Anyone ever realized...Follow

Seriously?


You should take some argumentation classes or debate. That's the some of the worst bending of facts to make it fit a story I have ever seen. You omitted a great deal here to stretch your point.

Don't make a hypothesis and then work the facts around your argument. Take the facts then make a hypothesis. Otherwise you look foolish, and biased.

Edited, Jan 8th 2008 4:03pm by MYteddy

It's a three second stun if you didn't charge the opponent, which happens rarely. As a general use effect it's a 1.5s stun, which is usually more or less gone by the time you actually get to the target.

The one primary exception is against Rogues, since we don't stand fights against them with Charge. That's the price you pay, though! In most cases I'd much rather have the speed boost and 20% more damage on the next attack.

Happens all the time you mean? >_>

I get intercept tons more then I get Charged, and after a few minutes of fighting, the DR is gone anyway.



It's not so much the lenght of the Stun, it's the fact that it's there. It gives you a white attack for free essentially, which is damn near enough Rage to hamstring... and it can be used to interupt caster from a distance.

Basically, a rogue who wants to mimic intercept would need to pop sprint, hope the distance isn't to big and land a kick. Warrior just hits a button and the game does it for him. Granted, Shadowstep removes the need to control our rogue...

Except he basically gets a free Hammy... we'd have to use Shiv on top of it.

Shadowstep + Kick + Shiv = 85 energy.

Intercept + Hamstring = 17 energy - 1 white hit.



Then you seriously don't realise just how powerful a 15 second intercept is.

The speed increase isn't a boost, it's to counter lag to makes the ability actually usable.

The 20% dmg boost is a lot less impressive when you don't have Mortal Strike... it doesn't hit so hard on Hemo/SS or even Evis.

If ShS was on a 15 second CD, or like 20 seconds and with gear able to be brought down to 15, it would definitely be viable.

I'd still prefer intercept, but there are situations where ShS could work better. If it had a 15 second CD.

Going off of basic rpg rulesets and the way things were meant to work but never do, it would appear that Shadowstep was originally designed with Ambush in mind. From 60-70 I leveled with Shadowstep daggers (it was so much fun!) and in PvE I used it mostly to increase the damage output of my Ambush. A 20% increase on something that would normally crit for 3k was a 600 damage increase. That was the best usage for it in PvE (for me).

PvP was another story. In PvP I used Shadowstep to counter 3 things mainly:
1.) Frost Nova. Bet that mage wasn't expecting THAT.
2.) To get to a hunter who's annoyance of a pet is trying to claw me.
3.) Quick travel to the top of towers in AV.

So, Shadowstep had it's uses in PvP, but I would trade that damage increase for a 3 second stun any day. In Grandia III there was an ability you could get similar to Shadowstep and it was the godliest move in the game. Unfortunately, in WoW, the 30 second cooldown ruins it.

I've not tried mutilate yet, and probably won't for a long time considering I just invest in mongoose on my MH sword, so I can't say much about that other than I know that MS is strong.

As for our combat tree... I feel like a leather wearing fury warrior. But what's the trade off? Well, warriors wear plate while we have stealth. Of course, if you put the 5 points in lightning reflexes, then we have a nice dodge rate (was 36% for me personally when I had my 5 points in there), but once again Overpower destroys us there.

Here's MY idea for the sub tree:

Make Shadowstep a trainable ability at level 50. Keep it on the 30 second cool down with 10% damage increase. Give it 3 ranks: 1 at 50, 2 at 60, and 3 at 70. Each rank would reduce the cooldown by 5 seconds and the damage modifier by 10%. So at level 70, standard cooldown would be 20 seconds and the damage increase at 30%.

Now, make the 41 point talent in the sub tree be improved shadowstep.

Imp. Shadowstep: Reduces the cooldown on your shadowstep ability by 5 seconds and increases damage from all sources on that target by 5% for 10 seconds after performing a modified ability (using up your damage % increase). In addition, you gain a 70% movement speed increase for 5 seconds.

Meh, I just want to see a rogue move like the Nexus guys.

Yay for 3 am posts. Off to bed now.

For Quor.

