Blizzard has posted the new talent list for the 1.12 Rogue revamp. Still looking it over myself so no impressions yet…
Edit – Summary of changes from a dev:
The following talents have been removed: Improved Deadly Poison, Improved Distract, Throwing Weapon Specialization, Improved Vanish, and Rapid Concealment.
Improved Instant Poison is now “Improved Poisons” and increases your chance to apply ALL poisons by 2/4/6/8/10%.
Rapid Concealment has been merged with Camouflage, by combining these talents you not only get a great talent to start off the tree, but obviously it frees up a number of points to be spent elsewhere.
Murder will now also apply to all finishing moves. The benefit this will provide to output and attack combinations is fairly straightforward.
Vile Poisons now gives your poisons a chance to resist dispel effects, in addition to increasing poison damage.
Improved Kidney Shot has been changed, and will instead increase the damage taken by the target while they are affected by Kidney Shot. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Kidney Shot.
Improved Sprint has been changed, and will instead have a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when you activate your Sprint ability. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Sprint.
Improved Evasion renamed to Endurance, and will add a Sprint cooldown reduction.
New talent Weapon Expertise in the Combat tree, increases your weapon skill with all melee weapons. The recovery of damage with an increased weapon skill should be a good boost to overall output.
Initiative is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75% end chance to add an additional combo point.
Elusiveness is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75 sec cooldown reduction to Evasion, Blind, and Vanish.
Ghostly Strike now has a reduced Energy cost, the reduction of Energy was enough to make it necessary to also reduce the damage output slightly.
Improved Garrotes damage reduction will be removed. This is being changed as part of an overall improvement for Garrote.
Setup is being moved higher up in the tree, becoming a 16 point talent with no prerequisites, helping move the talent in reach of specific builds.
New talent Heightened Senses in the subtlety tree, increases your Stealth detection, and reduces the chance for you to be hit by spells and ranged attacks.
Hemorrhage will be moved up in the tree to become a 21 point talent. This should help to place the ability in a more reachable position, and allow for a little more versatility with specific talent builds.
New talent Deadliness in the Subtlety tree, increases your Attack Power by a percentage.
Premeditation will have its Energy requirement removed, changed to an instant cast, and range increased. Its cooldown will remain the same. Premeditation will now be pre-reqd by Preperation.
Vanish will now remove effects that allow the caster to remain aware of the rogues presence, such as Mind Vision and Hunters Mark.
Garrote, Rupture, and Eviscerate are being increased in damage. More details to come.
Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.
I notice this (the dev post, not the talent calculator with specific info) has been up several days, so apologies if it was discussed as part of some other thread.
Edit #2:
Overall, I like this revamp quite a bit. They took out a bunch of useless talents that nobody took (Improved THROWING WEAPONS? Improved DISTRACT?) and made Subtlety a more useful tree by adding Deadliness (increased AP) deep into it, and improving Premeditation. I’m interested to see what other changes there are, particularly the damage increases to Garrote, Rupture, and Eviscerate – that could solve the Rogue’s biggest problem, which is that (at 60 at least) they can’t compete well with Fury Warriors and have little functionality in endgame instances. If Rogues again become kings of single-target damage, that will be great. The change to expose armor is interesting – I assume Rogues still won’t use it in groups (presumably it will still overwrite Sunder Armor), but it could make them a lot better against Warriors and Pallys in PvP, and against heavily armored opponents while soloing or in a small group with no Warrior.
Freed up a few talent points, did nothing to address damage scaling. Pretty much wankerific. At least hemo is slightly better now (the build, not the talent, which is unchanged.)
There are some improvements there, but nothing that would have caused me to change my build at all. Prep and Cold Blood are both just too useful for a PvP-centered character.
I haven’t played WoW in roughly a year, quit before zul’gurub came out. I had a rogue and a shaman. Looks like the changes for both of my classes were pretty much worthless and didn’t address key deficiencies one iota. If I still played, I’d be pissed off. I don’t, so, oh well.
So far it is a pretty horrid review. Blizzard has absolutely no fucking clue regarding balance.
Let’s see, druids can put 3 points into a tier 4 talent to gain 90 attack power, yet rogues would need to dump 5 points into a tier (LOL SUBTLETY) 6 talent to get a 10% boost.
Sleight of hand? 20% additional threat reduction? Great - again in the subtlety tree - which no self-respecting raiding rogue will be touching as they would be giving up way too much.
