As we expected, we already have the first preview of the changes that will be made to the class Rogue en Cataclysm. These changes are those published by Blizzard and make the class designers' intentions regarding this class quite clear. Note that these changes are preliminary and things can (and will) change during the Beta phase of Cataclysm.
In addition, I recommend you visit this article regularly as we will update it as more information about the Rogues appears. They usually answer user questions to clarify or reveal a few more things.
These are the most significant changes of the class:
- Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will have a new ability to help them switch between targets; Redirect will transfer all active combo points to their current target, thus not wasting their combo points when switching targets or when their targets die.
- Combat readiness (level 83): As long as this ability is active and the rogue receives a melee or ranged attack, he or she will receive a stackable buff called Insight in Combat, which will reduce damage taken by 10%;
- Smoke Bomb (Level 85) : The rogue will launch a smoke bomb and create a cloud that interferes with the enemy's targeting; enemies outside the cloud will be unable to select characters within the cloud with single-target abilities
- Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in their range slot. Additionally, they may be able to apply poisons to their throwing weapons.
You can find the rest of the information after the jump.
In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we will be making many changes and additions of talents and abilities for each class. In this preview, you will have the opportunity to learn about some of the changes we have planned for the rogue; In addition, we will provide you with an overview of some of the new abilities, talents, and an overview of the new Mastery System and how it will work with the different talent specs.
Rogue's New Abilities
Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will have a new ability to help them switch between targets; Redirect will transfer all active combo points to their current target, thus not wasting their combo points when switching targets or when their targets die. Additionally, certain perks like Make Hash will no longer require a target, so rogues will be able to spend their extra points on these types of abilities (more info below). Redirecting will have no associated cost but will have a 1 minute cooldown.
Combat readiness (level 83): The new Combat Readiness ability is intended to be activated defensively by rogues; As long as this ability is active and the rogue receives a melee or ranged attack, he or she will receive a stackable buff called Insight in Combat, which will reduce damage taken by 10%; Combat Insight will stack up to 5 times and its counter will reset for each new stack. Our goal is to make rogues better equipped so they can keep up with other melee classes when Evasion and other stun effects are not available. Combat readiness, will last 6 seconds and have a 2 minute cooldown.
Smoke Bomb (Level 85) : The rogue will launch a smoke bomb and create a cloud that interferes with the enemy's targeting; enemies outside the cloud will be unable to select characters within the cloud with single-target abilities; Enemies can "enter" the cloud to attack, or they can use area of effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack those inside the cloud. In PvP this will open up new dimensions to the gameplay experience regarding positional tactics, as the ability will offer a wide range of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Bomb will serve to protect your party from ranged attacks while bringing enemies closer together without having to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Bomb will last 10 seconds and has a 3 minute cooldown.
Changes to mechanics and abilities
Also, we plan to make some changes to the mechanics and abilities that you already know. Neither this list nor the summary of talent changes is exhaustive, but it will give you a good idea of what we have planned for each specialization:
- In PvP we want to reduce the rogue's reliance on binary cooldowns, including so-called warlock stunners, and instead give them greater passive survivability. One important change is that Cheap Shot will have the same diminishing returns as other stun effects.
- In PvE, taking into account active modifiers like Hash and Poison, a very large portion of the rogue's damage is attributable to passive sources of damage; yes, they use abilities throughout the fight, but we want to reduce the percentage of damage that comes from auto attacks and poisons. Most of his damage will come from active abilities and special attacks.
- We want to improve the rogue leveling experience; Positional attacks and ramping up periodic damage will be of little relevance at first, but will become important at high levels, especially for group content. In addition, in the first levels we will provide you with a new ability called "Recover", which will convert the combo points into a small healing over time.
- To complement the change we are making to combo points, non-damaging abilities like "Recover" and Make Hash will not require a target and can be used with any of the current combo points, including those that remained on the targets. that they recently deleted. This change will not affect damage abilities as they will still require combo points to be present on the specific target they wish to damage. To coincide with this, we'll update the UI so the rogues know how many combo points they have active.
- Ambush will now work on all weapons, however it will have a reduced coefficient if they don't use a dagger. Upon exiting Stealth, all rogues will be able to choose whether they wish to deal a lot of damage in a short amount of time, whether they wish to use damage-over-time abilities, or alternatively stun their target.
- As we have done with some of the abilities in the Subtlety tree, we want to ensure that there are more abilities that are not overly penalized for their choice of weapons; With a few exceptions (such as Backstab), they will be able to use a dagger, ax, mace, sword, or fist weapon without penalizing most of their attacks.
- Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in their range slot. Also, we hope to be able to allow them to apply poisons to their throwing weapons.
- We are very happy with Secrets of the Trade as a general mechanic and as a way to make them more useful within a group but we don't want their threat transfer to be as great as it is now.
New talents and talent changes
In Cataclysm, the overall perception of each of the rogue's talent trees will change, as we would like each tree to have a clearly defined niche and purpose. The details below will give you an idea of what we want to achieve.
- Assassination will have a greater emphasis on daggers, poisons, and dealing a large amount of damage in a short amount of time.
- Combat will revolve around swords, maces, fist weapons, axes and will focus on fights with your enemies. A Combat rogue will be able to survive longer without having to rely on Stealth and Evasion mechanics.
- The Subtlety tree will be based mainly on the use of Stealth, the abilities that are used to get out of Stealth, finishes and survival; It will also focus on daggers but less than Assassination.
- In general, the Rogues of Subtlety have to do more damage than they do today, and the other two trees need to have more tools.
