Musings about the rogue class

[Warstar]

First thing is that people are labeling all rogues by the "rogue" archetype. If you want to look at a rogue in WoW look no further than your friendly neighborhood Defias roaming the hills in Westfall. That's a rogue. An outlaw. Nothing more too it than a person living on the fringe of society getting by on whatever means he can which usually resolves to robbery or other forms of crime to survive.

But, that's just the archetype is an outlaw. A person who believes themselves above the law and who can do what they want when they want and that the rules don't apply to them. But the rogue is not just a rogue. We have specializations upon which we embark to make our character more than just the plain basic rogue. That's why while each class shares some of the common dirty tricks and stealthy aspects I personally believe that they are in actually different classes (although they have similar play styles but that's a different topic). Instead of the honorable knight who puts forth his family honor before everything you have a scoundrel who will insult your mother, call your wife a whore and say you're just like your worthless father, trick you into a duel and then use every sort of dirty trick in the book to kill you and then take your coin purse when he's finished. You have a master poisoner who relies on his poisons to do his dirty work inflicting far more harm with a cut than anything else. And then you have the one who sneaks about and kills his target with a single swift blow to the back and then vanishes into the crowd before anyone knows what happened.

Now I think they got the names backwards here. Subtly should be about the subtle way's of poison. Slipping a drop of deadly poison in their targets drink while no one is watching and then being miles away while their target suddenly drops dead for no apparent reason. Mean while assassination should be about just that. Ambushing and backstabing someone to death. Assassinating them. While obviously it's possible to assassinate someone with poison typically when someone hears of an assassination attempt it's more often than not someone with a gun trying to take a person out. Now obviously you can't have a game where on Tuesday you sneak through the current raid and poison everyone's food supply and then come back on Monday and collect all the loot just lying around there on dead guys and you have to have some sort of game play element tot it. I think both classes have their niche from an RP aspect they just goofed the names up.

Now about combat it should be that. Focused on combat. Think of a duelist class who doesn't revolve around stealth but weapon skill and agility to dodge and parry. They should have stealth because they are a rogue so for a person like that to be sneaking around definitely fits but they shouldn't get any stealth abilities aside from stealth it self. Even as it stands now combat has almost no reliance on stealth as it is and if it had an alternate form of garrote/cs/sap that weren't used in stealth they'd have the same game play now as they always have. Right now combat is somewhere between a pseudo stealther and a berserker smashing buttons and attacking as fast as possible with no elegance or flair. Combat has all the nuances of a little boy closing his eyes and windmill swinging his arms and charging at someone blindly.

I think the biggest detriment to the rogue class that has completely destroyed everything rogue about it. The thing that has changed the rogue from the stereo typical "rogue" in most RPGs and has turned it into a boring passive damaging snoozefest has been rated arenas and trying to get them into E-Sports. In every game out there the backstab rogue is the guy who can run around trash literally one shotting stuff with crit after huge crit after huge crit and then when they fight a boss their pretty lame because they rely so much on that burst and stealth attacks. That's the way rogues used to be and that was their thing. Aside from combat they were a burst class. They speced down into talents that made BS and ambush crit almost every time. They had low passive damage and low over all damage but they could chain some abilities together and do massive burst. But now everyone has giant health pools, rogues have been nerfed to the ground so that all our damage is passive and boring and our burst which used to be the best in the game now is the worst. FPS games are a great example of how PvP can work really well. You have all sorts of specs some which are more up front in your face and some which are long ranged. You use your surrounds to your benefit and each map has a huge game play difference compared to modern day arena which is what 5? different ways that you can see people running around pillar humping. The backstabbing crit based rogue should be the sniper of the game. I don't mean ranged but I mean that ass hole that everyone hates. You're running down an alley and all of a sudden you're heads flying off and you're staring at a spawn screen before you even realize it. But unless the guy is a serious pro most snipers are complete crap if you get them in one on one short ranged combat. Similarly the sub rogue should have the power to just ruin someones day. They should be able to assassinate someone rather than the current form of mildly annoying them. In a group fight where everyone is focused on a giant brawl the rogue should be the one who sneaks in and counters the healer/support but just taking them out. If there was a fast paced FPS style combat and think that'd bring back so much of the flavor of the rogue that has been passively lost over time.

