideally burst into a target who doesn't have ton of cooldowns and who doesn't have stun on DR or a trinket, often with a full energy pool. Kidney + damage trinket + shadow dance (and possibly shadow blades) and you will deal lethal damage. You can ensure your presence on a target with smokebomb (prevents enemy healers from healing your target and enemy ranged from peeling you) and cloak (same as it was in BC pretty much, immunity to magic stuff).

Mutilate does good sustained damage in pvp, the only rogue spec to do this. The burst damage of it is kind of low, however, and the cooldown, vendetta, both costs a global and takes some time to really pay off. Mutilate is mostly good for soloing plate clowns, but remember that all your poisons proc more when you press envenom, including the excellent paralytic poison. The ability to hit with an armor ignoring finisher, plus the ability to rapidly turn globals into damage gives this spec a pretty ok burst profile, but it lacks the control of sub and is predictable by most good players. The reliance on poisons and bleeds to regenerate energy often results in going ooe on a target who survived and not having followup.

Combat bring really excellent damage with killing spree, and combined with a damage trinket and shadow blades (bladespree) it can be unhealable damage out of nowhere. The spec does poor sustained, and good players will reduce your uptime (and therefore your cooldown frequency, as restless blades is only advanced by eviscerate, not kidney, deadly throw, or recuperate). I really like combat's ability to wail out excellent burst in a group scenario, but it seems really hard to capitalize on in arena. It's definitely been fun for me in RBGs, but I'm not sure how much of this is just 1700-2000 rated players not really expecting a combat rogue.


All rogues are more mobile than they used to be, but honestly, everything is. The current meta has warriors overtuned on likely three fronts (the nerfs needed aren't large, but pretty much, they need to gain a weakness or lose a strength), and this effects our arena standings. In RBGs we have solid roles as flag carriers, assassins, and scouts.


Our talent tree has changed things up quite a bit.




So to sum up:

All rogue specs can deal decent damage. Sub is almost all yellow damage, and combat is no damage outside of cooldowns. Mutilate does sustained damage that is good. None compare to the sustained done by a warrior or death knight, but both offer more control than these specs. All rogues specs except mutilate offer good burst.

World PvP is mostly about item level. Join a raid guild and get gear, or grab a bunch of pvp gear and make a few friends with oqueue and hunt raiders who think that 800k health makes them able to beat three pvp rogues working together.

If you were good at arenas before, you still will be. You can oqueue a decent healer, or if you know one, go to town. I recommend 2s only if you have a tumor, because I think tumors are worse than 2s, but only barely. 5s is mostly a dead format, and 3s is still solid. Note that arena is VERY comp dependent- when Blizzard homogenized class abilities, they also reduced the ways to score a kill to "burst a guy while his buddies are CCed", and as such the number of comps that are good at this is lower than before. This isn't so bad though: with cross server arenas, you can easily use oqueue to meet people interested in playing a comp that involves you. But don't try, for instance, rogue / feral / mistweaver, just because your friends are good at those things, unless you are ok playing at a rating decently below your ability.


Good luck!

[Maelstrom51]

I suck at pvp, but the other day I dueled an arms warrior friend in my guild. Cheap Shot -> SnD -> AR/SB/KS and he was defeated before the stun ended. We were both only self buffed, and he was in defensive stance with 720k health.

This combo has quite a long cooldown, but its damage is massive. Pretty great for world PvP.

Edit: Since this post I spent a couple hours on the Timeless Isle farming coins for my first time. Managed to get 80 coins and only died twice from other players while using this cheese combo.

[Verain]

Cheese? I'm pretty sure it's just a normal burst setup man. Warriors have access to similar.

You say you "dueled an arms warrior"... what were your item levels?

[Deleted]

I suck at pvp, but the other day I dueled an arms warrior friend in my guild. Cheap Shot -> SnD -> AR/SB/KS and he was defeated before the stun ended. We were both only self buffed, and he was in defensive stance with 720k health.

This combo has quite a long cooldown, but its damage is massive. Pretty great for world PvP.

Edit: Since this post I spent a couple hours on the Timeless Isle farming coins for my first time. Managed to get 80 coins and only died twice from other players while using this cheese combo.

I don't know why, but PvPers often seem completely clueless (like you) when it comes to CD stacking and whenever they discover that you can pop CDs, they call it a Swifty one shot macro or cheesing.

Maybe you should try a bit of PvE to learn how to truly maximize damage.

[Verain]

Also, the math doesn't add up on that. Cheap shot is four seconds to 4.5 seconds, slice takes a global, and then he did 700k damage to a dstance plate wearer before spree even ended with no insight? Assuming the enemy warrior had no resil on top of base, (0.3x incoming damage applied) and was in dstance (0.75x damage applied) and was in plate (roughly 0.5x damage applied), that's over 6 million damage. My killing spree is awesome, but it's not two million dps.

[Maelstrom51]

Also, the math doesn't add up on that. Cheap shot is four seconds to 4.5 seconds, slice takes a global, and then he did 700k damage to a dstance plate wearer before spree even ended with no insight? Assuming the enemy warrior had no resil on top of base, (0.3x incoming damage applied) and was in dstance (0.75x damage applied) and was in plate (roughly 0.5x damage applied), that's over 6 million damage. My killing spree is awesome, but it's not two million dps.

http://i.imgur.com/idNM9kb.jpg

Here is one combo against a target dummy. Deadly Poison ticked for a bit after Killing Spree ended, so the dps number is a little low, but the damage itself is mostly accurate.