That's not what I said, actually. What I said is that you _do_ start most fights with Charge. The three second stun on Intercept is a bit misleading because most of the time, it will be on DR... against most classes. It's not universally true, but it's certainly the usual case.

The only class I really have problems getting Charge off against is Warlocks. You don't enter combat until it actually reaches you, so especially at the start of an Arena match (when you're mounted) I can get a Charge off before the incoming Ice Lance or whatever actually connects.



Intercept takes more than a half second before you get to your target. =/

I'm not arguing that Shadowstep is better, but it's far from massively worse. There's plenty of times I'd rather that it worked like Shadowstep did, or even Feral Charge.

the thing is shao, everything you've posted here is so mind-bogglingly distorted that i cant do anything but gape, dumbstruck. i just dont know where to start.

also, this isnt really "science". science is based on fact, and pretty much everything talked about on these forums (with the exception of mechanics) is opinion.

now if you want to argue opinions, thats doable. but dont try to put it off as science. here, i'll see what i can do to present some kind of argument:



massive amount of anti-poison? by "massive" i assume you mean "three classes". so i guess that means theres a "massive" amount of -50% healing debuffs in game too. if three is "massive" than what kind of adjective can we use to describe the number of snares in game? ludicrous? have we gone plaid?

here's the counter, case by case, to anti-poison abilities.

cure poison (shaman, druid) - its a single target, single poison removal ability that takes a GCD. no druid or shaman will use this. ever. a rogue auto-attacking will apply poisons faster than any druid or shaman could remove them with this skill. ultimately a non-factor since better choices exist to both classes, and will be used in lieu of this skill under any condition.

cleanse (paladin) - single target, single poison removal (that also removes one disease and one magic effect). good in that it's a "three-for-one" ability, but bad because its generalist application means it costs one GCD for one poison to be removed. want to secure your poisons on a target, but a cleansing paladin is around? well, assuming he's willing to waste the GCD's to remove what your auto-attack is doing, you could bring along a UA lock who just casts UA (and only UA) on the target. voila; either your target will stay poisoned, or you have a paladin who just F'ed himself in the A.

alternatively, you could use the opposite approach, and instead overwhelm the paladins ability to cleanse poisons. hunters with snake traps and scorpid pets excel at this, and are a great way to protect your poisons from errant cleansing.

poison cleansing totem (shaman) - multi-target anti-poison totem that clears one (1) poison every five (5) seconds for two minutes (120 seconds). it uses a single GCD to cast, takes up the water totem slot, costs a fairly negligible amount of mana, and has five (5) hp. a critter can kill this totem. its the only anti-poison ability in game that anyone can remove with a single white attack. perhaps a level 1 alt using a worn mace might have trouble killing the totem in one hit, but im sure two would be more than enough. a 70-rogue in pvp gear should have no problem tabbing over and demolishing it, or said rogue can get a warrior friend to tab and hamstring it, or a caster to wand it, or something.

the major benefit of PC totem is that it can affect targets not in its LoS. this means a clever shaman will utilize cover to protect his totems, necessitating some movement on the part of the rogue or his teammates. this can be a hassle, but is much less of a hassle than letting the totem live out its duration.

abolish poison (druid) - arguably the strongest of the anti-poison abilities, abolish poison attempts to remove one poison every two (2) seconds for eight (8) seconds, and an initial removal of one (1) poison at cast, for a grand total of five (5) poisons over the course of its casting time and eight second duration. it uses a single GCD to cast, but has enough of a return that it warrants casting. it has a weakness in that it can be dispelled, so a hunter using arcane shot, a priest, a shaman, or a fel hunter (or shiels slam-specced warrior) all have abilities that can remove this poison.

out of all of these, one of them can be countered by the rogue without any outside help. one of them can be countered either by outright killing the depoisoner, or by dispelling the depoison. one can be countered by killing the cleanser, or by applying a copious amount of poisons or unstable affliction. the final one will never be used because its nothing more than a GCD hog that is only used until the better anti-poison abilities are learned (abolish and PCT).

incidentally, the overabundance of poison strategy is a strat that can be used to mitigate the effectiveness of abolish poison as well as cleanse and PCT.