2 points into a tier 6 combat tree talent to gain +5 to swords, maces, and daggers. Well…okay - too bad fist weapons got the shaft, as well as any combat dagger builds. Gee, it’s too bad that blizzard couldn’t have actually helped raiding rogues out with a little buff and included +1 of the appropriate weapon skill to each of the relative weapon specializations. But no, that would make too much sense.
Expose armor will be reducing armor by a percentage and not by a set amount. AWESOME! Well, wait…it still doesn’t stack with sunder armor, so again the rogue’s one really potentially useful utility still takes a backseat except in certain rare cases - (C’thun, Razuvious)
Well, at least the improved kidney shot will allow more damage to be taken by the mobs. Yay for seal fate rogues.
They really haven’t addressed the raiding rogue’s issues at all, so far. It is extremely disappointing to say the least.
It’s standard Blizzard doesn’t know shit day. It’s standard fare whenever Blizzard does a talent review, whether there was something fundamentally wrong with the class or not.
The problem with rogues in raids has to do with usefulness. There are four key facets of usefulness in WoW: tanking, AE, healing, and crowd control. DPS doesn’t count, because every class can DPS.
Now, rogues have sap, you say. That’s crowd control! Well, not really. It can’t be used in combat (Banish, Shackle, Sheep, Hibernate, etc. can all be used in combat). It has to be used from stealth, which means the rogue has to open with it. Doesn’t apply to other CC. Rogue has to be in melee range when he opens with it – which means he takes a bunch of hits in the first few seconds. Again, this doesn’t apply to other CC. And a rogue cannot refresh his CC, as he can’t restealth and the mob will be considered in combat in any case.
So ultimately, all the rogue can do is add DPS to a raid, and there is absolutely no shortage of DPS. So why bring a rogue when you can fill the spot with someone else who also has alternate usefulness?
DPS definitely counts. If Rogues could clearly out-DPS other classes, they would have a role in endgame instances and people would want them as part of the team. Right now they don’t. My hope is that after the review, they will. Remember that this talent revamp is (I think) not the only part of the review. The dev quoted in the first post says that Garotte, Rupture, and Evisc are going to do more damage. If done right, that could address the problem.
Well speccing for dps for other classes would kind of make them lose the point of having them in a raid in the first place. Sure a druid can spec feral, but then he can’t heal (or innervate before the last patch), a priest can spec shadow and lose a lot of his/her healing efficiency, a warrior can go fury and lose a lot of tanking potential, etc.
I mean seriously, if we take this into account, why don’t you just go to MC with bare minimum of required classes? Go with 8 priests (make sure you get water beforehand), 2 warlocks for banishing, and 30 warriors? Why can’t you do that?
A more fitting example: Assuming everyone was in equal gear, why take 5 rogues and 5 warriors to a raid when you can take 10 warriors? The warriors can out-dps the rogues and tank to boot. This is the root of the problem.
My feral druid can main heal any non-raid endgame instance, and in MC I am often assigned to an MT to heal. 8000 mana says that feral druids are still useful at healing. And again, we’re not talking about “ZOMG everyone can do everything perfect.” Simply that a fury warrior can tank in a pinch, a shadow priest can heal in a pinch, etc. A rogue can… die, in a pinch.
I mean seriously, if we take this into account, why don’t you just go to MC with bare minimum of required classes? Go with 8 priests (make sure you get water beforehand), 2 warlocks for banishing, and 30 warriors? Why can’t you do that?
You might be able to, if you subbed in a few mages. But regardless if you can or not, lots of other classes have very useful additions to raids which are piecemeal and fall outside of the core four. Combat rez and buffs by druids, resistance auras and DI by paladins, ranged DPS by hunters.
Anyway, I’m not saying rogues are totally useless or that DPS is useless (obviously it isn’t, since pretty much every class can DPS, or spec in a way that allows DPS), but there’s no non-dps reason to actively include rogues. They often get included to fill up the raid more than anything.
Well that and so all the rogue set loot doesn’t rot :p
I think you’re really undervaluing high DPS. Long ago when the WoW raid game was first getting started (like Jan-May '05) rogues started whining about how useless they were in MC because they got hit my AOEs and killed. Then everyone realized (largely because of Ragnaros) that rogues were actually very important thanks to their raid-leading DPS. No other class could compete with them. But now, because of the mechanics of the warrior class, they can out DPS rogues. Warrior mechanics (and gear) simply scale more effectively. So if you want high melee DPS warriors become a better option, hands down, because as you say everything else a rogue can do is worth fuck-all in a raid setting (with a few minor exceptions.)
