I’m not going to pretend I work for Blizzard or even have the slightest on insider information, but for the most part I’d like to think I spend more time than the average player hashing out ideas and dropping them into the suggestion box. When I was at Blizzcon this year and heard first hand all the announced changes in store come Cataclysm, I couldn’t help but feel overjoyed. Things were a little muddy though and some refined explanation with current comparisons would make it easier for the layman to understand.
Let’s narrow it down to talent trees. Right now it’s all pretty damn boring. You have a lot of filler shit and possibly 1 or 2 spells or skills available via talents that make the class feel specialized or fun. Here’s a direct quote regarding the Subtlety tree for Rogues being used as an example of what Blizzard would like to do. I’ll highlight the parts that really stand out and should be emphasized.
Long story short: talent trees should have a lot of specialization type skills that really put a class into a certain niche as well as give utility or other interesting bits.
That’s a good assessment. Ultimately, we’d like for more talent trees to look like Subtlety. Trading utility A for utility B is an interesting decision. Trading utility A for more dps is not an interesting decision; the latter is always going to win.
Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it’s likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It’s going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. (For some players, losing any dps is unacceptable, but I also know enough hardcore players that I can say with some confidence that you can’t just make a blanket statement that all competitive players feel this way.)
I don’t think we’re there with rogues yet. Assassination is now a serious contender in end-game raiding, but Subtlety isn’t and hasn’t been since HAT was in a silly place. I think we’re a lot closer with mages. Arcane may be the highest dps in a general sense, but there are fights on which Fire will win. Frost is a lot closer than it used to be, to the point where someone who just loves Frost won’t feel like they are horribly gimping their group’s progress. (It probably still needs to be slightly higher than where it is, but we’ll see what Icecrown is like.) We eventually want to get rogues, locks and hunters closer to where mages appear to be in 3.3 (and work on mages more too of course).
Honor Among Thieves was a good attempt to get more combo points, and therefore damage, into the tree. It ended up having the scaling problem that a lot of our abilites have — it’s easy for it to be too weak in a small, 5-player group and to be too powerful when it’s scaling off of 25 players. (Restricting it to a group doesn’t really help because you can just fill that group full of folks who crit a lot, and raids provide a lot more buffs to guarantee crits.)
I do agree with the general feel of Subtlety being high finisher damage and cps through alternative routes, and that’s a kit we want to keep going forward. I also agree that Ghostly Strike, Hemo and Backstab all could use more “juice” (by which I don’t just mean higher dps). I’ll also add that I think we went a little overboard in emphasizing damage over utility in Lich King PvE, especially in the earlier raid tiers. Who needs a good Sap when you’re AE’ing everything down?
PvP-wise, utility can be a lot more useful than in PvE. However, as I’ve said before we think we’ve kind of let rogues get into too much of that glass cannon state. They either keep someone controlled and blow them up, or they themselves get blown up. We would still like to tone down some of the rogue CC and increase some of their passive (not cooldown-based) survivability. It’s a little weird that leather classes are generally more fragile than cloth.
We try very hard not to give due dates on some of these changes. When you read through threads like this, I think you can see why. The risk of sharing some of our long-term plans is players then get frustrated when the changes don’t materialize in the next patch. We have a very long list of changes we’d like to make to WoW, and if we tried to get them all into whatever the next patch is going to be, those patches would just get continually delayed. When I say “long term” I’m trying to say not to look for a change any time soon (because we haven’t made the change yet) but that we recognize the problem and have some ideas we’d like to try out. This philosophy is the whole genesis of the infamous “Soon” and “When it’s ready.”
In other words, it isn’t that we don’t care — just that we have a lot to do. If you buy that, then all you can really argue with is our prioritization for what we do first and I totally acknowledge there are subjective elements to that as well as considerations that aren’t necessarily transparent to the community. I have no doubt that you might prioritize things differently were you in our shoes.
I know the Blizzard pace of development can be frustrating for some people, but when you look back at the history of the company, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t work for us.
[...] The full story can be read/found upon World of Warcraft: The destiny of bent trees in Cataclysm [...]
If Blizzard wants to make all classes trees like the Sub tree, then things are already not looking good for Cataclysm. The Sub tree is the worst designed, most poorly-thought out tree out of all the classes and has been that way for a long time. Maybe passive talents are “boring,” but they’re effective.