what does this mean? it means ideal teammates for a mutilate rogue include hunter (to help counter paladins, and to a lesser extent, druids and shaman), priest (to help counter druids), warlocks (to help counter druids and maybe paladins, if specced correctly) and shaman (to help counter druids). the best setup, in my opinion, would be a hunter with a scorpid pet who makes ample use of frost trap. the large-radius aoe snare means the rogue can choose to abandon crippling poison in lieu of some other poison of choice, while also providing plenty of slow targets for the rogue to maneuver around for mutilate positioning. for rogues that wish to use crip instead, the hunter can forego the frost trap and use a snake trap, playing off the overabundance of poison to overwhelm their opponents and protect vital poisons such as viper sting and wounding.

a second good partner would be a priest. hpriest or spriest doesnt matter, as the main role will be dispel and mana burn. this, coupled with viper sting, will put a lot of pressure on enemy casters, and force attention to the priest in an attempt to shut down the burning. adding a warlock for more control and mana drain would be a great idea, and having a shaman or druid for dedicated healing and support would further increase the strength of this team.

and ultimately thats the point. you *should* have to rely on others to use your abilities to their fullest, and they should have to rely on you as well.

It's massive because you're taking it out of context and ignoring the basic nature of arena combat - Teamwork.

3 out of 4 Healing class can dispel poison, making poison the easiest type of debuff to remove. This also means that in any given Arena team, the odds are said team has a poison cleanser.

It also is the only debuff that has 'over time cleanser' for it. Where's my Abolish Curse or Abolish Magic?

Oh yeah, Disease is easy to dispel to, but there's all of 1 disease ability in the game used in pvp and it's mainly a non factor.



You're highly overestimating the speed at which poison apply.

It takes a while to get a 5 stack of wound poison without poison talents and if you get CC'd, you're not applying it anymore (Which then allow Abolish poison to easily remove an entire stack).

And while overall I'll agree using Cleanse to get rid of Wound is not a good use of your GCD, using it to remove crippling poison is extremely effective. I've had paladin simply run away from me spamming Cleanse on themselves, this made it pretty hard to catch them... and eventually impossible when their warriors partner Hammy'd me.



Ah, spoken like a true warrior.

Say I disengage my target to go kill a totem. How the hell am I going to reconnect with him? Blow a cooldown? Heck, if he's smart he'll drop Earthbind or just Frost Shock me and then get distance. So I've took down the totem at the cost of taking myself out of the fight?

Here's the thing - Rogue don't have intercept (We can get shadowstep, but then that opens a whole new bag of problems). The idea that we can zip across the battlefield and change target on the fly is ill informed. I'll remind you that one of the rogue's biggest problem is mobility... leaving your target to break a totem quite often is exactly what they want you to do.

Yes, the rogue's partner can do it (Assuming they are better suited to do it, a priest for exemple, rarely has the time to go hit a totem), but even so, trading a GCD for several second of one person positioning itself so that it can kill a totem (if you're smart and hide them) is more then worth the GCD. This totem has no cooldown, it can be put right back down. There are time when letting it up is the best option.



Cleansing a target with a druid healers mean giving him healing through lifebloom (The UA of healing spell). It's a risky proposition at best. Cleansing also incure a GCD, which you might not yourself be able to spare.

The 'problem' with Abolish Poison and Poison Cleansing Totem is that they essentially mean it's easier to remove poisons then it is to apply them (From a rogue's perspective... I don't know how Hunter with scorpid pet fare against those two abilities).

You heard wrong. It's easier to apply poisons as mutilate yes, but if I get feared, cc'd, hell even if they somehow manage to run the other way I lose a lot of valuable time in getting poisons up. Even with talents, high proc rates, no dispeling and assuming I'm not being CC'd/kited it still takes a good 20 seconds to get crippling and five stacks of wounding poison up on a guy when a warrior can do the same thing in two attacks. It's likely that if you can stay on a person they'll be poisoned though, and mutilate will be able to work effectively. However as mutilate, if you're cc'd in any way shape or form and your target gets their poison cleanses, it's game over for you. You'll never catch them again, and even if you do you definitely won't be able to poison them. That's not a problem for the warrior community.




