Not a whine but...Follow

Just caught this:

Ok, I'll rephrase. It can be dispelled by a single class through the use of a long cooldown, so it will only be up about 98% of the time. That seriously swings the comparison in favor of Wound Poison, which will take 15-20 seconds to apply itself and can be dispelled by most healing classes without ever using a single cooldown. Thanks for correcting me there.


Good point, I forgot that every other class was completely reliant on dodge for survivability. Another great catch.




<Sarcasm>Another great catch. The Rogue self heals are much better than the Warrior ones. I should be thankful they gave them to the class that was already laughably easy to focus fire down, and not the one who wears plate armor and has more health.</Sarcasm>



Same goes for warriors. You also have all your cooldowns reset every time you go into arena.[/quote]
Wait, Warriors are cooldown reliant for DPS? Must have missed that change. Oh, you must mean those abilities that have a cooldown timer between 6 and 30 seconds. Yeah, I guess I was completely wrong there. A Warrior can only use those five or six times per arena. Rogues win again with all our talents we get to use once, and probably won't see the full benefit of anyway. And you know, if I do get controlled through my cooldowns, I can take solace in remembering that I can try again in the next arena. Thanks for reminding me about that.


Only useable from stealth, lasts 4 seconds, requires 60% of our maximum energy. Great CC option in the middle of the fight when you actually need to control people.

6 second maximum duration, single target, 20 second cooldown, requires CPs. Another amazing option for controlling a fight. Next time I'm fighting a Warrior, I'll just KS him, that way he only has 14 seconds out of 20 to get the five hits in he needs to kill me.

You're joking, right? Gouge as a CC? Zomg, 5.5 second duration that breaks on damage, and also costs 45% of your maximum energy! Blows Intimidating Shout out of the water. ***** 8 seconds of fear on 5 targets at the same time that doesn't break on damage, I want a 5.5 second incapacitate that breaks on all forms of damage 100% of the time.


You don't know what the term CC means, do you? It stands for Crowd Control. Removing a single target from the fight for 4-6 seconds at a high cost of DPS isn't CC. Removing yourself from a fight to try to control a target for a maximum of 15 seconds or so isn't CC either. All these forms of CC are also extremely situational and can be countered extremely easily by simply removing the Rogue from his target, which is laughably easy.


Hrmm, let's see. Effects all targets in range, doesn't break on damage automatically, costs next to no rage, doesn't hinder DPS in any noticeable way and knocks people out of stealth. I'd say that's significantly better than a handful of abilities where some are on long cooldowns, some cost huge amounts of energy, most break on damage, and some are only available to you while in stealth (which is a state impossible to maintain in an arena).

I have to ask, have you ever played an arena at all? I checked your armory profile, and you have no arena teams at all. You don't have any PvP gear, and hardly have any gear out of lolkara. Before you start spouting **** like this off, maybe you should have some perspective.

less, considering any arena pally has guardians favor. arena is won based on the gcds of your support more than anything else.



no, tossing a cleanse every now and then isnt as viable as it sounds, especially if your paladin has to worry about other things like healing. proper pressure ensures that a paladin wont have time to cleanse, and even if, by some miracle, he does, hes gambling that his 1.5s wont be wasted between the time the GCD wears off and the time his heal goes off (which could mean anywhere from 3 to 5.5s of time where a rogue is able to reapply the removed stack of wound).



nah, its completely different. like the rogue and the warrior class are completely different.

which is why i constantly wonder; why do rogues by and large insist on trying to be warriors? rogues arent warriors. they never will be. the two classes have one thing in common; melee damage. thats it. you can make an argument about rogues being "worse" than warriors in 5v5, but from what i see on the horizon for 2.3, about the only true buff is the blind change, and iirc, 2.3 was supposed to be the rogue arena buff patch. if thats the only thing that gets buffed, then clearly the rest of the rogue class isnt as bad off as people believe it to be.

