Review of the Rogue Changes for All 3 Specs in Patch 11.0.5 - Guide Writer Feedback

RPP Publicado hace 16 h 18 min por Wowhead

Our Class Writers share their expert opinions based on rigorous testing and theorycrafting in hopes of contextualizing the changes coming in future patches of the War Within. Check out all of our released editorials in our new Editorial Section.

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20th Anniversary Update Changelog - 20th Anniversary Update

Rogue changes:
• New Talent: Thrill Seeking – Shadowstep(Assassination/Subtlety)/Grappling Hook(Outlaw) has 1 additional charge.
• Cut to the Chase now grants Slice and Dice duration, instead of requiring an existing Slice and Dice to extend.
• Shadowstep has been removed. Shadowstep is still automatically granted for Assassination and Subtlety.
• New Talent: Supercharger – Shiv/Roll the Bones/Symbols of Death supercharges combo points. Damaging finishing moves consume a supercharged combo point to function as if they spent 2 additional combo points. 2-point talent.
└ Developer’s note: Supercharger’s bonus is intended to count towards any ability that scales with combo points spent and not just the damage value of finishing moves. Examples include Rupture’s duration, Poison Bomb’s effect chance, Restless Blades’ cooldown reduction, and Flagellation’s lashes dealt.
• New Talent: Forced Induction – Increase the bonus granted when a damaging finishing move consumes a supercharged combo point by 1. Choice node with Echoing Reprimand.
• Echoing Reprimand has been redesigned – After consuming a supercharged combo point, your next Mutilate/Sinister Strike/Backstab strikes with an Echoing Reprimand dealing Physical damage. Choice node with Forced Induction.
• Soothing Darkness now heals for 30% of max health over 6 seconds (was 15%). Effect no longer triggers from Shadow Dance.
• Feint no longer triggers a global cooldown when activated.
• Thistle Tea now automatically drinks when Energy falls below 30 (was 50).
• Cheap Shot duration increased to 6 seconds. PvP duration has not changed (4 seconds).
• Subterfuge now also grants duration to combat bonuses that require Stealth and also have a duration that persists after breaking Stealth, including:
└ Take 'em by Surprise (Outlaw)
└ Improved Garrote (Assassination)
└ Master Assassin (Assassination)
└ Indiscriminate Carnage (Assassination)
The following talents have been removed:
└ Resounding Clarity
└ Reverberation
• Echoing Reprimand’s icon has been updated.
• Flagellation’s icon has been updated.

Hero Talents:
• Fatebound
└ Inevitability was renamed to Inevitable End.
└ Inevitable End/Double Jeopardy effects now indicate they can match any flip outcome (including ‘edge’), not just one face or the other.
└ Delivered Doom now provides bonus damage when more than 1 target is nearby, with the bonus reducing by 6% for each nearby target beyond 1.
└ Edge Case now flips a Fatebound Coin on its edge when you activate Deathmark/Adrenaline Rush instead of your next finishing move after activation.
• Trickster
└ Coup de Grace now correctly attributes its combo point bonus to abilities that are affected by number of combo points spent, including numerous finishing moves and passives, similar to the function of the Supercharger talent.
└ Activating Coup de Grace no longer grants 1 second of immunity that prevents player actions for the duration.

Assassination:
• Twist The Knife now enables Envenom’s beneficial effect to overlap up to 2 times.
• Envenom Tooltip updated to contextually reflect the overlapping behavior when Twist the Knife is known.
• Master Assassin duration increased to 6 seconds (was 3 seconds) and bonus to critical strike reduced to 25% (was 30%).
• Iron Wire silence and damage reduction durations reduced to 5 seconds (was 6 seconds and 8 seconds). PvP duration of the damage reduction effect reduced to 3 seconds (was 4 seconds). PvP duration of the silence effect has not changed (3 seconds).