If you take the example from the rogue talent trees, combat is extremely “boring” according to GhostCrawler as a significant portion of those talents are passive bonuses. But you know what? The combat tree allows for far more damage output than sub does. “Boring” works for me. I don’t take enjoyment from how “interesting” my talents are, I take enjoyment from cutting mobs and raid bosses to pieces.
Jim i have to disagree with you. Subtlety is a powerful tree, it’s just that it is extremely hard to play it right and most people jsut choose some combination of the other trees. Combat as you said has a lot of passive abilities, -2-3 real hits, so its user friendly and does high amount of damage. This is not bad, but it gets boring to press couple of buttons always and know exactly what will happen. I loved Sub tree, still do. I am not playing it though. It is hard for sure, but its so much fun when you manage to do a nice stun lock and then finish it all with a shadowdance- cheap shot- ambush- ambush. You just feel proud you did something most people cant. Even when i am the victim of such a rogue masterpiece, im happy i had the previlege of being killed by a tottaly skilled player who enjoys the game as much as me.
I see you are talking about things from a PvP perspective whereas I am talking about them from a PvE perspective. I raid. It’s what I do, it’s what I’ve always done, and while the Sub tree does indeed give rogues a lot of survivablity when played properly, Sub has never been a powerhouse damage-dealing tree and it never will. It has been proven, mathematically, that there is no viable PvE sub tree that can hope to compete with the numbers that combat or assassination can put out. I’ve played my rogue for five years, and if there is one thing I know it’s raiding as a damage-dealer. And in all my five years of playing, there has only been one time that sub was viable for raiding and that was soley because of the broken-beyond-belief HAT bug about a year ago, and even then you had to have at least two other HAT rogues and two crit-heavy DPS’ers in your PARTY (not raid) for the bug to do its thing properly.
The bottom line is that passive talents work far better than active/”interesting” talents do when it comes to putting out massive amounts of damage. You can have all the fun you like with shadowstep, but it will never allow you to put out 6k DPS like combat or assassination do.
yay for double posts?
“Sub has never been a powerhouse damage-dealing tree and it never will.”
Only partly true. For a time, HaT was the best Raid dps spec in the game, outdamaging Hfb and combat by a fair margin, but it was very dependant on your party setup and having a full set of melee dps raidbuffs. It was also somewhat luckbased, but even so, for a time, it was great raid dps until bliz fixed it, understandably so.
Your reasoning behind “dont fix it, it works fine” is archaic. You think because bliz mix up the talent trees and make the picking of talents more fun, that your DPS will be gimped as a result? Wah, wah, dont fix my passive talents, they bosot my dps a lot, wah! Gimme a break, youll be doing dps fine, they will find other ways to boost everyones dps fine without the need of bloat passive filler talents. L2adapt, its what makes the damn game fun.
The double post problem was probably caused by my host going through it’s laggy maintenance funk yesterday.
As for the discussion at hand, the rogue as a CLASS should be putting out the DPS that you get with assassination and combat. Three different talent trees for a pure class should be just that, 3 different ways to achieve the same goal. Assassination screams high burst front loaded DPS with the goal of being an assassin, 1 hit kill – poisons – snipers – that kind of thing. Sub is the silent killer, the guy coming out of the shadow, the guy being able to manipulate stealth so you can’t tell if he’s a ghost or a living being. Combat to me screams ninja, that’s the blade master, the guy with 1,000 tools of death at his disposal and the dexterity and agility to be all over the place all at once.
All three should be true to the rogue as a pure class and give great DPS output. It would be amazing if combat and assassination gave up their endless passive talents and instead it was rolled up into the core of the class. The fact that at level 80 a combat rogue (and honestly speaking, I’m a combat rogue right now as it’s awesome for leveling) is still using sinister strike feels a little meh in design. It also kinda sucks that you MUST put min. 5 points into assassination always for the 5% crit, and 5 into combat for the hit and 5 again for the offhand damage, and then 5 in sub for Relentless Strikes.
Dran, I already mentioned the HaT bug – in fact I used it. Even though the HaT bug allowed for high DPS, it was still very clunky and broken. You had to have a specific PARTY (again, not raid) makeup in order for it to work properly, and if you were the only rogue in your raid, then you were fucked because the extra points the bug gave was directly based on how many other HaT rogues were in your party. It was a terrible and broken way to give sub high DPS, and again, it ONLY worked if you had the right group/class makeup.