It's the strongest snare in the game until it gets removed, as it's also the easiest removed snare in the game. Which, if they drop a poison cleansing totem, it's gone.
yes, its a GCD, but if its worth it to keep abolish off, then thats what you gotta do. even if it means blooming lifebloom.



Spoken like a true warrior. A druid usually rolls with a warrior or warlock partner, both of which can take a fair amount of beatings from a rogue and both of which can absolutely neuter the rogue if left alone. Mana burn a druid and he laughs at you, and runs behind a pillar to drink. If your priest runs behind the pillar to hit said druid he gets bashed/cycloned/lolstunned while said warrior has his way with your frail body. Even if he somehow resists every single CC and gets back to heal you ASAP, you're more than likely dying or dead and have no real chance of getting back up to a decent amount of HP. And if your priest stays out and lets the druid drink? You won't kill the warrior/warlock fast enough to take advantage of the opportunity.

Your replies make me wonder if you've actually played a rogue Quor.

Try this: unmap intercept and charge from your bar and pvp an entire day without them. You might understand a little better.



Edited, Jan 9th 2008 10:30pm by Shaolinz

killing windfury totem does nothing because it instantly applies the windfury buff which then stays on for 10s. in other words, even if you take out the windfury totem asap it doesnt matter; the shammies teammates still have the windfury buff. besides, most shaman will totem twist between windfury and grounding for the spell absorbtion.



of course its a problem. just because we have intercept doesnt mean we're instantly able to get to and stay on a target. warriors are more vulnerable to all forms of CC (save fear) than a rogue is. tyr talks about it being a GCD war and that plays into this; its as much a war for one team as it is for another, and if your paladin is busy spam healing the focus fire target while trying to LoS mana burn, getting a cleanse off on a poly'ed or rooted war may not be something he can do immediately. as we all know, even a few seconds of being disconnected from a target can be killer.

point being, you need to rely on your teammates here. taking 1:1 comparisons of things means nothing, and if youve got a scorpid pet stacking poison on your target, then its going to take a lot of heavy de-poisoning to counter that. in other words, it would seem to me that mut rogues would excel with hunters that use scorpid pets. the overabundance of poison makes cleansing a difficult prospect, while the hunter can keep conc shot and intimidation/scatter shot in his back pocket to help you should you get snared and your target gets away.

and again, this is in regards to mut rogues. a mut rogue will have a faster base movement speed than any class save ret paladins, and should have a passive 20% chance to resist snare/root effects to boot.



again, work with your team. in concert with a hunter, the chances of crip poison being removed by a single tick of a totem or abolish poison are quite small. sure, you can get unlucky and maybe it snags it before your hunter can arcane shot the abolish or you kill the PCT, but that happens from time to time. the RNG giveth and the RNG taketh away.

and if crip is removed? then your hunter conc shots.



your posts make me wonder if *you* have ever played a rogue. or pvped for that matter. ive never in all my arena life (which usually occurs around the 1900ish level) had an easy time of killing any rogue. maybe ive just fought every rogue with great reaction time, but the moment we try to focus fire the rogue down he vanishes or sprints away while his team goes into full support/CC mode.

then again, maybe thats the problem. maybe you just havent had a team that supported you correctly.



huh? charge is a non-factor in most pvp, altho i can fudge it in bg's as a nelf thanks to shadowmeld. intercept would be hard to live without, but i tell ya what; ill take you up on the deal if you go without stealth.



ya, it is a GCD war, and you just made that shammy use two in order to buy a little time off from you. maybe if hes lucky he'll get a LHW or CL off. but again, what i said was in regards to mut rogues, and i think a hunter would be a perfect match for that. he keeps his snare ready in case you lose distance on the enemy, maybe keeps an eye out with aimed shot if it looks like wounding might fall off, and aids with totem stomping and general poison stacking (and dps of course).

and even if the RNG rolls it right and you get the worst possible situation (your snared with the shammy at a distance unsnared) you can, as you said, still DT him. if your FS'ed, get it dispelled off you, then DT the shammy and catch up. if your EB'ed, take out the EB totem, get the snare dispelled, DT the shammy, and catch up.