Edited, Sep 29th 2007 6:07pm by Quor

We insist on being warriors because they do everything we can in 5v5 arena except to a greater degree.

1. 1080 HP or AP buff vs. rogue not adding anything to the group.
2. Indispellable Healing Debuff vs. Wound poison which you have to stack 5 times and can be dispelled.
3. Indispellable movement impairing effect vs. dispellable movement impairing effect.
4. More burst damage than a rogue. On par only when rogue busts all his CD's.
5. Faster reconnects. 30 sec intercept w/ 3 sec stun > 5 min CD w/ 70% speed.
6. Better CC's.
7. More survivability
8. On crit rage-free application vs. 5 CP rupture that barely outdamages.

Many people have touched on all these before, and they're all true IMO.

Edited, Sep 29th 2007 9:36pm by EliminatorX

<3 you. Rate up.

Uh, no. That's the point of being behind a target even as a sinister strike build.

Parrying increases the mob's attack speed by 40%.

Priests already do that, and do it better.

Uh... no, but since Nooble and Jimp have already covered why you have no idea what you're talking about here I'll let it slide.

With that said, let me say this:

Giving Rogues Wound Poison (well, the current Wound Poison) was an incredibly stupid idea. They shouldn't have got it. Then there'd be so many fewer posts complaining about it compared to Mortal Strike!

Or not. But the current incarnation of Wound Poison fosters the impression that Rogues are second-class Warriors, which is not how they're intended to be used (or are used by people who do use Rogues successfully). That's not what Rogues are, nor should their design philosophy be "let's make new versions of Warrior skills and give them to Rogues, ignoring any of the classes strengths by wanting to _become_ Warriors".

The frustrated QQing on this thread is pretty amusing, and I say that looking at both sides and even myself. You put up abilities on a side-by-side comparison and you end up with incredibly skewed results, especially when you throw in the healthy mix of hysteria and paranoia that threads like these always seem to produce. It's not as if yelling at each other is somehow magically going to stop the pain and bring in the Blizzard Tissue Squad to solve all our problems, or if we don't do enough yelling the enemy is going to get all their heart's desire, while we get to sit out in the cold in some sort of MMORPG Charles Richardens tale. Get a hold of yourself, guys, it's not that serious.

The side-by-side comparisons are flawed, because you go into it with the assumption that you're being cheated; looking at them like that ignores individual class skills and mechanics which end up with the skills having _wildly different_ default functions. Just for a quick example, I did decide to do it from the 'other' side...

Mortal Strike vs. Sinister Strike
ZOMG, Sinister Strike can be used as many times as you want if you have the Energy to do it! And Rogues use it every four seconds, and the cooldown on Mortal Strike is six seconds, and Sinister Strike does just as much damage! AND it can apply their poison effects! AND they only have a one second global cooldown! AND they don't get Energy Starved attacking targets that ***** Warriors, like anything with armor! AND AND AND AND AND... and nothing.

Warriors get a good CC move on a long timer. Rogues get some decent (moving to good) long timered CC moves in addition to a whole host of short-timered CC moves. Warriors can get a DPS boost on a long timer, Rogues can get a DPS boost on a long timer. Warriors can spec for random stuns, Rogues can spec for random stuns. Warriors have a combat closing ability; Rogues are getting a combat closing ability (the merits of that are a discussion for somewhere else, and I suspect we'll see more when they patch goes live to the PTR... expected to be next week, I believe). Warriors can reduce healing done; Rogues can reduce healing done. Warriors have decent survivability; Rogues have superb survivability on timers, considerably lower survivability as a base ability.

There? See how easy that was? The original suggestions in the post are... poor. Rogues != Ninja Gaiden, and Rogues should not == Warrior class defining abilities with a new name.

With that said, and as the current incarnation of Wound Poison seems to be a permanent or semi-permanent thing, how about a slightly different version?