Passive talents might be boring, but I’d rather have 20 “boring” passive talents than 20 goofy, hair-brained attempts at “interesting” talents. A very small handful of players love the sub tree, and almost all of them are PvP’ers – most of the players who try and talk me down when I badmouth sub either play other classes or are total noobs to the rogue class. There is a reason the vast majority of players won’t touch the sub tree – sub as it is right now is only good for ganking. It doesn’t give you high DPS, it doesn’t make you a terror in a battleground, it doesn’t help at all in raiding. What it does is make you extremely annoying in Arenas. That’s pretty much it.
If you want a bunch of goofy, worthless, “interesting” talents, then specc for sub. I’d rather stick with the boring old combat tree and spam sinister strike and put out DOUBLE the DPS that anyone speccing sub will be able to put out.
You are still missing the point I was trying to make, and your points are only valid for the current state of the game. You are thinking in pre-cataclysm terms – you say you’da rather have a cookiecutter build with bloated stat/dps increase talents than have a choice in how to play your rogue – but what if bliz find a different way to boost your stats and dps, and talent trees are about gaining different advantages and extra skills that affect how you *play*, and not the numbers you churn out?
If you really enjoy combat, I have good news for you: rogues have been mashing SS through Vanilla, TBC and WotLK, chances are quite high youll be mashing SS through Cataclysm as well. There is no point to being scared that your DPS will be gimped because of this change – history has proven that generally speaking, rogues always have done pretty damn well for single target DPS, so no worries on that front either.
So, tell me, how is removing bloat talents, and having more choice in the skills you get to use and how you play your toon, a bad thing? Please explain, because it just sounds to me you have no confidence that bliz know wtf they are doing. It sounds like you are simply afraid of change. As I said in my earlier post, change is good, change keeps the game fun. As the game evolves, so should the players gamestyle. If I wanted to play a game that never changed, I’d be playing counterstrke. :p
What I am afraid of are being assaulted by dozens of stupid talents that are obvious attempts at making “interesting” talents but instead serve as pointless filler talents. When I think of Blizzard attempting to make “interesting” talents, I think of the pointless crap that used to infest the sub tree, like “improved distract” or “improved throw”. Improved distract is perhaps the poster child for what happens when Blizzard attempts to make every talent something that enhances or alters abilities – they run out of ideas fairly quickly and are soon reduced to “enhancing” abilities that are situationally useful at best and almost never used at worst. BTW, it’s interesting to note that “improved distract” actually made distract worse and less useful. Distract is more useful with a smaller radius than a huge one.
There were many other extremely worthless talents that have long since been cut out of the sub tree (and a few that were removed from combat and assassination), but I remember improved distract because it was by far the worst of them all because it actually made the ability it was supposed to enhance worse.
I don’t think they’ll toss out a bunch of throw away talents. Remember that in Cataclsym the cap is begin raised only 5 times and they are not introducing new talents past the 51 pointers. Can you imagine how long that scrolling window would be at level 100?
If anything I think the major lean is going to be at taking the cookie cutter styles and breaking it up a little like the redundancy of added hit or crit or flat damage or block or health. I’d love to see dagger spec changed to grant armor piercing when using daggers or some special proc like double poison effects or something when using daggers for assassination. Just ideas guys.
Well no, they’re not adding any new talents to the trees, but they are taking out a lot of current talents – talents that will need to be replaced. All I’m saying is that if the choice is between the usual boring “increase crit chance by 5%!” talent and the “improved distract” clones that will likely replace them, I’ll take the boring ones every time.
Jim I think you are missing the point that is trying to be made here.Talents need to change HOW you do your job, not IF you want to do your job. I know it can get messy when you start discussing hybrid classes, but that is for another post (an also a reason I think hybrid classes are a bad idea).
Like Spoon said, rogues are a dps class. You shouldn’t have to spec your dps class to do dps. You should spec your dps class that allows you to dps in the way you find most enjoyable.
I’d say remove the 5% crit from assassination, apply it across the board for the class itself as in all rogues naturally will have that crit. Maybe push it into every base weapon spec. Perhaps instead push out something like grooved blades, critical strikes with daggers have a XYZ chance to leave a flesh wound making the target take XYZ more poison damage.
That’s a debuff utility for more poison users and makes using daggers a little more viable other than deep assassination.