the only way to counter that would be CC'ing you guys or closing distance/LoS'ing the hunter. LoS'ing the hunter probably means LoS'ing his team, so as long as you can keep on him its a 1v1 where the healer is at the disadvantage. if he closes distance, then your hunter drops a snare trap (or maybe a snake, depends) and now the poor guy is stuck in a large aoe snare that he has no hope of getting out of without BoF...which your hunter can handily dispel.

as for the CC....well, fear has a 20 yard range, so the hunter will likely be out of a locks fear range, but that still leaves you vulnerable. thankfully fear can be dispelled. scream requires close range to use, and you and the hunter should be far enough away that it would only affect one at a time, and it can be dispelled as well. poly is the biggest worry, but its also dispellable, and with detect magic removed its not as hard to take off as it once was.

there could also be interference from other classes, but that largely becomes a matter of team composition and teamwork. if a war gets on you, you can evade, but you gotta watch your back so he doesnt mitigate your dodges. prolly best if you get a mage to poly him, or a druid to root/cyclone him. but maybe you dont have a mage, and lock fear probably wouldnt work, so you might have to blind and maybe ice cube trap if he chooses to trinket the blind. then again, if you gouge the war and get him to use zerker rage, you can get a full duration fear off on him once rage is down. he'll probably pop death wish if its up, but then you can shift focus to the war, whos now the happy recipient of +15% damage from all sources. if a mut rogue gets an imp KS off then thats +24% damage from all sources on that war. thats brutal.

ive seen a tactic similar to that a few times in 5's. it hurt. but i digress.



it puts wars at a disadvantage too man. sure, we can intercept to get to the shammy if its up, but intercept is best utilized as part of a lockdown chain (pummel > intercept > pummel basically) or to aid teammates who need a second or two of fresh air to get a cast off. its used as a catch-up technique too, but less so in arena than it is as a utility tool. using it to close an 8-10 yard distance is a bad idea when you can just be dispelled and walk there.

Quor's still winning.

Funny thing is, instead of getting a Hunter for the purpose of allowing Wound poison to stay up...

You could just get a Warrior. He's doing what you need 2 class to do, allows more flexibility (Since instead of going Rogue/Hunter/Healer you can go War/X/Healer).

That's way to much effort for the sole purpose of wound poison staying on there.

Hunter + Rogue, flat out doesn't work. You might as well be writing those huge chunk of text about the validity of Mage + Warrior in 2v2. You can make everything sound like it works on paper, you can take any number of abilities and say how they'd work great together (Dude! Misery + Winter's Chill would be bad ***! And we'd get 2 Silence! Go go FMage/Spriest!!!!)... but if it doesn't survive to application, then what's the point?



It's on a 15 second cooldown.

15 second.

You can afford to use it to reconnect to someone. Because odds are, it will be back by the time you need it again. You can also tell your partner to wait 15 seconds if you're using it to coordinate some attack.

Our reconnect ability is on a 5 minute cooldown. Or we can take shadowstep, but neuter our damage so bad that we become a mere nuisance instead of a threat.

The mobility problem of rogue is real.

Suggesting that we just switch target on the fly and catch up to people after a dispel shows you don't know much about our classes issues... we ask nothing more then to be able to do what you're saying. We just don't have the ability to. Not reliably anyway.

If you're target has managed to shake you off... you've got a couple options - Blow cooldown to catch it, or go on another target. The ability to judge what cooldown you have left and the battle situation is what makes the difference between a good and a bad rogue. Remember that the only thing you need to do to kite a rogue with no CD is walk the other way, and while the rogue is totally usless in this situation, most other class will have instant cast ability they can use while on the run.

Running lap around Nagrand's Area to catch a priest that's shielding his team and casting HoTs on them won't win you any fights.



We went from being skulking figure, hiding in the shadow and striking down people with a few swift, accurate blows with our daggers... to being warrior knock off using maces and trying to beat stuff down with sheer determination.

I think the damage's pretty much done already >_>.

Edited, Jan 10th 2008 5:48pm by Tyrandor