- Weapon specialization talents are going away (not just for rogues, but for all classes). We don't want them to have to switch specs when getting a different weapon. Interesting talents like Slicing and Slicing will work with all weapons, however boring talents like Mace Specialization and Next Combat will disappear.
- Currently, the Assassination and Combat trees have many passive bonuses. As a result, we plan to reduce the amount of critical strike rating these trees provide so that rogues will still want to get weaponry with this stat.
Passive Mastery bonuses for talent trees
Murder
Melee damage
Critical Melee Damage
Poison damage
Combat
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Combo point generators that deal a higher amount of damage
Subtlety
Melee damage
Armor penetration
Finishers that deal a greater amount of damage
The rogue's first degree of Mastery bonuses will be very similar for all three talent trees; however, the more points they invest in a tree, the more specialized the Masteries will be and will provide a greater benefit according to the play style of that specialization; Assassination will have better poisons than the other two specs; In general, Combat will have constant and consistent damage; Subtlety will feature powerful shots.
We hope you enjoyed this preview and we look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions on it. Please note that this information is subject to change as Cataclysm development continues.
Actualización
Ghostcrawler has wanted to clear all doubts about the Rogue to avoid possible misunderstandings, as usual. To do justice, Bashiok has lent him a hand. As always you can find them in the preview itself. But I didn't want you to lose sight of it.
It will be interesting to see how the Recover ability heals
The numbers have not been looked at much yet but it will recover life based on maximum health and the more combo points used, the longer it will last. Although it's introduced as a low-level ability, it will obviously scale with gear and base health buffs (based on max health and all) and will be useful for more than just leveling up.
Combat readiness says it refreshes the timer every time you are attacked so does that imply that it will stay active while you are attacked at 6 second intervals?
Yes, and it can be active for a total of 30 seconds.
Some of you are very focused on the word "cooldown." Consider for a moment what the skill actually does. Current PvP encounters with a Rogue are based on stealth jumping from one to another, then attempting to finish off the target while applying a chain of stuns. One of two things happens (it's pretty binary): You kill the target in time or you run out of stuns and the target kills you. I know the situation is stereotyped perhaps to the point of inventiveness but surely you have a basic idea.
We want it to be less binary. With skills like Combat Readiness, you should be able to match a player with plates for a short period of time. With a smoke bomb you should be able to escape spells for a short period of time or at least make the caster get close to you. Does this imply that you are now wearing a badge instead of being a rogue? Of course not. But it does mean that you are less dependent on killing things when they are blocked. It means that you should think about having things at your feet instead of applying a predetermined sequence of attacks that can fail or be successful.
In addition, with the upgrades to leather armor and Stamina, you will be a little more difficult to kill even without using any special abilities.
We've said something similar in some of the other teasers but let me just say in a nutshell why we haven't added any opening attacks, combo point generators, or finishing moves. It's because you already have all those attacks.
We don't want to add new abilities just for the sake of adding them, and in fact we've tried over the last two expansions to make your arsenal of attacks serve a purpose. We don't want to consider the hypothetical level 120 Rogue and imagine that you have 4 versions of Ambush and an action bar filled with Sinister Strike with various imperceptible shadows to differentiate them.
We want to add new skills because it is an exciting part of a new expansion. But we want to find roles for them. Some will have to be much more situational, but that's why we offer them as core skills rather than talents that come at a cost.
One more point: Fan of knives has not been nerfed. I'm not sure where this concept came from unless you are interpreting it for switching to use the ranged weapon. We have not talked much about numbers so unless you see "We want this ability to do less damage", do not draw conclusions. It is assumed that each number in the game will change but the relative roles of skills and talents will remain the same unless we specify otherwise.
We just want ranged weapons to be more than just an attribute chart for Rogues. Adding poisons to this skill is an improvement. Yes, this implies that crossbows and firearms will no longer be of interest to rogues (after leveling up). But in this case we want the Fan of KNIVES to be taken literally.
That said, we suspect you'll be using Areas of Effect less often in Cataclysm. You'll use more crowd control and take down targets one at a time more often. But this just means that all classes will do less damage with areas. He is not a nerf to the rogue.
"Touch". You're right about the finishing moves - damage, bleed or stun, we have options. However, who is currently using Retaliation, Phantasmal Strike, or Bleed?
This is the point I wanted to make you see. Let's first make sure that all current skills are useful before adding more skills that, in a year from now, say "When are you going to make X useful?" We gave a similar answer as to why we don't add more demons to warlocks or cures to priests.
To be fair, 3.3.3 did some nice things for Subtlety even though we don't consider all the work to be done.
About Vanishing, the answer is not yet known. This ability was designed to allow rogues to return to Stealth and be able to make opening attacks or lose threat. It was never intended as a way to avoid spells and due to technical things in the way that client and server communicate, we're not sure we can promise that Vanishing could be the Vanishing of your dreams. Now maybe one option is to go the other way and say that Vanishing won't prevent you from taking damage and give you some other ability that works to do that. It's too early to know for sure. I'll be quite upset if we continue to have this conversation for another year.
In PvP mobility in general, we are aware of the complaints you have. A learnable Shadow Step is not something we have in mind but we are looking at other ways that rogues can feel like they can take on enemies who are trying to keep them at a distance.
On the subject of cooldowns, another way to look at the issue is how much PvP Rogues depend on Preparation. This is the problem we are really trying to solve: you feel invincible when those abilities are available and powerless without them. A rogue with Sprint and Vanish (maybe) looks impossible to catch, but a rogue with none of that seems immobile. We'd like to see a world where the rogues have more tricks, but not as dependent as everyone they have today. Like all things in Beta, all new (and old) skills are subject to adjustments based on testing and feedback.
Source: WoW-Europe forums