Wound Poison
Each strike has a 40% chance of applying Wound Poison to the target, dealing 50 Nature Damage and reducing all healing effects used upon them by 25% up to a maximum of 50%. Stacks up to 3 times on a single target.

Easier to apply, with considerably more presence in the "instant healing debuff" category. Also has a handy bit of removal disruption in there; it can stack three times, with the third being a safety poison. You'd have to remove two poison stacks to start reducing the effect, and each restacking would occur much more quickly. You can't make it much _more_ resistant to removal effects, or it becomes completely impossible to touch with a Mutilate build.

As long as we're on the subject of removal, a common misconception is that Mortal Strike is up the entire time on a target. Look at the ability again. It lasts for 10 seconds with a 6 second cooldown; if your target parried or dodges the attack, it will _drop_ from the target. If you think that people don't take account of this, you're wrong. I know that the Paladin I run with has an actual mod that will beep when Mortal Strike is parried/dodged/misses, and will beep again when he should start casting a heal for it to land when MS is not in effect. It's a huge, glaring weakness that a lot of people don't realize or take advantage of, but it is there.

Edited, Sep 30th 2007 6:33am by RPZip

Traditionally a wall of text does not include punctuation or line breaks, although I guess I could go back and make it look like that if you'd prefer.

Like I said, discussing the viability (or lack thereof) of the new Shadowstep belongs in a different thread, and I'm curious to see what kind of changes Blizzard will - or won't - make to it on the PTR. Yelling at each other about it here, while amusing, doesn't actually solve anything and somewhat muddles the issue.

The reason I compared directly to a Warrior is because with recent changes, that's basically what Blizzard has done. With nerf after nerf to general CC, which has always been our greatest strength and what set us apart from Warriors, Rogues have basically become Warrior lite. The two classes now differ in only a few ways. Rogues get more stuns and can do more steady damage. Warriors get far more burst, are harder to kill, can AoE CC, are much harder to kite and are much better at applying a healing debuff (which can be absolutely essential in good 5v5 teams). I'll stop making the comparison when Blizzard gives Rogues something that sets us apart in again. Currently, our class defining abilities are simply much too easy to shut down.

Sprint? Hamstring/Curse of Exhaustion/Wing Clip/Crippling Poison/Frost Nova
Evasion? Stun of any type

Vanish? Doesn't even work most of the time, and when it does, laughably easy to get knocked out again, especially in 5v5

Control? With all of our control options either being very short duration or long cooldown, and everything being trinketable, the only thing our control is good for anymore is locking down a healer. This is assuming the other team members leave us alone and let us do our thing for 30+ seconds.

Now, this:

You're also assuming that the only person cleansing is a Paladin. Both Druids and Shamans do it extremely well, and can do it repeatedly if necessary. Also, go check the top arena teams, virtually all of them have two healers. Helps a lot when you have somebody trying to lock your healer down. Might help if you knew what you were talking about before you tried to correct somebody on arena tactics.


No, what I did was point out that our biggest defense, dodge, was completely shut down by being stunned. You pointed out that the same thing happened to every class, and I pointed out that it didn't matter if somebody who had a 2% chance to dodge couldn't, because that's not their primary defense. I had absolutely no misconception, you were just pointing out **** that is completely irrelevant.


What correction? All you did was post exact numbers on how much they healed. Did I say they healed some massive amount? No. I said they self healed when stunned or critted, which is 100% correct. You didn't correct ****, you just had to respond to everything, and had absolutely no argument there, so you posted more meaningless ********* Stop grasping at straws, *******.


1. The cooldowns being ready every match doesn't mean **** when they get countered every match. Yay, I got knocked out of Vanish, was stunned through Evasion and kited through AR! Good thing they'll be ready next match, because all this can happen again!

2. You also said Warriors were cooldown reliant for DPS, which is just plain wrong. Zomg, 6 second cooldown! That can only be used like 30 times per match!


