What do you miss?

[Battlebeard]

One thing: Burst of Speed! Loved that more than anything!

[Nythiz]

Not much that I miss tbh.

A lot of the old/nostalgic stuff I see mentioned in this thread would be awfully misplaced and awkward in the current game. Old school combat for example had it's charms, but would be drop dead boring in the current setting. I think the new outlaw spec is the best iteration of the spec that I've seen.

That said, there are a few things that got pruned that I really miss:

1) Burst of Speed. I know the ability was a bit too strong for mobility purposes; but god I miss the day that rogues were one of the fastest to get around with. These days we get beaten on speed by nearly every other class, which removes the feeling of being that fast assassin/ninja/rogue/whatever.

2) Recuperate. In the day and age that nearly every class has decent self healing, I miss the old rogue ability. If only for the ability to solo some old content more reliably than we do now.

3) Smoke Bomb. I know it's still in pvp, but I miss this ability for PvE so much. It had such great applications if you were able to master it. Abilities like this and for example Gouge for every spec are those skill ceiling improvements that are desperately lacking from most rogue specs right now.

[M1r4g3]

I miss rotations in general being more punishing if you fail... Playing outlaw atm is like:
''oh no i used dispatch on 2 cps by accident''-0 dps lost
''oh no i used AR only with true bearing up, guess il just reroll a few times...'' - 0 dps lost
''oh no i used pistol shot on 5cps'' - 0 dps lost
and the worst one ''oh boy i got 5buffs time to destroy some dps meters''-0 dps gained.
Same kinda applies to assa and most specs in general.

[shoegazing]

I miss how Subtlety Rogue used to actually look, sound, feel, and play like a Rogue instead of an entirely different and worse class altogether

[Mathris]

Having mained this class since just before 2.1 there are things I definitely don't miss that a lot of you seem to or seem to think you do. Crafting poisons? Nah. That was terrible and only served for some immersion. Which was nice, don't get me wrong, but it was wholly impractical to actually playing and enjoying the content. Slice and Dice in every spec? Also terrible if you actually had to do rotations with it because Sin and Sub were never built to juggle that buff and it's clear it was a Combat/Outlaw thing. Rupture in every spec? Hell no. So glad it's gone. I'm a rogue, not a DOT spec. If I wanted to play a pure DPS class and have to juggle dots I'd be a warlock instead.

Things I actually DO miss that weren't terrible to actually play with:
Recuperate - Crimson Vial just doesn't do it for me or feel rogue-ish enough. Using your resources to heal instead of some 30sec CD made you have to make choices that actually mattered in PVE and PVP. Heal a bit or do more damage. Miss having that kind of decision.
Expose Armor - See the above, debuff for the benefit of the raid (and yourself a bit) or just do more damage at the time. This kind of choice was fun, it was less fun when it became mandatory to have this debuff on every raid boss so if you didn't have a warrior tank with devastate you had to keep it up and it was less choice and more chore but eh nothing's perfect.
DFA Legion Sub from Tomb - Without a doubt the most fun part of Legion. When you executed that opening sequence with Mantle and that DFA hit and you spiked to the top of the meters ahh man, nothing more fun. Also just using a finisher and seeing a huge number is nice.
Smoke Bomb - For both sides of the game this ability was awesome. Raid CD with its 10% damage reduction and amazing PVP utility. No idea why we don't still have this to give some in-combat utility. Shroud already gives us a ton of out of combat utility and is super useful for M+ skipping packs and what not but what do we offer in combat nowadays? Stuns on specific mobs, maybe a garrote silence? Things other classes can totally do too often at the cheaper cost of a short CD and no main resources.
Burst. Of. Speed - This is my #1. I used to always complain that for the majority of wrath rogues felt very slow and not the nimble thief you'd mistake the class for. Mut-prep pretty much only had sprint as a mobility thing and it felt weird at a time when Warriors could charge in combat -> swap to berserker stance and then intercept -> swap to defensive and intervene out to their friends -> only to charge back in again. In no world should the plate class be more mobile than the leather wearing thief. Burst of Speed pretty much solved this issue by just existing. Yeah it cost resources and if you spammed it ate the energy bar right up but the on demand mobility and the choice to sacrifice damage for movement was interesting and fun and really, really fit the class IMO.

