Potential Rogue Buffs and Discussion in Wrath of the Lich King Beta (Sep 29)

I suppose this here is for J and all the other Rogues readers of mine. I’ve never played one to end game so I’m unfamiliar with all the shortcomings but too familiar with all their strong points. So what’s your take on this Q&A and commentary from Blizzard.

Fan of Knives energy cost and cooldown
We picked that cost pretty much because it competes with Sinister Strike. If FoK is 40 or 30, we worry you would hit it every single time it’s up. Now that depends a little on your weapons and poisons, etc. But that was the concern.

We want to use it in groups where you need to AE, to try to get a little bit around the rogue’s inherent weakness at switching targets or having targets die with a few combo points up. It’s not supposed to be a go-to ability. In fact, if you look at a lot of the new spells and abilities we added for a lot of classes, very few of them are core, rotational abilities and most of them are situational. Bacon of Light and Wild Growth help those healers heal when they aren’t in an optimal situation.

We can talk about the cooldown some more. Some AEs are targeted and some aren’t. I’m not sure there is a reason it has to be targeted. We’ll look into that too. (src)

Rogues in Raids
We tend to test single target dps because that is what most fights are, especially the boss fights that people care the most about.

But we definitely keep the AE capabilities of classes in mind as we adjust numbers. We realize that a huge challenge of this new system is making sure that a raid doesn’t just take 12 of one class. That’s not what we want to see, and we’ll just keep changing numbers to avoid that. (src)

CoS not removing Chains of Ice/Mark of Blood
It seems like Cloak should remove Chains, maybe Mark of Blood, but probably not Death Grip. I’ll look into it some more. (src)

Now for some really insightful Q&A

Developer Q/A (src)

Given what we feel is a lack of group utility of the rogue class, what do you see as the value of the rogue in a group/raid setting now that their DPS is available from any other class? And will you be giving rogues more utility to balance this?
Bottom line is we want to see rogues in raids. We think you’re going to be there, but if we’ve miscalculated we’ll just keep working on it. This is a pretty big change to our raiding structure, and as nice it would be to declare it 100% done, realistically we are going to be tweaking it for a long time when we see what happens in the “real world.” In terms of the big raid buffs, the ones we consider rogues bringing are Expose Armor, Wound Poison and Mind Numbing Poison. There are plenty of others more along the lines of Kick and Sap that are harder to quantify.

With that in mind can you tell us any plans that you have to better close this PvE to PvP gap that we’re seeing with certain trees? How do you plan to make all three trees viable across the board?
Yes, this is definitely a priority. It is a lot harder with classes in which all specs are still focused mostly on dps. We understand that some specs are just going to be better for 5-mans, for PvP or for raiding. We’re trying to equalize as much as possible, but we’re also trying to be realistic about our chances.

How do you plan to deal with talents which ware still considered all too needed by rogues, particularly in the case of Relentless Strikes? Is there any possibility of making Relentless Strikes a core class ability we can all train?
Mandatory talents are tricky. There are certainly plenty of them in every tree. Every warrior spec without Cruelty is pretty experimental, as is every druid spec without Omen of Clarity. Part of the problem is we keep offering new character levels along with new talents, so each expansion ends up constraining you more and more to one tree. The real red flag, for me at least, is when a spec has so many truly mandatory talents (which is a funny thing to say, since it’s still a little subjective) that they don’t have any optional talents. Instead of a cookie-cutter build being something like 20 plus your choice, they become you must get these 24 talents. If that makes sense.

I will point out again as I have done so in the past. At the end of the day there will ALWAYS be a best spec. It is IMPOSSIBLE to create anything but carbon copies of abilities in each of the 3 trees and not have SOME variance. If you want the highest DPS there will ALWAYS be a max DPS…even if by 1 or 2% one spec will ALWAYS be better.
I think it is very likely there will be a theoretical max dps build. However:
1) It will probably vary from boss to boss.
2) It might depend a lot on the skill of the player.
3) Because there are so many variables (by design) it may be really hard to “solve the equation” for which actually is the highest dps build.
4) For 90% of players (maybe more) that kind of damage difference is in the noise. Very few players can do 2500 dps one night and then 2525 dps another night (a 1% difference). Usually the delta is much larger than that because of random elements including things as non-gamey as Internet lag, how tired you are and just bad luck. If taking the most optimal build can’t gaurantee you dps higher than the random element in the equation, it may very well not be worth taking. Now if the dps gain is significant by taking the best build, then I agree with you.

If a Blizzard developer is saying Expose freaking Armor is one of the more important factors when considering rogues in PvE raid situations, I might just have lost all hope for our class.
Unless you have high level alts in other classes, this new thought process may sound foreign to you. In BC, you might sit down to build a raid by saying that you need X shamans for WF and Bloodlust, 3-4 paladins for all their blessings, a Disc priest for Spirit, 2 Shadow priests for mana, a warlock for Curse of Shadows, etc.

In LK, you can get all the “needed” buffs in a relatively small number of players. After that you take who you want. If rogues were clearly the best dps in most situations, you would fill up your raid with maybe 5-6 rogues. But now what you really want to do is fill up your raid with the best *players*. That may be rogues for some guilds, but it may be mages, Ret pallies or death knights for others. Any group that leaves really good rogues out in order to bring a bunch of redundant buffs does so at its peril. Much more of the emphasis will be on gear and skill now, and less on the magic buff that earns you a raid slot.

The only time I can see this being a problem is if A) you aren’t a very good player (sorry) and you were just brought along before because there was nobody else to do Kings or WF, or B) you like to pug a lot and pugs can’t evaluate your skill, so they take you for your class instead.