Outlaw:
• Crackshot now also refreshes the cooldown of Between the Eyes upon gaining Stealth.
• Precise Cuts now increases Blade Flurry’s damage by 4% per missing target below its max (was 2%).
• Keep It Rolling cooldown reduced to 6 minutes (was 7 minutes).
• Blade Flurry’s area-of-effect range increased to match the same distance it was when the previous version of Acrobatic Strikes was talented.
• Blade Flurry’s initial damage effect radius increased to match the area of its primary effect.

Subtlety:
• New Talent: Death Perception – Symbols of Death has additional charge(s). 2-pont talent.
• The following talents have been removed:
└ Sepsis
└ Invigorating Shadowdust
• The First Dance has been redesigned – Remaining out of combat for 6 seconds increases the duration of your next Shadow Dance by 4 seconds. In PvP combat, the effect requires 10 seconds out of combat and increases Shadow Dance duration by 2 seconds.
• Death Perception now also increases Symbols of Death damage by an additional 3/6%
• Shadow Blades cooldown reduced to 1 minute 30 seconds (was 2 minutes) and duration reduced to 16 seconds (was 20 seconds).

Guide Writer Opinion

Assassination

Outlaw

Subtlety

WhispyrGuyFuuGeneral Rogue ChangesCut to the ChaseCut to the ChaseSlice and DiceSlice and DiceEnvenomDispatchEviscerateSlice and DiceSlice and DiceNew Talent: SuperchargerEchoing ReprimandResounding ClarityReverberationSuperchargerForced InductioneEchoing ReprimandSuperchargerShivRoll the BonesSymbols of DeathRuptureSuperchargerForced InductioneEchoing ReprimandMutilateSinister StrikeBackstabSubterfugeSubterfugeMaster AssassinIndiscriminate CarnageImproved GarroteTake'em by SurpriseIron WireImproved Garrote

- Baseline duration increased from 3 to 6 seconds, critical strike rating changed to 25%(was 30%).

- Silence duration reduced to 5 seconds (was 6 seconds).

Thistle TeaThistle TeaUtility Talent UpdatesCheap ShotKidney ShotFeintSoothing DarknessVanishShadow DanceIcon UpdatesEchoing ReprimandFlagellationFlagellationAssassination Rogue ChangesEnvenomSubterfuge

Spell

Change

Comment

Now allows two to overlap.

Increases burst damage during shiv and synergizes well with .

Duration increased to 6 seconds (was 3), critical strike bonus reduced to 25%.

Adjustment for the update.

Silence Duration reduced to 5 seconds (was 6). Damage reduction now only lasts for the duration of the silence effect (was 8 seconds).

Overall buff to the talent option.

Discussion

Assassination - One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

With the changes coming in the anniversary patch, it's a great time to examine the problems being addressed and their impact on the spec. There's a lot to cover, with changes on the class tree to Supercharger (previously Echoing Reprimand) and Thistle Tea, which has come under much scrutiny. Subterfuge is lurking in the shadows as possibly one of the strongest utility talents in the game and an interesting rework to Twist the Knife. Let's break down the impact of each change and how they will shape the spec from now on.

Tons of Talents
Most of the changes to the class tree/spec tree don't meaningfully impact the spec, but we'll go over them for the sake of completeness.

Master Assassin has finally received the 6 second standardization to match all the other stealth effects for us, but it came with a slight nerf. Numerically it looks good, but ends up falling short in mythic+ where points are already tight. Because there's no gameplay associated with Master Assassin currently, this change is purely a buff.

Thistle Tea is a minor accessibility feature that doesn't impact optimal play. We pool energy between Envenoms, falling under 30 energy to trigger the passive effect is relatively tricky. Because it can still be used the same as live, there's no difference in how Thistle Tea is used.