All this said, I still hold the strong belief that 7.0 brought the best changes for Rogues in a very long time, because the class was getting boring with no real fundamental shifts and the three specs all played very similarly and 7.0 made them all distinct at the very least. Even if yes, it wasn't perfect and isn't perfect now but it's a step in the right direction that I do hope the xpac after BFA finishes executing on.

[Straamibuu]

So no one misses the mindless 'Hunger for Blood' spamming ?

Personally I don't miss poisons as a weapon buff we had to create then apply, it was fun a couple of times then just became a chore / bag space eater. I was glad the day SnD left non Combat specs too
And Burst of Speed just wasn't balanced (so of course people miss it).

So I don't think I really miss anything... well apart from the Mantle from Legion. All those crits were fun


Edit: oooh I thought of something. I don't like Roll the Bones tbh, fair enough keeping up SnD as Outlaw but the RNG of Rtb is just too. Urgh. No. Not fun.

[shoegazing]

Having mained this class since just before 2.1 there are things I definitely don't miss that a lot of you seem to or seem to think you do. Crafting poisons? Nah. That was terrible and only served for some immersion. Which was nice, don't get me wrong, but it was wholly impractical to actually playing and enjoying the content. Slice and Dice in every spec? Also terrible if you actually had to do rotations with it because Sin and Sub were never built to juggle that buff and it's clear it was a Combat/Outlaw thing. Rupture in every spec? Hell no. So glad it's gone. I'm a rogue, not a DOT spec. If I wanted to play a pure DPS class and have to juggle dots I'd be a warlock instead.

Things I actually DO miss that weren't terrible to actually play with:
Recuperate - Crimson Vial just doesn't do it for me or feel rogue-ish enough. Using your resources to heal instead of some 30sec CD made you have to make choices that actually mattered in PVE and PVP. Heal a bit or do more damage. Miss having that kind of decision.
Expose Armor - See the above, debuff for the benefit of the raid (and yourself a bit) or just do more damage at the time. This kind of choice was fun, it was less fun when it became mandatory to have this debuff on every raid boss so if you didn't have a warrior tank with devastate you had to keep it up and it was less choice and more chore but eh nothing's perfect.
DFA Legion Sub from Tomb - Without a doubt the most fun part of Legion. When you executed that opening sequence with Mantle and that DFA hit and you spiked to the top of the meters ahh man, nothing more fun. Also just using a finisher and seeing a huge number is nice.
Smoke Bomb - For both sides of the game this ability was awesome. Raid CD with its 10% damage reduction and amazing PVP utility. No idea why we don't still have this to give some in-combat utility. Shroud already gives us a ton of out of combat utility and is super useful for M+ skipping packs and what not but what do we offer in combat nowadays? Stuns on specific mobs, maybe a garrote silence? Things other classes can totally do too often at the cheaper cost of a short CD and no main resources.
Burst. Of. Speed - This is my #1. I used to always complain that for the majority of wrath rogues felt very slow and not the nimble thief you'd mistake the class for. Mut-prep pretty much only had sprint as a mobility thing and it felt weird at a time when Warriors could charge in combat -> swap to berserker stance and then intercept -> swap to defensive and intervene out to their friends -> only to charge back in again. In no world should the plate class be more mobile than the leather wearing thief. Burst of Speed pretty much solved this issue by just existing. Yeah it cost resources and if you spammed it ate the energy bar right up but the on demand mobility and the choice to sacrifice damage for movement was interesting and fun and really, really fit the class IMO.

All this said, I still hold the strong belief that 7.0 brought the best changes for Rogues in a very long time, because the class was getting boring with no real fundamental shifts and the three specs all played very similarly and 7.0 made them all distinct at the very least. Even if yes, it wasn't perfect and isn't perfect now but it's a step in the right direction that I do hope the xpac after BFA finishes executing on.