/facepalm. Are you aware that Vanish is on a 5 minute cooldown? Are you aware that it doesn't work most of the time simply because of autoattacks DoTs and AoEs? Are you aware that the best use for it is generally as a last ditch effort to not die when being focused? The only time when you want to Vanish + CS is when you absolutely need to interrupt a heal, get somebody off your partner or if by some miracle it's become 1v1 and you're the last one on your team still alive (Rogues are generally the first to go down in my experience, we're just too easy to kill). Using a 5 minute cooldown for a 4 second stun just for the stun is ******* stupid. Why don't you actually play a Rogue before you start trying to educate us on our own tactics.


Good point, we always have 100% control over who's attacking us. As long as I just KS the healer, the Warrior won't come over and kill me in 15 seconds flat.



The fact that it can be used every 10 seconds and interrupts healing is the point. Not that your using it solely to try to disable a charater for 5.5 seconds.[/quote]
45% of your maximum energy is a massive amount of energy. That's waiting around for 6 seconds without doing anything just to be able to use it. To actually use it every 10 seconds, you couldn't use SS a single time. Learn how our mechanics work before trying to educate us on how our abilities can be used. Yes, it can be used to interrupt heals, but actually using it every 10 seconds is not only stupid, it's inefficient. I use Gouge to interrupt heals rarely, simply because I have other methods readily available most of the time.

[quote][quote]You don't know what the term CC means, do you? It stands for Crowd Control. Removing a single target from the fight for 4-6 seconds at a high cost of DPS isn't CC. Removing yourself from a fight to try to control a target for a maximum of 15 seconds or so isn't CC either. All these forms of CC are also extremely situational and can be countered extremely easily by simply removing the Rogue from his target, which is laughably easy. [/quote]

Name any form of CC that isn't dispellable or trinketable. CC is used in 5v5 arena for one thing and one thing only, to interrupt or block heals.[/quote]
No, the purpose of CC is not simply to interrupt heals, it's to control members of the opposing team. If you can make the fight 5v4, you are going to win. The point of Rogue CC is only to lock down a healer, because it's woefully inadequate at anything else. The only long duration CC we get that can be used mid fight is on a 3 minute cooldown, everything else requires either combo points (which means you can't have been using incapacitate effects) or massive amounts of energy. All but our long cooldown ability also require that we be in melee range, which is extremely hard to maintain as a Rogue, and impossible to spontaneously do if you need to control somebody other than your current target. All this adds together to make us good at only one thing, interrupting heals.

Warriors, on the other hand, can simultaneously remove several targets from the fight without even having to switch targets and with a relatively low cost to their DPS. Mages get a spell equivalent to Blind without cooldown. Warlocks get a better version without cooldown either. A Rogue's CC options are pretty lackluster in a group environment. Rogues were designed with 1v1 in mind (which we don't even do that well any more), not group play. We have no group synergy whatsoever, and our CC is a joke in 5v5, good for nothing but interrupting a spell.

[quote]We don't get free tics of 20 every 2 seconds.[/quote]
And we don't get free energy from getting hit or hitting people (well, we do get it from hitting people with our offhand, but the amount is extremely low). You also get this nice ability that generates rage instantly, and abilities that passively regenerate rage. 25 rage is not that much for what you're getting.

[quote]Using that 25 rage on a non-dmg ability does affect our dps in a noticealble way.[/quote]
It costs less than a MS, so it might reduce your damage by 600-1k damage on average if it bottoms out your rage, and that's if you hit really, really hard with a lot of crit on a low armor target.


I've looked at your armory profile, I know that you have no arena teams. You have no arena gear, you have no arena weapons (which are laughably easy to get). You obviously have no experience with a Rogue, let alone Rogues in 5v5 arena (or even a Warrior in 5v5 it seems). You have no perspective, come back when you have a clue.