Subterfuge now extending effects is an interesting change that could possibly impact the highest of key levels, allowing for Iron Wire to be used for 12 seconds instead of the regular 6 seconds after stealth. This leads to a total possible 17 seconds of Iron Wire. The issue remains, however, that it comes with a staggering 7% loss in damage, making it all but unplayable for most players. Without having an organized group to play around the powerful silence effect, Subterfuge loses nearly all of its value instantly. At first glance, the increased duration on Improved Garrote or Indiscriminate Carnage seems like a decent buff, but the duration is often unnecessary.

Supercharger is a simplified version of Echoing Reprimand that, while similar at first glance, actually changes the impact of the talent significantly. Instead of Echoing Reprimand spreading its benefit over the next 45 seconds, Supercharger empowers the next finishers cast after Shiv. This timing difference moves the entire benefit of Supercharger into our burst windows, leading to a more controlled, higher damage potential during Shiv. Because of the extra combo points being applied to finishers (typically Envenom), there's also synergy here with another reworked talent, Twist the Knife.

Twist the Knife
Twist the Knife has long been one of the worst talents on the spec tree, often finding no place to exist due to the inherently high Envenom uptime on the spec (over 90% in recent patches). This rework adds a new layer to the buff uptime, allowing it to stack twice. Anyone who has played a Guardian Druid might see where this is going. We're getting Ironfur on Envenom! (Also referred to as async stacks sometimes). If you're unfamiliar with some of the quirks, it's essential to cover exactly how this effect works. The first thing to note is how the timer itself functions. Below is a sample sequence showing how the overlap works with six combo point Envenoms and the two-second extension from Twist the Knife itself.

There are five full seconds of overlap in the sequence, during which we would enjoy the benefits of a second stack of Envenom. But what does that exactly mean?

Unintuitively, when Envenom "stacks," three effects are stacking. The first is the buff on Envenom itself, increasing poison application chance by 30% per stack or 60% at two stacks. The second is Dashing Scoundrel, going from a 5% critical strike chance to 10% at two stacks. The last is Rapid Injection, which states, "Envenom deals 10% increased damage while your Envenom buff is active". Two stacks of Envenom means 20% increased damage. The curious thing is that unlike other async stacking mechanics, this one will still pandemic, allowing you to extend the lesser of the two durations, and maintaining the clipping gameplay brought on by Rapid Injection

For a long time now, Envenom has had a near 100% uptime, removing most of the uptime management and gameplay around Rapid Injection. In the last couple of years, we have seen changes to Venomous Wounds, the buff on Envenom, the introduction of energy talents like Sanguine Blades and Vicious Venoms, and seen gameplay to play around the buff with Rapid Injection and Kingsbane being front and center to the spec. Twist the Knife "solves" the problem of managing Envenom uptime by simply raising the cap from 100% to 200% uptime. Sadly, It doesn't solve the underlying issue and has introduced a new problem with clipping Rapid Injection. It feels like kicking the can down the road and hoping it'll be good enough rather than trying to target the problem at its core. If Twist the Knife is supposed to solve Envenom's buff uptime, it's too tricky to reach on the talent tree currently (especially for Mythic+), and it's not fundamentally addressing the uptime.

Outlaw Rogue Changes

Spell

Change

Comment

Entering stealth now resets the cooldown of .

Welcome quality of life change for the talent.

Cooldown reduced to 6 minutes (was 7).

Overall buff to the talent option.

Discussion

Overall not much is changing with Outlaw Rogue, but everything feels like an improvement.

The change to Crackshot, now resetting the cooldown of Between the Eyes, is a huge QoL update that will give us more damage and further ways to optimize our damage around this new condition. The main thing to optimize here is casting Between the Eyes right before Vanish to maximize its refund, at the same time making sure not to wait too long and cause your Adrenaline Rush to fall off. It'll be an interesting new dynamic you have to balance while playing the spec. Still, the best part about this change is we will no longer have to experience the bug in dungeons where Between the Eyes will display as being off cooldown but is still on cooldown, causing the spell to fizzle out repeatedly.

A less notable change is a small buff to Keep It Rolling. A straight-up buff to an already competitive build is never going to be something I'll complain about.