1. your avatar is the skeletor mog helm lol

2. you clearly don't understand what cancer burst of speed was because you're specifically advocating that it should come back for PvP lol

3. '7.0 great changes for Rogues'

This post is peak ROUGE

Infracted.

[Chillside]

Didn't it only interrupt if you had a 2p bonus from the PvP set?

It was item bonus from pvp gloves, but considering the fact that gloves was the cheapest set piece to buy with the least rating requirement, vast majority of pvp and pve players would go for that item as their first piece, almost everybody had it

[Mathris]

1. your avatar is the skeletor mog helm lol

2. you clearly don't understand what cancer burst of speed was because you're specifically advocating that it should come back for PvP lol

3. '7.0 great changes for Rogues'

This post is peak ROUGE

The fact that you went straight for a forum avatar as a point to your argument shows you have no plan to actually debate. Still, let's actually try I guess.

I never said Burst of Speed was balanced, just something I miss because it made sense thematically to have the leather wearing nimble thief class actually be nimble. It was absolutely broken. For it to be balanced it would've had to cost far more energy than it did when it was around.

Since you brought up literally zero points and memed 'lol peak rouge 7.0 was trash' basically I don't know what to say to you here as this is indicative to me you're just ranting with no point. Do you wanna know what changed for this class from TBC to WoD? Practically nothing. Rotations got very few things that would always be removed/altered with the next xpac but the end goal of the three specs was always the same in PvE. Keep up rupture, keep up SND, spam Evis/Envenom in between. All that changed was the name of the builder you used and maybe a secondary button like Hemo, Recuperate for Cata Sub, Hunger for Blood, Revealing Strike, etc. You get the idea. Everything was incredibly samey. PvP was different and that's because PvP has different goals besides 'optimize DPS over a long period of time'. If you don't think 7.0 breathed life back into this class by actually making the three specs feel and play distinctly from one another you're delusional, blinded by nostalgia or both. Yeah, the pruning is awful but the general direction they've shifted the three specs is the right idea. We just need an xpac to actually deliver on what they started with 7.0. BFA isn't it, obviously and I have about zero hope for the future because their plan seems to be plugging holes with artifact traits from now on which is the laziest design style I've ever seen but just imagine if they didn't and actually kept the direction 7.0 started with actual depth. Sounds amazing to me.

[Doozk]

Poisons and burst of speed more than anything.

[shoegazing]

The fact that you went straight for a forum avatar as a point to your argument shows you have no plan to actually debate. Still, let's actually try I guess.

I never said Burst of Speed was balanced, just something I miss because it made sense thematically to have the leather wearing nimble thief class actually be nimble. It was absolutely broken. For it to be balanced it would've had to cost far more energy than it did when it was around.

Since you brought up literally zero points and memed 'lol peak rouge 7.0 was trash' basically I don't know what to say to you here as this is indicative to me you're just ranting with no point. Do you wanna know what changed for this class from TBC to WoD? Practically nothing. Rotations got very few things that would always be removed/altered with the next xpac but the end goal of the three specs was always the same in PvE. Keep up rupture, keep up SND, spam Evis/Envenom in between. All that changed was the name of the builder you used and maybe a secondary button like Hemo, Recuperate for Cata Sub, Hunger for Blood, Revealing Strike, etc. You get the idea. Everything was incredibly samey. PvP was different and that's because PvP has different goals besides 'optimize DPS over a long period of time'. If you don't think 7.0 breathed life back into this class by actually making the three specs feel and play distinctly from one another you're delusional, blinded by nostalgia or both. Yeah, the pruning is awful but the general direction they've shifted the three specs is the right idea. We just need an xpac to actually deliver on what they started with 7.0. BFA isn't it, obviously and I have about zero hope for the future because their plan seems to be plugging holes with artifact traits from now on which is the laziest design style I've ever seen but just imagine if they didn't and actually kept the direction 7.0 started with actual depth. Sounds amazing to me.

Sorry dude, just memeing with you about the skeletor mog thing. You started in 2.1, it's nostalgic for you the same way boob shoulders are for me, I get it.