Also, something else to note is that you hit extremely fast and Paralytic Poison will proc sometime during Killing Spree, giving you a longer stun.

[Deafyx]

Also, the math doesn't add up on that. Cheap shot is four seconds to 4.5 seconds, slice takes a global, and then he did 700k damage to a dstance plate wearer before spree even ended with no insight? Assuming the enemy warrior had no resil on top of base, (0.3x incoming damage applied) and was in dstance (0.75x damage applied) and was in plate (roughly 0.5x damage applied), that's over 6 million damage. My killing spree is awesome, but it's not two million dps.

Everyone now has a base resilience. PvE gear>PvP gear out in the world with this change.

Not saying the OP is speaking facts, but never underestimate Killing Spree with the bonus damage Rogues get during stuns if they took the talent. Im 570 PvE geared, and I can pop Killing Spree (which then would trigger my Cloak/Trinkets/Eng Gloves) on a AFK mounted say Priest rocking 550K HP and hes dead by the end of it. It is quite fun to say the least lol.

[Warstar]

Everyone now has a base resilience. PvE gear>PvP gear out in the world with this change.

Not saying the OP is speaking facts, but never underestimate Killing Spree with the bonus damage Rogues get during stuns if they took the talent. Im 570 PvE geared, and I can pop Killing Spree (which then would trigger my Cloak/Trinkets/Eng Gloves) on a AFK mounted say Priest rocking 550K HP and hes dead by the end of it. It is quite fun to say the least lol.

I agree. Rogues can do some pretty crazy "blow your load" burst and then be completely useless after that (similar to a ret paladin). Versus rares on the timeless isle with no island buffs just the crystal of insanity + poisons I typically burst ~500k+ and with opening with ambush -> popping adrenaline rush/shadow blades-> revealing strike-> SS til 5 CP->kidney shot -> killing spree I can typically kill a mob like Jakur of Ordon (who has 6mil hp) by the time killing spree runs out if no one else attacked him (if they did he shoots up like 3m higher each person who attacks and takes a bit more time to kill).

So ya I can see a person bursting down an arms warrior in d-stance if everything procs in pve gear in world pvp. Granted all they have to do is trinket the KS and pop shield wall and then the rogue's dps is down to crap and then the warrior gets to pop all their shit and has a good chance to kill the rogue too.

[Terahertz]

Rogue pvp isnt what it used to be. The old strong stunlocks are gone. Burst is high with cooldowns not without them. Everything is more cooldown based.

quoted for truth

Rogues used to have great non-stop burst/damage, but now it's -really- shit out of CDs. Even with find weakness up (no procs/CDs, just backstabs) your damage is extremely poor and probably even lower than warrior damage without any buffs. My backstabs usually hit for like 40k crits, which doesn't really happen often, and my eviscerates only do like 20-30k damage WITH find weakness up.

During CDs though you can do a lot of damage with eviscerates, ambushes and MfD eviscerates. Although, it's quite difficult to pull off because literally 1 storm bolt or even a fucking charge stun will fuck up your Shadow Dance. Considering literally every class had a short CC ability nowadays, it's actually pretty damn hard to pull it off playing with a healer.

[Deleted]

Why don`t you use keybinds lol? Clicking is so bad, it really hurts your mobility even in pve. (also, it`s alot slower)

[Verain]

In his picture everything was keybound that you press in a raid. Main builder, second builder, main finisher, redirect, slice and dice, cloak, vanish, prep.

While the spree pictured is nice, it's not what the poster I was responding to was saying. It would need to be 5+ million on a dummy to do the claimed damage, not a "mere" 1.2 million (4 million counting all sources except Xuen, who doesn't work in PvP). Also Note that in his claimed timeframe, the spree wouldn't even have time to complete, and also I have a kinda hard time believing you snuck 4 shadow blade mainhand hits into the specified timeframe as well.

Everyone now has a base resilience. PvE gear>PvP gear out in the world with this change.

No shit. I said, assuming he has the base and no more. You can get more ofc- there's a 2600 resil bonus for wearing both pvp trinkets, for instance.


Obviously spree is good. But when combat rogues make up such a trivial representation 2200+, it feels really absurd to have someone walk in here and talk about rogues as if they are "cheesy", and exaggerate numbers wildly to make their point. And yes, the numbers are an exaggeration. A warrior in dstance takes 25% less, plate halves all the damage except the shadow blades autoattacks, and the warrior was claimed to have over 700k health, and a base resilience of 70% reduced damage. No one is dying inside of an incomplete cheap shot with those stats.

The big thing is this: world pvp isn't balanced. Every class can really abuse this, and rogues have one spec that can do this trick too. But just because you can pop burst damage doesn't mean it's "cheese", or unbalanced, and it certainly doesn't justify claiming 6mdps.

[Maelstrom51]

Obviously spree is good. But when combat rogues make up such a trivial representation 2200+, it feels really absurd to have someone walk in here and talk about rogues as if they are "cheesy", and exaggerate numbers wildly to make their point. And yes, the numbers are an exaggeration. A warrior in dstance takes 25% less, plate halves all the damage except the shadow blades autoattacks, and the warrior was claimed to have over 700k health, and a base resilience of 70% reduced damage. No one is dying inside of an incomplete cheap shot with those stats.

You're saying I'm making shit up? Thanks.

http://i.imgur.com/idNM9kb.jpg

Here is one combo against a target dummy. Deadly Poison ticked for a bit after Killing Spree ended, so the dps number is a little low, but the damage itself is mostly accurate.

Also, something else to note is that you hit extremely fast and Paralytic Poison will proc sometime during Killing Spree, giving you a longer stun.