Supercharger is where things get a bit complicated. While Hidden Opportunity doesn't seem too interested in the talent based on early findings, this does seem attractive for builds focused on Keep It Rolling. At first glance, one might assume that both the removal of Echoing Reprimand, with its ability to help with unlucky streaks with minimal Opportunity procs, and with its replacement Supercharger rewarding you for pressing Roll the Bones more often it would seem that builds focused on Keep It Rolling might be struggling in the upcoming patch, but this couldn't be further from the truth! It turns out that Supercharger is an efficient talent for the build at further enhancing your Crackshot windows.

While a lot of the minutia is still being figured out, the main idea on how to leverage this talent is you will want to press Roll the Bones before you enter a Between the Eyes window, making it so you spend 9/10 combo points at a time giving you a 45-50% chance at a Ace Up Your Sleeve refund. However, this slightly increases the spec variance as we put more eggs into the Crackshot basket, hoping we get huge refunds out of it.

In conclusion, Outlaw ended up with buffs across the board and removing a controversial keybind that could spice up the rotation in new and exciting ways.

Subtlety Rogue ChangesInvigorating Shadowdust

Spell

Change

Comment

Redesign: Increases the duration of by 4 seconds after spending 6 or more seconds out of combat.

4 seconds of seem irrelevant throughout a raid fight. Potentially useful in Mythic+.

Cooldown reduced to 90 seconds (was 120).

Changes Subtlety to a 90 second burst spezialisation. A change to preserve the niche created by .

Talent replacing . Adds one charge to and increases the damage amp by 3% per talent point.

Is a weak replacement for the powerful , but it opens up the chance for more dynamic management.

Talent got removed.

The talent option didn't fit Subtlety, the removal was expected and is a welcome change.

Talent got removed.

The next section of this article covers the implications of this change in detail.

Analysis

This section quickly highlights the impact of some changes in a slightly more technical format.

Soothing Darkness: Subtlety uses Shadow Dance every 30 second and adds up to 4 Shadow Dance uses in a two minute interval. This totals to 5 triggers of Soothing Darkness before the change compared to the one trigger after. The total health generated before the change was 75% and is after the change 30%, which is less than half of what the talent provided prior to the change. Which means we likely talent Leeching Poison

Supercharger: Echoing Reprimand with Resounding Clarity generated 9 combo points per use. with a average of 7 casts over a 5-minute fight leading to a total combo point income of 63. Symbols of Death is used 10 times over the same period which leads to a total of 40 combo points and needs the Forced Inductione talent to get similar levels of benefit. The talent is still amazing for Subtlety because of the trigger point. We already align all cooldowns to Symbols of Death and can ideally empower our signature finishing move Secret Technique. Both hero talents have a capstone talent node to empower finishers. Deathstalker has Darkest Night and Trickster has Coup de Grace. Having the power concentrated around cooldowns increased the power level significantly and will make this talent the default choice.

Death Perception replaces Invigorating Shadowdust and replaces a 30 second cooldown reduction every 2 minutes. Only looking at Symbols of Death, charges are static while Invigorating Shadowdust applied for every Vanish cast. A typical 5-minute fight has three or four (depending on talents) uses of Vanish while the new talent option only gives you a total of two. It becomes fairly obvious how weak the talent is on its own if you realize that this was only one of all the cooldowns Invigorating Shadowdust reduced and as such is a inadequate replacement. The success of Subtlty heavily relies on updates to different parts of the talent tree.

Shadow Blades: The duration change is a buff because there is no need to delay Flagellation for 30 seconds every cast. The spell on its own did not get stronger due to the duration change. This reduction to 16 seconds should lead to overall the same uptime of Shadow Blades.

Discussion

I see any update to a specialization or talents as an opportunity to improve on the status quo. As such, combining all changes must be an obvious benefit to label a change as successful. The problem this creates is that neither of the recent updates to the class qualified as a clear success for Subtlety and 11.0.5 continues on this trend.