About Burst of Speed, I've actually argued on this forum in the past that it could have remained and continued to satisfy much of its existing audience if it just had the energy cost and duration/cooldown both increased in proportion, e.g. from 30 energy / 3 sec to 50 energy / 5 sec.

This would allow players to zoom around in stealth, out of combat to their heart's content, while being less cancerous in mid to lower level PvP because it can't be used as often to break snares and costs more energy to do so.

Regarding 7.0, though, I disagree on every level. This is not a great vision with failed execution, it's a terrible vision. I've mained a Rogue since 2005 and for the vast majority of that time, Subtlety has been my go-to Rogue spec. Subtlety was along with Frost Mage either 1a or 1b depending on who you asked on the list of the most legendary and iconic WoW PvP specs of all time but it has been turned into a terrible shell of its former self that doesn't even resemble a member of the Rogue class any longer. There a great many Rogues like me who just wanted to continue enjoying our beloved class and wanted nothing to do with this absolute disaster of a redesign.

The Fisher-Price ClassFantasyTM is gaudy, hamfisted, and terrible and better execution on the idea is not going to fix that.

Meanwhile it's a disaster mechanically. Shadow Dance was arguably the single most exciting button in the entire history of WoW, but turning it into the centerpiece for the spec does not work because of the massive compromises it required: 1. tremendous pruning of all the basic Rogue stuff outside of Dance (we can't keep Gouge with this level of constant Cheap Shot spam that nobody wanted, for example), 2. even pruning of the stuff we do while Dancing (Premed, Garrote), 3. the burst it offers is necessarily nerfed because it occurs more often (they brought back Find Weakness in BFA which is good except that they had to make it less impactful which makes it less fun and interesting to play around).

Better execution is not going to fix these problems because execution isn't the problem, it's a failure of the entire vision. Dance is not exciting when it's the basis for the entire rotation. Did it make the rotation better in PvE? Couldn't say and don't care, maybe it made the rotation better but it certainly made Dance a lot worse and it entirely ruined one of the best PvP specs of all time.

If PvE required changes and more variety in rotations, the correct way to implement these things would be through tiers, azerite, artifacts, etc. And these systems should not even be active in PvP, they should offer the designers great control to craft excellent PvE rotations without ruining the Rogue gameplay for everybody else.

[Mathris]

SNIP

Well, I'm glad to be wrong about you not wanting to debate the merits of various aspects of the class and comparing the design from then to now. The internet doesn't leave me much hope these days and I'm happy to see this. Now, onward.

You'll have to forgive my likely more narrow view of PvP. The last time I took it seriously and played at 2.2k+ was during Cata. I ended up unsubbing during MOP and WOD because I just didn't enjoy them and by Legion I was too old to really enjoy serious upper level PvP because my reaction times are not what they used to be. So speaking from a POV of someone who competed at a Glad level during TBC/WotLK/Cata and then sort of fell off the PvP wagon, I can agree that dance being the centerpiece of Subtlety is the wrong choice. I have said (and maintain) that the focus of Subtlety's aesthetics and kit should be Stealth, not dance. Now, that's hard to do in combat because er we can't stealth in combat. Dance giving access to Stealth abilities for a duration was sort of their solution for 'stealth but in combat without being actually invisible' The movement 7.0 made towards structuring some things like being based more around shadow damage, giving subtlety a stronger ambush, and some little additions (Symbols of Death, the auto attacks generating CPs, Backstab giving energy back sometimes, Sub having 2x Shadowstep charges) are far more interesting. Where they really missed the mark with this spec as far as PvP goes (and again remember my viewpoint here is much more limited than it used to be) was that Shadow Dance became less of a power moment and more of a constant and because it's a constant it can't be that power moment each time its used. When it was a full minute, one charge only, CD that lasted 10 seconds every time it was activated in a PvP situation it was usually with careful thought and planning either to burst down a kill target or CC an entire team because a well played Subtlety rogue absolutely could do that.