[ymirsson]

Noone should be able to one shot people in any semi serious pvp environment. But yeah, they should be able to put out some serious hurt and pressure if played right.

And time to reiterate the classic lore: Assassination is called that because the tree was called that before it became the master poisoner tree. Just like Backstab was a skill in the combat tree and eviscerate in the assassination tree, because CP builders were all combat and finishers all assa. They never bothered to update and streamline the correspondences. And now it's all juggled up anyway.

[Warstar]

Noone should be able to one shot people in any semi serious pvp environment. But yeah, they should be able to put out some serious hurt and pressure if played right.

And time to reiterate the classic lore: Assassination is called that because the tree was called that before it became the master poisoner tree. Just like Backstab was a skill in the combat tree and eviscerate in the assassination tree, because CP builders were all combat and finishers all assa. They never bothered to update and streamline the correspondences. And now it's all juggled up anyway.

This is why I think that arenas have ruined the possibility of a rogue class doing what it's supposed to in pvp. Imagine if BGs were a faster paced combat with a 4-5 second ress timer and everyone did a lot more damage and it was closer to an FPS game or even dotaesque. Outside of the Korean national sport games like LoL and FPS games are actually more serious, more competitive and actual e-sports where as blizzard arenas got taken out of that competition because arenas were impossible to balance making for bad competition in MLG. In an FPS people frequently play snipers who 100% one shot. In LoL there are assassin classes that are relatively weak, get smooshed extremely easy but can also pretty much set up a combo and one shot a support class. Frost mages right now are actually a really good example of this. They can get all their stuff inline, set up an amazing combo and burst the crap out of someone and they don't even need a major damage CD to do it it's just based on control, setting up procs and skill.

How is it that an assassin is supposed to assassinate people if his assassination move (ambush) does less damage over all than his main cp builder that over all hits like a wet noodle (why people open up with mutilate instead of ambush)? Rogues need more burst. They need to be feared in pvp but in the same time if you can control a rogue and keep them out of stealth they should be relatively weak. But now they have one of the weaker bursts, a really bad sustained outside of burst, and while they can peel really well in a 2s game of rogue/healer vs dps/healer it's really hard to shut a person down with the relative lack of big burst and kinda retardation of how strong healers are right now. Which is a different topic as well but for the sake of arguement I think healers should be a glass vase. They're awesome. Game changing and can do some amazing things but if you don't protect your healer they can get jacked up super easy compared to now where healers more of a tank than a tank in pvp.

[Tenjen]

bring up games from entirely diff genre's is a bad idea.

having instant kills in PVP, any pvp. is bad design and thematics can go to hell and should never be prioritized over mechanics.

[Deleted]

bring up games from entirely diff genre's is a bad idea.

having instant kills in PVP, any pvp. is bad design and thematics can go to hell and should never be prioritized over mechanics.

But what about headshots in fps? They are semi realistic, but also require more skill, which then is rewarded in instant or almost instant kills. Its fair, because everybody can use it there.
Also thematics should never go to hell, else you could go play Pong. Its all about the thematics in a mmorpg if you sum it up.

[Tsuna]

There's plenty of truth to this thought as far as pvp goes. But I've always thought pvp was utterly rubbish in WoW in spite of it being a game about fantasy world warfare. Arenas at high level of skill take forever because they balance around huge hp pools, massive resilience bases, and a metric ass ton of crowd control and never really felt like pvp to me anyway. But as far as rogues go I just don't see a way they can bandaid fix the class, it'll happen over many iterations down the next expansion or two.

I agree entirely with the idea that poisons as an integral part of Assassination rather than subtlety seems weird, but then again I didn't really care much for the rogue specs in general. I wouldn't bat an eye if they threw out the current specs and replaced them with completely random things like "Poisons, Ninjutsu, and Fencing". Don't get me wrong though, I play Combat as my favorite dps class and enjoy taking a break from Raid leading as a healer and just slicing things apart. It's just that the rogue design as a whole IS a bit weird.

Of course, I wouldn't bother debating realism of any kind in WoW. You can turn purple and somehow that can completely neutralize a giant molten boulder of death colliding with your face. If I want something close to a real one shot wonder I just garrote, shadow blades, killing spree and hope for the best #noskillpvpftw.