The change or removal of Invigorating Shadowdust was expected. The talent was already part of the initial beta blue post with an announced nerf which didn't make it into the game. But what makes this talent so bad that the only option left is to remove it completely?

The short answer is cooldown design. Invigorating Shadowdust allows to adjust cooldowns more dynamically than other classes in the game can and as such gave it a unique identity. For the current tier, it makes Subtlety one of the best specs in normal and heroic raids due to the already very low kill timers on bosses. And gives the spec on very specific fights like Silken Court a small advantage due to better cooldown alignments to the damage-amplifying phases. The impact is not even significant enough to lead to a bias towards the spec in Mythic raiding. Looking at the current player count on all three Rogue specializations, Assasssination has about three times the amount of logs in the current public Warcraftlogs statistic on Mythic difficulty.

This doesn't sound like a convincing argument for the removal, so there needs to be something else. This something else is the difficulty of execution. While the gameplay around the talent is simple currently, this was not the case in 10.2. The Raid back then had many fights with very specific timers and slightly different power distribution between talents. Having a 30-second difference in cooldowns led to the desynchronization of cooldowns and reliance on external resources (community-maintained spreadsheet) to optimize for encounter-specific management. However, this problem is easy to solve by streamlining major cooldowns and this is what is happening in the update.

The 20th Anniversary update seems like they haven't figured it out. Just a week ago it looked like we changed to a 60-second burst profile with the initial cooldown reduction of Flagellation to 60 seconds. But this change was reverted just some days ago and came with a cooldown and duration reduction to Shadow Blades. Both cooldowns have a 90-second timer now and as such can be aligned more easily.

The likely reason for this is to maintain the current gameplay. We already used both cooldowns in combination every 90 seconds with Invigorating Shadowdust. But Invigorating Shadowdust reduced the cooldown of Secret Technique enough to allow for multiple casts during Shadow Blades. Only Trickster is able to reduce Secret Technique enough to allow for back to back dances during Shadow Blades due to the extra cooldown reduction generated from Coup de Grace, Disorienting Strikes and Supercharger.

While this can be intentional, it is a noticeable difference in gameplay. The idea seems to be that alternative talents or the better baseline created due to the changes to Flagellation and the new Supercharger offset this. And while this seems to be likely the case for mythic+, it isn't as clear for raiding. The replacement talent for Invigorating Shadowdust is Death Perception. But we might not talent into it. Pathing costs to reach the talent are very high and you need to skip Inevitability and Deeper Daggers to reach it.

To finally get to the point. I don't think the changes are bad for Subtlety, and there is a high chance that the overall damage output stays similar or gets slightly better especially in mythic+ where non Invigorating Shadowdust builds already performed well. But it does not feel like a clear enough improvement to get excited about, all while a lot of problems stay unaddressed or get worse.

With this, I hope to see more updates and improvements soon.

ConclusionSuperchargerTwist the KnifeSuperchargerSuperchargerRoll the BonesAdrenaline RushInvigorating Shadowdust Rogue Discordwhispyrttvyoutube videos

Hey my name is ForeverGuy or just Guy, I'm the current guide writer for Outlaw Rogue. I raid mythic on Mal'Ganis but a lot of my time is spent in the Rogue Discord helping people out with their rotation, and general theory crafting and just talking with regulars. I've worked on previous guides in the past and I've helped optimize Outlaw for Simulationcraft in both the gear, talents, and APL. Feel free to message me about any questions you have about rogue, I'm usually around for anything just find me in Ravenholdt, my discord is guy#4019. I stream progression whenever the raid comes out, so feel free to give me a follow on Twitch, or follow me on Twitter if you like the guides.

author: fuu

Rogue Theorycrafter of ~8 years, moderator in the Rogue Discord. Guide writer and Subtlety enthusiast. Happy to answer questions about Rogue.

Youtube (soon) | Discord | Twitter | Simulations | Bug Tracker

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