Edited, Sep 30th 2007 1:01pm by Nooblestick

I'd thought of that as well. I've been bashing Riposte for PvP for a while now (it honestly isn't that good, basically 10 energy for another white hit right now), but this change will make it actually useful for PvP, especially against other Rogues. Warrior won't really be effected that much, as they don't swing often enough to generate the amount of parries needed to make a difference.

A step in the right direction, but so far Blizzard really has ignored all the glaring problems with Rogue Arena PvP.

As an aside, the only thing about the incoming buffs is that it's going to make the scrubs whine that much more. I still see morons spouting that ******** about Rogues being overpowered. I can see a whole new flood of retarded locks screaming to nerf Cloak of Shadows, and even more morons from other classes spouting off the line that we're the most buffed class, and how we never get nerfed, ever.

Edited, Sep 30th 2007 3:10pm by Nooblestick

Your post is not worth commenting on save for this nugget of irony.



You have no 5v5 team, your 3v3 team is default rating of 1500 meaning you have played no games. The only arena you have experiance in is 2v2 and you think you have a perspective on 5v5?

To use the coined phrase: "Pot, Kettle, Black."

Now now, stop with ad hominem attacks.

Started this to only have a friendly argument (it's actually possible you know, to argue a point without offending other individuals. Trust me).

As for the rest...

It's clear the debate isn't as one sided as I thought: there are pretty strong supporters on both sides of the argument.

The fact of the matter is that Rogues are not Warriors. I won't argue that. What I will argue is that due to current Arena mechanics in 5v5, rogues have to operate like warriors to be somewhat successful. This is due to many, many cumulative "slight" nerfs since BC as come out, but I'll go through some of the major ones here:

1.) Blind being trinketable. Blind used to be the strongest single target CC out there, as only three classes could get it off of other people and none can get it off of themselves. The trinket effectively ruined it. Although changing it to a physical debuff will help greatly, it's still a mockery of its former self.

2.) Stun Resist. Pre BC, only one race and two classes could talent stun resist. Now, EVERY class has access to some form of stun resist even if it's only 5%. That 5% is a big deal. Unlike other classes who might get the occasional resisted frostbolt or something akin to that, when a rogue gets a resist it really freaking hurts. Say you cheap shot someone and they get lucky and resist the stun. You get no combo points and the fight starts off in pretty much the same manner it would have had you been caught from stealth. Say you throw KS for a finisher and it gets resisted. You now lost all 5 points and took a big hit to your combat abilities, effectively gaining nothing.

3.) PvP Gear. Rogues were always about FAST fights. PvP gear, although it makes the rogue last longer, also makes his opponent last longer. Couple that with resilience and you've effectively neutered the rogue's "quick kill" ability that made him so popular in the old days.

These changes directly targeted the rogue class. Couple that with the similar amount of buffs others received and you can see why we're hurting when we fight like Rogues. Thus is why Rogues are now better off imitating warriors (mace spec) and why any rogue still trying to be a "true" rogue is a dying breed (dagger specs will more than likely be completely gone by season 3 if nothing changes). Add all this up with the fact that a 5v5 confrontation is something a rogue tries to avoid (It's the perfectly "bad" number for rogues. Too few to use others as a distraction and too many to control/fight) and maybe you can see where the issue lies.

So to sum it up:

Rogues are trying to be Warriors because we can no longer be rogues. You can't vanish and wait for the numbers to thin out, you can't control a healer for 20 some odd seconds, you can't stay in stealth and wait for danger to pass. You have to fight.

I think Blizzard knows full well how much they screwed rogues over for 5v5 combat: that's why they changed the points formula. Rogues are fine in 3v3 and 2v2 combat due to those confrontations resembling small-scale scuffles that rogues so favor. That change alone makes me quite happy, and I really have no problem sitting back and just getting that rating up as high as I possibly can. I just hate how I can never be in a good 5v5 team unless I trade my daggers out for maces and act like a class I oh-so-loathe.

Edited, Sep 30th 2007 10:16pm by Shaolinz