I disagree about premed, it was ok and in an ideal world wouldn't be necessary assuming Subtlety's CP generation wasn't terrible. Gouge, yeah. You got me there. I have no idea why gouge isn't still an all spec thing. It just sort of fits every spec that in a fight or flight situation the thief would either A) Vanish and disappear or B) Gouge your eyeballs so he could run. The outlaw would do it, the assassin would do it, the sneaky guy would do it too. I should've included this in my initial post honestly. Thanks for reminding me of this. Garrote is also something I feel Outlaw should've definitely lost, but Subtlety should've kept because again, why wouldn't the sneaky guy still cut throats?

On how the changes affected PvE sub - Until 7.2 they absolutely went way too hard on Shadow Dance being the cornerstone of the spec (incorrectly) and it was a very spammy spec that involved around putting up dance as much as possible and spamming shadowstrike over and over. It wasn't fun, it wasn't smooth and it didn't actually do any better than Sin or even Outlaw. Once they fixed the focus and the flow of the spec it was the dominant build for Tomb of Sargeras' tier. Then BFA hit and it feels like they undid all of that again and once more it's less about finesse and more about dance again. The Azerite traits even encourage this sort of dance-centric play with The First Dance being the best one to have for PvE sub. It has once again dropped off in lieu of sin and outlaw being the better options because of this. 7.2 had the right idea, it built upon the foundations 7.0 set but in a way that made sense. This is what I mean when I say that execution is the problem. There are aspects introduced in 7.0 that work, things that make sense, things that could be iterated on to perfection and yet they continue *NOT* to do that. For reasons no one knows.

Lastly I both agree and disagree about the azerite/artifacts/etc being the way to tune for PvE. My agreement is that they're a great 'knob' to turn to buff/nerf specs without harming PvP if they did them right. What I disagree on is mostly due to how they work right now, AKA attempting to plug holes in specs they've gutted. Imagine a world where you have a complete spec with proper abilities without the artifacts/azerite and instead the traits serve to enhance rather than plug holes in pruned spaces. Then it is literally a knob you can turn to adjust classes in PvE. Disable the system in PvP (because they won't need it if specs are complete without them anyway) and bam. You've got it good. Why haven't they done this? Dunno. Maybe next expansion...but based on track records...yeah I wouldn't hold my breath.

[therealstegblob]

Burst of Speed should just be reworked to be a toggle. When it's on, it doubles your run speed by 100% but drains your energy by a large amount, but not bringing it under 1 Energy. This would allow you to have it active 100% of the time, while making it very largely unusable during combat (except for hard running away).

Just fucking do it Blizzard just FUCKING DO IT YOU FUCKING PUSSIES WHAT ARE YOU SO FUCKING AFRAID OF.

[Grayjoy]

I miss rotations in general being more punishing if you fail... Playing outlaw atm is like:
''oh no i used dispatch on 2 cps by accident''-0 dps lost
''oh no i used AR only with true bearing up, guess il just reroll a few times...'' - 0 dps lost
''oh no i used pistol shot on 5cps'' - 0 dps lost
and the worst one ''oh boy i got 5buffs time to destroy some dps meters''-0 dps gained.
Same kinda applies to assa and most specs in general.

...I really hope you don't play with that mindset. Every single one of those is a terrible habit and absolutely a DPS loss.

[sirethas]

I think we all knew deep down that Burst of Speed was doomed from the beginning but it was definitely fun while it lasted. What I miss most is Combat Rogue from MoP, I don't think I ever enjoyed PvE despite of the instance like that ever. Come to think, early Surrender to Madness shadow priest is on par with this but that has been fucked as well, but you know how it is, Blizzard detects fun, fun removed (don't take this too seriously its mostly just a joke)

[Toxique]

RIP Swirly ball.

yep!

old school 29 twinking WSG was a kick, too

[Aurrora]

Leveling up stealth (not really)

Focused Attacks (FoKs every GCD on large trash packs was fun)

Ruthlessness and Relentless Strikes as Assassination.

[RivenXIII]

I miss 27% of my AA

[Sylar Hao]

50% less movement in stealth. Makes no sense that a rogue can run faster in a sneaky stance than a normal stance.

Same goes for cat form.

[Beatman]

Curse of the Dreadblades